Copyright by Jacob Charles Ptacek 2015

The Dissertation Committee for Jacob Charles Ptacek Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Unknown Publics: Victorian Novelists and Working-Class Readers, 1836-1870.

Committee:

Carol Mackay, Co-Supervisor

Coleman Hutchison, Co-Supervisor

Wayne Lesser

Allen Macduffie

Michael Winship Unknown Publics: Victorian Novelists and Working-Class Readers, 1836-1870.

by

Jacob Charles Ptacek, B.A.; M.A.

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin May 2015 Dedication

To My Mother, I‘m pretty sure I promised this one to you…

Acknowledgements

Every work of scholarship labors under pretty significant debts, and this one— which has been in the works for a long time—has more than its fair share. Foremost among my academic debts are to my committee members. Coleman Hutchison not only graciously agreed to work with a relative stranger, but gave unstinting advice and support both in person and via email. Despite a schedule that would crush lesser humans, he found time to give me detailed comments and drafts. His skillful editing and advice not only made the content of this dissertation better, but improved the very words on the page. I have learned more than I can say from his example. Carol MacKay has been so essential to this project, and to my time in graduate school, that she deserves a paragraph of her own. Many of the ideas in this dissertation were first inspired by her courses on the Victorian novel, and Carol has overseen many, many iterations of the content over many years. Additionally, Carol arranged teaching opportunities in her classes that gave me a chance to discuss some of these texts with perspicacious undergraduates and fired my thinking at the right time. No one at the University of Texas has helped me to develop more, both professionally and intellectually, than Carol.

While Cole and Carol have done heroic labors as co-chairs, the remainder of my committee have offered immense help, as well. Allen MacDuffie offered advice, insight, and encouragement throughout the planning and writing of this dissertation—going so far as to read an 80 page chapter without complaint. Michael Winship provided not only a model of rigorous scholarship, but my first exposure to many of the theoretical models upon which this text is built. My thinking about books as objects owes a great deal to his v teaching. Wayne Lesser stepped in when the project needed him without hesitation, for which I‘m deeply grateful.This dissertation would be much impoverished without their help. Four friends, in particular, went above and beyond the duties of friendship during the writing of this dissertation. Dr. Jessica Shafer Goodfellowread every word of this at least twice, and offered hours of insight and consultation. I can‘t express my debt to her except to say: I could not have written it without her support and critical eye. Melissa Smith did her level best to correct my constant ―which / that‖ confusion while asking great questions about chapters 3 and 4. Dr. Megan Eatman (and her husband, Charles Spinoso) provided food and literary theory in equal measures. Finally, Chris Ortiz y Prentice was there with me at every step of the way—his enthusiasm for the project and his critical intelligence never flagged over years of dinner and drinks. I have learned a lot from him.

These acknowledgements could go on forever, but I‘ll limit myself to a few more. Special thanks need to go to Dr. Philippa Levine, who provided insightful comments on Chapter 4 and many resources for the entire project. Her influence can be felt throughout this work. Dr. Heather Houser offered comments on a slightly different version of Chapter 2 with exemplary thoroughness. The Department of English offered me a year of fellowship support, which allowed for much of the research and writing of this dissertation. My family provided material and emotional support. This couldn‘t have been written without them, even if they do still call it my ―homework.‖ Dr. Jessica Werneke saw the beginning of this project in hours of conversations with her, asking hard questions and offering lightning insights. She has been a great role model in her commitment to research and scholarship. Stephanie Willis has given me, and this dissertation, more love and support than imaginable. Her contributions deserve a book of vi their own—hopefully someday they will get one. Until then, this dissertation will have to do.

vii Unknown Publics: Victorian Novelists and Working-Class Readers, 1836-1870.

Jacob Charles Ptacek, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2015

Supervisor: Carol Mackay and Coleman Hutchison

It is well known that readerships exploded during the Victorian era, as transformations of social structures, education, and print technology created a mass readership hungry for literature. Unknown Publics examines how Victorian novelists responded to the pressures these new mass readerships generated in the cultural sphere, a problem that seemed especially pressing in the moment between the First and Second Reform Acts.

Using the work of public sphere theorists Jürgen Habermas and Michael Warner, my dissertation argues that the Victorian novel became a contested arena for the representation of that public. Beginning with the staggering success of Charles Dickens‟s

Pickwick Papers (1836-7), Victorian novelists entered into an ongoing, dialogic debate about the novel‟s relationship with the mass reader. As authors writing directly for working-class publishers sought to expand the novel tradition by incorporating non- representational elements of parody, fantasy, and folktale, mainstream middle-class authors consolidated the novel‟s form by emphasizing realism. Unknown Publics traces the development of the novel in the Victorian era by examining key moments in this debate between 1836 and 1870. Beginning with the critical response to Pickwick Papers¸ viii I examine how both G. W. M. Reynolds‟s Pickwick Abroad (1837-8) and Dickens‘s own

Martin Chuzzlewit(1843-4) respond to the questions of working-class agency, urban identity, and literary form that Pickwick articulated. I next read William Harrison

Ainsworth‘s Jack Sheppard (1839-40) alongside William Makepeace Thackeray‘s

Catherine (1839-40) in order to discuss how the production of realism is predicated on a fantasy of working-class depravity. In my final chapters, I examine how the discourse of sensationalism interacted with the realist novel. I read Mary Elizabeth Braddon‘sRupert

Godwin (1864) and The Doctor’s Wife (1864) to track how the divide between ―realist‖ and ―idealist‖ fiction was deployed for mass and middle-class readers. In my final chapter, I discuss Wilkie Collins‘s The Moonstone (1868) in terms of the reading practices encouraged for mass readers by the architects of the Second Reform Bill, revealing how Collins‘s mystery story is predicated on the political project of reform.

Reading the presence (or absence) of realism as a crucial feature of the Victorian novel,

Unknown Publics calls for a new understanding of the cultural and social work of realism accomplishes, and of how it came to be.

ix Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ...... xi

Introductory...... 1

Chapter 1: Pickwick at Home and Abroad: Dickens, Reynolds, and the Pickwick Moment ...... 20 Tracking Pickwick‘s Reception, 1836-1860: ...... 28 Republican Pickwick: Reynolds, Appropriation, and Politics in Pickwick Abroad...... 45 Swindlers Abroad and at Home: Pickwick Abroad and Martin Chuzzlewit .65

Chapter 2: Ainsworth‘s Raptures, Thackeray‘s Poisons:Jack Sheppard and the Making of English Realism in 1840 ...... 83 Representing Realism: ...... 88 Jack Sheppard’s Strange Pleasures: Reading and Its Dangers ...... 91 A Catherine Cathartic: The Conservative Critique ...... 103

Chapter 3: ―I am always divided:‖ Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the Politics of Publishing in 1864 ...... 114 Specters of Finance: Rupert Godwin and Working-Class Morality ...... 121 ―Between Two Worlds‖: The Doctor’s Wife¸ Flaubert, and the Idealist Novel ...... 139

Chapter 4: Suspicious Characters: The Moonstone and Victorian Liberalism. ...163 Writing Character: Character at work in Collins and Mill ...... 172 Reading Character: Victorian Publics and the Disease of Reading ...... 195 Producing Character: The Moonstone and the Liberal Subject ...... 215

Coda: ...... 222

Bibliography ...... 229

Vita …………………………………………………………………………….248

x List of Illustrations

Illus. 1: Frontispiece to Pickwick Papers; Phiz, November 1837...... 22

xi

Introductory

―Should an ambassador from some far distant country arrive on our shores for the purpose of overreaching us in a convention, we know not where he could find a better clue to the infirmities of our national character, than in the columns of our book advertisements,‖ wrote the anonymous reviewer of Jack Sheppard in theAthenaeum in

1839 (803). Had such a figure arrived in London in the late 1830s and sampled the pages upon pages of advertisements, reviews, and essays that swamped Victorian print culture, he or she would have been dismayed. ―Something,‖ the reviewer continued, ―has gone widely wrong in that sudden expansion of wealth and population which has marked our times‖ (804). This was not a minority view. The revolutionary promises of the nineteenth century now seemed diminished. For the writer of ―The Age of Jack

Sheppardism‖ in the Monthly Magazine in March 1840, British culture was under siege and ―[t]he dead body of genius lies in the streets of London. How long! How long!‖

(231). In slightly less apocalyptic tones, another review in the British and Foreign

Review saw the decade as symbolized by ―barrenness‖ and worried that ―those who have less leisure, less wealth and less education, shall utterly and finally abandon themselves to rapine and thievery and contempt of law‖ (245-46).

1 Warnings like these can be found scattered throughout literary criticism in the early decades of Victoria‘s reign. That criticism represents a complicated netting of cultural and social anxieties interwoven with an aesthetic program. The causes of this early Victorian nihilism are multiple, as the journals themselves recognize: the reviewer for the Monthly Chronicle noted that in the space of just a few years England suffered from ―convulsions‖ of Chartists, Oxford Tractarians, and Plymouth Brethren, spreading

―false doctrines and demoralizing views of the practical duties of life‖ and contributing to the social disorder (―Recent Novels‖ 219). But each reviewer identifies the central agent of this social decay as ―the great public of the nineteenth century‖ (BFR 234). That uncontrollable mass reader is the central figure of this text. My dissertation is a sociology of the aesthetics of the novel from 1836-1870. In brief, it argues that anxieties over the mass reader caused authors, critics, and publishers to valorize the mode of literary realism as a pedagogical tool for transforming working-class and servant readers into normative social subjects. Unpacking that complicated statement will be the first task of this introduction.

Why define this dissertation as a ―sociology,‖ rather than a ―history,‖ or even more generally a ―literary analysis‖? After all, this study constructs a historical narrative, while it applies tools of critical analysis like close, distant, and surface reading much more frequently than statistical and evidentiary proofs traditional to sociology. And in many ways, Unknown Publics reexamines the political and ideological concerns of two definitive New Historical approaches to the Victorian novel, Nancy Armstrong‘s Desire

2 and Domestic Fiction (1987) and D. A. Miller‘s The Novel and the Police (1989), with an attention to the material and critical contexts of the Victorian period. Both of those texts present the imbrication of ideological action and literary reflection as a historical, even teleological, process. Yet I call this a ―sociology‖ for several reasons, some of them generated in response to the historical claims of theoreticians like Armstrong and Miller.

First, this study operates sociologically because it prioritizes the experience of

Victorian readers. This dissertation looks at a range of texts, from well-known novels like Charles Dickens‘s Pickwick Papers (1836-7) and Wilkie Collins‘s The Moonstone

(1868) to relatively obscure fictions like William Makepeace Thackeray‘s Catherine

(1839-40) or Mary Elizabeth Braddon‘sThe Doctor’s Wife (1864), from the perspective of what Richard Altick has called the ―English Common Reader.‖ Pioneering histories of reading by Altick, Louis James, Kate Flint, and Jonathan Rose, among others, have helped us recognize that the range and experience of Victorian readers was diverse.

Rather than locating the center of interest in a theoretical bourgeois reader, I have attempted to use fiction written largely for the working classes, contemporary essays and criticism about the working-class reading experience, and modern histories of the book and reader-response criticism to investigate how novels interacted with a wider group of

Victorian readers.

By privileging the concept of ―interaction,‖ my dissertation reveals a second debt to sociological thinking. One strain of the theoretical underpinning of this work lies in the work of Pierre Bourdieu and his followers. Indeed, a possible way to view this

3 dissertation is as an investigation, incorporating ―thick description,‖ of the specification, delimiting, and valorization of forms of ―cultural capital‖ in the Victorian novel. What forms of the novel are acceptable? what narratives can they tell? and to whom can they speak? In that way, my debts to Bourdieu are clear. In Distinction (1979) and the contemporaneous essays collected in The Field of Cultural Production (1993), Bourdieu offers an account of artistic production within the networks of dissemination (which included publication and the network of ―puffing‖) and support (formal and informal patronage, essayistic and journalistic criticism). For Bourdieu, cultural capital is an

―upside-down world‖ (Field 40) based ―on a systematic inversion of the fundamental principles of all ordinary economies‖ (Field 39). It transposes the qualities of things. The more ―useless‖—that is, removed from the socioeconomic matrix of the post-industrial

West—the work of art, the more unable to be corralled into everyday practice, the more cultural capital the work has. Rarified artistic production, valorized as creative genius, is defined by its inability to be harnessed by a technological, market economy.

This dissertation explores the rise of a certain form of cultural capital within the novel. It is interested in how the ―realist‖ literary novel came to be central to the canon of the novel, more or less, for Victorian critics and theorists, the only type of novel. In that way my work mirrors that of Bourdieu‘s most prominent American disciple John

Guillory, whose 1993 Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation argues that the central relationship of ―aesthetic value‖ and ―use value‖ is at the core of canon debates. Guillory locates a democratized ―aesthetic experience‖ or pleasure that

4 falls outside of the category of value. For Guillory, the pleasure of ―distinction,‖ that is the pleasure in the habitus or ―sense of the game‖ of artistic production, has replaced genuine aesthetic pleasure as the object of analysis. In his final pages, Guillory suggests that the category of ―aesthetic pleasure,‖ by escaping analysis, is a place of Utopian possibility of ―total autonomy from the laws of the market‖ (339). This ―thought experiment‖ (340), in which the utopian possibilities of pleasure are manifested in place of the iron laws of the marketplace, has important analogues in the ways in which

Victorian writers for the working classes fantasized alternative possibilities to the realist novel (see, particularly, Chapter Four and its discussion of Mary Elizabeth Braddon).

Tracing that double process in which realism comes to totalize novelistic production and yet creates aporia which allowed Victorian writers to renegotiate their relationships to the text is a key process of this study. However, where Guillory pursues his argument through the analysis of monuments of ―high theory,‖ my argument is attuned to the local.

I read once-popular novels, miscellaneous and ephemeral essays, and some of the hundreds, if not thousands, of obscure or otherwise inaccessible newspaper and journalistic reviews now available online in order to quantify my argument—using cultural detritus to try to recreate the Victorian experience in greater depth than the canon alone might allow.

The methodology of this dissertation, the contextualization of primary documents within the Victorian public sphere, is thus more indebted to Habermasian models of analysis. In particular, Michael Warner‘s work in Publics and Counterpublics (2002) has

5 provided a bracing model of how acts of discourse can be read as performative, self- reflexive moments of world-making. These acts of public-making exist within the public realm and mark moments of critique of the ―norms and contexts of their cultural environment,‖ yet they are not, themselves, political acts: ―mass publics‖—the topoi of this dissertation—―and counterpublics… are both damaged forms of publicness‖ (65).

For Warner, this ―damaged publicness‖ is analogous to the realms of gender and sexuality, ―damaged forms of privacy‖ which are dominated by the ideologically

―normal‖ center (65). While the Victorian concept of class is quite different from the models of gender and sexuality that Warner interrogates, it nonetheless not only spanned the gap between public and private life but, as the majority of Victorian accounts suggested, originated in the private sphere. Class required policing in Victorian England, much as gender and sexuality did, and often the separate concepts are inextricably linked, as in Wilkie Collins‘s portrayal of Rosanna Spearman in The Moonstone. Throughout the Victorian period, an enormous number of texts engaged in creating and defining a working-class public. This study examines both the fictional poetics of what a working- class readership might look like and the discursive writings that addressed them as subjects.

This last point suggests one last reason why this study is ―sociological.‖ The

Victorians were very aware of themselves as historical subjects. In the process of dedicating his 1859 collection Twice Round the Clock; or the Hours of the Day and Night

6 in London to Augustus Mayhew, G. A. Sala rather poignantly determined his value by his place in the historical imagination:

But if in the year 1959, some historian of the state of manners in England during the reign of Queen Victoria, points an allusion in a foot note by a reference to an old book called ―Twice Round the Clock,‖ and which professes to be a series of essays on the manners and customs of the Londoners in 1859, that reference will be quite enough of reward for your friend. (xii)

Yet the historical imagination of the Victorians was often bound up in their sense of the social reality. Sala‘s text follows its flâneur-narrator through the streets of London for twenty-four hours in a series of creative essays that blend reportage with fantasy. The text‘s historical value is inseparable from its social one. For me, one of the most exciting, and eye-opening, parts of this project has been the discovery that the wide-ranging social imagination that marks the Victorian novel is reflected at all levels of Victorian writing.

Even the most banal critical review might suddenly position the text within a sophisticated social network, proffer an unexpected opinion or a surprising reading. In that way, my own readings of these texts hopes to honor the Victorian viewpoints they interrogate.

This work springs from a similar impulse as the one documented in Isobel

Armstrong‘s The Radical Aesthetic (2000)—that the last major accounts of the Victorian novel are left-leaning critiques that become oddly complicit with conservative anxieties about the novel or identify the novel itself as a conservative form (15-16). Armstrong offers a highly theoretical attempt to challenge high theorists‘ abandonment of the category of the aesthetic. Those theorists seem, according to Armstrong, unable to 7 imagine an aesthetic in which the powerless or disenfranchised could speak or read (16).

In response, she argues—through a series of subtle engagements with affect theory and post-structuralism—that aesthetics, rather than replicating bourgeois experience, is a process of play and negotiation open to democratic discourse: ―I have suggested that the artwork be embedded in the ordinary processes of being alive, and viewed as a representation of mediation, a form of thinking, a request for knowledge, rather than as a privileged kind of creativity cut off from experience everyone goes through‖ (79-80).

Because Armstrong‘s work is itself a rebarbative work of theory, she offers little historicization of the transformation of the aesthetic. Instead she focuses on reclaiming the project of aesthetics from contemporary theorists. My dissertation traces one strand of that historical transformation by examining how conservative and radical authors coopted the form of realism in order to attempt to create a communal, mass tradition.

They found in the novel a form that identified the political and aesthetic interests of the working-classes as equally in need of regulation. And they found a mode of representation, literary realism, which offered a set of epistemic claims that would allow the negotiation of those interests.

Literary debates about realism, and in particular British forms of realism that developed across the middle of the century, tend to focus on the urge to realism as a mediating aesthetic. This definition was first articulated in Georg Lukács‘s The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1957), where bourgeois realism represents relationships between the individual and his or her ―social and historical environment‖ in their totality

8 (19). Like the Frankfurt School theorists, Lukács believed that the social work of realism was accomplished in proportion to the totality of the text‘s representation of social conditions, though the way that those conditions could be accurately represented was historically determined. This neo-Hegelian understanding of the historical function of realism has been one of the main strands of late-twentieth century accounts of the rise and function of realism in literature. Post-structuralist theoretical challenges to Marxist teleological arguments, as well as Lacanian and Derridean emphases on the inability to find an external referent outside of language, have shifted critical focus, as Caroline

Levine notes, away from an emphasis on representation itself and towards the images represented as the mediating forces themselves. She suggests that ―George Levine, John

P. McGowan, Katherine Kearns, and Tom Lloyd all characterize Victorian realism as the attempt to use language to get at a world beyond language—whether to a prior, unmediated experience of the world or to materiality itself‖ (―Ruskin‖ 74). The discourse of realism, as a fantasy of access, is often read in terms of other emergent technologies: photography, whose rise is contemporary to and objectively congruent with the realist novel, has provided a particularly thick vector for analysis.1

Many commentators ally the rise of realist literature with advances in other aesthetic forms. Linda Nochlin‘s classic account of the rise of optical realism in the pictorial arts, Realism (1971), despite its theoretical and philosophical limitations as art history, places French pictorial work in the larger theoretical scope of realism. Elizabeth

1 See especially Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography (1999); Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians (1997); and Daniel Novak, Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2008). 9 Deeds Ermarth, in Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (1983), allies the formal and theoretical problems of nineteenth-century visual culture with those of the realist novel. Both, she claims, were engaged ―in a rationalization of consciousness‖ that made identity seem ―abstract, removed from direct apprehension to a hidden dimension of depth‖ (Ermarth 4-5). Alternatively, realism can be made a matter of technique. Robert

Kiely‘s The Romantic Novel in England (1972) argues that realism is ―not dependent on subject matter… but method‖ (9); and one might read with Robert Alter that philosophical and literary realism temporarily derail formal experimentation in fiction and in aesthetics. The historical and technical dimensions of literary realism continue to be debated. Despite the diversity of opinion over what realism is, however, literary and cultural scholars agree that it happened. Yet little attention has been paid to the cultural conditions surrounding how it happened. The questions raised by Sala‘s vision of the future remain unasked: Why does realism suddenly become the dominant form in the

1850s?

In a sense, then, this is a text about ―theory‖—in that the larger fish I have to fry are those who remain incurious about the possibilities of the reading experience to liberate, or those who would wish to evacuate the reading experience of the possibility of liberation. But my interest in the Victorian novel is not just instrumental—I argue that the Victorian novel represents the most sustained cultural investigation of the libidinal energies of literature undertaken on a mass level. Each of the novels under investigation posits a utopian political economy—a Warnerian public that functions as a site of

10 exchange between mass reader and elite producer—even as it knowingly or unwittingly critiques that economy. As a media, the Victorian novel occupied a unique social position that reflects this interest in exchange: they often really were cross-class phenomena. Pickwick Papers, Jack Sheppard,and The Moonstone were common knowledge, properties shared by artisans, domestic workers, clergymen, and M. P.s alike.

It is only toward the end of the period in question that the division between novels for the masses and artistic novels comes into play.

That period, 1836-1870, is both arbitrary and precise. Mindful of Frederic

Jameson‘s warnings about periodization, this study is aware that it represents only a small sliver of novelistic production in the nineteenth century. On the far side of its historical boundary, it is silent about Walter Scott‘s idealized, pre-literate, and pre- or a-historical mass public, the ―folk.‖ On the nearer side of the boundary, it has little to say about the late-century naturalism which made working-class life the object of a scientific scrutiny.

Both romanticized and proto-naturalist conceptions of the working class were at play in the early Victorian period. Victorian novelists inherited a powerful conception of a romanticized public from Scott, one that operated not only in historical novelists like G.

P. R. James but also folklorists like Andrew Lang and ethnographers and early anthropologists such as James Frazer.2 Meanwhile, the ethnographic methods of Henry

Mayhew centered on producing a scientific account of the working-class subject, an account not too dissimilar from the art novels of George Gissing and George Moore or

2 Ian Duncan‘s Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel (1992) and Scott’s Shadow (2007) analyze the trajectory of Scott‘s reception in the nineteenth century. 11 the more populist stories of Arthur Morrison. But in neither case were the works produced ―for‖ the working-class reader, nor did they directly call into being a reflexive public. This dissertation focuses on works that were produced or consumed directly by working-class readers, or with the mass subject in mind. By the ―mass readership‖ I have something in mind like Richard Altick‘scommon reader, who in turn stretches back to

Virginia Woolf‘s formulation: that wide-ranging category included artisans, factory workers, members of the servant class, and, to some extent, agrarian laborers. Our knowledge of these readers is primarily urban, and in what follows, I—like Victorian novelists—generally consider the mass reader as a city-dweller.

And the mass subject was quite frequently in mind in the period. On either side of my boundaries lie the so-called First and Second Reform Acts (of 1832 and 1867, respectively). These acts extended the franchise to greater numbers of male voters, especially in urban areas, and reformed electoral districts. The reforms were as symbolic as they were actual—universal suffrage would not be achieved until 1928—but they had a powerful effect on the Victorian imagination. They brought the mass public into view, making visible the possibilities and challenges of an increasingly democratic society. A key study of how reform affected the novelistic imagination is Patrick Brantlinger‘sThe

Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

(1998). As his title suggests, Brantlinger‘s text focuses on representations of literacy in the novel. He finds that the anti-novelistic discourse popular in the press is ―inscribed in novels themselves in many ironic, contradictory ways‖ (2). In a series of expert readings,

12 he examines how novels encounter the mass public through the trope of ―the poisonous book‖ from Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein (1818) to Oscar Wilde‘s The Picture of Dorian

Gray (1890). Ultimately he argues that a governing trope of the nineteenth-century novel is a ―pathology of reading,‖ an anxiety that reading itself might lead towards cultural collapse (203). Brantlinger offers an extraordinary narrative, but, as this description suggests, he focuses on the anxieties of mass reading. A key difference between his text and mine lies in my emphasis on the neutrality of the reading experience. While the working-class reader provoked fear in some novelists and reviewers, for others, such as

William Harrison Ainsworth and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, the mass subject also offered the possibility of liberating, alternative trajectories for the novel. This study investigates the contradictory narratives of foreclosure and possibility that marked the Victorian period.

Two other texts stand out as being of seminal importance for the field of mass literature studies in Victorian England. The first is Richard Altick‘sThe English Common

Reader (1957), which investigates the rise of mass literacy among the working class throughout the nineteenth century. Although this is a foundational text for the history of the book and Victorian studies, Altick‘s is primarily a work of social history. Altick provides valuable information about what working-class readers actually read, modes of reading available to them, wage statistics relative to standard book and library prices, and an overview of alternative publication forms (e.g., serialization, popular and educational magazines for ―working men,‖ often-remaindered reprints of ―libraries‖ of novels).

13 While Altick‘s work as a social historian has yet to be superseded, the book does not engage with several areas of interest to scholars today. Primarily by design, the book does not engage critically with how working-class readers interpreted or received the literature they read, nor does it work through how texts are transformed through different modes of circulation or adaptation. Altick‘s text provides an invaluable starting point for further study, but its silence on literary, critical, and interpretive questions leaves room for much further investigation.

Equally important is Louis James‘s Fiction for the Working Man, 1830-1850

(1963), which provides a critical overview of ―cheap fiction‖ across two decades of the

Victorian experience. James‘s text is of particular interest because, as his introduction notes, he was given personal access to a number of private collections which have since been sold, scattered, or destroyed, and his text displays a rich and at times mind-boggling grasp of otherwise ephemeral literature. As a critic, James was the first to survey

Victorian working-class fiction, and he displays a clear, if never fully articulated, Marxist orientation in his discussion of literature, particularly in his concern for how the texts function within a socioeconomic matrix. James argues that working-class literature of the 1830‘s and ‘40‘s is indicative of an attempt by the working class to create a mass culture on its own terms, even though that culture was significantly and perhaps fatally mediated through middle-class control of the means of publication. Of particular interest for James is the political content of ongoing penny serials (especially those of G. W. M.

Reynolds) as constructive of a situated, oppositional, class mentalité.

14 While James‘s work provides a rich trove of material for Victorian cultural and literary studies, his text is problematic for the present-day reader. First, his tight focus vitiates any attempt to draw larger conclusions about working-class readerships across the nineteenth century. Moreover, he relies on Montague Summers‘s Gothic

Bibliography, a checklist whose accuracy has been questioned by later bibliographers.

Finally, despite the Marxist framework of the book, there is a persistent air of dismissal throughout. James‘s value judgments (based largely on aesthetic or critical criteria the works were never intended to fill) of the literary worth of the texts he examines in many ways re-imposes middle-class ways of understanding culture onto what he himself acknowledges is a different structure of values. For these reasons, his project is worth revisiting from an early twenty-first century vantage point, which allows scholars to think through value and difference in a more theoretical, nuanced manner.

Perhaps a final note, too, is worth appending to my discussion of these two central texts. Each of these texts, and many valuable contributions that have followed in their wake, tend to study working-class literature and experience in a vacuum, abstracted from other class-literatures and experiences.3 I find this model a problem, not the least because it has a tendency to valorize or to exoticize working-class ways of thinking. But equally important is that this act of abstraction can simplify what are otherwise complicated relational narratives. As the debates over the influence of Jack Sheppard suggest, class communities imagined and appropriated texts through methods that seem on the surface

3 See, for example, Jonathan Rose‘s encyclopedicThe Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), or the continuing work on Reynolds produced by James and his graduate students. 15 to be similar, but have very different inflections. In other words, the form often belies, or even hides, the content. To read the Sheppard debates as constitutive of only a working- class or middle-class ―problem‖ is to lose some innate and fascinating complexity. While total objectivity and mastery of a historical situation can only be a theoretical fantasy, I do want to import from history and the social sciences a ―thick narrative‖ that considers structural relations across class strata.

This dissertation, then, examines novelistic production across the first half of

Victoria‘s reign. My interest is in what happens to the novel when we consider its readers as not middle-class men and women, but members of the working-classes: artisans and servants, factory workers and laborers. Moreover, what happens to the form of the novel itself when those readers are implied? The realist, psychological novel has long been recognized as the most significant literary form developed in the Victorian period. This study puts that development within its social perspective, mapping onto the literary history an account of the social complexity that helped drive its transformation.

At the same time, however, I hope to avoid teleology, and to suggest that, in the complicated interaction between class and form, there were other possibilities at play, other novels that were written. Attending to their voices is my concern in this dissertation.

My first two chapters establish the historical conditions in which writing for mass readers was received. In my first chapter, ―Pickwick at Home and Abroad,‖ I examine the electrifying success of Charles Dickens‘s Pickwick Papers. Pickwick, I argue,

16 marked a crucial break in literary production, opening up the novel to a wider spectrum of readers than ever before. It initiates a process of writing, revision, and rewriting that marks the reception of writing for working-class readers in the early Victorian period. I set my reading within the historical and literary context of the 1830s, reading Pickwick alongside a detailed reception history before examining a working-class continuation of the text, G. W. M. Reynolds‘s Pickwick Abroad (1839). Using Michael Warner‘s work on publics, I argue that Reynolds‘s text seized on the unprecedented political potential of

Pickwick in order to assert a working-class vision of the novel. In a final section, I examine how Dickens‘s Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4) responds to Reynolds by rewriting

Pickwick Abroad’s comedic narrative as a tragedy of institutional and personal collapse.

This rewriting, I argue, is a marker of Victorian anxiety over the representation of class in works for mass audiences.

In ―Ainsworth‘s Raptures, Thackeray‘s Poisons,‖ I examine the controversy surrounding the publication of William Harrison Ainsworth‘s Jack Sheppard. The novel‘s popularity among working-class readers was particularly troubling to Victorian critics, given its perceived glorification of violence. I argue that the overwhelming negative response effected the course of literary production. In particular, I read

Thackeray‘s Catherine as a response to Ainsworth, one which stressed the production of literary realism as a means of representation. The Sheppard debate is central to the

Victorian novel because it marks the first significant discussion of realism in the nineteenth century. Class, as I discuss, is the key term in the practice of realism and

17 central to the formalist debate between Ainsworth‘s romanticism and Thackeray‘s

Victorianism.

In my final two chapters, I examine the consequences of this debate. In ―I Am

Always Divided,‖ I discuss two novels by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Both texts, like

Braddon herself, struggle with the implementation of realism by emphasizing transformative narratives. I situate the first text, Rupert Godwin (1867, initially serialized as The Banker’s Secret, [1864-5]) written for working-class readers pseudonymously, within narratives of economic and spiritual change. The second novel, The Doctor’s

Wife, an adaptation of Gustave Flaubert‘s Madame Bovary, I situate within the divide between realist and idealist literary production. Different as their content and audiences may appear, both novels use the logic of sensationalism to critique how realist narratives are inscribed on the bodies of their subjects. Moreover, both locate the possibilities of transformation in idealistic, non-realist reading practices.

In contrast, in my final chapter, ―Suspicious Characters,‖ I examine how Wilkie

Collins‘s The Moonstone participates in the ―disease of reading‖ controversy. In opposition to the indiscriminate consumption of literature feared by contemporary critics,

Collins‘s novel focuses on creating good readerly practices in order to solve the mystery of the missing jewel. The central practice involves reading for character, and I locate

Collins‘s interest in character within the larger debates, inspired by John Stuart Mill, about ―character‖ in an ethical and political sense. Collins‘s novel suggests how liberal theory collided with aesthetic practice to reify the realist text. I conclude with a brief

18 discussion of two texts by Robert Louis Stevenson and Margaret Oliphant that reflect on the abstraction of the realist novel.

19 Chapter 1: Pickwick at Home and Abroad: Dickens, Reynolds, and the Pickwick Moment

Two men are reading. Or rather, the younger man is looking up from a book, a wry smile on his face, with his finger pointing to a favorite phrase, no doubt about to utter one of those occasional remarks which cause the older man such amusement.

Plump, bespectacled, and balding, the older man leans on his right arm, a hint of merriment just breaking across his face. These men are the heroes of one of the most popular books of the nineteenth century: Samuel Pickwick, Esq., G.C.M.P.C. (“General

Chairman—Member Pickwick Club”), and Sam Weller (always “Sam,” never “Samuel,” though sometimes, in the paternal embrace, “Samivel”). The scene is one of comfortable domesticity. The table is cluttered with books (which were still, in 1831, the narrative time of this scene, luxury items), an inkwell, a decanter, bottle, and port glass; the high- backed chair Pickwick sits in is lined with deep pillows; the patterned carpet looks plush and inviting to the viewer‟s feet, as does the pillowy footstool where Pickwick rests his feet. In the background, a globe, a bookcase stuffed with more books, and a cabinet of curiosities holding statues and historical bric-a-brac signals a world of bourgeois luxuries, while in the foreground, a sleeping kitten completes the scene of domestic tranquility.

Phiz‟s charming illustration of Pickwick and Weller is both an ending and a beginning to The Pickwick Papers. The scene it depicts occurs in the very last pages of the final, double number of the serial run published October 30, 1837, but it served as the

20 frontispiece for the three-volume publication issued November 18 of the same year.

Janus-like, the illustration greeted readers of the volume edition by looking backwards over the staggering success of the serial run—which had made “Boz” a household name—and forward to the final words of the text. The text itself had a similar, “double- faced” (in Richard Altick‟s words) relationship with the fiction of the period (qtd.in

Jordan and Patten 124). In one way, as the Athenaeum noted in December 1836, the serial was composed of “two pounds of Smollett, three ounces of Sterne, a handful of

Hook, a dash of grammatical Pierce Egan” (841), taking its place in an old-fashioned world of masculine picaresque narratives. Though the errata list of the three-volume publication reveals that the narrative time of Pickwick was set nearly a decade before its publication, the novel rejects the kind of historical fiction pioneered by Scott in the preceding decades, instead taking its characters through a recognizable modern England.

Nor is it interested in developing the kind of acute and subtle psychological prose that characterizes Jane Austen‟s work. Instead, Dickens‟s text looks back to the reading of his youth: the energetic and rambling Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), the digressive narrator of TristramShandy (1759-1767), the sentimental morality of The

Vicar of Wakefield (1766), and the gigantic twin shadows of Henry Fielding and

Cervantes. Yet the novel was instantly recognized as marking something new in English prose fiction, despite its démodé antecedents. As John O. Jordan and Robert Patten note,

“Pickwick Papers has often been identified as the work that ushered in the Victorian era”

(6). The relatively innovative publication format—twenty monthly serial numbers, complete with two or three illustrations, priced at one shilling—became widely imitated, 21

Illus. 1: Frontispiece to Pickwick Papers; Phiz, November 1837. Image courtesy of Philip V. Allingham; http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/phiz/pickwick/front2.html, accessed 08/05/2014. 22 if not often with the efficiency and success of Dickens‟s project. Linda K. Hughes and

Michael Lund have argued that serial publication pioneered new relationships to temporality and narrative, the short, successive form of delivery matching the new era of steam. A series of brief bursts whose power accumulated over the course of a twenty- month journey, the Dickensian serial presaged the nineteenth century‟s increasing taste for compressed shocks even as it reflected the increasing technological and bureaucratic complexity in its counterpoint narratives. Just as important, the text ends someplace new, a truly novel area rarely explored in prose fiction before this moment: with Weller and

Pickwick sitting at the table together, reading a book. As N. N. Feltes argues, one key to

Pickwick‟s difference is just this scene of master and servant relations:

I would suggest that the introduction of Sam Weller into Pickwick Papers and his relationship with Mr. Pickwick is an early instance of corporatist ideology. It is not just that “Pickwick cut safely across party lines” or that “all classes, in fact, read „Boz,‟” but that “the affectionate communion” among Mr. Pickwick, Sam, and Tony Weller produces a determinate ideological effect by becoming the novel‟s principal focus of interest and by celebrating “the virtues of simplicity, innocence and directness in the relations of men” (15).

The traditional komosof the wedding scene which drove the dominant comic novels of the preceding century was not for Pickwick. In fact, avoiding the wedding plot is the plot of the novel. Bardell v. Pickwick becomes the engine driving the transformation of a series of sketches into long-form fiction. Instead, Pickwick celebrates a homosocial world of masculine relationships, fostering a fantasy of mutual dependence, a world where masters and servants sit down at the table together to read.

23 And it was a fantasy, as both text and illustration are at great pains to articulate.

Phiz‟s frontispiece is placed within a theatrical arch, framed by stage curtains. This scene isn‟t real: it has been created for our consumption. And the narrator‟s final peroration calls for us to focus on the brilliance of another moment of consumption, as Pickwick sits down to the table:

Let us leave our old friend in one of those moments of unmixed happiness, of which, if we seek them, there are ever some to cheer our transitory existence here. There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast. Some men, like bats or owls, have better eyes for darkness than for light; we who have no such optical powers, are better pleased to take our last parting look at the visionary companions of many solitary hours, when the brief sunshine of the world is blazing full upon them (PP 56: 752).

Like a Dutch painting, the radiant joy of this scene is made “stronger in the contrast” to the darkness lurking just behind the vision, gaining its effect from the sense of how perishable the moment must be. For early readers the effect of this rhetoric might have had a double valence. Dickens was initiating parish boy Oliver Twist‟s progress into the urban hell of a very different London even as these words were published. That novel

(Oliver Twist) spoke to an alternate set of revolutionary positions grimly feared by the bourgeois: Malthusian poverty, Chartist agitation, utilitarian egotism, anarchic violence.

But Pickwick hovers intentionally above those moments, focusing the reader on “the fullness of his joy” as the long text comes to a close (PP 56: 752). If Oliver Twist explores the nightmare possibilities of a world atomized by attenuated human relationships, a world of suffering and degradation and privation, Pickwick Papers calls up throughout its existence a no less revolutionary but oppositional world, England as a

24 land of plenty. Throughout its twenty numbers the text is as stuffed with the sheer joys of materiality as Phiz‟s frontispiece, full of Christmas feasts and bustling humanity and strangers with an interesting tale to tell, a novel whose signature (and most touching gesture) is an acknowledgement of the relationship between men, the quiet jangle of the money dropped in Jingle‟s hands in the Fleet. Dickens would increasingly ironize the relationship between the fecundity of English goods and the deprivations of English urban life, but here Pickwick is a celebratory vision of human relationships at their fullest.4 As Peter Ackroyd claims, that vision “created a national audience” (208).

I want to return to this constructed scene of reading for a few more moments with the idea of a national text in mind. Hanging over Pickwick and Weller as they readis a portrait of Pickwick which presides over the scene of domestic affections playing out below. In many ways it authors, and authorizes, the image even as it destabilizes a reading of the master and servant as communal partners in urban tranquility. The relationship between Weller and Pickwick, which, on the horizontal plane of the illustration, can be viewed as a relation between equals, is subject on the vertical plane to a hierarchy, to Pickwick‟s benevolent gaze. The careful positioning of Pickwick‟s portrait complicates our reading of the scene by calling into question the assumed power dynamics at play. Pickwick and Weller seem to be play-acting this scene, quite fitting for a novel so concerned with players and mistaken identities. The artificiality is further

4 In the ―Third Stave‖ of A Christmas Carol, for example, the bustling markets stand out sharply with the poverty of the Cratchit family‘s Christmas meal, a contrast stage-managed by the Ghost of Christmas Present for Scrooge‘s benefit. 25 produced by the stage curtains being pulled open by the comic figures in the lower corners of the image. Would Weller, left to his own devices, really pick up one of the heavy historical texts from Pickwick‟s bookshelf? Clever as he is, it is hard to imagine the “boots” from the White Hart settling down with the kinds of antiquarian manuscripts read and written by Pickwick. What would really happen in Pickwick‟s parlor?

I use this illustration to lay a foundation for my discussion of the uses to which

Pickwick could be put by those who wrote for a working-class audience. But in many ways, what interests me about the text is already encapsulated in the image. This chapter is about the stresses generated in the scene of reading presented in Phiz‟s frontispiece, the pressure exerted in the tensions between the horizontal and vertical planes of the illustration. Victorian publishers and authors were quick to exploit the gap between authorized reading and utopian fantasy that Pickwick enacts. Just as there was, beneath the content of this utopian fantasy, a host of alternate revolutionary dreams, violent and anarchic markers of what Carlyle called the “time of unmixed evil come upon us” waiting to emerge, there were wholly new strata of books erupting beneath the luxury books lining Pickwick‟s rooms. It will be the argument of this chapter, in fact, that those two facts are related, that the content of new social fantasies is being determined by the new literary and publishing forms being opened up at just this moment. These forms are occluded by the success of Pickwick, but they are also, perversely enough, being produced by it as well.

26 This chapter explores the effects of the explosive success of Pickwick in the years immediately following its publication. It identifies a “Pickwick event” in Victorian culture—that is, that the publication of Pickwick made possible a moment when Regency aesthetic and political production became destabilized, before these attitudes could retrench around what we now associate as the cultural politics of the day. These new attitudes were negotiated by a triple process, both historical and literary, of writing, revising, and rewriting. The three sections that follow investigate this process in more detail and define these ideas. In my first section, I explore the reception history of

Pickwick, tracking Victorian attitudes towards the text through both now-canonical reviews and overlooked discussions of the text. I argue that the success of the text reconfigured a number of areas of novelistic practice in the early Victorian moment, and I focus on those reviews that give us a sense of the issues raised by the publication and success of Pickwick. In my second section, I examine in depth one of the most popular appropriations of the text, G. W. M. Reynolds‟s spurious sequel, Pickwick Abroad.

There I argue that Reynolds‟s text seizes upon the innovations in form and content offered by Pickwick to promote an explicit political agenda, and I discuss the mechanisms through which Reynolds transformed the content of Dickens‟s text. In my final section, I investigate a hitherto-overlooked connection between Reynolds‟s text and Dickens‟s later novel, Martin Chuzzlewit. I argue that a close examination of the overlapping plot mechanics of fraudulent corporations reveals a set of Victorian attitudes towards class in the process of being rewritten in the gaps between the texts.

