Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)

VICTORIAN WRITING ABOUT RISK: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World

ELAINE FREEDGOOD

Cambridge University Press

In Victorian Writing about Risk, Elaine Freedgood explores the geography of risk produced by a wide spectrum of once-popular literature, including works on political economy, sanitary reform, balloon flight, Alpine mountaineering and African exploration. The consolations offered by this geography of risk are precariously predicated on the stability of dominant Victorian definitions of people and places. Women, men, the laboring and middle classes, the English and the Irish, Africa and Africans: all have assigned identities that allow risk to be located and contained. When identities shift and boundaries fail, danger and safety begin to appear in all the wrong places. The texts that this study focuses on reveal the ways in which risk moralizes and naturalizes the economic and political institutions of industrial, imperial culture during a period of unprecedented expansion and change.   is Assistant Professor in English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in Victorian Studies, Genders and Nineteenth-Century Contexts.

This page intentionally left blank

                                                General editor Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge Editorial board Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck College, London Terry Eagleton, University of Oxford Leonore Davidoff, University of Essex Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley D. A. Miller, Columbia University J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine Mary Poovey, New York University Elaine Showalter, Princeton University Nineteenth-century British literature and culture have been rich fields for interdisciplinary studies. Since the turn of the twentieth century, scholars and critics have tracked the intersections and tensions between Victorian literature and the visual arts, politics, social organization, economic life, technical innovations, scientific thought – in short, culture in its broadest sense. In recent years, theoretical challenges and historiographical shifts have unsettled the assumptions of previous scholarly syntheses and called into question the terms of older debates. Whereas the tendency in much past literary critical interpretation was to use the metaphor of culture as “background,” feminist, Foucauldian, and other analyses have employed more dynamic models that raise questions of power and of circulation. Such developments have reanimated the field. This series aims to accommodate and promote the most interesting work being undertaken on the frontiers of the field of nineteenth-century literary studies: work which intersects fruitfully with other fields of study such as history, literary theory or the history of science. Comparative as well as interdisciplinary approaches are welcomed. A complete list of titles published will be found at the end of the book.

This page intentionally left blank

                                                V I C TO R I A N W R I T I N G A B O U T R I S K

For Debra Roth

V IC TO RI AN W R I T I N G A BO UT R I S K Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World

ELAINE FREEDGOOD Department of English, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

PUBLISHED BY CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS (VIRTUAL PUBLISHING) FOR AND ON BEHALF OF THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia http://www.cambridge.org © Elaine Freedgood 2001 This edition © Elaine Freedgood 2003 First published in printed format 2001

A catalogue record for the original printed book is available from the British Library and from the Library of Congress Original ISBN 0 521 78108 6 hardback

ISBN 0 511 01012 5 virtual (netLibrary Edition)

Contents

page x xi

List of illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: the practice of paradise



 Banishing panic: J. R. McCulloch, Harriet Martineau and the popularization of political economy



 The rhetoric of visible hands: Edwin Chadwick, Florence Nightingale and the popularization of sanitary reform



 Groundless optimism: regression in the service of the ego, England and empire in Victorian ballooning memoirs



 The uses of pain: cultural masochism and the colonization of the future in Victorian mountaineering memoirs



 A field for enterprise: the memoirs of David Livingstone and Mary Kingsley

 

Conclusion

  

Notes Bibliography Index

ix

Illustrations

 “Abstract of the total quantity of White Herrings Cured, Branded for Bounty, and Exported, in so far as the same have been brought under the Cognizance of the Officers of the Fishery, form the th of April, , distinguishing each Year, and the herrings Cured Gutted form those Cured Ungutted.” From J. R. McCulloch, A Descriptive and Statistical Account of the British Empire (). page   “The moon shines forth with peculiar brilliancy.” From James Glaisher, Travels in the Air ().   “We saw a toe – it seemed to belong to Moore – we see Raynaud a flying body.” From Edward Whymper, Scrambles Amongst the Alps ().   “Dr Livingstone’s escape from the lion.” From John S. Roberts, The Life and Explorations of David Livingstone, LL.D. (). 

Acknowledgments

This book began as a dissertation under the direction of Steven Marcus, Edward Said and Gauri Viswanathan in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. These three exceptional scholars and mentors exemplify a standard of thought that I will always aspire to achieve. I am deeply grateful to them; this book exists because of their efforts and the efforts that they inspired. Siobhan Kilfeather and Susan Winnett taught me new ways to read, research and write in my first years of graduate study; they also offered me their friendship and support at crucial moments. Priscilla Wald’s compassion for her students and devotion to their intellectual training made a profound difference to me. An Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation gave me substantial financial support, as did several President’s Fellowships from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University. Many friends generously read various chapters: John Austin, Adrienne Donald, Monica Feinberg Cohen, Sherry Wolf, and Elizabeth Young in particular provided wonderful help. Donald Grey and an anonymous reader at Victorian Studies provided excellent guidance on a portion of what is now the first chapter; a reader for Nineteenth-Century Contexts helped me to improve the third chapter. I thank Victorian Studies, Indiana University Press and Nineteenth-Century Contexts for permission to reprint this material. Deirdre David and Kate Flint read the manuscript for Cambridge University Press; their insights, judgments, and reservations helped me enormously in the revision process. Linda Bree has been a patient and efficient editor, and I wish to thank Susannah Commings for her copy-editing. My colleague and friend Erin O’Connor read the entire manuscript; her considerable knowledge, acuity and generosity made this a better book than it would otherwise have been. All remaining mistakes and infelicities are of course my own. The University of Pennsylvania’s Department of English is a great xi

xii

Acknowledgments

place to work and I am happy to have finished this project there. For their friendship and support I’d like to thank especially Nina Auerbach, David DeLaura, Christopher Looby and David Wallace. To my deeply kind and long-suffering friends I owe debts that it will please me to try to repay: Gina Dent, Elaine McNulty and Gauri Viswanathan (again) have my permanent thanks. Phyllis Cohen helped me to turn many corners during the writing of this book and is thus an intrinsic part of it. I have thought of my brother, sister, and father often during the writing of this work, and of my nephews Misha and Alexander as well; I wish to remember them all here. My mother, Maurine Stuart, taught me to love reading and writing; I hope that if she had lived to see this book she would have been proud of it. Debra Roth continually provides what the Spinners defined some years ago as a “mighty love.” She has read every word of the text at least once and she has helped me to think about all of its ideas at least twice. Like its author, this book is dedicated to her.

Introduction: the practice of paradise

“The gate to paradise remains sealed by the term risk.” Niklas Luhmann, Risk

“. . . theirs is the hunger for paradise.” H. D., “The Flowering of the Rod”

This book is about a massive, disorganized and highly successful Victorian cultural enterprise: the textual construction of a safe England in a dangerous world between  and . Beginning in the s, a diverse group of writers labored to help the first victims and beneficiaries of industrialization imagine that danger could be banished from the domestic scene and relocated in the world outside British borders. Careful representations of the precise locations of safety and danger – in such diverse texts as statistical analyses of the British empire, handbooks of hospital reform, memoirs of balloon aeronauts, travelogues of Alpine mountaineers, and ethnographic studies of Africa – suggested that risk could be either avoided altogether (in England) or engaged voluntarily in the dangerous world beyond it. The attempt to resolve risk geographically ignores the most salient feature of risk: that it is by definition a temporal problem; it exists only and always as a possibility, a future contingency.1 A geographical solution obscures the impossibility of banishing risk. This form of risk management thus involves the colonization of time: danger would seem to be plucked out of its hiding place in the invisible reaches of the future and brought into the present, to be experienced, survived and thus eradicated. The idea that risk could be written into, and out of, specific places provided powerful consolation, I will argue, for the inhabitants of the tumultuous Victorian moment of modernity. Two key claims – one theoretical, one textual – motivate my discussion of Victorian risk. I make my first claim against the grain of many contemporary theorists to whom I am greatly indebted, including Anthony 



Introduction

Giddens, Niklas Luhmann and Marshall Berman, who hold that modernity is characterized by an unprecedented acceptance of the permanence of risk. I argue that the “modern” attitude to risk is distinguished from past attitudes more by its strategies of containment than by a new acceptance of the inevitability of risk. I call these strategies “modern cosmologies” because they proffer large-scale consolation and reassurance. Traditional cosmologies are usually theological in their origins; they are enduring and their focus is as large as the universe itself. Modern cosmologies, on the other hand, I define as structures of containment that attempt to offer totalizing explanations of a part of the world. The modern cosmologies I discuss in this book include, in the first chapter, early Victorian laissez-faire economics and in the second, mid-Victorian anticontagionist theories of disease transmission. In the third chapter, balloon aeronauts find a place of predictable serenity in the unlikely venue of the “upper air.” These frequent fliers represent the possibility that a dangerous circumstance might also be a pleasurable and indeed a tranquil one and a cosmology is born of the surprising security these travelers repeatedly recount. Similarly mountaineers, whose memoirs are the focus of the fourth chapter, intimate that scaling potentially fatal peaks provides an extraordinary sense of safety: climbers seem to inoculate themselves against the contingencies of the future by engaging danger voluntarily in the present. Finally, Victorian explorers of Africa delineate danger in precisely mapped locations in their narratives; they also find places and peoples who offer them unprecedented experiences of safety and serenity. The immemorially dangerous continent is “opened up” in such mixed representations: travel and trade, for example, become increasingly feasible. The dangerous world is paradoxically rendered safer in the precise definitions of danger offered by these writers. As a consequence of these representations, I came to analyze the implications and consequences of what I see as misunderstandings of modernity: the idea that modernity is characterized by an acceptance of the inevitability of risk denies the endurance and flexibility of cosmological thinking within it. If cosmologies go unremarked in modernity, as they typically have, then so do their frequently dire consequences, particularly for those people and places onto which the burden of being dangerous is displaced. Africa, the Alps and Ireland have all suffered this fate for centuries now, with profound political, economic and ecological consequences. The textual claim I make has to do with the value of ephemera in literary, cultural and historical study. Modern cosmologies find their home

Introduction



in ephemeral texts because these cosmologies must be so tightly focused and highly disposable. Like the ephemeral texts that house them, modern cosmologies are always ready to give up their cultural place to new and more useful cosmologies, which are in turn doomed to rapid supercession. Because of their disposability, the conflicts of the political unconscious can be symbolized with particular éclat in these texts. In Jameson’s description, the political unconscious is revealed when a work “insistently direct[s] us to the informing power of forces or contradictions which the text seeks in vain to wholly control or master . . .”2 The texts of this study, by economists, sanitarians, balloonists, mountaineers, and explorers, tend to have the “forces and contradictions” that they seek to master very close to the surface. They lack the stuff of “greatness”: they are topical, unashamedly prescriptive, and their ideological efforts often place them on the verge of breaking into a serious rhetorical sweat. I argue that ephemeral texts work like short-acting drugs in that they take effect quickly but also wear off quickly – both in terms of the effect they have on their individual readers and in their historical reach. Thus their endurance is brief and their assigned value negligible. But the cultural work these texts perform is neither brief nor negligible. Ephemeral texts circulate modern cosmologies at the margins of culture, telling stories and mapping risks in ways that paradoxically and powerfully contradict and complement dominant ideologies, giving them a flexibility and agility they would not otherwise enjoy. The short-acting text provides immediate relief for the problems it raises: J. R. McCulloch, for example, underwrites the unregulated, industrialized market with statistics that suggest that England is possessed of inexhaustible supplies of resources. His work thus stands in significant (although entirely unacknowledged) opposition to the theories of Malthus and Ricardo. McCulloch’s work provided a necessary relief from the substantial gloom imposed by the enduring economic writings of the century. Edwin Chadwick and Florence Nightingale promised that national cleanliness would eradicate disease, dissent and disorder: their conclusions were delightful to a reading public living in terror of cholera, typhoid, typhus, and smallpox as well as reform and revolution. Eventually the contagionist theories Chadwick and Nightingale opposed (and which were particularly terrifying in their implications for an increasingly urban nation participating in an increasingly global economy) did win the day and the nostrums of these two self-styled experts faded quickly. The relief offered by McCulloch, Chadwick and Nightingale was fleeting because it was not rooted either



Introduction

in reality, or in the representations of it that received, and continue to receive, the imprimatur of the “realistic” – in the literary, scientific and political senses of the term. All senses of the term evict (again and again) the utopian impulse, the hunger for paradise that haunts modernity and perhaps also guarantees its survival. The brief consolations of short-acting texts are powerful, but they must be supplemented by the longer-acting effects of those works – literary, economic, historical, and so on – that have endured and become the canonical texts of various disciplines and specialties. “Longeracting” texts, like Ricardo’s economic writings or the novels of Dickens, for example, produce a more enduring relief of cultural anxiety – both in the psyches of their original readers and historically, in the collective psyche of a few centuries of readers around the world. Their long psychic and cultural shelf life is related to the ability of these texts to slowly assuage anxiety at the time of their publication, and to continue to assuage it, even as anxieties shift and change, for subsequent readers in later periods. Oddly enough, these more canonical writers raise substantial anxiety. They then give their readers time, in the form of many dense pages, to learn how to tolerate this heightened anxiety, and then provide for the incomplete – what we have come to think of as the “realistic” – resolution of the conflicts they address. Ricardo, for example, admits that machinery is indeed bad for the laboring class in that it causes unemployment, but he insists that such unemployment must be tolerated if Britain is to remain competitive in world markets. In novel after novel, Dickens criticizes the dehumanizing effects of industrialization in a fiercely negative dialectic, offering his readers little in the way of consolation. Characters from Dombey to Little Dorrit to Pip to John Harmon must lose much before they can gain, and their gains are hauntingly attenuated, both by their belatedness and by their relative scantiness. Paradoxically, the remainders of unease and even of conflict in these works make for more effective, and enduring, anxiety relief because such remainders conform to literary and social conventions that came, in the nineteenth century, to govern our sense of what is realistic about the “real.” The Victorian sense of the real, like Hegel’s idea of history, comes to be identified with that which hurts;3 its pains cannot be fully resolved outside the realm of fantasy or utopia. At the same time, the practice of paradise must be preserved in the culture of realism lest the human condition prescribed therein become entirely unbearable. In The Afterlife of Property, Jeff Nunokawa describes Dickens and Eliot

Introduction



as having created in their fictions “threats and pleasures that . . . are as much our own as they are the Victorians’ who prepared them for us, and us for them.”4 The enduring texts of the nineteenth century created and continue to create their readers: they form us through their forms, through their very length, in the difficulty of their sentences, in the convolutions of their plots. The enduring text makes its readers endure its exigencies, and rewards the labor of steadfast readers with a sense that their effort has earned them a portion of serenity. The reader has witnessed and indeed participated in the representation of a world that would seem to have grown hopelessly complex and beyond the scope of human understanding. These works enact some necessary drama by virtue of their very existence. They reveal to us, in all of their difficulty and density, no matter how painfully or alarmingly, that there are writers who can actually understand and then re-present for us how some part of the world works and, as importantly, how parts of it don’t work at all. The consolation is in the very fact of representation; it is in the ability of the economist or novelist to apprehend and then capture the mechanics of the real between the covers of a book. Whether or not all readers can understand these works is also secondary: few readers could fully understand Ricardo’s descriptions of rents and taxes, and many readers (and not a few authors) probably lost at least some of the threads of huge novels that were serialized over a year or more. The point is that “realistic” works, just by being there, as it were, console their readers and nonreaders alike with the very fact that such massive representation could be accomplished. Enduring and ephemeral works exist not in discrete and lasting categorical slots, but along a fluctuating continuum. In the middle of a Victorian continuum of such works we might place the industrial or social problem novels. The texts that I focus on in this study are more decisively non-literary than is this intermediate group of works. This group of texts, Josephine Guy points out, has been read by critics – from Louis Cazamian in The Social Novel in England of  to Catherine Gallagher in The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction of  – as “in some way flawed . . . they are marked by incoherence and contradiction and . . . they possess fundamental weaknesses of plot and characterization.”5 These novels fail in what Chris Baldick has identified as the Arnoldian project of replacing “dogmatic and explicit forms of ideological experience with the implicit and intuitive forms of literary sensibility.”6 Industrial novels typically treat the market as an evil for which individual relationships and the comforts of the private sphere are



Introduction

proffered – however problematically – as a palliative or a cure.7 Unlike the more ephemeral works of McCulloch and Martineau that deal with similar issues, the public sphere in these novels is hopelessly and even tragically troubled. Although deeply topical and political, these novels still struggle to find literary solutions, often causing various sub-genres of the novel to clash and crowd one another in a formal jostling that results in acute literary failure. In more canonical works, the problems of the public sphere – of the market, of business, of empire – are represented with considerably less specificity. Guy contends that “[w]here Hard Times differs from, say, Our Mutual Friend or Little Dorrit is that an obsession with commerce is used to trope not archetypal themes of greed and corruption, but a specific dissatisfaction with contemporary ways of thinking about social life.”8 Kathleen Tillotson, in her classic study of the industrial novel, has pointed out a formal difference between the highly topical, specific, and therefore “flawed” nature of industrial novels in comparison to a more “literary” novel like Dombey and Son: The social criticism of Dombey and Son cannot be abstracted from the novel, and even such disengaging as is attempted here perhaps distorts it. It is pervasive, unformulated; not documentary in its origin or usefulness; no purposeful journeys or reading of newspaper reports lie behind it, and it is not a convenient source for social historians. Partly for this reason, that it is inseparable, it assists instead of disturbing the firm unity of the design.9

Social criticism cannot be formulated with any specificity in Dombey and Son: such documentation would generically disrupt the literariness of the novel – what Tillotson describes as “the firm unity of the design.” “Great” literature is about the human condition generally; indeed I would argue that it invents that condition for us so that we can understand and acquiesce to the limitations imposed on us by it. Ephemeral works provide relief from the permanence and inscrutability of this condition. They keep the possibility of paradise alive by refusing the formal, emotional, and intellectual constraints imposed by the Victorian redefinition of the “literary.” The disciplinary reach of this “reformation,” including the invention and policing of specific desires achieved by the novel, has been brilliantly described in the work of Catherine Gallagher, D. A. Miller and Nancy Armstrong.10 This does not mean that I find in these texts the possibility of subversion; indeed, it seems that paradise is the term that secretly indemnifies bourgeois culture. We imagine and re-imagine it, writing and reading about it as if, like the fateful combination that wins the lottery, we might get it just right and

Introduction



therefore make it just real enough to happen. Official culture dismisses and denies the importance of the practice of paradise in modern cosmological construction. This book tries to bring the Victorian practice of paradise into dialogue with the more enduring projects of that culture, a culture that continues to inhabit us, especially where we are most blind to our inheritance of it. J. R. McCulloch, in his Statistical Account of the British Empire (), and Harriet Martineau, in her Illustrations of Political Economy (–), use charts, tables, numbers and narratives to reassure their readers that England is in the safe keeping of both a deity who is providing abundant natural resources, and the invisible hand of the market, which is always working toward an equilibrium of “natural” prices and wages. Laissezfaire capitalism becomes a cosmology in their works, a structure of laws that guarantees the stability of the future. The utopian, and uneasy, over-reaching of these widely read works may have produced rapid relief, but such relief could not last because it was so obviously not rooted in the social realities these texts were attempting to explain to their apprehensive readers. Indeed, the ways in which these texts rush to reassure their readers suggests the complexity and the depth of the economic anxieties they sought to relieve. In contrast, texts of sanitary reform like Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain () and Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Hospitals () and Notes on Nursing () foreground, rather than deny, serious problems within England. Filth in all of its forms is the principal evil facing England: the nation must clean itself up. The passive rhetoric of the invisible hand is replaced with the active rhetoric of many highly visible hands. These works offer straightforward and immediate solutions to the problems they describe, thus containing the threats they acknowledge. The laws of anticontagionism replace those of laissez faire as a cosmology, one that promises individual and national health, of both a physical and political kind. When anxiety is not assuaged, it can also be exported in large quantities to the world above and outside England. In Victorian ballooning memoirs, including James Glaisher’s Travels in the Air () and Henry Coxwell’s My Life and Balloon Experiences (), the aeronaut exemplifies the liberal idea of the individual as one who can reject at will the limits and limitations of the group. While the combined effects of cosmologyand bureaucracy-building in this period threatened to homogenize English subjects and rationalize the structure of society too tidily, the



Introduction

combination of jaunty lightheartedness and serious risk in an activity like ballooning helped to preserve the precious and necessary idea of the liberal, liberated individual. This individual departs from the collective, but in so doing enriches it with his or her exploits, enacting the model of innovation necessary to the growth and development of industrial, imperial economies. The scandal of ballooning memoirs is that the risks of flight turn out to be so pleasurable that they threaten to undermine the risk–reward ratio of laissez faire: balloon travelers reveal the possibility that risk may be its own reward. The mountaineering memoirs I discuss, including those of Edward Whymper, Amelia Edwards and Leslie Stephen, chronicle the physical and mental toughness required to survive climbing, and falling, in the Alps. Both mountain climbing and the act of reading about it represent an enactment of what I call cultural masochism, a way of colonizing the future. Future threats (risks) are brought into the present in the form of the discomfort and danger of climbing and, ideally, they are survived, and thus neutralized. Mountain climbers, as well as the many readers of their memoirs, could experience – at first or second hand – the survival of risk and thus feel as though they had participated in the removal of a quantum of danger from the world. David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa () and Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa () locate safety in an unlikely place. Although both authors dutifully terrify their readers with thrilling tales of the “Dark Continent,” at the same time they disturb Victorian stereotypes of Africa as a place of Conradian “horror,” recounting peaceful and enjoyable encounters with the peoples and the landscape of Africa. (I have chosen Africa as the superlatively dangerous imperial locale: by the mid-nineteenth century, the Caribbean, Australia and the Indian subcontinent were, although still viewed as dangerous, at least partly domesticated through long colonization.) Their sense of comfort in Africa is problematically related to Victorian racial theories, which provided both writers with a newfound sense of superiority. Livingstone rose above the stigma of his laboring class origins and Kingsley escaped the constraints of gender through ideas of racial superiority that gave both writers a sense of authority not available to them in Britain. In spite of this problematic sense of their own power, their memoirs nonetheless rewrite “Africa” in important ways and they disturb many commonsense ideas about the provenance of feelings of safety and danger. The ability of Britons to face and to survive danger – from the scaling

Introduction



of the Matterhorn to the sailing of the Niger – became part of a new British self-conception based on a complex moralizing of the profits of industry and empire. Risk, as described by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, becomes, in bourgeois economics, “a moral excuse for profit.” In Weber’s description, a “fortunate person is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate. Beyond this, he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune . . . Good fortune thus wants to be ‘legitimate’ fortune.”11 For risk to succeed in its role as a legitimator of profit or fortune, it must be represented in contradictory but finally complementary ways: risks of various kinds must be encouraged as pleasurable and profitable activities or else economic and imperial expansion would stagnate; at the same time, risk must be represented as painful so that its rewards can be morally justified. Risk was continually constructed and reconstructed to evoke a usefully mutating array of attitudes. The necessary complications of a concept like risk must be worked out at many locations within culture, from the center where canonical texts reside to the margins where texts circulate briefly but powerfully. The scheme of a safe England in a dangerous world also falters continually. The consolations of this geography of risk are precariously predicated on the stability of dominant Victorian definitions of people and places: women, men, the laboring and middle classes, the English and the Irish, the Alps and Alpine peasants, Africa and Africans – each has an assigned identity to which they must hold if dominant ideologies are to remain coherent. When identities shift and boundaries fail, danger and safety begin to appear in all the wrong places. At such moments, these texts threaten to expose how cultural deployments of risk are used to moralize and naturalize the economic and political institutions of industrial, imperial culture. They also reveal how acutely Britain needs the outside world – for resources, markets, as well as for physical and psychological space – and so at least parts of the world outside British borders must eventually be represented as safe. Similarly, the idyll of a safe England is contaminated by the very data used to construct it by apologists and reformers: the unprecedented dissemination of information that began in the s provided British readers with distressing as well as reassuring information about the state of the nation. But these texts finally do more than disturb the neat geographical logic they initially supply. Perceptions of safety and danger are revealed, again and again – in representations of factories, of Alpine crevasses, of the upper air, of the slums and sewers of towns great and small, of the



Introduction

Kalahari Desert and the swamps of the Cameroons – to be irredeemably subjective, idiosyncratic and difficult to predict or explain. A collective and reliable sense of security is far more difficult to achieve than was assumed by such early risk analysts as William Farr, the first secretary to the General Registrar’s Office and a major Victorian statistician, who believed that “knowledge would banish panic.”12 Farr accordingly encouraged the publication and distribution of the masses of facts his office so enthusiastically collected.13 But it becomes clear that knowledge does not always banish panic: the writings discussed in this study and current work on risk-perception both suggest that knowledge of safety is not necessarily connected to feelings of safety. Balloon travelers, for example, routinely report feeling the most safe once they leave the solidity of the earth; in a recent study two risk analysts assert that “knowledge and perceptual accuracy bear only weak (that is statistically insignificant) relations to . . . perceived risks.”14 Danger cannot be located and quarantined in reassuringly predictable circumstances and knowledge cannot reliably produce psychic security. Nonetheless, the project of locating and thereby containing risk continues, and indeed flourishes, in the early twenty-first century. Sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, anthropologists, epidemiologists, policy and business analysts, actuaries, physicians and attorneys have produced a voluminous literature on risk management, perception, assessment and reduction. As these specialists labor to analyze and neutralize risk, new risk-takers continuously arrive on the scene, to participate in nineteenth-century practices such as mountain climbing and ballooning, as well as in new modes of apparently profitless risk taking, from the bungee-jumping of the s to the extreme sports of the present. Feats of daring continue to command attention and admiration, as well as to offer their audiences obscure but apparently powerful consolations for the dangers of a world in which humanly made risks have outpaced and outsized those of the nineteenth century many times over. Much work might be done on the perils of such diverse sources of risk as nuclear power plants, unsafe sex, recombinant DNA technology, air traffic control procedures, drug trafficking, and on the ways in which these activities – and their various representations – frighten and console their audiences in the precise ratios that make for the formation of modern cosmologies. There are also contemporary works on risk that seem to refuse to be cosmological: they insist on the inevitable persistence of risk. A recent study of perceptions of risk in technology, for example, emphasizes the

Introduction



obvious but always elusive point that risk can only be projected or assessed, it can never be measured: policy analyst Leroy C. Gould and his co-authors suggest that “when a risk-manager . . . provides numerical estimates of risk that look too precise to be true, they probably are.”15 Anyone who suggests that future dangers can be measured cannot be believed, and therefore Gould and his co-authors refuse to endorse the consolation and relief such measurements might afford their readers. Other analysts go much further in their refusal to reassure: Aaron Wildavsky, in a discussion of nuclear reactor safety, points out that the “Chernobyl accident was the result of on-line testing. The testing was part of an effort to increase reactor safety by providing yet another source of emergency power-turbine momentum combined with existing steam.”16 Contrary to commonsense assumptions about safety, Wildavsky goes on to argue that “[a]dding new safety devices and procedures is no guarantee of increased safety. Operational safety is not merely additive or linear, but highly conditional and contingent.”17 Safety cannot be predicted; it is as contingent as danger, as difficult to locate or stabilize and impossible to produce on demand. This solidly antiprogressive view of risk-management offers little in the way of consolation, and indeed promotes little in the way of government regulation or corporate responsibility; its interest is that, unlike more progressive ideas about risk-management, it refuses to provide a cosmology. The problematic refusal to locate risk merits consideration because it avoids the damage that can result from the inevitable endangering of those practices, people, neighborhoods, nations or continents that are labeled as dangerous. Nonetheless, engaging in, representing and theorizing risk are, in my view, always cosmological projects. Work on risk is always aimed – symbolically or materially – at increasing safety and reducing danger. Whether a theorist argues that risk can or cannot be eliminated, whether a risk-taker inspires fear or confidence, the hope is always, as Wildavsky’s title – Searching for Safety – suggests, for ever-greater security. To return to my epigraph from Luhmann’s study of risk: the “gate to paradise remains sealed by the term risk.”18 Cultural productions on risk are always working, separately and together, to unseal this gate. The task, as I see it, is to unveil modern cosmologies – and their often invidious structures of consolation – as they appear, and disappear, in works that are popular and ephemeral, as well as in those that have become the canonical works of professional specialties and academic disciplines. Scrutiny of the division of labor among these seemingly unrelated cultural works



Introduction

might provide new ways of understanding the conflicts and anxieties of particular historical moments. But the largest argument of this resolutely historicist book is a polemically transhistorical one. It is that the dangerous world is always our dwelling, no matter when, where, and even how we live: the consequences of imagining otherwise will always have to be understood.

 

Banishing panic: J. R. McCulloch, Harriet Martineau and the popularization of political economy

In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, a number of British liberal intellectuals attempted to popularize the “laws” of classical political economy in the hope, as the statistician William Farr put it, that “knowledge [would] banish panic.”1 There is a sense, in many of these works,2 that knowledge of economic laws might quiet the growing unease of the middle and upper classes and the growing unrest of the laboring classes in regard to the increasingly industrialized market economy. Among the most successful popularizers of classical political economy were Harriet Martineau and J. R. McCulloch who both wrote best-selling3 works that attached abstract “laws” to their concrete correlatives, in an attempt to make them more easily understood and accepted by the reading public. Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy is a collection of stories, the plots of which reveal the happy endings that await those who place their faith in a market left to its own “natural” workings. McCulloch’s Statistical Account of the British Empire supplies numbers, tables, descriptions, comparisons, historical surveys and expert opinions that illustrate the supremacy, when compared to both other places and other times, of the natural resources, industry, commerce, education, government, religion, poor laws, and vital statistics of Britain. In both works, England is represented as self-sufficient and secure. The risks of Britain’s new economy and social structures disappear in the predictability offered by the regularities of McCulloch’s numbers and the resolutions of Martineau’s plots. The words of William Farr’s aphorism – “knowledge will banish panic” – resonate with particularly Victorian meanings. “Knowledge,” in the increasingly empirical nineteenth century, is valued in proportion to its content of information and facts; other kinds of knowledge, the more abstract processes associated with speculation, or with the ability to theorize, recede in prestige. Facts conferred respectability: J. R. McCulloch defined and defended political economy as “not a science of 



Victorian Writing about Risk

speculation but of fact and experiment.”4 E. P. Thompson notes the emphasis on information as opposed to theory or speculation in the “improving” educational endeavors of Methodists, Evangelicals and Unitarians alike in the Victorian period.5 The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, which was founded in  and which published McCulloch’s Statistical Account, defined useful knowledge specifically as information.6 Although the SDUK directed its efforts particularly toward “educating” (or re-educating) the increasingly politicized laboring classes, a writer in the Poor Man’s Guardian characterized the “useful knowledge” purveyed by the SDUK as “namby-pamby stuff published expressly to stultify the minds of the working people and make them spiritless and unresisting victims of a system of plunder and oppression.”7 Victorians produced and published facts in unprecedented quantities: the statistical societies of Manchester and London (founded in  and  respectively) collected and circulated masses of information, as did the parliamentary commissions which produced the widely read Blue Book Reports.8 Statistics, the “empirical arm of political economy,”9 were presented as disinterested facts from which various laws could be just as disinterestedly inferred. Ian Hacking, in The Taming of Chance, describes the impact of statistics on nineteenth-century thought: Statistical laws came to be regarded as laws in their own right, and their sway was extended to natural phenomena. A new kind of “objective knowledge” came into being, the product of new technologies for gaining information about natural and social processes. There emerged new criteria for what counted as evidence for knowledge of this kind. The statistical laws that could thus be justified were used not only for description but also for explaining and understanding the course of events.10

In his Principles of Political Economy, J. R. McCulloch insists on political economy as the non-partisan result of a rigorous and unmitigated empiricism: the economist . . . takes the facts furnished by the researches of statists [i.e., statisticians]; and after comparing them with each other, and with those deduced from other sources, he applies himself to discover their relation and dependence. By patient induction, by carefully observing the circumstances attending the operation of particular principles, he discovers the effects of which they are really productive, and how far they are liable to be modified by the operation of their principles. It is thus that the various general laws, which regulate and connect the apparently conflicting but really harmonious interests of every different order in society, may be discovered, and established with all the certainty that belongs to conclusions derived from experience and observation.11

Banishing panic



Economic laws were, in this context, carefully represented as counterparts of the natural, immutable and inevitable laws of the physical sciences. T. R. Malthus’s use of numbers, for example, made the conclusions in his Essay on Population seem absolutely inescapable. In Gertrude Himmelfarb’s positivistic estimation, “the numerical precision gave an authority, a mathematical exactitude, and certitude to the theory which enhanced its appeal and was almost mesmerizing in its effect.”12 From the realm of the natural, it was only a short leap to the realm of the providential. Stefan Collini describes the way in which, in the work of the Reverend Malthus, [e]conomic laws seem to be equated with God’s laws in an effort to deliver the quietus to any prospect of beneficial change in social and political circumstances; human devices of any kind seem puny and helpless in the face of Nature. It is not so much a case of economic laws, but of biological necessity determining social and political arrangements.13

Yet in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, a universe arranged by nature or God was not always apparent. Social unrest, manifested in machine breaking, rick burning and rioting; the power and danger of technological innovations from railroads to power looms; the unpredictability and severity of market cycles; and a tradition of dependence on the resources, labor and markets of increasingly rebellious colonies all contributed to a sense of contingency and uncertainty for all classes, even at moments of prosperity. Even Charles Babbage, whose name is synonymous with scientific progress, experienced a fear of technology when he visited an iron works run by a hundred horsepower engine: “The intensity of the fire was peculiarly impressive. It recalled the past, disturbed the present, and suggested the future . . . candour obliges me to admit that my speculations on the future were not entirely devoid of anxiety.”14 The theories of classical political economy offered relief from the anxiety produced by this contingency and uncertainty. These theories promised continually to reveal a safe and stable reality just behind the convincing but misleading appearance of social and economic turmoil. The fact of immutable, beneficent laws and the consequent lack of a need for human intervention combined in the theory of classical political economy to assuage cultural anxiety: economic and social relations are not humanly made, nor are humans responsible for, or even capable of, improving these relations. Classical political economy was thus cosmological in that it attributes to the world a not entirely comprehensible, but nonetheless reliable, structure and dynamics. In this sense, theories



Victorian Writing about Risk

like those of the classical economists blur the distinctive boundary theorists like Anthony Giddens would draw around the experience of modernity, particularly the idea that the acceptance of contingency and uncertainty is peculiarly modern. Giddens argues that risk as a concept signifies the modern recognition of “not just the possibility that things might go wrong, but that this possibility cannot be eliminated. The phenomenology of such a situation is part of the cultural experience of modernity.”15 I am arguing that the theories of political economy, and, in the next chapter, anticontagionism, were quite precisely an attempt to eliminate the possibility that things might go wrong. What classical political economy attempted to do, particularly in its popularizations, was to cleanse the economic realm of contingency and uncertainty, to make it predictable. The functioning of the economy was placed in the reliable hands of nature and, explicitly in Malthus’s writing, of God.16 In consequence, the Victorian middle class found itself charged with a very comfortable double duty: on the one hand, it was to refrain from trying to regulate or modify the workings of the macroeconomic sphere, and on the other hand, it was enjoined to aggressively pursue its own selfinterest in the microeconomic one. To return to Farr’s prediction, that knowledge of political economy “will banish panic,” it is worth noting that Farr locates panic in the present with this use of the future tense. The popularizers of political economy, the most famous of whom could “demand from publishers higher payments than any but the most popular novelists,”17 reworked what Carlyle described as the “dismal science” of Malthusian and Ricardian economics into a reassuring gospel of ever-expanding growth and ever-increasing prosperity. With stories of the beneficence of machines and the evil of strikes; with tables showing the abundance of English herrings cured gutted and ungutted (see Fig. ); with lyrical descriptions of the thickness of English coal beds and the excellence of its cheese, McCulloch and Martineau set about “proving” to their anxious readers that the new economy was not a juggernaut about to crush them underfoot but some much slower and safer vehicle heading toward an ever-improving way of life for all classes. The class conflict, falling rates of profit, overpopulation, and mass death confronted by Malthus and Ricardo disappear in their accounts, or are, even more persuasively, frankly confronted but then swiftly dispatched to the realm of error. Despite the optimism of Martineau and McCulloch, their colleague Farr’s use of the word “banish” betrays a lack of confidence about the possibility of curing panic. “Banish,” according to the OED, means to “outlaw,” as well as to “exile, to expatriate, to expel, to dismiss.” To

Banishing panic



Figure  “Abstract of the total quantity of White Herrings Cured, Branded for Bounty, and Exported, in so far as the same have been brought under the Cognizance of the Officers of the Fishery, from the th of April, , distinguishing each Year, and the herrings Cured Gutted from those Cured Ungutted.” From J. R. McCulloch, A Descriptive and Statistical Account of the British Empire (). This table of herrings vividly illustrates the joys of counting just about anything in Victorian statistics.

banish panic is thus not to eradicate it, but to move it or hide it, to make it illegal and therefore unrepresentable, or to export it, to send it somewhere else. In later chapters we will follow into exile the panic banished by Farr and his colleagues. In Farr’s aphorism, and in the overstatements and aggrandizements of McCulloch and Martineau, panic is indirectly but thoroughly acknowledged as a permanent and disruptive feature of the culture of modernity; the need to eliminate it is represented in



Victorian Writing about Risk

calculations of risk that attempt to make the enduring and unendurable presence of uncertainty bearable. We will see the powerful but transitory nature of the consolations offered by the modern cosmology that was early Victorian popular political economy. The changes Martineau and McCulloch made in classical theory in order to create modern cosmologies – the discovery and invention of an inordinate amount of good news in the “dismal science,” most prominently – were precisely what made their works capable of offering powerful consolation to Britons caught up in the intensive changes of the first thirty years of the nineteenth century. McCulloch’s statistics and Martineau’s tales suggest an important division of textual labor between popular, fleeting accounts of political economy and the more enduring works on the subject. The works of Smith, Ricardo and Malthus – as well as of novelists like Dickens, Gaskell and Eliot – did not explain industrial capitalism as a utopia-in-progress: indeed, Ricardo’s account of the conflicts inherent in class relations and Malthus’s depressing view of the deadly outcome of healthy human sexuality18 suggest that the market is a tragic but inescapable and even necessary mechanism. McCulloch and Martineau repackage this tragedy as readily removable error. Indeed, their works seem to have provided immediate consolation for their middle class readers because they suggest that the pains of capitalism are due to misunderstanding and wrong action. Obedience to the laws of the market will lead to prosperity for all classes – eventually. We will see, however, that this powerful and immediate kind of consolation was of brief duration, largely because of its increasingly improbable optimism. . J. R. McCulloch’s career reveals an extraordinary devotion to disseminating, by all possible means, what he saw as the truths of classical political economy both to the middle classes and to the increasingly restive and politicized laboring classes. He worked as a public lecturer, a university professor, and an enormously prolific (although notoriously selfplagiarizing19) author of articles for numerous publications, most notably the Edinburgh Review and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His numerous books include the highly popular Dictionary of Commerce, Principles of Political Economy and an extensive bibliography of political economy. Although most of McCulloch’s work was directed at a middle class and educated readership, The Statistical Account of the British Empire was pub-

Banishing panic



lished and distributed under the auspices of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, as part of that organization’s on-going, and quite explicit efforts to bring the laboring classes into ideological conformity with the new economic order. Given McCulloch’s energetic proselytizing, it seems no accident that in the single book-length study of McCulloch – D. P. O’Brien’s J. R. McCulloch: A Study in Classical Economics – the man becomes the discipline in the subtitle. McCulloch, disparaged by Dickens, Carlyle and Marx as a heartless and buffoon-like publicist for laissez faire,20 unabashedly defined the strategy necessary for the popularizers of this doctrine: The economist who confines himself to the mere enunciation of general principles, or abstract truths, may as well address himself to the Pump in Aldgate, as to the British public. If he wished to be anything better than a declaimer, or to confer any real advantage on any class of his countrymen, he must leave general reasoning, and show the extent of injury entailed on the community by the neglect of his principles; how their application may be best effected; and the advantages of which it will be productive.21

McCulloch promotes an intellectual division of labor in which he and his fellow experts would work out theories in all their complex abstraction, and then diffuse them to the public by way of concrete examples, the details of which would concern, and thus interest, their audiences directly. In this division of labor, the knowledge fit for the many, which included most of the middle and all of the laboring classes, ought to be restricted to specific data selected by experts. McCulloch, in the Statistical Account, presents a wealth of geographical, zoological, botanical, and agricultural data to “prove” that Britain is self-sufficient in natural resources: Britain’s cheese, copper, iron, coal, wool, cotton, climate, people, lakes, puffins, turnips and bees are variously described as the most excellent or most abundant throughout the world and throughout history. The two volumes of the Account seem almost to be designed such that the casual reader, taking a volume off the shelf and dipping in at any point, can be comforted by this excellence and abundance of British resources. McCulloch leaves no stone unturned; indeed, when he turns his attention to stones he carefully describes the value found upon them: “[e]ven the lichens have yielded an article of utility and of commerce; and that they might do so more extensively, there can be no question.”22 Various vital resources, fish and coal in particular, are both enumerated in charts and tables and described as “inexhaustible” and “exhaustless,” to suggest both the impossibility of counting them accurately and



Victorian Writing about Risk

perhaps also the lack of any reason to count them at all. These resources reside in the realm of what might be called a statistical sublime, in which the amount – of iron, of fish, of wool, of coal – is so vast as to either defy or render superfluous the computational skills of a statistician, even one with McCulloch’s abilities. In a discussion of coal, for example, McCulloch quotes an expert, one “Mr. Taylor,” to the effect that “the coal fields of Durham and Northumberland are adequate to furnish the present annual supply for more than  years” (::). “More than  years” is a rather odd quantification. The specificity of “” is undermined but also reassuringly supplemented by the fuzziness of “more.” “” is quite precise and thus indicates some very sophisticated calculations but the qualification of “more than” opens onto the infinite, where calculations are blissfully unnecessary. Numbers, contrary to what a late twentieth-century reader might expect, are actually used to sketch and suggest, rather than to define and delineate the blessings of Britain in any final way, since to define too closely might be to restrict the bounty a responsive reader might imagine.23 McCulloch paradoxically argues against the Ricardian system he professes to be supporting, the very heart of which is that “economic growth must sooner or later peter out owing to scarcity of natural resources.”24 The figures of the Statistical Account show that, contrary to Ricardo’s predictions, home production of wheat was keeping pace with increasing domestic needs.25 McCulloch thus replaces the prospect of inevitable decline with the much more reassuring promise of seemingly infinite natural resources, remaking Ricardo’s essentially tragic economic theory into a utopian one. This view of an unending abundance of domestic resources was also an important element in McCulloch’s arguments for free trade and against colonization and protectionism. As trade and investment increasingly overflowed the confines of empire in the early nineteenth century, colonial monopolies, such as that of the British West Indies on sugar, came to be an anachronistic impediment to economic expansion. The West Indian colonies, the jewel in the crown of empire in the late eighteenth century, became a political and financial liability as former slaves rebelled and the planter class continued to insist on protectionism. Not only were the British less and less dependent on Caribbean markets as outlets for metropolitan goods, there was also cheaper sugar, including newly developed beet sugar, increasingly available elsewhere McCulloch, accordingly, dismisses the idea of British dependence on its possessions:

Banishing panic



Nothing, in fact, can be a greater mistake than to suppose, as many have done, that we are mainly indebted for our wealth, and to the high place we occupy among the nations of the earth, to our colonial possessions. We owe these distinctions to the favourable situations and physical capacities of our native country, the intelligence and enterprise of our people, and the emulation inspired by our free institutions . . . (::)

McCulloch denies that Britain has ever been dependent on its colonies, rather than admitting an historical trajectory in which, as Eric Williams has described it, “the colonial system was the spinal cord of commercial capitalism in the mercantile epoch,” but became an unwanted appendage in the era of industrial capitalism.26 In effacing this trajectory, McCulloch posits British independence as something essential and unchanging, rather than a result of complex historical and ideological changes, including the literal exhaustion of resources and people in the Caribbean, as well as an increasingly diffused dependence on international, and not necessarily colonial, goods and markets. Nonetheless, even though the wealth flowing to the metropolis from the Caribbean was, in fact, becoming economically negligible by the s, it had not yet become negligible in the public imagination. Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair, novels of  and  respectively, feature Caribbean wealth as a crucial source of income. McCulloch acknowledges the symbolic importance of the Caribbean in order to dismiss its material significance: A notion seems to have been at one time pretty general in this country, and is still far from being exploded, that the colonies in question [in the West Indies] were of especial consequence, from their furnishing our markets with ample supplies of so important an article as sugar. But there is not now, and, we believe, never was, any foundation for such a notion. Sugar is one of those products of which the culture is generally diffused all over the tropical regions . . . (:: )

The culture of sugar had become generally diffused by this period, and it was far cheaper for the British to buy it from Cuba, Brazil or Mauritius, where slave labor was still employed and the land was still fertile, or to buy beet sugar in Europe, than it was to produce it in the depleted Caribbean colonies. In arguing the free trade position, McCulloch brought the public up to date, in effect, on the realities of the new international economy without acknowledging that a momentous change had taken place. Since, in McCulloch’s account, the colonies were never essential to British well-being, the sting and the threat of actual and possible colonial loss is removed, both retro- and prospectively. As Bernard Semmel has pointed out, the loss of the American



Victorian Writing about Risk

colonies produced “forebodings of disaster” which were not completely assuaged by . McCulloch admits that [t]he American war seems to have decided, in as far as experience can decide anything, the question in regard to the policy of retaining colonies in a state of dependency that are determined to govern themselves. No colonies were ever regarded as half so valuable as those which now form the republic of the United States; and it was generally supposed that their emancipation would be decisive of the fate of England, that her sun would then set, and for ever! But have we really lost anything by that event? (::)

McCulloch answers this question at some length, pointing to Britain’s relief from the task of governing, while still enjoying a “preference” in American markets. McCulloch represents free trade (rather accurately, one might add) as imperialism without the expense and nuisance of colonial government. McCulloch argues his version of classical political economy using a blend of quantification, narration, polemic and description. Mary Poovey attributes this mixing of description and quantification to an uncertainty on the part of early statistical writers about the relative persuasive powers of “figures of arithmetic” as opposed to “figures of speech.” These early statistical writers had no way of knowing, given the newness of large numbers of large numbers, if what are now (sometimes) regarded as “hard facts” would be more convincing than soft speeches. One result of this ambivalence is that early statistical works are consistently written in what Poovey describes as “mixed genres.” Unlike contemporary statistics, these works, in addition to numbers in the form of lists, tables, charts, and graphs, routinely included narratives, policy polemics, social criticism and historical surveys. This multi-genre approach perhaps tried to circumvent “[t]he charges that numbers can be made to say anything and that they are boring if not unreadable.”27 In other words, statistics are both potentially productive of excessive and uncontrollable meanings as well as potentially non-productive of any meaning at all and hence useless, not to mention very dull. Excess and emptiness were thus guarded against with hybrid representations, in which there would be something to interest, to convince and to tranquilize everyone. A heterogeneous discourse of number, description, story, comparison and history, by virtue of its being multiply “verifiable,” if only in the viscera of its readers, stood a better chance of explaining away many possible sources of uncertainty, contingency and insecurity and thus banishing the panic of its readers.

