Introduction
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Notes Introduction 1. These definitions are drawn from Neal Riemer and Douglas Simon, The New World of Politics: An Introduction to Political Science, 4th edn (Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997) 3. Chantal Mouffe sees the political as an essentially antagonistic process involving contending collective identifica- tions. See esp. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). 2. Michael Sadleir, Blessington D’Orsay: A Masquerade (London: Constable, 1947) 189. I have drawn the biographical details in this discussion primarily from Sadleir’s study. 3. He inherited his mother’s estate, Knebworth, and her maiden name, Lytton, upon her death in 1844. I will use ‘Bulwer’ when I am referring solely to his pre-1844 activities. 4. Sadleir, Blessington 220. 5. Sadleir, Blessington 190. 6. Sadleir, Blessington 191–193. 7. Virg inia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1928; London: Penguin, 1967) 66. 8. Dorothy Mermin, Godiva’s Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830–1880 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993) 17, xvii, and see Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: OUP, 1987). 9. ‘[If] by aristocracy, those persons are meant ... who seek honours without merit, places without duty, and pensions without service ... the sooner it is carried away with the corruption on which it has thriven, the better.’ Lord John Russell, quoted Edward Pearce, Reform! The Fight for the 1832 Reform Act (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003) 76. 10. See Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles (London: Cresset Library, 1973). 11. See Isobel Armstrong, ‘Msrepresentation: Codes of Affect and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry’, in Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (eds) Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian (New York: Macmillan, 1999) 3–32; Harriet Kramer Linkin and Stephen C. Behrendt (eds) Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999); Anne Mellor, ‘The Female Poet and the Poetess: Two Traditions of British Women’s Poetry, 1780–1830’, Studies in Romanticism 36 (1997): 261–276. 12. J.V. Beckett, The Aristocracy in England, 1660–1914 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) 16–22. 13. See N.P. Willis, Evening Mirror (11 November 1844): 2/1 and Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? (1864–1865; Oxford: OUP, 1973) 1. 14. Lawrence Stone and Jeanne Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540–1880, abr. edn (Oxford and New York: OUP, 1986) 3. 184 Notes 185 15. This is a central tenet of David Cannadine, Class in Britain (London: Penguin, 2000). 16. See Francis O’Gorman and Katherine Turner (eds) The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 17. See Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall (eds) Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 18. Peter Mandler, ‘Namier in Petticoats?’, review of Aristocratic Women and Political Society, by K.D. Reynolds, Reviews in History (February 1999) 3, Institute of Historical Research http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/paper/ mandler.html, accessed 30 June 2008. 19. See Beckett, The Aristocracy in England; Norman Gash, Reaction and Reconstruction in English Politics, 1832–1852 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965); D.C. Moore, The Politics of Deference: A Study of the Mid-Nineteenth Century English Political System (New York: Harvester, 1976). See also Frank O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political and Social History 1688–1831 (London: Arnold, 1997) 368–371. 20. Hall, McClelland and Rendall, ‘Introduction’, in Hall et al. (eds) Defining the Victorian Nation 10. 21. David Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994) 10. 22. Davidoff, Best Circles 33–34. 23. See Anne Summers, ‘A Home from Home – Women’s Philanthropic Work in the Nineteenth Century’, in Sandra Burman (ed.) Fit Work for Women (London: Croom Helm, 1979) 33–63; F.K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in 19th Century England (Oxford: OUP, 1980); Marjorie Morgan, Manners, Morals and Class in England, 1774–1858 (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1994) 40–42. 24. K.D. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) 118–119. 25. Peter Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830–1852 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) 35. Mandler uses ‘whigs’ and ‘Whigs’ to distinguish between the individuals and ideals concerned and the party identity. 26. Mandler, Aristocratic Government 2–3. 27. Mandler, Aristocratic Government 42. 28. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women 153. 29. Catherine Hall, ‘Private Persons versus Public Someones: Class, Gender and Politics in England 1780–1850’, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity, 1992) 151–171. See also Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson, ‘Introduction’, in Gleadle and Richardson (eds) Women in British Politics, 1760–1860: The Power of the Petticoat (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 2000) 20 and Amanda Vickery, ‘Introduction’ in Vickery (ed.) Women, Privilege and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) 14–15. 30. Peter Mandler, ‘From Almack’s to Willis’s: Aristocratic Women and Politics, 1815–1867’, Vickery (ed.) Women, Privilege and Power 157. 186 Notes 31. Catherine Hall, ‘The Rule of Difference: Gender, Class and Empire in the Making of the 1832 Reform Act’, in Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann and Catherine Hall (eds) Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000) 125, 127. 32. Davidoff, Best Circles 15, and see 15–17 for a general discussion of the threats posed by new social mobility. 33. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women 136–143. 34. James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. 48–104. 35. See esp. Stefan Collini, Donald Winch and John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: CUP, 1983); Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930 (Oxford: OUP, 1991). 36. See Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working- Class History 1832–1982 (Cambridge: CUP, 1983); Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: CUP, 1994); Vernon, Politics and the People. 37. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 38. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edn, intro by Margaret Canovan (1958; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) 52. 39. Arendt, The Human Condition 35. 40. Arendt, The Human Condition 28. 41. Patrick Joyce (ed.) Class, Oxford Readers (Oxford: OUP, 1995) 183–184. 42. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (1962; London: Polity Press, 1989). 43. Joyce, Class 183. 44. Joan B. Landes, ‘The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration’, in Landes (ed.) Feminism, the Public and the Private (Oxford and New York: OUP, 1998) 141, and see Geoff Eley, ‘Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992) 289–339. See also Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). 45. Calhoun, ‘Introduction’, in Habermas 3. 46. Denise Riley, ‘Am I that Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (London: Macmillan, 1988), rpr. Joyce, Class 226. 47. Riley, ‘Am I that Name?’ 227. 48. Riley, ‘Am I that Name?’ 228. 49. Seyla Benhabib, ‘Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas’, in Landes, Feminism 87. 50. Denise Riley, The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) 7. 51. Seyla Benhabib, ‘The Personal is not the Political’, Boston Review (October– November 1999) v. 52. Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002) 8. 53. Benhabib, Claims of Culture 15. Notes 187 1 Aristocratic Lives: Life-Writing, Class and Authority 1. Laura Marcus, ‘The Face of Autobiography’, in Julia Swindells (ed.) The Uses of Autobiography (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995) 15. 2. Marcus, ‘The Face of Autobiography’ 15. 3. Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth Century England (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) 223. 4. Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject xii; Alison Booth, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) 4. 5. Linda Peterson, Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Politics and Poetics of Life Writing (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999), and see Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self- Representation in Britain, 1832–1920 (New York and Oxford: OUP, 1991). 6. Peterson, Traditions 1–42. 7. For women’s uneasy relationship with the spiritual autobiography’s inter- pretative structures, see Linda Peterson, Victorian