27

TRACKING PICKWICK’S RECEPTION, 1836-1860:

In one of the most insightful discussions of Pickwick written in the past fifty years, Charles Dickens’s Networks (2012), Jonathan Grossman lays to rest the question of the text‟s eclectic nature: “The whole tired notion that Pickwick forces an evaluative decision between its formless heterogeneity and artistic unity is a false one” (67). He notes—as all who confront Pickwick must—that serial publication, even in monthly format, had a storied history dating back to at least the publication of Clarissa and

TristramShandy. And he argues that Dickens‟s text “made new sense of serialization for its readers” by virtue of a novel (in both senses) exploitation of the coaching transport system as an organizational tool. It‟s a brilliant reading that forcefully points to the text‟s engagement with new technologies of transport as a moment of symbolically reordering readers‟ responses to modernity. One way, he claims, of understanding the novel‟s popularity is to look at what it does with the serial form: “In Pickwick, Dickens provided readers with an armature for understanding serialization in terms of the realist novel‟s project of imagining society as the networking together of the open-ended, collective unfolding of people‟s individual fates” (68).

Yet Grossman hasn‟t quitesettled that hash. The debate over Pickwick‟s narrative unity may be undeniably tired, yet it is, equally undeniably, a question that the initial critics of the text posed with especial vigor. For Victorian critics, there was a very real importance in answering the question: “What is this text before me?” Answering that

28 question is at the heart of Grossman‟s second, larger claim about realism in Pickwick. It was by no means clear to Victorian critics that they were even reading a novel, much less a “realist” one. The first reviews categorized the text as a magazine; a work of non- fiction; a burlesque; an eccentric Sternean travelogue; sketches of low life in the style of

Pierce Egan‟s “Days and Nights in London;” a comic extravaganza a la Theodore Hook; a picaresque indebted to Smollett; an imitation of Fielding; or a novel in the style of

Scott. Only the final two categories offered a plausible way to read Pickwick as “realist,” and as I shall discuss in a moment, those two genealogies of the text presented significantly different ways of making sense of the text‟s place in history. To instantiate

Pickwick as the origin point for Victorian realist fiction is putting the coach before the horse.

Reception history is sometimes dismissed as no more than a means of telling the same old story. Yet it can give critics the tools to examine aporia in our critical narratives and to challenge accepted histories of texts. This kind of history often asks us to reconceive our ideas of a text when confronted with the initial responses—at its best, it asks us to shake loose the critical dust that clings to our received notions of what a text

“does.” If we follow the initial critics of Pickwick closely, reception history can also usefully dissolve critical categories that we take for granted: for instance, that there was a tradition of a realist novel available to Dickens, or that there were ways of talking about that tradition that were cognizant with our own idealist critical horizons. To my mind, the clearest statement of the power of reception studies remains that of Jane Tompkins.

29 Nineteenth-century texts, she argues, looked different to their contemporaries than they do to twenty-first century readers because they were different, “not simply because each critic looks at the text from a different point of view or with different purposes in mind, but because looking is not an activity that is performed outside of political struggles and institutional structures, but arises from them” (251). Tompkins goes on to argue that such broadly defined institutions, including publishing networks and genres of marketing, play as important a role as the “cultural conceptions” that dominate interpretation. She suggests that the “appearance of an author in the context of a particular publishing practice rather than some other is a fact about the kind of claim he or she is making on an audience‟s attention and is crucial to the success of the claim” (Tompkins 251).

Though Tompkins‟s work is situated within the American literary scene, her insistence that texts are historically situated within horizons determined by historical and cultural factors including modes of production guides my thinking in this section.

Dickens emerged as a serialized author—that is, an author publishing in independent serial parts. We tend to think of the Victorian novel as being dominated by serial production, but in fact, very few authors successfully practiced independent serial publication.5 A substantial amount of Victorian novelists simply wrote and published three-volume novels, while the vast majority of those who were serialized published within weekly or monthly journals. Even the great exceptions to this, Thackeray and

Eliot, published independent serial novels alongside traditional three-deckers and journal

5 This is demonstrated in more detail in John Sutherland‘s Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers (1995). 30 publication. Only Dickens, and perhaps a few very minor novelists, could be fully identified with independent part publication. His status opened up for Victorian literary critics a serious instability within literary production which they consistently engage.

Though their comments can often seem to “offer no deep analytical insights” (Engel and

King 56), or even appear a bit boneheaded to those of us living after the Pickwick event, they are in fact useful documents of a society struggling to make sense of a hitherto undocumented mass phenomenon. Critics recognized that Pickwick offered a serious challenge to traditional forms of literary value and discourse that had been enfranchised by decades of practice.

An examination of the reception of the novel by the first generations of readers reveals how thoroughly the text reconfigured questions of form and audience and just what the stakes of that transformation might be. The reception history of Pickwick is shaped by its appearance within a society experiencing profound, systematic change.6

Early Dickens could serve for critics as a marker of that change, a break with the tradition of English letters. Pickwick made this break in a number of ways; however, in what follows, I shall focus on three major moments that constituted, for Victorian critics, the central challenges Dickens and Pickwick enacted to literary history. First, the form of the text made it difficult to identify the genre of the Pickwick Papers. Second, the translation

6 Recent historical and critical work which attests to this shift includes: Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic (2005); Elaine Hadley, Living Liberalism (2010); Hall, McClellan, and Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation (2000); Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body (1993). Raymond Williams‘s Culture and Society (1958) and The City and the Country (1973) remain classic expositions of this social transformation. The Victorians themselves theorized the systemic shift, especially in Carlyle, Signs of the Times (1829) and Thackeray, The Roundabout Papers (1863). 31 of character and setting away from a pastoral and aristocratic locus towards an urban and

“vulgar” one opened up new horizons for the direction of the novel as a form. Finally

(though this emerged more fully only in retrospect) the shift from a religious toward a political narrative transformed notions of the novel‟s purpose.

The researcher and journalist Edward Salmon, wondering near the end of the century if girls were really twenty times more likely to read Dickens than Louisa May

Alcott and six times more likely to read The Last Days of Pompeii than Black Beauty, suspected a certain skew in his data collection. “In the first place,” he suggested,

“doubtless they considered it proper to vote for such names as Scott and Dickens…in the second, Dickens‟s or Scott‟s works are probably in the school or home library, and hence easily get-at-able” (Salmon 30). All in all, however, his 1886 survey was proof that boys and girls “recognize and appreciate the best in literature, whether or not they always read it” (27). Salmon‟s survey resonates with certain common ideas about Pickwick, which figured near the top of both boys‟ and girls‟ reading lists. It suggests that the text exudes a certain cheery safeness which is authorized by its presence in the edifying scholastic library. It operated as an approved text, in more senses than one. By the turn of the century P. G. Wodehouse could riff on the stodginess of the text when he made the schoolboys of St. Austin‟s turn to Pickwick in order to get a sense of the style of

Thucydides, a joke perhaps more revealing than amusing.

In fact many early reviewers of Dickens would have kept him far from the classroom. No less an authority than Thomas Arnold expressed disapproval at the

32 popularity of Pickwick Papers. Conservative reviewers like Thomas Cleghorn turned to

Arnold to express their own dissatisfaction with the text, noting that the schoolmaster had

“observed with pain” an “increase in frivolity and childishness” and a concomitant moral degeneration in the boys of Rugby School under the influence of Pickwick (Cleghorn 85).

Far more ambivalent about the text than later Victorians imagined, for them Pickwick offered challenges that were both formal and moral, beginning with the question of genre.

It was only in retrospect, especially after the publication of the (somewhat) more tightly plotted Oliver Twist, that critics could comfortably identify Pickwick as a novel.

Early reviewers struggled even for a basic vocabulary within which to categorize the book. As Abraham Hayward, writing in the Quarterly Review, stated in 1837, the plan of the book was “so altogether anomalous that it is no easy matter to determine in what class of composition to place them, or in what their peculiar excellence consists” (494). If

Victorian critics saw Dickens as part of a tradition, it was often the eclectic, humanistic tradition of the periodical; or the discursive eccentricities of the late eighteenth century novel. The Athenaeum, most inclined to identify the work with Regency antecedents like

Hook and Pierce Egan, insisted that the work was a “periodical”, stressing its lack of narrative cohesion, its monthly appearance, and its “racy” or “piquant” language (841).

The Eclectic Review, too, admitted doubt about the text‟s status as a novel, going so far as to question whether the text were fictional or not: “It would be somewhat difficult,” they state, to determine the “precise species” of Pickwick (339). But if one were to classify it, the reviewer continued, it belonged with “some of the tales of Fielding,

33 Smollett, and others of our older novelists,” whose texts had “little in common with the ordinary novel, except that the incidents are invented, and happen, for the most part, to the same character” (340). Other reviewers, however, were neither so sure about the text‟s antecedents nor its status. Hayward, despite his confusion about questions of genre, stated magisterially that “admirers and detractors will be equally ready to admit that he has little, if anything, in common with the novelists and essayists of the last century” (484). Instead, he attributed Dickens‟s success to his “new and decidedly original genius” (484). For the reviewer in Fraser’s, the text began as a burlesque and only later evolved into a novel (393). The similarities to the novels of Fielding and

Goldsmith are incidental because the novel offers no fixed vantage point on character

(“Charles Dickens and His Works” 392-93). For the Dublin Review, too, Pickwick had only a minor resemblance to its eighteenth century predecessors; however, the Dublin

Review dismisses Fielding and Smollett on moral grounds (“gross and voluptuous even to disgusting”) while noting the purity of Dickens‟s moral intentions (168). From a vantage point a generation later, S. F. Williams identified the springs of Dickens‟s originality in his universal sympathy, a quality that allied him with Shakespeare and Scott (73); moreover, it made him a “true artist, a great novelist,” despite the insufficiencies of

Pickwick’s form (77-78).

These literary genealogies performed significant cultural work for Victorian reviewers. In both cases they seek to establish continuity with inherited literary traditions. The magazines more inclined to identify Pickwick with novelistic and belles-

34 lettres writers of the eighteenth century tended towards liberal politics and religious tolerance. In their reviews, they focus on the ways in which Dickens employs materials inherited from his Georgian predecessors, such as humor, typological characters, and digressive plotting, while suppressing the more radical breaks made with those conventions. This emphasis allows them to place the expansions of sympathy for which

Dickens argues in Pickwick within a liberal, even Whiggish, tradition of cultural progressivism. In response, reviewers who clustered Dickens with Shakespeare and

Walter Scott focused on the breaks or challenges Boz‟s text posed to the tradition of the novel, allowing reviewers to elide questions of genre by stressing Dickens‟s native genius. Shakespeare‟s rejection of the so-called Aristotelian unities and heterodox mixtures of comedy and tragedy had been remarked upon by his contemporary Ben

Jonson and seized by Romantics as a uniquely British alternative to the vitiated, classicizing Augustan tradition. Similarly, Scott‟s loose, shaggy plotting and narrative experiments offered a formal model for understanding Dickens‟s own episodic text. For the reviewer who wanted to praise Dickens, Shakespeare and Scott provided a historical lens that de-emphasized the importance of generic convention but also of continuous tradition. Like his towering predecessors, Dickens remodeled literary formulas by proposing something radically novel.

Part of the novelty of Pickwick lay in its serialization. Serial publication presented a serious challenge to identifying the genre of the text. The innovative presentation, reviewers recognized, opened up the text to readers who might never pick

35 up a novel by Scott. At the same time, however, reviewers experienced ambivalence about the effects offered by the new technology of serial publication. Though T. H.

Lister in the Edinburgh Review dissented from this view, he noted that “many persons” might find the form of Pickwick “attractive…to that vast majority, the idle readers—but not one indicative of high literary pretensions, or calculated to inspire a belief of probable permanence of reputation” (76). Idle reading is transitory and demotic: a function of, but also an encouragement to, an arbitrary, desultory attitude toward the text. It turns the attention towards the fleeting and the vulgar, fragmentary shapes instead of the permanent landmarks of literature. Moreover, the idle reading made possible by serialization fractured that attention in potentially harmful ways. Thomas Cleghorn in the

North British Review claimed that serial publication was fraught with “bad consequences” because it mingled the “unrealexcitement” of a “trance, or dream” with

“daily business” (85). Dreamy day-laborers, they suggest, might have difficulty sorting out the real from the phantasmagorical world of the text: category confusion run rampant.

The brief doses of narrative provided undercut the habits of “manly thoughtfulness” encouraged by the traditional novel (Cleghorn 85). Lurking just behind this critique is the fear: what would happen to a nation incapable of this kind of sustained thought? As with today‟s attacks on video gaming and social media, the Victorians worried that the atomized installments of serial fiction would produce a nation of inattentive citizens drifting towards a second childhood. Disabling the distinctive stable industrious qualities of the British character through the attenuation of attention, the moment of serial publication represented a threat to some of the core categories of British identity. 36 While critics acknowledged that the form of the text located a rupture in core categories of British identity, they also recognized that Pickwick innovated representations of that identity. The speed with which Pickwick and Sam were seized by the national consciousness highlighted the success of the novel‟s redefinition of the

British character. Even Cleghorn, so skeptical of the effects of Dickens‟s writing, distinguished “the genius of a master” in “the inimitable portraits” of Pickwick and Sam

Weller: “They are depicted with the most perfect truth, consistency, and humor; and while they represent general classes, stand before us in the clearest individuality”

(Cleghorn 66-67). As Cleghorn saw, one innovative aspect of the text was its ability to subsume the general within the individual, to locate beneath the rich, strange surface quiddities (a taste for “tights and garters,” perhaps, or an interest in relentless punning) a class structure. These early reviews echo N. N. Feltes‟s suggestion that this text interpellates its readers by working through the relationship between general and particular. They understood that the text brought questions of class identity to the forefront through this technique. “Bodies of men who live constantly together… naturally fall into peculiarities of manner and habit” that signify a corporate identity as clearly as “external badges” (341). The Eclectic Review marveled at the ease with which the author caught the “peculiarities of character” that “discriminate different classes of the community from one another; which mark the various species as strongly as other peculiarities do the individual” (341). They are, he concludes, “not described—they are exhibited” (341). For the presumed normative Victorian reader, Pickwick became an

37 expansive gallery, through which members of the nation could be viewed, identified, and recognized.

Unsurprisingly, given the ethnographic language of classification and distinction employed here, critics tended to focus on the depictions of Sam Weller and his father.

Dickens‟s “low” characters were depicted with a “healthy, manly, independent spirit” which provided rich linguistic access to London street life (Hayward 507). Dickens was

“the first to turn to account the rich and varied stores of wit and humor discoverable amongst the lower classes of the metropolis, whose language has hitherto been condemned” (Hayward 500). Representation through dialect and especially sociolect is central to the perceived achievement of Pickwick. On one level, it pursues the

“exhibitive” qualities of the text, scientifically marking Sam and Tony Weller as outsiders to the ideologically normative (and linguistically unmarked) representation of

Pickwick and his fellow club-men. Yet, on the other hand, mastery of Weller‟s cockneyisms proves to be the sign of the consummate insider, the reader who can navigate the new urban environments of London. Within the text, Sam‟s language negotiates a new subject position, one which—through puns, malapropisms, and intentional misunderstandings—enacts a complicated critique of ideological positions, overturning institutionalized meaning through jokes. This linguistic position was claimed by many of the working-class writers who used Pickwick as a platform for their own work. For Victorian reviewers, however, Weller‟s language operated as a signal of the text‟s authentic conformity to urban life. Often they cited real-world experience to prove

38 the plausibility of the Sam‟s assertions, as did, for example, the London and Westminster

Review, citing anecdotal evidence to “prove” the truth of a popular Weller anecdote

(209). Moreover, Victorian critics connected the demotic language of the cockney characters with the texture and style of the book itself. As Thomas Cleghorn argued,

“There is a vein of good, manly, and flexible, if not elegant, English writing, which we wish the author had continued to cultivate” (68). Likening Dickens‟s earthy good humor to the figure of Antaeus, the Athenaeum insisted that “Boz” drew his strength from proximity to his grimy, urban subjects. He remained unfit for the “cloud-capp‟d towers and gorgeous palaces” of higher literature (Atheneaum 843). These comments suggest not only social condescension towards the relatively unknown author, but a profound ambivalence about the operation of class within the literary and social communities of

Victorian England: on the one hand, invigorating, masculine and powerful, yet demotic, popular and “of the earth, earthy.”

For some reviewers, Dickens‟s focus on characters drawn from the middle and working classes signaled a commitment to radicalism. The late Sally Ledger, in her final book, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (2007), forcefully locates Dickens within a popular radical tradition of political critique and dissent. Ledger provides a rich reading of Pickwick‟s engagements with political and legal critique in Pickwick; yet, because her interest in the text is primarily political—and because hers is not a reception study—she does not discuss the issue that Victorian critics identified as most “radical” in

Pickwick: Dickens‟s attitude towards religion. How closely religion and radicalism were

39 linked in discussions of Dickens‟s work is made clearest in the portmanteau review of

“Modern Novels” that appeared in the Christian Remembrancer in December 1842.

Commenting on the first three of Dickens‟s novels, they critic wrote: “His religion, whenever any is introduced, is for the most part such mere pagan sentimentalism, that we should be better pleased by its absence. He is also a radical, probably of the better sort”

(595). Barely pausing to draw a breath, the reviewer yokes political and religious categories together into a Gordian knot: “The radical attacks appointed bounds and ordinances, ancient usage, and prescriptive rights, which, even when not directly and in the highest sense sacred, would nearly always be found helps, instead of hindrances, to the end he honestly has in view” (595). The Burkean conservatism seen here links religion—the “sacred”—with political stability. As moving parts of the same machine, if one is defective, the other will be unable to function. While the reviewer acknowledges the beneficial intentions of Dickens‟s social project (as he sees it), he also cautions that, as Dickens‟s popularity “is pretty nearly commensurate with the number of people within the four seas who read anything at all,” his message is more likely to find intemperate readers, giving rise to “evil fruit” (“Modern Novels” 595-96).

Few reviewers carried their critiques this far. Most, like T. H. Lister, emphasized

Dickens‟s “comprehensive spirit of humanity” whose “tendency… is to make us practically benevolent” (77). But there were dissenters from this view. The Eclectic

Review, for example, worried about Dickens‟s satire of Mr. Stiggins, the evangelical

40 preacher who fleeces Tony Weller‟s second wife. They noted the “dangerous task of making sport of fanaticism and hypocrisy,” a danger which they found two-fold:

[F]irst, because such matters are far too serious for sport… and secondly because, in too many instances, readers who know little or nothing of what true religion means, are easily tempted to apply to every thing which bears its impress, the name of cant, hypocrisy, and fanaticism. (354)

Dickens, by proffering no depiction of “true religion” within his text, allows the

“irreligious reader” to draw unwarranted assumptions about the nature of religion

(Eclectic 355). Similarly, Thomas Cleghorn noted that Dickens “frequently represents persons with pretensions to virtue and piety as mere rogues and hypocrites…. It is not surprising if he has thus created in the mind of some the impression that he holds the claims of religion itself in contempt” (84). Yet Cleghorn suggests that Dickens does more than muddle the distinctions between true piety and assumed virtue. He also argues that his “good characters” are morally deficient; that is, that they are subjects endowed with excessive goodness by nature, not education, “not constituted like other human beings” and thus “instinctively incapable of evil” (83). They do what is right by

“impulse,” not “principle;” and therefore have no legitimacy as depictions of human actors struggling in the sticky web of post-lapsarian evil (Cleghorn 83). They are, in other words, sentimental, not real, and only by draping these figures with a veil of sentiment can Dickens provide these “faultless monsters” with the illusion of reality

(Cleghorn 83). Margaret Oliphant, in 1855, would explicitly connect Dickensian

“sentimentalism” with an injurious social project:

41 There is such a thing as unwise kindness, injurious love, maudlin charity, a weak suffusion of universal benevolence which is good for nothing but pretty speeches, pretty pictures, pretty sentiments and actions…. What does Mr. Dickens mean by all the caressing condescension with which this powerful organ of his strokes down “the poor”—by all these small admirable moral histories, these truths and wonders diluted to the meanest capacities? (465-66)

Pretty pictures simply wallpaper over rough moral complexities. More and more, in the view of Oliphant, these kinds of religious fripperies offer up a weak “universal benevolence” in place of “the grievous and glorious mystery” of human life (1855 466).

Tying these threads together, the National Review in 1858 labeled Dickens a “sentimental radical” (“Cheap Edition” 480). Sentimental radicalism developed as an aesthetic response to the inordinate political cruelties of the Black Acts and the frequency of

Regency-era capital punishment, stressing sympathetic responses to another‟s pain: “the unfeeling obtuseness of the early part of this century was to be corrected by an extreme, perhaps an excessive, sensibility to human suffering in the years which have followed”

(“Cheap Edition” 480-81). Dickens‟s idealized heroes and caricatured villains are flip sides of the same coin, a cultural tool used to transform social perception. The benevolence of Pickwick is not a moral claim but a social one: “it brings out better than anything could have done the half-comic intensity of a sympathetic nature” (“Cheap

Edition” 481).

This whirlwind sketch maps one key aspect of Dickens‟s reception by his contemporaries. The absence of traditional religious feeling in Pickwick was quickly read by critics as a covert presence. Sentimentalism, which began in eighteenth century

42 literature as a moral response to the intellectual assertions of rationalism, is emptied in

Dickens of its affective spiritual claims and turned into a vehicle for social and political critique. Dickensian sentiment becomes a political category. It allows a text to pay lip- service to conservative, traditional social mores while smuggling political content into the text in the guise of natural representation. By removing Christian suffering as a representational category, Dickens created a world in which idealized characters suffer the slings and arrows of an unjust society, in which the meaning of their sufferings then has to be reinscribed within a horizon of political, not moral, action. The philanthropic and charitable ideals of Pickwick were read as social ideals, not spiritual, while the novel‟s comedy forced the reader to confront this world, not the next. Over the course of the nineteen installments, readers drawn into the text‟s discourse in that hypnotic “dream trance” could find themselves surprised by its advocacy of real social action over

Christian endurance. Thomas Arnold‟s fears that serial publication weakened moral character were not as eccentric as they first seemed.

One way to make sense of the complexities of Pickwick is to locate its reception history within twentieth-century frameworks of public discourse. The text, as Victorian critics recognized, created a massive reading public, one whose readership extended far beyond what Victorians had identified as the standard market for printed fiction. And, as we have seen, it is precisely as an intervention into public discourse that Dickens‟s work was understood—an intervention that, at least briefly, reconstituted social and cultural relationships to the novel. Michael Warner‟s work in Publics and Counterpublics (2002)

43 offers a way to read the shapes of this public. Warner argues that publics come into being within the horizons of textuality. He identifies seven crucial criteria for the creation of publics: 1) Publics are self-organized; 2) publics are relations among strangers; 3) public address is both personal and impersonal; 4) publics are constituted by the simple act of attention; 5) publics are the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse; 6) publics act historically according to the temporality of their circulation; and 7) finally, a public is a poetic world-making (Warner 67-124). Within the horizons of textuality, publics are “a principal instance of the forms of embodiment and social relations that are themselves at issue” (Warner 54). That is, through ongoing textual discourse, publics are a place where its participants are imagined in certain ways.

Publics are performative, in other words (Warner 114). Because some publics provide particularly powerful ways to imagine participation, they come to stand in as the public, rather than a public. They ideologically construct themselves as, more or less, universal.

Read within public discourse theory as outlined by Warner, the reception history of

Pickwick reveals a public in the moment of constituting briefly constituting itself as universal. As S. F. Williams claimed in 1863, “No section of the race could claim

Dickens as their exponent, as they could Hook, Marryat, Bulwer, or even Scott; for his sympathy was universal” (636). Those novelists “failed to recognize and embody those deep and universal elements which unite the multiplex classifications of the vast family of the human race into one great whole” (Williams 637). The moment of Pickwick is also the moment of a remarkable social fantasy finding embodiment within a mass public, creating not only a “national text” but also a “text of the nation.” 44 Warner‟s theory of public discourse offers us an advantageous way of reading the relationship between text and nation. It allows us to see Pickwick not only as a literary event, but as a process, a series of shocks that rippled out over time across the surface of the 1830s and 1840s. It was a text involved in constant circulation, reflection, and conversation. It was embedded in official public and private discourse of the time—a discourse marked by those readers who discussed the book together, who clubbed together to hear it read aloud, who inscribed its name on monuments. But it also opened up a unique and short-lived discursive genre, the Dickensian appropriation. These texts, which appropriated Dickens‟s plots and characters to their own ends, offer a rich stratum of evidence that allows us to see how writers targeting the working-classes seized upon the opportunities for “poetic world-making.” Neither acts ofdétournement nor recuperation, these texts grasped, often explicitly, that the reflexive and temporal aspects of serial publishing allowed them to intervene in the public that was being constellated around Dickensian philanthropy. In what follows, I want to examine closely one of the most popular of the appropriations of Pickwick, G. W. M. Reynolds‟s Pickwick Abroad, to examine how it offers an alternative reading of the Pickwick event.

REPUBLICAN PICKWICK: REYNOLDS, APPROPRIATION, AND POLITICS IN PICKWICK ABROAD

Pickwick Abroad; or the Tour in France (1837-1838) has never gotten good press. Though the title pops up with almost monotonous regularity whenever appropriations of Dickens are discussed, few critics—in the Victorian age or our own— seem to have read the novel. And even when it is given some slight attention, the text is 45 usually invoked simply to be dismissed: Grossman, for example, calls it a “lame rip-off”

(66); Ledger simply notes that the book “provoked, in Richard Altick‟s words, „Dickens‟s almost apoplectic wrath,‟” while claiming that the author‟s purpose was “primarily commercial” (143). The novel‟s only extended discussion—totaling three pages— appears in Louis James‟s excellent, though dated, overview of working-class fiction,

Fiction for the Working Man (1966). Even there, he hardly works up much enthusiasm for the book: “From the literary point of view, it is the best of all the Dickens plagiarisms, although few readers today would wish to follow it to the last page” (55). Appearing in

2008, the first collection of scholarly essays devoted to Reynolds mentions Pickwick

Abroad only in passing. The only scholarly attention paid to it in that book comes in

Brian Maidment‟s “The Mysteries of Reading: Text and Illustration in G. W. M.

Reynolds,” and even there his attention is focused on the generally fine illustrations by

Alfred Crowquill.

It is not hard to understand why the novel would draw so little, and such dismissive, interest. Compared to Reynolds‟s most significant achievements, Mysteries of London (1844-48) and Mysteries of the Court of London (1848-56)—labyrinthine tales of intrigue and radical politics spiced with all sorts of decadent aristocrats, cross-dressing, sexual depravity, and graphic violence—Pickwick Abroad‟s rather hokey status as a plagiaristic continuation of Dickens‟s text seems inconsequential. In addition, the text is so discursively plotted as to make Pickwick look like a master-class in tight narrative: characters travel from London to France and back again at random; the sprawling

46 chronology of the text leaps willy-nilly from month to month, sometimes covering the span of a season in a sentence; and traditional niceties of the novel, like character development or overarching story, are disregarded for a loose assortment of vignettes and anecdotes. Yet, in spite of the text‟s obvious flaws, it is both more interesting and more important than any critic has given it credit for being. Though Reynolds certainly used

Pickwick‟s fame to ensure a commercial audience for his text, Pickwick Abroad represents a serious attempt to examine the social effects of both meliorative and

Radicalist republican politics. As a text reflexively engaged in public dialogue with

Pickwick Papers, Reynolds‟s book attempts to explicitly politicize the new novel-reading publics formed in the wake of Pickwick‟s success. Audaciously, it equates the benevolent philanthropy at the heart of Dickens‟s novel with republican ideals, persistently linking the Pickwickians with revolutionary and republican figures while offering a kind of how-to guide to assimilating a republican political practice into English life. And finally, through the character of Edward Sugden, the book offers a figure of carnivalistic revolt so powerful that Dickens would revise it in the last of his early novels,

Martin Chuzzlewit.

More generally, I want to read Pickwick Abroad as symptomatic of the microgenre of Dickensian appropriation. Plagiarisms, adaptations, and appropriations of

Dickens‟s early work form a massive substrata or occult subconscious of the first decades of Victorian England. They represent a popular cultural phenomenon almost invisible to us today. Reading a list of the titles is like entering a strangely familiar alternate universe:

47 a short selection includes The Posthumourous Notes of the Pickwick Club (aka The Penny

Pickwick), Pickwick Abroad: or The Tour in France, Mr. Pickwick in America, Pickwick in India, Pickwick Married, NoctesPickwickianae, ThePosthumous Papers of the

Cadger’s Club, The Posthumous Papers of the Wonderful Discovery Club, not one but two(!) OliverTwisses, Nickelas Nickelbery (also confusingly known as

NickolberryNikollas), Barnaby Fudge, The Life and Adventures of Martin Puzzlewhit,

Master Timothy’s Book-Case (for MasterHumphrey’s Clock), Dombey and Daughter, and “A Christmas Ghost Story.” Most of these productions were highly ephemeral, many more were pulped in the paper shortages of the 1940s. At their peak, however, these appropriations of Dickens‟s works were reaching far more readers than the original: The

Penny Pickwick, published by Edward Lloyd, seems to have reliably sold 50,000 copies a week during its serial run, while a now-lost plagiarism of TheOld Curiosity Shop was estimated to have sold between 50,000 and 70,000 copies in its run (James 50).

The two-decade existence of a Dickensian cottage industry among working-class publishers should give us pause. Its sudden appearance and equally sudden disappearance is worth considering as something more than just a curiosity of literary history. Rather, its flourishing asks us to think about how genre worked for Victorians in specific ways. What was it about Dickens—or the Dickensian novel—that sparked such a consuming craze? Certainly one motivating factor was marketability, but this alone is an insufficient answer. Similar Victorian publishing successes from the same decades, like Thackeray‟s Vanity Fair, Ainsworth‟s Jack Sheppard, or the novels of Bulwer-

48 Lytton, failed to capture the imagination of working-class publishers. My previous section demonstrates some of the ways in which Dickens‟s project provoked anxiety among his middle-class readers. In this section, I argue that working-class publishers and authors engaged in a process of revision of the Dickensian text. They actively seized the text as a moment to negotiate the stakes of their representation in the new national consciousness made possible by the moment of Pickwick.

In this section I focus on G. W. M. Reynolds for two reasons. First, Pickwick

Abroad was popular. It warranted several editions and reprints throughout the century.Unlike some of its more ephemeral peers, it was reviewed in multiple periodicals published for workers and servants. Second, Reynolds is a major figure in Victorian literature who deserves closer attention. I want to make an audacious claim here:

Reynolds‟s absence from most studies of Victorian fiction has skewed our sense of that moment‟s literary history. By the estimate of his contemporaries, more readers were likely to encounter his work than that of any other Victorian author. The Bookseller noted in its 1879 obituary: “Dickens and Thackeray… had their thousands of readers, but Mr.

Reynolds‟ were numbered by the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions” (qtd. in Herr

13). When we ignore Reynolds, we impoverish our sense of the Victorian reader‟s experience. The popularity of Reynolds reminds us that there were more readers, perhaps many times more, drawn from the servant and working classes than from the middle classes. Their literature is often more ephemeral and fugitive, their aesthetics more rough, than the canonized masterpieces. Those very qualities have much to teach us about their

49 experience. We also run the risk of misinterpreting the true horizons of literary radicalism. Reynolds positioned himself in the hard left of Chartist politics. His mature texts exposed a corrupt, transgressive aristocracy menacing a suffering proletariate for profit and pleasure. The political implications of his texts are rarely subtle. They were not meant to be: their aesthetic was itself a form of provocation.

Pickwick Abroad was less inflammatory—by design—than later Reynolds texts, but it was still a typical product of a gadfly strong enough to arouse dislike and scorn even amongst those nominally sympathetic to his politics. Marx, for one, considered

Reynolds a “„scoundrel‟ [and] a „rich and able speculator‟” (qtd. in John 164). Born in

1814, Reynolds spent most of the 1830s living in France, where he seems to have moved among radical political and philosophical circles.7 His first publication, The Errors of the

Christian Religion, appeared in England in 1832. Its atheist and republican ideals effectively debarred Reynolds from standard avenues of publishing in the Victorian period, although there has been some doubt cast upon his actual level of involvement in the finished work. In France, he became the literary editor for the Paris Literary Gazette, publishing, among others, Thackeray‟s first articles for pay. Some unlucky financial speculation caused him to declare bankruptcy and return to England in 1836. Reynolds would be dogged by money problems for much of his life: he declared bankruptcy again in 1840 and in 1848. Certain accounts suggest that, during this time period, Reynolds and his brother supplemented their regular income through fraudulent schemes not unlike

7 My biographical sketch of Reynolds draws throughout on the ―Introduction‖by Humpherys and James to their collection on Reynolds, as well as his entry in the DNB, also written by Louis James. 50 those of Edward Sugden in Pickwick Abroad. These accounts are unreliable, only produced in the wake of Reynolds‟s notoriety as a Chartist agitator in the 1840s; in either case, however, his French experiences informed Pickwick Abroad at every level. His first major literary success, it recorded sales of over 12,000 per monthly part and commanded enough popularity (or notoriety) to be republished in volume form more than once during the nineteenth century (“Mr. G. W. M. Reynolds” 191). In 1840 he, along with several partners, founded The Teetotaller: a Weekly Journal devoted to Temperance, Literature, and Science, where his “NoctesPickwickianae”, in which Pickwick and Weller take the temperance pledge, appeared. By 1841, however, due to difficulties with stockholders he founded The Anti-Teetotallerfrom the same offices. In October 1844, Reynolds began publishing The Mysteries of London, an enormous serial novel that ran, along with its sequel, for a dozen years in four different series, and sold in the most conservative estimates well over one million copies in ten years, making Reynolds by far the best- selling novelist of the Victorian era. Prodigiously prolific, he continued to write novels in a number of genres, edited Reynold’s Miscellany (1846-1869), which boasted a circulation of 30,000, and founded Reynold’s Weekly Newspaper: A Journal of

Democratic Progress and General Intelligence, by all accounts the most popular and most important radical Chartist newspaper of the nineteenth century (with a circulation of over 350,000). It would survive until 1967. One of the most crucial and least known

Victorians, Reynolds‟s influence far outweighs his visibility in the literary canon.

51 Because of the text‟s obscurity, it may be useful to describe Pickwick Abroad‟s plot briefly, pausing to consider the first chapter in detail. The novel takes place in the wake of Pickwick Papers’ extraordinary success, with Pickwick himself now a recognized public figure. By conveniently treating the Pickwickians as real, not fictional, characters, the text offers itself up as both a consumable part of Pickwick mania and a commentary on celebrity. The text also frames itself as a meditation on celebrity from its opening moments, when Pickwick and Sam arrive at the quay of Calais, greeted by an expectant throng, “whose combined hundreds of lungs sent forth most vehement tokens of applause” (PA 5). By installing Pickwick as a global celebrity, the text, from its opening moments, places what was seen as a specifically British cultural virtue within the larger context of European history. While the reviewer for the Dublin Review asserted that Pickwick represented “the character of the nation as well as the writer…embodying and involving the great guiding principles of public taste in England” (161), Pickwick‟s rapturous reception at the shores of Calais ensures that those virtues are seen in this text as transnational, unbounded by geography and culture.

The crowd‟s ferocious cheer for the arrived Pickwickians, as well as the routine presence of gendarmes in the crowd, leads the tourists to assume the gathered onlookers to be a rioting “mob,” led by bloodthirsty “Johnny Darmies,” who would “think as much o‟ spitting a fellow-Christian through the guts as a French sugger „ould care about running another through vith his bagginet” (PA 5). Only after the captain reassures them that the crowds are celebratory and represent no danger are Pickwick and his company

52 comfortable enough to depart the ship. Upon arriving on land, they are immediately accosted by an “English sporting character” and his “prompter,” who together offer a

“bewildered” Pickwick a lengthy oration larded with overblown rhetorical figures and classical tags: “Most illustrious and welcome Pickwick!—all hail on the shores of

France! and when I say „all hail!‟ it is not the voice of an humble individual that pronounces these words… But „clamorum virorum facta moresque‟ must be related by other tongues, and celebrated by other pens than mine…” (PA 7-8). After dodging these purveyors of “downright humbug” (PA 8), the Pickwickians are “briefly and speedily examined” at the custom house, before Pickwick is carried to his hotel on the shoulders of the gathered crowd as a tribute to “the respect that the assembled French and English jointly and individually entertained for the illustrious name of Pickwick” (PA 8).

The opening chapter highlights several strategies that Reynolds deploys throughout the text. The first is the repeated process of incorrectly analyzing a French custom by applying pre-existing personal or cultural standards to it. As a consequence, a more or less comic scene of misapprehension follows, until a knowledgeable figure intervenes to restore order. While these scenes are often played as pure farce, they are also likely to provoke thought about the relative merits of French society. For example, when the hotel waiters suggest that he eat at the same table as Pickwick, Sam‟s astonished reply is that eating “vith my superiors, as if they vos my ek-vals” reminds him of a “radical conwivialmeetin‟” (PA 44). Unlike the Sam in Phiz‟s frontispiece, Weller in

Pickwick Abroad is keenly aware of class divisions. Indeed, as Tupman and Pickwick

53 point out, the intermingling of class is the “fashion” in French society, noting that the driver of their carriage sits just a few plates down from them. With no deleterious effects visible as a consequence of this inversion of the British dining order, the text begins its process of accommodating British and French social values. Reiterating the process of misapprehension as a discursive tool for motivating action, the text advances its political agenda on the level of narrative structure. Even the physical form of the book itself suggests how seriously Reynolds was invested in this project. Not only was it cheaply serialized for the working classes, but it presents itself not merely as a novel, but as a guide to France. The “Preface” to the volume publication asserts Reynolds‟ “hope that the contents of the ensuing pages will help to clear away from the minds of my untraveled fellow-countrymen, a few of those prejudices, in reference to the French, which are still so tenaciously adhered to, and place the character of our great and gallant neighbours… in a new and better light than they have ever yet been viewed in” (PA vii).

Thirty-three woodcuts of Parisian landmarks by English architectural engraver George

Wilmot Bonner have been inserted into the text, sometimes bearing only the flimsiest relation to the story. And the title-page emphasizes Reynolds‟s French connections, listing him as author of Alfred de Rosann and The Modern Literature of France, the latter notably including the first translation into English of Balzac. What the texts attempt to construct—both materially and narratively—is a meeting-place between England and

France where cultural prejudice could yield to sympathy. It calls English values into question in order to navigate transformative politics.

54 The second narrative strategy is one of creative alienation. The English abroad often seem more foreign, more linguistically incomprehensible, than the French citizens

Pickwick encounters. The rhetorical mush of the sporting figure‟s peroration is mirrored throughout the text in the dazzling array of idiolects, private languages, moments of extreme parataxis, and incongruous figures of speech. His speech also slyly hints at the revolutionary ideals of the text. His Latin tag, “clamorum virorum facta moresque”—

“the deeds and characters of famous men”—is the opening line of Tacitus‟s Agricolae.

Reynolds, student of French republicanism that he was, would have known of the central role Tacitus‟s historical works played in the discourse of revolution. While there is a precedent in Pickwick for the comic stylization of spoken English, Pickwick Abroad insists on the linguistic absurdities of its émigré characters in a way that seems likely to distance the reader more thoroughly from its English characters than its French ones.

Dickens used slang and dialect, as his critics noted, to quickly signify the social backgrounds of his characters. Reynolds, too, could create a casual sketch of a character‟s background through his linguistic self-presentation: Septimus Chitty, for example, reveals himself as a down-at-heel gentleman through his hodgepodge of standard English, misremembered quotations, and garbled Latin recalled from the “Eton

Latin Grammar” (PA 199). Con artists like “Adolphus Crashem” (one of the many aliases of Edward Sugden, a character discussed more fully in the next section) and Hook

Walker use “flash” slang that alerts the reader, if not the rather naïvePickwickians, to their true social roots. Yet other characters, like the sympathetic Scuttle or the long- winded Kallaway, indulge in bizarre, paratactic, and even self-contradictory monologues. 55 They are at once grotesque caricatures of Dickens‟s method and alienating devices, especially compared to the “very good” English and “easy but impressive” delivery of

French figures like M. Dumont (PA 45). This kind of verbal estrangement is one of the methods by which the text bridges the cultural divide between English reader and French subject, constructing the legibility and intelligibility of its French characters in contrast with the heterogeneity and strangeness of its English abroad. By disorienting readers on the plane of verbal representation, it continues the transnational shift of readerly values towards French practices.

The exception to the unmarked language of the text‟s heroic figures, of course, is

Sam Weller, whose Cockney dialect was already a national institution by the time

Reynolds embarked on Pickwick Abroad. Reynolds seizes upon the possibilities of linguistic richness in Weller‟s speech by allowing him to voice the most radical thoughts in the book. Politics are everywhere in Sam‟s speech. Often the text engages in word- play in which a linguistic misunderstanding opens the text up for political commentary:

“This Gubbins, it appears, Sir, vos sent to Orsemonger Lane Jug—“ “What does Jug mean, Sam?” enquired Mr. Pickwick sharply. “Prison, Sir, to be sure,” returned Mr. Weller. “Oh! I see—a synonyme [sic],” observed his master. “No, Sir, it ain‟t a sin on „em to be there, „cause they can‟t help it, Sir.” (PA 36)

As a comic interlude, this relentless punning can grow rather tedious, yet the text often situates these moments within the master-servant dynamic of the novel. In outline, it is not unlike the process of cultural misapprehension that structures the book, except that

Sam‟s exuberant inventiveness is often deployed to open up even the linguistic registers

56 of English for political critique. If in Pickwick the relationship between Sam and

Pickwick was one of mutual benefit—Sam protecting the unworldly Pickwick from predatory villains of all kinds, while Pickwick imparts his charitable philosophy to the younger man—here the relationship has been reconfigured. Emphasizing the more astonishing aspect of Dickens‟s vision, the Sam of Pickwick Abroad feels free to contradict, correct, and tutor Pickwick in the ways of the world, to reveal the various ways in which false or corrupt figures proliferate like weeds in the world outside

Pickwick‟s study.