Banishing panic



This patchwork approach indicates that the apparently totalizing positivism of the early statistical pursuit of reality turns out to be a fragmented empiricism, in which bits and pieces of evidence may be taken to indicate but not to delineate definitively, the finally unknowable (because infinitely rich) but unquestionably superior totality of Britain in general and England in particular. The confidence that the world can somehow be grasped whole if enough of it is counted is unwittingly undermined by the impressionistic nature of McCulloch’s numbers. Moreover, the bits and pieces are admittedly not randomly selected. McCulloch was at moments quite unselfconscious about the overdetermined nature of statistical inquiry and statistical evidence: Observations are scarcely ever made or particulars noted for their own sake . . . in the peculiar phraseology of this science [i.e. political economy] it is the effectual demand of the theorist that regulates the production of the facts or raw materials, which he is afterwards to work into a system.28

McCulloch thus admits the essentially deductive nature of induction by describing the ways in which a “system” governs the collection of facts. Just as McCulloch’s figures on grain production seriously undermine Ricardian theory, this admission deals a serious blow to the integrity of the very project of the early statistical movement, which was dedicated to transforming political economy into a science by replacing subjectivity and speculation with neutral fact: What the founders [of the statistical movement] seem to have had in mind was the creation of a science of government, the principles of which would be discovered outside the realm of partisan dissension and arise from the accumulation of simple, irrefutable social facts.29

And yet McCulloch, for one, seems to have understood quite well that facts were never “simple” or “irrefutable.” The construction of political economy as a science seems to have been a highly self-conscious public relations campaign: if political economy was represented as a “science,” it would acquire, in the public mind, the inevitability and disinterestedness of the processes associated with science, and it would be shown to transcend class and class interests. The middle classes would not have to worry about the ethical implications of laissez faire, and the laboring classes would have to accept the laws of political economy as inescapable, and abandon, ideally, radicalism and revolution. The idea of political economy as a science requires significant help from other Victorian “sciences”, including that of race. McCulloch, for



Victorian Writing about Risk

example, props up the faltering laws of laissez faire by strategically bringing in the Irish, to explain the distress of the hand-loom weavers: We doubt much, notwithstanding the currency of the opposite opinion, whether the hand-loom weavers have been materially injured by the introduction of the power-looms. (Their condition was bad before the power loom) . . . their low wages are not occasioned by the competition of the power-looms, but by the easy nature of their employment. . . . Thus this department of labour is greatly overstocked, and the price necessarily falls. The evil is aggravated by the multitudes of Irish who have flocked into Lancashire . . . and learn to weave as the easiest employment they can adopt. Accustomed to a wretched mode of living in their own country, they are contented with wages that would starve an English labourer. They have in fact so lowered the rate of wages, as to drive many of the English out of the employment, and to drag down those who remain to their own level. (::–)

The Irish explain the market’s failure to correct itself. They spread the poverty they bring with them from Ireland, reducing the English to their own condition. And McCulloch has his information on the Irish from a venerable source: Edmund Spenser. McCulloch explains that there is no need to worry about the apparent out-datedness of Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland () because, “[t]he habitations of the mass of the Irish people are quite as bad, at this moment, as they were three centuries ago; and are now, as then, crowded with cows and pigs as well as men . . .” (::). McCulloch cites no source for his contemporary information, and it is worth noting that many English (and even Scottish) subjects were also routinely living with their cows and pigs in the nineteenth century. McCulloch’s reliance on Spenser subjects the Irish to the dehistoricizing process Edward Said has described in regard to the Western construction of the “Orient”: the Irish, an imagined monolith produced by writers like Spenser and McCulloch, do not change, they have no history. And in case anyone might blame the situation of squalid Irish habitations on the absentee colonizing of the English, McCulloch writes a lengthy apologia on “Absentees and Middlemen,” in which he concludes that their “injurious influence has been very much exaggerated” (::). In McCulloch’s construction, England is safe insofar as it is not Irish; but the influx of the Irish both threatens England and provides a ready excuse for why England has not become a free market utopia. In this use of the Irish, McCulloch rescues English laborers from a place at the bottom of the social scale by placing another class – Irish laborers – beneath them. Classes are subdivided by nationality, leaving a fractured

Banishing panic



laboring class with seemingly disparate interests. No English person can identify with the Irish, who in addition to being responsible for their poverty, are also frequently represented by the English as enjoying it.30 The effectiveness of this displacement was mitigated, however, by the Act of Union in  and the Catholic Emancipation Act of . These Acts put Ireland (and Irishness) in the position of being both inside and outside Britain, since they effect an amalgamation of the two countries rather than an incorporation of one nation by another. The Irish as a people, and Irishness as a concept, can no longer be completely banished as foreign because they have become part of a unified Britain. Because of this ambiguous status, in which Ireland partakes of being both inside and outside, foreign and domestic, the Irish, and Irishness, become all-purpose excuses for problems in the formulations of laissezfaire apologists, and, as we will see in the following chapter, of anticontagionist sanitary reformers, as well. McCulloch’s confidence in the explanatory ability of the science of political economy made him somewhat obtuse about the potential impact of the information he was publishing. He raised, for example, and in effect publicized for the first time, the previously little-known statistics concerning infant mortality in Britain. The most disturbing finding of the early years of the statistical movement was that children under five were dying at a rate of greater than fifty per cent in many of the great towns.31 McCulloch initially tries to dismiss this figure as “a paradox of a high birth rate.” By way of further explanation, he cites Mr. Richman’s “Preliminary Remarks to the Census of ”: . . . a rapid increase of population infers the birth and existence of a large proportion of infants, and, therefore, a large proportion of short-lived persons; thereby accelerating pro rata, the time of life or age at which one half of the population are dead. (::)

Infant mortality is high, in other words, because there are too many children in the population and children tend to be innately and indeed recalcitrantly short-lived. McCulloch dutifully reports that in Lancashire, thirty-one per cent of female infants and thirty-six per cent of male infants die before the age of two years; he then denies what both radical and conservative critics of industrialism took to be obvious: No good evidence has ever been given, or, we believe, can be given, to prove that factory labour in the cotton and woollen mills at Manchester and other great towns is injurious to the health either of adults or non-adults employed in



Victorian Writing about Risk

them; so far as the excessive mortality referred to by Mr. Richman is not accounted for by the rapid increase of the population, it is explained by the extremely destitute condition of a large portion of the population not employed in factories; by the damp, ill-ventilated, miserable houses in which many of the poor live; and the filth and want of cleanliness so disgustingly prevalent among the Irish part of the population. (::)

McCulloch begins by dismissing the idea that anyone can prove that factory labor is injurious to health. He then shows that the evidence of excessive mortality in the great towns need not be connected to factory labor; he refers it to the “rapid increase” in the population, to the destitution of those not working in factories, to the living conditions of the poor, and to the filth of the Irish. Of course, McCulloch is roughly correct to cite an increase in population, the destitution of the nonindustrial laborer, poor housing conditions and filth as the proximate causes of the excessive mortality among the populations of the nineteenth-century factory town. But the factories themselves, and the way of life they created, were not just directly related to these causes, but were the primary cause of the miserable housing of the poor and the filthy living and working conditions of the Irish, the English, the rich and the poor. Although McCulloch begins the above passage as a discussion of the appalling infant mortality in Lancashire, he quickly and skillfully moves away from the difficulties created by so many dead infants, first by making them seem both larger and less helpless by calling them “nonadults,” and then by moving on to a discussion of the causes of ill health (rather than death) of all age groups. But the infant (or non-adult) mortality statistics apparently continue to trouble McCulloch, and he finally decides to dispense with them altogether as irrelevant: The determination of the average expectation of life at birth is, however, of comparatively little practical importance. The great object is to ascertain the probability of life at any given period, or the chances that an individual of a certain age has of attaining to any other age . . . (::)

McCulloch now sets out to convince his readers that infant mortality is not important, or at least not for “practical purposes.” But by this time, McCulloch’s repeated attempts to rationalize these numbers have resulted in a belaboring of bad news. McCulloch and other statisticians found themselves in the position of disseminating frightening information that they could not adequately explain, rationalize or neutralize. Perhaps it is a lingering sense of his own inadequacy to explain away high infant mortality that drives McCulloch, in what initially seems to

Banishing panic



be a contradictory ideological move, to champion the enlarging bureaucracy of the liberal state and its interventions into the new-fangled sanctity of private life. He finally turns responsibility for the dead infants back on their parents, and recommends the collection of information as an excellent method of social discipline and control: Books of blank certificates, and statistical nosology, have been distributed among all the qualified medical practitioners of England – nearly , in number; and the causes of death are certified in  cases out of  by the medical attendant. When a person dies unattended by a qualified medical man, the assigned cause of death is entered as “not certified.” Thousands of children are still suffered to fall victims to disease, ignorance, neglect, and quackery but the number is diminishing, as parents have been recalled to a sense of duty by the dread of seeing the delinquencies registered. (::)

McCulloch demonstrates in this passage a number of the salient features of early British sociological thinking. As Philip Abrams has described it, “the terms of analysis are the custodial state standing face to face with individuals in need of help, correction, or regeneration.”32 Abrams notes that although the early statisticians frequently faced evidence that might cause them to rethink entirely the social structure, they were remarkable in their consistent ability to “find an explanation for the incidence and distribution of poverty that squared with a self-regulating and optimistic conception of society.”33 McCulloch insists that the deaths of poor children are the result of a lack of a “sense of duty,” making child mortality a moral and individual problem of poor parents, which could be corrected by publishing their children’s deaths in statistical tables and thus “recalling” them to a sense of duty. In maneuvers like this, McCulloch pulls back from the edge of a statistical sublimity in which numbers provide dangerously prolific possibilities for meaning, but he does not solve the problem of the statistical sublime itself. The publication of what Ian Hacking has described as “an avalanche of numbers”34 in the early nineteenth century opens up the possibility of an infinite semantic proliferation, a situation definitively resistant to theoretical control. Letting numbers loose proves a risky business; authors like McCulloch could well provoke panic with the publication of the very knowledge that was supposed to banish it. The use of statistics made it clear that numbers can be used to construct a host of narratives and that they can resonate in dangerously unpredictable directions. Statistical knowledge cannot reliably banish panic, and indeed might evoke it. Nonetheless, for a few critical years in the late s and early s,



Victorian Writing about Risk

the sales figures of the works of McCulloch and Martineau suggest that they initially assuaged middle class anxieties. These anxieties were also addressed through reassurances given to the middle classes by political economy pundits that popular explanations and demonstrations of political economy would be read by the increasingly dangerous, which is to say politicized, laboring classes, and that the laboring classes would be converted to and pacified by the tenets of laissez faire. The Oxford economist Richard Whately, writing in , describes how laissez-faire doctrine might be made palatable to a large audience: There are some very simple but important truths belonging to the science we are now engaged in, which might with the utmost facility be brought down to the capacity of a child, and which . . . the Lower Orders cannot even safely be left ignorant of . . . Much of that kind of knowledge to which I have been alluding, might easily be embodied, in an intelligible and interesting form, not merely in regular didactic treatises, but in compilations of history, or of travels, or in works of fiction, which would afford amusement as well as instruction.35

This is precisely the project Martineau undertakes in The Illustrations of Political Economy, published in nine pocket-sized volumes from  to . Much of Martineau’s intended working class audience had already participated in or been exposed to a “varied and powerful” opposition to political economy.36 Fortunately for Martineau and her publishers, the middle classes were still consuming such works with relish,37 and apparently they did not mind being addressed as if they had the capacities of children. The protagonist of Harriet Martineau’s novel Deerbrook asks, “What can religion be for, or reason or philosophy, whichever name you call your faith by, but to show us the bright side of everything?”38 In the Illustrations of Political Economy, Martineau shows the bright side of an industrialized and deregulated market. Just as McCulloch’s numbers suggest the infinite natural and industrial bounty of England, Martineau’s narratives suggest the delightful array of happy endings that await those who place their faith in laissez faire. . It is perhaps not surprising that Martineau, who became so successful at addressing cultural anxiety, describes herself as a child plagued by phobias: [P]anic struck at the head of the stairs, and I was sure I could not get down; and I could never cross the yard to the garden without flying and panting, and fearing to look behind, because a wild beast was after me.39

Banishing panic



Martineau’s disabling anxiety is relieved by her discovery of “laws,” first of the Necessitarian doctrines of Unitarianism,40 and then those of political economy: I finally laid hold of the conception of general laws . . . My labouring brain and beating heart grew quiet, and something more like peace than I had ever known settled down upon my anxious mind . . . From the time when I became convinced of the certainty of the action of laws, of the true importance of good influences and good habits, of the firmness, in short, of the ground I was treading, and of the security of the results which I should take the right means to obtain.41

Martineau’s world becomes secure; the ground under her feet is guaranteed in its firmness by the existence of laws that regulate “results.” Predictability and solidity replace her vertiginous sense of the contingency and fragility of the world around her. Her tales of political economy impart this sense of a predictable and solid economic and social structure, and her confident optimism was no doubt a significant ingredient in their remarkable success.42 In addition to her own experience of anxiety, and a consequent intuitive understanding of how anxiety can be relieved, Martineau also had her own experience of the vicissitudes of the market. In  she and her family were bankrupted by a bad investment. This bankruptcy propelled her from part-time, amateur writing to a full-time literary career. The bright side of bankruptcy was that it provided her with a “scope for action”: I began to feel the blessing of a wholly new freedom. I, who had been obliged to write before breakfast, or in some private way, had henceforth liberty to do my own work in my own way; for we had lost our gentility.43

The iron laws of political economy rescued Martineau from the iron laws of domestic economy and a woman’s place within it: instead of having to hide her work, she now could and must engage in it openly and productively. For Martineau, a middle class woman who was not supposed to be either willing or able to earn her own living, the invisible hand of the market was mercifully impartial; it brought disaster down upon her and her family, but it also allowed her to regain financial security through writing a series of tales that explain and defend the system under which she has paradoxically been both victimized and liberated. For this reason, Martineau had considerable credibility as an apologist for laissez faire, and could preach the doctrine of submission to its laws from her own difficult, but rewarding, experience. Valerie Sanders suggests the extent of Martineau’s propensity for “proffering her



Victorian Writing about Risk

intellectual history for public edification” in her wish to leave “her brain and skull for phrenological research.”44 For all of Martineau’s credibility and, indeed, expertise in managing anxiety, the Illustrations could not provide their readers with enduring consolation. The work, after an intense but brief period of popularity, fell into a decline from which it has scarcely begun to recover. Although, as the word “Illustrations” suggests, the tales aspire to realism, they are actually more like myths in that they offer a “stable unifying philosophy by which to interpret a given subject matter,”45 the subject matter in this case being Britain’s new market. For Martineau to resolve her plots within the conventions of realist fiction would mean that she would provide humanly made and idiosyncratic solutions to the problems of a “free” market. Instead, her plots are resolved by laws, and these laws operate according to the reliable and providential mechanisms of the market. She has no need of the individualistic, idiosyncratic plotting typical of realism; rather, her fictions attempt to attain what is an initially productive but finally an inefficacious generic hybrid: realist myth. The swiftness with which Martineau’s plots resolve the problems they represent may also have contributed to their inability to assuage panic in the long term. Janice A. Radway, in her study of late twentiethcentury romance reading, reports that the texts regarded as “failed romances” by the readers she interviewed made the mistake of delivering pleasure and relief before they had evoked “equally powerful feelings of anger and fear.”46 There seems to be a need during the reading process for difficult emotions to be heightened before they are relieved: perhaps because of such a temporary heightening, the relief is more intense and more lasting. Although my theory of the Victorian psychology of reading must necessarily be highly speculative, I wonder if Martineau’s readers did not question whether or not they had truly earned, in the attenuated emotional labor required for the reading of her tales, the happy endings she so readily provides. Her law-governed plots work like short-acting drugs: they take effect quickly for readers in need of easily understandable solutions to overwhelming and complex problems, but they wear off equally quickly, requiring the complementary action of additional doses of short-term relief and also of texts that provide more complicated and therefore more long-acting resolutions to the problems at hand. The Illustrations are a series of tales, in nine volumes, that aimed to educate, as well as to console, a wide audience. R. K. Webb has argued that the tales had a dual purpose, and were actually addressed to two

Banishing panic



audiences: they both urged the lower classes to “accept the inevitability of the bourgeois industrial order . . .” while also “blasting away at entrenched interests and inherited prejudices.”47 Martineau’s work is thus radical, in the Victorian, middle class sense of the word: she tries to return to fundamentals, even if this return proves to be unsettling. Unlike McCulloch, Martineau is protective of social order but not necessarily of the social order. This difference is evident in the first tale of the Illustrations, “Life in the Wilds.” In southern Africa, a group of marauding Bushmen prey on a British settlement, steal all of the “capital” of the British, and turn the settlers from a “state of advanced civilization to a primitive condition of society.”48 Martineau, in an explanation unusual for any Victorian, portrays the Bushmen’s revenge as the result of European colonization, in effect turning the responsibility back on the apparent victims: The Bushmen were the original possessors of much of the country about the Cape, which the British and the Dutch have since taken for their own. The natives were hunted down like so many wild beasts. This usage naturally made them fierce and active in their revenge. The hardships they have undergone have affected their bodily make also; and their short stature and clumsy form are not, as some suppose, a sufficient proof that they are of an inferior race to the men they make war upon. If we may judge by the experiments which have been tried upon the natives of various countries, it seems probable that if Europeans were driven from their homes into the mountains, and exposed to the hardships of a savage life, they would become stunted in their forms, barbarous in their habits, and cruel in their revenge. (:)

Martineau rejects the biological tenets of Victorian racial theory, and puts forward an environmentalist explanation for the condition of the Bushmen. By bringing the Bushmen into a three-dimensional foreground, rather than leaving them in the background as part of the menacing African scenery, Martineau complicates considerably the apparently simple implications of her tale. In order to demonstrate “primitive accumulation,” Martineau has “primitives” reduce the English settlers to primitiveness, but she also makes the behavior of the primitives an understandable response to the brutalities of colonization. One effect of this complication is that the virtue of the English characters in her story is impugned from the beginning. Although Martineau effaces the agency of the colonizers by using the passive voice – “the natives were hunted down like wild beasts” – it is nonetheless clear that the hunters of the Bushmen are people like the settlers. Two parables collide: the first teaches that aggression is dangerous and the legitimate



Victorian Writing about Risk

anger of the colonized emerges in an act of revenge that, in turn, reduces the colonizers to the condition of the primitive colonized. This lesson is partially disavowed by a second one in which the English can never be reduced to a primitive condition because they have the experience of economic development and thus whatever else is taken from them, “the intelligence belonging to a state of advancement remains” (:). The English settlers recover from primitive economic conditions rapidly because of their intellectual capital, which cannot be taken from them. But it is precisely the imperial impulse, a crucial ingredient in the “intellectual capital” of capitalism, which has brought them to Africa in the first place. So although the virtue of the settlers may be undermined, their security and self-sufficiency are underscored. The aggressions of colonized peoples may be understandable, but they will never be permanently successful because of the superior and untouchable intellectual capital possessed by the British. The settlers’ loss of all capital provides a situation in which the evolution of an economy can be narrated at a fast-forward pace. The settlers are, in general, models of British industriousness, and set about making tools right away. But one character, Arnall, a former shopkeeper, is distressed at being reduced to a “labourer,” “having a very limited notion of the meaning of the word” (:). It seems as if Arnall may be a threat to the community because of his selfish unwillingness to labor. True to the tenets of Adam Smith, however, Arnall’s pursuit of his own selfinterest turns out to benefit the community at large: Arnall conceives of a plan for catching buffalo and antelopes by digging a pit that is used as a snare. “This magnificent plan entered Arnall’s head one day when he was thinking how he might distinguish himself in a genteel way, and show himself a benefactor to the settlement without sacrificing his dignity” (:). Arnall’s vanity benefits the larger society, even though it initially appears to be antisocial. As soon as tools are fashioned, a spontaneous division of labor occurs. Three boys manufacturing bows and arrows divide the work such that each boy does that which he can do best. The division of labor leads to the invention of machinery, because “men, women and children are never so apt at devising ways of easing their toils as when they are confined to this sort of labour, and have to give their attention to it” (:). Martineau represents manufacturing, the division of labor and the invention of machinery as processes that are as “natural” and spontaneous as child’s play. The boys naturally divide their labor, they naturally

Banishing panic



think of devices. In this way, the invention of machinery is represented as flowing spontaneously from the worker, and as resulting in a decrease of “toil”; the concept of machinery as a source of increased profit for the manufacturer is eclipsed. Martineau uses her de-civilized settlers to show that what the English regard as necessities are in fact luxuries that result from an ever-increasing and universally beneficial division of labor. Mr. Stone, the voice of political economy in the tale, longs for one of his wife’s Dorsetshire pies, but he is well aware that there must be an extensive division of labour before even that single dish can be prepared. To say nothing of what has already been done in our fields in fencing, ploughing, sowing, and trenching, there is much work remaining in reaping, threshing, and grinding, before you can have the flour. Then the meat for your pie is still grazing, and must be brought home and slaughtered and cut up. Then the salt must be got from the lake yonder; and the pepper, – what will you do for pepper? (:–)

The upshot of this conversation is that even the breakfast of an English washerwoman “has cost the labour of many hundred hands,” and is the result of a vast international division of labor and colonization. The tea, for example, comes from the East Indies and the sugar from the West. The intended effect of this tale on its laboring class readers is absurdly clear – without realizing it, they are all basking in the luxuries of a highly evolved economic system: Our countrymen little think how much the poorest of them owes to this grand principle of the division of labour . . . They little think how . . . many kings and princes of countries less favoured than theirs would be glad to exchange their heaps of silver and gold for the accommodations of an English day labourer. (:)

Such pronouncements indicate the extent to which Martineau was entirely unfamiliar with the actual accommodations of an English day laborer. In “The Hill and the Valley,” set in a “wild district of South Wales,” the landscape is transformed by the building of an ironworks. The first character we meet, old Armstrong, is appalled by the ugliness of the works; he values his solitude and the beauty of the unspoiled nature around him. Initially, Martineau represents his position as unassailable and unobjectionable. Slowly but surely, however, this seemingly unarguable position is shown to be mistaken. First, Martineau brings in the more moderate and reasonable views of the other inhabitants of the hill



Victorian Writing about Risk

and the valley, who “thought it would be an advantage to have so many people settled there as could be provided with employment” (:). But it is Mr. Wallace, the manager and part owner of the works, who, through a favorite device of Martineau’s, the friendly conversation, corrects Armstrong’s backward-looking ideas. Mr. Wallace calmly and cordially demonstrates the points at which Mr. Armstrong’s objections are either incorrect or grievously selfish. Armstrong, for example, believes that factory workers are like slaves; Mr. Wallace points out that unlike master and slave, capitalist and worker are bound together by a “mutual interest” in productivity. Armstrong refuses to invest his savings; Wallace shows that the investment of capital is an act of social generosity, almost of charity. Mr. Wallace himself experiences “great pleasure” in going around the ironworks and seeing how the employment of his capital afforded subsistence to nearly  people, and to remember that the productions of their labour would promote the comfort and convenience of many hundreds or thousands more in the distant places to which the iron of this district was carried. (:)

The industrial capitalist is represented as a benevolent pater familias, who provides for his “children” – who include both laborers and consumers. There is no sense that Mr. Wallace is himself making a considerable profit. Profit, which only appears as collective wealth, is socialized in Martineau’s account of laissez faire, making it closer to Owenite socialism than to Ricardian capitalism. Like McCulloch, Martineau cannot popularize classical political economy for an anxious audience without making considerable alterations in its theory and practice. We as readers, like the misinformed interlocutors in the tales, can believe a spokesperson like Mr. Wallace because of his experience and background. He is the “grandson of a labourer, who . . . by his skill and industry . . . managed to earn rather more than was sufficient to feed and clothe his family of four children” (:), and is thus able to save and invest his money, and rise “out of labour.” This is a cornerstone of Martineau’s economic optimism: laborers who think like capitalists can save enough money to actually become capitalists. Martineau does, however, give anti-industrialist views a full hearing, stinting nothing in her presentation of Armstrong’s compelling complaint about “the ugliness of smoke, and rows of houses, and ridges of cinders . . .” (:). He appeals to Mrs. Wallace, as a “lady of taste,” to second his aesthetic objections. Mrs. Wallace, however, proves to be more a woman of principle than a lady of taste:

Banishing panic



It was true that a grove was a finer object at this distance than a cinder-ridge, and that a mountain-stream was more picturesque than a column of smoke; but there was beauty of a different kind which belonged to such establishments, and to which she was sure Mr. Armstrong would not be blind if he would only come down and survey the works. There was in the first place the beauty of machinery. She thought it could not but gratify the taste to see how men bring the powers of nature under their own control by their own contrivances; how the wind and the fire are made to act in the furnaces so that the metal runs out in a pure stream below; how, by the application of steam, such a substance as iron is passed between rollers, and compressed and shaped by them as easily as if it were potter’s clay and then cut into lengths like twigs. (:)

Martineau has a female character explain to a male one that the beauty of the iron works lies in its manly power. The implication is that Armstrong not only has anachronistic ideas, but that his nature-worship verges, perhaps, on the effeminate. Mrs. Wallace’s description of the physical processes of iron production evinces the pleasures afforded by the domination of nature. Adorno and Horkheimer have described this ratio of power between the middle classes and nature in industrial society: . . . all power in class society is tied to a nagging consciousness of its own impotence against physical nature and its social descendants – the many. Only consciously contrived adaptation to nature brings nature under the control of the physically weaker.49

The excitement of the ironworks is produced by the human (male) domination of the physically stronger elements of nature and labor. Such representations of the industrial conquest of the natural world suggest that the power of middle class men over nature, and “the many,” is potentially available to women. It is not surprising that the tenets of classical political economy, which supported the advance of technology unequivocally, would have a strong appeal not only to Martineau, as an enfeebled50 middle class woman of the period, but to the multitude of women who were held psychically and economically hostage within the Victorian family structure by those whose power is shown here as nonessential: they are a mechanical addition that women could just as effectively deploy. The power of man over iron can be easily transmuted into the power of woman over iron and from there to the power of woman over man. Martineau, however, keeps her critique of gender roles within safe boundaries; Deirdre David has argued that she “engineers her feminism so that it serves the ideological aims of that same social class for whom she performs her legitimating role.”51 In



Victorian Writing about Risk

Martineau’s description, the beauty of industrialization and the invisible hand that guides it is that middle class women, like workers, could become capitalists. Back in the valley that has become happier because of the employment provided by the ironworks, the price of bar iron suddenly drops to half of what it has been and new machinery is introduced to cut costs. Many workers are thus unemployed and machine blaming and breaking ensues. Martineau does not evade the common objection that machinery, no matter how profitable, is wrong not only because it causes unemployment but because it is simply too dangerous. She steers the plot directly into this controversy: It soon happened, most unfortunately, that a boy, who had in charge the management of some part of the new machinery, was careless, and put himself in the way of receiving a blow on the head, which killed him on the spot. (:)

The syntactic strategy of this sentence is to place the responsibility for the death of the boy squarely on the dead boy himself: he was “in charge” of the machine and “careless.” He “put[s] himself in the way of receiving a blow on the head.” In a curious conjunction of states of mind, the boy is described as not paying attention and yet also as putting himself – which suggests deliberation rather than carelessness – in the way of receiving this fatal blow to the head. As in the hybrid quantifications of McCulloch, the reader can allay his or her own fear of machinery by choosing the most comforting conception of the boy: as either fatally absent-minded or terminally stupid. The machine is rendered passive, almost invisible in this account, able to hurt only those who put themselves “in the way” to be hurt. The narrator’s sympathy for the dead boy seems particularly generous given his apparently unstoppable drive to join the ranks of McCulloch’s short-lived people. In general, Martineau argues, machinery benefits everyone because it is a saving of labor and capital and thus leads to the production of more capital which will lead to the employment of more labor. Mr. Wallace tells his workers that “we could not have employed any of you for the last six months, but for the saving caused by the new machinery; and that, now it is gone, we can employ none of you any longer” (:). Workers who break machinery have their causes and effects confused: falling prices, not machinery, cause them to be unemployed. When prices fall, the use of machinery means that some of them rather than none of them may still work. What machinery will cause, eventually – and the

Banishing panic



timetable here is a considerable sticking point – is more employment by increasing the amount of capital available for investment. Martineau thus appropriates the Smithian doctrine of self-interest in a crudely reduced form. In her reworking, self-interest is simply equal to social interest. In Smith’s version, the “invisible hand” of the market leads individuals “to promote the wealth of their nation.”52 Although Smith abhors “self-conscious social interest” as an “affectation,”53 he does not, in marked contrast to the nineteenth-century economists, including Martineau, dispense with the need for “moral sentiments” in the economic and political sphere. In Smith’s vision, sympathy and empathy constrain commercial activity in socially useful ways; in the vision of nineteenth-century laissez faire, the checks and balances of the market are divorced from both psychology and ethics. The political economy of the nineteenth century succeeded in “establishing an area of discourse independent of moral considerations.”54 This isolation of the economic realm provides, among other things, for guilt-free, and therefore anxiety-free, commercial behavior. In the s, the increasing immiseration and potentially dangerous discontent of the laboring classes seriously challenged the idea that individual gain would or could increase public well-being. To preserve any credibility for Smith’s formulation of an equivalence between pursuing private gain and serving public interest, the concept of social compassion had to be thoroughly renovated. To this end, Martineau takes on one of the thorniest issues confronting laissez faire, the poor laws. “Cousin Marshall” asks “What is charity?”, and answers by debunking the apparently kind but actually cruel ideas behind the eighteenth-century poor laws. The tale begins with a poor woman and her children, the Bridgemans, who have been burnt out of their home. Mrs. Bridgeman’s sister, Mrs. Bell, who has been corrupted by too much government assistance, and has consequently lost her sense of self-reliance as well as a sense of responsibility for her own family, will scarcely aid her homeless sister, and when her sister dies, will not take in her nieces and nephews. Mrs. Bell not only has no mercy on her nieces and nephews, she claims that her own dead son is still alive (although she does admit he is “beyond hope”) in order to collect charity from the parish and food from the neighbors. Cousin Marshall, although a more distant relative, is not on relief, and consequently has far more family feeling. He takes in two of the four Bridgeman children. The other two must go to a workhouse.



Victorian Writing about Risk

At the time of the Illustrations, the only poor relief Martineau supported was free education, “the enlightenment of the mind” (:). She took the only position that was truly consistent with laissez-faire doctrine: that the government’s responsibility to the poor was to decrease their numbers. Martineau, with her canny sense of which characters to use as convincing proponents of various economic principles, has the Burkes, a compassionate and charitably active brother and sister, argue against all charity except free education. Thus, it is the people who are most in touch with the poor, and who care most about them, who oppose the poor laws. These are not greedy industrialists, or callous aristocrats, but a surgeon who cares for the poor, and his sister who is regular visitor at the local workhouse. They know first-hand that the present system of charity is ruinous morally and economically, and that it will eventually impoverish everyone through “sinking” rather than investing capital. Martineau abandoned this strict laissez-faire position on poor laws a few years later, and was actually commissioned by Lord Brougham of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge to write a series of tales in favor of the New Poor Law of , Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated. She came to favor the provisions of the New Poor Law, which, although more stringent than the old poor law, still provided considerable relief. Because of this stringency, including the replacement of “outdoor” relief with the indoor relief of the workhouse, the “less eligibility” test for admission to the workhouse, the need for paid administrators, and a central commission for oversight, the New Poor Law was the occasion “for the most important extension of government power and of the administrative apparatus of the state in more than half a century.”55 Many historians have thus viewed the New Poor Law as something of a paradox, since the establishment of a “free” market in labor was the product of such massive government regulation. It is important, however, to consider that the nineteenth-century evolution of the nation-state into a welfare-state bureaucracy was crucial to the survival of the “free” market. The apparent paradoxes and contradictions of laissez faire in theory and government intervention in practice were actually complementary and necessary. The theory of laissez-faire liberalism had to constantly disavow, however, that the economic sphere “as a sphere of continued and rapid change, has as its necessary condition the power of the modern state.”56 This power, after all, should be almost entirely unnecessary if the laws of the market are as self-regulating as classical political economy promised (and promises). If the laws of the

Banishing panic



market were not in fact self-regulating, political economy would also fail in its mission to reassure the citizens of the first industrial nation that the new economic system was somehow in control of itself. The need for a powerful state indicates rather obviously that the economic system required considerable regulation and a large safety net. Martineau and McCulloch, like many liberals in this period, manifested, particularly in their changing views of the poor laws, an increasing awareness of the risks that inhere in a deregulated, increasingly industrialized market, including the ability of sudden changes to create a domino effect of unemployment, poverty, indigence, unrest, and quite conceivably, revolution. In order for industrial capitalism to survive, these risks had to be insured by centralized government agencies, that would collect information about the poor and minister to them in a consistent and “scientific” manner. The stage is set for the reform movements of the s. The severity of a deteriorating social reality, a reality that inspired energetic educational, sanitary, political and economic reformism, crowded in upon the middle classes in the late thirties and early forties. Overly optimistic interpretations of it by writers like Martineau and McCulloch finally undermined the ability of works like the Illustrations and the Statistical Account to banish the panic of the middle and upper classes and quell the anger of the laboring classes in regard to the cruelty and the instability of the nineteenth-century economy. The cosmological consolations of popular political economy were limited in their duration by their attempt to totalize too tidily a particularly recalcitrant social reality. The rapid-fire plots of Martineau’s fiction, which dispatch problems with an initially reassuring alacrity, begin to suggest, because of this need to move with such speed and thoroughness, the severity of the problems at hand. Panic might be banished by such tales, but not eliminated. The banished panic will return, and a new text, with a new set of consolations, will be needed to assuage it. Similarly, the quantity and quality of McCulloch’s British resources create a statistical sublime in which meaning can easily go astray. Moreover, McCulloch published and thereby publicized information, like infant mortality statistics, that could as easily provoke as assuage panic. I have tried to suggest that the cosmological consolations of popular political economy were limited by their own utopian over-reaching, as well as by their tendency to expose more crisis and conflict in the social reality of Britain than they could readily explain or ameliorate. Popular and ephemeral works on political economy were replaced to a great



Victorian Writing about Risk

extent, in the s, by the best-selling and also largely ephemeral literature of reform. But cultural anxiety also requires the longer-lasting resolutions found in more canonical and enduring works, both literary and economic. Dickens and Eliot were acutely critical of Britain’s new economy, but their fictions allow for more complication and conflict than do Martineau’s and McCulloch’s, and therefore, I would argue, for more enduring relief of cultural anxiety. They represent England as fraught with difficult and even dangerous social, political and economic problems, problems that are not readily soluble. Their readers must experience and endure severe problems, including class conflict and violence, family dissolution, poverty and homelessness, over many pages and therefore over a considerable period of time. The serialization of many of these texts over a year or two also critically increased the time a reader would have to endure unresolved, albeit fictional, social problems. Anxieties are thereby raised before they are relieved – a process that Radway, we recall, found critical to the success of romance novels in providing their readers with emotional satisfaction. The conflicts realist fiction represents, and the contradictions that it does not completely resolve – poverty persists, the location of value remains uncertain, possessing wealth continues to threaten character, the values of home are incompatible with or hopelessly contaminated by those of the market – require that readers perform significant emotional and intellectual labor in the reading process, and that labor perhaps buys them a quantum of tranquility about certain aspects of the reality they have engaged, at the safe distance fiction can provide. Realism comes to dictate the realistic: that is, what is accepted and promoted as realistic becomes that which cannot be thoroughly resolved. Realism offers an odd kind of consolation: conflicts no longer need to be fully resolved; readers can take solace from their very representation. The novel is a model of how the world works and how it doesn’t work and it is the existence of the model rather than its content that provides the reassurance that the world can be understood, even if it can be changed only minimally, slowly and quietly. We can readily find a parallel to this fictional process in economic theory: in the third edition of Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy (), he admits that the use of machinery is not after all in the interests of the laboring class. Clearly such an admission might inspire concern in his readers about the kind of justice meted out by a laissezfaire economy. In the ensuing arguments about Britain’s need to remain competitive in world markets, Ricardo asserts that the use of machinery must be retained and class conflict countenanced. This text of “high”

Banishing panic



theory can tolerate, and ask its readers to tolerate, discomfort long enough to achieve a resolution – a resolution that involves withstanding and retaining some conflict rather than resolving all of it – through patently specious optimism and flimsy artifice. Ricardo’s very partial resolution of the machinery question, like the partial or tragic resolutions of “great” Victorian fiction, is sufficiently grounded in social reality to remain convincing in the long term. Along the way, “social reality” becomes increasingly reified and “realism” (of the literary and worldly kinds) comes to involve an acceptance of the inevitability of the social relations of the moment. Difficult and partial resolutions can treat the residuum of panic that resists the unstable blandishments of McCulloch and Martineau. But it is in these blandishments that the acute conflicts of the Victorian political unconscious are perhaps most available to interpretation, unresolved and unobscured by the long-acting conceptual and formal structures of the more enduring works of nineteenthcentury fiction and political economy. In these ephemeral works, conflicts are treated on an emergency basis; they are not “naturalized” or subsumed under the heading of the “human condition.” Conflicts are visible in these works as problems that might be solved; a necessary strain of utopianism is thus preserved. I have suggested that the optimistic, quietist and passive rhetoric of popularizations of laissez faire, with its millenarian gaze fixed on a certain if distant utopia, lost efficacy in resolving the conscious and unconscious conflicts of Victorian Britain. It was quickly supplemented, if not completely supplanted, by the active and pragmatic rhetoric of reform. The writers of this rhetoric would not wait for the corrections of the invisible hand of the market, but would themselves make England a place which could be seen and experienced, by expert and non-expert alike, as safe in the here and now, and they would make this happen with their own highly visible hands. In turning to a consideration of the works of two Victorian sanitary reformers, we will see a second version of modern cosmological thinking, this time in the form of the anticontagionist theory of disease, and ask which hands, visible or invisible, best banish panic.

