Debating Difference in an Age of Reform: Liberal Praxis and Representation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain by Jenny Deborah Kohn A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2019 Doctoral Committee: Professor Lucy Hartley, Chair Professor Geoff Eley Professor Daniel HacK Professor Kerry Larson Professor Adela Pinch Jenny Deborah Kohn [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0002-2819-2070 © Jenny Deborah Kohn 2018 Acknowledgements This dissertation is a tangible representation of collective action. Thanks are due to the following people, without whom I would never have been able to complete this project. First and foremost, I thank my dissertation committee. Danny HacK generously supported my completion during a difficult semester. It is also thanks to him that the novel plays the role it does in this dissertation. Adela Pinch has been a mentor since I taught for her; I cannot now imagine any other introduction to the Michigan classroom than learning regency dance with one’s students. Anticipating Kerry Larson’s questions has inspired no small degree of terror throughout my graduate career; it has also made me a better, more rigorous scholar. Geoff Eley kindly agreed to use precious leave time to sit on my committee, and in so doing pushed me to genuinely interdisciplinary ways of thinking and questioning. Above all, I thank Lucy Hartley, Whose intellectual rigor and curiosity, careful thought and analysis, and generosity of time and spirit represent everything worthwhile about the academic endeavor, and whose mentorship has shaped my growth as a scholar and a teacher since my first semester at Michigan. Lucy, I could not have completed the dissertation without you, nor would I have wanted to. I am lucky to have had mentors beyond the committee. Thanks to Marjorie Levinson, for spirited conversation and modeling the kinds of intellectual commitments I aspire to make, and to Christina Lupton, for helping me shape my driving questions When I first began to conceive of this project. For material support, thanks to Hannah Westall at the Girton College Archives for assisting my research on the Langham Place Group, and to Alice Denton for hosting me in ii Cambridge (and for many years of friendship). To members and staff of GEO, past and present, for being the best example of collective action, and to Lisa Curtis and Denise Looker, for being an integral part of our work as teachers. I am deeply grateful for community in and beyond Ann Arbor. Thanks to my cohort in the English doctoral program, for improving my work, and life, throughout the years. To Dean Disher, Liz Roberts, and Neda Ulaby for the title of the dissertation. To Meredith Perry, Scout, Penny, and Bravo for taking me in during the final crucial semester, and Ames Healy for alWays being a home to come back to. To Cat Cassel for being an ideal reader and note taker, not to mention a true friend. To the netball ladies for becoming my family over the years, especially Laura Adams (my favourite attacker), Isabel English, Louise Jeffery, Ruth Hamilton, Elspeth Martini, Denise Quinn, and Sarah White. To the late Dalia Warner: you are missed. To Jude, Susan, and Sym Kohn for their constant support. And finally, to my family, Ghazaleh Koohestanian and Vita, for being everything. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... ii List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... iv Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... v Introduction The Meaning of Difference in Nineteenth-Century Liberal Thought ............... 1 The rationale ............................................................................................................................... 4 The methodology ...................................................................................................................... 19 The plan .................................................................................................................................... 23 Chapter One The Idea of Difference in Mill’s Conception of Liberal Equality ................... 26 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 26 Labor, empire, and naturalizing difference ............................................................................... 32 The feeling of difference: Individualism and the limits of autonomy ...................................... 49 Love and empiricism: Private feelings of a mass public .......................................................... 66 Chapter Two A “Woman’s Squabble” or Ideal Public Sphere? The Women of Langham Place ........................................................................................................................................... 107 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 107 Of members and mobilization ................................................................................................. 113 The place of women in public ................................................................................................. 123 The English Women’s Journal in the literary public sphere ................................................... 129 Incorporated aesthetics ............................................................................................................ 143 Democratic letters ................................................................................................................... 149 Incorporated form of the LPG ................................................................................................. 171 Chapter Three Aesthetic Liberalism: Election Novels of the 1860s ..................................... 197 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 197 Felix Holt, The Radical ........................................................................................................... 207 Miss Marjoribanks .................................................................................................................. 229 Phineas Finn ........................................................................................................................... 249 The politics of the novel ......................................................................................................... 261 Afterword .................................................................................................................................. 282 Presentism and Difference: Victorian Studies Now ............................................................... 285 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 292 iv List of Figures Figure 1: [Barbara Bodichon?]. “Ye neWe generation” (c. 1854). .............................................. 144 Figure 2: Vote Like a Black Woman .......................................................................................... 282 iv Abstract “Debating Difference in an Age of Reform: Liberal Praxis and Representation in mid- Nineteenth-Century Britain” explores the function of difference and the nature of equality in the Victorian period. Focusing on the 1850s and 1860s, the dissertation offers a distinctive account of liberal thought, organizing, and aesthetics at a key moment of historical transformation in British society. It identifies how the expansion of the citizenry and the public sphere of readers revealed the fact of difference and why difference challenged democratic ideals of equality. The central question is this: how did liberal thinkers, organizers, and writers navigate the contradiction betWeen equality’s unrealized promise and the actually-existing hierarchy of differences in which they lived? Scholarship on Victorian liberalism often prioritizes liberal over liberal action. This dissertation seeks to redress the imbalance by focusing on the strategies and forms of representation that evolved in order to accommodate neW sets of people as political actors. The first chapter sets the parameters of liberal thought by presenting an analysis of the way J. S. Mill’s conception of difference informed his political practice. I argue that in his political speeches, “The Negro Question” (1850), On Liberty (1859), and The Subjection of Women (1869) Mill’s empirical uncertainty about the cause of difference – Whether it was natural or socially constructed – underpins the liberal equality that he worked to bring about throughout his political career. The second chapter turns to an account of the way that difference structured the organizing work of the feminist collective known as the Langham Place group. My analysis of v the group’s letters and articles from their mouthpiece, the English Woman’s Journal (1858- 1864), shows how the group represented an attempt to expand the democratic public sphere through the production of difference as the basis for forging collective bonds. The third