That world is an outsized one in Pickwick Abroad. The text makes little attempt to unify what are more or less comic sketches strung together by reappearing characters.

Much of the book concerns the continuing conflict between the Pickwickians and the con artist Edward Sugden, whose often successful plots to bilk Pickwick and his friends out of their money frequently involve the alluring Anastasie de Volange. Between encounters with Sugden, Pickwick visits celebrated places in Paris and the surrounding countryside, hobnobs with the upper echelon of British émigré society, proposes marriage to Sophia Weston and is jilted by her at the altar, while Tupman, Winkle, and Snodgrass have their own encounters with hucksters and beauties. Throughout, the comic and satiric thrust of the novel is interrupted by a variety of melodramatic inset tales, many narrated by M. Dumont, the charming detective who serves as Pickwick‟s entrée into the world of French culture. Because the text works largely through repetition and

57 accumulation, Sam‟s political awakening to the practical benefits of French society is, perhaps, the strongest through-line to the narrative of Pickwick Abroad.

Sam‟s initial suspicion of the French, typified by his nervous response to the

“Johnny Darmies” that escort the Pickwick circle to the custom house, is typical of his early response to France. Arriving in Calais, his first letter (to Mary, the servant he has married at the end of Pickwick Papers) offers a stereotypical portrait of French society as it might have been seen by a member of the working classes. Lamenting the frog‟s legs served at dinner and the lack of beer, noting the poor quality of the tobacco and the scantily dressed servants in “gouns that dusn‟t cum lower than their vaistis,” he sums

France up as a “quere place” (PA 15). Drawing attention to the cuisine and the attire, the text opens by acknowledging cultural difference, even as the narrative works to subvert those differences. Yet as Sam becomes more accustomed to French life, his initial response to France‟s strangeness registers differently. “Wery queer nation this is sure- ly,” he observes to Pickwick, “I hates to speak ill o‟ my own country…[but] all I can say is, that the French is much more politer and curtious than the English is” (PA 128). As

Pickwick and Sam note with wonder, even waiters are as “vell-behaved and gen-teel” as

“English gen‟lemen,” a fact they attribute to education (PA 128). By the time Sam comes to write to Mary again, rather than focusing on surface cultural differences, he represents the “powerful citty” of Paris as a utopian space: “there ain‟t no beggars. or so fu that they ain‟t vorthspeekin‟ ov. you doesn‟t see people dyin‟ here in the streets at night threw activalvant as you does in ingland, mari” (PA 351). With the price of bread and spirits so

58 low, Sam wonders why “all the old vomen in ingland” do not come to France for “a reglarblo out” (PA 351). Offering a radical revision of Dickens‟s bourgeois comedy,

Pickwick Abroad stages the earlier novel‟s interest in eating and drinking on a national level: a nation of hungry British having a riotous feast through the streets of Paris.

Locating Sam at the center of the novel‟s political consciousness not only allows

Reynolds to effectively target his audience, the readers of cheap weeklies, but also to continue to subvert the master-servant relations central to the book. The contrast between

Pickwick‟s idealism and Sam‟s hard-headed practicality generated much of the comedic frisson in Pickwick Papers, but Pickwick Abroad suggests how that dynamic could be put to political use. While the text never embraces Chartist ideals, Sam comes close to articulating a revolutionary praxis in a late scene with Pickwick. Reprimanding Sam for an outburst at a public occasion, Pickwick offers Sam “a piece of advice” (PA 429) to mind his manners. In return, Sam articulates a Francophile notion of fraternal equality—

“I thought as how vevos all ekal in this here country” (PA 429) and a lengthy anecdote about advice, in which a mysterious stranger promises an innkeeper the secret to life in exchange for a free meal and a fine bed. The secret turns out to be worthless: “If so be you ever goes to the treadmill, try and get the place next to the vall: „tis easier vorkin‟ there” (PA 430). Sam‟s reply, in other words, questions the notion of the relevance of

Pickwick‟s experience to his life, couching it in terms that raise the specter of illegality and penal servitude. Pickwick misinterprets the anecdote to be about swindling, but

Sam‟s response—“a most mysterious shake of the head” (PA 430)—leaves open the

59 larger question at play in their relationship: how is equality possible within the rigid class structure of masters and servants? The narrative pivots at this point to return Pickwick and Sam to the safer world of the comic business of the novel. Yet beneath the busy whirl of that comic machinery lies the depths of Sam‟s political education: “von is more freer here than in England, Sir” (PA 505). His sojourn in France transforming his views,

Sam‟s increasing openness to political and social transformation model questions of national engagement for working-class readers.

Sam is hardly the only member of Pickwick‟s circle to be transformed by his stay in France. All the Pickwickians return to England with their minds enlightened and their sympathies extended by their time on the Continent. Winkle realizes that “he liked the

French capital much better than the English one” (PA 217), a transformation unimaginable in Dickens‟s text. Pickwick, too, comes to confess his love for France.

Upon his return home he lectures his gathered friends on Paris—a city, Wardle notes with astonishment, “which you love so much” (PA 622). Pickwick declares that “there is much less crime in France than there is in England” and proceeds to analyze the “two direct causes,” lighter taxation leading to less public poverty and the passport system (PA

622-23). It is a curious speech for Pickwick to make while distributing gifts to his friends and family, yet it allows Reynolds to suggest an equivalent bourgeois model of political action to Sam‟s more radicalized viewpoint. The ideas Pickwick broaches in this final moment are reforms that could be pressed for by upstanding gentlemen without undue stress to the fabric of the social system. Rather than associating Pickwick‟s adventure

60 with an egalitarian republicanism, the text works to engage its readers‟ interest in moderate political change, a process in line with its avowed interest in building a bridge of sympathy between English and French culture.

While Pickwick Abroad overtly engages in this kind of restrained rhetoric, there is a more persistent level of political thinking to be found working on the level of analogy within the text. This is the metaphorical linkage between the Pickwickians and historical figures involved in the French Revolution—none more paramount than Napoleon

Bonaparte. The text is self-conscious about these parallels. After a quarrel between

Pickwick and Tupman, the narrator compares their “memorable breach” to that of “Fox and Burke... four of the greatest men, that ever lived, being thus divided and disaffected on account of French affairs, concerning which there was a trifling difference of opinion”

(PA 81). The ironizing of this lofty comparison does not strip the simile of its power, nor does it discount the narrator‟s praise of “the most glorious revolution that ever was” (PA

81). The historical English response to the revolution finds itself mirrored in the comic misunderstanding between Pickwick and Tupman, one that, moreover, is easily rectified as a “trifling difference.” Through its discourse of friendship, the text offers a reparative revolutionary politics, reconciling English and French as easily as Pickwick and Tupman.

But the text does more than merely equate Pickwick with British figures. Though the text identifies Pickwick as a Tory (PA 137), it also identifies him with the deposed Emperor of France: as Hook Walker recognizes, Pickwick is “excessively fond…of any thing connected with the Emperor Napoleon” (PA 154). Three months of Pickwick‟s stay are

61 denominated “the Hundred Days of the Pickwick Era,” which, like Napoleon‟s Hundred

Days, are “justly celebrated” (PA 193). Like a Homeric epithet, Pickwick is called “the great man” some forty times in the text, verbally linking him closely to “the greatest man who ever lived,” Napoleon (e.g. PA 51, 156). More importantly, the role of Pickwickian charity is fulfilled in the text not only by Pickwick, but by the Emperor. Napoleon appears in two paired tales near the beginning and conclusion of the novel. In the first, narrated by the gendarme Dumont, Napoleon rewards a faithful but indigent soldier with a fortune after a brief encounter with him in a public park; in the second, Napoleon secretly oversees a series of trials given to a young man who has unknowingly fallen in love with the Emperor‟s illegitimate daughter. In both cases the Emperor is evoked as the ultimate symbol of social good. Facing the most desperate of his tests, Frederick

Grandet, the hero of the second tale, remains convinced that Napoleon is “generous and merciful,” an opponent of “unjust and oppressive tyranny” (PA 528). Much like

Pickwick, Napoleon is even imagined as an angel: upon seeing the Emperor‟s signature,

Frederick “started as if an angel had crossed his path” (PA 533). Just as Pickwick is a symbol of mercy and charity, so was Napoleon. The revolutionary ideals of Pickwick and the French are one and the same.

This is not merely an analogical process, but a major node in the text‟s revision of the Dickensian original. For Reynolds, the figure of Napoleon acts as the guarantor of the civil and political freedoms promised by the republic. His presence in the novel makes it possible to enact the ideals of Pickwickian charity and friendship that the initial text

62 presented as urban fantasy. Reynolds writes to refute a conservative assumption of a circular relationship between literature, revolution, and violence. As Sara James discusses, Reynolds claimed in his contemporary pamphlet The Modern Literature of

France (1836) that moral panics associated with revolution were baseless: “An extension of political liberty does not implicate a decrease of moral rectitude and order; it rather encourages an increase” (James 24). Pickwick Abroad uses the features of the

Dickensian narrative—attenuated monthly installments, coded urban language, and the mobilization of sentiment for social ends. But it uses them with the recognition of their permeability to a working-class project. The possibility of Dickensian charity depends upon the social and political environment within which it is produced. Seizing the potential that the form and content of Pickwick Papers opened up to national discussion,

Reynolds writes a revision of the parent text, making concrete within the text the political operations that would allow the kinds of social structures that Pickwick imagines to come into play. Pickwick Abroad attempts to open up the novel to a truly popular discourse.

This last point justifies a few more words, as “popularity”—an ability to speak for and appeal to the voice of the readers of the nation—is an emblematic fantasy shared by both Reynolds and Dickens. Reynolds recognizes this near the end of the text. Pickwick reveals his plans to place his memoranda “in the hands of some gentleman connected with the press” when he returns to London (PA 607). The poet Septimus Chitty suggests that perhaps Pickwick could engage Boz, the “talented editor of your travels and adventures in England;” after all, “[h]e is the most popular writer of the day” (PA 607).

63 But Pickwick nixes the idea, on the grounds of Boz‟s lack of familiarity with French culture, and his prior commitments:

the public will look suspiciously upon the commencement of a new editor‟s labours. But the test of the success to be experienced by the work, shall exist in the continuation of the publication—it being my design to have it issued to the world, in the first instance, in monthly parts. You see I have arranged all my plans in reference to this important measure; and soon shall those friends whom I have met abroad, hear, I hope, of my safe arrival at home. (PA 607)

Like Pickwick, this text aims to reach its readers through the intimacy and immediacy of monthly publication. Serialization provides an instant “test of success” for a text, with the novel either acclaimed by the masses or dying “of inanition,” as Reynolds suggests in his preface. The image of inanition rather gleefully invokes the specter of Malthus, the arbiter of iron laws of consumption. In the Malthusian practices of serial publication, mass appeal comes to structure success, not critical praise. Serial publication posited an immediate relationship with an audience and offered the chance to democratize the relationship between author and reader—a textual revolution on behalf of the mass reader which recapitulates Reynolds‟s interest in revolutionary political practice.

For a committed advocate of working-class rights like Reynolds, this concept of a self-determining literary market was a goal to strive for. Many Victorian critics, however, found the spectacle of a market determined by popular appeal an ambiguous, anxiety-provoking possibility. Lisa Rodensky notes that the discourse of popularity in the 1830s and 1840s, often centered upon Dickens, “obviously and often problematically calls up the agency of the people” (584). As the century progresses, she argues that

64 representations of popularity increasingly generate an image of “an idle reading public manipulated by a market and work that caters to that public” (Rodensky 584). As we have seen, early reviews of Pickwick already invoke idle readers, and in chapters 3 and 4 we shall return to this image, and the scene of reading, to examine how Mary Elizabeth

Braddon and Wilkie Collins worked to counteract this idea of a popular public.

However, what I wish to highlight here is the porousness of “popularity,” a permeable discourse that could be structured by often contradictory attitudes. Profoundly ambivalent about the possibilities of popularity, the success of works like those by

Reynolds—and even Dickens—seemed to Victorian critics to destabilize the role of the reading. In the final section of this chapter, I turn to an examination of how Dickens himself rewrote materials from Pickwick Abroad in his fifth novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, as an example of the complex interactions of popularity (and its cognate, “populism”) in the

Victorian novel.

SWINDLERS ABROAD AND AT HOME: PICKWICK ABROAD AND MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT

We know that Dickens knew of Reynolds. The opening pages of the first issue of

Household Words, defining what the magazine is not to be, insist that it will not pander to the crowd. After acknowledging that there are some “tillers of the field” whose

“company it is an honor to join,” Dickens goes on to announce: “But, there are others here—Bastards of the Mountain, draggled fringe on the Red Cap, Panders to the basest passions of the lowest natures—whose existence is a national reproach. And these, we should consider it our highest duty to replace” (HW 1: 1-2). The insistent evocation of

65 outdated French revolutionary politics—redcap political agitation, the Montagnards who supported Robespierre‟s Reign of Terror—points to Reynolds, whose revolutionary

Francophilia was a scandal to moderate liberals and conservatives alike. In April 1851,

Dickens more directly attacked Reynolds in an editorial, stating, “the first name affixed to this Chartist programme is that of a person notorious for his attempts to degrade the working men of England by circulating among them books of a debasing tendency.”8

Pointing his finger directly at Reynolds here, Dickens paints him as a traitor to the cause of the working classes, a cheap huckster out to make a buck. As Graham Law points out,

Reynolds was not amused. His blistering response, “Charles Dickens and the Democratic

Movement” begins: “That lickspittle hanger-on to the skirts of Aristocracy‟s role…[was] originally a dinnerless penny-a-liner on the Morning Chronicle” (Law 207). Yet

Reynolds until 1850 had considered Dickens a fellow-traveler in the fight for working- class rights, as numerous, unnecessary references in Pickwick Abroad make clear. The two men may have even met occasionally: Law notes that the offices of Reynolds‟s publisher were only a few doors down from those of Household Words (206). Similarly,

Andrew King has found that Reynolds‟s offices as publisher of the London Journal were quite near Chapman and Hall‟s offices on the Strand (77). Perhaps the great Inimitable and the nation‟s most inimitable Chartist brushed each other as they crossed the street.

Their careers, too, followed similar paths. Both began as journalists for the dailies before finding massive success with fiction, and by the 1850s both were operating popular

8 Quoted in Graham Law, ―Reynolds‘s ‗Memoirs‘Series and ‗The Literature of the Kitchen‖in Humpherys and James, 206. 66 journals that doubled as platforms for their ideological projects. Though the two men grew to be political combatants, they shared a class background, urban familiarity, and a by-the-bootstraps work ethic, experiences that gave them far more similarity than

Dickens shared with Thackeray or Bulwer.

Because of their similarities, it is tantalizing to look for evidence that Dickens read Reynolds. While he was silent about Reynolds‟s work in his correspondence, we know from other letters that Dickens was a careful reader of his pirates and plagiarists. It is also quite likely, given Household Words’ interest in fiction for the masses, that

Dickens had some familiarity with Reynolds‟s Mysteries. The resurgent interest in

Reynolds‟s work has long grappled with the question of his influence on Dickens.

Though this influence has been characterized in various ways, that there is an overlooked point of contact between Dickens and Reynolds, and this is Dickens‟s reappropriation of materials in Pickwick Abroad for Martin Chuzzlewit.

Chuzzlewit, is, of course, Dickens‟s most sustained fictional investigation of popular democracy through its scathing depiction of the rotting Eden at the center of the

American republic. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that this investigation of the costs of republicanism should invoke a plot strand from Reynolds‟s sly, republican recasting of Pickwick. While Dickens later castigated Reynolds‟s desire to incite mass audiences to political fervor, in Martin Chuzzlewit he revises Reynolds‟s interest in fraudulent joint-stock companies to suggest how imbricated financial and personal speculation could be within a society concerned with “Self, Self, Self.”

67 One of the major nodes of interest in Pickwick Abroad is the chameleon-like

Edward Sugden. The son of a London innkeeper, Sugden masquerades in Paris as a down-at-heels English gentleman, Adolphus Crashem, and an exiled Polish nobleman,

Count Boloski. Throughout his career, Reynolds was fascinated by the figure of the outlaw who lived by his wits on the fringes of society. As Rohan McWilliam notes, “the outlaw hero is historically complex but can be employed both as an object of condemnation and as an agent of human freedom,” one that is “both conservative and libertarian” (46). Sugden exemplifies such liminality within the novel, cheerily fleecing the impossible naives of the Pickwick circle (sometimes repeatedly) through outlandish schemes. Yet unlike the quasi-Byronic outlaws that litter Reynolds‟s later work, Sugden descends from the hucksters and frauds that populate Enlightenment satire, particularly

Voltaire‟s Candide. In fact, Sugden represents Pickwick Abroad‟smost significant challenge to the benevolent philanthropism and optimism embodied in the Nachleben of

Pickwick. Pickwick Abroad repeatedly stages the confrontation of values between the kind-hearted Pickwick and the mercurial Sugden as irresolvable. Importantly, these confrontations are figured within the text as national conflicts splintered by issues of class and generational gaps. Sugden has a partner in crime in the novel, the French adventuress Anastasie de Volange, for whom he acts as front and pimp. De Volange is, objectively, as bad a character as Sugden. A fallen woman, she lives with her mother in a set of decaying apartments, scamming gullible English tourists of their money and valuables while on the lookout for a rich bachelor. However, one of the novel‟s final inset tales takes us within de Volange‟s subjectivity, as she narrates the gothic and 68 melodramatic circumstances that reduced her to poverty and prostitution. This kind of affective intervention recuperates de Volange for the Victorian reader by framing her criminal acts within a sensationalized yet powerful narrative of suffering. No such intervention takes place for Sugden, who is resolutely viewed from the outside. As is consistent with Reynolds‟s political project in Pickwick Abroad, the challenges to the

Dickensian worldview arise not from the shock of foreignness, but from within stratified

Britain itself.

It makes sense, then, that two-thirds of the way through the text Sugden vanishes from Paris and the Pickwick circle and reappears in London under the alias of Captain

Horatio Clarence Walsingham. The final third of Sugden‟s story describes his attempts to found the “Universal Stone-Expelling and Asphaltum-Substituting Equitable

Company,” events that bear no relation to the ongoing plot of Pickwick‟s experiences in

France. Though this pushes the already attenuated mechanics of the plot close to breakdown, bringing the challenge Sugden represents to the text home to the metropolis allows Reynolds to critique money-mad Victorian London. Moreover, the introduction of asphalt into the text was a timely development: as Reynolds was writing Pickwick

Abroad, the first asphalt was being laid in London at Whitehall. For its first few decades, asphalt was a decided luxury, with paving taking place near the royal residences and within the City. It was not until the 1860s that England saw widespread asphalt roads, and a number of early accounts suggested that asphalt was a faddish novelty. The chief purveyor of newly-paved roads was Claridge‟s Patent Asphalte Company, which mined

69 French asphalt for English use. It is likely that this conjunction—certain early accounts

(incorrectly) claim that Claridge‟s was managed by a French national—lies at the back of

Reynolds‟s satire.9 Hiding underneath the seemingly parodic name of Sugden‟s

Equitable Company, then, is a constellation of serious concerns that link some of the central themes in the book: wealth, fashion, modernization, and the play of surfaces.

Enumerating a long list of moral benefits entailed to the Company to the

“Directors” of the committee, Sugden claims that bill discounters who “offer half money and half paving-stones for suspicious bills” will find their “rapacity deprived of the means of gratification;” “unfortunate girl[s]” will no longer “walk the pave” but

“promenade the asphaltum;” moreover, the “cause of civilization” will be advanced because no paving-stones will be available for barricades (PA 407). Prostitutes, money- lenders, revolutionaries: Sugden cheekily embraces a traditional social morality that moves to “expel” these undesirables like so many outdated stones. Yet, like the image of the streets, Sugden suggests that the linkage of sex, money, and politics is an intractable part of the pathways of Victorian society. As durable as London‟s stony streets, they are crucial components of the networks of Victorian capital. In fact, Sugden suggests advertising the prospectus in Fraser’s, Blackwood’s, and the Old Monthly, implicating the literary networks of bourgeois culture. They, too, serve to disseminate a social morality, while they turned a blind eye to institutional corruption. Reynolds‟s text is always at its most dangerous at these moments, both performing and critiquing Victorian

9 For information on Victorian paving, I have relied on the articles excerpted in The Dictionary of Victorian London at http://www.victorianlondon.org/transport/typesofpavement.htm, accessed 07/03/2014, as well as a retrospective account in the Architectural Magazine, volume 5, 1838, page 228. 70 morality, recognizing the complicity of commercial interests in propagating social and financial inequity. Sugden‟s delight at subverting these social and moral norms is palpable in the “Equitable Company” sections of the novel.

Freed from the counter-weight of Pickwick‟s comic but sincere morality, Sugden runs riot as a figure out to exploit the world which surrounds him, filled as it is with the corrupt and naïve in equal parts. Peter Muggins, the target of Sugden‟s scheme, represents the Victorian paterfamilias as hypocrite. “Stamford-street itself [where the

Muggins family resides] is the only respectable one in all that neighborhood;” and, like the street, the Mugginses exist in the intersections of gentility and poverty (PA 418).

Muggins is a drunk and a lecher, and though he claims to be “very strict in my domestic ekkonommy” (PA 419) his precarious class status leaves him prey to those with a mind to exploit it. As is so often the case in Victorian texts, the actions of the larger world are played out in the theater of the home, and Muggins‟s failures of “ekkonommy” are richly symbolic for the text. Concerned with his own gentility, he is unaware that his maid-of- all-work, Mary, is filching goods from around the house: cold sausages, an apple tart, bottles of gin, even, at one moment, a pen. Predatory servants in Victorian novels often signify the anxieties surrounding a national economy dependent on especially wide class divisions coming into conflict with a new sense of mobility engendered by the shift to capitalism. As is so often the case in Reynolds‟s texts, though, here the anxieties are given a particularly Malthusian edge: Mary‟s relationship to the Mugginses is

71 symptomatic of the wider world at play in the novel, in which the trickster figures from the lower classes are literally devouring the edges of that national economy.

Muggins‟s missing pen—not simply a pre-Freudian joke—indicates his lack of civic authority. His pretentions to authority are extended on the linguistic level: “There‟s

Miss Anna-Maria has been in here this morning; and Miss Arabella was writing out the coal-bills last night. I know Hester-Henrietta is very fond of playing with the pens; and

Master Matthew Julius always does take „em” (PA 422). These names which invoke the faded glamour of an Augustan England aptly suggest the pretensions of a small businessman living on the fringes of respectability. Muggins is quite willing to marry off his oldest daughter, Aramintha, to “Captain Walsingham” to ensure that respectability, despite the visible dubiety of Sugden‟s social position. Like Thackeray and Dickens after him, Reynolds links the marriage market obliquely to prostitution, demonstrating how

“respectable” Victorian society exchanged sex for money under the veneer of marriage.

The grand ball thrown by Muggins to celebrate the engagement of Aramintha and Sugden is textually situated between two chapters detailing Pickwick‟s comic rencontre with an adulterous couple and his interview with WegsworthMuffley, the fraudulent travel writer.

Again, Reynolds contrasts a permissive French society to a hypocritical English one in which hucksterism is veiled beneath social form and custom, and to the detriment of the latter.

The success of the Equitable Company is cut short not through any mechanism of the law, but rather by Sugden‟s recognition by a former partner in crime. Tims, a fellow

72 swindler left in the wind by Sugden in Paris, reveals Sugden‟s impersonation to the

Muggins family. “Morsor morsus—the biter bit,” as Septimus Chitty observes, in his garbled Latin, elsewhere in the text (PA 486). As Chitty recognizes, ironic (or not-so- ironic) comeuppances are the structuring principle of British activity in Pickwick Abroad.

Not so among the French, whose vice is recognized and punished by the authorities, as in the trial of Anastasie de Volange. In contrast to the efficiency of Dumont and the French gendarmes, Reynolds represents the British legal system as lumbering and ineffectual. Its inability to produce a just outcome is the subject of chapter 36 of the novel, an account of

Sugden‟s trial for debt in London. Structurally occupying the center of the text,

Reynolds‟s depiction focuses on the system‟s permeability to manipulation through flattery and rhetorical fireworks. Undoubtedly capitalizing on the famous Bardell v.

Pickwick sequence of Pickwick, Reynolds offers a similar display of wit. Yet while

Dickens mobilizes his readers‟ outrage at the successful stratagems of Dodson and Fogg,

Reynolds encourages his readers to identify with Sugden‟s carnivalesque inversion of the legal system, which ends with his creditors badly shaken and his own discharge under the

Insolvency Act. Here, as elsewhere in the British sections of the novel, Reynolds reveals the “strict probity and honour” of institutions like the Court to be nothing more than a veil for avarice and apathy in equal measure (PA 298). Even after Captain Walsingham is unmasked by his former confederate, Sugden faces no legal consequences.

The text‟s ambivalence about Sugden, presenting him both as object of censure and identification, points to the fractures in Reynolds‟s project. Ultimately the

73 antinomies of the narrative—Pickwickian benevolence against Menippean satire— threaten to make hash out of the republican ideals motivating the discourse of the text.

The narrative ardently seeks to mobilize the charitable philanthropism Victorians identified in Pickwick in order to press for a British society less institutionally corrupt, less divided by class, more cultured and more compassionate. These ideals are coextensive with the vision of human charity at the heart of Dickens‟s text, in which small moments of human intimacy—a handshake, a tear, a shared belly laugh—offer an

Ariadne‟s thread leading out of the grinding maze of the City streets. Yet for all that,

Pickwick Abroad’s narrative is also fascinated by those who have internalized the predatory logic of Malthusian England. The interpolated tale immediately preceding the account of Sugden‟s trial is titled, “The Self-Devoted.” The story of young lovers suffering from hereditary insanity, it narrates melodramatically what Sugden‟s story presents as satire: to be “self-devoted” is to be mad, exiled from society, isolated from the external world. Sugden‟s opportunistic transformations and self-sufficiency threaten to tear a hole in the fabric of society. “We had better retire,” Pickwick tells Sam when he realizes the true nature of Sugden and his companions. Weller, who sees more clearly than anyone in the text the threat Sugden represents, responds “emphatically,” “Ve had, sir…an‟ for fear o‟ contamination” (PA 152). What‟s contagious in this novel is not political fervor but a self-regard that posits the individual as being more important than society, the part of more value than the whole. Like Oliver Twist‟s Fagin, Sugden is always looking out for “Number One.”

74 Little wonder, then, that Dickens should offer a rewrite of Sugden‟s narrative in

Martin Chuzzlewit. Chuzzlewit, of course, was Dickens‟s investigation of “the number and variety of humours and vices that have their root in selfishness,” as Forster put it

(quoted in Ackroyd 412); the text also offered his most sustained critique of Victorian society yet. In Chuzzlewit, the acid contamination of “self” is always just about to overflow—from Pecksniff to his daughters Mercy and Charity, from old Martin to young

Martin—and with corrosive effect. Only the experience of suffering can obliterate excessive self-regard and reintegrate the personal with the social. Martin‟s malarial fevers in Eden‟s wasteland and Merry‟s physical and spiritual torment in the house of

Jonas, prove to be the strait gate through which the little human utopia that concludes the novel can be built. Moreover, as the first of Dickens‟s novels to explore international politics—offering a powerful critique of American republicanism rooted in Dickens‟s own disappointment with his American tour—Chuzzlewit resonates symbolically with

Reynolds‟s text. It most directly resembles Pickwick Abroad, however, in the ways in which it recasts Edward Sugden as Montague Tigg, the down-at-the-heels swindler who reappears, halfway through the novel, as “Tigg Montague,” the successful proprietor of the “Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Insurance Company.”

Like Sugden, Tigg manipulates surfaces. Like a “polished glass,” he takes his image from the society around him, yet beneath the surface lies “the true Tigg metal”

(MC 27: 408). The Anglo-Bengalee, too, exists solely as a series of surfaces. Like the

Equitable Company of Pickwick Abroad, it exists entirely as show: newly painted

75 surfaces, expensive “green ledgers with red backs… court-guides, directories, day-books, almanacks,” a porter who represented “respectability, competence, property” (MC 27:

410-12). His account of the offices of the Anglo-Bengalee displays a number of similarities with Sugden‟s Equitable Company:

[Sugden] began by hiring a splendid set of offices in Bartholomew- lane, and forthwith purchased desks, tables, and chairs to place in them. He procured a painter, who painted the words “PUBLIC OFFICE” upon one door; “WAITING ROOM” upon another, and “BOARD ROOM” upon a third. He then hired three individuals, who, under the denomination of Clerks, were to sit at a desk in the Public Office, chatter and read the newspaper when they were alone, and apply themselves like madmen to three great books with clasps when a stranger came in. A servant in blue livery, with white buttons, was also engaged to lounge about in the passage outside the entrance door which led to the offices; and a man, with printed prospectuses to give away, was stationed in the street. (PA 422)

Both accounts stress visibility: the capital letters of the Equitable Company, the worked wire blinds and brass plates inscribed with the logo of the Anglo-Bengalee “staring the city out of countenance…looking bolder than the Bank” (MC 27: 410). The passages frame business as spectacle, clerks working like madmen, porters “grave with the imaginary cares of office” (MC 27: 412). And both accounts are careful to locate that spectacle within the specific networks of Victorian economy. Sugden rents out his

“splendid” offices on Bartholomew-lane, just round the corner from the Bank of London and the Royal Exchange. Dickens, less specific, locates the main offices of the Anglo-

Bengalee “in a new street of the city” (MC 27: 410)—perhaps part of the network near the bank junction being rebuilt in the 1830s—and a branch office in the fashionable West

End. Both concerns are framed, therefore, within institutions of staggering economic

76 power, and they hint at the rottenness just under the marble surfaces (the British banking system would nearly collapse in 1825 and again in 1847).10 Images of intransigent capital, both businesses are false coins (the “true Tigg metal”). Beneath their gaudy surfaces, they ring hollow.

Tigg is similarly undone not by any institutional authority, but by his own associates. Yet while Sugden‟s unmasking ruins his impending marriage and undoes the

Equitable Company, he escapes from the text unharmed. Tigg‟s fate is far more disastrous. In order to prop up the Anglo-Bengalee with the Chuzzlewit fortune, Tigg lures Jonas Chuzzlewit into the scheme. Jonas, the brutish son of miser Anthony

Chuzzlewit, is Dickens‟s most scathing indictment of the business class in the novel. A would-be poisoner, wife-beater, and murderer, he enacts the displaced violence of the market economy, making present and visible what is veiled on the institutional level of buying and selling. Hoping to bind Jonas more tightly to him, Tigg blackmails Jonas, accusing him of the murder of his father. This plot strand is complicated by the fact that

Jonas believes he is responsible for the old man‟s death—he has, after all, been poisoning him for some months in order to gain access to the family fortune—while in fact, the older Chuzzlewit dies of a broken heart brought on by his discovery of Jonas‟s plot. This convoluted moment of plotting is a minor representative of a major theme within the novel: the confusion between the surface and the reality. Giving the digressively plotted action of the text a tight symbolic structure, this confusion is enacted repeatedly in the

10 The British banking system failed in 1825 and again in 1847; see Gordon Bigelow, Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland (2007). 77 contrast between Pecksniff‟s upright veneer and hypocrisy, the elder Martin‟s stage- managed transformation from deluded miser to public benefactor, the false financial promises of Eden, U.S.A., and, of course, the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and

Life Insurance Company. Tigg‟s decision to blackmail Jonas results in tragedy: after luring Tigg into the country, Jonas murders him. It is an exceptionally bleak moment in this novel often praised as “among his greatest novels, primarily because of its comic mood” (Ackroyd 414). Alongside Jonas‟s death, it frames Dickensian comedy within an acknowledgement of human violence and evil.

Martin Chuzzlewit replays the concerns of Pickwick Abroad, pitting charitable benevolence—here the ability to look outside one‟s own interests—against economic speculation and self-involvement. Yet, while Pickwick Abroad finds these tensions locked in an irresolvable stalemate, Chuzzlewit ends with a bit of stage-managed magic.

Old Martin, vitiated by illness and paranoia throughout the text, reappears as a

“vigorous” and “triumphant” figure at the conclusion of the novel, an actor who has overseen the performance of the remaining characters in the novel (MC 50: 721). Meting out justice and punishment in the novel‟s dénouement with an even hand, the older

Martin becomes a figure from folklore or the popular drama. As is so often the case with

Dickens‟s great social novels, organic institutional change remains unimaginable within the world of the text. Instead, as in Shelley‟s “England in 1819”—in which the decaying world of Regency England is the “grave” from which a triumphal “Phantom” is born to renovate society—revolution takes place through an external agent. Liberated from the

78 burden of their inward focus—and with the text‟s irredeemable malefactors violently killed or exiled—the heroic figures of Chuzzlewit can walk into the garden “bestrewn with flowers by children‟s hands”, where past, present, and future intermingle into one

“noble music” of “Love and Trust” (MC 54:782). With its stress on performance and play, the characters are caught up in the shift of emphasis from the philanthropic charity that marks the early novels toward Dickens‟s mature interest in the central role of imagination in social life. This transition is partially constituted by the anxieties introduced in this version of the Sugden plot. Agents of discord, Sugden and Tigg represent the basest versions of popular appeal: they fashion themselves outwardly to reflect what their audience desires. Unlike Dickens‟s previous rogues, who are often physically and linguistically marked as outsiders through deformed language and bodies—Jingle, Bill Sykes, Fagin, the Artful Dodger, WackfordSqueers, Quilp—Tigg is a wolf in gentleman‟s clothing like Sugden. In their new suits and with the jingle of coins in their pockets, swindlers like Sugden and Tigg walked among the Victorian public.

There are no agents of public good efficient enough to expel such swindlers before they are recognized for what they are, false coinage, polished mirrors. Increasingly, Dickens‟s later novels try to determine how such imposters are personally and socially created, offering up visions of society in which only fairy-tale justice can intervene in human destiny.

One irony of the relationship between Pickwick Abroad and Martin Chuzzlewit is that, for all the narrative sophistication that Dickens brings to Chuzzlewit, Reynolds‟s text

79 is more clear-sighted about the entrenchment of social and political interests. It offers a variety of political and social positions to its readers, ranging from a quiet engagement with bourgeois radical politics to an oppositional ethos that must have challenged and delighted its working-class readers. If the text is finally unable to distinguish which position might offer the most hope for change among its readers, that is precisely because it engages with the horns of the dilemma facing early Victorians. The collapse of leftist political practice after the French Revolution and the increasing rapprochement between industrialization, urbanization, and capital in British society posed questions of how one could meaningfully act in the new modernity. We might see the text as a kind of early literary and cultural bricolage, exploiting a set of prefabricated identities and stock figures in order to generate a new literary and cultural space for Reynolds‟s audience.

Refusing to posit an overarching ethical system, Pickwick Abroad instead strands the reader in an assemblage of identities and structures, the “Daedelian mazes” of Paris and

London (PA 74). Finding her way out is the reader‟s business.

However postmodern avant la lettrePickwick Abroad might appear, the mere act of wrapping up does bring closure to the text. The final words of the novel, intentionally echoing those of Pickwick, picture Sam “still the faithful domestic and adherent of Mr.

Pickwick, from whose service he is determined that death alone shall part him” (PA 628).

Like its predecessor, Pickwick Abroad evokes, as a lingering image, a world in which unselfish devotion and the bonds of love, fidelity, and trust provide a pole-star for human action. Within the more aggressively politicized reading of Pickwick provided by

80 Reynolds, this vision is not far from those which echoed (despite Dickens‟s misgivings) on both sides of the Atlantic, where, as Emerson declared in 1844, “thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers” (Essays 344). But Reynolds‟s conclusion rings false in light of the persistent challenges raised to Pickwickian philanthropy in the course of the novel. A more fitting conclusion might be found in the preceding chapter, which brings Pickwick home. Taking rooms at the Ship Hotel in Dover upon their return to

England, Pickwick, Sam, Tupman and Winkle are astonished to discover that “Samuel

Pickwick” is already in residence. What follows is a final game of identity, a bit of farce in the tradition of Fielding: over the heated protests of the landlord, who assures

Pickwick that he can‟t be “the Mr. Pickwick”—“the best customer he is that we ever had,” rejoins the head waiter—the imposter Pickwick is unmasked (PA 615). The false

Pickwick is none other than Edward Sugden, fleeing the wreckage of the Universal

Stone-Expelling and Asphaltum-Substituting Equitable Company for the comforts of the

“rich old widow” that the Conclusion tells us will make him “a great man about town”

(PA 626). It is a mildly funny episode, but it is also an audacious gambit on the part of the author, who has, of course, himself been playing an impersonation for the length of the novel. A curious kind of recognition scene, it encourages the reader to identify the author with Sugden—an identification made stronger by the similarities between

Sugden‟s escapades and certain seamier adventures in Reynolds‟s past, made public in the 1840s.11 It offers a kind of premonition of the later relationship between the two

11 See Humpherys and James, ―Introduction‖to G. W. M. Reynolds. 81 authors, as well as exposing the limits of Pickwick‟s benevolence. Encouraging

Pickwick not to “blow” him, Sugden ironically reaffirms the good will that motivates

Pickwick‟s actions: “You were always my best friend, you know” (PA 619). “Wretch,”

Pickwick responds, “fire flashing from his expressive eyes: „Your presence is hateful to me‟” (PA 620). Hate is a concept foreign to the world of Pickwick—in the five instances in which some form of the word is used in Pickwick, four appear in the “Madman‟s

Manuscript,” and the fifth is uttered by a minor character. So, too, is the comic violence of Sam‟s response to Sugden, a hearty kick “upon the hinder parts” down the stairs (PA

620). Yet it is only by marshaling these libidinal forces exterior to the world of Pickwick that the “angel in tights and gaiters” can exorcise the threat Sugden represents. Some things, Pickwick Abroad suggests, prove intractable to philanthropy and the common bonds of humanity.

Sugden exits the novel exposed, attacked, but nonetheless with “a song in his throat, and a light heart in his left breast” (PA 620). Like Sugden, Reynolds too walked away from the bourgeois world Dickens helped create in Pickwick for the darker fields of political agitation. In the Mysteries serials, outlaw figures like Sugden would no longer be ambiguously represented, but rather enshrined as revolutionaries fighting against a corrupt system. As The Bookseller attested, “hundreds of thousands” of those other Sams envisioned at the beginning of this chapter followed Reynolds. For those figures—and those readers—Sugden‟s final challenge might serve as a motto: “Pickwick is nothing to me” (PA 619).

82 Chapter 2: Ainsworth’s Raptures, Thackeray’s Poisons:Jack Sheppard and the Making of English Realism in 1840

On Monday, July 6th, 1840, Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray saw a man hanged. The two authors joined a mass of more than thirty thousand people, who pressed into the streets of Holburn before Newgate Prison, “smoking and laughing,” cat-calling, “throwing missiles of various descriptions” back and forth (Examiner 444).

Window seats in the houses around the square sold for as much as five guineas to members of the aristocracy, while newspaper accounts noted genteel women crowding the windows with opera glasses, the better to catch every detail of the spectacle playing out below them (Examiner 444). The execution drew more nobles than usual. The man being hanged, a Swiss valet named Benjamin Courvoisier, had violently murdered his deaf, elderly employer, Lord William Russell, in his sleep. A crime freighted with dangerous symbolism in a hot summer of Chartist agitation, English authorities moved with anxious haste to contain the threat, executing Courvoisier two months to the day after the murder was committed. The sheer publicity of Courvoisier‟s execution marked an assertion of public power to the gathered onlookers. He was late to the scaffold, arriving at 8:04, where he was greeted with execrations by the onlookers (Ackroyd 330).

Thackeray‟s account, later published as “Going to See a Man Hanged,” catches the details of Courvoisier‟s last moments: the “new black suit” he wore, the way “[h]e opened his hands in a helpless kind of way,” the “pitiful smile” which “contracted his face” as he stepped onto the gallows (1869 15: 385). Whether out of shame or confusion,

83 Courvoisier stood with his back to the crowd when he reached the noose: “The tall, grave man in black twisted him round swiftly in the other direction, and, drawing from his pocket a nightcap, pulled it tight over the patient‟s head and face. I am not ashamed to say that I could look no more, but shut my eyes as the last dreadful act was going on, which sent this wretched, guilty soul into the presence of God” (1869 15:385-6). Within a few moments, Courvoisier was dead.

Dickens and Thackeray attended separately; in a reversal of their expected public roles, Thackeray mingled with the crowds on the street, while Dickens viewed the execution from a window-box. Yet both men were drawn by motives deeper than mere curiosity. Instead, the execution brought to light the messy intersections of aesthetics, moral responsibility, and literary professionalism in the developing Victorian market for fiction. For Courvoisier‟s confession had implicated a best-selling book. There he claimed that “the idea of committing the crime had been suggested by reading and seeing the performance of Jack Sheppard…and he lamented that he had ever seen it”

(“Confessions”). As Courvoisier stood on the scaffold in the morning sunlight, many in the crowd would have seen him as a symbol of the dangers confronting a newly-literate public: after all, a book had brought him there.

My discussion of Jack Sheppard begins here—in some ways, where the story ends—in order to enunciate some of the complexities of the controversy around William

Harrison Ainsworth‟s 1839 novel. On one hand, the novel‟s implication in Russell‟s murder is nothing more than historical contingency, the words of a guilty man

84 desperately trying to shift some of the blame from his own actions. Ainsworth, for one, thought the novel‟s presence in the confession a deliberate smear tactic.12 On the other hand, however, Courvoisier‟s words seemed, to many Victorian commentators, to justify what had already been written of the novel in strident tones—none more chillingly prophetic than the Monthly Magazine‟s despairing cry in a March 1840 review: “The dead body of genius lies in the streets of London. How long! How long!” (“Age” 231).