        

The rhetoric of visible hands: Edwin Chadwick, Florence Nightingale and the popularization of sanitary reform

Among the momentous and disorienting changes taking place in the early nineteenth century, a stunning return of epidemic disease produced not only anxiety, but also a distrust of the industrial and imperial expansion that seemed to be responsible for its resurgence.1 The two most feared (although paradoxically not the most fatal) epidemic diseases, cholera and typhus,2 were indeed intimately related to imperial and industrial progress. Cholera was stirred out of its usual confinement in the Ganges Delta because of an increase in British troop movements in India and the increased mobility of the population made possible by railroads.3 Typhus,4 which is spread by lice, was and is a disease associated with overcrowding and poor sanitation, and was most common in the nineteenth century in the jerry-built and densely-packed housing of the great towns. The doctrine of anticontagionism, which formed the theoretical basis of the sanitary reform movement, held that these dreaded diseases were caused by filth and its odors, rather than by specific germs or particles.5 Because of its apparent ability to explain, predict and prevent infectious diseases, anticontagionism promised relief from the seemingly random and often deadly visitations of epidemic disease, and, equally importantly, suggested that industrial and imperial progress need not be feared because of their fatal side effects. Anticontagionism held that infectious diseases were produced by dirty air or miasma, a “disease-mist,” which is described by William Farr, a colleague of Chadwick and of Nightingale, as arising from the breath of two millions of people, from open sewers and cesspools, graves and slaughter-houses, [and which] is continually kept up and undergoing changes, in one season it is pervaded by cholera, in another by influenza; at one time it bears smallpox, measles, scarlatina, and whoopingcough among your children; at another it carries fever on its wings. Like an angel of death, it has hovered for centuries over London. But it may be driven away by legislation.6 

The rhetoric of visible hands



Accordingly and comfortingly, the resurgence of epidemic diseases in the early nineteenth century was not the uncontrollable scourge it appeared to be, but the explicable and preventable result of poor sanitation, an angel of death that might be “driven away by legislation.” In reducing the multiple origins and transmission routes of infectious diseases to the single focus of miasma, sanitary reformers offered the practical panacea of sanitation to a frightened public.7 Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Classes of Britain () and Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Hospitals () and Notes on Nursing () publicized the anticontagionist theory of disease and the need for expert sanitary intervention that it implied. These works enjoyed a surprising popularity among the general reading public,8 a popularity that may be explained by the ability of miasma theory to render disease entirely predictable given certain physical conditions such as defective drainage, an inadequate water supply, and overcrowded, unventilated living and working conditions. Remove what the sanitarians described as “nuisances” (excrement, blood and offal from slaughterhouses, rotting vegetable and other assorted waste); open windows; install semi-circular, porcelain-lined drains; lay on running water to flush such drains: these measures promised to make disease virtually disappear. With the disappearance of disease, destitution would also vanish, since it was a founding principle of the sanitarians that disease caused destitution – and never the reverse. The laws of health, like those of the economy, would conspire toward an equilibrium of well-being if their proper functioning were made possible. Anticontagionism, like laissez faire, is what I have called a modern cosmology, that is, an attempt to eliminate risk through the revelation of, and obedience to, a system of supra-human laws. Several recent accounts of risk, particularly those of Anthony Giddens and Niklas Luhmann, contrast a “primitive” or “premodern” need for a universe that is inherently orderly and just to a “modern” acceptance of danger and contingency as irremovable facets of an uncertain world. In opposition to these arguments, in the first two chapters of this book, I analyze two specific systems of “laws” – laissez faire and anticontagionism – that promised to predict and locate risk, and thereby eradicate it. These systems evince a strong cosmological inheritance within modernity, one produced by the yearning for security within a “universe” (or nation or neighborhood) that makes sense. The sociologist Niklas Luhmann has argued that “in the face of an increasingly uncertain future . . . the old cosmological limitations, the constants of being and the secrets of



Victorian Writing about Risk

Nature [are] replaced by distinctions falling within the domain of rational calculation.”9 On close and specific examination, however, such rational calculations can be seen as built on a foundation of nothing other than “the constants of being and the secrets of Nature.” This “natural” or “God-given” basis gives these rational calculations considerable power to soothe, and makes them continuous with, rather than a rupture from, cosmological systems of explanation. The triumph of anticontagionism was related both to its ability to assuage widespread anxiety about disease, and to its ideological compatibility with both the unregulated market and increasingly globalized trade. Sanitary ideology rendered compatible with health the radically increased contact between people, as well as between people and goods of industrialization and imperialism10. Anticontagionist theory made England safe for an expanding industrial and international economy no longer limited by the regulations of mercantilism, including the quarantine regulations that dated from seventeenth-century episodes of plague. After all, if infectious diseases were spread by contagion, then it would be necessary to quarantine both people and goods, thus impeding and potentially stalling altogether the flow of domestic and international trade. If contagion rather than miasma spread disease, then the factory system and urbanization would have to be viewed as intolerably dangerous since the new closeness of large groups of people would ensure catastrophic increases in disease transmission. Potential domestic and international threats were neutralized in the twin anticontagionist dicta that international goods need not be quarantined, and “that the aggregation of mankind in towns is not inevitably disastrous.”11 To mitigate the disaster created by the “aggregation of mankind” in towns was no small undertaking. Overflowing cesspools and pits, emptied sporadically and not very effectively by cleaners wielding shovels and buckets; an inch or so of raw sewage routinely settling at the bottom of glasses of drinking water; hospital patients sharing their unwashed bodies with maggots and their never-changed beds with flourishing crops of mushrooms: Victorian filth, somewhat like the fiction and furniture of the period, threatens to overwhelm us with a profusion of detail which both begs and beggars adequate interpretation. For the moment, the most important feature of these conditions is that not one of them seems particularly to have shocked or incensed the English public for the first twenty or thirty years of the nineteenth century.12 The sights and smells of animal and vegetable waste were not

The rhetoric of visible hands



yet associated with disease, and in fact had a history of being regarded as therapeutic.13 The founding of public health required a revolution in sensual perception. Chadwick’s biographer S. E. Finer is not alone in noting “the suddenness with which the people of England appeared for the first time to acquire a sense of sight and smell and realize that they were living in a dung heap.”14 This new sensory perceptiveness was related to the catastrophic impact of industrial change, as Finer contends, but also must have been the result of the impact on middle-class perception of the popular publications of the sanitary reform movement. Although Chadwick notes in  that the laboring classes had apparently had their “senses of smell obliterated by their employment,” Nightingale, writing almost twenty years later, observes that in “comfortable” homes chamber pots generally lacked lids and that they were usually emptied only once in twenty-four hours, suggesting that the middle and upper classes also lacked what we in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century would consider an adequate sense of smell. Beginning in the s, sanitarians described, decried and upbraided dirt with great precision and energy. Stench came to signal danger in a highly overdetermined relation: the odor emanating from an alley might be breeding typhus, cholera, prostitution, crime, revolution or all of the above. The visual surveillance characteristic of modern medicine as described by Foucault is thus supplemented, in sanitary reform, by olfactory surveillance once the necessary sense of smell is established. The advantage of olfactory surveillance is that information obtained by the eyes can be cross-referenced by the nose. That which cannot be seen at all can frequently be detected by smell, thus expanding the range of surveillance afforded by the gaze and the possibility of gaining or maintaining control of that which threatens, both literally and figuratively, from below – from below ground in sewers, from the lower classes, and from the physiological processes of the lower half of the body. The threatening specter of bad air is neutralized, however, in the works of Chadwick and Nightingale, not only by instructions on how to detect it, but by a reassuring array of readily available cleaning and purifying methods. Their arsenals of specific and practical solutions made it seem readily possible to conquer dirt, and thus disease, on a national scale. The visual and olfactory presence of filth was thus not only anathematized in the public imagination of the early nineteenth century, but the cleaning and deodorizing of the English nation and people became a noble and cherished cause.15



Victorian Writing about Risk

The popularity of intensely interventionist sanitary ideas illuminates an apparent contradiction in liberal thinking of the s and s: as the “minimal, decentralized . . . laissez-faire State of the entrepreneurial ideal was consolidating itself as the norm of political theory, the expanding, centralized, state of modern times was coming into being in administrative practice.”16 Classical political economy provided the theory; utilitarian administration provided the practice: the seeming conflicts in these two varieties of liberalism actually worked together to provide the warp and woof of the ideological safety net for the contingencies and dangers of an increasingly deregulated, industrialized, and globalized capitalism. The consequences for the treatment of cultural anxiety were excellent. On the one hand, writers like J. R. McCulloch and Harriet Martineau attempted to soothe the public with the vision of an entirely self-regulating economic system that placed no burden of action or intervention on the middle and upper classes; indeed, their representations authorized inaction in the face of increasingly evident social problems. On the other hand, writers like Chadwick and Nightingale attempted to alarm and horrify these same middle and upper classes either into taking action themselves or encouraging the state to do so. This activity would offer the middle and upper classes the chance to experience the calming effects of grappling with, rather than ignoring or denying, increasingly threatening social problems. The rapid ascent to hegemony of liberalism in the first half of the nineteenth century had much to do, I would argue, with its ability to offer a broad spectrum of solace for the ever-relocating foci of cultural anxiety with these alternating recommendations of passivity and activity. The encyclopedic scope and detail of the works of Chadwick and Nightingale are perhaps the non-literary counterpart of the confident and ambitious inclusiveness of the realist novel. The representational style of reports, manuals and novels of the mid-century all exude a sense of assurance not only in their ability to reflect and explain large segments of a rapidly changing social reality to a confused and anxious reading public, but also in their ability to reform and reshape that reality. A crucial difference between the novel and the sanitarian text, however, is that authors like Chadwick and Nightingale insisted that England could be made clean and safe almost immediately if their prescriptions were followed. In the fiction of the same period, England is represented as fraught with complex and not immediately soluble social, political and economic problems. Novels as diverse as Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, Mary Barton, Our Mutual Friend, Adam Bede and Barchester Towers, to name only a

The rhetoric of visible hands



few of the major novels of the period –, allow for the representation of such problems over many hundreds of pages, through the thoughts and relations of numerous characters and in the incidents and denouements of several subplots. These novels, among many others, represent problems with great formal and thematic complexity, and then allow readers to experience and endure such problems over time at the safe distance that fiction can create. Chadwick and Nightingale could not pose imaginary solutions to the real problems they confronted; the sanitary report or hospital manual does not have the aesthetic or epistemological margins (the expansive margins of the fictional) in which to represent social problems as complex and overdetermined. Problems must be solved almost as soon as they appear in such accounts, or else excite anxiety which cannot be safely replaced within the brackets of the “fictional.” Wherever Chadwick finds fever, he immediately finds removable filth as the cause; whenever Nightingale finds foul air, she instantly locates a window that can be opened. Because of this rapid-fire depicting and dispatching of problems, texts like those of Chadwick and Nightingale provided a powerful, if short-acting, relief for cultural anxiety – “short-acting” because the speed and thoroughness with which they solve every problem opens up the possibility that these problems are so threatening that their presence cannot be tolerated textually for longer than a paragraph or two. The effective relief of cultural anxiety requires the complementary, long-acting processes of those fictions in which problems are vicariously experienced and survived by readers over a longer textual time, making the same problems seem less threatening because they can be not only confronted, but also tolerated at length. The confident realism of both kinds of texts brings the world to the reader with the promise that that world is bearable, and that it is safe to know it and to live in it. In The Normal and the Pathological, Georges Canguilhem has observed that “it is in the rage of guilt as in the clamor of suffering that innocence and health arise as the terms of a regression as impossible as it is sought after.”17 The works of Chadwick and Nightingale rage and clamor with a particular eloquence, as they vigorously seek to transform an industrialized, urbanized, and, in increasingly large swathes, immiserated Britain into a virtual utopia of cleanliness, order and health. They represent the realization of this utopia as contingent on the participation of people like themselves – i.e. the middle class or the female Briton who had been previously barred from wielding public authority18 – who, on



Victorian Writing about Risk

the basis of their merits and qualifications, would have the ability to administer into being a general condition of both physical and metaphysical health, and then maintain the necessary surveillance for its continuation. They are thus not only key figures in sanitary reform, but also in the creation of a class of expert administrators appointed on the basis of a particular definition of merit (rather than on the basis of birth or connection) to an expanding bureaucracy, and thus to the professionalization of British society.19 Because of their impressive claims to possess the truth and their ability to reveal laws that were somehow both writ large and at the same time legible to only a small group of the elect, they brought to this professionalized administration a compelling moral and intellectual authority. Chadwick and Nightingale thus contributed generously to the transcendent administrative authority achieved by the Victorian English middle classes, not only over their own nation, but over much of the world outside it. . In the Report on the Condition of the Labouring Classes of Great Britain (), Chadwick compiled a monumental mass of data and theorized its implications for Victorian society. A “small army” of investigators, including Poor Law Assistant Commissioners, medical officers, clerks, individual doctors, factory inspectors, the provosts of all the Scottish Burghs and other miscellaneous experts gathered the data. M. W. Flinn estimates that “probably upwards of , individuals were approached for information.”20 In addition, Chadwick had access to statistical material from the offices of the Poor Law Commission and the Registrar General. The Report, in some four hundred closely printed pages, describes the condition of the laboring classes in town and in country, in agricultural and industrial employment, at home and at work, in sickness and in health. It is a collage of lengthy citations from the testimony of the various investigators, interpolated with analyses and comments by Chadwick. Liberally illustrated with sanitary maps, the Report highlights the “less cleansed districts” in dark brown, and includes drawings and floor plans of “improved” cottages, “Tabular Views of the Ages at which Deaths have occurred in Different Classes of Society,” “Linear Representations” (i.e. graphs) of deaths from various diseases and even a plan of the Derby Arboretum, offered as an example of the “arrangement of walks in public towns for the economizing of space.”21

The rhetoric of visible hands



Although the reader may feel almost crushed under the weight of the evidence, the method of relentless and repetitious citation of investigators’ descriptions of alleys, factories, cottages and cellars from “one end of the island to the other” actually gives the Report the aura of attaining the seemingly unattainable goal of its title. Chadwick’s work set a new and rigorous standard for inclusiveness and breadth in governmental reports. It may also have established the bureaucratic style itself, in which density of information is more important than readability or even intelligibility. The government report, Chadwick-style, confers authority on its author and keeps it there; continually confronted with rhetorical thickets overgrown with facts, the clearest impression a reader gleans is that the author is indeed an expert. Such reports, in other words, do not so much help their readers to become conversant with their subject matter as demonstrate why they cannot become familiar with such voluminous and complex material. This form of representation works to make its content seem safe, or safely contained. The seemingly comprehensive description of the sanitary condition of the laboring population is arranged so that it substantiates a series of interrelated arguments. In the first three chapters, vignettes of living and working conditions of the laboring population, of its domestic habits, of the state of sewers and of streets around its homes, abound to “prove” that “epidemic” (e.g., infectious) disease is always found in connection with squalor and overcrowding. In Chapter , entitled “The comparative chances of life in different classes,” statistics indicate the death toll taken by these conditions. The removal of filth and the ventilation of homes and factories are shown, in the vignettes of Chapter , to cause disease to “almost entirely disappear.” In between, in Chapter , the economic impact of poor sanitary conditions is calculated, so that Chapter  not only demonstrates improvements in health and in morals, but also the savings effected by preventive measures. Implicit in the first large argument of the Report is that factories and towns are not inherently unhealthy; they can be made healthy by enforcement of health codes and the building of a sanitary infrastructure. The second large argument of the Report – the need for centralized administration of public health – is presented implicitly throughout the Report and explicitly in the seventh chapter on legislation. Chadwick shows that the existing laws for the protection of public health, many of which are of Elizabethan origin, are inadequate and confused. He characterizes local commissions as usually corrupt and as additional sources



Victorian Writing about Risk

of confusion. This critique leads to the main recommendation of the report: a Central Board of Health, which would be empowered to enforce and oversee the health of the nation, from the construction of sewers (for which Chadwick offers a specific design) and the cleaning of streets to the building of cottages and the oversight of the bathing habits of laborers. Chadwick theorized the raw materials of the Report with concepts gained from his contact with the ideas of Jeremy Bentham and the Benthamite circle, from his study of French authorities on public health,22 and from the work of his anticontagionist, medical colleagues, particularly Neil Arnott, James Phillips Kay-Shuttleworth, and Thomas Southwood Smith.23 Chadwick thus combined an extraordinary breadth of data with a considerable depth of theory to produce an uncommonly compelling document. The Report inspired much of the sanitary reform movement, as well as various government interventions, including the  Public Health Act, which, although “tentative and uncertain” in its initial impact, made government intervention into matters of health and sanitation seem not only acceptable but inescapable.24 The good news of the Report is crystallized in Chadwick’s description of the “Duties of the Officer of Health,” written for the Public Health Act: the “causes that produce excessive sickness and premature mortality are definite, palpable, and preventable.”25 Disease is not mysterious, and it cannot hide from expert eyes (and noses). Chadwick’s description of the causes of disease as “definite,” “palpable,” and “preventable” inspired confidence about his ability to solve the seemingly overwhelming problems created by urban squalor. Chadwick could thus take the risk of bringing before his already anxious readers the most hideous and horrifying details of the disease-producing living and working conditions of the laboring classes. In fact, a strategy of the Report seems to be to represent the reality of squalor such that it becomes more and more intolerable for the reader, thereby making Chadwick’s confident solutions seem more and more desirable, and indeed urgently necessary. Chadwick includes, for example, this description of a family by J. F. Handley, medical officer of the Chipping Norton Union:26 When the small-pox was prevalent in this district, I attended a man, woman, and five children, all lying ill with the confluent species of that disorder, in one bed-room, and having only two beds amongst them. The walls of the cottage were black; the sheets were black, and the patients were blacker still; two of the children were absolutely sticking together.27

The rhetoric of visible hands



The reader can visualize the inability of the poor to alter substantially their living conditions and, consequently, the necessity that someone else, preferably the government (in the form of a Central Board of Health), should intervene. Unlike the narratives of the numerous reform novels of the s,28 in which characters, however idealized or vilified, move and change, even if to very little effect, Chadwick and his investigators represent the poor as objects in a tableau, frozen (often almost literally) in time and mired in refuse. They are objects not so much to be pitied, but to be bathed and then returned to an atmosphere purified of the disease and dirt that are immobilizing them – sometimes causing them to stick together in an all too literal fashion. The Report describes large families living in one-room cellars without mattresses, or indeed furniture of any kind; horses, pigs and fowl living indoors as members of the family with no accommodations for human (much less animal) waste; several women huddling in bed in the middle of the day because the other women of the family needed to wear all of their collective clothing to be able to go out into the streets; of twelvefoot dung heaps towering just outside dwellings; and of the many deaths, from cholera and typhus especially, among the people living in these conditions. National health and wealth depend on the freeing of the laboring class from this constraining mire and ill health, the Report asserts, but such liberation must be effected under expert administration. And this is not a one-time effort: Chadwick and his professional investigators implicitly argue for the necessity of their own continuing surveillance of the working classes in order to keep laboring hearts, minds, homes, and streets clean, and thus no longer a threat to the health and safety of the rest of the nation. Chadwick carefully highlights cases of rural squalor to preempt any hasty conclusions about the relative dangers of large towns. Thomas H. Smith, the medical officer of the Bromley Union, is appalled that “so many sources of malaria [meaning ‘bad air’ in this period] should exist in a rural district.” He finds that “refuse, vegetable and animal matters, are also thrown by the cottagers in heaps near their dwellings to decompose [and that] pig sties are generally near the dwellings . . .” (pp. –). Rural garbage, like its urban counterpart, produces miasma and then disease. In a move that further equates town and country conditions, Chadwick cites the report of Aaron Little, the medical officer of the Chippenham Union, because it “affords a specimen of the frequent condition of rural villages which have apparently the most advantageous sites”:



Victorian Writing about Risk

The parish of Colerne, which, upon a cursory view, any person (unacquainted with its peculiarities) would pronounce to be the most healthy village in England, is in fact the most unhealthy. The filth, the dilapidated buildings, the squalid appearance of the majority of the lower orders, have a sickening effect upon the stranger who first visits this place. During three years attendance on the poor of this district, I have never known the small-pox, scarlatina, or the typhus fever to be absent. The situation is damp, and the buildings unhealthy, and the inhabitants themselves inclined to be of dirty habits. There is also a great want of drainage. (pp. –)

Chadwick thus argues that what seem to be the perils of town living are not in fact peculiarly urban. The intensified – and unplanned – urbanization that necessarily accompanies full-scale industrialization is not the problem, just as the poverty of the laboring classes and the stresses of the factory system are not. The problem is simply filth, whether in urban or rural places. And this filth may not be visible to those not trained to look for it, and especially to those who do not enter the quarters of the “lower orders.” Ideas about the health of the countryside may be simply the product of ignorance and of the town dweller’s idealization of rural life. If Chadwick tries strategically to neutralize the opposition between urban and rural squalor, the opposition between Irish and English squalor is, in contrast, strategically heightened. William Rayner of the Stockport Union describes, in a manner typical of Chadwick’s informants, Backwater-street as: proverbially the most filthy street in the town, [containing] a number of lodging-houses and Irish, who mostly live in dark damp cellars, into which the light can scarcely penetrate . . . It is not to be wondered at that such places should be the constant foci of fevers. (p. )

In Rayner’s description, the Irish live in what is tellingly described as “proverbially the most filthy street in the town.” The tradition by which the Irish are judged the “most filthy” is indeed proverbial in England; Victorian social critics were still citing Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland of , as a legitimate source for describing nineteenth-century conditions in Ireland.29 Equally disturbing is Rayner’s sense that the Irish can scarcely be seen or known: like the lodging houses with which they are paired in his description, they become a fixed and unfortunate part of the landscape, they cannot be easily inspected; the light of English reason can “scarcely penetrate” their darkness. In Wolverhampton Union the Irish keep a “pool of green [sic] stagnant water or mud continually” outside their dwellings, and the investi-

The rhetoric of visible hands



gator is “afraid it would require the interference of the law to effect any permanent good” (p. ). Thus state intervention into private life, so anathema to the libertarian English tradition,30 is made necessary by the Irish tradition of inexplicable and intractable dirtiness. The Irish, as both insiders and outsiders in Britain, both part of the Union and racially alien, make all-purpose and highly flexible scapegoats for problems that might otherwise be referred to the social structure. Blamed by the defenders of classical political economy for depressing the living standards of the English laborer,31 they are blamed again by the sanitary reformers for creating foci of disease. This association of Irishness and disease is not peculiar to Chadwick’s Report; M. W. Flinn describes its extent in sanitary thinking: One school of thought attributed the rising incidence of disease in the first half of the nineteenth century quite simply to the Irish immigration. Several witnesses before the Irish Poor Inquiry of  stressed the role of the Irish in disseminating disease. “The Irish in Birmingham are the very pests of society,” said one, “they generate contagion.” And the Commissioners themselves concluded that, “from the dirtiness conditions of the bedding, the want of the commonest articles of furniture, the unclean habits of the inmates themselves, and the numbers which, without distinction of age or sex are closely crowded together, they [the Irish] are frequently the means of generating and communicating infectious disease.”32

The Irish contribute a disproportionate share of miasma to British air. And although at moments Chadwick and his investigators seem to have a sense that the English laboring class does not choose to live the way they do, that if they were “placed in clean cottages, the improvement in themselves and their children would soon be visible” (p. ), the Irish are represented as bent on their own degradation, refusing to buy furniture apparently because they like to be without it. Although Chadwick, and physicians like James Phillips Kay-Shuttleworth, were anticontagionists, holding that disease was caused by miasma, both authors represent the Irish as literally and figuratively contagious. “The contagious example which the Irish have exhibited of barbarous habits and savage want of economy, united with the necessarily debasing consequences of uninterrupted toil, have demoralized the people.”33 Fault and blame shift around in Kay-Shuttleworth’s description as they do in Chadwick’s Report. On the one hand, dirtiness causes disease, destitution, criminality and political subversion; on the other hand, the dirt is held to originate with the laboring classes themselves, or, more efficaciously for English self-esteem, with the Irish portion of it, and



Victorian Writing about Risk

thus to be the effect of disease, destitution, criminality and political subversion. So, although English poverty (the squalid aspects of which are not entirely voluntary) does not cause fever, the Irish variety does, because the Irish poor voluntarily and even enthusiastically live in dirt and darkness without furniture, cynically ignoring their negative impact on British public health. Chadwick uses the situation of the Irish as central evidence for his ultimate goal: a Central Board of Health that would oversee local hygienic policing.34 This would not only ensure that the slums would stop breeding the cholera and typhus that might be spread to the middle and upper classes, but also the moral degradation that produces crime and political unrest. Chadwick cites the examples of the “chiffonniers” of Paris who live by raking for what they can find amongst the refuse cast into the streets . . . and . . . like all men who live under such circumstances, are prone to throw away their wretched lives on every occasion. There are nearly  of the chiffonniers alone in Paris, and they and the water-carriers were conspicuous actors in the revolution of . (pp. –)

In this description, contact with waste causes a kind of wanton risktaking, including suicide and revolution, and therefore it must be managed by those who will not be corrupted by its powerful influence, i.e. middle class experts. And yet, Chadwick’s sense of the power and potential that inheres in filth seems to make him increasingly regret its being simply flushed away.35 This ambivalence creates an undercurrent of conflict in the Report. Cleanliness is made a necessary condition of national health, but this health is not associated with strength, but with docility and domesticity: On entering an improved cottage, consisting on the ground floor of a room for the family, a washhouse and a pantry, and three sleeping rooms over, with a neat and cultivated garden, in which the husband is both pleasantly and profitably employed, he has no desire to frequent the beer-shop or spend his evening from home; the children are trained to labour, to habits and feelings of independence, and taught to connect happiness with industry. (p. )

Mary Poovey has argued that in Chadwick’s Report, domestic activity becomes the opposite of, and the cure for, political activity. Staying home and identifying oneself with one’s family was preferable to going out into the streets and identifying – like the Parisian chiffonniers – with one’s class.36 The dirty streets are the place of dangerous disease- and classformation.

The rhetoric of visible hands



In Chadwick’s Report, filth is the cause of disease, and disease is posited as the cause of destitution in a strict one-way circuit: In the great mass of cases in every part of the country, in the rural districts and in the places of commercial pressure, the attacks of disease are upon those in full employment, the attack of fever precedes the destitution, not the destitution the disease. (p. )

Chadwick suppresses the widespread co-existence of employment and destitution, but in so doing, by connecting disease with employment, raises the specter of danger in factories. He then must counter this impression, lest work become unintentionally denigrated. Chadwick argues that tailors, for example, who have a high rate of work-related tuberculosis, need only open the windows of their shops or choose to work in less crowded shops to avoid this complication. In connection with child labor, Chadwick suggests that factories are actually “healthier places for [children] than their own homes” (p. ), pointing out that fifty-seven per cent of children in Manchester die before the age of five, “before they can be engaged in any factory labour, or in any other labour whatsoever” (p. ). Chadwick’s findings leave the structures of the factory system and the New Poor Law (of which he was the principal author) intact. If disease causes destitution, then destitution can be solved by basic sanitary measures (which benefit all classes) rather than by the more expensive remedies of poor relief or major factory reform. Chadwick points out that even physicians may be mistaken as to the real causes of fever because of the limits of individual observation, especially when such observation takes place through the optic of an outmoded and unscientific paternalism: The main error of those who have ascribed fever to destitution, appears to have been in adopting too hastily as evidence of the fact of destitution, such prima facie appearances as are noticed by Dr. Scott Alison, an error which non-professional [i.e. non-medical] experience may correct. In more than one instance where, in a district in which the demand for labour was still great, and the wages high, benevolent gentlemen have propounded similar doctrines, which, being at variance with the known state of the labour-market, I have requested that the names of these fever cases might be given, that their antecedent circumstances might be examined, and the accuracy of the conclusions tested, by officers of experience in such investigations; but I think it right to state the names or means of inquiry have never been forthcoming. In general, medical practitioners and benevolent individuals are extremely liable to deceive themselves and to deceive others, by what they call the evidence of their own eyes. The evidence shows that the best means of preventing the consequent destitution are those which prevent the attacks of fever and other epidemics upon all classes of the community. (p. )



Victorian Writing about Risk

Chadwick critiques the acceptance of the prima facie as the true. Truth is not what appears immediately before the eyes of a single individual; it is arrived at by those trained in the careful analysis of large bodies of evidence. And the expert collection and analysis of such evidence reveals a society that is coherent and humane. The role of the expert is to reveal truth; and conversely, truth increasingly becomes that which can only be known by experts who have access to and who can analyze large quantities of data. When reporting his own conclusions, Chadwick assumes the passive voice to proclaim that “the occurrence of destitution is denied as a general cause of fever.” The passive construction effaces the source of this denial, which is, after all, Chadwick himself. Chadwick’s grammar attempts to transform his own view into a transcendent truth, and this identification of expert opinion with truth is a crucial part of Chadwick’s campaign to place experts in positions of naturalized authority. Chadwick contributes to the status of empirical knowledge in what was becoming an increasingly statistical society. In so doing, Chadwick’s work is emblematic of the centrality of an empirical and statistical epistemology to the ideology of industrialization. The regularities that emerge from large numbers of facts provide security, and can explain, rationalize and tame the apparent ferocity of the new economic system. Eventually, the work of hygienic experts will make every nook and cranny of the nation safe. The hope of attaining such readability and visibility has been described as central to the Victorian definition of health itself, a “state in which reliable cognition and purposeful action continually reinforce each other.”37 Chadwick’s expert and authoritative presence in the Report is scarcely muted by the fact that he quotes so extensively from his correspondents. In fact, the force of his questionnaires is felt in the striking ideological unanimity of their responses. In a footnote, Chadwick gives us a glimpse of the methodological density of the instructions he gave to his investigators: A given amount of evil is experienced by a class placed under peculiar circumstances; a large portion of that evil is shared by other classes not under these peculiar circumstances; to attribute the whole of the evil experienced by the first class to those peculiar circumstances is obviously fallacious. It is conceived that it is only by investigating the subject with this precaution constantly in mind that it is possible to arrive at a just conclusion. While you carefully observe the effects of labour on the children and the adult workpeople, and report every case in which you conceive it to be excessive, and state the reasons on which you ground that opinion, you are requested to investigate minutely the concurrent causes of

The rhetoric of visible hands



ill health. With this in view you are requested in every case to examine and report the state of the drains in and about the factory: the state of the neighbourhood of the factory as to dryness or dampness, cleanliness or filthiness: the state of the houses and neighborhood in which the children and adult workpeople take their meals and exercise . . . and where they sleep: the state of the air within the factory, and which the workpeople usually respire, whether it be pure, or whether it be rendered impure by effluvia floating it, and if so, what, from careful examination, you find to be actually in it: the temperature of the air, the highest, the lowest, and the average temperature, and the condition of the air as to dryness or moisture. (pp. –)

The opacity of Chadwick’s prose in this passage is symptomatic of the conflict and controversy surrounding the ideas that underlay these investigative instructions. In the first sentence, a “given amount of evil” seems to refer to rates of disease and death. Chadwick reminds his investigators that a “large portion of that evil is shared by other classes,” meaning, apparently, that middle and upper class Britons also fall ill and die. Thus, disease and death cannot be attributed to poverty, the “peculiar [and peculiarly unmentionable] circumstances” of the laboring classes. Keeping this “fact” constantly in mind is the only way to avoid the fallacy of positing destitution as a cause of disease. So that while the effects of labor (and its correlative condition, poverty) should be observed, Chadwick strenuously implies that the real causes of morbidity and mortality will be found elsewhere. While labor is given one sentence, and no specific hazardous aspects of labor or laboring life are specified, the details of the environment to be investigated are elaborated at length. The factory, as well as its neighborhood, must be examined as to “dryness or dampness, cleanliness or filthiness.” Every possible state of air is then listed: “whether it be fresh or not fresh, owing to deficient ventilation, whether it be pure, or whether it be rendered impure by effluvia floating in it, and if so, what the effluvia are . . .” As in the Book of Leviticus, the elaborate and repetitious mention of that which is clean and unclean takes on the rhythm of ritualistic repetition. The investigators become like hygienic priests, able to look at the air with naked eyes and identify the presence and the nature of the particulate matter floating therein, even though this effluvia is invisible to everyone else. Chadwick’s administrative confidence seems almost unlimited: “the course of the present inquiry shows how strongly circumstances that are governable govern the habits of the population, and in some instances appear almost to breed the species of the population” (p. ). The expert administrator can actually govern a new species into being. This must have been good news indeed for the middle and upper classes in



Victorian Writing about Risk

, a year “marked by perhaps a greater incidence of unemployment, destitution, and social protest than any other in the nineteenth century.”38 The “new species” would be a cleaner and therefore more compliant laboring class. Hygiene becomes a metonym of social wellbeing, a means of literally washing away class conflict. Given the putatively salutary effect of cleanliness on the more threatening aspects of class difference, it is no small paradox that the central and most damning statistical finding of the Report was that an Englishman’s expectation of life varied directly with his social class. For us as contemporary readers, for whom statistical conclusions such as this are clichés, it is difficult to imagine the anxiety such a fact was capable of producing. Facts and figures in regard to life expectancy or rates of death were neither reliable nor, for that matter, available to the general public until the establishment of the General Register Office in .39 Chadwick, using information from the GRO as well as his other sources, compares death rates and comes across this appalling fact of differential mortality, laden with seemingly inescapable implications for the need for radical social and economic reform. Yet, he is able to surround and overwhelm these implications with evidence “proving” that the reasons for this difference in death rates were not economic but environmental.40 Chadwick draws up a handy table proving that “domestic mismanagement” rather than low wages causes poverty. John Salt, for example, earns twelve shillings a week and has a wife and one child to support; he is a “drunk and disorderly fellow, very much in debt.” He is partnered in the table with George Hall, whose wages are lower, ten shillings per week, but who has “reared ten children” and lives in “comfortable circumstances” (p. ). This “table” is an excellent example of the vicissitudes of “quantification” in the Report: the term “comfortable” is a rather nebulous description of physical circumstances in a document that contains hundreds of pages detailing every aspect of the dwellings and neighborhoods of the laboring classes. Perhaps the “comfort” of Hall’s circumstances cannot bear more elaborate scrutiny. Chadwick’s strongest indictment of mismanagement is not directed at the poor themselves, but rather at governmental failure to put in place the basic sanitary codes and infrastructure and thus provide the necessary foundation for a clean environment. In contrast to this governmental lethargy, the energy Chadwick evinces in the very preparation of the Report suggests the kind of gusto with which he would implement the practical solutions he proposes.

The rhetoric of visible hands



Chadwick’s argument for sanitary reform could claim, in addition to its political appeal, a sound economic base: the “pecuniary burdens created by neglect” are more expensive than the sanitary measures Chadwick proposes. Section  of the Report details these pecuniary burdens, the most serious of which is that, as the physician Southwood Smith reports, “fully one-half of the cases of fever occur in the prime of life, when men are most useful either to their families or society” (p. ). Smith cites the economic calculation of the redoubtable J. R. McCulloch, “who, viewing a human being as a productive machine, reared to last a certain time, and to return so much more than he costs, estimates a full-grown workman just arrived at maturity as having  pounds of capital invested in him” (p. ). This capital investment can best be protected by the small additional investment required by sanitary measures like the installation of a sewer system and running water.41 Rather than trying to remove social services from the economic realm, as utilitarian liberals in the period frequently did,42 Chadwick actually places sanitary reform squarely within the market economy, arguing for its worth as an investment in security – security from the myriad threats posed by the unwashed and therefore dangerous laboring classes.43 There is a second respect in which Chadwick’s report tries to realize a profit for those who would invest in his ideas: the notion that money can be made directly from sewage, by either a public utility or a private joint-stock company.44 For Chadwick, “the emptying of sewers into rivers anywhere seemed like pouring away liquid gold.”47 Apparently overwhelmed by the enormity of this loss, Chadwick was convinced that an arterial system could be created between towns and rural areas that would be mutually beneficial: Within the towns we find the houses and streets filthy, the air foetid, disease, typhus, and other epidemics rife amongst the population, bringing, in the train, destitution and the need of pecuniary as well as medical relief; all mainly arising from the presence of the richest materials of production, the complete absence of which would, in a great measure, restore health, avert the recurrence of disease, and, if properly applied, would promote abundance, cheapen food, and increase the demand for beneficial labour. Outside the afflicted districts, and at a short distance from them, as in the adjacent rural districts, we find the aspect of the country poor and thinly clad with vegetation, except rushes and plants favoured by a superabundance of moisture, the crops meager, the labouring agricultural population few, and afflicted with rheumatism and other maladies, arising from damp and an excess of water, which, if removed, would relieve them from a cause of disease, the land from an impediment to production, and



Victorian Writing about Risk

if conveyed for the use of the town population, would give that population the element of which they stand in peculiar need, as a means to relieve them from that which is their own cause of depression, and return it for use on the land as a means of the highest fertility. (p. )

This vision of sewage farming, to which Chadwick held even after its impracticality was absolutely confirmed,46 is a fitting emblem of Chadwickian administrative exuberance: the fatal ingredient of urban miasma can be turned into the fertile ingredient of rural agriculture, linking the residents of town and country in an organic system of symbiotic exchange. Waste is turned into food; the system is closed and nothing is lost. The power that has seemed to inhere in dirt earlier in the Report is made manifest in this vision, and this power is retained, and indeed put to use for the national well-being rather than flushed away. . Chadwick’s  Report focused on the homes of the laboring population of Britain, making the private sphere of the poor considerably less private and more visible than that of the middle and upper classes, and “proving” that “the existing mass of pauperism was not a disease attaching to the very structure of society, but merely a disorder of its functions, which could be corrected by a proper regimen.”47 Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing and Notes on Hospitals focus on public and private space in a very different way, locating the dangers of ill-health where Chadwick would include them – within the hospitals – but also precisely where Chadwick would exclude them: within the private sphere of the middle and upper classes. Chadwick wished to teach the laboring classes the value of a middle class standard of hygiene and domesticity, but Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing, which is not a textbook for hospital nurses, but rather a handbook of household management and home care of the sick, suggests that such elevated middle-class standards were largely imaginary. Notes on Hospitals compounds the scandal incipient in Notes on Nursing. The likelihood seems clearly to be that hospitals could be made into paradigms of sanitary engineering and management much more readily than could the comfortable but nonetheless dirty homes of England. In Notes on Nursing, Nightingale looks closely at “handsome” and “comfortable” homes and reveals why many such homes were breeding grounds for disease:

The rhetoric of visible hands



I have known cases of hospital pyaemia48 quite as severe in handsome private houses as in any of the worst hospitals, and from the same excuse, viz., foul air. . . . I will tell you what was the cause of this hospital pyaemia being in that large private house. It was that the sewer air from an ill-placed sink was carefully conducted into all the rooms by sedulously opening all the doors, and closing all the passage windows. It was that the slops were emptied in the foot pans; – it was that the utensils were never properly rinsed; – it was that the chamber crockery was rinsed with dirty water; – it was that the beds were never properly shaken, aired, picked to pieces, or changed. It was that the carpets and curtain were always musty; – it was that the furniture was always dusty; it was that the paper walls were saturated with dirt; – it was that the floors were never cleaned . . .49

Nightingale likens the faulty sanitary management, and one of its results – pyaemia – of private homes to that of public hospitals and thus subverts the comforting Victorian domestic ideology that secured the home within the unassailable precinct of a separate sphere. Nightingale exposes the dangers lurking in the most familiar objects, indeed in the very objects that served to define certain homes as comfortable, including sinks, chamber crockery, curtains, wallpaper and carpets. Although she does not catalogue the dirtiness of comfortable homes in the voluminous detail characteristic of Chadwick’s Report, the details of her recommendations in regard to cleaning and dusting suggest vividly the deficiencies of “normal” hygienic practice in affluent homes in the midnineteenth century. The residents of the affluent homes in Nightingale’s text do not seem to be significantly cleaner than Chadwick’s tenementdwellers. Moreover, it would seem that the furnishings of such homes, furnishings whose absence in poor homes is so frequently deplored by Chadwick, are precisely what make them intractably unclean. Nightingale’s near despair with the generations of dirt that saturate English drapes and wallpaper vanishes in the face of the seemingly more daunting squalor of the nineteenth-century hospital. Notes on Hospitals is essentially a manual of sanitary hospital construction and management, and consists of two papers given before the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science at Liverpool in , as well as written evidence given to the Royal Commission on the State of the Army in .50 In these collected papers, Nightingale narrows down what seem like an infinite number of complex problems in Victorian hospitals to four simple defects: the “agglomeration of a large number of sick under the same roof,” “deficiency of space,” “deficiency of ventilation,” and “deficiency of light” (Notes on Hospitals, p. ). This group of problems is striking in that they are virtually the same: the first three all have to do



Victorian Writing about Risk

with a lack of space and air, and the fourth defect, deficiency of light, remains within this thematic. Where Chadwick focused most closely on what made the air foul from below, Nightingale concentrates on the movement and quantity of air, on bringing in the pure air of the outside to drive out the impure air of the inside: “The very first canon of nursing . . . is this:                       . . . (N, p. ). One way to interpret this focus would be to suggest that in Nightingale’s sanitary calculus, what is unsafe is what is inside – the air from outside must be brought in to disperse the dangerous “closeness” of interior air. For Chadwick, what is dangerous is what is outside, since defective sewerage and drainage mean that the refuse that has been put outside returns to the inside in the form of miasma, bringing along disease and death. Consequently, although each sanitarian follows the same anticontagionist principles, their geographies of risk differ, and come into significant conflict. Nightingale locates danger inside, in claustrophobic closeness; Chadwick places it outside, in the increasingly dirty and disorderly streets. The dangers of the private sphere for women are evident not only in the sanitary symbolics of Nightingale’s work, but also in the works of the social critic Harriet Martineau, the mountaineer Amelia Edwards and the explorer Mary Kingsley, all of whom are discussed in other chapters of this book. Each of these women seems to have found the requirements of the theoretically tranquil and secure domestic sphere harder to bear than the apparently more exigent circumstances that each confronted outside the home: bankruptcy and the demands of economic self-sufficiency in the case of Martineau, the Crimean War and sanitary reform in the case of Nightingale, the ascent of the as yet unclimbed Dolomite Alps in the case of Edwards, and the exploration of West Africa in the case of Kingsley. Each of these authors represents home – the private domestic sphere as well as England itself – as safe, but then subverts this idyll, whether in a memoir, a handbook, or a collection of tales that indicates explicitly or implicitly the rewards of escape from the dangerously constraining duties of home and of England. A telling example of this double message is found in the juxtaposition of Notes on Nursing and Notes on Hospitals. In Notes on Nursing, Nightingale instructs and admonishes her women readers, in chapter after chapter, to make their homes clean, and therefore disease-free. But the very need for Nightingale’s explicit directions suggests that such homes were not safe. Moreover, for Nightingale, “the family [was] too narrow a field for

The rhetoric of visible hands



the development of an immortal spirit, be that spirit male or female.”51 For her it was the hospital that provided a large enough field of action, and an arena in which women could truly make a difference, more of a difference than in the confines of the patriarchal family structure. In Notes on Hospitals, Nightingale continually recommends that women be given the central role in the sanitary management of hospitals, and indeed in “institutions of all kinds”: “I think the Anglo-Saxon would be very sorry to turn women out of his own house, or out of civil hospitals, hotels, institutions of all kinds, and substitute men-housekeepers and men-matrons.”52 Nightingale deftly annexes domestic and institutional space, noting that men would not turn women out of their homes – a place where women clearly belong – and by the same token women should not be denied their rightful place in institutions like hospitals and “hotels.”53 “Matrons” are inescapably female; the use of the oxymoronic “male-matron” suggests that there is no proper term for a man in this position because they do not belong in it. Nightingale’s rejection of the domestic duties required of her by her particular gender, class and family are expressed with greatest clarity in her philosophical novella, Cassandra: The family uses people, not for what they are intended to be, but for what it wants them for – for its own uses. It thinks of them not as what God has made them, but as the something that it has arranged that they shall be. If it wants someone to within the drawing-room, that someone is to be supplied by the family, though that member may be destined for science, or for education, or for active superintendence by God.54

In her non-fictional works, her critique of domesticity did not take the form of openly rejecting a woman’s place in the domestic sphere, or of rejecting the traditional realm of woman’s work, but rather of expanding that sphere and that work to include public institutions and their management. Notes on Nursing and Notes on Hospitals combine to make nursing and sanitary management the domain of all women. For Nightingale to designate every woman a nurse, as she does in the Preface to Notes on Nursing, is to articulate part of her general scheme to entrust the cleanliness of the nation to women, and thus give women genuine authority in both the private and the public sphere.55 “The woman,” she informed the Royal Commission on the Sanitary Condition of the Army, “is superior in skill to the man in all points of sanitary domestic economy, and more particularly in cleanliness and tidiness. I think great sanitary civil reformers will always tell us that they look to the woman to carry out practically their hygienic reforms” (H, p. ).56



Victorian Writing about Risk

In constructing nursing and sanitary management as vocations for which women were peculiarly suited, even those of the middle and upper classes, Nightingale made possible an unlikely and even paradoxical escape route for such women: from the apparent security and comfort of the affluent Victorian home into the dangerous and distressing space of the Victorian hospital. The idea that some women might want to leave the domestic sphere troubled the Victorian ideology of “home”; that they would choose the apparently more threatening space of the hospital only added to the scandalous nature of the project. In her attempt to establish powerful positions for women within the hospital, Nightingale attempted to create a space that women could make safe by their own efforts and maintain as safe by their own authority. Nonetheless, it is important to remember that effort and authority were distributed according to a class-based hierarchy, in which women from the middle and upper classes had authority over laboring class women who made the effort, i.e. who performed the actual labor of nursing. Martha Vicinus has pointed out that Nightingale’s “plan of ward life closely resembled an upper-class wife and her domestic servants.”57 Nightingale attempts to replace the patriarchal family with the matriarchal hospital, retaining a strict class hierarchy. For Nightingale, as for Martineau, the necessary escape from the duties and constraints of family life was facilitated by a sense of the existence of a set of God-given laws that could offer emotional and intellectual security, as well as an arena for action. Just as Martineau was deeply comforted by the regularity and stability promised by the laws of classical economics, so Nightingale found solace in the laws of anticontagionism. Anticontagionism made sense of disease; it was consistent with a world ordered by laws that were grounded in a providential morality. Although Chadwick mentions the moral import of these laws more in the breach than in the observance – citing case after case of the coincidence of dirt, sickness and depravity among the laboring classes, Nightingale explicitly identifies the “laws of life and death” and the “laws of health” as God’s laws. For Nightingale, the rejection of anticontagionist theory represented a reckless abandonment of meaning: The idea of “contagion,” as explaining the spread of disease, appears to have been adopted at a time when, from the neglect of sanitary arrangements, epidemics attacked whole masses of people, and when men had ceased to consider that nature had any laws for her guidance. Beginning with the poets and historians, the word finally made its way into medical nomenclature, where it has remained ever since, affording to certain classes of minds, chiefly in the southern

The rhetoric of visible hands



and less-educated parts of Europe, a satisfactory explanation for pestilence and an adequate excuse for non-exertion to prevent its recurrence. (H, pp. –)

Contagion is little more, in this description, than a superstition that leads to a fatalistic acceptance of pestilence. Charles Rosenberg describes Nightingale’s sense of the “moral implications” of contagionism: Contagion seemed arbitrary, random in its moral implications. If chance alone determined whether an individual should intersect with a disease-causing microscopic particle, then sickness was bereft of meaning; it could play no monitory role in a world of moral order.58

If sickness is meaningless, it cannot be interpreted, which means that it cannot be made to yield information that can then be acted on. The chaos of contagion could never be controlled; and, equally importantly for Nightingale, contagion theory would seriously weaken the case for the utility of nurses in the prevention and cure of disease. The resignation and fatalism that led to filthy hospital conditions also led to insanitation in affluent homes. Nightingale blames English mothers for ignoring the anticontagionist connection between dirt and disease. The still widely accepted contagionist theory bred resignation, in Nightingale’s view, because it made infectious diseases seem inevitable. Turning to the negligence of the mothers of England in regard to measles, she asks them, at characteristic point-blank rhetorical range: If you believed in and observed the laws for preserving the health of houses which inculcated cleanliness, ventilation, white-washing, and other means, and which, by the way, are laws, as implicitly as you believe in the popular opinion, for it is nothing more than an opinion, that your child must have children’s epidemics, don’t you think that upon the whole your child would be more likely to escape altogether [from having such epidemics]? (N, p. )

Nightingale dictates from her position as possessor of God’s laws, which he is “always teaching while you are not learning” (N, p. ). Throughout the Notes, Nightingale confronts her readers in abrasive apostrophes, chastising “you” and “you” and “you” for what quickly becomes “our” embarrassing ignorance in regard to the “laws of health.” Is it better, she asks, “to learn the piano-forte than to learn the laws which subserve the preservation of off-spring?” (N, p. ). Such accusatory questions were something of a cliché in the rhetoric of Victorian sanitary reform; they were designed to “play upon . . . feelings of guilt and fear and suggest that much death was preventable.”59 But the high infant mortality rates of the period60 make this cliché one that retained considerable affective force, and it is perhaps to soften its sting that Nightingale, in the



Victorian Writing about Risk

rhetorical tradition of J. R. McCulloch, who preferred to call children “non-adults” or “short-lived persons,”61 employs the matter-of-fact “offspring” when accusing musical English mothers of what is possibly an infanticidal choice of occupation.62 In addition to her energetic pursuit of the meanings of sickness, Nightingale’s titles convey her struggle to reconcile the requirements of Victorian womanhood with her expertise on health and hospitals.63 Many begin with a circumspect and even shy assertion of themselves: “Notes,” “Subsidiary Notes,” “A Contribution,” “Suggestions,” and “Observations” are her chosen genres. And yet in the substantive portion of her titles, circumspection gives way to bold assertions of expertise and comprehensiveness. Notes on Nursing is subtitled “What it is and what it is not,” declaring its authority in a way that considerably enlarges the diminutive sense of “notes.” The title Subsidiary Notes as to the Introduction of Female Nursing into Military Hospitals in Peace and In War: Presented by Request to the Secretary of State for War gives a strong impression of Nightingale’s sweeping knowledge about military hospitals, nursing, hospital administration in peace and war, as well as her ability to influence men of power. In the title Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army, the scope of the material belies the possibility that this is simply a matter of Nightingale’s jottings or musings: Nightingale’s biographer Cecil Woodham-Smith describes it as an “enormous volume,” one whose “canvas is immense” and that in its “great masses of detail, vast quantities of facts and figures are handled with admirable lucidity.”64 Nightingale’s titles, with their self-deprecation and diminution in regard to form and their epic ambition in regard to content, reveal a great deal about her as a thinker and writer about sanitary reform. In a letter to a friend she wrote “I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.”65 Nightingale puts a tidal wave of information in motion, the force of which will compel her readers to act. For Nightingale, as for Chadwick, to discern the laws of health required energetic and minute attention to the environment. Anticontagionism was based on the idea that controlling the environment would mean controlling, and indeed eliminating, disease. Both Chadwick and Nightingale attacked their respective environments with a vigor that is peculiarly Victorian in its almost heedless energy and ambition. Like Chadwick’s painstaking attempt to describe adequately something as enormous and amorphous as the sanitary conditions of the

The rhetoric of visible hands



laboring population of Great Britain, Nightingale’s testimony to the Royal Commissioners66 in regard to the sanitary state of the army is startling in its unfailing attempts at specificity and inclusiveness. WoodhamSmith describes the conditions that Nightingale faced, and faced down, in the Barrack Hospital in Balaclava: . . . men in the corridors lay on unwashed rotten floors crawling with vermin. As the Revd Sidney Osborne knelt to take down a dying message, his paper became thickly covered with lice. There were no pillows, no blankets; the men lay, with their heads on their boots, wrapped in the blanket or greatcoat stiff with blood and filth which had been their sole covering perhaps for more than a week.67

In the face of conditions that had overwhelmed and largely defeated the efforts of the military officials in charge of them, Nightingale, as a first step, went about the hospitals and their grounds quantifying everything from the number of urinals on hand (“many”) to the number of dead dogs outside a window at the General Hospital (“six”). The endurance and energy that made this unflagging attention to alternately grisly and tedious details possible undercuts the sentimentalized and sanitized myth of the lady with the lamp, particularly given what the lamp is illuminating. Nightingale’s efforts in the Crimea are the stuff of which the Nightingale legend is made (see Fig. ). Her two years there in fact comprised virtually her total experience of hospital nursing. She returned from the Crimea to spend the rest of her life literally in her own home. From her London house, based on her two years of military nursing in Turkey, a few brief forays into French and German hospitals, and extensive research, she directed the reinvention of nursing within Britain, (including the founding of nursing schools in hospitals), gathered statistics from around the world in order to direct as much as she could the reform of British hospitals and attacked the problem of sanitation in India, writing thousands of pages on the subject. Nonetheless, it is nursing for which Nightingale is most remembered, and it is nursing that was truly the cornerstone of her plan to make England and its empire clean and safe.68 In Nightingale’s vision, the ability of nurses in homes and hospitals to conduct minute surveillance constituted their primary contribution to the health of the nation. In Notes on Nursing, Nightingale calls on nurses to carry out the surveillance of both the patient and the patient’s environment to ensure or restore health. Nurses are crucial in Nightingale’s system because while the



Victorian Writing about Risk

“medical man sees the patient only once a day or twice a week,” nurses, observing patients all day every day, can detect and record the subtle changes. If nurses became as vigilant as Nightingale recommends, “it is quite incalculable the good that would certainly come from such sound and close observation in this almost neglected branch of nursing, or the help it would give the medical man” (N, pp. –). It is likely that this unprecedented attention to the sick, as much as increased cleanliness, contributed to the decrease in hospital mortality in the nineteenth century. Nightingale’s view of the benefits of surveillance was related to her particular view of disease. Although squarely in the anticontagionist camp, it allowed a more significant role for beneficent forces beyond human control than is usually articulated in anticontagionist writing: “all disease, at some period or other of its course, is more or less a reparative process . . .” (N, p. ). As the waste in Chadwick’s Report turns out to be liquid gold, so disease in Nightingale’s Notes turns out to be reparative rather than destructive. It is nurses who must maintain the patient and the patient’s environment in a state in which “repair” can take place. When patients die, it is more due to the mistaken interventions of their caretakers than because of the disease itself. Similarly, complications of illness are humanly caused: “If a patient is cold, if a patient is feverish, if a patient is faint, if he is sick after taking food, if he has a bed-sore, it is generally the fault not of the disease but of the nursing”69 (N, p. ). Just as a market crash can be construed as part of the beneficent plan of the invisible hand, so disease can be interpreted as part of a larger plan of healing: in both cases, the individual must place herself or himself in a right relation to the higher laws governing the process. Suffering and its survival can be brought under human control, a control underwritten and guaranteed by divine law. It is not disease that causes most suffering (and even death) but human mismanagement, which is to say, human non-alignment with divine law. Nightingale had an absolute faith in the value of statistics and quantification as the means to reveal these higher laws of anticontagionism. With the help of her friend and correspondent William Farr, she became a major statistician of the period.70 She regarded statistics not only as the most reliable form of knowledge; statistics also “discovered and codified law in the social sphere and thereby revealed certain aspects of the ‘character of God.’ ”71 She manifests the energetic optimism of the Victorian statistical movement, with its confidence that any and every aspect of social reality could be comprehensively counted and

The rhetoric of visible hands



then made subject to administrative control. Such confidence was in large part the result of Poisson’s “law of large numbers,” developed in , which “provided a further rationale for applying the mathematics of probability to social matters. It also seemed to explain how there could be statistical stability in social affairs.”72 The increasing ability of the national bureaucracy to collect these large numbers meant that reassuring regularities could be discovered and published, numbers and the would both explain and tame the apparent disorder of so much of British society. Nightingale used quantification both to make her hospital plans specific, and to convince the powerful men she addressed that her recommendations were based in necessity, not in imagination or whim. To prove the need for “a much larger mass of air . . . to dilute and carry away emanations” of the sick (H, p. ), she produces a systematic set of numbers, the derivation of which is not clear, but which is nonetheless impressive: The total amount of this gas [carbonic acid] produced by an adult in twentyfour hours is about , cubic inches, which, in a barrack-room, say, containing sixteen men, would give  cubic feet per diem. Allowing eight hours for the night occupation of such a room, when the doors and windows may be supposed to be shut, the product of carbonic acid would be  cubic feet, or about fifteen and a half cubic feet per hour. This large quantity, if not speedily carried away, would undoubtedly be injurious to health; but there are other gaseous poisons produced with the carbonic acid which have still greater power to injure. Every adult exhales by the lungs and skin forty-eight ounces, or three pints of water in twenty-four hours. Sixteen men in a room would therefore exhale in eight hours sixteen pints of water, and  cubic feet of carbonic acid into the atmosphere of the room. With the watery vapour there is also exhaled a large quantity of organic matter, ready to enter into the putrefactive condition. (H, pp. –)

Nightingale uses this numerical narration to reveal the exact process of the formation of miasma. This kind of “quantitative” argument was a very persuasive one to use in addressing the British Association for the Advancement of Social Science, an organization that shared many concepts as well as many members, including Nightingale herself, with the Royal Statistical Society. Like J. R. McCulloch, Nightingale saw in statistics a way to grasp and to represent reality vividly and authoritatively. Nightingale pioneered the graphic presentation of statistics, using colored or shaded squares, circles and wedges to make quantifications more immediately comprehensible.73 The use of such aesthetic devices was to help “excite inquiry”



Victorian Writing about Risk

– into the condition of hospitals, of the army, of the sanitary state of colonial settlements in India, etc. – and thus help to change such conditions. Nightingale put statistics, which was still a new discipline, to a threefold use: to reveal God’s laws, to convince her readers of the necessity that existing sanitary conditions in a given venue be changed, and to provide the factual basis for such changes. Nightingale’s statistical evidence is always accompanied by rigorously specific suggestions for the improvement of the problems that the statistics suggest. Like Chadwick, Nightingale never mentions a problem without offering its remedy; thus her work never raises any anxiety that it cannot immediately assuage. She proffers remedies for everything from the smallest comforts of a patient to the largest structural problems in the building of hospitals. In Notes on Nursing, for example, Nightingale discusses at length the best way to feed patients, concluding with this “very minute caution”: . . . take care not to spill into your patient’s saucer, in other words, take care that the outside bottom rim of his cup shall be quite dry and clean if, every time he lifts his cup to his lips, he has to carry the saucer with it, or else drop the liquid upon, and to soil his sheet, or his bed-gown, or pillow, or if he is sitting up, his dress, you have no idea what a difference this minute want of care on your part makes to his comfort and even to his willingness for food. (N, p. )

These precise instructions exemplify Nightingale’s close and happy relationship with any and all details. In Notes on Nursing and Notes on Hospitals, she makes specific suggestions about what kind of music is best for the sick (wind instruments including the human voice), the value of flowers in a patient’s room, the number of feet there should be between windows in a ward, placement of beds in relation to windows, the evil rustle produced by nurses who wear crinoline petticoats (and the potential fire hazard posed by such petticoats), the use of beeswax and marine glue to render hospital floors impermeable, the advantages of horsehair mattresses, the over-use of beef-tea as a food for the sick, and so on. As with Chadwick’s sure grasp and apparent control over a varied and potentially chaotic mass of data, Nightingale inspires confidence with the breadth of her concern, with the wealth of her information, and with the number and variety of situations she knows, very concretely, how to improve. Hospitals in the early and mid-nineteenth century were correctly regarded by their potential patients as dangerous places, where one was more likely to die (and then suffer the further indignity of dissection) than to recover. During the cholera outbreak of , The Poor

The rhetoric of visible hands



Man’s Advocate editorialized about fever hospitals as instruments expressly designed to kill off the laboring class.74 In the face of this generalized squalor, Nightingale prescribed the makings of a safe and sanitary hospital with a thoroughness that leaves nothing to be interpreted or imagined. From the patient’s bedside to the building as a whole, Nightingale evinced expertise in making sickness and hospitals subject to comprehensive control. The bulk of Notes on Hospitals is a manual for building and administering safe hospitals that can contain and control disease, and that could become “didactic microcosms”75 in which patients could learn how to be cleaner citizens, better able to align themselves with the “laws of health.” In the face of profoundly unsanitary and chaotic hospital conditions, and considerable official disinterest in changing them,76 Nightingale launched a campaign to convince the public and the government that hospitals could be made safe if they followed the highly specific principles she detailed. Just like Chadwick’s Report changed the aesthetic and moral valence of filth, Nightingale set out to change the valence of the hospital, an institution that most Victorians feared, and all but the poor studiously avoided. Nightingale is true to Chadwickian principles of a sanitary environment, but, as we have noted earlier, while Chadwick’s attention in the Report is focused most extensively on questions of sewers and drainage, and the ability of public works to drain and flush away potentially dangerous waste, Nightingale’s preeminent sanitary principle is ventilation. One way to construe these differing sanitary priorities would be to suggest that Chadwick, as the son of unsuccessful Lancashire industrialists, coveted the liquid gold that Victorian governmental neglect had wasted, whereas Nightingale, as the daughter of a conventional, affluent Victorian family, coveted the free flow of air that her claustrophobic home life denied her. In these gendered symbolics of public health, Chadwick and Nightingale combine to construct the most serious health problems of their time as easily and readily remediable. Chadwick and Nightingale represented themselves as the “therapeutic clergy” described by Foucault, ready to administer into being “a corrected, organized, and ceaselessly supervised environment, in which medicine itself would finally disappear, together with its object and its raison d’être.”77 Medicine itself might indeed disappear, but Chadwick’s Medical Officers of Health and Nightingale’s hospital and home nurses would remain, to correct, organize and supervise a healthy, safe England.



Victorian Writing about Risk

In order to make such administration and surveillance popular, Chadwick and Nightingale offered reconceptualizations of both public and private space. Chadwick’s investigators move in and out of streets and homes of the poor until the walls around their dwellings become transparent and the laborer’s home is made not only contiguous with but also continuous with the world outside. An unassailable private sphere is thereby denied the poor (if indeed it had ever been granted them), whose potential for spreading disease necessitated that their homes become part of public space, and therefore open to routine scrutiny. But the sewers that are so central to Chadwick’s sanitary vision actually connected the private space of all classes with public space in a new and vital way, suggesting that certain boundaries could be safely, and even salubriously, breached. As Chadwick’s collage of reports wove private and public spaces together, erasing or breaching boundaries as necessary, Nightingale expanded the domestic sphere by attempting to include within it parts of public institutions, including those over which she believed women should have sanitary authority. Public and private spheres were thus assimilated to a more homogenized national space over which experts who are middle class, in Chadwick’s vision, and experts who are women, in Nightingale’s, have administrative dominion. In the works of Chadwick and Nightingale, the washing and watching of British spaces and people within an anticontagionist cosmos are akin to rituals, which, in the description of Mary Douglas, “enact the form of social relations and in giving these relations visible expression they enable people to know their own society . . . [R]ituals work upon the body politic through the symbolic medium of the physical body.”78 The rituals of Victorian sanitary reform, in addition to materially improving many lives, enabled the middle and upper classes to learn how to experience their nation as a place that could be made known and then made clean, and therefore safe from the ravages of disease, and the social instability associated with it. “By analogy as well as in fact,” writes Bruce Haley in his study of the idea of health in Victorian culture, “disease and health became the measure of social well-being.”79 For the Victorians of the anticontagionist period (–80), this analogy was worked out in large part in the air, a realm which had to be purified, as Dickens puts it in Dombey and Son, of the “fermentation” produced by the “crowds of people and mountains of goods, departing and arriving score upon score of times in every four-and-twenty hours.”81 The air becomes almost a geographical unconscious in this novel of :

The rhetoric of visible hands



Those who study the physical sciences, and bring them to bear upon the health of Man, tell us that if the noxious particles that rise from vitiated air were palpable to the sight, we should see them lowering in a dense black cloud above such haunts, and rolling slowly on to corrupt the better portions of the town. But if the moral pestilence that rises with them, and in the eternal laws of outraged Nature, is inseparable from them, could be made discernible too, how terrible the revelation! Then should we see depravity, impiety, drunkenness, theft, murder, and a long train of nameless sins against the natural affections and repulsions of mankind . . . 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 who could tell 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!82

Nightingale and Chadwick did take the house-tops off to make unknown areas of Victorian society known, and, perhaps more importantly, knowable. Such knowledge, however much tamed by the interventions and interpretations offered by the sanitary reform movement, may have inspired a need in its possessors to remove to a purer realm, a place that had not yet been contaminated and made the prey of Farr’s Angel of Death and Dickens’ Destroying Angel. In the following chapter, the memoirs of several balloon aeronauts offer readers a vicarious escape from the befouled air of everyday life and a chance to explore the “upper air,” the still-immaculate air that has not been contaminated by the activities of busy Victorians on the ground.

 

Groundless optimism: regression in the service of the ego, England and empire in Victorian ballooning memoirs

“The atmosphere in which we live weighs upon everyone with a twenty pound force, but do you feel it?” Karl Marx, “Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Paper,”1 

Invented in France in ,2 balloon aerostation became immensely popular in England within months. “The chief feature of the afternoon fêtes”3 in the pleasure gardens from the s on, a balloon ascent also marked the opening of the Crystal Palace in . Although only a small number of Britons actually went up in balloons, ascents drew large audiences, and aeronautical entrepreneurs were able to charge admission to spectators and passengers alike. The balloon became a popular decorative emblem on fabrics, jewelry and china, and a diverse literature of ballooning attracted a wide readership.4 The balloon, however, was not solely or even originally an instrument for amusement. It evolved, or devolved, very quickly through three overlapping stages: from its original status as a major technical discovery, the precursor of navigable flight, it became an instrument for meteorological and atmospheric research, and then the Victorian equivalent of an amusement park ride. In Wonderful Balloon Ascents (), Fulgence Marion ranks the discovery of balloons with the discovery of America, “equally” in that “of all other discoveries, these two have attracted the greatest amount of attention, and given, in their respective eras, the greatest impulse to popular feeling.”5 Indeed, William Cowper seems to have been nearly overcome with feeling in regard to the balloon, recommending in  that a man caught flying be brought down “from his altitude by a bullet sent through his head.” Cowper was quite concerned that balloons would cause “the annihilation of all authority”6 because of the easy escape they might afford to criminals and other miscreants. Cowper’s reaction underscores their impact in the s, and the awesome sense they inspired that navigable flight, for better or for worse, was at hand. 

Groundless optimism



Navigable flight, however, was not at hand. By the time Marion was writing his history in , balloons had proven to be “as beautiful and as useless” as they were in the first years of their discovery.7 No improvements in navigation could be made in them, and as the historian of flight J. E. Hodgson has written, the balloon’s familiar appearance – a harmless, placid, even attractive object, floating serenely and unconcernedly in the sky, subject always to the whims of changing currents or the mercy of strong winds, and carried here or there or (in a calm) nowhere – affords an appropriate symbol of its own characteristics.8

This harmless, placid and attractive object drew crowds of excited spectators from the s to the s. The possibility of a fatal accident increased both the size and the excitement of the crowd that would attend a particular ascent. George and Margaret Graham, an exceptionally disaster-prone husband and wife balloon team, could always “draw a sensation-loving crowd,” a crowd that came “expecting trouble and was rarely disappointed.”9 Although the Grahams survived their many misadventures, deaths of ballooning daredevils were common, including those of two notable aeronauts in the s: George Gale whilst seated on a pony and James Goulston during an ascent in a storm, where the risks of equestrian and foul-weather flying were taken for the purposes of showmanship.10 Less dangerous for all concerned were “captive ascents” in which one could sit in the balloon while it was held a few feet off the ground by ropes. Balloon flights seem to have evoked two general classes of sensations: the thrills and excitement offered by the possibility of disaster and death that attended all balloon ascents, and the spectrum of peaceful and pleasurable sensations described in the popular memoirs of balloon travelers, in which fears of death and disaster figure only in their remarkable absence. The extremes of danger and safety came together in the upper air, and paradoxically, intense feelings of safety were experienced in an obviously dangerous circumstance. The value of experiencing safety in the midst of danger seems particularly modern: as the risks spawned by technological innovation are engaged and survived, the threat of danger, which seems to have loomed so large in such innovation, is, for the moment, neutralized. Anthony Giddens has argued that the modern recognition of risk includes “not just the possibility that things might go wrong, but [the recognition] that this possibility cannot be eliminated.”11 But the possibility that things might go wrong can be eliminated on a case-by-case basis: each successful engagement with



Victorian Writing about Risk

danger, each balloon flight that is survived, eliminates or evacuates a quantum of risk from the atmosphere. The rewards of such engagements lead to something like a dialectic of phobia and counter-phobia, in which the more risks are taken and survived, the safer the world seems to be. Perhaps such voluntary risks are satisfying because although fear is aroused, it is intentionally aroused, and for this reason it is accompanied by a sense of pleasure and security, as well as a more or less confident hope of a return to safety.12 Yet the safety experienced by balloon passengers is not adequately accounted for in such a theory of risk. In an odd reversal of the expected order of things, fear is what is felt on the ground; once the balloon ascends “fear is lost in admiration, and there is a joyous consciousness of safety, which favours calm observations.”13 James Glaisher agrees: “I believe the most timorous lose their sense of fear as the balloon ascends and the receding earth is replaced by the vapours of the air; and I refer this confidence chiefly, as has been suggested, to the consciousness of isolation by which the balloon traveler feels more like a part of the machine above than of the world below. The balloon strives to attain a height where it may rest in equilibrium with the air in which it floats . . .”14 There is no apparent basis for the sensations of security experienced in a balloon: they are in no way underwritten or guaranteed by reassuring statistics or established theories of flight. In fact, the statistics and the theories of the period in regard to flight were anything but reassuring, with frequent injury and mortality occurring during balloon adventures, and theories of flight disproved literally and often tragically in the air. Nonetheless, there is a virtual consensus in the ballooning literature that once the balloon ascends a sense of safety and tranquility descends on its occupants. Technological innovation led, in the case of ballooning, to a situation in which human agency was experienced as mercifully slight. As in the economy of laissez faire, so in the atmosphere of the upper air: human subjects have no greater responsibility, can be called upon to experience no greater exigency than to go, as it were, entirely with the flow. Thomas Monck Mason, a journalist and frequent passenger of the commercial aeronaut Charles Green in the s, analyzed the feelings of safety experienced in balloon flights in his memoir, Aeronautica (). According to Mason, a sense of safety or danger is never based on rational calculations. When someone becomes afraid, so long as his senses continue to indicate a possibility of the occurrence of what he dreads, the assurance, nay the knowledge of its improbability is quite insufficient to neutralise their evidence and overpower their suggestions.

Groundless optimism



Indeed, the process of reasoning is an undertaking far too elaborate for the occasion, even where the individual is disposed to encourage it. In situations of such impending physical peril, the mind has neither time nor calmness sufficient to enter into a calculation of chances, or to balance the arguments in favour of destruction against it, with a view to being guided by the result.15

Mason goes on to argue that one feels safe in a balloon precisely because there is a “visible want of connection” to the earth. The balloonist can neither see nor look for any defect that might be present in a visible support: it is the air that holds him up. No structural fault can be found with the air; there is nothing ominous about it that cannot be seen. Unlike a cable, for example, there can be no hidden weakness, no unseen flaw that might cause it suddenly to let go. Reports of the seemingly paradoxical sense of safety in the upper air are accompanied by descriptions of feelings of intense solitude, serenity and an at-oneness with the atmosphere: Henry Mayhew, in an article for the Illustrated London News,16 describes feeling “for once tranquil as a babe in a cot,” and of experiencing “really, as you had ideally in your dreams, floating through the endless realms of space.”17 Monck Mason describes a sense of “extraordinary quiescence,”18 and Henry Coxwell, in My Life and Balloon Experiences, a feeling of being “transported with delight.”19 James Glaisher, in Travels in the Air, reports that once above the clouds, “we seem to be citizens of the sky, separated from the earth by a barrier which seems impassable . . . the silence and quiet are so intense that peace and calm seem to reign alone.”20 This constellation of sensations bears quite a remarkable resemblance to psychoanalytic descriptions made later in the nineteenth century concerning the subjective experience of the infant before it achieves some recognition of its separateness from others and from its environment. Later in this chapter I will situate in its historical context and analyze the idea that such sensations were indeed pleasurable, as well as the attribution of such feelings to infants. First, I would like to draw out the parallels between the tranquility of the balloon passenger and that which psychoanalysts attribute to infants and to regressions to infantile states. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud describes longings for religion as part of an effort to experience (or rather re-experience) this early “oceanic feeling”: “the feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole.”21 Freud suggests that the desire for this feeling, i.e. the wish to regress, is based on memory traces of the earliest infantile state in which there was a “more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it.” In this state, the ego does not experience the



Victorian Writing about Risk

danger that it will later “recognize as threatening from the external world.”22 Subject and object are undifferentiated; the self is unbound in an unresisting and unthreatening world. Balloon flight apparently allowed for the experience of something very like Freud’s description of the oceanic state. Balloons, because they are lighter than air, meet with no resistance from the atmosphere, and this lack of resistance accounts for the feelings of unprecedented stillness and serenity so often recounted in descriptions of ballooning. And, by taking its passengers to a region of the atmosphere essentially devoid of objects, the balloon actually allows for something of a symbolic holiday from object relations. The psychoanalyst Michael Balint has compared the human relationship to the air with what is imagined to be the experience of the fetus in the uterine environment: “in our relationship to the air there are no sharp boundaries . . . we still live in the air in a state of harmonious mix-up.” To be completely surrounded by empty air, as in a balloon flight, allows for an experience of the environment that is, in Balint’s description, “quiet, peaceful, safe, and unobtrusive.” The subject is “in no way obliged to . . . notice, to acknowledge, or to be concerned about”23 this atmosphere. The balloon and its relationship to the air provide the environment where “regression” (or a return to what has been imagined by psychoanalysis as an infantile state) can occur; such an environment is by definition experienced as profoundly safe. Mason’s description of the experience of floating in a balloon remarkably parallels the feelings that psychoanalytic theorists would later attribute to the experiences of infancy or of fantasy: Undisturbed by the interference of ordinary impressions, [the balloonist’s] mind more readily admits the influence of those sublime ideas of extension and space which, in virtue of his exalted station, he is supremely and solely calculated to enjoy. Looking out from his lofty car in every direction save one, a boundless blank encounters his gaze . . . he involuntarily imbibes a sentiment of immense vacuity. In the midst of this vacuity . . . ’tis not to be wondered should a sense of solitude, to a degree never before experienced, form the predominating character of the feelings with which the aeronaut is . . . forcibly impelled to regard the scene around him. Utterly abstracted from all contact and communion with the habitable world, environed and upheld by an invisible medium, without a single object to interrupt the drear monotony of all about him, nothing can be more perfect than the state of isolation in which he is placed . . .24

In the perfect object-less isolation of the sky, the aerial voyager does not experience any difference between himself, the world and others: no one and no thing impinge upon his psychic and physical boundaries.

Groundless optimism



The observing subject can mutate into the observed object in the space of a sentence: the “boundless blank” suddenly assumes subjectivity and “encounters” the aeronaut’s gaze; the aeronaut, in turn, is rendered passive and object-like by the enormity of this blankness. Subject and object, in the ideal medium of the permeable and acquiescent air, lose the rigid boundaries they possess on the ground. The self can extend indefinitely into the “immense vacuity” of the upper air, in what Balint describes as the state of “harmonious mix-up” in which the subject is undifferentiated from, and therefore unthreatened by, the world around it. Mason’s sense of isolation within boundless blankness and immense vacuity also evokes the sublime. But whereas the sublime is usually that which in its magnitude overwhelms the subject, in the experience of the upper air what is encountered is an enormous absence, rather than an awe-inspiring presence. The self seems to be both threatened and aggrandized by its own possibilities within this great emptiness, and it is perhaps for this reason that Mason attempts to keep the sublime at arm’s length. He gingerly suggests that the “mind more readily admits the influence of sublime ideas” in the emptiness of the atmosphere. But he refrains from any elaboration of whether or not his own mind has admitted such ideas and if so, to what effect. The sublime is postponed or delayed by the possibility that the mind may not admit the sublime at all (thus rendering the sublime a volitional experience) and the sublime is further distanced by relegating it to the status of an “influence.” In Mason’s account of it, the sublime is just one more experience among many; the number of verbal qualifications placed between it and Mason as its unwilling victim vitiates its power. This distancing of the sublime is belied, however, further on in the passage by the intensity of the qualifiers and the frequency of superlatives used to describe the experience of the upper air: the immense vacuity, the boundless blank, the “sense of solitude to a degree never before experienced,” the feelings “with which the aeronaut is . . . forcibly impelled to regard the scene around him . . .” This language suggests the experience of a mind so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence draw on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings and hurries us on by an irresistible force.25

In the experience of the sublime, as described here by Edmund Burke, it is the object that fills and overwhelms consciousness; in the experience



Victorian Writing about Risk

of regression, it is the subject that is experienced as filling and overwhelming the boundaries of the world around it. In the descriptions of the sensations experienced in a balloon, aspects of sublimity and regression emerge and intertwine. Through this intertwining, the regressed subject can become the sublime object as the ego seems able to extend infinitely into the empty and unresisting space around it. The sublime is thereby rendered safe and controllable because what Burke describes as its “great power” and “irresistible force” is appropriated by the self: it is the self that overwhelms all else. The self can thus admire itself as a “great object,” and submit to its own power, rather than to an outside object that might threaten its integrity. It is not immediately evident why such an experience should be at all pleasurable, not to mention worth risking life and limb to achieve. The solitude and emptiness experienced in the upper air might just as easily evoke anxiety, depression or fear. The pleasure described by the aeronauts, which is so similar to Freud’s description of the primary state of the infant, or the return to this state in regression, can be explained, at least in part, as a product of its historical moment – a moment in which solitude, silence and space became increasingly rare and prized commodities as space was radically reconfigured from the late eighteenth through the middle of the nineteenth century. The Enclosure Acts changed the physical space of the countryside,26 and in the process the very idea of space was changed by the division of land into more rigidly defined spheres of public and private property. The urbanization that followed industrialization made open spaces in towns increasingly rare.27 The Select Committee on Public Walks () identified a need for open spaces and promoted public parks as both a public health measure and a political necessity.28 The many profit-making pleasure gardens were able to charge an admission fee for, among other delights, the pleasures of the relatively open spaces they offered. Similarly, time was constrained in a new way by such developments as the office-away-from-home for the middle class29 and the factory system for more and more of the laboring class. Work and leisure, like public and private space, were divided by new and inflexible boundaries. Moreover, time was more and more precisely measured and monitored by increasingly ubiquitous clocks and other timepieces. Not only were work and play sharply separated, but the time allotted for work became greater; long working hours for both the middle classes and the laboring classes became the norm, and in the latter case, the factory system imposed a cruel regularity on the amount and the pace of work to be performed.30

Groundless optimism



Consequently, there was less time and space left for play: “work and productivity became the ideal, and then the idol, of the age.”31 An  account of London remarks, “London at play! The foreigner will be inclined to maintain that the Londoner never amuses himself.”32 Another contemporary witness, the aeronaut James Glaisher, describes the sound of London from , feet above it as “a deep, rich, continuous sound – the voice of labour.”33 This is the atmosphere that Dickens, in Hard Times, so aptly described as “severely workful.” The intensive use of time and space also meant that the atmosphere, the very air in which people lived and worked and in which they tried occasionally to play, was, especially in the great towns, increasingly polluted and, in the miasmatic imagination created by the sanitary reform movement, potentially fatal.34 Ballooning not only became a means of escape from new and restrictive configurations of time and space, it also provided access, albeit brief, to a region of the air that was unsullied by the heightened pace of activity on the ground. Although Samuel Johnson contended that he would have preferred the discovery of a cure for asthma to the invention of the balloon, early balloon enthusiasts actually conceived of the balloon as having therapeutic possibilities for just such diseases because it could remove patients to a purer atmosphere.35 Although empty space and time remain precious in the late twentiethand early twenty-first century, we now see problems related to isolation and what is loosely called “narcissism”36 as the cause of a disproportionate amount of individual and social malaise. Daniel Stern, in his  work, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, replaces the Freudian infant’s literal self-absorption with an infant who is in a state of differentiation from and relatedness to others as early as the intrauterine period.37 One might speculate that where Freud and many of his disciples imagined, nostalgically, a primary state of pure solitude because of the increasingly random and rapidly intensifying demands of social relations in the nineteenth century,38 Stern imagines (equally nostalgically) a primarily interactive infant because of the isolation and loneliness that are seen as characteristic of the present. This is not to say that isolation was not regarded as a serious problem in the nineteenth century, and that problems of crowding and a lack of privacy and space are not problems now; rather, what Engels, and later Simmel, described as the “atomistic” relations of urbanization impose too much in the way of human contact and too little sustaining emotional content. The sense of bombardment imposed by the crowd seems to have been dominant in the



Victorian Writing about Risk

nineteenth century, and the isolation of such atomistic relations has come to the fore in the twentieth. Stern is perhaps thus predisposed to “discover” the saving grace of innate relatedness much in the same way that Freud was predisposed to “discover” the saving grace of a self able to enjoy itself by itself, in a state of profound at-home-ness in the world. The increased contact among people in the nineteenth century was perhaps particularly frightening given its proximity to the destruction or diminution of traditional “organic” relationships and dependencies – between parents and children, farmers and tenants, masters and men – relationships that were increasingly being replaced by those of the “cash nexus.” The balloon ascent offered temporary and, for its largest audience, spectators and readers, vicarious relief from the demands of the new social world created by industrial capitalism with its suddenly too-numerous and too-contingent object relations. Given this context, ballooning can be seen as a chance to escape temporarily from the complications of such relations. It provided a necessary pause from the tearing pace of productivity and progress and the consequent increase in the number and contingency of relationships. This pause, in the description of another Victorian, Sandor Ferenczi (–), provides for the simultaneous playful repetition and overcoming of all the dangers inherent in the birth struggles and the life struggle of adaptation . . . [It acts] in a revivifying manner . . . The periodical admission of the pleasure principle to dominance may bring solace to the struggling individual and may give him strength for further toil.39

Ferenczi suggests that regression is a much-needed vacation from reality, and that it allows for reality to be engaged more productively when the subject “returns” to it. It is important to note here that regression, or a theoretically backward psychological movement, is justified in terms of the forward movement it will paradoxically produce: the promise of “further toil” transforms the seemingly useless and possibly dangerous and asocial pleasure principle into a crucial cog in the wheel of productivity. I have suggested that the value and pleasure associated with experiencing or re-experiencing a stage theorized by some Victorians (Freud and Ferenczi) and experienced by other Victorians (balloon aeronauts) as blissfully safe because of its lack of differentiation and relatedness might be at least partly attributed to the momentous social, economic and technical changes caused by the advent and development of industrialized