Far from being an extraliterary, historical accident, the convergence between Courvoisier and Jack Sheppard was already determined for many Victorians, a necessary collision between a “bad book” and a “bad public,” to use the Athenaeum‟s well-known terms

(“Jack Sheppard” 803). But I also begin here because I want to keep squarely in mind the stakes of that debate. Victorians took their reading seriously. They endowed their books with a cultural power which we, at the beginning of a very different century, can grasp at best only fumblingly, in fragments. If the moral panic which Jack Sheppard provoked often looks tellingly similar to the outcries over violence in film, television, and video games that inflect our own, early twenty-first-century consciousness, it also differs from them in striking ways. The Sheppard controversy is inflected with explicit questions of class, with profound anxieties over literacy, and with the rise of printing technologies which allowed material to circulate with increasing speed and saturation, and the interrelationships between morality and the fictional mode.

12Ainsworth contradicted the account of Courvoisier‘s confession in a letter written to the Morning Chronicle, declaring the confession ―utterly without foundation.‖ The Morning Chronicle responded with a statement from the officer to whom Courvoisier had confessed, upholding the account. See Stearns for a concise summary of the debate. 85 This last point is worth pausing over for a few more moments. Our contemporary debates about the pernicious effects of media tend to take place within horizons of liberal thought that enshrine freedom of expression and individual rights as paramount.

Questions of media censorship balance upon the protection of both the general public and individual liberties, such as freedom of speech. In contrast, the Sheppard controversy demonstrates a fundamental difference in the way individual rights were conceived.

While critics formed differing constellations of ideological positions around Jack

Sheppard, virtually all operated under an aligned set of moral or ethical responses which censured the book‟s representation of violence. Yet the critical discourse surrounding the book rarely called for censorship of subject matter. Rather, they argued for a form of self-censorship that took place on the level of mode of representation as an intervention into reading practices. That is, Victorian reviewers articulated an ethics of fiction that sought to diminish the affective identification of a reader with a character and to reinscribe that identification within a discourse of critical distance.13 In particular,

Thackeray, who in 1839 was still a hack journalist and sometimes friend of Ainsworth, took the lead in articulating this shift in his first full-length work of fiction, Catherine

(1839-1840), a caustic response to the popularity of Jack Sheppard.

For this reason, this essay investigates the reception of Jack Sheppard in 1839 and

1840. Despite its relatively minor status within the Victorian canon, Jack Sheppard is

13My attention to the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of Victorian criticism is indebted to the recent work of Rohan Maitzen, and, in a different register, of Nicholas Dames. While mindful of Matthew Sussman‘s bracing argument that Victorian ethical criticism needs to be understood within the wider frame of ―the good life,‖ in this article I remain centered within a more narrow discussion of ethics, as the ill effects of Jack Sheppard are the central terms of the critical discourse around it. 86 crucial to our narratives of what it means to be “Victorian.” As Mary Russell Mitford put it, “[t]his nightmare of a book” was more dangerous than “all the Chartists in the land”

(qtd in Ellis 1.376), because it posed a question about the ethical possibilities of aesthetic representation: what were the limits of fiction? In this article, I explore the connection between these figural anxieties over the novel and a renewed emphasis on reality as productive of the literary mode of “realism.” The story of how that came to be is intimately tied to the institutional, aesthetic, and social networks that Ainsworth and

Thackeray shared. Catherine sprang from the author‟s distaste for the effects of Jack

Sheppard, but it was also produced by the literary culture of Fraser’s Magazine, the influential journal that gave both Ainsworth and Thackeray their start.14 Though

Victorian realism drew from many sources, including the psychological depth of

Richardson and the trenchant social analyses of Austen, it was Thackeray whom contemporaries viewed as the key figure of Victorian realism. Through the crucial mediation of Thackeray, public discourse came to encourage the production of realist works to police working-class readers. A central moment in the creation of a politicized history of the novel, Jack Sheppard transforms a legal claim about delinquency into an aesthetic fantasy of representation.

14The classic account of the history of Fraser’s Magazine remains Miriam Thrall‘s Rebellious Fraser's: Nol Yorke's Magazine in the Days of Maginn, Thackeray, and Carlyle (1934). 87 REPRESENTING REALISM:

Realism, of course, is never a neutral word. It sits at the center of a web of conflicting definitions which span not only from various literary discourses (formalism, historicism, hermeneutics, post-structuralism) but also from philosophy and the social sciences. Attempting a rigorous history of the term is beyond the confines of this essay, yet we may note three essential critical formations of the word. The first, an essentially neo-Hegelian interpretation, sees the practice of Victorian realism as a form of novelistic

“bad faith.” According to this strand of thought, realism depends on the structures of an

Enlightenment narrative of human rationality and ethical judgment to produce false epistemological claims, all the more seductive because they premise to represent reality itself. As Catherine Belsey claims, “the term is useful in distinguishing between those forms which tend to efface their own textuality, their existence as a discourse, and those which explicitly draw attention to it. Realism offers itself as transparent” (51). Like

Wittgenstein‟s captivating world picture, realism‟s supposed transparence reproduces itself as hegemonic: this is the world we live in, these are our lived experiences, these are our possibilities. In contradistinction to this interpretation, certain scholars read

“realism” as a representational form, a place where democratic thought and practice are shaped. Drawing from the work of Lukács and Auerbach, they claim that realism‟s immediacy generates a powerful sense of the economic, social, and historical forces molding human subjectivity. As Pam Morris argues, “realism participates in the democratic impulse of modernity. As a mode, it has reached out to a much wider social range, in terms both of readership and of characters represented, than earlier more elite 88 forms of literature” (3).15 A final articulation of “realism,” exemplified best by French deconstructionist practices, argues that “there is nothing outside of the text,” an argument which we may shorthand, with some distortion, as “textual idealism:” realism‟s claims to any kind of ontological or epistemic force are bankrupt, as there is no external referent available to give words absolute meaning.16 While this post-structuralist challenge to traditional conceptions of language and aesthetics has given rise to some of the most innovative and interesting work in literary studies in the postwar era, I bracket it for the purposes of this essay. In its place, I examine how a thick history of Victorian understandings of realism in 1840 might profitably interact with neo-Hegelian or populist theories of the term.

I follow George Levine‟s definition of realism: “Whatever else it means, it always implies an attempt to use language to get beyond language, to discover some non-verbal truth out there” (RI 6). Levine reads Victorian realism as a set of practices that presuppose a world external to us. Cows glimpsed outside a window, whorls of hair on a baby‟s head, the smells of dinner cooking, the feeling of heartbreak, the moon‟s reflection in a still river, the proper placement of antimacassars, misremembered train

15 Beyond Lukács and Auerbach, significant figures in a number of disciplinary fields have embraced this articulation of realism. Philosophers Donald Davidson and Jürgen Habermas, as well as geographer David Harvey, have all called for a renewed interest in realism. Similarly, New Historicist interpretations of the novel, like those of D. A. Miller and Nancy Armstrong, are predicated on the populist power of realist representation. 16 It was hardly chance that David Masson, in the first extended usage of ―realism‖ in English literary criticism, divided up literary production into the ―Realists‖ and the ―Idealists‖ (Masson 263). For the ―classic‖ articulation of post-structuralist theories of aesthetics, see Derrida‘s Of Grammatology and ―Signature, Event, Context.‖ A useful overview of the manifold relationships between deconstructionism and realism are the essays gathered in Realism Discourse and Deconstruction (Routledge 2003); a more focused discussion of literary realism and post-structuralism appears in ―Realism and Anti-Realism in Contemporary Philosophy‖ in Beaumont 2007. 89 schedules: all these things in Victorian realism exist not simply as type on a page but “out there,” beyond the novel as a tradition. They call our attention to an overflowing world, and it is precisely this sense of being overwhelmed by detail, by the sheer lived-in quality of realism, that Levine cites as its greatest achievement: “Realistic novels contain more than they formally need” (RI 57). This excessive attention to the detail of lived experience Levine calls “antiliterary” because it provides the reader with more than the mechanics of the novel requires. This sense of plenitude is part of the tremendous moral thrust of Victorian realism, its aim—as Levine notes elsewhere—is to get at “the greatest of all [Victorian] virtues… truth-telling” (“Realism” 15). Following Levine, then, I see

Victorian realism as an aesthetic technology which aimed at producing truth through the accurate representation of external objects and relationships. Unlike Levine, however, I want to take account of the explicit political and pedagogical functions of realism as it emerged in a critical aesthetic discourse in 1840. To do so, I track the reception history of Ainsworth‟s text before turning my attention to the original text of Thackeray‟s

Catherine, which is both an important document in the reception of Jack Sheppard as well as a formative work of realism in its own right.

As such, my account of Jack Sheppard differs from recent scholarship of the text in several ways. The foundational reading of the text can be found in Keith

Hollingsworth‟s seminal The Newgate Novel (1963). Hollingsworth sees Jack Sheppard as the capstone to a decade of production of Newgate novels, a genre defined as novels focusing on a criminal or criminals, whose practitioners include Bulwer-Lytton and

90 Dickens as well as Ainsworth. He advances a reading of the text which emphasizes containment, in what we would now call a Foucauldian sense. For him the text allows a celebration of criminal culture set in the past, while the moral apparatus of the conclusion

(Jack‟s hanging) shuts down the carnivalesque elements and returns the reader to a world of law and order. Hollingsworth‟s work has defined the reception of Jack Sheppard since its first publication. Simon Joyce, Patrick Brantlinger, and, more recently, Matthew

Buckley and Elizabeth Stearns have all offered provocative re-readings of the text within the contexts of Chartist agitation, mass literacy, and encroaching modernity. Yet they have paid little attention to the innovations the Sheppard controversy introduced into literary production in a wider field. By focusing on the reception history of Jack

Sheppard, we can register how political and moral contexts that shaped Victorian society surfaced in the seemingly neutral arena of genre and mode. The critical responses to

Ainsworth‟s text make visible a constellation of attitudes that defined the shift from late romanticism to Victorian retrenchment.

JACK SHEPPARD’S STRANGE PLEASURES: READING AND ITS DANGERS

Few members of the literary scene could have predicted the collision between

William Harrison Ainsworth and his reviewers when, in late 1837, he began work on a

“Hogarthian novel” to be called Thames Darrell in which the notorious prison-breaker

Jack Sheppard might make an appearance (Ellis 1.328). Ainsworth was then 32, a rising young literary celebrity with one of the most successful novels of the decade, Rookwood

(1834), to his credit. Born to landed gentry in Manchester in 1805, Ainsworth had fled

91 the legal career his father arranged for him for the fast-paced world of literary London. A decade‟s worth of editorial and hack journalistic work had introduced him to most of the major figures on the scene—old luminaries like Scott and Lockhart and celebrities like

Edward Bulwer and Lady Blessington—and Ainsworth had a talent for identifying the rising stars of his generation. He met Carlyle and befriended Thackeray while on the staff of Fraser’s Magazine in the early 1830s, and introduced the bright young biographer John Forster to another friend, Charles Dickens, in 1837. With his good looks and sparkling conversation, Ainsworth was a luminary of the social scene and a central figure of the literary landscape. Little in his previous work suggested that his newest novel would court literary controversy.

By the end of 1838 Ainsworth completed the text, now called Jack Sheppard and contrasting the progress of the virtuous Thames Darrell and the historical thief Jack

Sheppard. The novel was contracted to publisher Richard Bentley, who suggested serializing it in his monthly Bentley’s Miscellany. Sales of the magazine were high due to the success of editor Charles Dickens‟s Oliver Twist (1838-39), but Twist would soon be coming to an end, and relationships were strained between publisher and editor.

Bentley hoped to continue the success of the Miscellany by serializing the work of another popular author. The first installment of Jack Sheppard duly appeared as the lead story in the January 1839 issue of Bentley’s Miscellany, with vivid illustrations by the decade‟s great artist George Cruikshank. “From the outset,” S. M. Ellis, Ainsworth‟s biographer claims, Jack Sheppard was a “triumphant success” (1.352) across a variety of

92 classes and in a number of forms. As an event in Victorian publishing, it rivals the impact and significance of the success of The Pickwick Papers and The Old Curiosity

Shop (1840-41) on either side of its publication. Sales exceeded those of Oliver Twist immediately. Moreover, it thrived when transplanted to new media. Cruikshank‟s illustration “The Name on the Beam” was parodied in Punch. “Nix my dolly,” inserted by J. B. Buckstone into his melodramatic version of Jack Sheppard, “was whistled by every dirty guttersnipe, and chanted in drawing-rooms by fair lips,” according to

Theodore Martin, who also heard the song chimed out by the Edinburgh Cathedral, St.

Giles (Ellis 1.366). Forster noted the popularity of the theatrical adaptations, claiming

Jack Sheppard is the attraction at the Adelphi; Jack Sheppard is the bill of fare at the Surrey; Jack Sheppard is the choice example of morals and conduct held forth to the young citizens at the City of London; Jack Sheppard reigns over the Victoria; Jack Sheppard rejoices crowds in the Pavilion; Jack Sheppard is the favourite at the Queen’s; and at Sadler’s Wells there is no profit but of Jack Sheppard (509).

Flash songs from the novel and from Rookwood were performed on stage and printed in songbooks or as broadsides. The wildly popular illustrations were detached, sold separately, copied, and pirated. Mass-marketed paraphernalia and novelty items circulated in the material culture of the time, as well (like the “Jack Sheppard House- breaker Bags” glimpsed by Thackeray for sale outside the Colburg Theatre). Spreading almost rhizomatically in early Victorian culture, Jack Sheppard represents one of the first truly modern success stories of Victorian publishing.

The novel represented modernity in other ways as well. Victorian reviewers understood the novel to be symptomatic of the times in which they lived. In a remarkable 93 anonymous review in The Athenaeum for October 26, 1839, the value of popular literature is described in ways that prefigure modern sociology: “should an ambassador from some far distant country arrive on our shores for the purpose of overreaching us in a convention, we know not where he could find a better clue to the infirmities of our national character, than in the columns of our book advertisements” (803). Rather than possessing “an intrinsic value of their own,” popular literatures—“works of mere amusement”—are useful as providing “indications of what the public are doing and thinking” (Athenaeum 803). For the reviewer this relationship is geographically and temporally “universal… but it never was so immediate as in the present age” (Athenaeum

803).

The Athenaeum understood that “immediate” relationship between reader and author to be, at least in part, an issue of literary form. The new economics of professional authorship transforms literature from a position of prestige to “a trade… produce[d] much and fast,” which rendered an inferior literature not merely tolerable, but acceptable”

(Athenaeum 804). The tradesman novelist must “subordinate his own tastes to those of his customers” (Athenaeum 804), rather than follow presumably “healthy” dictates of his own interest. Under the new nineteenth-century conditions—the professionalization of the author, the expansion of literacy, the modernization of printing and distribution— literature, and especially the novel, is governed by the whims of the people, forced to submit to the national character. And the national character is out of joint under the regime of modernity:

94 [A]n increased artificiality of social life, an estrangement from nature, and a consequent merging of all individualities in one common character, cold, monotonous, superficial, polished (it may be), but hard and hollow. The difficulties which beset the struggle for existence, the aggregation of the population into large towns, the universal pre-occupation of mind on the routine habits of a sordid industry, the disciplining of man to the minute restraints of complicated laws, are among the principal facts which contribute to this result. (Athenaeum 804)

Unlike Georg Simmel‟s city dweller, for whom the metropolis compensates for the deprivations of modern life with dazzling new forms of apprehension, The Athenaeum’s modern subject lives in an ever-expanding “circle of causes” which impoverishes the imagination, “sour[s] the temper, and deprave[s] the human heart” (804). Serial publication exacerbated this already-attenuated relationship between author and reader.

The success of Jack Sheppard was “a proof that something has gone widely wrong in that sudden expansion of wealth and population which has marked our times” (Athenaeum

804).

That sense of “something wrong” also permeates the lengthy (twenty-three pages) double review of Jack Sheppard and Frances Trollope‟s The Life and Adventures of

Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy in The British and Foreign Review (BFR) for

January 1840. Like the reviewer for the Athenaeum, the BFR sees the phenomenon of popular literature as a political and sociological problem: it interacts with “the grave and complex question” of “the education of the people” (BFR 223). The reviewer classes

Jack Sheppard as “the literature not of despair, but of debasement” (BFR 231). The review‟s central critique—significantly, not about Ainsworth but about Dickens— demonstrates the way moral concerns about readerly identification with the text could be

95 fused with an aesthetic concern for truthful representation. Speaking of the “immense popularity” of Oliver Twist and the merits of Dickens‟s social critique, the reviewer claims:

[The] means he uses we think a mistaken one…. The deceitful heart of man, while it loves to imagine itself as thrilling with a generous indignation, inquires not how much of that thrill belongs to the strange pleasure of following the course of things obscure and monstrous and forbidden.—Terror is rarely awakened without the accompaniment of fascination,--or crime dwelt upon, without the anatomy of its workings partaking as much of curiosity as of disapproval…. Now, as Truth—the one undying and immutable principle of Art—is of a sound and health- giving morality, we ought sparingly to introduce the gross, the horrible, the cruel, into the world of Fiction. (BFR 231-32)

Creating a mélange of associationist psychology, Romantic literary theory, and Calvinist theology, the BFR offers a critique of the practice of fiction that sets up the limits of realistic fiction as understood by the early Victorians. While it should engage with the

“real business of life,” at the same time it must limit its scope (BFR 232). It should quest for “Truth” as an ideological formation, but not too far. On the other side of the boundary lay “the gross, the horrible, the cruel”—those things which need to be excluded from the novel precisely because they cannot remain within the novel. “Foul and distorted aspects of humanity” cast a “passing shade of sullied disfigurement” on the observer, and in the penumbra of the reading experience clarity of vision can be obscured

(BFR 232). Rather than being inert words on the page, what you read reaches out and touches you, stirs your emotions. The gross, the horrible, and the cruel are, after all, exciting. They provide “strange pleasures”—fascination, curiosity. In the sway of these passions, a reader‟s moral discernment was likely to be impaired. Everywhere the

96 Victorians looked, they saw proofs of this theory: how else to explain the wave of

Werther suicides? For what other reason could the Newgate Calendar be so popular among the working classes?

The strange pleasures of reading are no new problem, the BFR acknowledges, but what is new is the spread of mass literacy. More people are reading than ever before.

Silver-fork novels and partisan journals already debase the bourgeois reading public. But the working class, who have never experienced healthier literary conditions, must place their “implicit trust in the truth of a printed book” (BFR 242). The hope for restoring both political and aesthetic order lies in circulating by means of the press “the master- pieces of our literature, the historical records of our country, in accessible and useful forms” (BFR 245). When the taste for “accessible and useful” literature is disseminated throughout the public there need be no fear that “those who have less leisure, less wealth and less education, shall utterly and finally abandon themselves to rapine and thievery and contempt of law” (BFR 245-46). The review ends with the utopian dream of harnessing the machinery of distribution to renovate British society through the power of classic literature and undoing the damage of modernity, whose literary production is otherwise only “barrenness” (BFR 245). In this fantasy of cultural regeneration, political and aesthetic categories collapse into each other.

The Athenaeum and the BFR worry about the political repercussions of reading

Jack Sheppard for both the leisure and the working classes. More inclined to draw a line between the readers of the novel and its readers, The Monthly Chronicle for March 1840

97 acknowledged that the novel had “invigorated the bulk of the population” but emphasized that it “fascinated the sympathies of the lower orders… to make them fall in love with burglaries and murder” (“Recent Novels” 220). Still, it agreed with the other reviewers that the appearance of Jack Sheppard represented a modern phenomenon, noting that

England has been marked by the “convulsions” of Chartism, the Oxford Movement and the Plymouth Brethren, whose “false doctrines and demoralizing views of the practical duties of life” have prepared the way (“Recent Novels” 219). With the specter of cultural collapse haunting the British psyche in the wake of these social convulsions, the success of Jack Sheppard seemed symptomatic of the enervated conditions of literature and culture.

Victorian critics were quick to note a consonant problem in Ainsworth's novel.

Just as the popularity of the novel indicated a decadent appetite whetted by the enervating circular rhythms of modern life—exemplified in magazine culture‟s demand for more: more speed, more material, more scandal—Jack Sheppard itself was seen as a post- lapsarian phenomenon, a product of the modern novel‟s fall from its eighteenth-century state of grace. Inevitably, Victorian critics compared the novel to John Gay‟s The

Beggar’s Opera (1728) and Henry Fielding‟s The History of the Life of the Late Mr.

Jonathan Wild (1743) and found it wanting. Not “the subject” but “the treatment” was a primary objection, as Forster put it:

The low was indeed set forth, with all the graces of literature or art, by our Fieldings, our Hogarths, and our Gays, but only to pull down the false pretensions of the high…. The vulgarity of vice was the object at which

98 they drove, and not its false pretensions to heroism or its vile cravings for sympathy. It was not so much that they sought to discover the soul of goodness in things evil, as to brand the stamp of evil upon things the world was apt to think good. (Forster 511, italics in original)

For The Athenaeum’s reviewer, “In looking back on the Newgate scenes of Fielding and of Gay… the first thing that recurs to memory is the noble purpose to which they are directed” (506). Jack Sheppard puzzled reviewers precisely because of its lack of “noble purpose,” its perceived sympathy for criminal activity, and its refusal to explicitly moralize. Even the language of the text was somehow off. Ainsworth‟s “prose descriptions labour as they proceed. Not one single touch or colour in them has of itself any significance. Effort is laid to effort, word piled upon word, allusion tacked to allusion” (BFR 225). Nothing, in the BFR‟s judgment, has “struck root” (225, italics in original). In other words, Victorian critics struggled to formulate even basic aesthetic criteria for analyzing Jack Sheppard. The text seems not only not to do anything productive, but not to want to do that kind of work. No critic accuses the novel of being an artistic failure—many critics praised Ainsworth‟s technical skill. But the novel seems to court the lowest common denominator—“pandering,” in the words of The Athenaeum,

“to the prevalent corruption of intellect” (803). Refusing to even engage in the basic literary function of signification, Jack Sheppard does nothing, other than encouraging

“unnatural excitement” and “sensation” in its readers (Athenaeum 504).

Ainsworth met these challenges not, like his defenders, by formulating a moral basis for his novel, but by emphasizing the author‟s freedom from responsibility and loosely arguing for the capacity of romance against the novel. In his Preface to the 1850

99 Routledge edition of Rookwood—perhaps Ainsworth‟s most important critical statement—he stresses the identification between author and subject. Rookwood‟s famous set-piece was the highwayman Dick Turpin‟s ride, on his legendary steed Black

Bess, from London to York within the span of a day; and Ainsworth in the preface makes a similar claim: “The Ride to York [sequence]was completed in one day and one night…. a feat it was, being the completion of a hundred ordinary novel pages in less than twenty- four hours” (xxxiv). But Ainsworth goes farther than aligning his compositional prowess with Turpin‟s horsemanship. He puts the relationship between author and character in terms that seem surprising, given the controversy over Jack Sheppard which would continue to flare up in the 1850s:

So thoroughly did I identify myself with the flying highwayman, that, once I started, I found it impossible to halt. Animated by kindred enthusiasm, I cleared every obstacle in my path with as much facility as Turpin disposed of the impediments that beset his flight [.] In his company, I mounted the hill-side, dashed through the bustling village, swept over the desolate heath, threaded the silent street, plunged into the eddying stream, and kept an onward course, without pause, without hindrance, without fatigue. With him I shouted, sang, laughed, exulted, wept. Nor did I retire to rest till, in imagination, I heard the bell of York Minster toll forth the knell of poor Black Bess. (Rookwood xxxiv)

Author and character here are merged in a kind of imaginative sympathy—or rather, perhaps, the identity of the author is lost within the viewpoint of the character. The respectable English gentleman becomes the “flying highwayman.” The novel subsumes the individual‟s identity within the text, offering up the possibility of a total authorial

100 identification with the text.17 The peculiar power of the text is in its refusal to allow anything other this total identification, whether that identification is between the text and author, or the text and reader. As Laman Blanchard noted, “the reader is never allowed to pause for an instant to think at all” (Blanchard xiv). These particular qualities of

Rookwood—speed, the suppression of thought, emotional identification—of course mirror the objections of many of Jack Sheppard‟s critics. For Ainsworth, they are, however, not the effects of a “bad book… got up for a bad public” (Athenaeum 803) but rather constituent parts of the mode of romance. Romance is related less to the developing canon of the novel than it is to theater: “romance… may be termed the drama of the closet” (Rookwood xxxv). This distinction is fundamental, for it implies that

Ainsworth‟s understood his text to be articulating something significantly different from the goals of the novel.

Thackeray, writing to David Masson in 1851, noted “the Art of Novels is to represent Nature: to convey as strongly as possible the sentiment of reality—in a tragedy or a poem or a lofty drama you aim at producing different emotions; the figures moving, and their words sounding, heroically” (qtd in Ray 1.394). Novels are different from theater and poetry. Where the latter articulate grand emotion and heroics, the novel should provide readers with an appropriate emotional structure—a sentiment—for the business of living in the real world. Writing from the point of view of production rather

17Laman Blanchard points, somewhat more ambivalently, to a similar effect on the readers of the text: ―The famous picture of the ride to York… is but an image of the reader‘s course as he leaps the abrupt gaps and turns the picturesque corners of this singular tale. He goes through it hurried, yet noting everything, and with breathless interest‖ (Blanchard xiv). 101 than reception, Ainsworth articulates a literary aesthetic at odds with those moral and ethical categories that governed critical reception of Jack Sheppard. Instead of insisting on the sentiment of reality, which Thackeray figured to Masson as an ethical duty,

Ainsworth reveled in the freedom available to the writer of a romance:

Conscious he is no longer individually associated with his work, the writer proceeds with all the freedom of irresponsibility. His idiosyncrasy is merged in that of the personages he represents. He thinks with their thoughts; sees with their eyes; speaks with their tongues. His strains are such as he himself (per se) would not—perhaps could not—have originated. In this light he may be said to bring to his subject not one mind, but several; he becomes not one poet; but many. (Rookwood xxxv)

The act of writing a romance enacts a powerful estrangement within the author‟s consciousness. Ainsworth can engage in a play of voices, no longer conscious of his own identity. Like his overwhelming identification with Dick Turpin, writing is for

Ainsworth a tremendous act of slippage, enabling the formulation of thoughts and concepts outside of or inaccessible to the producer. In other words, Ainsworth grants romance its own form of epistemology. Blanchard‟s rather anxious commendations of the text make it clear that this generic epistemological formation appealed to readers too, who sank their own consciousness into the text. This uneasy response typifies the

Victorian reaction to Jack Sheppard. In a climate in which the received political and moral order sustained heavy blows from Chartist agitation and Oxford Tractarianism, what effects could this absorption of self have on a reader? Was Courvoisier only the first?

102 A CATHERINE CATHARTIC:THE CONSERVATIVE CRITIQUE

The most significant literary response to the questions generated by the Sheppard debate came in the form of a curious, episodic text serialized in Fraser’s Magazine from

May 1839 to February 1840.18 Like Jack Sheppard,it expanded into a full-length fiction a brief entry from the Newgate Calendar, in this case the story of Catherine Hayes, an

“illiterate country wench” (Catherine 124) who murdered her husband with the assistance of two fellow lodgers in the early eighteenth century. From this unpleasantly sensational material, the author of Catherine: A Story, William Makepeace Thackeray, constructed a parodic and experimental polemic against Ainsworth‟s novel. Like the attacks of the reviewers, Thackeray‟s stated purpose was staunchly moral—to respond to the market saturation of a text which “dosed and poisoned” the reading public, “giv[ing] birth to something a great deal worse than bad taste, and familiariz[ing] the public with notions of crime” (132). Catherine‟s attempt to untangle the intimate relationships between morality and aesthetics offers an important early statement of Victorian realism, asking critical questions about the limits of representation in fiction. The larger scope of

Thackeray‟s fictional project, however, allowed him a dazzling array of fictional voices—parodic, ironic, lyrical, plain-spoken—through which he could dismantle the easy identification between reader and author central to Ainsworth‟s conception of the romance.

18 Serialized in seven installments over the course of ten months, Catherine was timed, as Keith Hollingsworth has noted, to appear against the increasingly popular Jack Sheppard, with the last numbers likely held back in order that they could appear simultaneous to the conclusion of Sheppard‘s serial run (152). 103 Thackeray‟s encounter with Ainsworth‟s work drove him to articulate the most conservative formation of the novelist‟s moral duty in the Victorian era. In his attempt to write to that standard, Thackeray first utilized the game of masks, formal and generic experimentation—resources he had developed in his capacity as a journalist—in an extended fiction. Responding to the narrative raptures of the Newgate novel with an insistence on the reality principle, Thackeray developed a set of techniques that he would utilize in his longer fictions: the oppositional relationships of surface and form in Vanity

Fair, the stylistic play of Henry Esmond, the metaliterary discourse of The Newcomes.

While Ainsworth languished in increasing poverty, a figure from an older world, these techniques canonized Thackeray for a generation of younger authors. The “Young

Bohemians” in the 1850s looked to his works as the high point of the developing English canon. Thackeray‟s influence as the prophet of realism could be felt throughout the

Victorian era: Charlotte Brontë found him “the legitimate high priest of Truth” and

Arthur Hugh Clough found him “much further into real life than I am” (qtd in Ray

1.394); George Eliot invoked him in Middlemarch; Walter Pater discovered resemblances between Thackeray and Plato. David Masson described his fiction as “sternly, ruthlessly real,” just as Elizabeth Rigby found his work to be “a literal photograph… of the nineteenth century” (qtd in Levine 134). Catherine marks a seismic shift in the landscape of novelistic representation.

That shift begins with a moment of catharsis. Thackeray called his text a

“Catherine cathartic,” intending it to violently purge his readers of the fantasies ingested

104 through romances. The metaphor, linking aesthetics and the body, is typical of the way the text thinks through questions about the larger social body. One of the ways

Thackeray emphasizes this function of the text is through Catherine‟s attention to gender politics. As Peter Brooks has noted, the female body has been the “object to be known” par excellence in realist literature, the arena through which the epistemophilic pleasure of knowing is constructed. Centering his text on a woman‟s subjectivity allowed Thackeray not only to ramp up the shock value of Catherine‟s transgressions, but also to situate female sexuality at the center of this cathartic process. Ainsworth‟s critics had largely danced around sexuality in his presentation of Sheppard‟s historical mistresses,

Edgeworth Bess and Poll Maggot. Typically, it was a Fraserian, Hamilton Reynolds, who made the most of this, emphasizing the lacunae enforced by Victorian standards of propriety (“in company with his two—ahem—ladies” [Reynolds 240]). In general, however, critics passed over the issues of sexuality and gender Jack Sheppard raised in their condemnation of the moral grounds of the story. Thackeray makes these issues central to his line of attack. On one level, at least, Thackeray‟s choice is exploitative: he wants to marshal the “greatest disgust for the characters he describes… using his humble endeavors to cause the public also to hate them” (Catherine 133). By focusing on a female figure variously guilty of poisoning, sexual immorality, abandonment of her child, adultery, and ultimately murder, Thackeray is able to mobilize the power of disgust more easily than if his novel had centered on a man. Certainly it was easier for a Catherine

Hayes to affront Victorian society than a Jack Sheppard.

105 But the power of disgust is double-edged, and Catherine‟s position as a critical response to the Newgate novel also, paradoxically, ensures that Thackeray‟s text exposes

Catherine Hayes as at least as much a victim of social institutions as their transgressor.

As Micael Clarke suggests, “Catherine is designed to demonstrate the realities of the criminal mind, the sordid trivial ugliness Thackeray felt was obscured by the writers of criminal romances” (51). The Newgate novel outraged Thackeray because of its falsification of reality: “if we are to be interested by rascally actions, let us have them with plain faces, and let them be performed, not by virtuous philosophers, but by rascals…. let your rogues in novels act like rogues, and not like honest men” (Catherine

19). Ainsworth, Bulwer-Lytton, and (more warily) Dickens, he argues, ignore their moral duties as authors by disguising and fictionalizing what should be the repulsive truth about crime. Thackeray, praising the style of Newgate novelists in terms that recall the

British and Foreign Review‟s critique of Ainsworth, drives his point home with maximum irony:

Without bragging at all, let us just point out the chief claims of the above pleasing piece of composition. In the first place, it is perfectly stilted and unnatural…. Our dear Cat is but a poor, illiterate country wench, who has come from cutting her husband‟s throat; and yet, see! she talks and looks like a tragedy princess, who is suffering in the most virtuous blank verse. This is the proper end of fiction, and one of the greatest triumphs that a novelist can achieve; for to make people sympathize with virtue is a vulgar trick that any common fellow can do; but it is not everybody who can take a scoundrel, and cause us to weep over him as though he were a very saint. (Catherine 124)

Newgate novels are dangerous because they not only blind the reader to the social conditions that produce crime, but they falsify those conditions even at the linguistic and

106 rhetorical level. In “Fielding‟s Works,” written just a few months after the conclusion of

Catherine, Thackeray put it even more bluntly: “‟Jack Sheppard‟ is immoral actually because it is decorous” (269). Hiding the truth about crime and criminals, a “squeamish lady” who refuses to read Fielding or Smollett on moral grounds could “go through every page” of Jack Sheppard “with perfect comfort” (“Fielding” 269). Thackeray‟s early aesthetic is committed to a moral realism, continually calling attention to the underlying realities that these novelists elide. As such, Catherine cannot help but be a critique of society: the murderess is equally an exploited woman. Robert Colby notes that

“Thackeray does all he can to point up the moral significance of the case of Catherine

Hayes” (392). Catherine may be innately “bad,” Thackeray suggests at certain points, but she is also confined within an abusive net of social relations.

The text‟s unique manipulation of fictional modes, slipping within a paragraph from parody to oratory or irony enacts a heteroglossia that consciously refuses to cohere into a whole. Thackeray exploits the tension between the narrator, who upholds the socially constructed view of Catherine, and the narrative, which suggests all too potently the forces that have made her so, to dislocate any easy judgment about Catherine‟s character. The formal strategies of the book, especially as it enters its final chapters, push heteroglossia to its breaking point, creating an experimental narrative that offers multiple conclusions, subsuming narrative resolution into a series of competing and contradictory narratives. The final serial number—comprising “Chapter the Last” and “Another Last

Chapter”—contains the bulk of Thackeray‟s anti-Newgate rhetoric (toned down

107 considerably in the tonier, posthumous version canonized in Thackeray‟s collected works), but it also expands the targets of the novel to include a staggering array of literary genres and modes. He paraphrases newspaper accounts, as well as suggesting playbills and dramatic tableaus in which “Children in arms” are “encouraged, rather than otherwise” (Catherine 130).

The final serial number marks a considerable break from the realism of the preceding narrative by first discursively assuming the style of the Newgate novel. All of

“Chapter the Last” is given over to the narrative of the murder of John Hayes. Thackeray in fact creates a considerable amount of sympathy for Catherine by portraying her, in this chapter, as the unwilling accomplice of Brock and Tom Billings, her son: her face is

“deadly pale” when she finds Hayes drinking with the two; she whispers, “No, no! for

God‟s sake, not tonight!” at Brock‟s suggestion; she even encourages Hayes to go to bed early and “lock [his] door” (Catherine 118). The murder itself is presented as literally absent from the text, only a series of fragmented phrases set off by a profusion of asterisks, leaving Catherine‟s role in it ambiguous. Here, and in the following meeting of

Catherine and Galgenstein in a moonlit graveyard—one that will leave Galgenstein “a hopeless idiot” (Catherine 124)—Thackeray is mocking Ainsworth‟s particularly gothic taste. At the back of this curious scene may be Hogarth‟s engraving “Cruelty in

Perfection,” the third of his Progress of Cruelty series (1751), in which an apprehended

Tom Nero stands over the body of his murdered mistress in a moonlit churchyard. This engraving was retroactively read as an anti-Newgate picture—with its emphasis on the

108 brute physicality of Nero and the vivid moral message. R. H. Horne, in The New Spirit of the Age (1844) notes of the picture that there “is no bold Turpin, or Jack Sheppard-ing, to carry the thing off heroically;” rather, the “purpose of the moralist” dominates (13). In any case, the effect of these passages is, as with the Newgate novel, to bring the reader into a sympathetic relationship with Catherine through a distortion and suppression of reality.

“Another Last Chapter” dialectically opposes the techniques of the Newgate novel by introducing documentary material relating to the historical Catherine Hayes. In a long passage quoted almost verbatim from the Newgate Chronicle, Thackeray focuses on the physical details of the murder, restoring to his fiction the unpleasant realities that

Ainsworth elides. In this version of the murder, Catherine is an active participant:

[Mr. Hayes] made shift to get into the other room, and, throwing himself upon the bed, fell asleep: upon which Mrs. Hayes reminded [Billings and Wood] of the affair in hand, and told them this was the most proper juncture to finish the business…. When the murderers perceived that Hayes was quite dead, they debated on what manner they should dispose of the body… but that which appeared most feasible was that of Catherine‟s contrivance. (Catherine 125-6)

The Chronicle account represents another fictional voice, an alternate narrative mode which immediately conflicts with the sentimental and gothic tendencies of the Newgate.

The addition of a new textual layer of documentary material disrupts any sympathetic identification between the reader and Catherine, while also undercutting any notion of novelistic authority. The doubled accounts cancel each other out, opening up a new space in which Catherine Hayes is simultaneously the passive tool of male aggression

109 andmurderous agent—in which Catherine both tries to expose the social conditions which create “scoundrels” and seeks to reinscribe those conditions in a text that motivates not sympathy but “disgust” and “hate.”

Thackeray‟s conservative impulse drove him to reject the sympathetic depictions of criminals in the Newgate novelists in an attempt to tell “the whole truth;” but that conservatism ultimately led him to realize the inadequacies of the form of fiction itself as a vehicle for “truth.” My sketch proposes, then, that in this early work of Thackeray‟s we find him deploying a kind of truncated dialectics throughout the text, positing a narrative or rhetorical thesis (Catherine as a sympathetic figure) only to introduce a negating or complicating antithesis (Catherine as vicious murderer). But Thackeray continually refuses to mediate between these two positions to produce a synthesis which can resolve the tensions and establish a coherent fiction, producing instead a new kind of fiction, ludic in form if serious in content. As Jack Rawlins suggests, Thackeray‟s fiction is marked by “ostentatious emphasis by the novel on its own fictionality, and the attempt to get outside the bounds of formal structure” (Rawlins 60). What may appear on the surface to be anti-realist is, in fact, for Thackeray, an impression that, as George Levine describes it, “the quest for the world beyond words is deeply moral,” driven by a sense of the impossibility of representation (RI 12). What Catherine realizes through its multiple generic structures, its narrative instabilities and conflicts, its contradictory rhetoric, is something new in Victorian writing, a modern realism aware of its fictionality. In his attempt to deal candidly with Catherine Hayes, Thackeray came to understand that

110 reality—the “truth”—always exceeded the closed structure of narrative; and in the formal features of his (anti)novel he first attempted to create a fiction that insisted on itself as fiction.

The history of realism in the nineteenth century is uneven, contested, and knotty, as close attention to it reveals. Under Thackeray the dominant mode of British realism began as a moral response to the vitiating content of Newgate novels by returning to the perceived aesthetic standards of Fielding and the eighteenth century, the representation of truth in action. But by the end of the decade strict fidelity to realism forced the Victorian author and reader to recognize that the moral categories operating in most fictions were not necessarily borne out in the world around them. The abstract categories of virtue and vice central to the debate about Jack Sheppard held only limited social consequences.

This is not to say that realist fiction could not transmit inherent ideological messages— only that embedding them as surface content was a risky maneuver: extreme caution needed to be exerted in novelistic technique, as Adam Bede, appearing the same year, argued. Increasingly debates about realism shifted into the realm of aesthetics. The various influences of Balzac, already felt in the 1850s but growing in stature throughout the remainder of the century, critical writings by E. S. Dallas and G. H. Lewes in the

1860s, and Henry James, Walter Besant, and R. L. Stevenson—himself a devoted fan of

Ainsworth19—in the 1880s and 1890s would stage massive interventions into realism as an aesthetic category while obscuring and reifying its overt connections to the political.

19 RLS to Edmund Gosse, Nov 9, 1881: “Go and see Harrison Ainsworth, and if you do, give him my homage: say I dote on his works….”(Letters 198). 111 Not until the end of the century, with the experiments of a generation of writers like

Hardy, George Moore, and above all Oscar Wilde, would artists again attempt to make clear the relations between the politics and the aesthetics of realism; this time from a deeply skeptical position. As the reception history of Jack Sheppard demonstrates, though, realism was deeply engaged in a political project of control from its inception.

The political element in the response to Jack Sheppard is not, as has been argued, a straightforward one of repressive prohibition. It was, instead, an argument about readerly identification. As Catherine suggested, realism‟s drive to delineate a faithful reproduction of human activity in a world of objects provided a technique which responded to those social pressures. Realism valorized a critical discourse which severs the intimate links of identification between a reader and a character, shifting that readerly response to a narratorial function that insists on distance. Narrator and narrative strategies are functions in which political and ethical concerns are mutually imbricated.

A close examination of how these two texts circulated in 1840 suggests several constitutive ironies which structure our reception of Victorian realism. First, the suggestion broached seriously by the Frankfurt School (later taken as doxa by post- modernist critics) that through the technology of realism “conventionalized modes of behavior are impressed on the individual as the only natural, respectable, and rational ones” needs to be qualified (Adorno and Horkheimer 28). Victorian realism turns precisely on this conception of the “impression” as passive reception. The kinds of realism Thackeray and his contemporaries valued negated passive consumption through

112 the sheer complexity of their world-making. The force of the challenge that Catherine raises to Jack Sheppard and to readers today lies in its insistence that reality is troublesome, not easily apprehended. Instead of identification it seeks bifurcation, splitting, dwelling on the breaks in representation, not the sutures which bind it together.