Groundless optimism



capitalism. In a more sociological vein, the value and pleasure of regression may have also had to do with what two recent historians have described as the “frenzy” of state formation and cultural regulation40 occurring in the same period. In this intensive state formation, featuring the rapid growth of bureaucracy, individuals were increasingly assigned to categories, and predictions about them were made based on a burgeoning fund of statistics and studies. These data, which formed the basis for social policy, had an aura of determinism about them. In one sense, this promise of predictability was welcome at a moment of such intense change and instability. But determinism threatened to dull the sharp edges of the self as conceived by the philosophies of liberalism and individualism, the self-directed and self-reflective individual upon whom industrial, imperial capitalism depended for its continued growth and vitality. In the intense experience of the self provided by the balloon ascent, the self literally transcends the confines of statistical predictions and bureaucratic categories. From this angle, ballooning might be seen as part of what Frances Ferguson has called “the aesthetics of individuation.” Aesthetic elaborations of the self, whether in the literature of Romanticism or that of balloonists, were necessitated by the increasing rationalization of the modern state, a process in which society became a system, “an antitype to the notion of society as a collection of individuals.”41 Governmental rationalization and system building required risky ventures like ballooning as an opposing force. Because such highrisk activities lay beyond the normative and predictable, as such concepts were increasingly being defined by statisticians and policy-makers, they helped to sustain ideas about unique and self-directed persons. Activities like ballooning thus contributed to the preservation of the processes and the ideologies of individuation and of individualism in the midst of an increasing and opposing wish to predict human behavior and categorize human beings. The liberating regress offered by ballooning thus provided for progress because it helped to overturn normative limits that, although useful for organizational purposes, might have constrained individual, national and imperial growth. The balloon traveler, along with other Victorian risk takers, kept alive the idea of individuals as free agents, always capable of achieving that which had been consigned to the realm of impossibility. Risky pleasure also functions as an antidote to the intense asceticism of the Protestant ethic described by Weber: the combination of the drive to earn “more and more money, combined with the strict



Victorian Writing about Risk

avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life.”42 This ethic, which Matthew Arnold recognized some years earlier and called, unfortunately, “Hebraism,” must be balanced or offset by spontaneity and playfulness lest all aspects of culture be reduced to a “mechanical and unfruitful routine.”43 As psychoanalysis later asserted the centrality of pleasure and play for individual (and by extension social) development, so Arnold sees it as crucial to cultural development. Similarly, John Stuart Mill suggested, in On Liberty, that English culture must resist its drift toward uniformity and make room for “individual spontaneity,” because from it springs genius and originality.44 The recommendations of Arnold and Mill in regard to the importance of play and spontaneity to individuals and to cultures do not seem to have had much of an impact on the Victorian ideal of recreation, which was above all else rational. The idea of rational recreation, like so many other Victorian ideas, became a movement by mid-century and reformers worked to insure that both individuals (especially laboring class ones) and society would be improved by an “ordered, disciplined, improving, educational leisure.”45 In the process they brought into existence a range of public institutions, including museums, public parks, libraries, and free musical events. The ideological success of the rational recreation movement appears in Gladstone’s definition of British recreation as a “change of employment”46 and George Eliot’s observation in Adam Bede () that “leisure is gone” and that “even idleness is eager now.”47 Although the rational recreation movement feared the potentially disruptive effects of pleasures which were not recognizably educational and improving, such as those offered by balloons, the frequent presence of balloons in English skies can be seen as contributing to public order in that they provided a compelling diversion from many troubling issues on the ground. The aeronaut Henry Coxwell points out that while watching the ascent of a balloon in the turbulent year of  “the bright eyes of many Essex ladies were directed, not to the six points of Chartism, just then famous, but to the one point where the silken craft towered above the adjoining buildings.”48 The possible amelioration of interest in Chartism that could be effected by diversion and recreation is also remarked by Edwin Chadwick in his  sanitary Report. He notes that a “Chartist meeting failed in Manchester because the mayor opened the Botanical Gardens, Zoological Gardens and the Museum to the working classes.”49 Recreations, especially those that seemed to literally divert eyes to benign focal points – to interesting objects in a garden, a zoo, a

Groundless optimism



museum or the sky – were quite literally regarded as a preventions against unrest. The historian Hugh Cunningham notes that once “leisure was shorn of many of its political and social associations, . . . it was no longer politically or socially dangerous.”50 A nation can only benefit from the regressions of its members to the extent that those regressions are controlled and contained, able to revitalize individuals without damaging the social fabric, and allowing them to return, refreshed, to the nation’s work. The silk balloons with their wicker passenger baskets were in many ways the perfect containers, symbolically and functionally, for Victorian regression. Symbolically, silk and wicker are apt metonyms for the decorative and the practical, especially as they existed in the draperies, dresses, and furniture of the newly hallowed sphere of home and family. The silk of the balloon was very often printed with the Union Jack, or some other array of festive colors, so that, although exotic, balloon designs maintained comfortable associations with British flags, dresses and drapes. The baskets were large versions of the kind that anyone (or anyone’s servant) might carry to market.51 Wicker was also used in furniture making, of course, including baby bassinets, so that the return to what would later be defined as an infantile state took place in a most fitting container. In addition to these homely symbolic associations, balloons, which could not be steered, were completely passive vehicles, and in this, as well as in the materials of their construction, they were ideally suited to contain, or benignly disperse across the sky, the potentially disruptive effects of a holiday from reality and the socially felicitous constraints of the reality principle. This contained regression allowed aerial travelers the tranquility in which a new and reassuring perspective on the nation could be gained. Henry Mayhew, a legendary observer on the ground, confessed himself a “coward” in regard to balloon flights. Yet Mayhew echoes the sense of security described by other aerial travelers: To peer straight down gave you an awful sense of the height to which the balloon had already risen, and yet there was no idea of danger, for the mind was too much occupied with the grandeur and novelty of the scene all around to feel the least alarm.52

Mayhew’s balloon voyage was inspired by the possibility of obtaining an “angel’s view of London,” a metaphor which suggests a wish for a view that would purify both the observer and the observed, a view which would rescue Mayhew from being polluted by the degradation on the



Victorian Writing about Risk

ground, and also reveal a larger and more reassuring picture of the metropolis: I had seen the great metropolis under almost every aspect. I had dived into holes and corners hidden to the honest and well-to-do portion of the cockney community. I had visited Jacob’s Island (the plague spot) in the height of the cholera, when, to inhale the very air of the place was almost to breathe the breath of death. I had sought out the haunts of beggars and thieves, and passed hours communing with them as to their histories, habits, natures, and impulses. I had seen the world of London below the surface, as it were, and I had a craving to contemplate it far above it . . .53

Mayhew’s description of the ground-level dangers of London suggests that his expeditions taken on terra firma were perhaps more hazardous than those taken in the air. As an angel, Mayhew is safe, not only from the contagion thought to issue from the squalor on the ground, but from the moral contagion that might attend one who takes up the “devil’s view,” the view from below. The sensations of security experienced in the precarious situation of a balloon flight thus destabilize ideas about where and how to locate safety. In a further scrambling of the semiotic code, Mayhew finds the grim and grimy city, the city that a moment before had been described as filled with thieves and beggars and breathing “the breath of death,” transformed into nothing more malignant than a “child’s box of toys”: As the balloon kept on ascending, the lines of buildings grew smaller and smaller, till in a few minutes, the projections seemed very much like the prominences on the little coloured plaster models of countries. Then we could see the gas lights along the different lines of road start into light one after another all over the earth . . . and presently the ground seemed to be covered with little miniature illumination lamps, such as may be seen resting on the grass at the edge of the gravel walks in suburban gardens of amusement. The river we could see winding far away, undulating, as it streamed along, like a man-of-war’s pennant and glittering here and there in the dusk like grey steel. . . . The roads below were like narrow light-brown ribbons, and the bridges across the Thames almost like planks; while the tiny black barges as they floated up the river, appeared no bigger than insects. The large green fields had dwindled down to about the size of kettle-holders, and the hedges were like strips of chenille.54

To experience the city of London as the construction of a “child’s box of toys,” with a surrounding countryside constructed of ribbons, pennants, insects and kettle-holders, confers a sense of power on the observer, and rids the metropolis and its surrounding area of the sense of being too large and too complex to know or control. London is reduced both in scale and in threat by viewing it in miniature. Not

Groundless optimism



only is everything made small, but the city and its surroundings are made to seem like a diorama or a model in which all components, from hedges and rivers to buildings and bridges, can be easily arranged and re-arranged at the will and pleasure of the viewer. Moreover, the stillness and tranquility experienced in the upper air is transferred to the world below. Susan Stewart locates the source of this calm in the tendency of the description and depiction of the miniature to move toward contextual information and away from narrative . . . [it] transforms our sense of narrative closure, for in the miniature we see spatial closure posited over temporal closure. The miniature offers a world clearly limited in space but frozen and thereby both particularized and generalized in time . . . The miniature offers the closure of the tableau . . .55

As in the geography of risk that this book studies, a spatial solution solves an insoluble temporal one: the narrative of London viewed by the balloon traveler cannot achieve closure in time, but, for a moment, such closure can be achieved through space, the particular space provided by the view from a balloon. Victorian social investigation, which features looking into all that is figured as “below”, both socially and physically, finds an opposite number in the aerial investigation, in which the squalor and disorder of the ground-level view is revealed as an orderly, comprehensible and sometimes even amusing whole in the view from above. Most importantly, the view from above is possessed of great scope, so that even though details may be distorted or blurred, a larger tableau is available to the aerial viewer than to the ground level observer. Views from on high possess, because of their unique angle and scope, a kind of prestige; an association with the elevated and divine underwrites their authority. Thus Mayhew’s bird’s-eye perspective, in which London and its surrounding area become adorably petite and toy-like, confers a kind of authority on his newspaper account, just as seeing London from below, had conferred authority on the world he chronicled in London Labour and the London Poor. He is Foucault’s eye of power, but he is an eye on the move; he improves on Bentham’s still sentinel in the panopticon in his mobility and versatility as an observer. In describing the concept of the “eye of power,” Foucault uses the concept of “resolution” – a photographic metaphor – to explain the increasing quantity and quality of knowledge obtained by governments in the late eighteenth (in France) and early nineteenth (in England)



Victorian Writing about Risk

centuries. Prior to the consolidations of administrative effectiveness, Foucault contends, the French monarchy was a discontinuous, rambling, global system with little hold on detail, either exercised over consolidated social groups or else imposing itself only by means of exemplary interventions . . . Power had only a weak capacity for ‘resolution,’ as one might say in photographic terms; it was incapable of an individualising, exhaustive analysis of the social body.56

Mobile observers like Mayhew were capable of conferring great benefits on the state, because they could achieve what Foucault describes as the highest “resolution” in gathering details about its citizenry. The state needs the comprehensiveness of the data collected by those who can take up posts from above as well as from below. Observations made from a balloon provide an increase of “resolution” not only in regard to the amount of data that can be seen from it, but also because it provides an altogether new axis of observation.57 The balloon in this usage is like a precursor of the helicopter, especially as it has been deployed in contemporary Los Angeles: able to record data from above; it offers the advantage of eyewitness observation at a safe distance. There is also a literal connection between ballooning and photography: Nadar, the French photographer, took the first aerial photographs from a balloon in .58 The view from on high also homogenizes the nation; it brings disparate areas into a visually coherent and manageable whole. Monck Mason notes that for the balloon traveler, distances which he was used to regard as important, are contracted to a span; objects once imposing to him from their dimensions dwindled into insignificance; localities which he never beheld or expected to behold at one and the same view, standing side by side in friendly juxtaposition; all the most striking productions of art, the most interesting varieties of nature, town and country, sea and land, mountains and plains, mixed up together in one scene, appear before him as if suddenly called into existence by the magic virtues of some great enchanter’s wand.59

Oppositions – art and nature; town and country; sea and land – come together in “friendly juxtaposition.” The conflicts or seeming incompatibilities between art and nature, or town and country, are seen from the sky as so minute as to be insignificant; differences that seem large on the ground are dwarfed in the comprehensive and all-inclusive vantage point of the aeronaut. There is thus another kind of resolution that can take place in the air – the resolution of differences that might otherwise block the construction of national unity and harmony.

Groundless optimism



From a certain height, the entire scene below appears flattened out; all objects are leveled and hence level, underscoring a sense of national solidarity. In James Glaisher’s description of London as seen from three and four miles up the view was indeed wonderful: the plan-like appearance of London and its suburbs; the map-like appearance of the country generally, and the winding Thames, leading the eye to the white cliffs at Margate and on to Dover, were sharply defined. Brighton was seen, and the sea beyond, and all the coast line up to Yarmouth. The north was obscured by clouds. . . . Railway trains were like creeping things, caterpillar-like, and the steam like a narrow line of serpentine mist. All the docks were mapped out, and every object of moderate size was clearly seen with the naked eye. Taking a grand view of the whole visible area beneath, I was struck by its great regularity . . . (pp. –)

Not only are town and country brought together in a contiguous and continuous relationship, in Glaisher’s description, the entire scene is one of order. From the air, England is revealed as a gloriously regular place; the apparent chaos which often presents itself to the ground-level viewer is, when seen from the proper height, revealed as careful planning. England becomes a country of map-like legibility. But however comforting this impression of order and legibility seems, it threatens to give way to one of dreary monotony and deadening uniformity, and underscores the allure of floating on unpredictable winds dangerously above and away from it. At a certain height, the aerial observer is relieved of resolution, and the power and threat of something like the new and rather monstrous railroad is subdued by its comforting resemblance to the fuzziness of a caterpillar. The greater the height, the smaller and less focused the items in the landscape become; everything seems less significant and powerful than the balloonist himself. This perspectival enlargement of the self represents a different version of the regression discussed earlier. In this comparative mode, the self does not fill the entire landscape; rather, it experiences itself as greater than or more powerful than things, like railroads, by which it would usually feel dwarfed. This is an excellent rehearsal for and re-enactment of empire building, a project in which the colonizer’s sense of self must be sufficient to survive and overcome a wide panoply of resistances and hardships. Activities like ballooning could function as both a rehearsal for and re-enactment of empire building for two reasons: because many cultural practices were generated in the colonies and then brought back to England; and because it was important for the homogeneity of the national culture that those who did



Victorian Writing about Risk

not or could not participate in empire building to enact its practices in some analogous way at home. The potential of ballooning as a rehearsal for empire building is most evident in the work of James Glaisher and Henry Coxwell. James Glaisher, F. R. S., whom the  edition of the D.N.B. describes (somewhat anticlimactically) as the “Nestor of British Meteorology,”60 used the balloon to gather atmospheric data, frequently risking his life to do so. In a series of collaborations with the aeronaut Henry Coxwell, Coxwell piloted the balloon while Glaisher tirelessly took down the fleeting data of the upper air. Although Glaisher hoped to gather data that would make meteorological phenomena easily predictable, it fell to later scientists to work out atmospheric theories based, in part, on his work.61 In , Coxwell and Glaisher reached the unprecedented and lifethreatening (because oxygen-poor) height of , feet and were lauded by the London Times as “epic heroes.” The Times declared that the achievement deserved to “take its place among the unparalleled junctures and the critical and striking moments of war, politics, or discovery.”62 Glaisher’s description of their experience at this height is given at a considerably quieter but no less dramatic rhetorical pitch. This is one of the most famous passages in the literature of ballooning (insofar as any of its passages can thus qualify), and it is worth quoting at some length: Discharging sand, we in ten minutes attained the altitude of five miles, and the temperature had passed below zero and then read minus  degrees. At this point no dew was observed on Regnault’s hygrometer when cooled down to minus  degrees. Up to this time I had taken observations with comfort, and experienced no difficulty in breathing, whilst Mr. Coxwell, in consequence of the exertions he had to make, had breathed with difficulty for some time. Having discharged sand, we ascended still higher; the aspirator became troublesome to work; and I also found a difficulty in seeing clearly. At h. m. the barometer read . in. About hr. m. or later, I read the dry-bulb thermometer as minus  degrees; after this I could not see the column of mercury in the wet-bulb thermometer, nor the hands of the watch, nor the fine divisions of any instrument. I asked Mr. Coxwell to help me to read the instruments. In consequence, however, of the rotatory motion of the balloon, which had continued without ceasing since leaving the earth, the valve-line had become entangled, and he had to leave the car and re-adjust it. I then looked at the barometer . . . Shortly after I laid my arm upon the table, possessed of its full vigour, but on being desirous of using it I found it powerless – it must have lost power momentarily; trying to move the other arm, I found it powerless also. Then I tried to shake myself, and succeeded, but I seemed to have no limbs. In looking at the barometer my head fell over my left shoulder; I struggled and shook my body again, but could not move

Groundless optimism



my arms. Getting my head upright for an instant only, it fell on my right shoulder; then I fell backwards, my back resting against the side of the car and my head on its edge. In this position my eyes were directed at Mr. Coxwell in the ring. When I shook my body I seemed to have full power over the muscles of the back, and considerably so over those of the neck, but none over either my arms or my legs. As in the case of the arms, so all muscular power was lost in an instant from my back and neck. I dimly saw Mr. Coxwell, and endeavoured to speak, but could not. In an instant intense darkness overcame me, so that the optic nerve lost power suddenly, but I was still conscious, with as active a brain as at the present moment while writing this . . . My last observation was made at h. m. above , feet.63

Glaisher pursues his data until he finally loses consciousness altogether, an event that he narrates with the same quiet lucidity, so that his writing recapitulates his affective calm. Fortunately Coxwell, who loses the use of his arms due to lack of oxygen, is able to open the valve with his teeth so that the balloon might descend to a more oxygenated level of the atmosphere. Glaisher observes his own body, and what very well could have been the symptoms of his impending death from hypoxia, as if it is one of his meteorological instruments. In the same sentence we learn that the “aspirator became troublesome to work” and that Glaisher “found a difficulty in seeing clearly.” The workings of the aspirator and of Glaisher’s eyes are recorded with the same lack of rhetorical urgency. He offers the evidence of his body as simply a part of the knowledge that he is gleaning from the previously unknown upper atmosphere. There is no sense of alarm, and no plan to descend in the face of his and Mr. Coxwell’s increasingly severe need for oxygen. This risky ascent and the laconic style of its narration suggest that the regressive pleasures of ballooning provide an emotional foundation for what came to be thought of as the traditionally English “stiff upper lip” form of self-presentation. In other words, accounts like Glaisher’s suggest that the pain and fear that must have been present at such a feat were so negligible as to be easily suppressed in self-presentation. This “tradition” of the stiff upper lip (like many others involving national and gender identity) was essentially invented64 in the second half of the nineteenth century, and became a crucial feature of new conceptions of both “Englishness” and masculinity.65 The particular conception of masculinity66 associated with a severely restrained emotional self-presentation is attributed by the historian John Tosh to the increasingly sharp division of gender attributes in midVictorian families.67 It is part of a new definition of manliness that



Victorian Writing about Risk

requires calm, strength and restraint; it is a state of mind and a selfpresentation in which circumstances, no matter how extreme, are engaged with calm and fortitude. The strength and restraint of the stiff upper lip protects its users from the dangers of excess and the related peril of effeminacy.68 The balloon, however, is a curious site for “proving” this version of masculinity. First, the distinct, and distinctly described, pleasures it provides undercut the possibility of an unalloyed heroism. Second, the balloon itself is not a very manly thing: the colorful silk and the homely wicker give it strong associations with the domestic sphere. Indeed, its French origin and ornate appearance raise the specter, in the later Victorian period, of dandification and homosexuality. Restrained emotional self-presentation is as much a part of an emerging definition of “Englishness” as it is of manliness. Toughness, steadiness and the ability to muddle through without a fuss: these qualities were used both to explain and promote national and imperial security. Indeed, the quasi-hysterical separation of external expression from internal emotions – as implied in the idea of a stiff (or paralyzed) upper lip – indicates the severity of the need to immobilize and camouflage the anxieties that afflicted a nation struggling for mastery and authority in a period of unprecedented and heavily contested economic and territorial expansion. In Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Thomas Hughes invokes this newly formed national identity in the figure of the Brown Family, a “family” which includes the entire middle class of the nation. The “quiet, dogged, homespun” Browns not only cultivate their own land, they have also left “their mark on American forests and Australian uplands”; they are a “fighting family” and no failure can “knock them up or make them hold their heads.” It is the “great army of Browns, who are scattered over the whole empire . . . whose general diffusion” is the “chief cause of that empire’s stability.”69 A number of recent cultural theorists have explored this heightened sense of national identity as the result of the exigencies of imperialism: an unshakable English identity, like a characterological passport, ensured the safe passage of the personality features of a conqueror in the most difficult and unfamiliar locales.70 I would add that such characters might also have been useful as protective gear for safe passage through the increasingly complex and hazardous labyrinth of English economic and social life. In the Victorian ideal of Englishness, a true English man (and on occasion, woman) ought to be willing to take risks purely in the pursuit

Groundless optimism



of an idea, rather than for direct material gain. In the case of imperial expansion, Edward W. Said has pointed out that the risks and hardships suffered by colonizers necessitated that the pursuit of empire be represented as driven by more than the quest for material gain, which after all did not substantially accrue to the average colonizer. “The enterprise of empire,” Said writes, “depends upon the idea of having an empire . . . and all kinds of preparations are made for it within a culture . . .”71 Conrad’s formulation in Heart of Darkness () is that the “conquest of the earth” can only be redeemed by an “idea” and “an unselfish belief in the idea – something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to . . .”72 Just as the London Times praised Robert Falcon Scott’s failed and fatal polar expedition for revealing, even (and perhaps especially) in its failure, “the temper of men who build empires,”73 it praised Glaisher and Coxwell as “epic heroes”74 for attaining the unprecedented height of , feet in a balloon, a risk taken in pursuit of meteorological information.75 The value of such high-risk, low-return ventures, in the description of The Times editorial on Scott, was “spiritual and therefore in the truest sense national.”76 The idea of national greatness, a greatness that is fundamentally spiritual, is crucial for both nation- and empire-building. Although balloons were certainly not central to either pursuit, they were woven, by editorials in The Times as well as by the popular memoirs we are discussing here, into the fabric of what Said has described as the cultural preparations for empire. The peculiar role of balloons was that they not only afforded participants, spectators and readers an escape from an increasingly complicated and atomized social world, and an increasingly rationalized political and economic one, but that this escape was able to produce, in its pleasurable self-absorption, the emotional groundwork of “heroic” action. The needs and interests of egos, England and empire meshed in the upper air where the highly pleasurable experience of regression, in which the self is momentarily sublime and therefore experienced as maximally powerful and even indestructible, becomes the emotional basis for the heroic action associated with imperial and colonial ventures: Above the clouds the balloon occupies the centre of a vast hollow sphere, of which the lower portion is generally cut off by a horizontal plane. This section is in appearance a vast continent, often without intervals or breaks, and separating us completely from the earth. No isolated clouds hover above this plane. We seem to be citizens of the sky, separated from the earth by a barrier that seems impassable. We are free from all apprehension such as may exist when



Victorian Writing about Risk

nothing separates us from the earth. We can suppose the laws of gravitation are for a time suspended, and in the upper world, to which we seem now to belong, the silence and quiet are so intense that peace and calm seem to reign alone.77

Glaisher describes a freedom from human constraints, a sense of being utterly alone, the sole citizen of a nation of clouds, subject to nothing more restrictive than a reigning calm and peace. The legendary dangers associated with attaining such height, with removing oneself so utterly from citizenship on the earth, are nowhere present in Glaisher’s description. Perhaps because ballooning involves passive floating rather than active flying, the intention and thus the responsibility of the balloon traveler are accordingly less. In a case of life imitating art proleptically, Glaisher, it seems, visits the “Never Land” of J. M. Barrie’s later Peter Pan (). The feelings of security and tranquility experienced by Glaisher correspond quite closely not only to the Freudian conception of the “oceanic feeling” mentioned earlier, but to a specific facet of that feeling, described by Otto Fenichel as the “original paradise of oceanic omnipotence.”78 In this paradise the infant is imagined as feeling all-powerful because he or she fills the world: there are no other objects with which to contend or compete. The re-experiencing of what would later be theorized as an original sense of omnipotence is obviously a useful one for a nation in the process of building an empire. And unlike many colonial venues, the air offers no resistance and no obstacles to overcome. In the air, the aeronaut is more solid, more “real” in a sense, than anything else; the body and the self prevail over this space without a struggle, and the experience of conquest is undiluted and uninterrupted. Empty space, the geographer Henri Lefebvre has argued, “unleashes desire. It presents desire with a ‘transparency’ which encourages it to surge forth in an attempt to lay claim to an apparently clear field.”79 This unleashing of desire in the face of such immense emptiness is an excellent preparation for the taking of the spaces of empire, which were frequently imagined and represented as empty, as blank spots on the map, but which were of course “empty” only in the sense of being as yet unvisited by the British. Risk-taking provides for more than national heroism; it also becomes the moral justification for the taking of the spoils both of industry and of empire. Adorno and Horkheimer, in their discussion of adventure myths, illuminate how such myths moralize a risk– reward ideology:

Groundless optimism



Both Odysseus and Crusoe, the two shipwrecked mariners, make their weaknesses (that of the individual who departs from the collectivity) their social strength. Delivered up to the mercy of the waves, helplessly isolated, their very isolation forces them recklessly to pursue an atomistic interest . . . for Odysseus, defenselessness against the breakers is of the same stamp as the traveler’s justification of his enrichment at the expense of the aboriginal savage. This was to be confirmed later on by bourgeois economics in the form of the concept of risk: the possibility of failure becomes the postulate of a moral excuse for profit. From the standpoint of the developed exchange society and its individuals, the adventures of Odysseus are an exact representation of the risks that mark out the road to success.80

Adventurers and capitalists alike risk failure, and consequently their successes are earned and deserved. And this “morality” accrues not only to the individual who risks, but also to a nation and its people. This conception of risk was essential for moralizing the profits of both industrialization and imperialism. In activities like ballooning, one could take risks similar to those taken by imperial adventurers, but above rather than away from national space. The balloonist thus visibly departed from the collectivity and risked individual weakness against the perils of the air. The paradox of this particular enactment of risk is that the danger was probably felt more by the spectators below than the adventurers above. From the standpoint of the developed exchange society, to paraphrase Adorno and Horkheimer, the pleasures recorded in the memoirs of balloon aeronauts suggest that the road to success may be less arduous, that risk may be less painful, than it has been figured in the Western canon of adventure. The pleasures elaborated by the balloon aeronauts threaten to demystify the moral calculus of risk, a key element in the ideology of laissezfaire capitalism. In canonical adventure fiction, from The Odyssey to Robinson Crusoe to the works of Conrad, Kipling, and Stevenson, among others, risk-taking is represented as predominantly frightening and painful. Adventuring outside the confines of a safe England (or Edinburgh, in the case of Stevenson, suggesting the difficulty of maintaining the idea of England within the political reality of Britain) – on the sea, in India, Africa or the Scottish Highlands – delivers one up to pain and fear, the agonies of which are rewarded only in the very end when the hero is finally allowed to take possession of the money or character or spiritual fulfillment he (and it is always he) has earned. Literary adventure fiction might be described as shoring up the ascetic credo of the Protestant ethic as described by Weber; it has an extraordinary



Victorian Writing about Risk

ability to contain or resolve conflict in a way that is compatible with the dominant ideology of risking as a means of earning profit. In the conflict between the pleasures and pains of risk-taking, pleasure cannot get the upper hand for long. If risk is not as painful and failure not as threatening as Odysseus, Crusoe, Marlow, Kim O’Hara and David Balfour make it out to be, the function of risk, as a moral excuse for profit, is seriously undermined.81 “Literary” adventures generally give pain the last word, ensuring that risk-takers, in fiction and in the culture at large, are morally entitled to their rewards. The popular, nonfiction accounts of risk given by balloon aeronauts, and, in the following two chapters, by Alpine climbers and explorers of Africa, come dangerously close to revealing too much of the pleasure, gratification and even the sense of safety that inhere in many close encounters with what have been socially constructed as, but not always experienced as, dangerous situations. In this connection, it is interesting to note that both James Glaisher and Henry Coxwell decried the use of balloons for pleasurable and sensational purposes, and looked forward to what Coxwell described as a “new and brighter era, when military and meteorological ballooning will be further applied to useful objects.”82 And yet both aeronauts left considerable documentation of the sensational pleasures they experienced in balloons; indeed, their scientific and military interests fade in the midst of their accounts of the delights that clearly underwrote their willingness to risk the unprecedented altitudes they visited. In Travels in the Air, Glaisher intercalates pages of stoically gathered and reported weather data with intensely lyrical descriptions of the pleasures of ballooning: We were in a basin of cloud, whose sides extended far above us all round. We slowly rose, and when we reached its boundary the sun rose, flooding with light the whole extent of cloudland beyond, which glistened like a golden lake under his beams. The scene all round possessed a reality and grandeur far exceeding sunrise as viewed from the earth. Grouped around the car, both above and below, there were clouds of alpine character, sloping to their base in the glistening light, or towering upwards in sheets of shining vapour, which, added the charm of contrast to the splendid tints of sunrise.83

Glaisher seems actually to prefer this realm to the earthly one. The scenes of sunrise offered in the clouds are greater in “reality and grandeur” than those available on the ground (see Fig. ). In an earlier passage, it is clear that it is actually difficult for him to tear himself away from the comforts of “cloudland”: “We must quit these regions to

Groundless optimism



Figure  “The moon shines forth with peculiar brilliancy.” From James Glaisher, Travels in the Air ().

approach the earth; our revolt against gravity has lasted long enough, we must now obey its laws again.”84 The scene of adventure in this telling is not hell, but heaven, and it is difficult to leave it and return to the difficulties on the ground. Glaisher’s sense of security in a place that is imagined as dangerous threatens to subvert the ideology of risk as painful and therefore deserving of reward. Monck Mason points out with some amusement that the “exemption from fear” that balloon aeronauts enjoyed is not widely known and accounts for the admiration aeronauts have drawn in the eyes of the uninitiated and admiring public. A very pardonable desire to make the most of such a peculiarity has accordingly induced many aeronauts to make their ascents under circumstances of exposure particularly calculated to enhance the apparent dangers of the case and afford room for the exercise of such apprehensions in the fullest force, were they at all capable of being felt in such situations.85

Balloon travelers were able to enjoy a highly pleasurable sense of security and the equally pleasurable psychological and economic benefits of being hailed as heroes who had confronted and endured the seemingly painful risks of high altitudes. In this regard, it is balloon aeronauts,



Victorian Writing about Risk

rather than Odysseus or Crusoe, who enact the situation of Victorian entrepreneurs and imperialists. These risk takers, although caught up in the increasingly secure embrace of a society that was more and more willing to democratize and indemnify its risks,86 made the “apparent dangers” of the risks it seemed to be taking the source of its rich rewards. Although the balloon upon its invention seemed to herald the inexorability of human progress and the imminent conquest of the skies by navigable flight, it became instead an excellent instrument for an experience or re-experience of a simple and pleasurable relationship to an empty world. Such experiences of what psychoanalysis would later describe as regression helped Britons to tolerate and acclimate themselves to the unprecedented pace and brutal effects of progress. Balloon ascents, for their passengers as well as for their viewing and reading audiences, provided valuable moments of diversion from various troubling and subversive foci of attention on the ground. Additionally, the pleasurable feelings experienced and reported by aeronauts provided part of the emotional basis of risk-taking and heroism. Risk-taking and heroism, in turn, became a key enactment of individualism in the nineteenth century, the necessary counterweight to the constraints of an increasingly administered nation. Balloons took egos to a realm where, unimpeded by the usual resistances of terrestrial life, they could rest, gather a sense of strength and return to the earth rejuvenated (literally, perhaps), ready to serve England and empire with a fresh supply of truly groundless optimism.

         

The uses of pain: cultural masochism and the colonization of the future in Victorian mountaineering memoirs “The view is superb, but you dare not look at it.” Albert Smith, The Story of Mont Blanc ()

In the previous chapter, we saw that the pleasures recounted in ballooning memoirs disrupt the idea of risk as predominately painful and therefore deserving of reward. In canonical adventure stories from The Odyssey to Heart of Darkness, rewards for risk generally come only at the end of the story. In ballooning memoirs, by contrast, rewards for risk are continuous: pleasures of various kinds are experienced by balloon travelers even in the midst of considerable danger. Mountaineering memoirs disturb canonical stories of risk by suggesting that the pain of risk has its pleasures and uses; indeed, for some, pain may be its own reward. In the memoirs of five mountaineers – Leslie Stephen, A. F. Mummery, Edward Whymper, Amelia Edwards and Frederica Plunket – pain makes and unmakes the subject and the world, providing pleasure and power to those who are willing to risk experiencing it. The mountaineers considered in this chapter are a diverse group, but they shared everyday lives that were socially and economically secure, and largely sedentary. Edwards was a novelist, traveler and Egyptologist; Stephen was a major Victorian intellectual, the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and the author of numerous volumes of history, biography and criticism. Mummery was a wealthy businessman and political economist who co-authored a book on industry with J. A. Hobson.1 Whymper is exceptional in the group in that he was neither middle class nor intellectual; he was an engraver who first came to the Alps to do sketches on assignment from the publisher (and Alpine Club member) William Longman. The memoirs are as diverse as are their authors. Mummery, in My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus (), and Plunket, in Here and There Among the Alps (), confine themselves to mountaineering material (although 



Victorian Writing about Risk

Plunket has a long section on what and what not to wear in the Alps) and their works are relatively slim volumes. Edwards’s Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys (), Stephen’s The Playground of Europe (), and Whymper’s Scrambles Amongst the Alps (), on the other hand, are typically hybrid Victorian compilations. They include, in Edwards’s work, much ethnographic information on peasant life in the valleys of the Dolomite Alps; in Whymper’s text, speculations on the causes of cretinism in Alpine villages as well as long sections on various climbing equipment; and in Stephen’s work, two chapters on the history of the aesthetics of mountains in European literature. In this chapter, rather than doing a close reading of one or two texts, I have selected passages from the five texts that concern climbing itself rather than the other material that is so amply included in these works. My aim is to get a sense of what climbing meant to those Victorians who engaged in it or read about it. My purpose is to suggest how various linguistic and rhetorical features of these works functioned ideologically. I am asking why mountaineering memoirs were written at all, and why they were read to the surprisingly large extent that they were in Victorian Britain. What cultural work did they perform? What cultural anxieties did they help to allay? Before turning to these questions, I will sketch briefly some changes in British perceptions of mountains, changes that made it possible for mountaineering works to become a popular means of symbolizing the uses of pain. . Until roughly the end of the eighteenth century, mountains were typically treated, in Western culture, as “‘warts, wens and blisters’ upon the otherwise fair face of nature.”2 The aesthetic canons of Romanticism changed perceptions of mountains: irregularity, asymmetry, roughness and extremity were invested with value and variously organized into the categories of the sublime and the picturesque. British – and European – eyes were fitted out with new categories through which to appreciate scenery that had previously been regarded as “strange, horrid and frightful.”3 The Alps, which had been crossed during every early eighteenthcentury “grand tour” of Europe as quickly as possible, and treated conventionally as obstacles of the ugliest and most frightening kind, became instead the “playground of Europe” by the last decade or two of the eighteenth century.4

The uses of pain



The Romantic experience of the Alps as sublime and picturesque tended to be a private, psychological one. In The Prelude, Wordsworth catalogues the many feelings evoked in him by Mont Blanc, until his internal experience overtakes and transcends the scenery: . . . those majestic floods, yon shining cliffs, The untransmuted shapes of many worlds, Cerulean ether’s pure inhabitants, Those forests unapproachable by death, That shall endure as long as man endures, To think, to hope, to worship, and to feel.

(VI, –)

Wordsworth’s experience of the Alps begins and ends inside him, in his thinking, hoping, worshipping and feeling: “[t]he Romantic mind, stirred by a view, begins to examine itself, and to analyze the effects of the scenery upon its emotions.”5 In this process, the scenery itself falls away: it is not the subject of the work, but its occasion. Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” and Byron’s “Manfred” similarly use the Alps as the spur to various feelings and ruminations; the material actuality of the mountains themselves is of secondary importance. Victorian experiences and representation of the Alps, on the other hand, tended to be more exteriorized and material in their emphases: engagements with mountains combine geology with aesthetics, athleticism with identity, and pain with pleasure. “Shining cliffs” are replaced by precise geological descriptions of the mica that makes cliffs shine; private considerations of death and the infinite are replaced by socially useful representations of rugged mountaineers conquering forbidding peaks. If the Romantics rehabilitated mountains through the categories of the sublime and the picturesque, the Victorians put them to work. Three Victorians in particular suggested what mountains could do: the critic John Ruskin, the geologist James David Forbes, and the showman Albert Smith suggested a wide range of social, scientific, material, recreational, spiritual and psychological uses of mountains, and of the Alps in particular.6 John Ruskin, in Modern Painters (), represents mountains as useful in their beauty, in their geological richness, and in their challenge as objects of study. James Forbes, professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh, in his Travels in the Alps of Savoy (), suggests the value of climbing as a means of collecting a wealth of geological and meteorological data, as well as a refreshing and invigorating escape from the “evils of our more artificial existence.”7 Albert Smith put the Alps to commercial use as the creator and performer of a multi-media show called “Mont Blanc,” a spectacle that played to sold-out crowds for six



Victorian Writing about Risk

years at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly.8 Together, these three writers assigned new meanings and new possibilities to mountains, preparing the cultural imagination for the “Golden Age of Mountaineering,” which lasted from the mid-s through the mid-s. Mountaineering came into existence as a sport: “[b]efore  a man climbing a mountain was simply – a man climbing a mountain. A decade later he was a mountaineer.”9 An official British pastime that was at once extremely dangerous and eminently respectable, mountaineering by  could claim a club, a journal and many eminent Victorians among its adherents.10 In the fourth volume of Modern Painters, “Mountain Beauty,” Ruskin invests mountains with layers of spiritual, psychological and material value, in a work that combines art history, sociology, geology and psychology. Ruskin, like Wordsworth, represents mountains as inspiring noble thoughts and feelings in those who look at them. But they do more than this in Ruskin’s account. In addition to their spiritual benefits, mountains perform crucial material work for the world below them: “without mountains the air could not be purified, nor the flowing of the rivers sustained, and the earth must have become for the most part desert plain, or stagnant marsh.” Ruskin goes on in this passage to unite the physical with the spiritual “services” performed by mountains: But the feeding for the rivers and the purifying of the winds are the least of the services appointed to the hills. To fill the thirst of the human heart for the beauty of God’s working, – to startle its lethargy with the deep and pure agitation of astonishment, – are their higher missions . . . It is impossible to examine in their connected system the features of even the most ordinary mountain scenery, without concluding that it has been prepared in order to unite as far as possible, and in the closest compass, every means of delighting and sanctifying the heart of man.11

Mountains are like workers who combine manual work with a “higher” mission for the human heart. They provide a parable of unalienated labor: Ruskin puts mountains to work in a utopian economy; they perform a set of connected labors in which physical and spiritual work are combined. This economy is “prepared” by God, in a “connected system” for human benefit, and it thus can be interpreted as reassuringly providential, part of a general plan for human well-being on earth. Writing in , the geologist James David Forbes also gives his readers a complex sense of mountains as beautiful and useful. Unlike Ruskin, who thought mountains “best seen from below,” Forbes was an avid climber; he is generally regarded as the original British mountaineer. His

The uses of pain



Travels through the Alps of Savoy was the first work to offer actual technical advice about climbing, and because of this he encouraged not only aesthetic and intellectual appreciation of the Alps, but also physical engagement with them.12 Forbes’s memoir does not stint in describing the grisly dangers of climbing. He records, for example, coming upon an American who, wandering by himself in an isolated area, falls over a cliff, has his fall checked by his clothes catching on a bush, and is able to alight on a ledge that is surrounded on all sides by precipices. He spends the night in this “perfectly hopeless prison,” and is rescued from his isolated perch the following day only by the greatest stroke of luck (p. ). No such luck has attended a series of corpses Forbes discovers under the precipices of Mont Collon. He describes the effect of these deaths on himself and his guides: The effect upon us all was electric . . . we turned and surveyed, with a stranger sense of sublimity than before, the desolation by which we were surrounded, and became still more sensible of our isolation from human dwellings, human help, and human sympathy . . . We are men, and we stand in the chamber of death. (p. )

This experience of sublimity provides not only an interior sense of the power and danger of the Alps; the corpses strewn along under the precipices makes the fearful aspect of the mountains an actuality: they form a “chamber of death.” Rather than discourage climbing, however, this sort of description seems to have called forth a virtual flood of mountaineers. I will explore later in this chapter why a number of mid-century Britons wished to confront this hostile landscape, and why an even greater number confronted it vicariously through the reading of mountaineering memoirs. For now, I would suggest that surviving the dangers of the Alps provided a sense of mastery and control – both to those who actually climbed, and to those who read their accounts. Albert Smith climbed Mont Blanc once and brought it home with him, in the form of a highly profitable mixed-media show. Dickens praised Smith’s treatment of Mont Blanc: “by his own ability and good humour [Smith is able to] thaw its eternal ice and snow, so that the most timid ladies may ascend it twice a day . . . without the smallest danger of fatigue.”13 A review in the Illustrated London News describes the ambitious realism of the production: “the proscenium [was] reconstructed to represent the exterior of a Swiss chalet, not in the mere style of stage carpentry, but actually of solid wood, and of the real size. The centre of this rises out of sight as the views are exhibited; and a pretty effect is gained



Victorian Writing about Risk

by the light through the curtained window in the interval of the scenes.”14 In addition to the “views,” Smith variously spoke and sang a comic travelogue. Over the six years the show ran, various innovations were introduced, including the introduction of more or less actual sheepdogs and Alpine maidens to further heighten its realism. Smith also wrote The Story of Mont Blanc (), and developed a popular board game, “The Game of the Ascent of Mont Blanc.”15 His productions were not only profitable for himself; they brought the Alps, and the possibility of climbing them, to a much wider audience than could the more specialized texts of either Ruskin or Forbes. The works of Forbes, Ruskin and Smith in the s and s transformed the Alps into dangerous, thrilling and beautiful places, worth knowing because of the geological information to be found in them, and because contact with their difficult and dangerous beauty was both exciting and good for the English person whose native landscape offered no such challenges or extremes. In constructing the Alps as a perilous place worth risking, Forbes, Ruskin and Smith also contributed to the construction of England as safe. England’s homely and hilly landscape provided a comforting contrast to the wildness and extremity of the Alps, and the Alps became a useful geographical other against which some mid-century Britons could attempt to forge, actually or vicariously, a rugged and durable identity for themselves, their class, their gender, their nation and their empire. . One way to account for the popularity of mountaineering in Britain from the s on is to suggest that it functioned, for both its practitioners and for those who read their memoirs, as a form of cultural masochism. “The masochist,” Gilles Deleuze has written, “waits for pleasure as for something that is bound to be late, and expects pain as the condition that will finally ensure (both physically and morally) the advent of pleasure.”16 Pleasure is always late for the mountaineer, if it comes at all: “the view is superb,” writes Albert Smith, in his account of ascending Mont Blanc, but you dare not look at it. It is only when the loose ground crumbles beneath your feet, and you nearly slide away over the precipice – you would do so if the guide did not seize you by the arm with the sudden grip of a vice – that you give up staring about you, and do nothing but carefully watch the footsteps of the man who is going before.17

The uses of pain



The climber suffers no matter what: by looking at the scenery he can risk death; by not looking at it he can proceed along his arduous path, knowing that he is missing the superb view that justifies the risks he is taking. He can thus punish himself by looking or not looking, and the punishment earns him the pleasure of the view he may eventually be able to enjoy if and when he reaches a safe resting place. The mountaineer negotiating a dangerous and unpredictable terrain is one particularly apt emblem of the precariously triumphant midcentury industrial and professional middle class of Britain. This newly powerful class had to work out, more or less on the run, theories of government, society and economics that would explain, rationalize and stabilize the rapid and myriad changes that resulted from their rise to dominance. The unprecedented extent and pace of change made the future seem unusually fraught with unknown risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties, because they necessarily resided in the future, evoked anxiety. They produced a state of continuous anticipation about the exact shapes and consequences of new, and as yet unknown, contingencies. As Deleuze’s formulation suggests, masochism is one means of ending the anxiety of waiting to learn what the future will bring. Masochism is a voluntary engagement with pain, one that seems to enable its participants to meet, and conquer, whatever the future holds. The masochist can stop “fearing the future threat: it is present.”18 I am suggesting that there is a cultural analog to masochism. What I call cultural masochism is a collective means of preemptively expressing and relieving anxiety: it is both the enactment and the popular representation of a voluntary and knowing embrace of danger. Such enactments, and the vicarious experience of them in representations, attempt to engage and therefore prevent random encounters with danger. The embrace of risk in Alpine mountaineering is one way of colonizing the future,19 of bringing it into the present and neutralizing its potential threat. Danger is engaged with forethought and preparation, and thus the unknown punishments of the future are brought into the present, experienced, and (usually) survived. Mountaineering memoirs recount health-restoring recreation, unparalleled aesthetic pleasure, rigorous character-building and hair-raising danger, grievous injury and sudden death (see Fig. ). Edward Whymper begins his classic Scrambles Amongst the Alps () with an emphasis on these scrambles as “holiday excursions,” as “sport and nothing more,” lamenting (or celebrating) the fact that “the pleasure that they gave me cannot be transferred to others.”20 He ends the work, however, with this



Victorian Writing about Risk

Figure  “We saw a toe – it seemed to belong to Moore – we see Raynaud a flying body.” From Edward Whymper, Scrambles Amongst the Alps ().

The uses of pain



grim caveat: “Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are nought without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end” (p. ). These words are followed by a small drawing of one of his companions lying sprawled and dead in a ravine after falling from a slope of the Matterhorn.21 This is obviously not the ending of a “holiday excursion” one hopes for, but Whymper makes no attempt to reconcile vacationing with death. Whymper had come close to ending his own holiday, and indeed his life, in a similar fashion. He tells of a fall of his own at a slowmotion narrative pace, allowing writer and reader to linger over the grim particulars: in attempting to pass the corner, I slipped and fell . . . [t]he knapsack brought my head down first, and I pitched into some rocks about a dozen feet below; they caught something and tumbled me off the edge, head over heels, into the gully; the baton was dashed from my hands, and I whirled downwards in a series of bounds, each longer than the last; now over ice, now into rocks, striking my head four or five times, each time with increased force. The last bound sent me spinning through the air, in a leap of fifty or sixty feet. . . . The situation was sufficiently serious. . . . The rocks could not be let go for a moment, and the blood was spirting [sic] out of more than twenty cuts. The most serious ones were in the head, and I vainly tried to close them with one hand, whilst holding on with the other. It was useless; the blood jerked out in blinding jets at each pulsation . . . [See Fig.  for an illustration of a similar fall] (pp. –)

Pride and shame seem to struggle for the last word in this passage. The very length of this description suggests that Whymper took some pride in enduring this fall, even though it involves the devastating loss, symbolically speaking, of his baton. On the other hand, he describes himself as deeply embarrassed by the injuries he sustains. He has to slink “past the cabin of the cowherds . . . utterly ashamed of the state to which I had been brought by my imbecility” (p. ). But the detail with which he recounts his fall, particularly in regard to the various spurtings of blood from his scalp (he finally stanches the gushing wounds on his head, in a moment of inspiration, with a pressure dressing made of snow) suggests that he is not really “utterly” ashamed of having fallen. We might wonder if he is ashamed rather of the pride he takes in this fall, and if there is not an element of pleasurable excitement involved in coming so close to death, and yet still maintaining, if not his baton, at least the metaphorical upper hand – the one he uses to scoop up snow to stop the flow of blood from his lacerated head.



Victorian Writing about Risk

Whymper’s attempt to maintain his bodily integrity and to retain his vital bodily fluids with one hand, while trying to check his fall with the other, suggests the difficulty posed to the self by such extremity: the conflicting demands to at once preserve the boundaries of the self and to contend with or succumb to forces that deny or breach those boundaries. Whymper is able to hold onto himself, literally and figuratively, in the main body of the text. But in a footnote, rhetorical symptoms indicate ruptures in his subjective continuity: The battering was very rough, yet no bones were broken. The most severe cuts were one of four inches long on top of the head, and another of three inches on the right temple: this latter bled frightfully. There was a formidable-looking cut, of about the same size as the last, on the palm of the left hand, and every limb was grazed, or cut, more or less seriously. The tips of the ears were taken off, and a sharp rock cut a circular bit out of the side of the left boot, sock, and ankle at one stroke . . . The only serious effect has been the reduction of a naturally retentive memory to a very common-place one. [Emphasis mine] ()

The lack or loss of possessive pronouns (which are present in the quotation given above from the main body of the text) suggests Whymper’s subjective loss of himself, just as the detailed catalogue of the physical parts of himself – the tips of his ears, a circular bit of his ankle – indicates the extent of the objective loss. But there is a disconnection between mind and body: the loss of bits of flesh (and also of memory) is accompanied by a loss of those pronouns that indicate possession. When Whymper loses parts of his body, he linguistically disavows possession of them, and therefore some of the psychic impact of their loss. This ability to split the mind from the body, like the pain that occasions the need for such disconnections, is extremely useful to the coherence of individualism as a philosophy and as a subjective experience. The mind of the self-directed, free-willed individual seems able to disavow the baggage of the body when exigency requires it: risk and its representation become much more bearable when they are engaged under the control of minds that can detach themselves from the vicissitudes of their too-vulnerable bodies. Although “one of the heroes of the new sport” of mountain climbing,22 Leslie Stephen records no such dramatic falls in his mountaineering memoir, The Playground of Europe (). He warns his readers in advance that it contains “no records of thrilling adventure, and . . . I shall not even assert (for the sufficient reason that it is not true) that at any given point a false step might have broken my neck” (p. ). His experiences of falling seem to have been strictly vicarious and voluntary, taking the form of an oft-repeated game of throwing stones from high

The uses of pain



places. In the following quotation, we can see why Stephen described the history of mountaineering as “the history of the process by which men have gradually conquered the phantoms of their own imagination”:23 It is an amusing and instructive experiment, if you have a weak-kneed companion, to throw down a large stone . . . and if by any ingenious maneuver you can give him the impression that it is one of the party, the effect is considerably heightened. The hollow sound of the blows coming up, fainter and fainter, from the invisible chasm beneath naturally enables one to realise the course which one’s own body would follow, and renders the cliff, as it were, audible instead of visible. There are various delusions of perspective which on a bright day sometimes diminish the apparent height of a precipice; but when it is robed in mysterious darkness, and only some such dim intimations as the sound of a falling stone come up to stimulate your curiosity, it is your own fault if you do not make it the most terrible of cliffs that ever tried the steadiness of a mountaineer’s head. (pp. –)

Stephen’s stone-throwing involves not only falling vicariously, but also the self-inflicted torture (which was also apparently a pleasure) of imagining falling from a cliff specifically envisioned as the “most terrible.” In this game, the body stands metonymically for the self, and the self imagines itself – using both audible and visual evidence – in the process of being destroyed. It is “your own fault” if you don’t imagine this destruction in the most graphic and fatal terms. Stephen’s game is strikingly similar to the “fort-da” game described by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (). Freud describes a child (his grandson) throwing toys into corners, and then exulting in their goneness. To Freud, this game represents a “great cultural achievement”: the ability of the child to tolerate and even master temporary separations from his mother. Like Stephen, the child emphasized the “fort” (gone) part of the game over the “da,” or return of the object. Freud explains this as an attempt at active mastery: initially the child is in a passive situation, with no control over the presence or absence of the object. The child, in repeating the loss of the object, “unpleasurable though it was as a game . . . took on an active part.”24 Similarly, Stephen takes an active part in fantasies of his own demise. He can thus gain a sense of control, however illusory, over the fate of his body in his repeated attempts to master the dangerous landscape in which he climbs. At the summit of the Wetterhorn, Stephen indulges in another such vertiginous and masochistic reverie: [Its summit] is a long and nearly horizontal knife-edge . . . It is when balanced upon this ridge – sitting astride the knife-edge on which one can hardly stand without giddiness – that one fully appreciates an Alpine precipice . . . Behind



Victorian Writing about Risk

you the snow-slope sinks with perilous steepness towards the wilderness of glacier and rock through which the ascent has lain. But in front the ice sinks with even greater steepness for a few feet or yards. Then it curves over and disappears and the next thing that the eye catches is the meadowland of Grindelwald, some  feet below. I have looked down many precipices, where the eye can trace the course of every pebble that bounds down the awful slopes, and where I have shuddered as some dislodged fragment of rock showed the course which, in case of accident, fragments of my own body would follow. (p. )

The pleasure, for Stephen, of looking down precipices seems to lie in imagining “fragments” of his own body making the same journey as the pebbles that skitter down. Stephen admits, or confesses, that sitting on a “knife-edge,” looking down a precipice and imagining tumbling pebbles as his own body parts is something of a habit with him. Courting giddiness, as well as imagining pain and dismemberment (whether the result of sitting on a knife-edge or falling from it) are at once voyeuristic and explicitly self-referential. But the crucial psychological, and I think cultural, principle at work here is that this close encounter with ideas of pain and dismemberment is voluntary indeed, Stephen reports unashamedly his own orchestrations and embellishments of these imagined falls. Like the masochist, Stephen arranges the terms of his own demise, and therefore seems to gain control over it. His text suggests that it is impossible for injury and death to come as a surprise once they have been transformed into psychic guests who are entertained on a regular basis. This seeming ability to control a dangerous world makes the endurance of risk, and of representations of risk, possible. However, this attempt at control does not constitute an acceptance or embrace of risk: Stephen attempts to reduce risk to knowable and predictable danger, and thus eliminate it. These attempts allow him to reassure himself and his readers that even the dangerous world outside Britain is subject to human, or more precisely, British control. . Whymper’s actual fall and descriptions of Stephen’s vicarious falls evoke the role of pain and injury in “the making and unmaking” of the subject and the world.25 In Male Subjectivity at the Margins (), Kaja Silverman explores this double nature of pain. Silverman argues that a “particular subspecies of moral masochism” might contain a “strong heterocosmic

The uses of pain



impulse – the desire to remake the world in another image altogether, to forge a different cultural order.” For Silverman, this impulse is a potentially radical one, in which the dominant cultural order might be overthrown. She suggests that masochism has “radically emasculating implications, and in its purest form is intrinsically incompatible with the pretensions of masculinity.”26 Silverman indicates that masochism might be able to undermine or displace patriarchal norms of gender and power. Masochism, which Silverman sees as incompatible with the pretensions of masculinity, was seen by Freud as incompatible with the essence of masculinity because “the subject is placed in a situation characteristic of womanhood . . . he is being castrated, is playing the passive part in coitus, or is giving birth.”27 For Silverman, masculinity is a social construction, where for Freud it is a natural and normal identity: but for both, masochism undermines masculinity. In contrast to these positions – which turn out to have surprising similarities – I am arguing that masochism is constitutive of masculinity, particularly in its Victorian redefinitions, and that it is essential to other aspects of modern culture as well. The ability and the willingness of mountaineers to engage with pain was evidence of their manliness, as manliness was redefined in the nineteenth century. James Eli Adams has brilliantly analyzed various “styles” of Victorian masculinity: such varied identities as “the gentleman, the prophet, the dandy, the priest and the soldier” each represent the “incarnation of an ascetic regimen, an elaborately articulated program of selfdiscipline.”28 Such programs necessarily involved the punishment or painful restriction of the self. So the new manliness of the Victorian period, whether or not it is always muscular and athletic (Adams, for example, is specifically examining the masculinity associated with intellectual life), is masochistic at its core. In contrast to the more sedentary eighteenth century, the nineteenthcentury ethos of health and strength began to require that men possess a muscularity of body and spirit: “Victorian sport and sportsmanship . . . involved a shift away from gambling and spectating towards hard team-work, fair play and physical exertion.”29 The attainment of muscularity necessarily involved experiencing pain. Masochism is thus not only compatible with this muscular masculinity, but also central to it. This form of masculinity was, in turn, central to the management of risk. Largely an imaginary and symbolic undertaking, the management of risk addresses cultural anxieties through representations of mastery. The Victorian strategy of locating risk geographically, and of engaging



Victorian Writing about Risk

it voluntarily and surviving it (usually) in places like the Alps, is one version of the modern management of risk. The strategy rests on an ideal of manliness, and this ideal of manliness rests precariously on a masochistic, or “feminine,” embrace of pain. This masochism is central to the management of risk, and by extension, to the management of modernity. Largely an imaginary and symbolic undertaking, the management of risk addresses cultural anxieties through representations of mastery. Modernity, especially in its nineteenth-century form, required a demonstrable ability to contend with an unprecedented proliferation of exigencies, exigencies related to the expansion of both industrialization and imperialism. This is not to suggest that modernity is in some sense more risky or dangerous than pre-modernity, but rather that the proliferation of new dangers – machinery, railroads, the upsurge in epidemic disease related to urbanization or the fluctuations of the market – made it seem as though new, humanly made but not humanly controllable hazards were constantly arising. This rapid proliferation of new and unfamiliar risks made it highly desirable to bring the future into the present through voluntary engagements with pain. Advances in the governmental control of society during the nineteenth century find their cultural counterparts in representations of risk in which danger is engaged and survived.30 The common achievement of both the bureaucrat and the mountaineer was to make the control of contingency seem possible, but the mountaineer achieved this semblance of control with and through his or (to a much lesser extent) her own body. This paradoxical, and culturally disavowed, use of pain is explored in Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain (), which enlarges on the relationship between pain and the control of risk. She contends that pain can both make and unmake the world for its victims: in torture and war, pain is engaged involuntarily and is thus a means of unmaking the world of its victims; in cultural production, pain is evoked voluntarily and remains under the control of the creator, and is thus a means of making or remaking the world. Mountain climbing and written representations of it combine these two uses of pain, but in a system that is self-enclosed because it is the climber who at once makes and unmakes the world. When the subject is unmade by pain, or imagined pain, so is the world. In Stephen’s imaginary tumbles, for example, he unmakes – and remakes – the world around him according to his own wishes, rather than to any necessity inflicted on him from outside.

The uses of pain



I have suggested that this controlled use of pain is a form of masochism. Silverman points out that the “sexual practitioners of feminine masochism generally extend the masquerade to include the person inflicting the pain or humiliation as well, and indeed the entire ‘scene’ of the erotic adventure, in effect remaking the world.”31 In mountaineering, as in sexual masochism, pain is used to remake the world into a place over which its creators can exercise greater control. The “masquerade” as enacted by the upper-middle class – and often intellectual – mountaineer, is that he puts himself at the scene of death. He can then “experience things which would otherwise be impossible: danger, intense comradeship, manliness, [and] physical pain.”32 He can then perform or imagine performing various heroic, or even not-so-heroic escapes. In representations of pain in mountaineering memoirs, the world is specifically remade to allow a nation (England) a class (the industrial and professional middle) and a gender (the male one) to imagine itself as particularly indomitable. The “heterocosmic” impulse described by Silverman is not subversive in this case; it remakes of the world in a more extreme image of what the English middle class needed it to be: a world that is dangerous, but finally subject to its own administrative and athletic control. Whymper, for example, describes the way in which the experience of Alpine climbing remakes the subject and his relation to the world: We glory in the physical regeneration which is the product of our exertions; we exult over the grandeur of the scenes that are brought before our eyes, the splendours of sunrise and sunset, and the beauties of hill, dale, lake, wood, and waterfall; but we value more highly the development of manliness, and the evolutions, under combat with difficulties, of those noble qualities of human nature – courage, patience, endurance and fortitude. (pp. –)

The development of a muscular manliness has always required “combat with difficulties”: the point is that English, male, middle-class combatants – men who performed less physically-demanding labor than their working class counterparts, and whose physical prowess was not regularly tested or proved until the advent of pastimes like mountaineering – could develop the necessary qualities to win the battle. The theories of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and Freud are based, roughly speaking, on the idea that pleasure guides human economic, political, social and sexual behavior. The economists, political theorists and psychoanalysts of modernity – that is to say, of industrial capitalism – have been loath to fully admit a pain principle: such a principle would be highly disruptive to ideas about the “natural” (and in psychoanalytic



Victorian Writing about Risk

theory, masculine) flow of production and consumption in all human relations. Of course Freud did move beyond the pleasure principle, in (not surprisingly) Beyond the Pleasure Principle () and The Ego and the Id (). But an earlier presence of un-pleasure principles in Freudian theory has been usefully interpreted by Leo Bersani, who reads Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality () as an argument for the inherently masochistic nature of all human sexuality. In the psychoanalytic model, sexuality involves a build-up of tension that leads to a temporary shattering or dispersing of the self. But young humans, unlike other creatures, must experience and tolerate that tension before they have the psychic or physical means either to bind or discharge it.33 This tension is tolerated, and indeed sought out and repeated, because, in Bersani’s reading of Freud, humans are innately and fortunately, rather than perversely or abnormally, masochistic: Masochism serves life. It is perhaps only because sexuality is ontologically grounded in masochism that the human organism survives the gap between the period of shattering stimuli and the development of the resistant or defensive ego structures . . . Masochism would be the physical strategy which partially defeats a biologically dysfunctional process of maturation. Masochism . . . allows us to survive our infancy and early childhood.34

Mountaineering is also a willful repetition of a potentially shattering tension, one in which the shattering threatens to be all too literal. Perhaps such high-risk activities are a return to the familiar, and in that way pleasurable, pains of the infantile state. But they may also be seen as a cultural rehearsal for, or repetition of, the pains of industrialization. The pleasurable gratification of spending and consumption must be delayed in favor of a long period of self-denying (and often painful or uncomfortable) saving and investment. Masochism is clearly useful to those having to endure the constraints peculiar to the industrializing phase of modernity, in which work is regimented in a newly formed public sphere, and sexuality is (ideally) confined to a newly formed private sphere.35 If desire, as Foucault has argued, is actually incited as much as it is repressed by these disciplinary measures, pain and frustration attend a discursively constructed sexuality just as they do a Freudian sexuality that is innate.36 Individual appetites are subject to both a radical increase, and a radical increase in regimentation, and desire is elicited and thwarted by new regulations of space and time. Sacher-Masoch, arguing for the normality of his “perversion,” contended that pleasure without pain is strictly an ancient

The uses of pain



Greek ideal, something that “modern man” cannot pursue. “The struggle of the spirit against the senses is the gospel of modern man,” he writes, arguing for the necessity of masochism to modernity.37 If I can, for the sake of extending this argument out on a potentially interesting limb, bring some unlikely categories and thinkers together, I would suggest that in his insistence that modernity requires an embrace of pain, Sacher-Masoch might be said to anticipate the Weberian analysis of the Protestant ethic required by capitalism. Weber’s analysis, in turn, can be read as a resolution of what Freud described, with no reference of course to political economy, as the “economic problem in masochism”:38 the summum bonum of [the Protestant] ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational. Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naïve point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all people not under capitalistic influence.39

If Freud indirectly posits masochism as essential to the survival of infancy and early childhood, Weber indirectly posits it (in the form of voluntarily deferred gratification) as essential to the launching of industrial capitalism, in which gratification, if it comes at all, will come later, rather than sooner, and after the withstanding of long frustration of the very desires – for money and for goods – that it incites. This frustration is tolerated with more and more ease as the lack or delay of pleasure becomes thoroughly naturalized and moralized in industrial capitalist culture: Weber describes the Protestant ethic as creating a kind of sacralized pleasure in self-denial – that is to say, in something that is often experienced as discomfort, if not outright pain.40 If the spirit of capitalism, especially in its industrializing form, requires that its participants tolerate and even value discomfort and pain, some of its leisure activities are bound to follow suit. Mountaineering thus fits very well into the Protestant ethic as described by Sacher-Masoch and Weber. A. F. Mummery, in his classic work, My Climbs in the Alps and Caucausus (), describes the arduous work of climbing “as unmixed play,” and recounts this “play” in the ironic,



Victorian Writing about Risk

erotic, sado-masochistic language typical of many mountaineering memoirs. In the following passage he describes himself being awakened by a companion to climb the Matterhorn: The huge Furggen ridge of the Matterhorn had long tempted his [the companion’s] desires, and what are such things as sleep, rest, or blissful ease, when weighed in the balance with the wild joy of gripping grey-brown ledges, and hacking the long gullies of black ice into submission? All the ingrained fighting instinct was aroused in him. He wished to hurl himself once more at the cliffs and ridges, matching his skill against their dumb, passionless resistance, and forcing them now, as ever, to yield to his reckless onslaught.41

Pain and pleasure play a shadow-boxing game here; Mummery’s position as narrator, his implication in the sensations he seems to ridicule, complicates the use of an activity like mountaineering as an identifying component of hegemonic Englishness, manliness or middle class-ness. He attributes the joys of gripping grey-brown ledges and the pleasure involved in hacking gullies of ice into submission to his companion; he indirectly represents himself as saner than this, because he wishes to remain in bed, asleep. But Mummery goes along for the climb, and he too will hurl himself “at the cliffs and ridges,” the “dumb and passionless resistance” of which seem only to call forth more ardor and more recklessness, as if somehow the mountains could be made to speak, to evince passion and to resist it. Mummery’s description of mountains evokes images of female genitalia and feminine passivity and “passionlessness.” The violence of his response and that of his companion make mountaineering into an act of symbolic rape, in which the powerful passivity of mountains elicits a rage of “ardor” and “recklessness” from the climber, who wishes to “force” the mountain to “yield.” “Hacking” at gullies of ice is a particularly disturbing image, one that extends beyond the symbolic terrain of rape and into mutilation. But since these mountains are not women or otherwise sentient beings, it is finally the mountaineer who becomes himself the subject of these onslaughts; the attacker essentially attacks himself in attacking so vigorously such a mammoth and impassive object. Mountaineering thus provides for a manly sort of masochism, in that the “feminine” or non-phallic passivity, or more accurately, the receptivity, of the masochist is camouflaged (as symbolic rape and mutilation of the female or feminized terrain) in the furious activity of Alpine climbing. If mountains are passively sadistic in Mummery’s account, putting

The uses of pain



up a “dumb and passionless resistance” that call forth “reckless onslaught[s]” from the mountaineer, in Amelia Edwards’s description they are likened to deadly weapons. The Dolomites, Edwards writes, are an infinitely varied chain of pallid peaks and pinnacles. Some of these are almost white; some splashed with a vivid rusty red, indicating the presence of iron. One keen, splintered aiguille, sharp as lance and curved as a shark’s tooth, looked like a scimitar freshly dipped in blood.42

The implications of masochistic mountaineering reach new heights in this description: the mountains are dangerously phallic in this description and the possibility of violent penetration is evoked graphically in the image of the “scimitar freshly dipped in blood.” Such scenery would not seem to invite intimate engagement, but Edwards was in fact the first Briton to visit many of the Dolomite peaks, which were described by her guide as “too difficult for ordinary travelers, and not difficult enough for the Club Alpino” (pp. –). In addition to being an Alpine traveler, Edwards was the author of eight novels, and an Egyptologist who founded the first chair in Egyptology at University College London. Her work A Thousand Miles Up the Nile () was the first general archaeological survey of Egyptian ruins.43 Her scholarly work on Egypt, Pharaohs, Fellas and Explorers (), resembles her account of her Alpine experiences in that it foregrounds dispassionate description and documentation. Her own emotions are restrained to a similar extent in both works – indeed her Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys () reads more like a scholarly work than a memoir. Unlike the male mountaineers who were freer to recount their pain in great detail – because of the extra credential of manliness mountaineering conferred upon them – Edwards had to prove that a woman possessed the necessary emotional and physical stamina to undertake mountaineering. Rather than register her own feelings about the forbidding appearance of the Dolomites, she records that appearance with as much analogical precision as she can muster. But the overscrupulous excess of simile produced by comparing the mountains to a lance, a shark’s tooth and a bloodied scimitar indicates some authorial anxiety – both in regard to her own safety in such a landscape and perhaps about her self-presentation as a level-headed female mountaineer. In moments of acute pressure, Edwards invests the scenery itself with feelings rather than avow them as her own, since to admit such feelings might give evidence of her possible unfitness for high places. She describes, for



Victorian Writing about Risk

example, a “very interesting excursion” to the Ponte dello Schios on Monte Vederne: At length when we have mounted to the height of perhaps fifteen hundred feet above the valley, we pass under an impending roof of rock, and find ourselves at the mouth of a gigantic cavern which looks as if it might have been scooped out by some mighty water-power ages ago, when the world was yet unfinished. Beyond this cavern there rises a semi-circular wall of vertical precipice, at the end of which a small cascade leaps out over the ledge and is dispersed in mist before it reaches the brown pool below. Our path turns abruptly into and round the inside of the cavern, and then along a giddy wooden shelf supported on pine-trunks driven into the face of the rock-wall opposite . . . The shelf looks horribly unsafe, but is extremely picturesque. (p. )

The wooden shelf is “giddy,” rather than the climber. It looks “horribly unsafe,” but Edwards, as a dutiful and undaunted observer, does not fail to note that it is “extremely picturesque.” In spite of her precarious situation, she continues to record as many details as possible. This selfdenying, self-suppressing scenery collecting requires or results in a denial of subjectivity in favor of what seems to be objective and exhaustive observation. This is perhaps the female enactment of the risking and losing of the self rehearsed and performed, respectively, by Stephen and Whymper. The relinquishing of the self is less noticeable in a text written by a woman because of the physical and intellectual selfabnegation expected of Victorian women; the loss is also less noticeable because of the restricted physicality of women, so that Edwards’s “unmaking” of herself is rhetorical rather than physical. In Edwards’s memoir, she suppresses or denies her subjectivity in what seems like a gesture of deference to the world around her. She would bring the Alps to her readers without any authorial mediation or interference. This narrative method includes constant, almost obsessive description of every Dolomite peak and valley Edwards visits. She even records herself recording: “Lunch over,” she writes, “we set to work with maps and field-glasses, to identify all that is visible of the panorama” (p. ). Her findings – what she can see from her vantage point on “the brink of some cliffs” across from the Sasso di Ronch – cover six pages. Here are some excerpts from this exhaustive and somewhat exhausting description: All the heights and valleys on this side lie spread out before us, like the surface of a relief-map. We look down upon Monte Migion and Monte Frisolet – both green to the top, and scattered over with hamlets, farms, cultivated fields, and fir-forests. Monte Migion, estimated by Trinker at , feet, lies full  feet

The uses of pain



below . . . We can see the peasants moving to and fro between the church and a great white booth on the tops of which a red flag is flying. Now and then, when the wind comes up this way, it brings faint echoes of the bells, and of the braying of a brass band . . . North-West of the Marmolata [one of the mountains in the panorama] about nine miles distant as the crow flies, rise the snow-streaked bastions of the Sella Massif, of which, however, only two great towers . . . are seen from this side; while in an opening between the Boe and the Marmolata rises a noble, solitary rock which proves to be the Lang Kofel, , feet in height, and distant about thirteen English miles. . . . Returning now to the point from which we started, and looking due North straight over the top of Monte Migion, the pinky snow-streaked line of the Sett Sass, divided from Monte Lagazuoi by the Valparola pass, comes into view . . . (pp. –)

This style effaces the author’s subjectivity: the author does not ask her readers to trust her sense of which details might be most important or worth recounting; she seems instead to be intent on giving all details. Moreover, her heavy reliance on precise heights and distances gives her description the additional authority produced by “scientific” observation. Conventional realist metonymy – in which some details stand for all details – is replaced by a torrent of information. There seems to be no subjective presence selecting and arranging data. However, like the temporary losses of selfhood experienced in the exigency of a real or imagined fall, loss may be an occasion for remaking the self and the world. Edwards’s realism, like nineteenth-century realism generally, confers on its author a certain authority in a world that the writer seems only to record, but of course also remakes. Temporary losses of selfhood – real, rhetorical or imagined – provide powerful possibilities for remaking the world, and for providing the self with authority and control over a re-created place, a place that resembles, closely enough for comfort, the world in which such authority and control are impossible. . Elaine Scarry, in her reading of Marx’s materialism, observes that Marx’s conception of class inequality rests on an argument about differential embodiment. The capitalist acquires, in his capital, a surrogate body. Where the worker “suffers, desires, and risks in his body, the capitalist suffers, desires and risks in his capital.”44 In Marx’s words, “the worker suffers in his very existence while the capitalist suffers in the profit on his dead mammon.”45 The benefit of suffering in one’s capital is clear: pain of a physical kind can be avoided, but there also may be a price paid in the loss of physical connectedness to oneself.



Victorian Writing about Risk

The upsurge in the popularity of “games” and athleticism, including mountaineering, in nineteenth-century Britain suggests that the middle classes became increasingly concerned about the state of their own physical condition. The historian Richard Holt describes the “distinctiveness and significance of the new games” as a product of the interplay of such diverse phenomena as changing attitudes to mental and physical health; the redefinition of masculinity and the new concept of ‘manliness’; divisions within the Church of England and the desire to promote active religion; the influence of the biological and evolutionary theories of Spencer and Darwin [and] the powerful ethic of commercial competition and imperial endeavour.46

Although historians of sport have, like Holt, often attributed the new athleticism to larger social and political concerns with strength and health, I would add a complementary psychological function: athletic activities also provided an opportunity for Britons to assume a hyperconscious residence in their own bodies, and to connect or reconnect those bodies to subjectivity.47 The critical point about this reconnection of body and mind is that it is voluntary. The recovery of physicality allows the otherwise largely sedentary and seemingly comfortable middle class to experience physical exertion, an experience the middle class seemed (particularly in comparison to the laboring class48) to have largely escaped. The mountaineer restores, symbolically, the experience of painful and dangerous effort to the middle class. In addition, he demonstrates the otherwise questionable physical strength and endurance of that class. The differential embodiment of worker and capitalist is replaced or displaced, in the ideology of athleticism, by a differential embodiment according to newly formulated notions of gender difference. Physical fitness was constructed by Victorians – paradoxically we have seen, since it involves a “feminine” embrace of pain – as constituting manliness. In a further paradoxical turn, this “feminine” embrace of pain was largely foreclosed to women, who were simply not allowed to possess, inhabit or risk their bodies in the same ways or to the same extent as men. In the s, for example, tennis became an acceptable game for women, but they were not allowed to play either vigorously or well. The required costumes for women (including wool bodices and silk blouses, long skirts and large hats) ensured that only a minimum of effort could be expended. Similarly, the clothing requirements for women mountaineers, especially the necessity of wearing skirts rather than trousers, made

The uses of pain



it impossible for women to do much climbing on foot, and thus to take the same risks as their male counterparts.49 The risks that women did take in mountaineering were not emphasized in their accounts; histrionic description of danger could be easily misinterpreted and call into question the ability of women to withstand the rigors of the terrain. In other words, if a woman were to report the dangers of a risky climb, she might be seen as hysteric rather than heroic. Had a woman, for example, written of her habit of gazing into abysses with the kind of enthusiasm Leslie Stephen evinces, she would probably have acquired a diagnosis rather than a large readership. The critic I. A. Richards, himself a mountaineer, has observed that the enjoyment of “unnecessary discomfort or insecurity” requires that “we must first be bored with comfort.”50 The idea, and the ideal, of comfort was central to Victorian culture. In his social history of Victorian design, John Gloag cites Dickens’s description of Mr. Pickwick’s house in Dulwich – “fitted up with every attention to substantial comfort” – as “the theme song of the Victorian age.”51 The illustrations in Gloag’s study show the results of such attention: in the search for ever more comfortable comfort, furnishings and interior designs attain increasingly absurd levels of ornament and luxury, bedsteads of complex design are swathed in yet more complex draperies, ornately carved mantels are then covered over with yet more ornate mantel valences, even a small wastebasket is almost entirely obscured by silk pompoms. Some members of the Victorian middle class perhaps reached, at mid-century, a sense of discomfort with their comfort and this discomfort was perhaps a symptom of a troubling sense that “every attention” to comfort could not, after all, produce a deeper sense of psychic comfort, and might in some ways undermine to the British physical constitution. Pompoms and valences notwithstanding, the security and comfort that the Victorian middle class feared might make them weak was more a wish than a reality. Embracing danger in the Alps reinforced the idea that England, or that part of it inhabited by the middle class, had become so safe and secure that it had lost all possibility of providing challenge and difficulty. The idea that one needed to engage danger in the outside world because it was no longer readily available in England provided a kind of psychic security. Risk was therefore assigned and confined to a distinct geographical location. A temporal problem (risk, after all, exists only as a future possibility) was reconfigured and resolved



Victorian Writing about Risk

as a spatial one. British culture has an impressive record of aiding imperialism; in this case, the experience of imperialism comes home to assist in imagining a spatial solution to the insoluble and unbearable temporal problem of risk. Problems, anxieties and fears can be exported, and thereby displaced, to distant corners of the world. Victorians attempted to remove risk from its abstract residence in the future and make it manifest in the present, in an actual geographical location where it could be contained and mastered. In the nineteenth century, the Alps were transformed – both imaginatively and materially – into an excellent location for risk. They became accessible by rail in the s, and resorts quickly developed at such places as Chamonix, Zermatt and Grindelwald. The Alps became a place to which one could travel with ease and in which one could stay in comfort. Best of all, tourists could choose their own level of risk. Such choices included whether to conquer new peaks or to tread the beaten tracks produced by others; whether to travel on foot or by carriage; whether to attempt the impossible or to settle for the readily achievable. A combination of the Romantic elevation of the Alps and the Victorian sense of their usefulness to human bodies and souls made seeing the Alps de rigueur for all sections of the middle class. Although the Alpine portion of the journey in Little Dorrit seems to be almost as depressing and confining as life within the Marshalsea Prison, Mrs. General, the chaperone of the Dorrit daughters, observes of the particular peak the family ascends that, “like other inconvenient places, it must be seen. As a place much spoken of, it is necessary to see it.”52 Similarly, Matthew Arnold, an unenthusiastic member of the Alpine Club, remarked that “everyone should see the Alps once, to know what they are.”53 Although uncomfortable, difficult and, to differing degrees, dangerous, the Alps became a place with which the Victorian middle class thought that they ought to make contact, perhaps in partial atonement for the physical comforts at home that threatened to undermine the very conditions they were supposed to provide: physical and moral well-being. . To the true Alpinist, the pain, danger and risk of mountaineering were essential elements; those who experienced mountains without sufficient suffering were mere tourists. James Buzard describes the cultural consequences of the opposition “tourist” and “traveler” that developed in the nineteenth century.54 The opposition rests on the idea that the

The uses of pain



tourist visits a pre-arranged, highly controlled foreign venue. Dickens described the tourist as locked into a regimented encounter with “that extensive miscellany of objects which it is essential that all persons of polite cultivation should see with other people’s eyes, and never with their own.”55 The traveler, by contrast, is able, because of superior intellect and sensibility, to engage in an authentic experience of the foreign place. In the case of Alpine travel and tourism, the traveler is the mountaineer. The authentic experience of the traveler is connected to the formation of new identities. Edwards, Plunket, Stephen, Whymper, and Mummery each created identities for themselves as Alpine travelers that would have been impossible for them to construct out of the materials of their everyday lives in England. Travel provided these writers with an opportunity to engage with danger and to experience a level of physical exertion otherwise unknown to them, and thus to create identities that could not be constructed at home. Buzard has described the ability of travel to provide a venue for such pursuits. Travel, he writes, is an image in high relief of culture’s potential function in modern industrial democracies: the cultural is conceived of as ‘outside’ ordinary social life, comprising a compensatory domain of autonomy and creativity to which utilitarian capitalist social arrangements pay no heed. Travel, like culture, offers an imaginary freedom not as a rule available in modern social life; it encourages the fashioning of special identities, good for the duration of the journey and afterwards – identities privately and intensely possessed, which are congruent with that freedom.56

Although privately and intensely possessed, the identities forged on Alpine peaks and passes had wide cultural results. The enactment of these identities was at once intensely useful to the individual and to the nation at large, a nation whose middle class had come to the economic and political fore without a significant body of theory or tradition to legitimate their rule. Theories of the economy and of the state, for example, were often written to catch up with and explain changes that had already taken place, changes such theories often aspired either to predict or prescribe.57 The mountaineering identity was a particularly suitable one for the rigors of industrialization and its ad hoc theorization. Its intense association with individual freedom made it all the more compatible with the ideals of individualism that were central to the ideology of, but highly problematic within the British economy and nation-state of the nineteenth century. Tourists provided the foil against which travelers could define their



Victorian Writing about Risk

experience, and their new identities, as authentic. Tourists took fewer risks than did travelers in the dangerous landscape of the Alps, largely because they traveled along established routes in trains and coaches. They were not engaged in the “opening” of new routes or the conquest of unvisited peaks, and tourists did not exert themselves on their Alpine holidays to nearly the same extent as did climbers. Mummery describes, with impatience and contempt, the “pious worshipers of the great god ‘Cook’ ” who regard the facilitation of the ascent as an unmixed good . . . To ascend the Matterhorn in a steam lift, and all the time remember that brave men have been killed by mere stress of difficulty in its gaunt ice-bound cliffs, will be to the cockney and his congeners unmixed delight. When they read of the early mountaineers, of their bivouacs, their nights spent in chalets, their frozen toes, and even of whole parties carried to destruction by a single slip, the halo of danger and suffering will seem to envelop them in their comfortable railway carriages, and they feel themselves most doughty warriors. (p. )

The inferiority of the tourist is propitious for those like Mummery, whose own strength and valor are brought into dramatic relief by the relative cowardice of such visitors. The presence of the Cookworshippers provides not only a contrast to, but also an audience for, the traveler’s self-presentation, however ironic, as a “doughty warrior.” Tourists miss an authentic – and athletic – experience of the Alps; in so doing, they allow climbers to imagine themselves as having an authentic experience because of their mental and physical superiority. This ability to experience the Alps authentically is related, in turn, to the bravery and muscularity central to a certain Victorian conception of manliness. The educated, middle-class male climber could lay special claim to this new identity characterized by strength, courage and physical skill. Stereotypically weak and sickly intellectual or sedentary businessmen – like Stephen or Mummery – become, because of mountaineering, consummately tough specimens of English manhood. True Englishness, like manliness, is also assimilated, in these works, to an educated and middle-class identity. Leslie Stephen, for example, differentiates quite clearly between the Englishman and the cockney: the Englishman is the traveler while the cockney the tourist. Stephen dissociates himself from and defines himself against cockney tourists, as if they are a race apart from the English:

The uses of pain



I was confronted at supper by a person belonging to a class unfortunately not as rare as that of royal personages. The genuine British cockney in all his terrors was before me. The windows of the dining room opened upon all the soft beauty of a quiet alpine valley in a summer evening. Far above us the snow-clad range of the Palu and the Bernina still glowed with the last rays of the setting sun. But the cockney was not softened by its influence, and he talked in full perfection the language of his native streets . . . [After complaining of the Cognac] he thought it proper to add a few remarks upon the scenery of the country, extracted with more or less fidelity from Murray or Baedeker; and I know not whether his aesthetical or his practical remarks were the more significant of delicate sensibility. (p. )

The “cockney” is a Londoner who has recently made money in trade and ascended to the middle class in financial terms, but has not achieved the intellectual or cultural level of its previous residents.58 The cockney is part of a herd, indelicate and unoriginal, propelled by guidebooks rather than by effort or taste. The authentic Englishman, on the other hand, is one whose “delight is to wander all day amidst rocks and snow; to come as near breaking his neck as his conscience will allow, and after consuming a Homeric meal, to smoke his evening pipe and retire for a short sleep before another start” (pp. –). This rugged Briton has no need of the guidebooks of Cook, Murray or Baedeaker; he can wander independently. Stephen and Mummery both contribute to the formation of what Noel Annan has described as an “intellectual aristocracy” within the middle class.59 This class fraction is paradoxically represented by writers like Stephen and Mummery as composed of a select number who avoid the stigmata of what will later be defined as middle-brow culture – including travel books – and of representing true Englishness. Stephen neglects to mention the ubiquitous presence of guides in his idyllically individualistic self-presentation. Native guides were truly the traveler’s equivalent of the tourist’s handbook, and the Swiss, Italian and French peasants – former chamois hunters, herdsmen and farmers of the steep hillsides – led British travelers up peaks that the British then claimed as their own.60 When Stephen does mention the presence of guides, their very lives are at his disposal: whilst all good and wise men necessarily love the mountains, those love them best who have wandered longest in their recesses, and have most endangered their own lives and those of their guides in the attempt to open out routes amongst them. (p. )



Victorian Writing about Risk

The presence of guides in the memoirs of British mountaineers is adjusted to fit the needs of self-presentation and identity-formation. Especially since the British mountaineer is usually following them, the guides are not represented in moments of acute individualism. At such times they are simply not mentioned, although we can be sure that they were there, cutting steps in ice, following chamois tracks in the pursuit of viable passes, or pulling their British charges back from the edges of cliffs. We know this because such scenes are reported often enough in mountaineering memoirs at moments when life and death are in the balance and the claims of individualism conveniently relax their grip upon even the rugged British subject. For example, Whymper, in a tribute to his guide Croz, describes him leading Whymper and his party down the Glacier di Pilatte in a dangerously “dense mist”: As an exhibition of strength and skill, it has seldom been surpassed in the Alps or elsewhere . . . Now he cut steps down one side of a sérac,61 went with a dash at the other side, and handed us up after him; then cut away along a ridge until a point was gained from which we could jump onto another ridge; then, doubling back, found a snow-bridge,62 over which he crawled on hands and knees, towed us across by the legs, ridiculing our apprehensions, mimicking our awkwardness, declining all help, bidding us only to follow him. (p. )

What is most striking in this description is the open admission of reliance upon the guide: it is difficult to understand how Whymper and Stephen, who were always assisted in their climbs by guides, claimed the peaks to which these guides led them for themselves and for Britain. The right to conquest, and the justice and fairness of it, is simply given. Mountaineering was a thoroughly self-conscious re-enactment or rehearsal of those aspects of Englishness that allowed the English to imagine their imperial successes as earned, deserved and even sanctified by a certain spirituality and idealism. Hereford Brooke George, writing in the first edition of the Alpine Journal, describes the “climbing spirit” as a form of restless energy, that love of action for its own sake, of exploring the earth and subduing it, which has made England the great coloniser of the world, and has led individual Englishmen to penetrate the wildest resources of every continent.63

In George’s description, the penetration of “wildest resources” is secondary to the “love of action for its own sake.” Imperialism springs spontaneously from the English talent for “exploring the earth and subduing it.” In this account, restless energy and love of action lead to colonization, rather than a primary interest in resources and material gain.