But at the same time, the realist project instantiated by Thackeray is opposed to mass culture. Rather than marking the birth of a democratic form, Victorian realism enacts a deep skepticism about the liberating possibilities of representation. Realism, at least as

Thackeray enacts it, is a monitory gesture to a mass audience. Far from opening up the novel to a wider field of representation, it sets explicit boundaries on the possibility of representation. Finally, for all that the Victorian novel has been identified as an engine with an “overt interest in generating personal and social reform” in opposition to the

“post-Victorian trend of separating literature from life” (Maitzen 173-74), the kinds of realism being valorized in contemporary responses to Jack Sheppard institute just such a split. It insists that a reader consider her relationship to the text abstractly, to stand outside the characters of the text, looking in. Bringing moral questions into collision with questions of identity, realism offered Victorian authors a powerful aesthetic through which to construct a world after the political and social transformations that marked the

1830s. In the wake of the Courvoisier hanging, it provided a structure to discuss issues of class and gender for an increasingly enfranchised, literate public; in turn, those discussions provided the foundation for our own.

113 Chapter 3:“I am always divided:” Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the Politics of Publishing in 1864

―This is not a sensation novel,‖ cautions the narrator of The Doctor’s Wife (1864);

―I write here what I know to be the truth‖ (358). The distinction is clear, unmuddied: a truth claim that in one quick stroke delineates (sensation) novels as false, untrue, less accurate than other kinds of fictional production. Yet readers following the progress of

The Doctor’s Wife perhaps had cause to question that announcement: when it is made, in the eleventh and penultimate serial number, Roland Lansdell (the would-be lover of

Isabel Gilbert, the doctor‘s wife of the title) has just been savagely bludgeoned by her disguised father, while Isabel‘s husband lies dying of typhoid fever caught from the slum tenantry of the town. Moreover, though The Doctor’s Wife was technically appearing anonymously in the pages of the Temple Bar, the byline—―By the Author of ‗Lady

Audley‘s Secret,‘ &c, &c‖—told eager readers the text they were consuming was by ―the queen of sensation fiction‖ herself, Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Braddon had shot to fame in 1862 with the surprise success of Lady Audley’s Secret, and since then her novels and stories had provided one of Temple Bar‘s main attractions—the publication of Aurora

Floyd, with its infamous horsewhipping scene, was simultaneous to Lady Audley’s

Secret, and the concluding chapters of John Marchmont’s Legacy had overlapped with the opening of The Doctor’s Wife in 1864. All the while Braddon had kept up a steady stream of publications in other formats, too; her hyperproductivity is evidence of her

114 struggle to support herself, her immediate family, and the family of her mentor and secret lover, Temple Bar‘s publisher John Maxwell.

The Doctor’s Wife neatly embodies a debate central to questions of aesthetics in the 1860s: what exactly was the relationship between ―sensation‖ and ―truth‖? As I have argued in previous chapters, the early Victorian era saw a sustained effort to reify the novel‘s objective and epistemic claims as a genre able to represent truth. These claims were generated in close relationship with moral ideology; indeed, as the Victorian moment progressed, realism itself could be identified with moral values, as the enthusiastic response to Thackeray‘s The Newcomes (1853-5) suggests. Burne-Jones claimed that Thackeray‘s text had ―done a good work for society in giving us the story of our manner of life so faithfully and tenderly‖; similarly, The Times suggested that readers

―looked upon these ‗Newcomes‘ as real personages, as helping to people our world, to attract or repel us, and to point or adorn our moral speculations‖ (Newcomes vii).

However, as we have seen, the dyadic formation of objectivity and morality takes its cultural charge from its interrelation to class position. As I argue in Chapter Two, the increasing visibility of mass fiction with non-realistic aims generates the cultural vantage point from which works like The Newcomes could be received. In the controversy surrounding the real and imagined effects of the popularity of novels like Jack Sheppard among working-class readers, Victorian critics and politicians formulated an instrumental role for the novel, arguing that it should produce civic good through its alliance with objective realism. If the Newgate novels of the 1830s and 40s were one node for this

115 kind of argumentation, the discourse around sensationalism knotted these concerns even more tightly. As W. Fraser Rae argued, the novels of Braddon were evidence that the author was ―evidently acquainted with a very low type of female character, or else incapable of depicting that which she knows to be true‖ (North British Review 45: 190).

The violence of this rhetoric—and Rae is by no means the most extreme representative— differs from the assaults on Jack Sheppard by combining class and aesthetics into a single position: sensation novels are either ―low‖ or intentionally false depictions of social relationships. Characteristic of the inquiry into sensationalism in the 1860s was just this tessellation of concerns.

By 1865 ―sensation‖ had been identified as a loose category that organized a constellation of thematic, tropaic, and narrative material around a central apparatus of physical and emotional impressions. Much ink was spilt trying to define the terms of that sensation, but everyone seemed to agree on the effects. As Punch put it in 1863, sensation novels were responsible for:

Harrowing the Mind, Making the Flesh Creep, Causing the Hair to Stand on End, Giving Shocks to the Nervous System, Destroying Conventional Moralities, and generally Unfitting the Public for the Prosaic Avocations of Life (qtd in Hughes 3).

As Punch‘s blurb makes clear, conservative Victorian critics worried about sensation novels on two fronts. First, they caused physiological and psychological stimulation— responses that in unwary readers could quickly turn to addiction—―sensation

116 mania‖.20Secondly, they had a moral and social effect. For the philosopher and future dean of St. Paul‘s, Henry Mansel, sensation novels were ―indications of a wide-spread corruption… called into existence to supply the cravings of a diseased appetite, and contributing themselves to foster the disease, and to stimulate the want they supply‖

(482-3). Novelists like Wilkie Collins, Mrs. Henry Wood, and Braddon were dealing sensation to an increasingly strung-out public, and the outcry was immediate. While

Collins could boast the patronage of Dickens and All the Year Round, and Ellen Wood retreated after the success of East Lynne (1862) into the less-controversial realms of domestic and sentimental fiction, Braddon became the lightning-rod for critical attacks whose severity escalated throughout the 1860s.

Yet, while Braddon‘s fiction has been continually aligned with sensationalism in the public eye, her novelistic output across five decades contains an astonishing variety.

Alongside the novels of sensation that made her name, she experimented with penny dreadfuls and melodramas like The Black Band (1861) or The Octoroon (1863); novels of explicit social criticism such as Strangers and Pilgrims (1873) or Lost for Love (1874); art novels like The Doctor’s Wife (1864); rural tragedies like Joshua Haggard’s Daughter

(1876); and historical epics like Ishmael (1884). Comparatively, Braddon‘s reach and range of interests are more diverse than any of the other ―sensationalists‖ among whom she was grouped. At her best, like her avowed mentor Edward Bulwer-Lytton, her novels

20 See Kate Flint for a compelling and thorough examination of the Victorian rhetoric surrounding novel addiction. 117 provide a panoramic insight into the cultural conditions of the middle and late Victorian era.

More than any other sensationalist—perhaps more than any other Victorian novelist—Braddon combined a practical knowledge of the literary marketplace with a relentless desire to innovate and exploit the changes in market production opened up in the 1860s. Her long professional and personal relationship with the publisher John

Maxwell, with whom she lived from the early 1860s until his death in 1895, brought her close to one of the lively centers of the Victorian book trade. Maxwell‘s publishing interests included not only his own book imprint, but a range of monthly and weekly journals, from the working-class Halfpenny Journal (1861-1865) to the men‘s magazine

Robin Goodfellow’s to the upper-echelons of The Belgravia, ―conducted‖ and edited for its first decade by Braddon herself. Maxwell and Braddon pioneered syndicated newspaper serialization of novels in the 1870s, and Braddon was among the earliest adopters of the one-volume format for fiction after the collapse of the triple-decker in the

1890s. Through Maxwell, Braddon developed important relationships with members of the developing bohemian literary culture including G. A. Sala and Edmund Yates.

Alongside Braddon, Sala and Yates worked to reconfigure the status of literary professionalism as indefatigable essayists, journalists, and editors, especially through their journal, Temple Bar, which serialized Braddon‘s first bid for artistic, rather than commercial, success.

118 The popularity and centrality of sensationalist discourse in the 1860s has prompted a number of penetrating academic studies of the phenomenon. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given both the high representation of women writers and the focus of sensational novels on women who challenge or subvert normative Victorian ideologies of domesticity and womanhood, feminist critical theory has yielded the most productive and thought-provoking insights. A paradigmatic text for the feminist interpretation of sensationalism remains Ann Cvetkovich‘sMixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and

Victorian Sensationalism (1992). Through a series of detailed close readings of both

―high‖ (Daniel Deronda, Das Kapital) and mass (The Woman in White, Lady Audley’s

Secret, East Lynne) texts, Cvetkovich argues that sensationalism became the site of a political project that naturalized affective responses. These responses became ―embodied in the figure of the middle-class woman‖ (6). As her title suggests, these affective emotions were complex and contradictory, ―the source of both social stability and social instability‖ (6). To offer only a simple example, the sensations produced by an audience‘s response to the revelation of Lady Audley‘s ―madness‖ both reaffirmed bourgeois constructions of domestic femininity and challenged those constructions by evoking sympathy for Lady Audley‘s fate at the hands of the policing family unit.

Cvetkovich‘s analyses provide an exemplary depiction of the ways in which these seemingly apolitical texts engage in a knotted political project. In this chapter I want to extend Cvetkovich‘s argument while simultaneously complicating it in two ways. First, I want to subject a wider portion of Braddon‘s work to this kind of analysis, to move beyond Lady Audley’s Secret now that Braddon has secured wider visibility within 119 literary history. At the same time, I want to situate Braddon‘s sensationalist project within the literary and social networks in which her works appeared. Braddon, like all authors, had both acknowledged and unrecognized political subtexts in her novels. These subtexts were determined not merely by her personal politics but by her unrivaled sense of audience dynamics and were complicated by the wide range of audiences for whom she published.

Appropriately, given the title, my own process in this chapter will be divided, reading two of Braddon‘s novels written within a twelve-month span against each other:

Rupert Godwin, first published as The Banker’s Secret in 1864-5 and republished (with dubious revisions) for a middle-class audience in 1867; and The Doctor’s Wife, an adaptation of Flaubert‘s Madame Bovary aimed at a literary audience. These two novels sharply differ from one another in sophistication, style, and intended audience. The ways in which the novels refuse to cohere into a unified literary ―project‖ reveals much about the sharp divisions in publication, as well as fantasized constructions of class and gender, at work in the 1860s.

And yet different as these texts appear at the surface level, their divisions—like the class strata of the 1860s, or Braddon‘s own perceived bifurcation—are more fantasized than real. Both texts are deeply interested in examining the circulation of modes of capital. The trails of gold which link the forests of Hampshire with the London suburbs in Rupert Godwin are mirrored by the circulation of texts as cultural capital among London and the idyllic Midlands in The Doctor’s Wife. And in both, the infusion

120 of forms of capital pose threats to the intimate rural communities and families central to the texts. Parodying the logic of critics of sensationalism, each text plumbs the limits of a deep conservative imaginary rooted in tradition, representing it as dissolving under the pressure of modernity. Renewal for each community depends on a shift in perspective: in one, a transformation from the law of the Old Testament to the new dispensationalism of the Gospels; in the other, from a conservative reading of society towards a liberal, even radical, horizon of idealist practices. Both texts, then, broadly center reading practices at the heart of social identity. Knowing what kind of text you are in is crucial to navigating the world. Alongside my following chapter on Wilkie Collins and The Moonstone, this chapter hopes to excavate a part of the political projects at work in the popular publishing industry during the height of the Victorian era.

SPECTERS OF FINANCE: RUPERT GODWIN AND WORKING-CLASS MORALITY

Rupert Godwin is a novel obsessed with the transformations of capital in the middle of the nineteenth century. It attempts to give form to the experience of the

Victorian marketplace in a transitional moment marked by significant debates over the role, shape, and nature of that marketplace, even as the power of Victorian capital could be recognized as extending far beyond the walls of the City to ―Otaheiti railway debentures and Fiji-Island first preference bonds‖ (i.42). It also navigates the shift between a naturalized consciousness of identity rooted in pastoral and traditional customs and a newer, cosmopolitan, and altogether more foreign sense of Englishness. These two

121 nodes of discourse—finance and identity—are uneasily conjoined in the text, whose anti- realist, non-linear sprawl represents an intriguing attempt to work through questions of modernity amongst working-class and bourgeois audiences. Beginning and ending in the idyllic ―woodland scenery of Hampshire,‖ the novel traces the adventures of the

Westford family, a ―poet‘s ideal of domestic happiness,‖ as they are drawn into the grasp of the voracious banker Rupert Godwin (i.1). The unscrupulous Godwin drives the action of the novel as he plots to use Captain Westford‘s life savings to shore up his international banking firm. At the same time, he pursues his revenge against the

Captain‘s wife, Clara, who had spurned his advances in her youth. Any attempt to summarize the book in depth runs the risk of sounding, as Robert Lee Wolff called it,

―preposterous‖ (122); moving the bulk of the action to London, Braddon juggles a number of plots linked through their focus on the slow revelation of the full monstrosity of Godwin‘s character. Among them are the apparent murder of Captain Westford by

Godwin and the subsequent investigation by Westford‘s son, Lionel; the reduction of

Clara and her daughter Violet to penury, forcing Violet to perform as an actress on the

London stage; a plot by Godwin and the rakish Marquis of Roxleydale to kidnap and rape

Violet; Vincent Mountford‘s discovery that the true object of his affections, Esther

Vanberg, is Godwin‘s illegitimate daughter; and the struggles of Julia Godwin to prevent her father from poisoning and imprisoning Lionel when Godwin discovers his identity.

Against this gothic pattern the novel sets a number of tropes drawn from Christian and comedic narratives. Captain Westford re-emerges from the dead, like Lazarus, at the end of the novel, while Clara Westford‘s charity to Jacob Danielson moves the old clerk to 122 provide the key evidence of Godwin‘s wrongdoing. The novel closes with the double marriage of Lionel and Clara to the virtuous children of Godwin, restoring order and balance to the domestic sphere threatened by the machinations of Godwin and unchecked capitalism.

As even this superficial summary suggests, Rupert Godwin brims with a full array of gothic tropes. The novel foregrounds the gothic as a mode of contemporary experience in the encrypted spaces of Wilmingdon Hall, full of ―the mystic terrors of a haunted mansion‖ (ii.228) and the machinery of the Roxleydale subplots, where hidden chambers and suppressed identities are given full play.Braddon had deployed gothic tropes in earlier texts like Lady Audley’s Secret not only for narrative spice, but as a means of making visible the fissures that ran through Victorian attitudes towards gender.

Yet a gothic reading of gender is difficult to pursue in this text. Unlike Lady Audley’s

Secret or The Doctor’s Wife, constructions of gender remain relatively unchallenged here.

Rupert Godwin does not feature a woman of comparable status and interest to Lady

Audley; instead, it splits its focus onto the suffering bodies of Violet Westford and, as the story comes to a close, Julia Godwin, for both of whom virtue is depicted as the domestic quietism recommended by cultural commentators like John Ruskin. The various strands that are brought together in the figure of Lady Audley (child-like wife, materialist social climber, murderous femme fatale) are dispersed to the different characters. By the standards of realist fiction, characterization in the novel is remarkably thin. Violet and

Clara Westford are studies in passivity; even Julia Godwin‘s active role in the

123 investigation into her father‘s guilt is curtailed by the mechanics of the narrative. This is a text which valorizes ―the quiet spirit of endurance‖ in its heroines (ii.42), not the active disruptions favored by Lucy Audley or Aurora Floyd.

While it is tempting to read Braddon‘s use of this quietism, alongside the narrative and linguistic conventions of gothic novels, as parodic or parergic—Esther

Vanberg‘s deathbed speech, which runs a full 18 pages in the three-volume text, represents an alluring example—the consistent linkage of gothic images to market concerns seems to suggest a more active attempt to make sense of the conditions of modernity that shape the novel‘s experience. As Andrew King has noted, gothic texts were common in cheap fiction in the 1860s, which traded the ―symbolic capital‖ of intertextual allusion utilized by middle-class modes of writing for ―high economic rewards‖ (148). The utility of the gothic provided a set of ready-made tropes and associations that even the most naïve readers could follow, yet these texts could exploit a high level of indexical complexity in their discourse. King argues that these novels are written in a ―style, casually mixing registers, at once telegraphic and long-winded, formal written and colloquial spoken‖ which marks their ―simultaneous complicity with and resistance to authority‖ (149). A key aspect of gothic style was the hybridity which enabled it to juggle widely-ranging historical and textual registers. Rupert Godwin deploys an astonishing range of these cultural registers cobbled together from elite and popular materials in order to investigate and critique structures of authority. Beyond persistent Miltonic echoes, an instance of which is examined below, the text makes

124 several explicit references to Jacobean dramatist Philip Massinger‘s A New Way to Pay

Old Debts (circa 1625), one of the few non-Shakespearian Jacobean dramas sporadically staged in London throughout the Victorian period. The central character of the play, Sir

Giles Overreach, is a rapacious business figure who emerges from the City of London to challenge the ideologies of the entrenched aristocracy. His role as a conceptual model for the figure of Rupert Godwin is clear. The business of both texts is to diagnose and control the anarchic energies of the bourgeois challenger of traditional values.

At the other end of the cultural spectrum, as the plot recapitulation demonstrates,

Braddon drew from the workman-like popularizations of the gothic novel produced by penny journals and cheap publishers like the Minerva Press to sustain an unflagging pace in her plotting. Similarly, the novel drew from other texts of the 1860s, for instance both

Braddon‘s own Lady Audley’s Secret and Charles Reade‘s Hard Cash: as Oliphant was quick to note, in a derisive discussion of the novel, Braddon ―has taken the bones‖ of

Hard Cash in a ―bare-faced and impudent‖ act of ―literary theft‖ (262). Oliphant leaves unspoken, however, the debts Reade‘s novel owes to Lady Audley’s Secret, closing a circle of adaptation and transformation of sensational material over the first half of the decade. Like the later Dickens, she incorporated materials from folk narratives and fairy tales into her text, as well. A particularly striking example occurs in the late chapter

―Girt with Fire.‖ In this chapter, Julia Godwin retells how she discovered her father‘s attempted poisoning of Lionel Westford as a dream-narrative, a structure that parallels popular English folktales like ―The Story of Mr. Fox‖ or ―Doctor Forster,‖ where

125 endangered young women recount scenes of attempted violence as dreams. The parallel is reinforced by the formal structuring of the scene, where Julia‘s narration of the dream is interrupted three times by her father, mirroring the ritualistic incantations of folklore.

The polysemicreferentiality of the novel thus locates it at the intersection of high and low cultural spheres, which as King suggests is a crucial feature of the mid-Victorian gothic‘s simultaneous acquisition to and critique of authority. That sense of doubleness is masked here by its origin in a conservative cultural imaginary. Unlike the culture clashes which mark and structure Reynolds‘s Pickwick Abroad or Collins‘s The Moonstone, Braddon‘s text draws from identifiably English signifiers to construct its narrative world. Though there is a greater world at the margins, this is an English text.

In Rupert Godwin, moreover, Braddon‘s use of gothic and materials drawn from folklore offers a specifically English narrative epistemology. The gothic, as numerous commentators have noted, is an anti-rationalist narrative form, one which, as Peter

Brooks notes, is balanced against the ―pretensions of rationalism… It reasserts the presence, in the world, of forces that cannot be accounted for by the daylight self and the self-sufficient mind‖ (Melodrama 17). A unique feature of Braddon‘s use of the gothic in the text is the insistent linkage of concepts of money and finance to the irrational.

Godwin is figured as a ―kind of modern magician, who could have coined gold out of the dead leaves which strewed Wilmingdon woods in the autumn, if he had chosen to do so‖

(i.52). The metaphor calls attention to the disjunction between the natural and the artificial (leaves / gold coins) only to build on it, highlighting the inert nature of capital.

126 The leaves which function as metonymy for gold are ―dead,‖ no longer of living use but waste product, just as the Godwin‘s projects within the novel prove able only to bring forth death and waste. The close echo in this passage of Paradise Lost i.300 ff., where

Satan calls forth the ―legion‖ of fallen angels ―who lay entranced / Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks / In Vallombrosa,‖ perhaps subconsciously reinforces the connection between the magical acquisition of capital and the lurid, demonic, or debased.

Within the shadow of capital, people are transformed: Esther Vanberg resolves to be ―a beautiful demon‖ pursuing ―reckless extravagance [and] insatiable avarice‖ (iii.132) in order to ―wear the coronet of a duchess‖ (iii.135); valets cast off their ―Quaker-like appearance‖ to reveal the dissoluteness of ―servants in the house of Lucretia Borgia‖

(ii.144); even Captain Westford, after his near-fatal encounter with Godwin, wears ―a white death-like face‖ which hardens into―the face of death‖ (iii. 238-9). Places as diverse as Wilmingdon Hall and Roxleydale Moat have the feel of ―a charnel-house‖

(ii.174), while Dr. WildersonSnaffley‘s new-model asylum is transformed into ―a kind of tomb‖ for the cast-off relations of the wealthy, hiding ―guilty secrets‖ within its ―dismal walls‖ (iii.153). Even things are corrupted: the Limited Liability Act of 1855 is described as ―that seven-league-booted giant‖ (iii.83); ―little bills‖ become ―demon avengers‖

(ii.98); the horse from which Esther Vanberg is fatally thrown is named ―Devilshoof.‖

Rupert Godwin employs a kind of logic of transformation in its narrative discourse, one which seeks out the gothic potentials hidden within the everyday. There is little surprise that Braddon should apply such a logic in the 1860s. Mid-century

127 Victorians understood that they lived in a society which looked quite different from that of their forebears. Rapid industrialization, market expansion, the growth of a civil service, all had deeply altered the face of British society. As Thackeray noted in ―De

Juventute,‖ one of the early Roundabout Papers, ―We have stepped out of the old world on to ―Brunel‘s‖ vast deck, and across the waters ingenspatuttellus. Towards what new continent are we wending? to what new laws, new manners, new politics, vast new expanses of liberties unknown as yet, or only surmised?‖ (RP 54-55) The novelty of the situation, as Thackeray grasped, involved transformation at every level, from legal thought to the reform of manners. The shift was felt in economic registers, too.

Boyd Hilton has persuasively argued in The Age of Atonement that economic thought over the first half of the nineteenth-century was dominated by struggles within deeply felt religious convictions, which inflected the debates between Malthusian and

Ricardian forms of economic thought. He identifies two helixes within which economic and religious practice could entwine:

There was an optimistic model whereby it was thought that Free Trade would wondrously unfold the harmonies of physical nature, which man had merely to contemplate passively. There was also a retributive model, which described Free Trade as revealing both physical disharmony (competition) and human adaptability (or willingness to obey the rules of the market). (Hilton 188)

Hilton emphasizes the importance of eschatological thinking to economic practice in the first half of the century, and ties transformations in market practices occurring after the mid-century, like the development of limited liability laws, to the emergence and eventual triumph of liberal theology: ―the repeal of hell-fire can be regarded as

128 unbuttoning a system of spiritual capitalism at just the point where the upper classes felt vulnerable‖ (277). Similarly, at the end of the century the legal historian A. V. Dicey, in his 1905 Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion during the

Nineteenth Century, sawthe middle third of the century as the victory of utilitarian individualism. In his twelfth lecture, he notes the concurrence of Evangelical thought with legal practice, arguing that ―Benthamism and Evangelicalism represented the development in widely different spheres of the same fundamental principle, namely, the principle of individualism‖ (399). These attitudes, he notes, were on the wane after 1860, replaced with the period of legislative collectivism (399). The institutional changes of the 1860s opened up, as Thackeray identified, new forms of lived experience and new struggles to represent those experiences.

Thus the cultural moment in which Braddon wrote Rupert Godwin was marked by these new forms, fundamental changes to economic and social attitudes which defied entrenched beliefs, as evangelical and individualistic systems of thought gave way to the encroaching pressures of liberal theology and collectivism. Central to these changes is the question of individualism: to what extent is the individual the basis for society? How does one check rampant individualism for common good? These are also pertinent questions within Braddon‘s novel, where Godwin‘s amoral, unchecked desire for acquisition is brought into conflict with the passive quietism of the Westford family. The choice of the gothic, a form, as Victor Sage demonstrated, whose debts to Protestant

129 thought run deep, allows the novel to investigate these assumptions at the level of form or aesthetics, encrypting its political content within a narrative framework.

I contend that, in the continued linkage of magical practices with capitalist practices, Rupert Godwin represents a sustained attempt to make the Victorian marketplace irrational to its readers. This has, paradoxically, the effect of dragging it out into the open, making visible through her narrative structures the irrational operations which govern the workings of capital. By deploying the gothic narrative of Rupert

Godwin as a structure sufficient to interpret the world, Braddon emphasizes the occluded forces structuring Victorian experiences of modernity and engages in a critique of

Victorian ideology, which, as Christopher Herbert has argued, depended on the

―imperative concealment‖ of the capitalist system (―Filthy Lucre‖ 195). These transformations are global in scale, but the text focuses on their local applications. While the world of colonial and international commerce is present on the margins of the text—

Captain Westford‘s fortune is made by the international trade established by the Empire to ports in the South Seas and China (i.22)—Braddon nonetheless locates the heart of the

―storm brewing‖ (i.37) in ―an old-established English banker‖ (i.42). This focus on a contemporary, domestic gothic economy sets the novel in counterpoint both to the classic exemplars of the first wave of gothic production and many Victorian gothic texts. It neither dislocates its text temporally or geographically, nor represents the threat to

England as external or colonial. Instead the threat is homely, identifiably a product of the

English social situation. This ―homely‖ form of the gothic has been associated with the

130 ―return of the repressed‖ since Freud‘s pioneering essay on ―The Uncanny‖ (―Das

Unheimliche‖) appeared in 1919. Freud argues that a basic structure of recognition subtends our experience of fear, the kind of frisson generated by the gothic:

if…every affect arising from an emotional impulse… is converted into fear by being repressed, it follows that among those things that are felt to be frightening there must be one group in which it can be shown that the frightening element is something that has been repressed and now returns. This species of the frightening would then constitute the uncanny, and it would be immaterial whether it was itself originally frightening or arose from another affect (148).

Freud notes that a key part of the experience of the uncanny requiring ―special emphasis‖ is that it represents the moment ―when we are faced with the reality of something that we have until now considered imaginary, when a symbol takes on the full function and significance of what it symbolizes‖ (―The Uncanny‖ 150). That is, we experience uncanny feelings at the moment when a seemingly imaginary construct bursts upon us with the full weight of reality, when something familiar suddenly reveals itself in a new light. As the work of Valdine Clemens and Robert Mighall has suggested, this structure of recognition need not be limited simply to emotional or psychological affects; instead, it can cover a range of sociological and historical formations. Structurally the gothic provided a form in which to analyze these formations, and the baggy narrative of Rupert

Godwin reflects the interpenetrations of capital economies into everyday life. The extravagant disorder of its plotting mirrors the byzantine world of globalizing capital, pursuing the hidden connections which join disparate characters, while offering a structure through which tangential plots converge on a single figure.

131 In this way the form of the novel mirrors Walter Bagehot‘s account of the

Victorian capitalist in his Postulates of English Political Economy. Bagehot presents the capitalist at the peak of the ―monarchical structure of money business‖ (84), exerting control of the labyrinthine circuits of economy which trace an indirect line between ―a thinking man in a dark office‖ (85) and ―the consumer, a man whom mostly he has never seen, whose name probably he does not know… having scarcely any point of intimate relation to the producer‖ (86). Similarly, Godwin‘s ―enchanted temple,‖ an edifice no stronger than a ―fairy fabric of spun sugar,‖ depends on the existence of ―thousands of innocent people [who] would suffer for the inordinate extravagance which had sapped the capital of one of the most respectable private banks in the metropolis‖ (iii.265-6).

Untangling this circuit, which remains untraced in Bagehot‘s unfinished lectures on political economy, forms the substance of Rupert Godwin.

These connections are often figured in sensationalism not as presences but as absences, gaps in the natural sequence that must be investigated and whose content must be made apparent by the application of rationality. The central mystery of the novel revolves around not what is present, but what is absent. When Lionel Westford penetrates the north wing‘s secret crypt, looking for evidence of his father‘s murder, he finds, at first, nothing. ―The cellar was to all appearance empty‖ (ii.238). Not quite empty, as it turns out: he finds a narrow strip of ―bluish cloth,‖ the stain of a ―great pool of blood‖ at the bottom of the stairs, and a ―glove of tanned leather‖ (ii.243-9). Enough signs of violence are present to allow Lionel to assert that ―the Hand that has lead me to

132 the scene of the crime will lead me to the grave of the dead‖ (ii.248), but hardly the body that the narrative promises to disclose to the reader. This substitution, of absence for presence, is symptomatic of the novel‘s investigation of capital, just as the seemingly miraculous resurrection of Captain Westford is key to the Christian narrative embedded within the text. As Cvetkovich notes, this process (discovery—absence—substitution) is also replayed in Marx‘s work: ―Capital is thus no ordinary mystery novel; it uncovers a nightmarish world in which bodies become things, and things become people‖ (173).

Just as the commodity effaces the bodies which produced it, Godwin‘s empty cellar holds only the traces of the crime, not the crime itself. The location of the room, in a hidden cellar positioned beneath Godwin‘s private office, creates a spatial link which otherwise might only be hinted at in the structure of the novel. Like Godwin‘s wealth, built over the obscured bodies of his victims, the endless recessive structures of the novel point us to the shadowy transformations always at work in the novel. A sea captain can be reduced to a bare series of things: a scrap of blue cloth, a leather glove, a pool of blood. But those things can also be reconstituted into a text, a legible sequence written in the materials of everyday life that cannot be ignored, like the hand that traced letters of fire on

Nebuchadnezzar‘s wall.

Lionel Westford‘s invocation of ―the Hand‖ of fate points us to the Christian providentialism at work in the conclusion of the text. As I have suggested above, the plot works to resolve itself by bringing in a number of Biblical and theological parallels, including the quasi-miraculous conversion of Jacob Danielson and the virtual resurrection

133 of Captain Westford from the dead. The conclusion of the novel iterates the shift from

Jewish legalism to Christian dispensationalism as a springboard to achieve the desired komosof the wedding scene:

―Is the young man to suffer because his father was a scoundrel?‖ the sailor asked himself. ―That may be the letter of the old Jewish law, but I‘m sure it isn‘t Christianity. The Teacher who refused to cast a stone at a guilty woman would have been the last to punish her innocent children. Let young Godwin stand upon his own merits; and if I find he‘s a good fellow, he shall marry my daughter, in spite of the scar under my left shoulder which bears witness against his father.‖ (iii.309-10)

A final transformation for the novel, the scene abbreviates a shift from ―the letter‖ to the spirit: pointing away from the legalistic machinations of Godwin towards an Arcadian future that rewards ―good fellows,‖ each according to their virtue. As in the conclusion of so many Victorian novels, typological Christian virtues of forbearance and suffering are seen as ultimately compatible with and productive of social and economic stability, not in conflict with it. On one level, as in the cognate form of melodrama, such ideas helped to reassert, in Peter Brooks‘s words, ―the existence of a moral universe which, though put into question, and masked by villainy and perversions of judgment, does exist and can be made to assert its presence and its categorical force among men‖ (Melodrama

20). However, as Jonathan Loesberg has suggested, the interrelationship between these providentialist assertions of a natural law and the patient, empirical unraveling of evidence has special importance within sensationalism. As he notes, the two ideas

contradict each other because the notion of providence entails precisely the idea of an interruption of the laws of nature, a naturally inexplicable or at least unlikely and hence providential revelation of the true state of affairs, while the empirical view of the interrelatedness of facts tends to 134 see reality as a self-governing entity, with its truth manifest to the properly trained observer (126).

The structure of sensationalist fiction provided a resting point for contradictory impulses, one where God‘s will and human activity met, reconciling the two within narratives whose paramount concern was to see justice enacted on earth. The two narratives mutually sustain and implicate each other, creating a ―both / and‖ structure in which human action is both sufficient to unveil the mystery of the plot and yet a proof of the ultimate workings of an ethical, even moral, universe in which suffering is validated and evil punished.

The final volume of Rupert Godwin revels in these kinds of instabilities as it attempts to map providentialism onto the broken strands of its narrative, bringing Lionel

Westford to the same asylum within which his father has been immured, revealing that

Godwin‘s clerk Jacob Danielson was once the kindly teacher of Clara Westford. Just as the system threatens to spin out of place, the Westford family‘s determination to return moral goodness for evil actions is revealed as a consistent pattern, one which delimits and orders all the activities within the novel. One‘s capacity to uncover the truth demonstrates the ultimate, harmonious stability of the world within which one exists.

But the important term here is the natural law which governs the outcome of the novel.

Sensationalist fiction imagines a universe that is both ―a self-governing entity,‖ a system whose laws and activities are mapped and internally regulated, as well as a place given to

―interruption‖ and incursion from outside the system.

135 This contradictory structure is especially appropriate to Rupert Godwin because it mirrors the conflicts in economic thinking at the moment, translating them into an aesthetic form that gives shape to a narrative produced through their tensions. Just as

Loesberg finds an irresolvable paradox within the structure of the sensationalist novel, historians of the marketplace have recognized the same paradox at work within Victorian economic thought. Adam Smith, and through him a number of Victorian disciples, found the economic marketplace to be a natural construct within which institutional interference limited the freedom and activity of the ―invisible hand‖ which guided capitalist enterprise. As Paul Johnson argues, the idea that the Victorian marketplace occurred naturally forms a common substrate to theoretical speculation about the role of finance and capital in the nineteenth century, yet in practice this idea was often called into conflict: ―In fact, the market of Victorian England was a deliberate, and thus far from natural, construction of ideas, conventions, beliefs, customs, laws, and enforcement mechanisms….. [T]he building blocks were not assembled randomly, but in accordance with the design of key actors, and thus reflected both their interests and their political power‖ (Making the Market 24). Moments of crisis in the Victorian economic sector brought this constructedness of the English machinery for distributing capital to light.

Transitional upheavals from backwards-looking Toryism to the ―economic man‖ of the utilitarians marked the 1850s and 1860s. The key debates of those decades (like the establishment of limited liability or the Joint Stock Companies Act of 1856) drew attention to the contradictory impulses embodied in British thinking about capitalism. If the dominant thinking ascribed natural qualities to the marketplace, including ultimately a 136 ―natural law‖ that guided and controlled the market, it also classified attempts to control the market as ―unnatural,‖ wrenching the system out of order. Johnson quotes the political economist J. R. McCullough in 1856 on the limited liability debate:

In the scheme laid down by Providence for the government of the world, there is no shifting or narrowing of responsibilities, every man being answerable to the utmost extent for all his actions. But the advocates of limited liability proclaim in their superior wisdom that the scheme of Providence may be advantageously modified, and that debts and obligations may be contracted which the debtors, though they have the means, shall not be bound to discharge (qtd in Johnson 137).

What God proposes, man had best not dispose of: the systems in place were ―laid down by Providence‖ for the betterment of mankind. Attempts to interfere are outrageous. As

Robert Lowe remarked, querying the government‘s haphazard application of liability: ―I should as soon think of allowing the Secretary of the Treasury to grant dispensation for smuggling, or the Attorney General licenses to commit murder‖ (qtd in Johnson 145).

These developing economic binaries—natural / unnatural, real / artificial, true / false—acquired (as both Johnson and Hilton demonstrate) moral signification. They were debated in the economic arena by Tories and Liberals, by preachers and economists.

But these binaries were also being debated, in very similar terms, in the arena of literary production, especially within the novel. The question of what is natural, as opposed to what is artificial or unnatural, is investigated within Rupert Godwin in several forms, none more explicitly than through the figure of Godwin himself. His name itself glances backwards to William Godwin, whose association with the philosophical radical milieu that also included Bentley and Mill was well-known. On this purely semantic level the

137 novel generates a teasing relationship between (William) Godwin, the progenitor of

Romantic individualism, and (Rupert) Godwin, the logical outgrowth of such individualist thinking within the transformed commercial landscape of Victorian Britain.

But he is actively figured as unnatural within the text, lacking sympathies, divided from his son by a ―strange and unnatural dislike‖ (i.77), and willing to sell his mistress and illegitimate daughter to recover his gambling debts. Even his laughter, beloved by

Romantic theorists as the spontaneous expression of innate joy, is pointedly (and repeatedly) described as ―unnatural‖ (i.72, i.73), accompanied by a ―strange, almost satanic smile‖ (i.40). As the novel sums up his character, he is ―created without that attribute of mind, that natural love and tenderness, pity and remorse, which we blend into one general whole and call a ‗heart‘‖ (iii.240). Against this depiction Braddon emphasizes the closeness of the Westfords and those associated with them to nature—the family begins and ends the novel in an idyllic woodland cottage—and the naturalness of their responses to events: their grief, wishes, desires, even hatreds are all labeled

―natural‖ within the text. Within the moral valuation of the novel, the text works to articulate naturalness and rootedness as conservative values, set in contrast to the interloping ―unnaturalness‖ of new civic and economic regimes.

Godwin‘s unnatural manipulation of the marketplace can only be redeemed through natural, or indeed even supernatural, manifestations. The text collapses Christian and natural registers, as in the evocation of the ―Hand‖ which will guide Lionel Westford on his quest to expose Godwin: at once the hand of god which will write Godwin‘s

138 crimes legibly, but also, as the conclusion of the text makes clear, the natural hand of the market, which cannot support Godwin‘s criminal activities. The image repeated throughout the novel to figure market collapse is drawn from nature: the storm. The storm is natural, periodic, and intervallic, and though it brings suffering, it leaves behind renewal. Only this ―commercial tempest‖ (iii.266) can cleanse the novel of the Godwin‘s attempt to game the system. Against such unchecked desires, the novel values the

―patient toiling in the obscurity‖ which allows the ―tangled skein‖ to be ―unraveled, inch by inch‖ (ii.181). The capacity to become a ―living image of patience and resignation‖

(ii.207), an icon of devotion, is accorded ultimate praise in the book, which finally envisions a Christian paradise flourishing in rural England. ―Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,‖ in the language of the Gospel of Matthew. If Rupert Godwin downplays the leveling content inherent in Christ‘s words, so fundamental for generations of English radicalism, it interprets this vision as one of harmonious—but quiescent—stability. The political content of the novel, which unfolds in this final vision, emphasizes a high Tory project, but one founded on the practice of melioritive, Christian charity, rather than the harsher laws of London‘s unredeemed society. Alongside the process of naturalizing affect the novel also recapitulates the naturalization of the marketplace, and the naturalization of social formation.

“BETWEEN TWO WORLDS”: THE DOCTOR’S WIFE¸ FLAUBERT, AND THE IDEALIST NOVEL

When the narrator of The Doctor’s Wife declares ―This is not a sensation novel,‖ she is defending—perhaps a bit anxiously—a claim that the novel is somehow different, 139 exceptional, within Braddon‘s oeuvre up to that moment. In letters written to Edward

Bulwer-Lytton, her literary mentor, during the composition of the book Braddon stressed its importance to her:

I am especially anxious about this novel; as it seems to me a kind of turning point in my life, on the issue of which it must depend whether I sink or swim. … But I feel every day more ignorant & life seems so short, & literature so long. And again I am always divided between a noble desire to attain something like excellence—and a very ignoble wish to earn plenty of money. (Wolff 165)

She was, she informed Bulwer-Lytton, ―going in a little for the subjective‖ (Wolff 161).

As such, The Doctor’s Wife represents a significant cultural project, signaled by

Braddon‘s invocation of Horace, and one which she is aware navigates the fissures dividing the Victorian novel, engaging in questions of high versus low, ―something like excellence‖ versus ―plenty of money.‖ In it, she again opens up questions about the circulation of forms of capital—in this case, a persistent question about the use of cultural capital, represented by reading, in bourgeois life. As in Rupert Godwin, the successful navigation of this problem requires a shift in reading practices. Here, however, those practices are literal, as Braddon investigates the consequences of literary production in the 1860s.

Isabel Sleaford is a beautiful, yellow-eyed teen when she meets George Gilbert, the good-looking doctor of a small Midland town. Isabel is dreamy and romantic, already at nineteen an inveterate reader of novels and poetry. Gilbert is smitten, and after the mysterious collapse of Isabel‘s family she agrees to marry him, though she does not love him. But after the marriage reality sets in: unlike the passionate romances in Byron and 140 Shelley—poets Isabel knows by heart—her day-to-day life is drab and routine, and

Gilbert, though hard-working and kind, is no Byronic hero. Instead, he has square fingertips and a decided love for turnips; and though Gilbert loves Isabel deeply, he is incapable of understanding her. Both Mr. Raymond and her sensation novelist cousin

Sigismund Smith worry about her taste for romantic texts and encourage her to identify with the real world. Into this emotionally suffocating environment comes Roland

Lansdell, aristocrat and poet. Lansdell is everything that George is not—wealthy, well- read, sympathetic, idle, and fashionably atheistic—and their relationship deepens, until

Lansdell asks Isabel to elope with him. Isabel is shocked to discover that his interest in her is sexual, not Platonic, and rejects his advances; pouring her emotional (and libidinous) energies into the church. Things come to a head when George contracts typhoid fever and Isabel‘s father, now revealed to be a dangerous criminal, reappears on the scene. Lansdell, whose sexual obsession with Isabel has become almost frenzied in the wake of the failed seduction, attacks Mr. Sleaford, believing him to be Isabel‘s working-class lover. In the plot‘s most melodramatic twist, Sleaford recognizes Lansdell as the man whose testimony imprisoned him, and he ferociously beats Lansdell. The novel concludes with Isabel attendant on two deaths. George‘s uncomplaining Christian death provokes Isabel to recognize George‘s heroism. Lansdell‘s dramatic deathbed conversion, made under the power of Tennyson, assures Isabel of the eternal verities at play on earth. In the novel‘s final pages, Isabel inherits Lansdell‘s property and fortune, allowing her a sphere of action to pursue good deeds.