The uses of pain



Mountaineering thus contributes to the “spiritualization” of imperialism – a construction of imperialism as an idealistic rather than a materialistic pursuit. This leads in turn to an elevation of an idealistic British imperialism above cruder varieties in which material gain was the highest, or the only, goal.64 The mountain climber, in the masculine, national and imperial imagining of him, is the intensely solitary and self-sufficient individual of Enlightenment thinking, the self possessing itself without much need of the crowded world below. Steven Marcus, in a discussion of mountaineering and Arctic exploration, describes the men who traveled with Scott in  as “fundamentally not technologists but entrepreneurs who retained that fierce trust in the unalterable grace of their individuality and whatever that individuality might compel them to do.”65 whether climbing mountains or reaching the South Pole, individual greatness enacts not national greatness, Marcus argues, but a cultural emblem of it, the “decoration” on the more drab but substantial greatness of the actual workings of industry and empire. Indeed, such activities allow an escape from the overwhelming “greatness” of an increasingly prosperous and powerful Britain, a place that demanded less and less in the way of individuality and more and more in the way of collective functioning – and dis-functioning. “The Alps,” Leslie Stephen writes, “are places of refuge where we may escape from ourselves and our neighbors. There we can breathe air that has not passed through a million pairs of lungs; and drink water in which the acutest philosophers cannot discover the germs of indescribable diseases” (p. ). At the same time, the Alps require that climbers literally tie themselves to each other, and to their guides, and be fully aware of their movements in relation to each other. Such physical dependence makes for profound relationships among those who climb together. The solitary and selfsufficient figure on the mountain top is not usually thought of as tied to the other members of his party. Although it is likely, for example, that Wordsworth used ropes on the ascent of Mont Blanc he recounts in The Prelude, he does not mention them. In the Grundrisse, Marx observes that “the epoch which produces . . . the isolated individual is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social relations.”66 The individual, enmeshed in an ever-expanding web of social relations on which he thoroughly depends, wishes to imagine himself at an “earlier” moment, a more “natural” moment of pre-development and imagined independence. Mountaineering promises such an experience, but the



Victorian Writing about Risk

interdependence of social relations follows the Briton to the Alps. Indeed, on these mountains the international dimension of interdependent social relations is repeatedly enacted and revealed: again and again it is the guides who save their charges, and find the safe paths over treacherous Alpine snow and ice. If, as was suggested earlier, the presence of guides is represented fitfully, women mountaineers are never mentioned at all in the memoirs of men, although women climbers took substantial risks and conquered new peaks. Although she traveled mostly by mule, Amelia Edwards undertook risky ascents in remote areas of the Dolomites. The title of her work Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys stakes her claim to traveling off the beaten track rather than to touring on it. She notes in the preface to her work that among the “unascended Dolomites, many exceed , feet in height, and some . . . are so difficult, that the mountaineer who shall first set foot upon their summits will have achieved a feat in no way second to that of the first ascent of the Matterhorn” (p. xiv). Edwards thus implicitly compares herself to Edward Whymper who “conquered” the Matterhorn in , eight years before she is writing. Frederica Plunket, writing in , describes her motive in publishing her Alpine memoirs as the wish to persuade other ladies to depart more than is their usual habit from the ordinary routine of a Swiss summer tour; to urge them no longer to pause on the threshold of the Alpine world, but to pass its snow-marked boundaries, and to see and admire for themselves those wonders of nature which many of them are content to gaze on from a distance, thus losing half their beauty.67

Plunket encourages other women to have a more authentic and intimate experience of Alpine beauty. Her attempts to minimize the risks of crossing the “snow-marked boundaries” do not entirely succeed, however: “All that is required to meet the comparatively slight difficulties of these excursions,” she writes, as if what will follow will be a list most Victorians of any gender could tick off without hesitation, “is strength, health, the habit of taking exercise, and a perfectly steady head” (p. ). How many Victorian women, or men for that matter, cultivated strength of any kind, took exercise or were possessed of perfectly steady heads? Plunket engages in the rhetoric of athleticism, in which the remarkable abilities of the athlete are brought into even greater relief by being ascribed, with ostensible generosity and modesty, to everyone. In her suggestion that most women can do what she does, Plunket underscores

The uses of pain



her own rare abilities, and her own especial fitness for the rigors of the Alps. But Plunket also usefully displays her own manliness, and in so doing, she makes manliness available to other women by providing a rhetorical and affective template for its enactment. In an encounter with a crevasse, Plunket’s coolness rivals that of Whymper or Stephen at their levelheaded best: You are going along quite composedly on the snow, when suddenly you sink in much deeper than usual, and you find, to your surprise, that you have nothing under one foot; instinctively you dig in your stick, hoping that it will touch something solid, but no, it also rests upon air, and then you become aware that you are on a snow bridge, and that if it should give way you will soon be hanging suspended by the rope over one of those gigantic cracks, that sometimes reach to the bottom of the glacier. (p. )

Plunket does not risk her rhetorical capital on first person narration: the second person allows for extra distance, a kind of stylistic and psychological elbowroom between the experience described and its author. Plunket pictures herself “going along quite composedly”: the rigors and dangers of her path are minimized almost out of existence, and her own calmness is brought into understated prominence. The close call with the crevasse becomes, in this description of it, a Chaplinesque predicament of suddenly flailing limbs, in which a possibly tragic future is blotted out by an intensely comic present. She represents exigency and risk as tolerable and even pleasurable because of the seemingly easy subjection of these contingencies to rhetorical and psychological deflation. Leslie Stephen reveals the fear that underlies this need for preemptive deflation: Tall talk is luckily an object of suspicion to Englishmen, and consequently most writers, and especially those who frankly adopt the sporting view of the mountains, adopt the opposite scheme: they affect something like cynicism; they mix descriptions of scenery with allusions to fleas or to bitter beer; they shrink with the prevailing dread of Englishmen from the danger of overstepping the limits of the sublime into its proverbial opposite; and they humbly try to amuse us because they can’t strike us with awe. (p. )

Writers like Stephen and Plunket established a convention of representing exigency and risk as comic; this insistence on the comic is rooted in what might be called the “stiff upper lip” tradition of English selfpresentation, a tradition largely invented in the nineteenth century in which the control of potentially unruly feelings is under a strict but



Victorian Writing about Risk

seemingly effortless control. This flawless self-government is an ideal reflection of the effortless control ideally exerted by British national and imperial governments. Some Victorian women could emulate this manly style; they could even be manly up to a point, but they could not equal men in their ability to control a dangerous world. Their contributions to mountaineering, like their contributions to exploration and travel in general in the nineteenth century, have only recently, and sparingly, been rediscovered.68 . The geographer Neil Smith has argued that “capitalism strives to move from developed to underdeveloped space . . . If it can but move with sufficient alacrity, capital can remain one step ahead of the falling rate of profit.”69 As new and “underdeveloped” spaces were valued as fresh sites for resources, manufacture and consumption in the nineteenth century, so were such locations needed as new settings for effective cultural production. The Alps were one such underdeveloped space for the profitable expansion of the Victorian cultural imagination. They allowed for the construction of a particularly Victorian sublime, in which danger and pain are put to use in building and consolidating identities, that are based on the seeming ability to bring a frightening future into a safe present. This project rests, however, on a use of pain that has been nervously consigned to the categories of the perverted, the feminine and the unnatural. The uses and pleasures of pain threaten to undermine risk as “the moral excuse for profit”:70 if the pains of risk are actually pleasurable to some risk-takers, then those risk-takers may not deserve to be rewarded with any additional profit. This story of pain must be disavowed, i.e. told of and then pushed aside, because there is always a conflicting need to make risk both attractive and unattractive: attractive enough to make it seem worth engaging for its own sake and unattractive enough to make it seem only worth engaging if there is a reward. The disavowed story of the pleasures of pain and risk must circulate at the margins of culture, briefly but powerfully articulated in texts that enjoy a fleeting popularity. These unofficial stories of risk hybridize the official story told in the canonical texts of literature, psychoanalysis, economics and political theory. They allow for the engagement of risk without which Englands its economy and empire could not grow. The official stories justify the rewards of risk because of their emphasis on

The uses of pain



the undesirability of pain. The unofficial stories found in popular and fleeting texts like those of balloon travelers or Alpine mountaineers encourage taking risks because they suggest its pleasures and the pleasurable pains, and they proffer a dangerous and exciting world subject not only to (English, male) control, but also one that offers many possibilities for unlikely forms of enjoyment. This control and enjoyment have exacted a high price and produce enduring effects. To be designated as dangerous is to become endangered. As the Alps became an emblem in British culture of the dangerous place, their fragile topography became increasingly endangered by the large numbers of tourists trampling into existence those tracks that rapidly became the “beaten track.”71 Similarly, Alpine peasants were put at risks previously unknown to them in the increasingly lucrative but hazardous profession of guide. Women were put at risk by British cultural masochism in another way. Although masochism would come to be defined, in large part, as a “feminine” perversion, middle-class women in the nineteenth century were restricted from participating in the pain, pleasure and power afforded by the practices of cultural masochism because they could not risk themselves in the same voluntary ways, and to the same extent, as did men. Women risked, of course; childbirth comes to mind as a particularly high-risk venture in the nineteenth century, and laboring-class women had obviously to endure the additional risks of poverty. But as an involuntary and unrepresentable area of risk, the rewards of the risks of childbirth did not accrue to its participants. In the following chapter, I will turn to the Victorian uses of Africa. Perhaps no other place has experienced so acutely and for so long the danger of being constructed as dangerous, and the task of containing risk for countries and continents that have the wherewithal – economic, technological, territorial, cultural and psychological – to imagine themselves as safe.

         

A field for enterprise: the memoirs of David Livingstone and Mary Kingsley

. . . Geographers in Afric-Maps With Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps . . . Jonathan Swift, On Poetry

The previous two chapters explored the pleasures of risk as recounted in the memoirs of balloon aeronauts and the pains of risk as represented in the memoirs of Alpine mountaineers. This chapter will concern the effects of two writers whose work effectively dismantled ideas about the severity and ubiquity of risk in the most dangerous place in the dangerous world as it was imagined in Victorian Britain: Africa. David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches () and Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa () work to illuminate the “dark continent” and render it less threatening and hazardous than the dominant Victorian discourse of Africa suggested.1 Livingstone, as a laboring-class Victorian, and Kingsley, as a female Briton, create (because of the exigencies they experienced at “home” as a result of their class and gender) an alternative discourse of Africa. They implicitly direct their readers to a safer Africa, a place in which Britons like themselves could risk subjective expansion in a way that had been impossible for them at home: it becomes what Mary Kingsley calls in West African Studies () “a field for enterprise.” This subjective expansion is the latent content of their narratives; the manifest content of both texts is the geographical expansion that each writer accomplishes in his or her explorations of previously unknown (by Europeans) or little-known areas. The other manifest issue at stake in their narratives is economic expansion: Britain could and should take the risks involved in trading with Africa, both authors argue, although, as we shall see, for very different reasons. This “illumination” of Africa as a less dangerous place than was usually imagined by Europeans worked to endanger Africa and Africans. 

A field for enterprise



These texts, with their useful and enthusiastic discoveries and descriptions, “opened” the continent psychologically and geographically to the incursions and depredations of both the informal empire of free trade2 that characterized the mid-century when Livingstone traveled and wrote, and the formal empire that would result from the late nineteenthcentury “scramble for Africa,” the period during which Kingsley wrote and traveled. Of course there are profound historical differences between these two periods, but for the purposes of this chapter, the focus of both authors on trade and expansion works in opposition to a larger, overarching discourse about Africa, one that the European Partition interrupts and then heightens, but does not radically revise. Livingstone and Kingsley transform a dangerous place where risk has been imagined as overwhelming in its frequency and extremity, into a peculiarly and paradoxically safe location for some Britons. Like other stories of risk discussed in this book, their vision of Africa circulates peripherally in cultural consciousness, telling a story that is necessary but that also contradicts the dominant imagining of Africa. This is not the “selling of darkest Africa” that Thomas Richards has analyzed so well;3 rather this is the quiet narration of a more illuminated Africa than was usually represented. Livingstone and Kingsley participate in the paradox of exoticism, as Chris Bongie has described it, wherein nineteenth-century colonialism, and with it the immeasurable problematic of modernity, first asserts itself as a global phenomenon – one that inevitably, and irreparably, puts into question the Other’s autonomy, absorbing this Other into the body of the Same and thereby effacing the very ground of exoticism.4

The alterity that provides Livingstone and Kingsley with a chance to enlarge their own subjective space will be undone or annihilated in the very process of this usage. This is a complex form of exploitation, one whose twists and turns require careful mapping. . Although Livingstone and Kingsley represent the peoples and the geography of Africa against the grain of the dominant Victorian discourse, the power of that discourse and its ability to assimilate dissent is evident in the conclusion of an editorial in The Spectator of : “reading the accounts now appearing of Miss Kingsley’s adventures in the Cameroons, the question which all African narratives suggest comes again into the mind, What makes the African continent so bad?” The editorial goes on to list the familiar nineteenth-century catalogue of



Victorian Writing about Risk

complaints against Africa and Africans: that the people are “abnormally low, evil, cruel”; that although “they are not all cannibals . . . they are all degraded”, that “they have founded no empire, built no city, developed no art.”5 Kingsley, surprised and dismayed that her writing had been thus interpreted, tried to distinguish her narrative from The Spectator’s monolithic rendering of “all” other African narratives. In a reply she wrote, “I do not like to think that I have done anything to bring the African into further disrepute.” She defends a (problematically) monolithic “African,” insisting that “he has both a sense of justice and honour” and that he is “often grateful and faithful.” Kingsley then argues that cannibalism must be viewed in light of the fact that Africans have no other method of punishment; they have no “prisons, or hospitals or workhouses, no regular police force, &c.”6 Kingsley’s defense of African character and culture reveals her background as a self-taught anthropologist: she interprets African customs in terms of their symbolic uses. The editors of The Spectator find it both appalling and hilarious that the “centre of her argument is that the negro is very like other people . . .”7 The radical anthropological idea that “primitive culture” was not a hopeless oxymoron, an idea first put forward by E. B. Tylor in his work of the same name in , obviously was not yet widely diffused.8 The “Africa” discursively constructed by many travelers, explorers, missionaries and colonialists became the superlative Other of nineteenth-century Britain.9 Victorian theories of culture, evolution, race, geography, imperialism, colonization and evangelism filled their conceptual “gaps,” to paraphrase the epigraph from Swift, with an African savagery that was the consistent and reliable opposite of European or, more specifically, British civilization. British civilization was elevated in numerous ways by this opposition to African savagery. In the “primitive” culture of Africa, ethnographically-minded Britons could imagine that they were seeing their own prehistory and judge how far they had come. For monogenist biologists, Africans supplied living examples of an earlier stage of species development, and for polygenist biologists, of the existence of an entirely separate species.10 For missionaries, African animism and the “savagery” associated with it required replacement by a civilized religion – namely, Christianity. For abolitionists, the continuation of slave-trading in Africa offered a site in which to prove their own morality and humanity, and to distance themselves and Britain from their own recent involvement in slavery. For imperialists, Africa was a source of raw materials that industrial and technological

A field for enterprise



advances had made suddenly crucial, like the palm oil used for machine lubrication early in the century, or the rubber needed for pneumatic tires later. For some colonial enthusiasts, Africa became a huge “empty” space to which excess, and potentially troublesome Britons, could be relocated.11 Racial theorists drew up self-congratulatory hierarchies, with black savages at one end, representing “primitive” man, and civilized whites at the other end, representing the highest state of advancement.12 V. Y. Mudimbe describes how, in this racial organization of social reality: “[e]volution, conquest, and difference become signs of a theological, biological, and anthropological destiny, and assign to things and beings both their natural slots and social mission.”13 What makes the works of Livingstone and Kingsley different from the more conventional discourse of Africa is that instead of finding the Africa that terrorized and titillated Victorian imaginations, they found a generally hospitable place, both in terms of its geography and its people. In the land, they found a richly varied and often wondrous landscape; in the numerous tribes with whom they came into contact, and upon whom they often depended for survival, they found people with whom they could usually form relationships, and whose customs and practices they found, if not always agreeable, generally rational and meaningful. For reasons that will be explored throughout this chapter, Livingstone and Kingsley were able to experience Africans as possessing both subjectivity and culture. And although their writings are separated by nearly fifty years, and by the European Partition of Africa that resulted from the Berlin Conference of –, and their travels are separated by hundreds of miles, the continent that they discover and imagine, that they visit and remember, is remarkably similar, a place frozen in what Johannes Fabian has so brilliantly described as the “time of the other.”14 To keep the other in a time that is not one’s own is to make a temporal distance that keeps the observer-participant safe from cultural contamination and safe from the rigors of historical understanding. For Livingstone as for Kingsley, African history hasn’t really started yet: commerce with the British will start the motor. In the works of Livingstone and Kingsley, Africa becomes a site in which both British individual subjectivity and, by a complicated analogy typical of imperial culture, the British economy could reasonably risk expansion. Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa () and Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa () suggest that Africa could provide something more valuable to Britain than an inexhaustible supply of thrills and horrors. These thrills and horrors were



Victorian Writing about Risk

useful in that they helped Victorians displace their own considerable cultural anxiety in regard to a rapidly changing political, economic and social world onto a distant place, using Africa – and other foreign places15 – as a kind of geographical unconscious for domestic anxieties. But this symbolic use of Africa played a role in frightening away visitors and investors, and it therefore served to block more materially profitable uses of Africa, as both a source of raw materials and as a potentially vast market for British goods. For these uses, Africa had to be retrieved from the sensationalism in which it was steeped by the middle of the nineteenth century, and represented as a more rational place, in which a desire to engage in trade with the British was alive and well. Kingsley and Livingstone carefully and repeatedly represent Africans as people receptive to, and capable of, participating in trade with the British. Livingstone finds tribe after tribe wishing for trade, and in the case of the Makololo people, their desire “for free trade coincided exactly with my own conviction that no elevation of a people can be effected without commerce.”16 Kingsley devotes an entire appendix to “Trade and Labor in West Africa,” in which she details how the various “stuff” found in Africa might be profitably “gotten out.” Livingstone and Kingsley engaged in what Mary Louise Pratt has described as the “reimagining of the African interior” in which Africans were reconceived as a “market rather than a commodity.”17 In Livingstone’s eyes the African was not a depraved savage but a “rational man, capable of responding to the demands of the market,” and Mary Kingsley became known as “Liverpool’s Hired Assassin,” because she “defended the Liverpool, London and Manchester merchants and the liquor trade on the reasonable grounds that Africans were not easily debauched by liquor . . .”18 Indeed, Kingsley wrote that she had “no hesitation in saying that in the whole of West Africa, in one week, there is not one-quarter the amount of drunkenness you can see any Saturday night you choose in a couple of hours in the Vauxhall Road.”19 To include Africans within the trucking and bartering club to which Britons had long belonged was in a sense to include them within the same culture, or to give them a place as honorary, albeit underdeveloped, Britons on the same continuum of civilization. In Victorian Anthropology, George Stocking has argued that whereas in France thinking about race and civilization tended to focus on anatomy, and in Germany on philology, in Britain “modes of political economy” were the favored area through which to organize ideas about what constituted

A field for enterprise



a civilization: subsistence modes, the division of labor and institution of property were all held to provide significant keys to the level of development of a given civilization.20 By representing Africans as possessed of the wish to truck, barter and exchange, Livingstone and Kingsley brought them within the human family and, from some points of view, within the outer precincts of British civilization. It is as though Africans are going to be awakened to their status as economic beings by the British. We will explore this representation in the writings of both authors, and examine how their vision of economic expansion paralleled their own experiences of subjective expansion in Africa, and the role of fantasy that pervades this vision. Paradoxically, the economic expansion both writers favor could only serve to make Africa a place more like the Britain that both writers gladly left behind. The important point to remark on now is that in the writing of both Livingstone and Kingsley, the complex trading practices that had long existed within Africa are largely ignored or massively simplified. Basil Davidson notes that the consistent use of the “synchronic” approach to African cultures strengthened “the impression of a ‘complete otherness’ of African societies. Presented without history, as living in a perpetual vacuum of experience, [Africans] came to seem the denizens of a garden of Eden left over from the remote past.”21 Livingstone and Kingsley do much imagining in their travels; like all travelers, they brought “memories” to a continent they had never seen. In the case of Africa, Victorian travelers had particularly bulging cultural baggage. . Livingstone was born in Blantyre, a mill town just outside Glasgow, in . He, his parents, and four siblings lived in a single room. At the age of ten, Livingstone went to work in the mills as a “piecer,” putting in twelve-and-a-half hour days, six days a week. He attended the factory school from eight to ten at night, studied from books balanced on his spinning jenny, and became proficient enough in Latin to qualify for medical school. As his biographer Tim Jeal notes, When Livingstone began his first session at Anderson’s College, Glasgow, in the autumn of , he had already achieved something that statistics alone made grotesquely improbable. Of all the children put to work in mills during the first three decades of the nineteenth century, less than ten per cent learned to read or write with any proficiency. Those who managed to do this and devote time to Latin, botany, theology and simple mathematics were virtually unheard of.22



Victorian Writing about Risk

Livingstone’s life and achievements made him into a one-man apology for a number of nineteenth-century British institutions of uncertain virtue: industrialization, child labor and imperial expansion were all improved by their association with him. An early biography, The Weaver Boy Who Became a Missionary (), chronicles the way in which Livingstone educated himself by “manag[ing] to lay in a good store of information by stealing hours from the night, and letting no odd moments pass by unimproved.”23 According to the parable provided by Livingstone’s life, children working in mills might educate themselves if they managed their time properly. Livingstone becomes, through his own hard work and devotion to others, “a pattern and exemplification of the true missionary.”24 He not only transcends his origins, he also helps to consolidate a homogenized British identity, one that is exclusive of class and national origin, one in which the disadvantages of growing up outside England and inside a mill are neutralized, and indeed rendered compatible with achievement of a high order. It is no mistake that his Missionary Travels “continued to be given as school prize well into” the twentieth century.25 A missionary who advocated the expansion of commerce and an explorer who contributed significantly to “opening up” the African continent, Livingstone was also the ideal muscular Christian, one who combined physical strength and courage with moral purpose: his cool engagement with a lion early in his travels becomes the emblem (literally on many nineteenth-century editions of his works)26 of his heroic response to African exigency (see Fig. ). His courage also enables him to undertake crossing terrain – like the Kalahari Desert – that Europeans and Africans alike regarded as impassable. As a result, he made, or claims to have made,27 five major discoveries: Lake Ngami in , the Victoria Falls in , the central Zambezi valley in –, Lake Nayasa in , and the River Lualaba in . His discoveries had great geographical value for Britain (and Europe more generally); his observations of the people and landscape were acute and remarkably free of ethnocentric arrogance or criticism, even when he is confronted with the seemingly ineradicable practice of polygamy, which was probably the greatest single stumbling block to Christian conversion in African cultures. In sum, Livingstone’s ability to rise from poverty, his “Christian kindness,” his courage, his discoveries and observations all combined to make him a usefully overdetermined symbol and spokesperson; indeed Livingstone seemed to have something for everyone to admire and idealize:

A field for enterprise



Figure  “Dr Livingstone’s escape from the lion.” From John S. Roberts, The Life and Explorations of David Livingstone, LL.D. ().

Livingstone was a great traveler, a man of science, a pioneer in tropical medicine, and a Protestant hero. To working-class people he was one of themselves, a factory worker who had made good; to wealthy industrialists he was a man who preached social peace at home and commercial expansion abroad; to believers of all classes he spoke for the spread of the gospel; to men of science he was remarkable as an accurate observer, a man of the cloth who looked at African societies more with the detachment of a clinical diagnostician than with the zeal of a bigoted Hot Gospeller.28

His heroism at home in a sense belies Livingstone’s complex and rich relationship to southern Africa and its societies. Rather than being filled with rare and adventurous experiences, the contents of a sample chapter heading from his seven-hundred-page Missionary Travels combine substantial helpings of the serene and ordinary with less frequent occurrences of the exotic or hair-raising experience: Increasing beauty of the country; Politeness and liberality of the people; Beeeaters and other birds; Death from a lion’s bite at Libonta; Cooking and washing; Egyptian geese; Alligators; Superstitious feelings respecting the alligator; Gun medicine; Depravity [and] its treatment; Shoals of fish; Hippopotami.



Victorian Writing about Risk

The inclusiveness of this list of topics characterizes his work; it is as much a work about itinerant domesticity as it is of adventure. In Missionary Travels and Researches, Livingstone covers large swathes of territory, from southern to central Africa, then to the west coast and across the continent to the east coast, although he begins with six years spent in four separate missionary settlements. The London Missionary Society originally sent Livingstone to Kuruman, a remote settlement in present-day South Africa. His future father-in-law, Robert Moffat, had lived at Kuruman for twenty years by  when Livingstone arrived. The guiding philosophy of missionary work in Africa was that missionaries ought to settle among a tribe, with the expectation that conversion would be the work of decades. Livingstone accordingly spent two years at Kuruman in training with Moffat, and was in  assigned to begin a new settlement at Mabotsa to the north of Kuruman. Livingstone was unable to get along with the other missionaries at Mabotsa, however, and he relocated further north to Chonuane, proud to be the “most remotely situated missionary in southern Africa.”29 He then moved to another settlement at Kolobeng in . At each settlement, Livingstone became more and more convinced that trade must precede Christianity in Africa, and at Kolobeng he essentially gave up missionary work as such and began in earnest the “travels and researches” of his title. The stop-and-go nature of African travel is punctuated in the narrative by moments of remarkable stillness in which Livingstone observes and writes about, in luminous detail, African flora and fauna. He also contemplates with the same seriousness various African peoples and their ways of life and explains customs, we will see, in the manner of a late-Victorian anthropologist – that is to say, with some condescension but with a noticeable lack of judgment given that many of the customs Livingstone describes are precisely those – like polygamy – that contributed decisively to making his missionary work a failure. Indeed, we will see that Livingstone’s memoir is something of a conversion narrative: as he refashions his missionary self into that of an explorer, he comes to accept, to develop an ambivalent interest in, and sometimes to experience an emergent desire for the African ways he had originally meant to uproot and replace. Fortunately for Livingstone, the unconventional and sometimes even radical implications of his work went largely unremarked by his contemporary audience. Missionary Travels and Researches was a great popular success and Livingstone became, on the strength of it, both financially secure and a major celebrity.30

A field for enterprise



Many African travelers wrote popular works – Henry Stanley, Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke, for example, were all voluminous chroniclers of Africa.31 Livingstone’s work departs from the midVictorian “tradition” of African travel writings as these authors developed it. There is relatively little excitement in his work; he does escape a nearly-fatal encounter with a lion early on, but this incident is atypical. The two hundred pages he spends on missionary settlements focus on everyday life: the housekeeping tasks performed by his wife, and the “manual labor” performed by himself as “smith, carpenter, or gardener” (p. ). He describes the diet at various locations, as well as the architecture and interior decoration of various abodes. Domesticity triumphs over adventure; ordinary routine over extraordinary incident. This order of precedence persists in the five hundred pages spent on travel and exploration. Observation of the ordinary is the rule, including lengthy and surprisingly engaging descriptions of the habits of beetles, ostriches and red ants. Livingstone’s account not only lacks the frequent violence and regular excitement typical of the accounts of other explorers, it also lacks the sense of pervasive evil that is conventional in mid-century accounts of Africa. In the typical writings of nineteenth-century missionaries, for example, the savagery of Africans was played up as much as possible, partly in an effort to generate donations, on the theory that [t]he darker the picture of African barbarism, the more necessary the work of the missionaries . . . They consciously chose to report on those aspects of African culture most likely to be shocking to their readers, and they often omitted sections of journals and letters that stressed elements common to all human cultures.32

Burton, Speke and Stanley, although not missionaries, participated in this project as well, highlighting the radical and savage alterity of the Africa they explored. Upon realizing – very early in his African career – the extent of the changes that would be necessary for widespread Christian conversion, Livingstone argues that Christianity cannot be accomplished in Africa without the “civilizing” effect of commerce: Sending the Gospel to the heathen must . . . include much more than is implied in the usual picture of a missionary, namely a man going about with a Bible under his arm. The promotion of commerce ought to be specially attended to, as this, more speedily than anything else, demolishes that sense of isolation which heathenism engenders and makes the tribes feel themselves mutually dependent on, and mutually beneficial to each other. (p. )



Victorian Writing about Risk

Yet Livingstone consistently represents the tribes with which he comes in contact as more than aware of their dependence on each other and their need to be mutually beneficial. Indeed, Livingstone’s own ability to survive in Africa has depended on a system of “reciprocity” in which a traveler can regularly be the recipient of goods for which he has nothing, at least at the moment, to exchange. African reciprocity, unlike that of a more developed exchange society, took a longer-term view of give and take. Even though Livingstone frequently notes the interest of Africans in trade and insists that its development is crucial to the success of the missionary effort, he simultaneously reveals that the morality of capitalist commerce would be a serious disruption not only of African ways of life, but of the ability of white explorers like himself to survive travel in Africa: Europeans spoil the feeling that hospitality is the sacred duty of the chiefs, by what in other circumstances is laudable conduct. No sooner do they arrive than they offer to purchase food, and, instead of waiting till a meal is prepared for them in the evening, cook for themselves, and then often decline to partake of that which has been made ready for their use. (p. )

Had it not been for such hospitality, Livingstone would have surely starved to death in Africa; he and his expedition routinely accepted food for which they had nothing to pay except their knowledge of Christ. Passing through the Barotse valley, for example, during his , mile trek to Quilimane, he notes that every village gave us an ox, and sometimes two. The people were wonderfully kind. I felt, and still feel, most deeply grateful, and tried to benefit them in the only way I could, by imparting the knowledge of that Saviour, who can comfort and supply them in the time of need . . . Even now, I earnestly long to return, and make some recompense to them for their kindness. (p. )

Even Livingstone seems uncomfortable with the efficacy of such an exchange, and longs to return and make “some recompense” other than, or in addition to, what he himself seems to see as the inadequate payment contained in “knowledge” of the Savior. Widespread free trade with Europe would probably mean the end of the exchange of Christian teaching (not a very valuable commodity) for food. The system in which reciprocity could be postponed over long periods and indeed suspended altogether would be undone by trade. Chances for survival in the often difficult climate and geography would be seriously diminished by the unrelentingly immediate reciprocity required by capitalist exchange.

A field for enterprise



Livingstone often seems to be at a loss to defend his religious practices, or to make an effort to convince Africans of their value. While Livingstone was living among the Bakwain people at Kolobeng during the truly “missionary” phase of his travels and researches, the region was plagued by drought for three years. He converts the chief of the Bakwain, Sechele, to Christianity. Sechele had previously been the most successful rain-doctor of the tribe, but his Christianity now makes it impossible for him to continue his rain-making practices. Consequently, the Bakwains believed that there must be some connection between the presence of God’s Word in their town and these successive and distressing droughts, they looked with no good will at the church-bell, but still they invariably treated us with kindness and respect. I am not aware of ever having had an enemy in the tribe. The only avowed cause of dislike was expressed by a very influential and sensible man, the uncle of Sechele. “We like you as well as if you had been born among us, you are the only white man we can become familiar with . . . but we wish you to give up that everlasting preaching and praying; we cannot become familiar with that at all. You see we never get any rain while those tribes who never pray as we do obtain abundance.” This was a fact; and we often saw it raining on the hills, ten miles off, while it would not even look at us “even with one eye.” (p. ) [Emphasis mine]

Livingstone does not, indeed it seems that he cannot, disagree with the conclusions of this “influential and sensible man.” It was a “fact” that the Word of God and drought had arrived at the same time, and Livingstone has neither remedy nor homily to offer Sechele’s uncle. Rather, he seems to find it extraordinary and laudatory that the Bakwains have treated him with “kindness and respect” in spite of this unfortunate confluence of events that cannot help but seem causally related to those who are suffering: “[w]ere we as much harassed by droughts,” Livingstone contends, “the logic would be irresistible in England in .” Contrary to the legend, Livingstone’s success as a missionary was limited to exactly one convert – Sechele – who subsequently lapsed because he could not ethically give up his many wives.33 Livingstone left the Bechuanaland tribes (in present-day Botswana), which included the Bakwain, after seven years and then spent two years with the Makololo tribe (in present-day southern Zambia or northern Zimbabwe), where he was even less successful. “By ,” Jeal writes, Livingstone had certainly ceased being a missionary in any sense that the members of the London Missionary Society could accept, but that still did not make him purely a traveller. Quite what he was is impossible to define; he had



Victorian Writing about Risk

become part social theorist, part explorer, part missionary propagandist, part trading expansionist, part anti-slavery proponent.34

Livingstone’s missionary work, although it comprised the first nine years of his life in Africa, essentially ends less than two hundred pages into his seven-hundred-page memoir: he gave up the usual London Missionary Society strategy of settling down for many years with one tribe and working patiently for a few conversions, and turned instead to travel and exploration. His travels are “missionary” because they will provide the research upon which increased trade with Africa will be based, and this trade will lead to civilization: then and only then will widespread Christian conversion be possible. He is working, in other words, on the infrastructure necessary for Christianity. The Protestant ethic follows rather than precedes the spirit of capitalism in Livingstone’s view of economy, religion and society. Livingstone’s seemingly straightforward endorsement of the need to bring “civilization” and Christianity to Africa is continually complicated and undermined, I have suggested, by his substantial appreciation of the benefits of life in Africa without “civilization.” This appreciation is such that he identifies his own ancestral people, Scottish Highlanders, with Africans. In the opening pages of his memoir, he describes the conversion of his forebears by missionaries: Our ancestors were Roman Catholics; they were made Protestants by the laird coming round with a man having a yellow staff, which would seem to have attracted more attention than his teaching, for the new religion went long afterwards, perhaps it does so still, by the name of the “religion of the yellow stick.” (p. )

Livingstone makes it clear to his readers that his people have not always been part of the dominant culture of Britain (he actually makes it clear that there is no such thing), but have been converted to it, and in suggesting that the vestiges of that conversion may remain – the yellow stick may still be attracting attention – he makes this conversion seem recent or else like an on-going phenomenon. Instead of waxing eloquent about the good effects of Protestant conversion, Livingstone admits, however ironically, that conversion may have had more to do with the pleasing color of a stick than the content of a doctrine. In this way, he distances himself and his ancestors from the dominant culture that he is ostensibly representing in Africa; he compares Highlanders to “Cape Caffres” (p. ) and it seems that he identifies himself, his culture and his ancestry more with Africa than with England. Livingstone is unusually bold, for

A field for enterprise



a mid-century writer, in making such comparisons: the predominant mode of comparison among Victorian writers on Africa was to distance oneself and one’s race as much as possible from the savagery and barbarism of Africans. This boldness was, I think, the result of his long and happy residence in parts of Africa where he was often the only European. His partial conversion, albeit an unacknowledged one, to a belief in the value of African ways of life is evident in the fact that he did remain in remote parts of Africa for over fourteen years. When Stanley finally finds him, he is – shockingly, and perhaps disappointingly for the New York Herald Tribune, which paid for Stanley’s expedition obviously in hopes of a good story – neither lost, captive or dead. Livingstone’s alienation from his fellow Britons manifests itself early on in his inability to get along with the other missionaries at Mabotse. En route to Loanda, the west coast port to which he wanted to discover an interior route, Livingstone, half-dead from dysentery, hears that there is a “genuine English gentleman” nearby. He expresses none of the relief that one might expect from a critically-ill Victorian in the middle of Africa; instead, he writes that he “naturally felt anxious to know whether he were possessed of good nature, or was one of those crusty mortals, one would rather not meet at all” (p. ). Yet this “natural” anxiety about good nature does not appear in his dealings with various African tribes, whom he variously and regularly describes as “kind,” “attentive,” “liberal” and “generous.” Livingstone is even moved to endorse the effects of animism, the very religious practice he has come to eradicate: “The belief in the power of charms for good or evil produces not only honesty but a great amount of gentle dealing. The powerful are often restrained in their despotism, from a fear that the weak and helpless may injure them by their medical knowledge” (pp. –). Livingstone notes again and again that the “negro” one hears of and sees represented in Britain bears very little relation to the Africans he actually encounters: All the inhabitants of this region [Londa, in central Africa] may be called true negroes . . . The dark colour, thick lips, heads elongated backwards and upwards and covered with wool, flat noses, with other negro peculiarities, are general; but while these characteristics place them in the true negro family, the reader would imbibe a wrong idea, if he supposed that all these features combined are often met with in one individual . . . many are met with in every village in whom thickness and projection are not more marked than in Europeans . . . after I became so familiar with the dark colour as to forget it in viewing the



Victorian Writing about Risk

countenance, I was struck by the strong resemblance some natures bore to certain of our own notabilities . . . With every disposition to pay due deference to the opinions of those who have made ethnology their special study, I have felt myself unable to believe that the exaggerated features usually put forth as those of the typical negro, characterize the majority of any nation of south central Africa. (pp. –)

The move in this passage from his seeming endorsement of a “true” negro to the revelation of a “typical” negro is emblematic of a recurring rhetorical pattern in Livingstone’s work. In the opening sentence, he seems to assent to the dominant British construction of the “true” negro; by the end of the passage, the existence of a true negro is called into question. “True” becomes “typical” and this typical negro is described as being “put forth” by ethnologists, suggesting that some ethnological descriptions were overdetermined and distorted caricatures rather than the unmotivated or objective representations of actual Africans they claimed to be. Indeed, Livingstone reports, many Africans not only look British, but like British “notabilities.”35 The “exaggerated features” reported to the British public are British rhetorical exaggerations rather than African anatomical ones. “Many Bushmen,” he writes, are of low stature, though not dwarfish; the specimens brought to Europe have been selected . . . on account of their extreme ugliness; consequently English ideas of the whole tribe are formed in the same way as if the ugliest specimens of the English were exhibited in Africa as characteristic of the entire British nation. (p. )

Unfortunately, Livingstone offers none of his own thoughts about why the British chose to represent Bushmen and other Africans as physically inferior. Nonetheless, he makes it clear that he sees a conscious process of selection taking place in the “specimens” chosen to be brought to Europe, and therefore a conscious effort on the part of Europeans to represent Bushmen as “ugly” and “dwarfish.” There is an ongoing tension in Livingstone’s work between the virtues of various African cultures,36 including the benefits conferred upon him as a traveler, and the necessity of commerce with Europe, which would entail the demise of African trading systems. Livingstone remarks that “the real politeness with which food is given by nearly all the interior tribes, who have not had much intercourse with Europeans, makes it a pleasure to accept [and] they readily accepted our excuse at having nothing to give in return” (p. ; emphasis mine). Some seventy-five pages later,

A field for enterprise



Livingstone asserts, with perfect aplomb: “we ought to encourage the Africans to cultivate for our markets, as the most effectual means, next to the gospel, of their elevation” (p. ). On the one hand, he describes intercourse with Europeans as degrading what is best in African culture (and what is best for Europeans like Livingstone who are traveling in Africa and who need regular donations of food). On the other hand, he describes trade as essential to the “elevation” of Africans. Livingstone seems entirely unaware of the contradiction between these two positions, one of which he seems to inhabit as a traveler and the other as an advocate for increased and unfettered trade as the precursor to Christian conversion. These two positions suggest the kinds of contradictions encountered by Britons like Livingstone traveling in nineteenth-century Africa. He was a missionary who failed to find evil in Africa; rather, he found there a way of life that he consistently, if unwittingly, represents as an improvement over Blantyre and its cotton mills: “waggon-travelling in Africa,” Livingstone writes, is “a prolonged system of picnicking, excellent for the health, and agreeable to those who are not over-fastidious about trifles and who delight in being in the open air” (p. ). In Africa, Livingstone experiences the pleasures of open air, a great luxury after the confinement of living with his family in one room and working twelvehour shifts in a factory. Life is, simply put, better for Livingstone in Africa. It is more than open air and open space that make Africa a place of freedom for one who has been so constrained by membership in the laboring class of an industrialized society. We have noted earlier that Livingstone entertains the idea that a life without hard work might in fact be a good life. Such an idea is directly opposed to the Protestant ethic that Livingstone hopes will be the result of commerce between Britain and Africa. On the banks of the Kweelo river in south central Africa, this ethic seems all but forgotten: “to one who has observed the hard toil of the poor in old civilized countries, the state in which the inhabitants here live is one of glorious ease. The country is full of little villages. Food abounds and very little labour is required for its cultivation . . .” (p. ). His readers know from the early autobiographical information given in Missionary Travels that he has been more than an “observer” of the “hard toil of the poor”; he has participated in such toil and the “glorious ease” possible in some fertile parts of Africa, even the hard travel across its infertile deserts, is represented as an



Victorian Writing about Risk

appealing alternative to the life Livingstone survived, and escaped, in Britain. In addition to clearing up misrepresentations of Africans, Livingstone also rehabilitates the landscape of Africa. The many zoological descriptions in his Missionary Travels impart a vivid sense of the delight and wonder he took in the African fauna: he lets red ants bite his hand in an effort to figure out precisely how their jaws work; he describes the remarkable efficiency of the excretion removal methods of scavenger beetles and recommends them to sanitary reformers in Britain; he times ostriches with his stopwatch to determine their exact speed: When the ostrich is feeding his pace is from twenty to twenty-two inches; when walking but not feeding, it is twenty-six inches; and when terrified . . . it is from eleven and a half to thirteen and even fourteen feet in length. Only in one case was I at all satisfied of being able to count the rate of speed by a stop watch, and, if I am not mistaken, there were thirty in ten seconds, generally one’s eye can no more follow the legs than it can the spokes of a carriage-wheel in rapid motion. (p. )

The precision of this description is in keeping with Livingstone’s sense of the detail required for exact representation. It is as if, to attain authority as a writer, Livingstone must not only meet but exceed the standards of realism in its literary and journalistic senses. Where other writing indicates reality through metonymic chains of salient detail, one gets the sense that Livingstone strained and strove in his prose to represent if not all details, at least more than enough details. This exaggerated sense of responsibility in regard to representing reality combined with authorial anxiety produced a new worry: Livingstone fears that he will be criticized for including excessive detail in his work. Pausing in his description of life among the Makololo, for example, Livingstone explains, “[g]reat numbers of little trifling things . . . occur, and would not be worth the mention but that one cannot form a correct idea of missionary work except by examination of the minutiae. At the risk of appearing frivolous to some, I shall continue to descend to mere trifles” (p. ). Like the women mountaineers of the previous chapter, Livingstone is not at his ease when writing; the cultural burden of authenticating himself as an author weighs heavily, producing symptoms in the form of obsessive attention to detail, which might actually serve to undermine rather than buttress his authority. “My African life,” Livingstone writes, “has made composition irksome and laborious. I think I would rather cross the African continent again than undertake to write another book. It is far easier to travel than to write about it” (p. ).