141 Critical responses to The Doctor’s Wife tend to coalesce around two central categories. The first category, pioneered by Kate Flint‘s groundbreaking The Woman

Reader(1994), focuses on the status of novel reading in Braddon‘s text. Flint argues that the text subverts its overt moralistic content by encouraging readers ―to enter into an active process of interpretation which invites recognition of their own active, rather than passive, role as readers‖ (283). By engaging in mimetic and ekphrastic moves, the novel provokes its readers to consider the self-constructed nature of reading. Following Flint‘s argument, Catherine J. Golden finds that ―the third volume of The Doctor’s Wife debunks the pervasive nineteenth-century tropes of consumption and addiction that fueled the fears of antifiction critics who opposed women‘s novel-reading habits on moral grounds‖

(39). Stressing the ―fairy-tale‖ nature of the novel‘s conclusion, Golden sees the novel as an optimistic response to Flaubert‘s account of the dangers of fantasy. Julia M. Chavez, in ―Wandering Readers and the Pedagogical Potential of Temple Bar,‖ argues that both

Braddon‘s text and Temple Bar, where the serial was first published, emphasize critical, non-hegemonic forms of reading. She finds that the novel internalizes the critical culture of Temple Bar, encouraging the general reader to re-evaluate perceived notions of literary and social value.

The other strand of critical readings considers the novel‘s complicated relationship with literary genre, particularly the negotiations between sensationalism and realism. These readers tend to be more sanguine about the liberating possibilities of the text. Pamela K. Gilbert emphasizes that Braddon‘s employment of literary realism means

142 that the popular novels Isabel reads are a ―disruptive intrusion into realist ‗high‘ culture‖

(108). The ensuing deaths of George Gilbert and Roland Lansdell demonstrate the danger of Isabel‘s populist desires, ―collapsing the distance between the ‗moral‘ critical discourse and the ‗immoral‘ fictive one‖ (111). Though Ann Heilmann and P. D.

Edwards draw back from making such extreme claims, they both explore the ways the novel adapts Flaubert‘s emphasis on ―the prosaic reality of middle-class domesticity,‖ seeing the novel as a crucial vector for the dissemination of Flaubert in Victorian England

(Heilmann 32). While Tabitha Sparks stresses the ―ultimately confused‖ nature of the novel, finding that it cannot negotiate the ―competing epistemologies at work in 1860s fiction‖ (198), Richard Nemesvari suggests that ―Braddon‘s commitment to the realist project‘s psychological exploration of character‖ causes her novel to ―insist on the inevitable constructedness of both individual and social identity‖ (149).

On the one hand, we have a group of readers who find a text that dramatizes, upholds, and finally celebrates women‘s reading practices; on the other, a set of readers who locate in the novel‘s uncertain commitment to realism an ambivalent-at-best critique of the practice of novel-reading. Like Braddon during the writing of the novel, the text too can be figured as ―always divided‖ against itself in its potential mobilizations. Yet I want to argue that we can negotiate these seemingly divergent sets of readings. I argue that the novel exists in a dialectical relationship with realism and that it valorizes a particular, non-realist literary formation. In other words, though Braddon‘s novel

―performs‖ realism for its first two-thirds, in the end result the novel draws from and

143 returns to non-realist literary tropes and narrative gestures. Contemporary readers of

Temple Bar, and the narrower percentage who had followed the English response to

Gustave Flaubert, would have found Braddon‘s novel a response to debates over literary realist practice. But at the same time, reading practices in the novel need to be contained;

Braddon advocates the power of a specific English idealist tradition. To make this as-yet nebulous formation clearer, I want to explicate Flaubert‘s reputation in England before turning to the literary attitudes of the Temple Bar group. I will then conclude by providing a reading of the text within these alternative models of practice.

Braddon‘s choice of Madame Bovary as a source-text puts her on the cutting-edge of Victorian readers. Though Madame Bovary had ignited a firestorm of controversy in

France when the government prosecuted the Revue de Paris and Flaubert for ―outraging public morals and religion,‖ the novel had made little visible impression in England.

When Braddon began work on the novel in 1863, the novel had received just a few notices in British magazines: in 1857 the Saturday Review had published two articles condemning the novel, while the Westminster Review praised the novel in a brief notice.

The Saturday Review took advantage of the publication of Salammbôin 1863 to rejoin the attack, this time in much stronger language. However, Flaubert‘s work would not be discussed at length in British magazines and journals until the late 1870s; the first English translation of Madame Bovary, by Eleanor Marx, did not appear until 1886.21

21 I draw from Annie Rouxeville‟s “The Reception of Flaubert in Victorian England” which remains the standard discussion of Flaubert‟s English reception history; the earlier portions of Rouxeville‟s survey, however, need to be approached with caution as they contain some inaccuracies. 144 In 1857, The Saturday Review had mixed emotions about the novel. On the one hand, it was in one sense ―a disgusting performance,‖ in that ―disgust is certainly the most prominent feeling that it awakens‖ (―Madame Bovary‖ 41). Though the reviewer grants that the book achieves brilliant effects through the author‘s strong descriptive powers, no ―mechanical‖ skill can redeem the fact that Flaubert refuses to present his readers with even a single redeeming character: ―From the first page to the last, not a person is introduced calculated to excite any other feelings than contempt‖ (―Madame

Bovary‖ 41). But what truly concerned The Saturday Review was ―the obvious intention on the part of the author to write rather a moral book‖ (―Madame Bovary‖ 41). Great art, the reviewer suggests, need not abide by conventional standards of morality—Othello and Paradise Lost, he notes, could not be read aloud with propriety in front of a mixed audience—but they encourage us to see immorality as an evil in itself. The extremity of

Emma‘s punishment for adultery gives no sense of proportion:

Strange as such a comparison may seem, Madame Bovary has a strong family likeness to a certain class of tracts—those which turn upon what we may call, without offence, a sort of providential tour de force. When we hear of a boy who is drowned for boating on Sunday, the logical conclusion is that it is foolish to do that for which you may be drowned, but not that it is wrong to boat on Sunday; and in precisely the same way, we infer from Madame Bovary that poisoning by arsenic is a very painful death, and that it is well to avoid what may lead to it, however pleasant. (―Madame Bovary‖ 41)

With the crude moral logic of a tract, the novel encourages us to avoid punishment rather than to see immoral behavior for what it really is. Though the reviewer dismisses the aesthetic and moral claims of Madame Bovary, he found the French novel‘s

145 outspokenness an important challenge to English fictional mores. Madame Bovary, he announces, represents no threat to society because no English author would dare to write it. This is an ambivalent thing, at best. Though modern ―light literature… is written upon the principle that it is never to contain anything which a modest man might not, with satisfaction to himself, read aloud to a young lady,‖ the article questions whether this ―emasculation produces purity‖ (―Madame Bovary‖ 41). The condition of England is ―not so very immaculate‖ as fiction depicts it; perhaps the fact that authors are

―absolutely and systematically silent as to one most important side of it… stimulate[s] passions‖ rather than repressing them. The reviewer ends by advocating that ―serious consideration‖ be given to the fictional silence surrounding depictions of sexuality.

The reviewer for theWestminster Review, probably George Meredith, demurred from the rejection of the novel‘s aesthetics: ―We flung the book to the four corners of the room; but we took it up again, and finished it…. M. Gustave Flaubert is a singularly powerful writer‖ (―Belles Lettres‖ 600-01). Reviewing the novel alongside Moxon‘s Pre-

Raphaelite edition of Tennyson and Trollope‘s Barchester Towers, the reviewer noted

Flaubert‘s ―remorseless‖ realism, but claimed that

―the Author is right: if an adultery is to be treated of at all… it should be laid bare—not tricked out in meretricious allurements: subjected to stern analysis—not made solely to present the passion, thereby to awake the sympathies of a vulgar prurience…. The Author has no more love for [Emma Bovary] than an anatomist for his subject (―Belles Letters‖ 601).

―No harm can come from reading Madame Bovary,‖ the critic concluded, ―but it is physic for adults, as doctors say‖ (―Belles Letters‖ 601). As Peter Brooks has shown us,

146 The Westminster Review’s medical metaphors for Flaubert‘s realism suggest the

―epistemophilic urge‖ of the modern novel, which is ―defined by its quest to ‗know‘ the truth of the woman‘s body‖ (qtd in Gilbert 191). Defining Madame Bovary as an event in the modern history of the novel, The Westminster Review stakes Flaubert‘s claim on his dispassionate desire to know, a function of the novel‘s ―stern analysis‖ of female sexuality. Emma‘s problem is central to modern life.

Though they dissent from each other about the merit of the novel, both the 1857

Saturday Review and The Westminster Review locate Flaubert in the realist school. This early Saturday Review article, in fact, almost enlists Flaubert among English realists, claiming that ―his style conveys to us the impression that it has been formed upon that of

Mr. Thackeray, of whose influence it shows the strongest traces‖ (―Madame Bovary‖ 40).

However, when The Saturday Review returned to its discussion of Flaubert in an 1863 review of Salammbô, the novelist was figured much differently. Though the reviewer again notes Flaubert‘s hyper-detailed descriptions, they are no longer held up for praise:

―No matter how loathsome or repulsive an object may be, it is enough for them [French authors] to know, or believe, that it either has been or is…. There is nothing from which he shrinks‖ (―Salammbô‖ 309). This is, the author believes, the tendency not of realism but of ―hard and gross materialism‖ (―Salammbô‖ 309). Flaubert might get the outward details right, but his ―characters most decidedly are not‖ human beings (―Salammbô‖

310). His urge to describe—the reviewer figures it as a compulsion—is a ―coarse and inhuman fidelity to the lowest instinct of the artist‖ (―Salammbô‖ 309). The reviewer

147 links the experience of reading Flaubert to that of reading sensation novels—each is fundamentally untrue to human experience, though the Flaubert of Salammbô is a much more perverse ―caterer for the morbid appetites of the nineteenth century‖ than sensation novelists could ever dream of being (―Salammbô‖ 309).

Thus when Braddon chose to adapt Flaubert as she began writing her new novel in the fall of 1863, she was faced with several challenges. The first was transforming a plot that was certainly scandalous for contemporary readers, given its emphasis on libidinal fantasy and sexuality. By 1863 Braddon had several potential models to hand: both popular successes like East Lynne and critical triumphs like Adam Bede had, at the very least, mobilized sympathy for their adulterous or sexually intransigent women.

Braddon herself, however, perhaps sensitive to the irregularity of her domestic arrangements, fretted about the ―hideous immorality‖ of Madame Bovary, insisting that it was not the content but ―the style of which struck me immensely‖ (Wolff 162). ―I do dread the things that will be said of ‗The Doctor‘s Wife,‘‖ she wrote to Bulwer-Lytton in a later letter, ―but I can most solemnly vouch for the purity of my intention‖ (Wolff 163).

Braddon‘s changes to the source material, then, are at her own instigation, not simply, as critics like Wolff have suggested, made at the behest of social ideology.

At the same time, the definition, status, and value of realism within the English tradition were being hotly contested. In 1859 the influential critic David Masson divided the field of contemporary novelistic production into two distinct schools: the Real school, and the Ideal or Romantic school. Though Dickens was the formidable embodiment of

148 the Idealist school, it was the realists, under the figure of Thackeray, who were in full sway. In the past ten years, he claimed, there has been a ―growth among our novel-writers of a wholesome spirit of Realism‖ (Masson 263). The realists ―aim to represent life as it is actually and historically,‖ (Masson 248) taking up the burden of precise representation of their surroundings, giving accurate accounts of facts and characters, even those previously deemed too ―common, disagreeable, or even painful‖ for inclusion in the novel (264). It is, he suggests, as if

the British Novel, in its totality, should be a Natural History of British life, [where] individual novelists were acting farther on the principle of subdivision of labor, and working out separately the natural histories of separate counties and parishes. With Thackeray presiding in the centre, as director of the metropolitan museum, and observer-in-chief of the Middlesex district, though with the liberty of an excursion hither and thither as he chooses, there are scores of other at work gathering facts, specially in Berkshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire, etc., some of them with the talent of accomplished master in the whole field of the science. (Masson 264-65)

Realism is a science, he claims, with its written record—the novel—forming a museum.

In the pages of these ―accomplished masters‖ readers can see for themselves the habits and patterns of their nation represented with thick detail. Like a scientist, the novelist works by patient observation, accumulating data from which to generalize theories and laws of behavior. The cooperative ―labor‖ of the British novel is figured as engaging in a massive reorganization of the world, making discrete, apparent, and knowable the external world, representing it, in a series of volumes, to the reader.22

22 Masson‟s scientific and economic language points us to other definitive texts of 1859, Darwin‟s On the Origin of Species and Marx‟s Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. 149 Perhaps no magazine of the 1860s was as opposed to this ―scientific‖ realism as

Temple Bar, where The Doctor’s Wife first appeared. The magazine was founded in 1860 by publisher John Maxwell, editor George Augustus Sala, and sub-editor Edmund Yates.

Sala had made his literary name through his journalistic work in Dickens‘s Household

Words throughout the 1850s, but on the social front he was a confirmed member of the growing bohemian class of writers, musicians, and other artists that sprang up in London in the middle of the nineteenth-century. As Peter Blake puts it, ―Although English bohemians, unlike their French counterparts, were not overtly political, their personal experience of poverty… meant that they fraternized and empathized with the lot of the poorer classes and desired social change‖ (186). For Sala, as for many bohemians, this played out in a personal distaste for bourgeois respectability and a suspicion of its attendant ideology. Edmund Yates, though never himself a bohemian, had rocketed to notoriety thanks to the Garrick Club Affair. His unflattering portrait of Thackeray in

Maxwell‘s Town Talk had caused Yates to be blackballed from the club, an event small enough in itself that precipitated the public and private split between Dickens and

Thackeray. In the late 1850s, this fractious rivalry was more than a literary event. It represented a deep ideological split between literary schools: with Thackeray identified as the head of the Realist school, realist literature was becoming confirmed in its drift towards conservatism and a cynical acceptance of ―things as they are.‖ The founding of

Thackeray‘s Cornhill Magazine, which had, as Blake notes, an emphasis on realism as a didactic tool, seems to have provoked Maxwell, Yates, and Sala into the creation of

Temple Bar as a left-wing corrective (188). 150 There were deep personal and ideological fractures informing the Temple Bar group‘s aesthetics, which rejected conventional realism. An August 1862 article called

―Society‘s Looking-Glass‖ spells out the magazine‘s critique:

Nowadays, however, [society] is determined to have the looking-glass of fiction simply a looking-glass, in which she can secretly examine her own follies, flaws, beauties. She is content, therefore, with the reflection of her superficial features—the externals and ‗realities‘ of daily life. Consequently few, if any, of our novelists see farther than the domestic parlour and the drawing-room window…. Thus encouraged, the novelists set to work to study the minutiae of character and incident; and the outcry they make in order to please the publisher has been characterized, falsely however, as Realism. (―Looking-Glass‖ 132)

Masson‘s grand science is reduced to a series of ―trivial domestic pictures.‖ So-called

―realism‖ rejects grand narratives in favor of narrative ―trifles,‖ working through a false synecdoche, substituting an obsessive attention to the part for the whole. The real stuff of life is in ―the ideal and metaphysical element‖ where ―an active ideal principle is secretly working‖ (―Looking-Glass‖ 132). ―The fact in brief is,‖ the article continues, ―that

Society has come to a conclusion that it is possible to depict real life agreeably and truly without idealizing it; that to idealize the facts and personages of real life is to produce false social pictures, to seriously misinterpret the functions of art in general‖ (―Looking-

Glass‖ 133). Abandoning their social relevance for the lure of cash, realist writers make the mistake of thinking that ―Art should be rather photographic than pictorial‖ (―Looking-

Glass‖ 133). Distantly invoking Ruskinian arguments about the role of art, Temple Bar argues that mere representation was taking the place of the essential act of interpretation.

A later article, ―Truth in Art,‖ would more bluntly state, ―In most works of Art—in

151 painting, and still more in poetry—there is a margin of the ideal ever hovering around the real, which we cannot dispense with, or clear up into certainty… Truth, therefore, like every thing else, may be out of place… [and] may consist not so much in accuracy of representation as in the fact of the representation being in harmony with the ideas and beliefs of the beholder‖ (369-70).

There were, however, pockets of resistance. One was the continuing work of

Dickens, who rejected the circumscriptions of realism, insisting on the expanded social role of the artist. Another was an unlikely vector, the sensation novel: ―One must observe that Realism, improperly so-called, appears under other and varied phrases; but

Society is continually reacting against the cant. The latest reaction against realism—one now actively exhausting itself, however,--has been called ―sensation‖ (―Looking-Glass‖

136). Sensationalism resists the inherent conservatism of realism by agglomerating ―the individual in the incident‖ (―Looking-Glass‖ 137). While the author worries about the form‘s lack of innovation (―It entails no originality‖) he recasts sensation fiction‘s populism and commercial nature as liberating, appealing to the masses, not a particular class (―Looking-Glass‖ 137). Temple Bar‘s commitment to the sensationalist project was long term. Alongside Braddon, they had also serialized Sala‘s Seven Sons of

Mammon(1862). Altogether there had been some ―sensationalist‖ content, whether novel, poem, or journalistic expose, from the second number of the magazine until The

Doctor’s Wife began appearing in 1864.

152 What I would like to argue is that The Doctor’s Wife exemplifies Temple Bar‘s complicated, dialectical relationship with the realist novel. As even my cursory plot summary makes clear, roughly the first half of the text follows the plot of Madame

Bovary in presenting a realistic depiction of a young married woman‘s unhappiness as the consequence of a speedy marriage to an unsuitable partner. However, the text departs from the norms of realism when Isabel rejects Lansdell‘s suit. From here on out, the text will push against the foreclosures that a realist novel would pursue. It offers religious devotion, self-sacrifice, and the reparative power of reading as counters to the conservative and cynical world of the realist text. In other words, as the novel moves towards its open-ended conclusion, it reorients us away from formal realism, where it begins, and pushes us towards literary idealism.

When Masson divided novelistic production into realists and idealists, he defined the question confronting idealist writers as this: ―What can be made out of this; with what human conclusions, ends, and aspirations can it be imaginatively interwoven, so that the whole, though attached to nature by its origin, shall transcend or overlie nature on the side of the possibly existent—the might, could, or should be?‖ (Masson 250-51). Rather than working in the realm of the quantitatively verifiable like realists, idealist novelists work from generalization, ―where the laws need not be those of ordinary probability‖ and characters of ―ideal perfection and beauty‖ are possible (Masson 249). The idealist school need not be governed by the strict adherence to factuality proposed by the realists, and character motivations that seem implausible by realistic standards are not only

153 acceptable but perhaps necessary. Careful contemporary readers were attuned to these distinctions. An Irish reader wrote to Braddon just after the August 1864 installment, where Isabel rejects Lansdell‘s offer of elopement: ―I am so sorry for Roland and Isabel but I am sure you are right, and it would never do to sacrifice public opinion for the sake of ideal characters, though you make them so real‖ (qtd in Wolff 164). Though what drives the reader‘s response is the realism of their depiction—―one feels sure they are living and loving and suffering somewhere,‖ she goes on to say—nonetheless she stresses that Roland and Isabel are ―ideal characters‖ (qtd in Wolff 164). Critics emphasized the same concept when discussing Isabel‘s character. The reviewer at The Spectator noted that Isabel failed to become one of the ―real figures‖ of fiction (1215). The critic for The

Saturday Review wondered ―whether a personage so exclusively embodying a single idea could ever by possibility exist, and continue acting in real life in anything like the fashion of Isabel in fiction‖ (―The Doctor‘s Wife‖ 571). Though they praised the ―moral elevation‖ of the novel as a promising new direction for Braddon, they critique the ―over- strain of fancy‖ in the ideational content (―The Doctor‘s Wife‖ 572). When judged by the standards of realism, Isabel simply fails to be believable.

But the novel takes great pains to educate us in how to move from realist to idealist methods of reading. Like Madame Bovary, the first two installments of the text— roughly a quarter of the total—focus on George Gilbert and his courtship of Isabel

Sleaford. Narrating events from George‘s perspective, the novel imbricates us within his common-sense world. George doesn‘t have a touch of the ideal about him--when a

154 young woman blushes romantically at him, he can‘t understand what it signifies: ―he looked at the young lady‘s emotion from a professional point of view, and mistook it for indigestion‖ (DW 8). He is figured as prisoner who has grown comfortable within the walls his prison, ―placidly indifferent‖ to the world outside (DW 7). He holds to the conservative political and social beliefs of his father and grandfather, and his dream is to live and die ―in the familiar rooms in which he had been born‖ (DW 7). Ultimately, we are told, he ―filled a very small place in a very narrow circle‖ and ―took his life as he found it, and had no wish to make it better‖ (DW 6-7).23 Like many novels of the 1860s,

Braddon‘s text is concerned with the breakdown of masculinity.George‘s Carlylean devotion to work fails to mask that he lacks some component that would push him into an active engagement with history. George fails to be sympathetic to the world around him and to external experience. He can, we are told, ―sit in the little parlour next to the surgery reading Byron‘s fiercest poems… with no passionate yearning stirring in his breast‖ (DW 7).

In other words, George is figured as the quintessential realist reader, weighing and articulating things by their common-sense value. And George‘s attitude towards Isabel is an implicit critique of realist reading practices: ―He had married this girl because she was unlike other women; and now that she was his own property, he set himself conscientiously to work to smooth her into the most ordinary semblance of everyday

23 One of the tricks of the novel is that it will force us, at the conclusion, to see George from an idealist perspective. He dies “as heroic a death,” the narrator tells us, “as any she had ever read of in her novels: the death of a man who speculates his life for the benefit of his fellow-creatures, and loses by the venture” (DW 365). 155 womanhood, by means of the moral flat-iron called common-sense‖ (DW 116). He is contrasted to Isabel, a thorough-going idealist reader, who uses the content of her reading to transform her everyday world. Like an opium addict, for Isabel the everyday world is

―only the frame that holds together all manner of splendid and ever-changing pictures‖

(DW 118). As the narrative shifts, in the central fourth through eighth installments, to focus on Isabel‘s perspective, the novel links idealist reading practices to disruptive desire. Her fantasies threaten to tear a hole in the social fabric by unfitting Isabel for a normative social role. Isabel‘s problem is that she has no realistic standard by which to judge the material she finds in her books (―novels,‖ the Spectator noted, ―of the better kind‖ [1214]). When she meets Lansdell, she seems to find a kindred idealist reader who can ―wander with her in the Valhalla of her heroes‖ (DW 161). Her misidentification of

Roland Lansdell as ―a Sir Reginald Glanville, or Eugene Aram, or the Giaour, or

Napoleon the Great, or any other grand melancholy creature‖ blinds her to his prosaic reality as a self-centered idle county squire (DW 159), and makes her fail to understand how the townspeople could consider her his mistress. Yet, Braddon‘s narrator asserts, the content of her fantasies is ultimately pure:

A woman of the world would have very quickly perceived that Mr. Lansdell‘s discourse must have relation to more serious projects than future meetings under Lord Thurston‘s oak, with interchange of divers volumes of light literature. But Isabel Gilbert was not a woman of the world. She had read novels while other people perused the Sunday papers: and of the world out of a three-volume romance she had no more idea than a baby (DW 253).

156 Isabel‘s potentially problematic sexuality is controlled, not encouraged, by her idealist reading practices. And Lansdell‘s inability to understand the nature of her passion for him—a platonic, that is to say definitionally ideal, passion—provokes the crisis of the novel.

The final four installments of the novel alternate the perspectives of Isabel and

Lansdell as they navigate the fallout of Lansdell‘s disastrous proposition. These chapters work to provide a synthesis for the reading problems of central characters. But as the novel progresses towards its conclusion, it pushes our interest from Isabel to Lansdell— five of the final twelve chapters center on his perspective, and the long penultimate chapter ―Between Two Worlds‖ narrates his death. Isabel‘s idealist reading practices cease to be central to the novel because her rejection of Lansdell, and the ensuing deaths of Lansdell and her husband, provide her with the experience necessary to act as a correlative. Isabel‘s ―foolish youth‖ is transformed by age and perspective: ―There is a great gulf between a girl of nineteen and a woman of five-and-twenty‖ (DW 402). At first disruptive, Isabel‘s reading practices are ultimately subject to processes of the natural world.

If Isabel suffers from a surfeit of idealism which will be naturally corrected,

Lansdell must finally recognize the power of idealist reading. On his deathbed, the doctor is surprised to find Lansdell, who had been reported to be ―a Deist—even an

Atheist‖, ―dying with a smile on his face, murmuring alternate fragments of St. John‘s gospel and Tennyson‘s In Memoriam‖ (DW 389). Though Lansdell argues that this is

157 ―no earthly conversion achieved by books and sermons,‖ his final moments are routed through Tennyson‘s poetry (DW 387). As he confesses to Isabel, only now does he

―begin to understand what Tennyson means‖ (DW 392). So central is the reparative power of Tennyson‘s idealist text to the conclusion of the novel that Lansdell‘s parting words are all about the poet:

I used to read him only in a critic‘s cynical spirit, or rather in the narrow- minded spirit of that literary Janus, who is himself an author, and pretends to possess the disinterestedness necessary to criticize the writings of other people… [O]nly now, I begin to understand how much more than a poet he is. He has told me what I am: ―an infant crying in the night; an infant crying for the light; and with no language but a cry‖ (DW 392).

Lansdell moves from cynical reader to rapturous believer in the novel‘s final pages: ―He has written the gospel of his age, Isabel‖ (DW 392) What the novel has posed for its characters as a problem of realism—that is to say, the discrepancy between desire and reality—is solved by invoking the central idealist text of the Victorian period. By making In Memoriam literally a form of gospel, the novel confirms the value of idealist literature within lived experience: it can transform doubting Thomases into devout penitents.

The Doctor’s Wife turns out to be deeply invested in the kinds of reading that it at first asks its readers to look at with suspicion. It invokes and articulates ―literary realism‖ as the initial term in a dialectical process, but it offers a powerful idealist alternative to

Flaubert‘s realist text in its second half. Resisting the totalizing conservativism that

Temple Bar found in literary realism, The Doctor’s Wife ultimately offers its reader a vision of the liberating power of Victorian idealism. It was a seductive vision for at least 158 one reader. Dickens‘s daughter Kate Perugini reported that The Doctor’s Wife was her father‘s favorite of Braddon‘s novels. Cynical, flippant Eugene Wrayburn, in the novel

Dickens wrote following the publication of The Doctor’s Wife, seems to owe a lot to

Roland Lansdell. Both men find themselves involved with a lower-class woman who obsesses them; their sexual desire precipitates both into an ethical dilemma; and both men have a shadowy date with destiny in the form of a dispossessed figure from the margins of Victorian respectability. Our Mutual Friend(1864-5), however, is concerned with ideal women resurrecting men from the dead; in The Doctor’s Wife, one of those women gets a chance to do a little living, too.

In The English Novel (1970) Raymond Williams identified a “parting of the ways” (63) in the history of the English novel. Occurring in the quarter-century between

1890 and the First World War, Williams defines this split in the novelistic imagination as a division between the sociological and the psychological: “it is from that time on that… people tried to talk of „social‟ and „personal‟ as separate processes, separate realms” (73).

The geography of the novel, which once ratified and unified human life within social activity through comprehensive structures of feeling, becomes increasingly fragmented as the personal and the social are mapped differently, configured as alternate ways of knowing the world. Virginia Woolf in “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown” typified this divide as one between novelists who “laid an enormous stress upon the fabric of things” (18) and novelists who emphasized character. On one side lies the acute psychological

159 analysis of Henry James and the experimental narratives of Woolf and other modernists; on the other, the fictions of “that composite figure, H. G. A. J. Wells-Bennett-

Galsworthy, Esquire” (Williams 64). Williams‟s formulation displays his typical insight, not least in his attempt to recuperate the social fictions of those composite figures dismissed by Woolf, and has provided a fruitful interpretive model for literary scholars engaged in analysis of the fiction published just before the war years. However, as my discussion of Braddon‟s work argues, this process of fragmentation can be seen in the generation preceding the 1890s: her novels of 1864 strive, on the one hand to formulate a conservative critique of the social conditions of the 1860s through the modes of popular fiction, and on the other to narrate the formation of character through aesthetic mediation.

I have suggested that these divisions were rooted in the economic and political machinery of publishing: that a complex interrelationship between a paternalist government and an exploding marketplace created a circuit in which questions of aesthetics—especially questions of “realism”—are reframed as social questions. As this interrelationship produced a growing body of literary professionals, a sense of writing for an audience became much more acute than it had for an older generation of novelists. As marketing interpenetration in journals and newspapers became more and more sophisticated, interpretations of audience interest came to circumscribe what kinds of narratives could be published, a process N. N. Feltes sees as a cognate to the “parting of ways” in Modes of Production of Victorian Novels (89). In my next chapter, I will examine how Wilkie

Collins attempted to suture the concept of “character” to the emergent political discourse surrounding the novel in the 1860s in an attempt to stave off just this moment of division. 160 But the complexities of this division in Braddon‟s case are informed not just by political and social developments, but by Braddon‟s own sense of herself as a woman writer: her admission of (self) division—“I am always divided”—locates the nexus of this change at the personal level. Impossible to imagine Dickens the Inimitable or Thackeray, titans of an older generation, conceiving of their own careers as fractured, riven by conflicting desires of necessity and aesthetics, in such a direct statement. Braddon‟s position as a woman writer—an author who commanded high prices and immense visibility, yet frequently viewed as a subordinate agent in Maxwell‟s “stable” of authors—gave her a unique insight into the schizoid (in the Deleuzian sense) conditions of modern capital.

Braddon‟s internalized frustration was shared by other women writers of the decade, perhaps most poignantly by Braddon‟s old sparring partner Margaret Oliphant, who judged her astonishingly productive career a failure in her unpublished Memoirs. Yet, ironically, this internal self-division seems to have allowed Braddon , Oliphant, and their sisters to succeed as popular and even, on occasion, critical successes while better-placed male professional writers like G. A. Sala, Edmund Yates, William Russell, and James

Greenwood—all associated with Maxwell‟s publishing empire, and virtually all with

Dickens—failed to sustain careers as novelists. The next wave of successful male novelists would not be drawn from the ranks of literary professionals like Braddon, but from civil servants (Trollope), publishers‟ readers (George Meredith), working architects

(Hardy), or the independently wealthy (James). Not until the 1880s and the advent of

Rudyard Kipling would a male writer with a similar literary professional background to

161 Braddon break through to the extent that her work did. Though Braddon felt the divisions of the marketplace keenly, she also embodied them with success.

162 Chapter 4:Suspicious Characters: The Moonstone and Victorian Liberalism.

The Moonstone (1868) has long been recognized as Wilkie Collins‘s most ambitious and artistically successful novel. That it is an ambitious political novel is, I think, less generally apparent. To invoke the ―political novel,‖ especially within the context of the 1860s and 70s, is to summon to mind some of the towering achievements of Victorian fiction: the overt interest in political questions in Felix Holt, the Radical

(1866) and Middlemarch (1874), for instance, or the careful delineation of political experience found in Trollope‘s Palliser novels (1864-1879). The Moonstone, on the other hand, with its central narrative interest in the investigation into the disappearance of a young woman‘s diamond, seems to have no apparent narrative use for the kinds of thinking about Victorian realpolitik which are discussed in these novels. One could imagine, of course, a narrative for the novel in which these issues could be raised: had

Dickens written it, for instance, the theft of the gem may very well have been a guiding metaphor through which a society predicated on forms of institutionalized theft could be made apparent. Collins‘s novel, however, resists drawing these conclusions, even, as

Tamar Heller has argued, actively suppressing expressions of political discontent within the text.

The Moonstone tells the story of the title jewel‘s appearance in England, theft, and return to India. In an English country house, Rachel Verinder is presented with the

163 diamond, a legacy from her disreputable uncle, on her twenty-first birthday. A celebratory dinner party brings together many of the major figures in the novel. Beside

Rachel and her mother, there are in attendance her cousins Franklin Blake and Godfrey

Ablewhite, both would-be suitors, her pious evangelical relative Miss Clack, official figures like the lawyer Matthew Bruff, the adventurer Mr. Murthwaite, and the local doctor Candy, and the devoted household servants including steward Gabriel Betteredge.

The very next morning the Moonstone is discovered to be missing, and suspicion falls on various figures inside and outside the house, among them the Brahmin Indians masquerading as traveling jugglers in the area and the housemaid Rosanna Spearman.

The great detective Sergeant Cuff is brought in to investigate by the family, but is dismissed when the results of his investigation point to Rachel herself, and the investigation is taken over by other figures within the novel, especially Franklin Blake.

Blake‘s investigation of the chain of evidence, including a locked box buried by Rosanna in the Shivering Sands before her suicide, brings Blake to the impossible but inescapable conclusion that he has stolen the Moonstone. At this point the novel introduces the last of its detective figures, Ezra Jennings, the strange ―gipsy‖ assistant to Dr. Candy.

Jennings reveals that Blake was under the influence of opium secretly administered by

Candy when he committed the theft and arranges an experimental recreation of the night of the theft, where Blake reenacts his unconscious theft, but the experiment fails to reveal the location of the diamond. In the narrative‘s final chapters the action shifts to London.

There Blake and the returned Sergeant Cuff keep watch on the money-lender

SeptimusLuker, who they believe has possession the Moonstone for a client. In the end, 164 after a game of cat-and-mouse with various suspects, the thief is revealed to be

Ablewhite, who took the diamond from an unconscious Blake in order to hide his illegitimate financial dealings. The Moonstone, however, is not recovered—Ablewhite is murdered by the Brahmins who have also been in pursuit of the gem. An epilogue follows the Moonstone‘s journey homeward and its eventual return to its place in a shrine in India, ―look[ing] forth… over the walls of the sacred city in which its story first began‖ (542).

The plotting and formal qualities of the text itself seem to announce the novel as something distinct from its peers. Written by a series of homodiegetic, internally focalized narrators, The Moonstone continues the experiments in documentary narrative begun in Collins‘s reputation-making The Woman in White and continued, in muted form, throughout the decade of the 1860s. Though Collins‘s method drew from epistolary fiction and Dickens‘s experiment in Bleak House, it emphasized the individual experience of reality in modern ways. Like The Woman in White, the multiple narrators of The Moonstone present their testimony within each writer‘s ―own individual experience of persons and events‖ (305); unlike The Woman in White, however, The

Moonstone‘s narratives can be contradictory and consciously unreliable, creating a formal level of difficulty new to the novel. Not only does the manner of narration seem excitingly modern, but the plot of the novel seems to institute a break with tradition. In

T. S. Eliot‘s famous phrase, The Moonstone was ―the first and greatest of English detective novels‖ (310). Its teasing revelation of the mystery through three ―Periods‖

165 (plus a prologue and epilogue set in colonial India) created ―ravenous hunger,‖ in

Geraldine Jewsbury‘s words, among readers of the original serial text as it appeared in

Household Words from January through August (543).

How, then, can one read this novel as political, when it seems so silent about politics? One way is to interrogate those very silences, the moments emptied out. Both feminist and post-psychoanalytic criticism provide rich theoretical models for investigating those moments of disruption. At least since Albert Hutter‘s foundational

1975 reading of the text, ―Dreams, Transformations, and Literature: The Implications of

Detective Fiction,‖ a primary way of integrating those models has been to investigate the profound connection or cathexis made in the text of psychological speculation and femininity. In the best work which has grown out of this tradition, like Jenny Bourne

Taylor‘s In the Secret Theatre of the Home (1988) and Tamar Heller‘s Dead Secrets

(1992), the fairly crude Freudianism of early readings of the novel is replaced by sophisticated historical and theoretical analysis. Bourne Taylor examines the contradictory ways in which the novel applies Hamiltonian psychological models

―reinforcing and undercutting a moral management that has no coherent focus,‖ (177) arguing that the novel continually deconstructs the binary oppositions—self / other, for example, or domestic / colonial—that it ostensibly tries to generate. Heller interrogates the novel‘s ―ideological doubleness,‖ wherein the novel encrypts alternate voices within a masculine narrative through the use of ―feminine and Gothic spaces,‖ (155) which read as an ―analogy between sexual and imperial domination‖ (145). Similarly, the novel‘s

166 interest in the experience of Empire has generated important and impressive work.

Recent post-colonial criticism of the novel has drawn attention to the imperialist fractures which ―invade‖ (Moonstone 88) the narrative, drawing the rich ambiguities of the Indian material to the surface. Ashish Roy argues that The Moonstone investigates ―the structural cohesion the imperial imagination aimed at but could never quite achieve‖

(657); while Ian Duncan suggests that the novel‘s image of India creates a ―powerful alien origin that constitutes the limit or end of English national identity‖ (319).

This chapter, however, departs (not without due hesitation) from these theoretical models to argue that a necessary context for The Moonstone‘s reception is the passing of the second Reform Act of 1867, an event which occurred alongside the serial publication of the novel. The causes and repercussions of the 1867 Reform Act continue to be debated in historical literature, yet its significance is widely understood. Briefly, the Act gave the vote to all male householders in urban areas and lowered the ratepayer‘s threshold for enfranchisement to 10 pounds, as well as redefining the property thresholds for rural landowners. The Act‘s immediate effect was to double the size of the electorate to roughly two million voters, but it also indicated to both conservative and progressives alike that universal male enfranchisement was in the air (Himmelfarb 97). The Reform

Act also sutured together two separate discourses which structure The Moonstone‘s narrative and narratological concerns.

First, reform was widely seen as a triumph of liberal political theory. Though the actual act itself was engineered, in a moment of historical irony, by Disraeli‘s

167 Conservative government, classical Burkean conservativism was seen as actively opposed to reform. The reformer John Morley denounced the opposition as showing a

―Tory instinct… against theories of liberty, equality, and fraternity‖ (118). Those theories, however remarkably diverse, as Robert Pearson and Geraint Williams remark, were nonetheless typified by the confluence of Richard Cobden‘s Manchester School of economics, which set Adam Smith and laissez-faire capitalism before all, with the utilitarian liberalism theorized by Bentham and his disciples that had been shaped into an elegant and yet powerful political force by John Stuart Mill, the era‘s greatest liberal thinker. This confluence of economic and philosophical thought—what Mary Poovey, in her study Making a Social Body(1995), calls a ―regime‖ of thought—remains an important force in thinking about Victorian liberalism. Though much post-Marxist historical work, like that of John Burrow in Whigs and Liberals (1988), argues that the economic and political registers of Victorian liberalism are not necessarily linked, I follow critics like Poovey and Catherine Gallagher in suggesting that, at the very least,

Victorians believed they were.24 It is within the context of utilitarian liberalism‘s focus on creating the autonomous individual that I argue The Moonstone makes an important intervention into the political history of the novel. This is not merely a matter of slotting the work into its historical moment, though this kind of reading might produce interesting results by investigating the silences and suppressions within the novel. For example, such a reading might see the quietism of the servants in the novel—much less outspoken

24 Much interesting work on the relationship between economy and genre has focused on the Victorian period; some representative examples include Mary Poovey‘sMaking a Social Body and Genres of the Credit Economy (2008); Catherine Gallagher‘s The Body Economic (2005); and Regina Gagnier‘sThe Insatiability of Human Wants (2000). 168 about class relations than other Collins creations like title character of the short story

―The Diary of Anne Rodway‖ (1856)—as a reassuring fantasy papering over a deeper anxiety about the new social relationships being produced by reform, which made it harder to see the relations between ―master and man.‖ However, I propose to largely eschew such local readings in order to explore the deeper contiguities between the project of liberalism and the project of the novel. I argue that The Moonstone is made possible within a liberal, utilitarian heuristic which values individuality and seeks to promote that individualism through the dissemination of its own structure. In other words, utilitarian liberal thought emphasizes the production of the autonomous individual as a discriminating agent within political, moral, and economic regimes of thought. The

Moonstone is a key moment within this project of dissemination because it displaces this process to an aesthetic realm, making central to the solution of the novel liberal modes of thought like psychological associationism and inductive reasoning.

At the same time, however, there is a second strand of liberal thinking evident in

The Moonstone which reform sutures to the rationalist theoretical concerns of liberal thought. As the moment of reform approached, liberal political praxis, as opposed to liberal theory, began to focus on producing a subject who could discriminate among competing value choices. This interest was most clearly expressed in the series of

Education Acts passed between 1870 and 1893, which established compulsory mass education in England and Wales, but the urge can be seen operating in other registers as well. This operation was often figured not as political but as aesthetic—especially, as I

169 shall discuss in the second part of this chapter, in Wilkie Collins‘s journalistic writings.

The act of reading itself became one of the central areas in which this articulation or production of the subject came to be paramount in what has been termed the ―Disease of

Reading‖ debate. In the second half of this chapter I locate the origins of this debate in the 1860s and read The Moonstone‘s interventions into this debate as evidence of the text‘s interest in a liberal practice.

These two operations are linked by their interest in the working-class figure, who required pedagogical training in order to take his place in the political order. As I have argued in the previous chapter on Braddon, the narrative logic of sensationalism proved ideal for a class-conscious exploration of political and economic ideas. The Moonstone, bookended by its narrator drawn from the servant class, continues that tradition by investigating the disruption of the status quo while dramatizing its reintegration. But while Braddon‘s texts located their inquiry within the subjectivity of women, Collins‘s text is interested in making men good political subjects by entwining good reading practices with self-identity. Substituting circular narratives for the transformational ones of Braddon, Collins implicates his readers in a stabilized, ongoing political process.

―We have,‖ the adventurer Murthwaite tells Matthew Bruff midway through the novel, ―nothing whatever to do with clairvoyance; or with mesmerism, or with anything that is hard of belief to a practical man, in the inquiry that we are now pursuing. My object of following the Indian plot, step by step, is to trace results back, by rational means, to natural causes‖ (Moonstone 351). Murthwaite, with his extensive knowledge

170 of the quasi-mystical India of the text, has perhaps the most reason to be skeptical of

―rational means‖ in elucidating the novel‘s hidden mysteries, yet his faith remains anchored to the processes of modern rationality. I take his words as both an epigraph and a procedure for this chapter: the type of reading performed here necessarily finds its interest not in the revealing gaps or stress fractures running through the novel, but rather in the novel‘s very visible—perhaps all-too-visible—surface structures; it stresses the ways in which the novel attempts to find contiguities between part and whole, rather than the various modes which attempt to productively deconstruct these relationships. In other words, I reverse the tendencies of modern criticism, ones which focus on the traces within The Moonstone of suppressed alterities, and instead focus on the ―things seen‖ within the text, the legible and inscribed: how the novel attempts to do what it sets out to do.

One of the tangible aspects of The Moonstone which has received only passing interest from critics is the text‘s interest in character. ―In some of my former novels,‖

Collins wrote in the ―Preface to the First Edition,‖ ―the object proposed has been to trace the influence of circumstances upon character. In the present story I have reversed the process‖ (47). In general, present-day critics seem, like Patrick Brantlinger, to find this assertion ―hardly persuasive‖ and to insist that ―the sensational derives much more from plot than character‖ (―Sensationalism‖ 12-13). Victorian critics, on the other hand, saw the issue of character as central to debates about fiction and, in particular, sensationalism. As

Alex Woloch has demonstrated in The One vs the Many (2003), character has a political

171 dimension, and though my analysis proceeds along very different methodological lines than

Woloch‘s, his recognition that the ―character-space‖ of the novel is intimately entwined with the ideological work of economics is crucial in understanding how Victorian analyses knit cultural and social systems together (Woloch 160-66). Indeed, for Victorians

―character‖ was not simply a property of aesthetic criticism but was central to political analysis as well. The study of character, as the psychologist and critic Alexander Bain wrote in 1861, ―concerns our welfare no less than astronomy, geology, or mechanics‖ (vi), for it is ―a primary condition of much of the social improvement our age has been panting for‖ (v). It is within the context of this paramount interest in engineering ―social improvement‖ that I would like to set The Moonstone.

WRITING CHARACTER: CHARACTER AT WORK IN COLLINS AND MILL

―Sensationalism‖ emerged as a discursive concept in response to Collins. His novels seemed to provide, even encourage, direct and unmediated access to the reader‘s nervous system, delivering sharp shocks—sensations—in ways that the bourgeois novel‘s emphasis on mediated realistic representation had typically discouraged. Collins‘s fragmented narrative method owed a debt to epistolary and gothic traditions but privileged narrative immediacy as a response to modernity: local over global knowledge, emotional response over rational reflection. Sensationalism seemed to represent a threat to the realist novel, which, by contrast, was seen to encourage a healthy critical and intellectual relationship between reader and text. As Patrick Brantlinger noted,

172 sensationalism ―marks a crisis in the history of literary realism‖ because it challenged the

―naïve empiricism or observation‖ that formed the epistemology of the realist novel (RL

161). Sensationalism seemed to upset the subject / object division that was paramount to traditional accounts of reading by overturning borders that had previously been policed: the boundary between reader and text, for example, seemed to be vanishing as sensationalism encouraged a dangerous absorption. As Alison Winter suggests, the mass response to The Woman in White was physiological and in that sense virtually pre- affective, ―prior to and perhaps in many cases more powerful than self-conscious thought‖ (324), and one which posited not a single, individual reader but a ―community of sensation‖ (Winter 326). As Margaret Oliphant noticed, in sensation fiction the ―silent woman lays her hand upon our shoulder as well as upon that of Mr. Walter Hartright,‖

(118). The plural pronoun ―our‖ marks a deliberate recognition of the peculiar communal experienced engendered in Collins‘s novels. This new model linked physical response, not the classical mechanisms of narrative, to the excitement of the text: ―these… startling points of this story do not take their power from character, or from passion, or any intellectual or emotional influence. The effect is pure sensation‖ (Oliphant 119).

Beneath Oliphant‘s praise for the mechanics of the narrative lies a muted ambivalence about what such a story, devoid of cognitive or affective interest, might mean. Could one lose hold of one‘s self among the flood of sensations?

Discussions of character assumed a paramount interest in the critical reaction to

Collins in part because just this issue of character was one of the ways through which

173 Victorian critics marked out the difference between sensationalism and realism.

Character occurs as a central category in Victorian analyses of novels, functioning as an eruption of the private into the public, a negotiator between the two zones whose values are being transformed by shifts in everyday life, providing an important code for maintaining individual identity in a collective public. As Mary Poovey argues in Making a Social Body, interpersonal relationships in the Victorian public sphere of the 1850s and

1860s were becoming more profoundly marked by an economic discourse that suppressed individual identity for putatively equal economic agents. As economic markers seemed to shift identity from a public to a private quality, ―character‖ came to function as an indexical marker which provided access to the ―real‖ person. How to discriminate and cultivate the qualities of a individual in a universe of increasingly equalized agents took shape in its most persistent and pressing form in the political arena, where the looming pressures of franchise reform prompted the spectacular agonizing of

Carlyle‘s ―Shooting Niagara, and After?‖ (1867), and, in a different register, the outcry of

Mill‘s On the Subjection of Women (1869).

But these questions were at work with equal strength in the novel, both in the deep aesthetic structures and the surface debates of the critics. By the 1850s critics of all stripes began to see the novel as occupying a key place in the cultural production of subjectivity, though the relationship was looser than a pedagogical one. The brilliant critic E. S. Dallas captured this dual sense of the novel in his 1859 article ―Popular

Literature—The Periodical Press,‖ arguing that literature was

174 a perfect index of the innumerable processes at work throughout the whole frame of society, all tending, by slow revolutions and oscillations, to complete the destined cycle of events… Literature, on the other hand, is not only the expression of public opinion and the index of contemporary history, it is itself a great force that reacts on the life which it represents, half creating what it professes only to reflect…. It creates in the mere act of expressing public opinion; it leads while it follows; like the Parthian bowmen, it shoots its most effective arrows as it flies. (97)

The transcendental function assigned by Wordsworth and the Romantics to nature is here reconfigured as a function of literature and specifically the popular novel, ―half creating‖ what it at first merely seems to be representing. Dallas‘s account of the social role of novels strikingly mirrors some twentieth-century versions of public sphere theory:

―Literature thus seizes on the whole of our public life, and so much of our private life as through social irregularity and force of character necessarily emerges into publicity‖

(Dallas ―PL‖ 97). Mediating between the tendency of public life to blur individuality and the private zone, popular fiction intervened in how individuality came to be defined in a public context. Victorian complaints about the problems of character in Collins‘s novels show a serious anxiety at work: if novels played such an important role in shaping social forms, what would happen to those forms when character was deemphasized?

Novels literalized the discourse of the public sphere, providing the grounds on which public political discussion was both predicated and enacted. Sensation novels, which at the same time invoked an individual reader‘s response while abstracting her out to an unprecedented generalization, seemed to perform a function that was consonant with conservative political fears, which saw liberalism as enacting just such an emptying out of specificity within society at large. For Carlyle, who saw ―velocity increasing‖

175 daily, the end point of Reform was ―the Bottomless,‖ a pit where ―complete ‗liberty‘‖ would be determined by statistical abstraction: ―Count of Heads to be the Divine Court of

Appeal on every question and interest of mankind; Count of Heads to choose a

Parliament according to its own heart at last, and sit with the Penny Newspapers zealously watching the same said Parliament‖ (674). Carlyle‘s formulation neatly ties together the ways in which the Victorian consciousness imbricated questions of popular discourse—the regime of the penny newspaper—with the nightmare figure of the individual reduced to a mere form, the bodiless ―Count of Heads.‖ If Carlyle‘s response is, as Loesberg notes, typical of his late thought in its ―shrillness‖ (121), the sentiment expresses in exaggerated form the fears embodied in the shift toward the ―Economic

Man‖ that was the bogey of both the right and the socialists. Both Ruskin and Marx would claim Mill‘s scientific revision of economy and culture emptied out the specific content and qualities of human life for an abstracted individual.25

At the same time the science behind sensation suggested that physical responses created by the sensation novel could generate real psychological changes. Associationist psychology and the physiological aesthetics that descended from it made ―sensation‖ crucial to the formation of the self. Identity and character were impressed by initial

25 On the relationship between the thought of Marx and Mill, see B. A. Belassa, ―Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill,‖ WeltwirtschaftlichesArchiv 83 (1959), 147-165, Brantly Womack, ―John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and Modern Citizenship,‖ Journal of Cambridge Studies, Winter 2012, 1-17, and Paul Smart, Mill and Marx: Individual Liberty and the Roads to Freedom, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991. Ruskin responded directly to Mill and Ricardo in the essays collected as Unto This Last: Four Essays on the First Principles of Economy (1860). For an excellent reading of Ruskin‘s involvement with Victorian liberalism, see Judith Stoddart, Ruskin’s Culture Wars: ForsClavigera and the Crisis of Victorian Liberalism, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998. 176 external stimuli—sensations—which were transformed upon receipt by the brain into the basic building blocks of cognition. James Mill‘s revision of Hartleyanassociationism— which was more or less accepted by philosophical figures as diverse as John Stuart Mill,

Alexander Bain, and Herbert Spencer, and by biologists and physiologists like G. H.

Lewes and E. S. Dallas—stressed that mental processes are enchained to physical responses. As Janice Carlisle notes, physical stimuli traveled through the body in a fixed pattern, ―beginning in sensation, proceeding to ideas, then to trains of ideas, through complex variations on consciousness such as affections, motives, and dispositions, to end in the will and intention, the projection of will into the future‖ (24). Associationism avoids the Manichean body / mind divide of idealist philosophy (Carlisle 24), substituting a subject whose physical body conditions the brain, even as mental processes like willing and feeling alter the attitudes and attributes of the body. The associationist subject is, quite literally, the ―man of feelings,‖ one whose external sensations impresses and defines his character. If associationism thus claimed to solve one of the central schisms in philosophical thinking, the new unity imposed on subjects nevertheless created a different order of problems for the Victorian culture-critic by placing the subject in the center of a web of affective cultural relationships. What happened when the impress of those sensations were diffused among a mass audience, affecting not individuals but—as

Oliphant insists—groups of readers?

One pervasive form in which this anxiety expressed itself was through rhetorical figures of mechanization and industrialization, which appear again and again in the

177 critical responses to Collins‘s texts. Collins‘s characters were accused, with frequency, of being ―all alike—like each other and like nothing else‖ (Nation 174). These non- individuated units are specters of the sensation reader, who seemed to be in the process of becoming interchangeable. As Rachel Teukolsky argues in ―White Girls: Avant-Gardism and Advertising after 1860,‖ sensation could be defined as an issue of ―category containment‖, a kind of social ―confusion surrounding objects and persons competing in the cultural market‖ (432). The threat of industrial interchangeability suggests the way in which identities, expressed through character formation, seemed to be slipping into mere objects. Rational thought‘s ability to discriminate, to mark out differences between objects—and the word ―objectify‖ enters public usage at this moment in time—seems to be bound up in a process which, like industrialism, turns the identity into a sequence of objects, commodities to be evaluated. Collins‘s seeming failure to create characters who were more than articulated mannequins defined, in the eyes of sensationalism‘s critics, the mechanical nature of the product.

Critiques of Collins‘s ability to create characters drew several evolving public responses from the author, often in the remarkable prefaces to his novels. For example, in the ―Preface‖ to the 1861 ―New Edition‖ of The Woman in White, he spends almost half the allotted space defending himself on this charge, arguing that ―the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story‖ (4). Moreover, the author‘s attention to plotting implies creation of character:

178 It may be possible, in novel-writing, to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters: their existence, as recognizable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can effectively be told. (WW 4)

Subverting his critics by suggesting that The Woman in White was a triumph of characterization rather than plotting, Collins here announces a model of the novel that looks forward in theoretical perspective to the Jamesian dictum that plot is character in action. Collins stresses the everyday nature of his characters, who as ―recognizable realities‖ offered a mirror for the subjectivity of the reader: ―The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers, is a narrative which interests them about men and women—for the perfectly obvious reason that they are men and women themselves‖ (WW 4). However, The Moonstone would be a much more aggressive attempt to assert both his skill in depicting character and the inherent realism of his text. The first words of the ―Preface‖ to the first edition of The Moonstone are blunt in their assertion that ―the attempt made [in the novel] is to trace the influence of character on circumstances‖ (47). Though it was common practice throughout his career for Collins to insist on the verifiability of the events in his novels, the preface to The

Moonstone, as many commentators have noted, is particularly audacious in its truth- claims. Collins ―decline[s] to avail myself of the novelist‘s privilege of supposing something which might have happened, and have so shaped the story as to make it grow out of what actually would have happened—which, I beg to inform my readers, is also what actually does happen‖ (Moonstone 47-8). The confusion of grammatical moods— what ―might have happened‖ creates what ―would have happened‖ to end in a triumphant

179 ―what actually does happen‖—attempts to shift the ground beneath the reader from mere plausibility to solid fact. Not a possibility, in other words, but an actuality: properly understood, character provides the key to defining social relationships.

As Nathan K. Hensley notes, contemporary convention cited in the OED points us to the paradoxical split in the meaning of ―character:‖ it meant ―both ‗a person regarded in the abstract‘ and ‗the aggregate of the distinctive features of any thing: essential peculiarity‘‖ (Hensley 610). Henry James elaborated just such a paradox in his discussion of fictional character when he noted in his essay ―Turgenieff‖ (1896) that the strength of the characters in Turgenev and Flaubert lies in their ―being at once an individual, of the most concrete sort, and a type… they are so strangely, fascinatingly particular, and yet they are so recognizably general,‖ just the kind of depiction James finds noticeably absent in the works of Dickens and the populist tradition of the English novel (AN 202). Like the Moonstone itself, character is both defining and unstable, individuated and generalized. As Franklin Blake points out, ―The flawed Diamond, cut up, would actually fetch more than the Diamond as it now is; for this plain reason—that from four to six perfect brilliants might be cut from it, which would be, collectively, worth more money than the large—but imperfect single stone‖ (Moonstone 93-4). The jewel indexes a financial economy which shifts value away from inherent qualities towards the flattening horizon of exchange, as both Ruskin and Marx understood the dominant political economy of Mill and Ricardo to affect individual qualities. Blake explains that to realize the diamond‘s value as a commodity means negating the qualities

180 which make it unique: ―the Diamond will be the Diamond no longer; its identity will be destroyed‖ (Moonstone 94). Erasure of identity, a lapse into quiddity, is possible—even desirable—in the extreme horizons of the novel; an erasure which is signaled in the novel by its reductive equivalence of ―Persons and Things‖ (Moonstone74), a far end of the subjective / objective split Blake explores in the text. This is consonant with a further transformation of ―character‖ current in the 1860s unnoticed by Hensley, a slippage in the usage of the word allowing it to be applied to commercial goods, underlining the pressure

Victorians placed on the concept: at once abstract and particular, applicable to persons and goods, character became a way of navigating the possible shapes of identity in the modern age.

As James‘s essay suggests, representing this tension between particularity and generality seems to enter the English novel through the relatively rarified world of

Continental fiction, rather than through the robust native populist tradition. Yet ideas of character were already the subject of serious scrutiny in the English philosophical tradition. Some attention will be given to reconstructing the most controversial and central discussions of character, that of John Stuart Mill and liberal wing of Victorian philosophy. In the sixth (and final) Book of A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and

Inductive, Mill concludes his discussion of ethics and politics with a look at character. A

System of Logic had first been published in 1843, but the work only achieved its final form in the 1870s, thus bookending the high Victorian moment. The Logic was not only a seminal document in the history of liberalism—Leslie Stephens described it as ―a

181 sacred book for students who claimed to be genuine liberals‖ (qtd in Hensley 609)—but also a major intervention into scientific and philosophical thinking. In it Mill espoused the primacy inductive reasoning, based solely on experience, against the a priori or intuitionist claims which dominated traditional English philosophical thinking, especially in the figure of William Whewell. The Logic was immediately both influential and controversial, nowhere more so than in the sixth Book, where Mill argued that both individual and social structures are governed by laws as deducible and regular as those of nature. Mill places ―ethology,‖ his nascent ―science of character,‖ midway between psychology and sociology, recognizing character as a construct which mediates between the potentially disruptive recesses of the self and the overly generalized social public.

Mill‘s account of ethology is notoriously complex, riddled with internal complications and serious qualifications, because it attempts to locate a fulcrum which balances individual autonomy within what Mill described elsewhere, in On Liberty (1859), as society‘s ―tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression… compel[ling] all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own [character]‖

(Logic 9). Character is the necessary balance between the inward, antisocial self and the flattening tyranny of the public world. As Mill developed his thinking, character came to be the typical form of self-presentation, fully developed ―habits of willing‖ which form the zone of liberty between the iron laws of mental processes and the overbearing demands of social structures.

182 Mill‘s account of the scientific procedures by which the foundational principles of the ―moral sciences,‖ composing psychology, ethology, and sociology, can be discovered has been much critiqued by later commentators, and it is beyond the scope of this chapter to investigate its accuracy as a philosophical system. For our purposes what is more important than the mechanics of the moral sciences is the overall shape of the liberal construction of character. Mill begins by arguing that the moral sciences are closed, rational systems. In direct contravention to the Hamiltonian philosophy driving investigations into the unconsciousness which stressed the mind‘s irrationality (producing works which prefigured Freud, like E. S. Dallas‘s The Gay Science [1866] and Frederick

Myers‘s ―Multiplex Personality‖ [1886]), liberal thought stressed the contiguities between the physical and social sciences. ―Social science,‖ Mill argues, ―is a deductive science; not, indeed, after the model of geometry, but after that of the more complex physical sciences,‖ praising astronomy as the ideal cognate (Logic2.895). Just as fundamental physical laws like gravity and elliptical motion could be deduced from careful observation of the astronomical phenomena, Mill argues that detailed observation of social and psychological phenomena allows the viewer to extrapolate laws governing the systems. Because these systems are not only closed but subject to these deducible, universal laws, events or actions which seem aberrant or irrational may, in fact, be predicted and even influenced once the structuring principles are understood. Ethology, which emerges as the necessary mediation between mind and social form, is made possible because in Mill‘s account, as in The Moonstone, the mind is fundamentally knowable. As Ezra Jennings remarks apropos of his experiment in reconstructing Dr. 183 Candy‘s mental processes, ―It is all confusion to begin with; but it may be brought into order and shape, if you can only find the right way‖ (Moonstone442). In the same sense

Mill believes that ―order and shape‖ can be brought to the human experience through investigation of the way axiomatic psychological principles produce discrete responses to external stimuli, providing a necessitarian account of human nature. Mill argues that,

―given the motives which are present to an individual‘s mind, and given likewise the character and disposition of the individual, the manner in which he will act might be unerringly inferred… with as much certainty as we can predict any physical event‖

(Logic 2.836-37). Character is internally consistent and predictable, provided the analyst can uncover or recover all the data, and the development of an ethological science would benefit society because it would allow for the manipulation of a national character.

The Moonstone is unique among the novels of Collins in its emphatic embrace of a rationalist, probabilistic universe. Collins‘s works display an obsession with questions that probed the divide between fate and necessity, and whether chance or divine law governed human experience. As his biographer Catherine Peters notes, his works are littered with recurring themes, like the double or the prophetic dream, at odds with the prevailing plausibility of many of his stories (Peters 1-2). Ann Cvetkovich has demonstrated the ways in which the surface veneer of legalistic rationalism in The

Woman in White conceals a ghostly economy of ―chance occurrences, uncanny repetitions, and fated events‖ (―Ghostlier Determinations‖ 25), an affective process which she sees as mystifying the fantasy of class relationships inherent in the novel. And The

184 Moonstone‘s immediate precursor, Armadale, rings baroque variations on symbolic dreams and fragmented identities in ways that challenge normative experiential models of modernity. The Moonstone, however, carefully excludes the irrational from its central narrative. The mechanics of detection, Winifred Hughes argues, allows Collins to focus on ―plausible human agencies… while avoiding any approach to moral or mystical evaluations‖ (162). Though there are moments of the uncanny—the vision in the spot of ink, Rachel‘s fear that the Moonstone ―might take to shining of itself‖ in the dark

(Moonstone134)—the novel‘s drive is not to displace them from the order of the symbolic to the Real, as in The Woman in White, but to elucidate them as particular aspects of character.26 As D. A. Miller notes, a providential or divine will, thematically recurrent in much of Collins‘s work, is muted or absent here in ―the established logic of a thoroughly ordinary world‖ (Miller 160). The major detective figures within the novel,

Cuff, Blake, and Jennings, insist on such ―established logic‖ in the procedural investigative methods they use to bring order and value to the experiences narrated within the text, often described as ―system.‖ These values figure in the text as beneficial constraints to rampant speculation, values that find their cognate in the frequent images of drawn from the daily routine found in the narration. Betteredge makes this connection explicit when he admires the harnessing of the pony that leads Blake out of the narrative for a time. There ―the infernal network of mysteries and uncertainties that now surrounded us‖ are compared with intricate network of ―buckles and straps‖ which

26 Instead, as some post-colonial readings of the novel suggest, the uncanny is pushed to the Indian frame narrative, where the cyclical and irrational values inherent to the gem can be contrasted with the rigorously probabilistic English events (see Ian Duncan). Even here, however, the narrative stresses probabilistic reasoning when dealing with the diamond‘s provenance. 185 provide solidity, for ―you had seen something there was no doubt about‖ (Moonstone

151). And although Betteredge claims an ironic ―superiority to reason‖ (Moonstone 229), he, too, insists on the rationality of the events of the novel, providing a credible account of the ―hocus-pocus‖ (Moonstone 72) of the Indian jugglers (both Blake and Murthwaite concur in viewing the episode as performative and rational). In this way the body of the novel insists on identifying coherent structures undergirding events that, on the face of it, challenge probability.

Mill conceded that a non-theoretical application of ethology was difficult, if not impossible. The available methodologies through which the principles of ethology could be limned were ill-suited to the complexities of life outside the experimental laboratory.

Controlled scientific experimentation—raising children within contained environment— was not only wildly unethical but, as Mill‘s own childhood at the hands of a similar scientific rationale suggested, failed to produce ―ordinary‖ political subjects. Such limitations, however, do not apply to fictional representation, and in the extended experiment Jennings performs on Franklin Blake—itself a larger form of the ―child‘s

‗puzzle‘‖ presented to Jennings in the feverish babble of Dr. Candy (Moonstone 442)—

Collins investigates the psychological structuring of character in ways which mirror back

Mill‘s image of the mind in action. Though Jennings bills his ―bold experiment‖

(Moonstone 457) as a test of physiological theory, his emphasis on recreating not simply

Blake‘s ―nervous condition‖ but also the ―domestic circumstances‖ of the night

(Moonstone 548) outstrips the reflex associationism of Carpenter and Elliotson (the

186 authorities quoted in the text). The classical physiological theory which Collins uses to verify his narrative stressed only that the nervous or physiological conditions under which the event occurred need be recreated, yet Jennings invests enormous energy into supplying and imitating the affective and physical textures of the episode.

That the experiment is conducted on Blake is especially significant to the novel, because Blake‘s character has been read as prone to slippage throughout the text. His

English core is overlaid with ―varnish from foreign parts‖ (Moonstone 80) that makes his character given to ―puzzling shifts‖:

At the age when we are all of us most apt to take our colouring, in the form of a reflection from the colouring of other people, he had been sent abroad, and had been passed on from one nation to another, before there was any time for any one colouring more than another to settle itself on him firmly. As a consequence of this, he had come back with so many sides to his character… that he seemed to pass his life in a state of perpetual contradiction with himself (Moonstone 98).

Like Rachel‘s painted boudoir, with which Blake‘s ―colouring‖ and ―varnish‖ are associated, Blake‘s multiplicity is ―entangled‖ and ―topsy-turvy‖ (Moonstone 116), a colorful camouflage which masks Blake‘s deepest self from the eyes of those around him.

The Spectator dismissed Blake as showing ―no qualities at all‖ (Page 172) but a more accurate assessment might suggest that Blake, instead, suffers from too many qualities, an associationist run amok. Betteredge‘s account stresses the imprint of nationality on

Blake‘s personality, with ―his French side, his German side, and his Italian side‖

(Moonstone 98) contributing mental and emotional patterns of behavior: ―Miss Rachel used to remark that the Italian side of him was uppermost… when he unexpectedly gave

187 in, and asked you in his nice sweet-tempered way to take his own responsibilities on your shoulders‖ (Moonstone 99). One of the prime areas Mill identified as a target for ethological study was the influence of nationality on character, where difference seemed to be articulated in its most aggressive form, and Blake‘s lightning-like changes of character, which leave him by turns manic, enervated, quizzical, and depressed, seem to reduce him to a palimpsest of possible identities; his psyche an internal equivalent to Ezra

Jenning‘s patchwork face and piebald hair. Yet far from insisting on his multiplicity, the experiment demonstrates consistency of response. The results which emerge mirror the kinds of associationist psychology central to utilitarian liberal thought.

Mill‘s account of the moral sciences in the Logic runs aground on the rocky nature of what it sets out to investigate, character. Just after Mill triumphantly announces that ―[a] science is thus formed, to which I would propose to give the name of Ethology, or the Science of Character,‖ he is forced to concede that ―[it] would indeed be vain to expect (however completely the laws of the formation of character might be ascertained) that we could know so accurately the circumstances of any given case as to be able positively to predict the character that would be produced in that case‖ (Logic2.869). A science, then, but a science predicated on profound limits. The circular rhetoric of these claims, each undercutting the other, helps reveal a problem central to liberal political discourse: how to navigate the divide between individual experience and group or social forms—exactly the type of dyadic operation lurking in Victorian usage of the word

―character.‖ In the earlier stages of the Logic Mill moved from the individual to the

188 general through inductive reasoning, but a byproduct of its application to social systems was that, as Ruskin saw with special clarity in Unto This Last, it detached human desires from the full range of human experience. It created a ―type,‖ an agent absolute in its needs and interests, as a catch-all which stood in for the real person.

The Moonstone explores a similarly paradoxical process: how can objective knowledge—the ―truth‖ about the Moonstone‘s theft and recovery—be assembled from the various subjective experiences on display? By what process can an episteme be constructed out of inevitably fragmentary, varied, and contradictory accounts? And how can individual experience be balanced with collective needs? In this sense Miss Clack‘s narrative is crucial to the novel insofar as it provides the voice most inflected by difference: Clack interrupts the smooth progression of male, more or less grammatically unmarked narrators. Not only is she the novel‘s sole woman writer, but her Evangelical beliefs and distaste for Rachel and Betteredge set her off in both affective and social ways from the remainder of the text. She is also the most willing to demonstrate the ways in which the project of the text is imbricated within a capitalist one. ―Condemned to narrate‖ by pecuniary need (Moonstone 263), Miss Clack‘s vocal adherence to evangelism offers an alternate reading of the novel‘s events by focusing on their inscrutability: ―‗The human heart is unsearchable,‘ I said gently. ‗Who is to fathom it?‘‖

(Moonstone 286) Clack‘s narrative challenges the remainder of the text with a powerful alternative epistemological model which stresses reliance on received power structures, like Biblical or religious authority, in place of the scientific or rationalist will to

189 knowledge which the project of the text as a whole suggests. Narratives of liberalism themselves often stress its origin as an alternative to dominant but crumbling religious culture. The text‘s ability to enfold such an alternative viewpoint is, in itself, a verification of the pluralism inherent in utilitarian liberalism.

Just as Mill‘s liberal science sought to use inductive processes to move from concrete particulars to abstracted generalizations, the novel emphasizes a similarly vexed move from limited, individual points of view, which contain irrelevancies, prejudices, and omissions, to a transcendental narrative. In the opening chapter of the First Period of the story, Franklin Blake not only outlines the rules by which the narratives are governed, but makes the persons of the story linguistically coterminous with the events in it: ―We have certain events to relate… and we have certain persons concerned in those events who are capable of relating them. Starting from these plain facts, the idea is that we should all write the story of the Moonstone in turn—as far as our own personal experience extends, and no farther‖ (60). A decade earlier, The Woman in White had used a similar narrative device to structure its chain of events, but whereas the earlier novel had presented itself as a legal document whose concern was ―to present the truth always in its most direct and intelligible aspect‖ (WW 5), to build a chain of evidence as a supplement to a disenfranchising legal process, The Moonstone is less concerned with veridical truth than (like a Victorian Rashomon) with the process of reconstructing events from the tangles of personal perception. The novel‘s invocation of the legal process at the conclusion of the First Period stresses equivalence of ―the interests of truth‖ with ―the

190 limits of… experience,‖ picturing the reader ―like a Judge on a bench‖ (Moonstone 254), empowered to create from multiple, occasionally cross-intentioned testimonies, a coherent narrative.

Perhaps I may make this point clearer by providing a counter-example. In

Dombey and Son, the first of Dickens‘s novels written to address a specific social project, the narrator wishes for a ―good spirit‖ who could provide the agency to make transparent to readers the often obscured social relationships hidden by their own ―contracted sympathies and estimates‖:

Oh for a good spirit who would take the house-tops off, with a more potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes, to swell the retinue of the Destroying Angel as he moves forth among them! For only one night's view of the pale phantoms rising from the scenes of our too long neglect; and from the thick and sullen air where Vice and Fever propagate together, raining the tremendous social retributions which are ever pouring down, and ever coming thicker! Bright and blest the morning that should rise on such a night: for men, delayed to no more by stumbling-blocks of their own making, which are but specks of dust upon the path between them and eternity, would then apply themselves, like creatures of one common origin, owing one duty to the Father of one family, and tending to one common end, to make the world a better place! (702)

This image of this ―good spirit‖ serves as a kind of locus classicus for one kind of liberal narrative project, where the possibility of a transfer of narrative omniscience from author to reader would seem to necessarily generate an ameliorative and progressive ―bright and blessed day‖ (Dombey702). While Dickens repeatedly aligned the novel‘s generic purpose with just this kind of expansion of sympathy, it can only be represented as by means of fantasy or within a schematic power relationship. The Moonstone‘s narrative 191 strategies reject this kind of explicit, pedagogical project for one which emphasizes not omniscience‘s totalizing effect but the play of multiple voices. As Jenny Bourne Taylor notes, The Moonstone‘s narrative structure enacts a ―reversal of narrative authority‖

(180), making the narrative out of specific and liminal texts—the testimonies of its various contributors—rather than a centralized narrative ego or consciousness, whose authority could underwrite the events of the novel. That authority is transferred instead to the reader, who alone is witness to all the clues. Unlike Dickens‘s good spirit, where a classical, unitary figure provides enlightenment, Collins‘s novel is invested in modernity, in the play of individual voices which cross and re-cross in the course of the novel. The sheer number of the narrators (counting the interpolated diaries and letters of Rosanna

Spearman, Ezra Jennings, and the figures who contribute the ―Epilogue,‖ there are at least twelve), as well as their varied class positions, indicates the novel‘s interest in the modern experience: debates over reform often stressed the numerousness of the English society, to which the novel gives palpable sense.27

The image of the reader as judge indicates the reader‘s ability to make meaning from the events of the novel. It locates the reader within a transcendental political institution, even while institutional authority within the novel is represented as contingent. Take, for instance, the case of Detective Cuff, the sharp-eyed representative of police power within the text. He could be parroting Mill when he describes Lady

27 See Janice Carlisle, Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 192 Verinder the process by which he has come to believe that her daughter Rachel has hidden the diamond. After a long summation of the facts of the case, he concludes:

Having brought my inquiry to that point—then, my lady, and not till then, I begin to look back into my mind for my own experience. My own experience explains Miss Verinder‘s otherwise incomprehensible conduct. It associates her with those other young ladies that I know of. It tells me she has debts she daren‘t acknowledge. And it sets me asking myself, whether the loss of the Diamond may not mean—that the Diamond must be secretly pledged to pay them. That is the conclusion which my experience draws from plain facts. (Moonstone 228)

Moving from the specific to the general, as in his ability to connect a ―spot of ink on a tablecloth‖ with a murder (Moonstone159), Cuff applies axiomatic inductive reasoning, gathering the facts and applying personal experience to them in order to draw a conclusion. Yet, of course, Cuff‘s solution is incorrect. In fact it seems that the novel can‘t help but suggest that the kinds of institutional inquiry theorized by Mill are doomed to a certain contingency, even failure: not only is the great Cuff wrong, but Jenning‘s experiment is ―only partially successful‖ (Moonstone 499). If we have expected these kinds of culturally authoritative figures to ―authorize‖ the text for us, to provide us with access to the meta-level structures governing meaning within the text, that expectation is unfulfilled: rather than making meaning for us, they seem to stumble in the dark.

So, though figures like Cuff and Jennings appear at first to operate as Millian social theorists in the novel, in fact their inability to access a wide enough perspective, amass enough data, and know the system thoroughly enough, results not only in their disappearance from the novel but the transfer of their role as detective to other characters.

D. A. Miller has influentially seen the moment of Cuff‘s exit from The Moonstone as 193 turning the text‘s interest in cultural power outwards, dispersed from a single, fictional character towards a real group of individuals, the readers who internalize the practice of the novel. He ―reads‖ this practice theoretically, within the dual lenses of Foucault and

Bakhtin, arguing that authority is dispersed to the members of the community of the novel, thereby reifying its operation even as they render it invisible by decentralizing its processes. Similarly, we might be tempted to read the text‘s inability to successfully represent the experimental operations central to Mill‘s social and political theory as a critique of liberal processes; however, to do so, I argue, would be mistaken. The text locates the process of induction as exterior to itself—outside of the ―work‖ of fiction in both the literary and the manual senses of that word. It asks the reader to apply scientific and analytic methods to it, thereby locating the inductive process in non-speculative ways within the individual. Like Miller, then, I see The Moonstone as directing its ultimate interest outwards from the confines of the text to its reader. However, this reader is not a theoretical construct. She reads the novel in a specific context. It might help to understand the text how the text does this, if we were to reinscribe the history of its reader within the history of reading, to look to how the text fantasizes its own readers, rather than assuming a set of ahistorical and consistent reading practices. In fact, The

Moonstone makes a powerful intervention into contemporary debates about the role and practice of reading, traces of which are legible within the text itself. How and why

Collins‘s text insists on the master-narrative being supplied by the reader will be the subject of the next section.

194 READING CHARACTER: VICTORIAN PUBLICS AND THE DISEASE OF READING

―I complain of a new disease,‖ Betteredge tells Franklin Blake about halfway through The Moonstone: ―I don‘t want to alarm you, but you‘re certain to catch it before the morning is out.... I call it the detective-fever‖ (Moonstone 369). Betteredge may call it ―detective-fever,‖ but to Victorian readers it must have sounded awfully like another

―new disease,‖ the disease of reading, descriptions of which were appearing with increasing frequency in the world around them. Debates about the possible pernicious effects of reading are at least as old as the novel itself and are themselves foundational in the creation of novels as a genre. Don Quixote‘s disastrous penchant for romance defines the problem of the novel by literalizing generic discourse, making the space of the novel possible only through its assault on other forms of reading, while Pamela and Clarissa, ur-texts for the English novel, sprang from Richardson‘s letter-writing manuals for servants. Nihil novi: yet Victorians inflected the debate with characteristic urgency, especially when sensationalism‘s astonishing success seemed to indicate a contamination of bourgeois literature by the tainted reading of the working classes. The Moonstone‘s detective-fever shares the etiology of sensationalism, including ―an uncomfortable heat at the pit of your stomach… and a nasty thumping at the top of your head‖ (Moonstone

369). Mimicking the new intensities of modern life, whose manifold transformations were viewed as effecting a profound change in human subjectivity, sensation produced its essential effect on the body with electric but unflagging speed. Like Betteredge‘s

―detective fever,‖ sensation reading seemed to call into existence a new physical state in which an attenuation and enervation of consciousness coexisted. 195 Discourses of contagion, like the diseases they fantasize, have a way of spilling into other discourses. By the end of the 1860s a narrative which had initially condemned reading sensation had begun to infect reading as a whole. A. Innes Shand argued in the pages of Blackwood’s that the ―promiscuous circulation of books‖ created a ―restless craving‖ which led to ―far-fetched anxieties‖ and even to ―painful brain and nerve diseases that fill our asylums, and are transmitted by descent‖ (quoted in Mays 176-77).

Kelly J. Mays has identified this as an emergent discourse of ―the disease of reading,‖ which she sees as a ―rhetorical framework‖ designed ―to define, or ‗fabricate,‘ a single, healthy reading practice for middle-class readers‖ (Mays 166). Reading practices emerge as a crucial vector for negotiating subjectivity: what kind of reader is produced is largely a function, for Victorian critics, of what and how she reads. Sensationalism focused this rhetoric, providing a scaffold on which arguments about reader-centered practices could be built. Though Mays focuses on the 1870s and 1880s, the debate over reading practices is especially imperative during the 1860s and early 1870s, when the Second Reform Bill of 1867 made questions of the character of the nation particularly acute. In the second half of this chapter, I read the representations of reading within the novel itself alongside contemporary debates over appropriate reading practices to suggest how The Moonstone provides a model intervention into these debates by generating a narrative that demonstrates how plotting could beneficially reorient reading practices toward desirable goals.

196 Rolf Engelsing has provocatively identified a ―reading revolution‖ that occurred around the turn of the nineteenth century—in his formulation, anyway; others have dated the transformation of reading practices Engelsing outlines to the Enlightenment.28 The evidence and effect of this revolution—a turn from intensive reading represented by the family Bible, passed on from generation to generation, deeply marked by its continual rereading, to an ephemeral extensive reading—has been much criticized, but it would have been a familiar narrative to Victorian critics, who saw such a revolution at hand in the 1860s. Victorians believed that industrialization had transformed publishing in much the same way as it had transformed the world around them. Everyday life was now saturated with printed material of all types: a ―storm of literature,‖ Frederick Harrison named it in 1879 (13). Reviewing ―fugitive literature‖ two decades earlier, E. S. Dallas remarked that ―there has never been so great a quantity produced as at the present moment‖ and suggested that ―it would seem as if the day were not far distant when… speech might be abolished altogether, and writing might become the only mode of communication‖ (―PL‖ 97). Not everyone greeted this incipient graphotopia with open arms. From the vantage point of the end of the century, Arnold Haultain, author of ―How to Read‖ in The Living Age, could insist: ―Reading, it is safe to say, is a lost art. And what has killed it is the spread of reading‖ (250). Quoting Joseph Ackland‘s turn-of-the- century research into ―intellectual force‖—itself strongly influenced by the degenerative theories of Nordau and Lombroso—Haultain argued that ―‗the general drift [is] away

28 See Engelsing, Der BeurgeralsLeser:Lesergeschichte in Deutschland, 1500-1800 (1974); representative responses may be found in the work of Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier, and Elizabeth Eisenstein. 197 from solid, and in the direction of more scrappy and discursive, literature‖ like Tit-Bits and the magazine culture of the 1890s (250). Haultain‘s ―new reader‖ was a ―devourer of the ephemeral‖ (Haultain 250), and hardly new by the time ―How to Read‖ was published in 1896. Instead, he or she had been at the center of a debate on how to read stretching back to the 1850s. But Haultain‘s vision of a world in which ―the force of the intellectual wave seems to have been almost exhausted‖ leaving nothing but ―drift‖ and fragmentation charts the debate‘s extreme end, one where effects of mass publication,

―books… daily manufactured to order (like boilers and boots)‖ (250) result in an enervated, restive populace.

Earlier responses are less extreme in announcing the ―death of reading,‖ but no more temperate. Ruskin was typically blunt, though perhaps atypically direct, when he suggested of the Victorians in ―Of King‘s Treasuries‖ that ―we have despised literature,‖ not in spite of, but because of ―the very cheapness of literature‖ (Ruskin 50-1).

Similarly, Macmillan’s Magazine (playfully) proclaimed in ―Books and Their Uses,‖ first published in 1859: ―Truly, the illiterate man has much to be thankful for‖ (111). More seriously, they noted a shift in reading practices. ―We read too much, and too little,‖ they argued, and ―the former of the two excesses is… the more new and remarkable‖

(―Books‖ 110):

[Books] do not meet with the right welcome at our hands. Unrecognized for their just claims, we grumble because they do not present some others. Often are they read so quickly that their eccentricities strike the attention before their worth is discovered…. To make the right use of a book is not so easy a matter as it appears. (―Books‖ 111)

198 A new culture of speed was becoming apparent in Victorian analyses of reading. In an

1867 article, ―Reading as a Means of Self-Culture,‖ Sharpe’s Magazine drew an explicit relationship between modes of reading and the new technologies of speed: ―In rapid reading [the mind] is nearly in the same state as yours is when you are whirled through a country in a railway-carriage or post-chaise‖ (―Reading as a Means‖ 317). Not only were books and periodicals being manufactured at a more intense rate as the century progressed, but changes in the cost and distribution of books changed a reader‘s relationship to the text. Making the ―right use‖ of a book was all the more difficult when the circulating libraries spoke to the reader with their ―million mouths‖ (―Books‖ 110).

As the famous anthologist Francis Palgrave wrote:

The root of the wrong appears to be, that people, unless profession or scientific interest influences them, go to books for something almost similar to what they find in social conversation. Reading tends to become only another kind of gossip. Everything is to be read, and everything only once; a book is no more a treasure to be kept and studied and known by heart, as the truly charming phrase has it, if deserving that intimacy. (Palgrave 488)

The crisis outlined by Palgrave—the replacement of a traditional invested reading with a broader, faster, more disposable mode of reading—mirrors our own contemporary debates on reading in the electronic age. Indeed, what Sven Birkerts identifies in The

Gutenberg Elegies as ―deep reading: the slow and meditative possession of a book‖

(146), offers an exact cognate to the process that Victorian critics saw declining among mid-century readers. Victorian narratives assert that the reader, flooded with printed material, was simply overwhelmed. The new ―mode of absorbing print‖ (Harrison 6-7)

199 created a reader who lacked the necessary readerly attributes of attention and active engagement.

Unsurprisingly, prose fiction and particularly the novel, constituted the most important vector of debate. Poetry and history, more rarified cultural forms, received more outright approval. The Pall Mall Gazette‘s Best Hundred Books extra number, published in 1886, endorsed Walter Scott, Goldsmith‘s The Vicar of Wakefield, Defoe‘s

Robinson Crusoe, and Swift‘s Gulliver’s Travels in the ―Poetry and General Literature‖ section; for ―Modern Fiction‖ they could only work up enough enthusiasm to suggest

―selections from Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, Kingsley, Scott, [and] Bulwer

Lytton‖ (6). Few other critics viewed the modern novel as anything more than a necessary evil. Harrison adds Tom Jones and Jane Austen to the Pall Mall‘ssuggestions, but condemns the majority of the ―sewage outfall of today‖ to ―black night‖ (66). There is an irony here. As Nicholas Dames discusses in his innovative text, The Physiology of the Novel (2007), Birkerts, Martha Nussbaum, and Richard Rorty, among others, have valorized the Victorian novel ―as a training process in ethically valuable cognitive habits‖ (18). Finding in the Victorian novel a sustained device which demands long-term attention as well as exposure to alternative viewpoints, they demonize its alternatives— electronic media like the internet or television—in ways that reproduce Victorian discourse around the novel (17-20). Furthermore, they attempt to make deep reading practices the platform on which we learn the rational processes necessary for good ethical and political practices. On this showing, deep reading becomes foundational for

200 recuperating a public sphere discourse that has been corroded by commercialization and exploitation. Yet for the Victorians it was this very turn towards the public that seemed to compromise the stability of the individual agent, as Palgrave‘s emphasis on social networks like gossip and conversation suggests. ―There still remains a question,‖ the author of ―Books and Their Uses‖ stated, ―whether the craving for books may not be a disease, and whether we may not live too little in ourselves, and too much in others‖

(110). Whereas a modern discourse of reading values the alterity that novels provide, for

Victorians it was this very sense of loss of self that seemed a danger of promiscuous reading practices.

E. S. Dallas, who found in popular fiction a ―strange new form of publicity‖ in

1859 (―PL‖ 97), mirrored those concerns when he revised the text of ―Popular Fiction—

The Popular Press‖ as ―The Ethical Current,‖ the final chapter of The Gay Science

(1866). There he described the novel as ―gossip etherealized‖ (GS2.286) and noted that the tendencies of both high and low literature—figured as Thackeray and sensationalism—promoted ―the withering of the individual as an exceptional hero, and his growth as a multiplicand unit‖ (GS 2.287). Henry Mansel found this operating particularly in the sensation novel: ―A commercial atmosphere floats around works of this class, redolent of the manufactory and the shop‖ (484). With its intentionally confused referentiality, this sentence enables a free-floating anxiety: not only does the specter of commodification ―float around‖ the novels themselves, but it extends out towards the readers of these texts. These non-individuated units are specters of the

201 sensation reader, who seemed to be in the process of becoming interchangeable. Far from being a staging ground for civil and political discourse, Victorians viewed deep reading as an essential marker of individuality in a world where the individual was under assault. The broad reading that increasingly seemed to be replacing it was a product of a commercialized society, where, as the historian Stefan Collini has argued, pressure of opinion made for conformity (44). The critic could serve as an intermediary in this process, shaping public opinion about literature, but, as Macmillan’s put it, there was ―the disagreeable necessity of forming a taste of one‘s own‖ (―Books‖ 112). As Frederick

Harrison mused, ―it took strong character and a resolute system of reading to keep the head cool,‖ for ―we read nowadays in the marketplace‖ (13).

One way character could be deployed in the Victorian cultural vocabulary was in just such a sense, as the signifier of an agent at least partially outside of marketplace and gossip as constitutive markers of social and economic regimes. According to Stefan

Collini, in the Victorian language of character ―the individual is not primarily regarded as a member of a political community, but as an already private (though not thereby selfish) moral agent‖ (42). The alternative, ―lack or weakness of character,‖ is seen as an inability to demonstrate innate singularity, ―propelling the otherwise self-maintaining individual into a state of dependence and in that sense into the public sphere‖ (Collini 43, italics in original). Reading, an essential function of acculturation, is intimately bound up in this process of character development: as Collini notes, the figure of the autodidact, the individual who has quite literally constructed himself out of reading, is held up in

202 biographies and manuals like Samuel Smiles‘sSelf-Help (1859) as a central figure in the

Victorian imagination. The formation of individual taste becomes a mark of character because it asserts independence. As a reader learns to read appropriately—to discriminate—he or she demonstrates their fitness to live in one‘s own self, as ―Books and Their Uses‖ might have it.

Yet this discourse around taste was hardly unitary. Instead it was fractured by class and gender. Two early pieces of journalism collected in My Miscellanies by Wilkie

Collins suggest how contradictory the discourse around aesthetic judgment could be. ―To

Think, or Be Thought For‖ (first published in Household Words in 1856) is an assault on what Collins viewed as an outdated artistic orthodoxy, outlines ―the Conceit of

Criticism.‖ This ―Conceit,‖ which comprises ―the conventional laws and formulas, the authoritative rules and regulations, which individual men set up to guide the tastes and influence the opinions of their fellow-creatures,‖ is a veil which has placed itself

―obstructively between Art and the people‖ (461). Collins asserts against this system of judgment an internalized response, where ―the greatness of intellectual work‖ is assessed by ―its power of appealing to all capacities for admiration and enjoyment, from the very highest to the very humblest‖ (Collins ―Think‖ 461). Arguing that it is ―a part of the national business‖ for subjects to assert their own artistic taste, Collins asserts that this is a ―revolutionary sentiment‖ (Collins ―Think‖ 475). And in ―To Think, or Be Thought

For‖ Collins appears to be formulating a dictum that resembles the more famous aestheticism of Pater. Art should give pleasure and enjoyment to the individual, and the

203 work which produces the greatest pleasure is therefore the greatest work. As Regina

Gagnier has suggested in The Insatiability of Human Wants, Paterian aesthetics, which rely on subject response to measure artistic success, were complicit with economic transformations that centered on the consumer as a private agent. Collins‘s piece evinces a similar faith that the marketplace functions as a better index of artistic success than a critical discourse, and the prefaces to his novels often display a quasi-democratic faith in the voice of the many over the minority opinions of the critics. Yet, despite Collins‘s avowals that aesthetic pleasure is possible for the humblest as well as the highest, his well-known essay ―The Unknown Public‖ presents a very different narrative of acculturation.

―The Unknown Public‖ records Collins‘s shock at the ―startling discovery‖ of a reading public constituted outside of the traditional bourgeois and elite reading cultures of ―the customers at publishing houses, the members of book-clubs and circulating libraries, and the purchasers and borrowers of newspapers and reviews‖ (―Unknown‖

157). Collins estimates this mass public as at least three million readers strong. As

Graham Law and Andrew Maunder have noted, Collins was ―economically and ideologically‖ drawn to the idea of an ―audience measured in hundreds rather than tens of thousands‖ (Collins253), and ―The Unknown Public‖ ends with the promise of untold rewards for a writer who can capture this new market. Yet Collins‘s attitude towards working-class readers in ―The Unknown Public‖ is not straightforward. Rather, it is a mixture of ―fascination and repulsion‖ (Law 253), and he carefully cordons off this

204 newly-constituted public from other readers. He presents the class as itself an evolving organism:

The Unknown Public is, in a literary sense, hardly beginning, as yet, to learn to read. The members of it are evidently, in the mass, from no fault of theirs, still ignorant of almost everything which is generally known and understood among readers whom circumstances have placed, socially and intellectually, above them (Collins ―Unknown‖ 176).

Collins invokes biological determinism to classify his unknown public as distinct from his middle-class readers. Like Mayhew‘s wandering Cockney tribes, this public is a

―mass‖ which it requires scientific study to differentiate, and Collins displaces social relationships into scientific and evolutionary registers.

This fantasy, in which working-class readers are biologically and socially different than others, plays itself out in its most pronounced form in the arena of fiction, where the issue of representation is foregrounded for Collins. As he notes, penny journals contain a great deal of ―miscellaneous contributions… pickings from Punch and

Plato; wood engravings…; modern and ancient anecdotes; short memoirs; scraps of poetry; choice morsels of general information‖ (Collins ―Unknown‖ 171). But serial and self-contained stories are the ―staple commodity‖ of penny journals. This universal taste for fiction proves to be a problem for Collins. Why, he asks, have contemporary novelists failed to break into the mass market? He notes that the penny journals had serialized reprints of blockbuster French novels like Alexandre Dumas‘s The Count of

Monte Cristo and Eugene Sue‘s The Mysteries of Paris, while Charles Reade, then at the height of his popularity, had attempted to serialize a new work of fiction in the penny

205 format (―Unknown‖ 174-75). Yet, Collins claims, these attempts were failures, resulting in decreased circulation. The answer is as much determined by biology as by economics: the new public needs its own taxonomy of literature, producing journals which are ―all- pervading specimens of… a new species of literary production‖ (―Unknown‖ 159).

Collins‘s analysis of mass-oriented serial fiction is different than the political critiques that surrounded the Jack Sheppard controversy. While writers involved in that controversy tended to focus their responses on the question of moral influence, Collins sets morality largely to the side. He notes of the materials he reviewed that the ―one thing which it is possible to advance in their favor is, that there is apparently no wickedness in them…. If they lead to no intellectual result, even of the humblest kind, they may at least have this negative advantage, that they can do no harm‖

(Collins―Unknown‖ 173). Collins instead focuses on the essential ―sameness‖ of mass- produced literature, each part showing, he argues, ―the same dead level of the smoothest and flattest conventionality‖ (―Unknown‖ 172). Collins identifies four essential tropes of mass-produced fiction:

A combination of fierce melodrama and meek domestic sentiment; short dialogues and paragraphs on the French pattern, with moral English reflections of the sort that occur on the top lines of children‘s copy-books; incidents and characters taken from the old exhausted mines of the circulating library, and presented as complacently and confidently as if they were original ideas; descriptions and reflections for the beginning of the number, and a ―strong situation,‖ dragged in by the neck and shoulders, for the end (―Unknown‖ 172).

Universal in tone, style, story, and structure, ―The Unknown Public‖ suggests that the popular fiction was increasingly industrialized, no different that the pen nibs or pulley 206 blocks being produced simultaneously in Manchester. Operating on the margins of the text is an unspoken fear of the results of such reading material on the minds of its readers: how could they help but become interchangeable, nothing more than factory-produced versions of each other?

In his conclusion Collins suggests that ―the future of English fiction may rest with this Unknown Public, which is now waiting to be taught the difference between a good book and a bad book‖ (―Unknown‖ 177). This critical sense Collins calls

―discrimination‖ when he states: ―The largest audience for periodical literature… must obey the universal law of progress, and must, sooner or later, learn to discriminate‖

(―Unknown‖177). The contemporary OED entry defines discrimination as the ability ―to make or constitute a difference in or between; to distinguish, differentiate,‖ especially as this is represented as an action of the ―mind or intellect.‖ Linking the social evolutionism soon to be formalized in Herbert Spencer‘s work with aesthetics, Collins makes progress a test of cultural fitness as well as biological. An inevitable product of the progressives‘

―iron laws,‖ aesthetics, discrimination becomes a key term in evaluating class. Unlike the bourgeois art patrons of ―To Think or To Be Thought For,‖ readers from the lower classes needed to be taught how to evaluate material.

The pervasive irony is that Victorian discourses of sensationalism redeployed

Collins‘s concern about narrative equivalence and evaluation as a middle-class phenomenon. To critics the sensation novel seemed to foreground in its readers just the lack of aesthetic discrimination that Collins found in the material of working-class

207 readers. As Ann Cvetkovich has noted, sensationalism seemed to have drifted upwards from working-class fiction (MF 14-15). This looked less like the iron law of progress than it did the nightmare specter that the fin de siècle would term degeneration: Mansel‘s indelible image of the sensation reader as culture junkie. Sensation novels were precognitive, routed around ―judgment‖—the authoritative term for nineteenth-century aesthetics as well as ethics—to work directly on the nerves. They generated their shocks on the body. ―Playing no inconsiderable part in moulding the minds and forming the habits and tastes of its generation,‖ as Mansel defined it (483), sensationalism seemed to be ―preaching to the nerves instead of the judgment‖ (483). Rather than encouraging beneficial readerly habits of rational consideration and proper moral, ethical, and aesthetic discrimination, a reader‘s response to sensationalism was often figured temporally as the irresistible impulse to finish the book—an impulse which is well attested in the apocryphal responses of public figures to The Woman in White. As

Margaret Oliphant wryly noted, ―domestic histories, however virtuous and charming, do not often attain that result‖ (Page 111).

The Moonstone, itself as Dickens noted a ―wild yet domestic‖ history, asks its readers to pay close attention to its narrative (Page 169). The detective plot of The

Moonstone has often been read as a psychoanalytic narrative, as seems especially appropriate to a novel in which Blake‘s unconscious theft of the diamond can only be resolved by an experimental quest for the origins of the self. Too, the Moonstone‘s circulation within the text bears a resemblance to Lacanian models of desire: emerging

208 from the colonial alterity of India, the jewel passes through the hands of many of the major characters, yet its identity resists possession just as its effects seem excessive and surprising. Yet, as we have seen in the previous section, Jennings‘s experiment has as much to do with the physiological basis of political theory as it does with new ideas of psychology, and the novel is finally unable to produce an etiology of a coherent liberal subject psychologically or politically. However, the detective plot can function in other ways. TzvetanTodorov‘s assertion that detective stories ―contain not one but two plots‖ is well known (44), however his analyses highlights some of the salient points of interest for the novel:

In their purest form, these two stories have no point in common . . . . The first story, that of the crime, ends before the second begins. But what happens to the second? Not much. The characters of the second story, the story of the investigation, do not act, they learn…. The first [plot] — the story of the crime — tells 'what really happened,' whereas the second — the story of the investigation — explains 'how the reader (or the narrator) has come to know about it.'" (Todorov 44-48)

The interest of the second plot—the story of the crime‘s detection—lies in its ―slow apprenticeship.‖ Here, as elsewhere in the essay, Todorov links the reader and the narrator through his use of first person plural: we examine the text for clues to the identity of the criminal. Reader and detective fuse into a single figure in order to excavate an event and identify possible outcomes, a process that is foregrounded by The Moonstone‘s multiple narrators.

Rhetorically, the novel works to engender that possibility by stressing good readerly practices, responding to the emergent discourse of the idle or impatient reader

209 associated with sensationalism. Reorienting habits of readerly attention, Collins emphasizes a slow and rational approach to the text. The reviewer for the American

Lippincott’s Magazine noted in December 1868: ―Let the impatient reader, hurrying to reach the denouement, skip half a dozen pages. Instantly the thread of the story is broken, the tale becomes incomprehensible, the incidents lose their coherence‖ (Page

181). Narrative coherence is made possible only by careful reading of the text, as the various author-figures within the novel insist. Gabriel Betteredge, the figure who most frequently doubles for the reader in the text, is quite explicit about directing the reader‘s attention:

Here follows the substance of what I said, written out entirely for your benefit. Pay attention to it, or you will be all abroad, when we get deeper into the story. Clear your mind of the children, or the dinner, or the new bonnet, or what not. Try if you can‘t forget politics, horses, prices in the City, and grievances at the club. I hope you won‘t take this freedom on my part amiss; it‘s only the way I have of appealing to the gentle reader. Lord, haven‘t I seen you with the greatest authors in your hands, and don‘t I know how ready your attention is to wander when it‘s a book that asks for it, instead of a person? (83-84)

With an address that imagines readers of both sexes, Betteredge endows the ―book that asks‖ for attention with a subjectivity equivalent to that of a ―person.‖ He draws attention, that is, to the very act of reading itself as a social discourse, arguing for a deep, rather than attenuated, engagement with the text.

The effects of distracted reading, particularly au courant in the 1860s, were often commented upon in the journals of the day. For example, Charles Alston Collins, brother of the novelist and Dickens‘s son-in-law, offered a quite similar comical indictment of

210 reading practices in ―Our Audience,‖ in Macmillan’s in 1863. In the article Alston

Collins fantasizes a number of distracted readers, largely women (like the ―maiden aunt‖ who can intervene in a family argument over her Goethe, or the wife who takes shelter from domestic dispute behind a novel [162-3]) who use books as a screen for everyday life. Against those readers who are likely to read with ―more parenthesis of word or action‖ Alston Collins sets the ―consolatory mission‖ of literature, which allows both relaxation and a deeper self-knowledge (166). This is quite in line with Leah Price‘s suggestion that the turn from a distracted or pretended reading to an invested one can signal a shift in meaning from ―social surfaces‖ towards ―linguistic or psychological depths‖ (―Reader‘s Block‖ 47). Yet The Moonstone‘s moments of direct address do not call the reader‘s attention to her own deep subjectivity. Rather, they seem to call for the

―strong resolution and infinite pains‖ that Frederic Harrison to counteract the ―habit of reading idly [which] debilitates and corrupts the mind‖ (6). They encourage her to apply rational processes—the process which Franklin Blake terms ―system‖ (Moonstone 91)— to the material at hand. In other words, they ask the reader to learn to be active in discriminating important information from background noise.

We can see an example of this at work near the end of the solicitor Matthew

Bruff‘s testimony. Bruff‘s narrative transitions the novel from the parodic domesticity of

Miss Clack to the first direct address from Franklin Blake, who emerges as the novel‘s focus of interest in the final third of the text, and as such it provides a crucial, public sphere supplement to the interiority of the previous sections. After providing the reader

211 with crucial evidence of Godfrey Ablewhite‘s motives, Bruff transitions to the matter of the Moonstone: ―The little that I have to tell is (as I think I have already said) of some importance, nevertheless, in respect of its bearing very remarkably on events which are still to come‖ (Moonstone 342). The events that follow, coming near the end of the twentieth weekly installment, act as a kind of teasing challenge to the reader, enacting in miniature the type of readerly speculation the detective framework of the novel encourages. One of the Indians in pursuit of the diamond visits the solicitor, attempting to borrow money on security. Bruff speculates that the Indian‘s visit was simply a pretext to his final question, an attempt to discover the timeframe in which a secured pledge could be redeemed. In the final paragraph of the installment, Bruff‘s ―unaided ingenuity‖ leaves him wondering about the meaning of the visit, while his final words ensure his readers that the discovery will be forthcoming in the next installment.

Proponents of active reading stressed the importance of rational analysis, rather than passive reception, when reading a text. Here the formal qualities of Collins‘s novel generate an appeal for that kind of logical work, inviting its readers to follow the events with close attention and to speculate on their meaning before the twenty-first installment reveals the solution. The demands of this passage are twofold. First, it asks the reader to assess the reliability of Bruff‘s judgment about the importance of the visit, a process that becomes incrementally entangled as the novel progresses. Any reader who had followed the Shandean demands of Miss Clack‘s narrative would be aware that an event‘s significance is not always presented or assessed with accuracy by the novel‘s narrators.

But it also asks the reader to produce a narratological function for the event itself: what 212 could the Indian‘s visit mean? This is no place for a passive reader. Instead, like the ideal reader proposed by Sharpe’s Magazine, the act of reading required the full play of the intelligence, ―the full vigour of the attention without any of its wanderings, the full retentiveness of the memory, the full activity of the imagination‖ (317).

A principle model for this readerly engagement is depicted in Gabriel Betteredge, and especially his continual reference to Defoe‘s Robinson Crusoe. Betteredge is likely the most active reader in Victorian fiction, even among the often prodigious readers in

Collins‘s novels; when the action of The Moonstone begins, Betteredge is on his seventh copy of Crusoe, and Jenning‘s description near the end of the novel of a ―dirty and dog‘s- eared book‖ reeking of tobacco (478), suggests that Betteredge will soon need an eighth.

In any case Betteredge‘s devotion to Robinson Crusoe is wholehearted: ―such a book…never was written, and never will be written again‖ (61). Though Betteredge‘s bibliomancy is sometimes figured as a comic obsession, in fact the proper narrative of

The Moonstone ends with a validation of his reliance on the text when he triumphantly foretells Rachel‘s pregnancy, boggling Blake. This narrative endorsement has prompted post-colonial critics to investigate how Crusoe‘s hyper-colonial narrative intersects and deconstructs Collins‘s own, much more ambivalent narrative of Empire. Yet it is also important to note that the book was widely viewed within the Victorian cultural context as an ideal text for readers of all ages and levels. Frederic Harrison‘s account of

Robinson Crusoe a decade after the publication of The Moonstone is hardly less glowing than Betteredge‘s:

213 Robinson Crusoe, which is a fairy tale to the child, a book of adventure to the young, is a work on social philosophy to the mature. It is a picture of civilization. The essential moral attributes of man, his innate impulses as a social being, his absolute dependence on society, even as a solitary individual, his subjection to the physical world, and his alliance with the animal world, the statical elements of social philosophy, and the germs of man‘s historical evolution have never been touched with more sagacity, and assuredly have never been idealized with such magical simplicity and truth…. [It] has inexhaustible teaching for the student of man and of society. (Harrison 64)

In Harrison‘s account Crusoe is central to the configuration of modern subjectivity, providing an account of the scientific and epistemic structures governing human actions.

Robinson Crusoe‘s presence in The Moonstone, then, points us to an originary set of values that determine daily experience, a common framework in a novel which is unusually skeptical of ―common sense.‖ Sharpe’s Magazine declared that one of the benefits of reading was that it provided access to just such values in the making, allowing the reader to ―become like‖ the ―great minds of the world‖ in part by through transcendental exercise of judgment: ―Our judgment can decide correctly in view of the facts which they have collected, and the principles which they have evolved, and the reasonings they have elaborated‖ (316). In other words reading encourages the reader to follow the intellectual moves and internalize the thought process displayed, a second- order practice of the intellect, an exercise in applied Millian rationality, helping to make life navigable. Just as The Moonstone encourages readers to engage in the process of solving the mystery of the missing diamond, it provides reader with a mimetic example of this discursive rationality in the moments in which Betteredge attempts to evaluate events based on the text of Robinson Crusoe. The very recursiveness of the image—a

214 reader reading a text in which a reader is depicted reading another text in order to explain the events of the text—suggests how The Moonstone locates analytic reading practices as fundamental to modern identity. As such the presence of Robinson Crusoe within the novel should be understood as instructional. Declaring it a work with ―more religion, more philosophy, more psychology, more political economy, [and] more anthropology, than are found in many elaborate treatises on these special subjects‖ Harrison lamented that ―grown men do not often read Robinson Crusoe, as the article has it, ‗for instruction of life and ensample of manners‘‖ (Harrison 84). Yet it is within precisely this cultural context of ―instruction‖ that The Moonstone locates Robinson Crusoe, and Betteredge‘s continued references to the book provide an ideal model of good readerly practice. Like the ideal reader fantasized by critics of reading in the 1860s, Betteredge applies the text to everyday experience. Like the Queen and ―her Majesty‘s judges,‖ Betteredge ―steer[s] a middle course‖ in the novel (Moonstone 197), providing a normative evaluative system within which difference can be marked out. However, the novel locates that system within a set of reading practices: a good story can bind the nation together.

PRODUCING CHARACTER: THE MOONSTONE AND THE LIBERAL SUBJECT

The Moonstone provides an important narrative of how reading came to occupy a central category in the production of subjectivity, producing the new liberal subject of the

1860s through a structural insistence on rationality and induction. Like the Millian version of liberal theory which was ―simply an analysis of empirically observable tendencies which, in ensemble, constitute the social system‖ (Ashcraft 106), The

215 Moonstone emphasized the ways in which the personal and subjective could be instrumental to building the global and objective. Frederic Jameson reminds us that a narrative form or paradigm ―emit[s]… ideological signals,‖ and one goal of this chapter has been to indicate how the form of The Moonstone is mutually implicative with the form of utilitarian liberalism (186). Within the larger context of this dissertation, however, this excursus on the novel‘s liberal project seems out of step with the wider narrative of the relationship between class and the novel in nineteenth century Britain. In this conclusion, I wish to address how the alliance between liberalism and the novel plays an important role in the history of class relations. To do so I wish to turn briefly to

Jürgen Habermas‘s influential critique of Victorian liberalism.

The outlines of public sphere theory are well known: the socioeconomic transformations of the Enlightenment, which included the institution of both ―public‖ and

―private‖ forms of identity under a bourgeois constitutional state, allowed for the growth of social and technological institutions (coffeehouses, newspapers) that encouraged rational and critical public discourse. This discourse of public opinion represented ―the subjection of domination to reason,‖ where rational-critical discourse capably affected political policy (Habermas 117). How these publics are constituted has been a source of the most fruitful post-Habermasian work in the wake of the publication of The Structural

Transformation of the Public Sphere, yet most accounts agree with Habermas in locating the collapse of the liberal public sphere in the nineteenth century. In Habermas‘s account, it is precisely the moment of reform that represents the moment in which the

216 public sphere is, to borrow Michael Warner‘s phrase, ―refeudalized.‖ That is, this is the moment where the distinction between society and the state begins to blur and where majority public discourse ceases to have an immediate effect on policy: ―The political public sphere no longer stood for the idea of a dissolution of power; instead… it became a mere limit on power‖ (Habermas 136). No longer serving a transcendental function,

Habermas suggests that Mill‘s interest in preserving minority opinion from the mass attitude divided the public sphere against itself, hamstringing the effective power of critical discourse. What replaces public power, Habermas contends, is a new representation of the individual. He terms this ―representative publicity‖ (Habermas 137) but Mill (from whom Habermas draws his quotation) calls it character: ―their [i.e. the public] judgment must in general be exercised rather upon the characters and talents of the person whom they appoint to decide these questions for them, than upon the questions themselves‖ (quoted in Habermas 137). As Habermas suggests, this argument might rightly be glossed as ―not things but men:‖ liberalism‘s ―mechanism‖ –an apt word choice, considering Mill‘s interest in investing the subject with laws drawn from the sciences—is ―personalization‖ (137). What once constituted formal power in and through itself, the public voice, now serves only as the limit against which the individual can be produced.

This pattern, in which a multiplicity of attributes are mechanically reduced into a single form, should be by now a familiar one. It is not only Habermas‘s model of liberalism but also the inductive logic of Mill‘s moral sciences. Detection, too, which

217 resolves a series of scattered traces as different as a smear on a doorframe and a hastily withdrawn marriage proposal into a coherent narrative of crime, provides an elegant example of this operation in a narrative register. We could, of course, follow this skein outwards even further, noting that Collins‘s critics objected to his mechanization of novelistic form, reducing the manifold qualities of ―nature‖ and ―human life‖ to

―mechanism‖ (Page 174). But in closing I would like to turn to one more moment in the text to help articulate the stakes of this transformation of public discourse. When, in the midst of her narrative, Miss Clack confronts Bruff about the ―pretty story‖ being told about her idol, Godfrey Ablewhite and his involvement in the theft of the Moonstone, she draws a lengthy description of the tales being told by the ―world in general‖ from the solicitor (Moonstone 282). Bruff begins by summarizing the ―appearances‖ of the case –

―He was in the house when the Diamond was lost. And he was the first person to go to

London afterwards‖—before moving on to more specific reasons to suspect Ablewhite:

They [the Brahmins in search of the Moonstone] have their suspicions that the ‗valuable of great price‘ is being shifted from one place to another; and they hit on a singularly bold and complete way of clearing those suspicions up. Whom do they seize and search? Not Mr. Luker only— which would be intelligible enough—but Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite as well…. The plain inference is, that Mr. Ablewhite had his private interest in ‗the valuable‘ as well as Mr. Luker, and that the Indians were so uncertain as to which of the two had the disposal of it, that there was no alternative but to search them both. Public opinion says that, Miss Clack. And public opinion, on this occasion, is not easily refuted. (Moonstone282)

In the sixteenth of thirty-two installments Collins provides the solution to the theft of the

Moonstone as the ―plain inference‖ of ―public opinion.‖ It is a bravura move—made all

218 the more so by how quickly the novel enjoins us to ignore or suspect the role of public knowledge in the text. Knowledgeable as we are in post-Enlightenment subjectivity, we might expect the novel to counter this public knowledge through recourse to a private position, an epistemology of the individual. Instead, in a characteristic move, the novel returns to character discourse to undercut the agency of public opinion. After offering an encomium to Rachel‘s qualities—―true as steel, and high-minded and generous to a fault‖—Bruff insists that ―[i]f the plainest evidence in the world pointed one way, and if nothing but Rachel‘s word of honour pointed the other, I would take her word before the evidence, lawyer as I am‖ (Moonstone 283). If this has not quite the force of a historical dialectic at work in the novel, it perhaps marks its fallout: from a system where a social

(perhaps even legal) regime is oriented towards things, visible and empirical traces, the novel pivots towards an overarching emphasis on personal structures of signification. In other words, it replaces an analysis of things with an analysis of people, internalizing skepticism about mere fact.

The success of this shift—we readers, after all, are meant to question Rachel‘s defense of Ablewhite no more than Bruff does—suggests just how complicit the novel is with liberal theorizing. Habermas suggests that the end result of Mill‘s liberalism created a public sphere ―declassed and structured into layers of representation‖ (137). That is, through the very condition of being represented to the public as an individual endowed with a character, class is veiled from view. Frederic Jameson, drawing from the same

Marxist tradition of inquiry, makes the point clearer when he argues that liberalism is a

219 world-view in which ―the political and ideological are mere secondary or ‗public‘ adjuncts to the content of a real ‗private‘ life, which alone is authentic and genuine‖

(Jameson 289). In other words, it institutes a private life called forth in the very train of diaries, letters, private papers, and family histories that make up the text of The

Moonstone that is separate from public identities. This private identity is naturalized and normalized by the discourse of character. There is no radical discourse break between

Betteredge—who moves with fluency above and below stairs—and Blake, who is equally at ease with the old retainer and Lady Verinder. When we are given access to their private lives, we see no difference in kind or quality between the two.

Indeed, those characters who display a more aggressive class-consciousness are functionally marginalized within the novel. What do we know of the private identities of

Rosanna Spearman, who dares to fall in love above her station, or Limping Lucy, who outright declares that ―the day is not far off when the poor will rise against the rich‖

(Moonstone 248)? They are denied the normal private subjectivity the novel grants to its other characters, literally marked as different or abnormal by their bodies: Rosanna‘s deformed shoulder, Lucy‘s club foot. We are, briefly, granted a peek at Rosanna‘s subjectivity, but only after her suicide neutralizes her threat to destabilize the text.

Rosanna herself recognizes that her subjectivity is something different than that of other characters. Her posthumous declaration of love to Blake is predicated on her absence, her negation from the text: ―It would be very disgraceful to me to tell you this, if I was a living woman when you read it. I shall be dead and gone, sir, when you find my letter….

220 Not even my grave will be left to tell of me. I may own the truth—with the quicksand waiting to hide me when the words are written‖ (Moonstone 392). Only a thoroughgoing act of erasure allows Rosanna‘s voice to be heard, to be normalized. Her silence parallels that of Rachel, who is also in love with Blake and who also hides the truth in order to protect him. However, Rachel‘s silence is temporary, while Rosanna‘s ―silent tongue and solitary ways‖ are permanent features of her life in the house (Moonstone 75). Only in the weird, liminal environment of the Shivering Sand can the reader experience

Rosanna‘s interiority. That interiority is literally entombed there, until Blake dredges it up. Blake is not only symbolically blind to Rosanna‘s attraction to him. He and

Betteredge refuse even to acknowledge that attraction as a possibility. In the end the servant is almost literally invisible to him, as his inadvertently poignant footnote to her letter reveals: ―I never noticed her‖ (Moonstone 393). In these marginal presences The

Moonstone laments the foreclosure of class in the novel but never recuperates it. In making class a presence absent (but never an absence present) in the novel, The

Moonstone ironically enacts the triumph of liberalism.

221 Coda:

In a poignant phrase, Robert Louis Stevenson indexed the shift this dissertation has been tracing: ―There must be something wrong in me, or I would not be popular‖

(Letters 300). Impossible to imagine at the dawn of Victoria‘s reign, by the 1880s literary popularity could be internalized as evidence of ―something wrong,‖ a moral insufficiency. ―That way lies disgrace and dishonor,‖ Stevenson confessed to Edmund

Gosse (Letters 299). Margaret Oliphant, too, found her lifetime of literary work disgraceful. ―No one will even mention me in the same breath with George Eliot,‖ wrote

Margaret Oliphant in an 1885 entry in The Autobiography, ―And that is just‖

(Autobiography 17). This was not only a matter of literary quality, but a more deeply- seeded analysis of failure: ―I am not indifferent, yet I should like to forget it all, to wipe out all the books, to silence those compliments about my industry, &c, which I always turn off with a laugh‖ (15). The novel, which emerged in the post-Romantic consciousness as the premier technology for the creation of a national public, now existed in the palpable tension between ―popular‖ and ―aesthetic‖ or ―industry‖ and ―genius.‖

Both authors found themselves caught in the complex netting which marked certain kinds of narratives—domestic, romantic, exotic, horrific—as external to the culturally-sanctioned realist novel. In this dissertation I have attempted to explain the social and literary conditions which rewrote the novel from public material to bourgeois form. The moral emphasis on writing ―realistically‖ adumbrated by Thackeray transformed Victorian aesthetics while also altering the discourse about discursive

222 reading and critiquing fiction. Both Stevenson and Oliphant, however, created textual rejoinders to the narrative I have described. By way of a conclusion, I want to offer a brief meditation on Stevenson‘s ―A Humble Remonstrance‖ (1884) and Oliphant‘s ―The

Library Window‖ (1895). These texts suggest ways that current scholars could continue the project of rupturing the historical weight of realism.

Stevenson famously wrote ―A Humble Remonstrance‖ as a rejoinder to the 1884

―Art of Fiction‖ debate between Walter Besant and Henry James. It is beyond the purpose of this conclusion to investigate the full debate, which Mark Spilka described as

―the first modern credo‖ of novelistic practice. But Walter Besant‘s lecture, the instigation for the debate, offers in miniature the larger themes of this dissertation.

Establishing the novel as an art form, he identifies Thackeray and Eliot as exemplary

―great masters,‖ stresses the historical realism of Dickens while downplaying his grotesque or melodramatic sides, and, most forcefully, argues that the successful technique of the English novel is indivisible from its moral function: ―the modern English novel, whatever form it takes, almost always starts with a conscious moral purpose‖ (29).

Placing this discussion in the section concerned with ―laws of construction,‖ Besant asserts that ―moral purpose…has become practically a law of English fiction‖ (29).

James‘s subtle, imaginative, and immensely influential response to Besant‘s lecture aimed to liberate the novel from both of these strictures. Again, it is beyond the scope of this essay to do justice to James‘s famous critique, but it founds the modernist aesthetics of the novel in the congruence between moral and aesthetic representation. James argues

223 that the two ―lie very near together‖ in that ―the deepest quality of the work of art will always be the mind of the producer‖ (83). But freeing the novel from the moral responsibility urged upon it by realism did not, however, mean leaving realism behind.

For James, as Mark Spilka claims, ―the ‗supreme virtue of a novel‘ was ‗to create an air of reality‘ through ‗solidity of specification,‘ an ‗illusion of life‘ through ‗truth of detail‘‖

(116). That is, while the fundamental moral project of the realist novel comes under critique, the aesthetic technique which embodied that project remains valorized. The true novel ―competes with life‖ (66).

Stevenson‘s intervention into the debate is challenging and perceptive. First, he reframes the terms of the debate, arguing that ―fiction‖ is ―an element which enters largely into all the arts except architecture‖ (214). More capacious than simply the stuff of the novel, Stevenson identifies fictionality as central to the aesthetic experience:

―Homer, Wordsworth, Phidias, Hogarth, and Salvini, all deal in fiction‖ (214). What

Besant and James are discussing, rather, is the ―art of fictitious narrative in prose.‖ This strategy is not mere hair-splitting on Stevenson‘s part. Instead, it is the modus operandi of the larger essay, for Stevenson constantly stresses the insufficiency of the part in relation to the whole. Just as Besant and James mistake ―fictitious narratives in prose‖ for ―fiction,‖ they similarly mistake a particularized representation of life for truth or life itself. In his central paragraphs, Stevenson ringingly deconstructs Jamesian aesthetics:

―The whole secret is that no art does ‗compete with life‘‖ (216). Rather than capturing lived experience, literature works by suppressing it, bringing into focus ―not the facts of

224 human destiny‖ but ―the emphasis and suppressions with which the human actor tells of them‖ (217). Against the ―monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant‖ experience of life, the novel functions like a geometric proof: ―Both are reasonable, both untrue to the crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither represents it‖ (217). Because lived experience exceeds aesthetics, no single aesthetic form could hope to capture it.

As an alternative, Stevenson, like Ainsworth, wants to formally reconceive the novel as a communal experience. ―The real art that dealt with life directly was that of the first men who told their stories around the savage camp-fire‖ (216), Stevenson claims, and like those story-tellers the novel should divest itself of overt truth-claims to focus on the telling, not ―capturing the lineaments of each fact‖ but ―marshalling all of them to a common end‖ (217). Unlike James‘s ideal artist, intent on capturing the life by peering into the dark crevices of the mind, Stevenson‘s shamanistic storyteller engages in literature as a public-making. Insofar as literature is mimetic, ―it imitates not life but speech‖ (217). Speech projects outwards. It anticipates not the individual reader but the community who are joined in its utterance and the public who are formed in its experience. For Stevenson, the attempt to compete with life doomed the novel to a solipsistic and hermetic project; only by acknowledging its ―significant simplicity,‖ that is, its inevitable inability to replicate real life, could the novel find an audience (218).

Oliphant, too, seemed to find the new novel isolating, as her strange, late period story ―The Library Window‖ suggests. In the story, set in the early years of Victoria‘s reign, a young girl becomes obsessed with the figure she sees through the college library

225 window across the street from her aunt‘s home. Or rather, with the portion of the figure she sees: from her vantage point, she can make out only ―the shoulders and the side of his head‖ as he sits writing ―a long long page which never wanted turning‖ (Oliphant Stories

305). The man‘s labor is unceasing. Night after night, the narrator watches him from her window as he writes tirelessly. More and more she grows attached to the figure until, in the climax, the figure recognizes her: ―at last he had found out that somebody, though only a girl, was watching him, looking for him, believing in him‖ (Oliphant Stories323).

Ultimately, however, she comes to discover that the scholar whose nightly efforts she watches is a ghost, a young man killed by her ancestors, jealous brothers of a flirtatious young woman. The story ends with the narrator in possession of a family heirloom, the diamond ring which was caused his death.

Tamar Heller argues that Oliphant‘s story may encode Gilbert and Gubar‘s

―anxiety of authorship‖ in its focus on unsatisfied (and unsatisfiable) female longing.

Like Braddon in The Doctor’s Wife, Oliphant‘s story demonstrates that male inability to satisfy female desire, on both a textual and sexual level, is cyclical and ever-present. The appearance of the scholar to the narrator is part of a larger historical tale of sexual desire.

The story is quite demure about it, but it is lightly suggested that this foundational narrative may be about class. The scholar, who ―liked his books more than any lady‘s love,‖ falls victim to the brothers of a ―light woman‖ who ―waved to him and waved to him to come over,‖ giving him the token of a diamond ring (328). The scholar‘s long hours at work contrast sharply with the extravagance of the narrator‘s ancestor, and the

226 imputation of a cross-class relationship helps explain the admittedly underdetermined and extreme actions of the brothers. His existence, then, is predicated on the narrator‘s desire, but rather than feeding on that desire, the scholar vanishes after being confronted with it.

Located at the junctures of gender, power, and class, Oliphant‘s story offers an ambiguous response to novels and writing. As Heller notes, the ―newly-sanctified hermetic zone of culture recalls the study‖ where the scholar works (24). His place in the tale is marked off, the site of cultural privilege. Not only is it inaccessible to the narrator despite her desire to enter it, it is out of reach of the other characters in the story. In fact, that ―hermetic zone‖ is revealed not to exist at all, or rather only as the occult survival of something archaic, outdated. Intruding into everyday reality, the text suggests that the kind of literary production the scholar represents is an abnormal rupture. The ghost is a liminal figure: both real and unreal, visible and invisible, it marks the transformation of the realist novel into a haunting presence.

Both Stevenson and Oliphant ask us to turn away from the sanctioned narrative of the realist novel at the end of the nineteenth century. Oliphant‘s tale points us towards the complicities of gender and desire in the construction of writing. The potent ambiguities which structure her tale of haunting reflect the conservativism that kept her at arm‘s length from the mass readership she both desired and feared. While her narrator cannot evacuate her desire for the hermetic zone of privilege, she can recognize it as a historically contingent fantasy. Writers as different as Vernon Lee, Edith Nesbit, and

Elizabeth Jane Howard would continue to investigate the historical breaks in the

227 patriarchal structure through the ghost story, recognizing the power of the irrational to situate the text within lived experience. Stevenson asks us to attune to the voice of the storyteller and the primordial function of narrative. That is, he asks us to reconceive the formal qualities of the social value of the novel not in its ability to represent but in its ability to enthrall. In seeing the novel as a public form, he looks backwards to the

Pickwick moment and the Ainsworthian romance. But he also looks forward: towards the public poetics that define the project of the imperial romance, and Ezra Pound‘s invocation of epic as ―the tale of the tribe.‖ Stevenson‘s final writings moved romance and history to the South Seas beach of Falesa. Those who followed the voice extended its reach, assembling a myth of the nation in the farthest corners of the imperial project and the deep stretches of antiquity. That the architects of Empire embraced the public- making potential of mass literature abroad while rejecting it at home is an irony of literary form.

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Jacob Charles Ptacek was born in Kansas and studied at Kansas State University and the University of Iowa before receiving his Master‘s Degree from the University of Texas at Austin. Apart from teaching, he has been an experimental musician, written film and music criticism for underground magazines in Kansas and Florida, and assisted in the production of several independent films. His interests outside of Victorian literature include hauntological pop, the history of comics, international ―trash‖ cinema, and writing an interminable novel.

Permanent email: [email protected]

This thesis was typed by Jacob Ptacek

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