A field for enterprise



. Mary Kingsley also escaped to Africa from an arduous and confined life in Britain. Indeed, her biography shares some striking parallels with that of Livingstone. Like him, she grew up in quarters that were quite literally too close for comfort. Livingstone and his family lived in one room; Kingsley was raised in a small house in the Highgate section of London, in which there reigned “a perpetual dusk”: the front windows were bricked in, and Kingsley’s mother kept the shutters closed on the back windows day and night.37 Her father was the traveler and physician George Kingsley (and brother of the novelist Charles). Her mother, Mary Bailey, had been her father’s cook, and because of this never gained acceptance in the larger Kingsley family. Like Livingstone, Kingsley also worked as a child: she was required to care for her chronically ill mother, as well as for the male members of her family. Kingsley kept house for her family from her childhood until she was thirty, when her mother and father died a few months apart. She wrote that “the whole of my childhood and youth was spent at home, in the house and garden. The living outside world I saw little of . . .”38 Her only formal education consisted of a series of German lessons; before these lessons she had taught herself to read English in her father’s extensive library. Given this background, Mary Kingsley’s considerable celebrity as an explorer of Africa in the late nineteenth century is both surprising and predictable. Her two works, Travels in West Africa () and West African Studies (), were highly successful, although, as one of Kingsley’s biographers points out in regard to the Travels, a book running to an excess of six hundred densely packed pages, more than a hundred of which were devoted to an arcane disquisition on fish and fetish, would not seem to possess the essential ingredients of a blockbuster. But the booksellers on Charing Cross Road had trouble keeping enough copies of Travels in stock, and the society lady patrons of Mudie’s Lending Library had to wait their turn patiently to read it on an ever-lengthening waiting list.39

Her record of travel moves at the very slow pace of a careful observer. Kingsley stops not only to collect anthropological data, but also specimens of fish for the British Museum, which had provided her with a collector’s outfit for this purpose. Given its large amounts of anthropological, ichthyological and general geographical observation, Kingsley’s account is surprisingly readable. It departs from the conventional genre of African travel and exploration literature – especially from one of its closest contemporaries, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – in that Africa is



Victorian Writing about Risk

represented as more comic than dangerous, more likely to land one in a hilarious predicament than in a threatening one. Dea Birkett sees this style as characteristic of Victorian “spinsters abroad”: “ridicule,” she writes, is one component of a rhetorical concealment of “a troubled relationship between their own experiences as travellers and those as colonial women.”40 Kingsley’s writing is distinguished by numerous funny scenes, a stance toward her audience that is combative but oddly compelling, and a series of convincing claims about her own authority as a truth-teller. Although, like Livingstone, she aims at a high level of representational accuracy, she does not share his staid, restrained and generally self-effacing style. She describes her day in the town of Clarence (present-day Malabo, capital of Equatorial Guinea) on Fernando Po island: When you spend the day on shore, and when, having exhausted the charms of the town, – a thing that usually takes between ten minutes to a quarter of an hour, – and you apply to an inhabitant for advice as to the disposal of the rest of your shore leave, you are told to “go and see the coals” . . . These coals, the remnant of the store that was kept here for the English men-of-war, were left here when the naval station was removed. . . . I am by no means a person who hungers for amusement – far from it; but when I had been to see the coals I certainly felt as if I could cram another excitement into that afternoon without any great effort. (p. )

Kingsley regularly transforms that which is dull or difficult or even terrifying in her travels into moments that become variously funny, interesting and non-threatening. When confronted by an alligator climbing aboard her canoe during a trip through a swamp, she recounts banging it on the snout with her paddle; when she finds herself in an animal trap of iron spikes, she reports being saved from impalement by her skirt which acts as a sort of parachute, catching the spikes but leaving her safely in the middle of them; when she is put up in a hut by a chief at Efoua, near Lake Ncovi, and traces the awful smell therein to a bag containing a “human hand, three big toes, four eyes, two ears, and other portions of the human frame,” she remarks calmly that “[t]he hand was fresh, the others only so so, and shrivelled” (p. ). Her ability to observe these body parts dispassionately enough to evaluate their relative freshness not only makes her work highly readable, it also confers upon her a certain authority as an unflappable, and therefore reliable, reporter. Details about fresh hands and shriveled ears make up part of what might be described as an aggressive strain in her realism. She concludes the preface to her work on a rather confrontational note: “Your super-

A field for enterprise



ior culture-instincts may militate against your enjoying West Africa, but if you go there you will find things as I have said” (p. ix). Readers addressed directly in the second person may not be able to enjoy Kingsley’s account of this daunting and sometimes disturbing place, but whether or not they do, what she says about it is true, and she challenges any skeptics to go to West Africa and verify that things are indeed as she has said. She thus gives her readers a responsibility from the beginning of her text to distinguish between what they may like or dislike about West Africa, and what is simply the case – which she cannot be blamed for reporting accurately. She differentiates her work from missionary literature, because she has found “that these good people wrote their reports not to tell you how the country they resided in was, but how it was getting on towards being what it ought to be, and how necessary it was their readers should subscribe more freely . . .” (p. ). Kingsley is not in the business of fundraising, and she has no motivation, she seems to assert, to report anything but the truth. And she has achieved this truth by a rigorous process of comparing her received ideas about Africa with its reality: “I took my old ideas derived from books and thoughts based on imperfect knowledge and weighed them against the real life around me and found them either worthless or wanting” (p. ). She implicitly asks her readers to go through the same process in the reading of her work: if the reader will compare her text to other texts, like those of missionaries, that are motivated by many considerations that have nothing to do with Kingsley’s confident idea of “the truth,” they will find that the accurate portrayal of West Africa is the one she gives. In addition to addressing readers in the somewhat hectoring tone that the second person produces, and criticizing missionaries for their inaccuracies, there is another sense in which Kingsley’s writing is combative. She enjoys recounting anecdotes that she is sure will trouble or disgust her readers; she then disavows her enjoyment and increases the disgust she has evoked by indicating that there is much more she might say, and giving a fairly clear idea of what it might consist of. Passing through a swamp, for example, Kingsley reports that we got horribly infested with leeches, having a frill of them round our necks like astrachan collars, and our hand covered with them, when we came out. Knowing you do not like me going into details on such matters, I will confine my statement regarding our leeches, to the fact that it was for the best that we had some trade salt with us. It was most comic to see us salting each other; but in spite of the salt’s efficacious action I was quite faint from loss of blood, and



Victorian Writing about Risk

we all presented a ghastly sight as we made our way on into N’dorko. Of course the bleeding did not stop at once, and it attracted flies and – but I am going into details, so I forebear. (p. )

At the last minute, Kingsley controls herself with dashes and a promise to “forebear.” But this less-than-complete forebearance is somewhat insulting to her readers: it implies that they, unlike her, are too delicate to hear further details. Even for the fairly hardy reader, the images produced by the “frill” and the “astrachan collar” of leeches are revolting; by the time Kingsley “forebears” from appalling us with more “details,” we can imagine the effects of the salt and we have a good enough idea about the flies to be wondering what kind of collars they came to resemble around the bloody necks of Kingsley and her companions.41 In a similar case of authorial rough-housing, Kingsley cuts herself off in the middle of a string of anecdotes about the Gold Coast: I must forthwith stop writing about the Gold Coast, or I shall go on telling you stories and wasting your time, not to mention the danger of letting out those which would damage the nerves of the cultured of temperate climes, such as those relating . . . of the man who wore brass buttons; the moving story of three leeches and two gentlemen; the doctor up a creek; and the reason why you should not eat pork along here because all the natives have either got the guineaworm, or kraw-kraw or ulcers; and then the pigs go and – dear me! it was a near thing that time. I’ll leave off at once. (p. )

This passage performs a number of services: in its playfulness, it can safely, because partially, reveal Kingsley’s contempt for the “cultured of temperate climes,” a group from which she was herself always somewhat alienated because of her identification with her laboring-class mother, which included her life-long retention of her mother’s cockney accent.42 However, since it is the cultured of temperate climes who buy travel writing by authors like Kingsley, it is useful to smudge the outlines of her contempt with a dose of Alice in Wonderland-like silliness. Her combined playfulness and irony lets her readers know that they are missing out on stories because of their too-delicate sensibilities; and she inflames those sensibilities by directing her readers’ attention to the fact that pork is contaminated with human diseases because “pigs go and – .” We can fill in the word her dash elides easily with the image she has led us to directly and unmistakably – that pigs eat human excrement. The “oh dear” that follows the duplicitous dashes, like her promise to forebear in the matter of the leeches and the flies, comes too late to do what she promises to make it do – that is, it comes too late to avoid shocking and incensing her readers. This implicit needling and even shaming of readers for their

A field for enterprise



squeamishness pushes the individual reader to identify with Kingsley rather than be lumped in with the kind of reader who cannot bear the difficult reality of West Africa and must receive an edited, and partially sanitized, version of it. Kingsley, in other words, makes herself into an ironic kind of heroine – a woman who can deal with various and variously revolting exigencies. This ability, and the rewards that accrue to a woman who possessed it, may make her readers eventually wish to identify themselves with her rather than with the general run of readers who maintain their delicate sensibilities and with them, a limited range of experience and knowledge. Like Livingstone, Kingsley defends her inclusion of seemingly trivial details, the consistent inclusion of which means that “the reader gets . . . notice of things that, although unimportant in themselves, yet go to make up the conditions of life under which men and things exist” (p. ). To be faithful to reality means that details are not fastidiously selected and ranked, but rather that they are included as expansively and sweepingly as is possible. This jumble of details is valued for providing a rich source of markers or metonyms for “the conditions of life under which men and things exist” in Africa. We might understand Kingsley’s method as an early effort to avoid ethnocentrism. The reader must repeat this process of generous inclusion (rather than ethnocentric exclusion of the apparently “unimportant” detail) and valuation in the reading of this mass of details, having faith that each detail has a significance that may not be immediately evident. Kingsley defends this method early in her work, stating “I am ambitious to make a picture, if I make one at all, that people who do know the original can believe in – even if they criticize its points – and so I give you details a more showy artist would omit” (p. ). Kingsley may fail in her ambition – she may not make a picture at all – but if she succeeds in making one, it will not be “showy,” i.e. not decorative or necessarily pleasing, but simply accurate, a picture that can be believed in by the only people who can legitimately, in Kingsley’s view, criticize her work – those who know West Africa at first hand. Kingsley is protective of her work about West Africa, and of the place itself – a place that makes her life in London seem a two-dimensional, black-and-white existence: [The] charm of West Africa is a painful one. It gives you pleasure to fall under it when you are out there, but when you are back here, it gives you pain, by calling you. It sends up before your eyes a vision of a wall of dancing, white, rainbowgemmed surf playing on a shore of yellow sand before an audience of stately



Victorian Writing about Risk

cocoa-palms, or of a great mangrove-walled bronze river, or a of a vast forest cathedral, and you hear, nearer to you than the voices of the people round you, nearer than the roar of the city traffic, the sound of that surf that is beating on the shore down there . . . and everything around you grows poor and thin in the face of that vision, and you want to go back to the coast that is calling you . . .43

For Kingsley, Africa exerts a charm that makes it seem more real – “nearer” – than the reality that is most immediate as she writes – that of the people, the city and the traffic of London. She asks her readers to forgive her for finding in Africa a place that she preferred to England: “You must make allowance for my love of this sort of country, with its great forests and rivers and its animistic-minded inhabitants, and for my ability to be more comfortable there than in England” (p. ix). Tim Youngs has argued that “travel writing, especially in an imperial or colonial context, is an expression of identity based on sameness to and yet remoteness from the members of the home society.”44 Kingsley ups the ante on this tradition, suggesting that she is closer to the visited place than to her home, and by extension closer in identity to Africans. Kingsley first went to Africa when she was finally relieved of responsibility for her chronically ill mother (who died in ) and temporarily relieved of keeping house for her brother, who went out to the “East.” Leaving home, almost for the first time, Kingsley describes herself as “dead tired and feeling no one had need of me anymore . . . I went down to West Africa to die.”45 But to go to West Africa to die is to make a great deal of effort: if Kingsley had wished to die she could have done so as easily in Highgate as in Sierra Leone. In making such an assertion, Kingsley perhaps disavows her own long-frustrated desire to see the world beyond her family’s house in London. To say that she was going to go to West Africa to live – what actually happened – might have been too great a betrayal of her previous life and particularly of her parents, who confined her more or less alone in her home, as nurse and housekeeper, from childhood. Her fatalism, whether or not it was very deeply rooted, turned out to be one of her greatest assets in coping not so much with West Africa itself, as with the mythology surrounding it.46 Kingsley makes this declaration only to disavow the liberating benefits of her mother’s death, she would undoubtedly have been persuaded not to risk travel to West Africa by those who assured her that she would die there, and that for this reason she should get to know the Wesleyan missionaries, who were the “only people on the coast who have got a hearse with feathers” (p. ). But

A field for enterprise



Kingsley’s experience of Africa reverses all such grim expectations, including the need for a hearse. For her, there is nothing so fascinating as spending a night out in an African forest, or plantation; but I beg you to note I do not advise anyone to follow the practice. Nor indeed do I recommend African forest life to anyone. Unless you are interested and fall under its charm, it is the most awful life in death imaginable. It is like being shut up in a library whose books you cannot read, all the while tormented, terrified and bored. And if you do fall under its spell, it takes all the colour out of other kinds of living. (p. )

Kingsley suggests that the African forest would be to many Britons what her life at home has been to her: imprisonment in a house whose books, which for most of the time were her only source of companionship or entertainment, she could not read. Terror, torment and boredom seem to be the combination of feelings evoked by the claustrophobia of being shut up in an unreadable library. Kingsley repeats her early experience of being “shut up,” but this time in an unreadable African forest, a place that she learns, as she learned to read the books in her father’s library, eventually, see her way through, and thus move about in freely. It is perhaps the discovery of a freedom of movement within a potentially confining and “unreadable” place that casts a “spell” on Kingsley and takes the “color” out of her life in England. In the African forest she can endlessly repeat, and endlessly master, her earlier experience of learning to read, and can have an actual physical experience of the intellectual power and freedom of movement that earlier knowledge conferred on her. Having taught herself to read, Kingsley was particularly wellequipped to endure the long and frustrating learning process required to “read” the forest, a place in which, “on first entering,” you hardly see anything but the vast column-like grey tree stems in their countless thousands around you, and the sparsely vegetated ground beneath. But day by day, as you get trained to your surroundings, you see more and more, and a whole world grows up gradually out of the gloom before your eyes . . . It is the same with the better lit regions, where vegetation is many-formed and luxuriant. As you get used to it, what seemed at first to be an inextricable tangle ceases to be so. The separate sorts of plants stand out before your eyes with ever increasing clearness, until you can pick out the one particular one you may want; and daily you find it easier to make your way through what at first seemed an impenetrable wall . . . When this first period [of not being able to see clearly] passes there comes a growing sense of power. The proudest day of my life was the day on which an old Fan hunter said to me – “Ah! you see.” (pp. –)



Victorian Writing about Risk

Kingsley can endure the “first period” when the forest seems like an “impenetrable” wall because she has had this experience with books, and has also learned how to “penetrate” them. The “growing sense of power” that Kingsley experiences in being able to see her way through the forest, is reminiscent of the developmental achievements of children that involve the increasing ability to move away from parents and home – milestones that Kingsley had to wait until her thirties to accomplish. But in the daunting context of West Africa Kingsley makes up for lost time with a vengeance that haunted her and that she had to disavow, as in her assertion that she went abroad to die.47 Although Kingsley survived West Africa with great aplomb, she represents its dangers with a great deal of complexity. She was an enthusiastic advocate of free trade, and therefore was careful not to exaggerate or dramatize dangers that would discourage trade, but she was also a self-designated truth-teller, and saw herself as incapable of the kind of partisan distortions she attributes to missionaries who represent Africa according to their own agenda. She brings up the subject straightforwardly enough: “I should like here to speak of West Coast dangers because I fear you may think that I am careless of, or do not believe in them, neither of which is the case. The more you know of the West Coast of Africa, the more you realise its dangers” (p. ). The two great dangers of the West Coast are fever and “horror,” “a state briefly and locally described as funk, and a state that usually ends fatally . . .” (p. ). Kingsley then tells the story of a particular case of “funk”: A young man who had never been outside an English country town before in his life, from family reverses had to take a situation as a book-keeper down in the Bights [of Benin, the curve in the West African coast encompassing, roughly, present-day Cameroon, Nigeria, Benin and Togo]. The factory he was going to was in an isolated out-of-the-way place and not in a settlement, and when the ship called off it, he was put ashore in one of the ship’s boats with his belongings, and a case or so of goods. There was only the firm’s beach-boys down at the surf, and as the steamer was in a hurry the officer from the ship did not go up to the factory with him, but said good-bye and left him alone with a set of naked savages as he thought, but really of good kindly Kru boys on the beach. He could not understand what they said, nor they what he said, and so he walked up to the house and on to the verandah and tried to find the Agent he had come out to serve under. He looked into the open-ended dining-room and shyly around the verandah, and then sat down and waited for someone to turn up. Sundry natives turned up, and said a good deal, but no one white or comprehensible, so in desperation he made another and a

A field for enterprise



bolder tour completely round the verandah and noticed a most peculiar noise in one of the rooms and an infinity of flies going into the venetian shuttered window. Plucking up the courage he went in and found what was left of the white Agent, a considerable quantity of rats, and most of the flies of West Africa. He then presumably had fever, and was taken off . . . by a French boat, to whom the natives signalled, and he is not coming down to the Coast again. (–)

One cannot read this passage without thinking of Conrad and the ways in which it now both confirms and subverts his canonical version of African “horror.” The similarities are clear in the naiveté and innocence of the English young man, and the awful irony that suffuses the image of his diffidence and concern for propriety: his looking shyly around the verandah, his willingness simply to sit and wait rather than disturb anyone – all this in regard to a man whose body is in the process of being eaten by rats. But high literary seriousness, and the image of Africa as a place of horror, is undercut at a number of crucial points. The boys on the beach are “savages” to the young man, but Kingsley informs us that they are in fact “good” and “kindly,” and thus reduces the specter of menacing Africans to the status of a simple ignorance and misunderstanding. Kingsley, like Livingstone, experiences Africans as rational subjects; Conrad reduces Africans to menacing “bundles of angles”48 who cannot communicate. The quantifiers Kingsley chooses for the numbers of animals that are eating the Agent – a “considerable” quantity of rats and “most of the flies in West Africa” – and indeed the fact that she quantifies them at all further diminishes the solemnity of the circumstance. In so doing, Kingsley’s text becomes a handbook of the vocabulary and attitude required to avoid succumbing to the “horror.” In Kingsley’s description of it, and of how to resist it, the “horror” is not endemic to Africa. It is not a geographical problem but a psychological one: it afflicts those who are not psychologically tough enough to withstand the particular dangers of Africa – dangers that are represented as real but as different in kind, rather than in quantity or intensity, from those of other locations. The paragraph following the tale of the young man begins “But most of the new-comers do not get a shock of this order” (p. ). This disclaimer pulls most of the rug out from under the “horror,” brusquely asserting that the deplorable circumstances of this particular young man are not typical or frequent. Rudyard Kipling, who met Kingsley at the home of “three delightful old ladies who had been kind to me when I was a boy,” heard her tell of her West African adventures with a similar matter-of-factness: “her even, disinterested tones were in precise keeping



Victorian Writing about Risk

with the Victorian atmosphere and surroundings; but the matter of her discourse was heathen and adventurous.” Kipling’s observation suggests the complementarity of this seeming opposition of form and content: Kingsley’s evenness and disinterestedness are the perfect vehicle for the “heathen and adventurous” matters of which she tells. This combination produced a strong impression of her fearlessness: “Being human,” Kipling writes, “she must have feared some things, but one never arrived at what they were.”49 Kingsley uses herself and her attitudes – her fearlessness, her ability to resist the “horror” with her humor – as a representation of the characteristics required of those who would trade with Africa. The overarching argument of her work is that free trade, as opposed to colonization and Christian conversion (to which she was staunchly opposed), was a way to leave African culture intact while increasing its prosperity, and that of Britain. Kingsley, visiting Africa in the s and s, was engaging in a bit of Africanist nostalgia. By , many regions of Africa were well on the way to a kind of mercantilist capitalist development, or what the historian A. Adu Boahen describes as “rural capitalism.”50 What Kingsley wished to preserve was already on its way to radical change, a change that was profoundly interrupted by the destructive effects of the “scramble.” In an appendix to the Travels, she writes at length and in depth about trade with the West Coast and with the western interior of Africa, detailing the geographical and political difficulties of various regions, insisting that the rigors of trade would be worthwhile because, although it is hard to get at, “Africa has lots of stuff in it; structurally more than any other continent in the world . . .” (p. ). She details what this stuff is (ivory, gold, silver, copper, lead and petroleum), elaborates on the introduction of cash crops such as tea, coffee and cocoa and evaluates the labor potential of various tribes according to her knowledge of their cultural practices. Kingsley is in accord with British policy in tropical Africa before : “the merchant was expected to create empire,” he was expected “to do without imperial rule, to make do with the protection of a sphere of influence.”51 She saw the West Coast traders as having created this sphere of influence in a highly beneficial way. For example, she felt that it was thanks to them that she “visited places I could never otherwise have seen; and to the respect and affection in which [the trader] is held by the native, I owe it that I have done so in safety” (p. ). Missionaries, on the other hand, with very few exceptions, seem to Kingsley to have a miserably corrupting influence in Africa:

A field for enterprise



Nothing strikes me so much, in studying the degeneration of these native tribes, as the direct effect that civilisation and reformation has in hastening it. The worst enemy to the existence of the African tribe is the one who comes to it and says: – Now you must civilise, and come to school, and leave off these awful goings-on of yours, and settle down quietly. The tribe does so; the African is teachable and tractable; and then the ladies and some of the young men are happy and content with the excitement of European clothes and frequent church services; but the older men and some of the bolder young men soon get bored with these things and the, to them, irksome restraints, and they go in for too much rum, or mope themselves to death, or return to their native customs. The African treats his religion very much as other men do: when he gets slightly educated, a little scientific one might say, he removes from his religion all the disagreeable parts . . . (p. )

Kingsley was unabashed in her opposition to Christian conversion and colonialism in Africa, and advocated only the contact of trade. Like Livingstone she could not foresee or take into account the degree to which such trade is also a form of imperialism, and the extent to which it would cause the “degeneration” she saw as caused by contact with European customs. This is in keeping with the economic doctrine of the Enlightenment, the doctrine that governed nineteenth-century laissez faire: commerce was “natural,” humans are always and spontaneously economic, – i.e. possessed of the desire to truck and barter. Accordingly, commerce did not strike her as a set of customs at least as powerful as those of Christianity. Kingsley’s “conversion” to West African culture is more overt than is Livingstone’s. She comes to Africa to study “fish and fetish,”52 having read ichthyology and ethnography for years in her father’s library, including the work of E. B. Tylor, whom she calls her “great ju-ju.” His ethnographic definition of culture, as encompassing the customs, laws, beliefs, traditions and practices that form the “complex whole” of the life of a given people, makes it possible for Kingsley to find “culture” (previously the exclusive property of the civilized) in Africa. And this ethnographic understanding works in the opposite direction, as well. Julie English Early points out that Kingsley’s “large view” of fetish is “theoretically as applicable to British ‘truths’ as to any other culture’s . . .”53 But the extraordinary sympathy and respect she is able to accord to various peoples, especially the Fan people of the French Congo, extends beyond the understanding elicited by Tylor’s new definition of culture. Kingsley’s sympathy and respect were partly an odd side-effect of her polygenist racism: “I agree with the French ethnologists,” she writes in one of her five chapters on fetish, “and fancy there have been several



Victorian Writing about Risk

points of origin of the human race” (p. ). The white and black races, in Kingsley’s view, reside on different summits in “the mountain range of civilization . . . the African is not keen on mountaineering in the civilization range. He prefers remaining down below and being comfortable” (p. ). It is a paradox of nineteenth-century racism that the doctrine that held out most virulently for a basic species difference between the races – polygenism – also allowed most liberally for cultural diversity and relativism. One wonders, after reading the five chapters on “Fetish” in the Travels, if the “mountain range” Kingsley sees Africans as inhabiting is not the one where she herself feels most comfortable. Her extraordinary sympathy and even identification with animism – she describes herself as “animistic-minded,” as well as “savage,” on a regular basis and attributes animism to European thinkers she admires including Spinoza and Goethe54 – suggest her affinity with the West African view of the world. Kingsley cautions prospective ethnographers about the difference and the complexities of African thought, and denies, in a radical statement for , that there is anything “child-like” about Africans: However good may be the outfit for your work that you take with you, you will have, first, great difficulty in realising that it is possible for the people you are among really to believe things in the way they do. And you cannot associate with them long before you must recognize that these Africans have often a remarkable mental acuteness and a large share of common sense; that there is nothing really “child-like” in the form of their mind at all. Observe them further and you will find they are not a flighty-minded, mystical set of people in the least . . . (p. )

By insisting on the acuteness and common sense of Africans, Kingsley insists on their full-fledged subjectivity and their participation in culture. And African cultures are based on highly complex sets of practices: “When you have found the easy key that opens the reason underlying a series of facts . . . do not . . . go home with a shriek of ‘I know all about Fetish,’ because you don’t”: various sets of customs require different keys and there is no one master key to decode all the cultural practices of one people. She cautions her readers that “I make no pretension to a thorough knowledge of Fetish ideas; I am only on the threshold” (p. ). Fetish customs are both rational and adaptable in Kingsley’s view: “I often think that it must be the common-sense element in fetish customs that enables them to survive in the strange way they do, in the minds of Africans who have been longer under European influence and education” (p. ). Kingsley attributes the deep-rooted conviction fetish

A field for enterprise



inspires to its rational element – its sense – a conviction that even a longer exposure to European customs than to African ones does not displace. In a typically wry but also admiring summation, Kingsley writes that “the fascination of the African point of view is sure to linger in your mind as the malaria in your body” (p. ). The simple-minded, irrational and evil savagery portrayed by earlier African travelers and missionaries is replaced in Kingsley’s account of fetish with a meaningful and powerful system of belief. This view of animistic belief is also present in Livingstone’s account, but more implicitly, since he is a missionary: for example he not only understands the practice of rainmaking; he sees it as a logical response to the difficulties of withstanding drought, one that, as he points out, the English might well adopt had they the same climatic exigencies with which to contend. . We have seen that both Livingstone and Kingsley seemed to feel more at home, even safer, in Africa than they did in Britain. The two authors, a laboring-class Scot and a (barely) middle-class woman, could never, because of their class and gender positions, assume an easy or stable status as full-fledged psychological or political subjects in Britain. Indeed they were in political, economic and social terms less than full citizens of their own nation. Moreover, both grew up in circumstances in which they were isolated at home or at work, and by which their choices and their physical and emotional mobility were constrained. Kingsley poignantly described herself as “being no more a human being than a gust of wind is. I have never had a human individual life. I have always been the doer of odd jobs – and lived in the joys, sorrow and worries of other people.”55 The subordination of her own needs, and eventually her own identity, to those of her family from childhood seems to have prevented her from developing, or being able to admit to experiencing, anything like a reasonably full sense of herself – someone actually possessing a “human individual life.” Similarly, Livingstone, who, because his mother was an “anxious housewife striving to make both ends meet,” was sent to work at age ten in a cotton factory “to aid by my earnings in lessening her anxiety” (p. ). He describes himself as having to work primarily because of his mother’s anxiety – he too has to live according to the feelings of others, as well as according to financial circumstances that prevent him from enjoying anything like a reasonably carefree childhood.



Victorian Writing about Risk

Livingstone and Kingsley continually had to subordinate themselves to the physical and emotional needs of others, a subordination in which their own subjective growth was necessarily stunted. The subjective impoverishment produced by the exigencies of their social “places” and familial situations made it particularly possible for Africa and Africans to provide Livingstone and Kingsley with “recognition” – the acknowledgment that one needs from another to realize oneself fully. Frantz Fanon, following a train of thinking about alterity extending from Hegel to Lacan, has described this need for recognition and the consequences of its absence: Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognized by him. As long as he has not been effectively recognized by the other, that other will remain the theme of his actions. It is on that being, on recognition by that other being, that his own human worth and reality depend. It is that other being in whom the meaning of his life is condensed.56

We might speculate that the dominant discourse about Africa, and the investiture of the African in the role of the absolute other of nineteenthcentury Britain, may have had to do with non-recognition. Non-recognition may be a crucial psychic feature of the imperial/colonial encounter, in which (actual or potential) colonizers look to (actual or potential) colonized subjects for recognition to affirm their superiority and authority. Fanon writes of the need of the former slave, of the former colonized person, for recognition from the master or colonizer; here I am suggesting, following and to some extent literalizing the master/slave dialectic of Hegel, that masters and colonizers needed – and could not always fully get – such recognition from slaves and colonized peoples. When such subject peoples refused to enact this crucial feature of subjection, they were further devalued in the representations of the slave-owner or colonizer, in a kind of reaction formation, in which Africans (or Irish, Indian or other non-recognizing subjects) are devalued to the point that their recognition would be meaningless in any case. The obliteration of the other as a subject, I am suggesting, is not solely an act of domination, but may also arise from a complicated cultural disappointment: the refusal of the subjected to enact their subjection by recognizing the power, the greatness or other qualities of putative superiority in the subjugator. Writers like Livingstone and Kingsley moved beyond the constraints of dominant Victorian constructions of Africa to experience Africans as actual subjects: both writers were able to attribute meaning and ration-

A field for enterprise



ality to African cultural practices, as well as kindness and generosity to individual Africans. This ability may have been the result of the lives they led in Britain, which did not lead them to expect or to require the personal aggrandizement that many of their fellow Britons assumed they would find in Africa. This is not to deny the pervasiveness of Victorian racial theory in their thinking. They could experience Africans as subjects, but also as safely different subjects. Because Africans were so clearly defined as radically other in nineteenth-century Britain, Livingstone and Kingsley could engage with them as inferior and non-threatening others. They thus reduced the risk that inheres in relying on the cooperation of others to develop and maintain a sense of one’s own subjectivity. One risk of this process is that the cooperation of the other may destabilize rather than stabilize the subject, and to a frightening and potentially annihilating extent: “the other-infested subject can have no other destiny than that of successive disappearance and return, entity and non-entity, sense and nonsense, concentration and dispersal, being there and being gone.”57 For Livingstone and Kingsley, Africans perhaps symbolized others with whom their own British subjectivity (because superior) might be less prone to the terrible, and terrifying, fluctuations of “being there and being gone.” They could maintain a kind of psychological upper hand because of the cultural milieu – Africa – in which the “free trade” of subjectivities occurs, an upper hand not unlike the one maintained by Britain and other European nations in the particularly unliberated practice of “free” trade with Africa. In this racist-utopian relationship to Africans, Livingstone and Kingsley seem to avoid the risk of being infested or overtaken by the other. They chose, albeit unconsciously, a particular field and a particular other, in which their own superiority and thus “natural” authority, as it was constructed in various versions of Victorian racism, protected them psychologically and allowed them a sense of safety and freedom that neither had experienced in Britain. Empire provided an arena for a number of Europeans who were in some way outsiders both to make better lives for themselves and to serve the imperial state. Andre Gide’s L’Immoraliste, for example, can be read as an extended application for a civil service job: in the opening chapter, the question is asked, “[e]n quoi Michel peut-il servir l’Etat?”58 This question was asked, often implicitly, and answered by Europeans – one thinks of Richard Burton, E. M. Forster and T. E. Lawrence, for example, who were happy enough to



Victorian Writing about Risk

leave home to attain power and pleasure in the colonies. Their psychological needs meshed seamlessly with the imperial needs of Britain, with salubrious results for the culture of empire. Yet Livingstone and Kingsley also subverted the dominant ideologies of the state they served and the selves they served, by finding, and vividly representing, subjectivity and culture in Africa. Problematically, racial others provided a non-threatening alterity against which a poor or female Briton could find their places toward the top of the evolutionary ladder. In the terms of such evolutionary thinking, “underdeveloped” Britons could find the ideal place to “prove” their own development: in the field of an other who was less “developed” still. Kingsley and Livingstone were generally aware of, and were careful to enact, their superiority and authority in the presence of these lessdeveloped others. Livingstone refers with affection and respect to his African “companions,” but he repeatedly emphasizes the need for the “complete subordination” of these companions. He describes himself on one occasion as maintaining his authority over some of his rebellious guides by seizing a double-barreled pistol, and “looking . . . so savage as to put them to a precipitate flight. As some remained within hearing, I told them I must maintain discipline, though at the expense of some of their limbs, so long as we travelled together they must remember that I was master, and not they” (p. ). After an altercation with a Kasai chief who was demanding that Livingstone pay a tribute to him, some of Livingstone’s party wish to fight rather than simply leave: I shouted to my men to take up their luggage and march, some did so with alacrity, feeling that they had disobeyed orders by remaining, but one of them refused, and was preparing to fire . . . until I gave him a punch on the head with the pistol, and made him go too. I felt here, as elsewhere, that subordination must be maintained at all risks. (p. )

Livingstone’s authority in Africa has often been attributed to the force of his Christian kindness, but in these instances, his pistol and his “savagery” seem to form its actual source. Kingsley, who also identifies herself as a “savage,” and confesses her sympathy with animism, nonetheless is careful to maintain her own distance from, and authority over, Africans. She insists that it is always necessary that she conduct herself in Africa as a “Devil man,” one who “must betray no weakness, but a character which I should describe as a compound of the best parts of Cardinal Richelieu, Brutus, Julius Caesar, [and] Prince Metternich . . .” (p. ). Kingsley has an interesting sense of trust in the universal ability of the “best parts” of these characters to

A field for enterprise



command respect and obedience – a universality that is not particularly apparent to me, and I suspect may have been even less so to West Africans in the nineteenth century. Even more importantly, it seems that Kingsley can become a man in Africa: she can successfully play the role of the “devil man,” and she reports natives calling her “sir” on a number of occasions. Just as Livingstone’s class position becomes irrelevant in Africa, the effects of Kingsley’s gender are conveniently canceled by the stronger effects of her racial and national affiliations. In addition to finding in Africans others with whom they could have limited but safe relationships in which to experience their own selves perhaps more fully than had been previously possible, Livingstone and Kingsley also found in Africa the space in which that subjectivity could expand. African space was “empty” on British maps and in British imaginations, and therefore provided an open field for the play of subjectivities that had been pinched and impeded by the nineteenth-century factory and domestic systems. D. W. Winnicott postulated that children need a large and safe symbolic space – he calls this the space of play – in which to develop a productive and balanced relationship between their inner and outer worlds.59 Africa provided Livingstone and Kingsley with a large and paradoxically safe space in which an analogous process seems to have been, however belatedly, enacted. Both writers take considerable pride in the hardships they overcome in traversing African space. Kingsley describes herself leading her expedition through a swamp: If I happened to be in front, the duty of finding the ford fell on me; for none of us after leaving Efoua knew the swamp personally. I was too frightened of the Fan, and too nervous and uncertain of the stuff my other men were made of, to dare show the white feather at anything that turned up. The Fan took my conduct as a matter of course, never having traveled with white men before, or learnt the way some of them require carrying over swamps and rivers and such. (p. )

In terms of both her race and her gender she can experience herself as extraordinary in her ability to lead the way through this literal morass: most white men in Africa would not be walking, much less leading, the way. She does not claim the male gender here; she transcends it altogether in a new identity that is characterized not by sex but by one’s ability and willingness to cross swamps. Similarly, Livingstone consistently refers to his bouts with illness in an off-hand way: “During our second day on this extensive plain [in south central Africa], I suffered from my twenty-seventh attack



Victorian Writing about Risk

of fever, at a part where no surface-water was to be found . . . when I was quite unable to move on, my men soon found water to allay my burning thirst by digging with sticks a few feet below the surface” (pp. –). With remarkable affective control, Livingstone notes vomiting of blood, sores that prevent him from sitting on his ox, severe diarrhea and other maladies as little more than irritatations. We know that affect is being controlled because however emotionless the prose, the fact that Livingstone has kept count of his bouts of fever, and lets his readers know that this is the twenty-seventh, indicates both the depth of his suffering and his need to communicate it, albeit in terse numerical form. Nonetheless, this suffering is firmly connected, rhetorically speaking, to the pleasure of mastering a difficult landscape. Kingsley, en route to N’dorko, in West Africa, encounters “one of the biggest swamps I have ever seen south of the Rivers”: It stretched away in all directions, a great sheet of filthy water, out of which sprang gorgeous marsh plants, in islands, great banks of screw pine, and coppices of wine palm, with their lovely fronds reflected back by the still, mirrorlike water, so that the reflection was as vivid as the reality, and above all remarkable was a plant, new and strange to me, whose pale-green stem came up out of the water and then spread out in a flattened surface, thin, and in a peculiarly graceful curve. (p. )

Stuck with having to forge this swamp, Kingsley is still able to note the beauty emerging from the filth of it, and she brings the new plant to Kew Gardens, as she also brought many fish to the British Museum (three species of which were named for her), for identification. The ability to cross a swamp, desert or plain, and observe it minutely, gather botanical specimens from it, record animal behavior with precision in it and tolerate vomiting of blood or the fear of a fatal mis-step in it requires particular courage, patience and endurance. Livingstone and Kingsley developed these qualities within the exigencies of what should have been the safer space of Britain. They find in Africa the space of play in which once-constrained subjectivities can roam and come into a productive and rich connection with the outside world. The capturing of that space in language then gives both writers the chance to infuse the landscape with their own subjectivities, subjectivities that have long been pent up or stunted in their potential growth. This use of African space is made possible by the imperial mapping of the world in which places where Europeans are not resident tend to be seen as “blank,” and therefore empty, spaces. The manifest narratives of geographical expansion

A field for enterprise



in Africa, and the projected narratives of British economic expansion in Africa are underwritten – however unconsciously for both the writers and many of the readers of these texts – by latent narratives of British subjective expansion. Livingstone’s discoveries of waterways; the descriptions offered by both authors of interior parts of Africa – of present-day Angola, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mozambique by Livingstone and of present-day Cameroon, Gabon, Congo and Zaïre by Kingsley; and the ability of both to survive their travels and explorations shed much light on the darkness in which so many regions of Africa remained shrouded in the European imagination. In addition to their geographical contributions, both writers represent African people so that they “make sense” to their fellow Britons: Africans, too, participate in culture. The ubiquity of culture stabilizes Africa for British trade and colonization: “[r]ational ethnography, ” E. B. Tylor argued, produces “the causes which have produced the phenomena of culture, and of the laws to which they are subordinate . . .”60 In finding “culture” outside of Britain, Livingstone and Kingsley suggest, from their first-hand experience, that culture is as ubiquitous and beneficent as the invisible hand of the market described by J. R. McCulloch and Harriet Martineau.61 Granting the other a measure, although a strategically limited one – of subjectivity, and of culture – brings the other into the fold of the comprehensible. Livingstone and Kingsley gradually (from  to ) construct a safer Africa in a less dangerous world. In so doing, they suggest that Africa could provide something more valuable to Britain than an inexhaustible supply of thrills and horrors. This symbolic use of Africa blocked more materially profitable uses of Africa because it constantly suggested an unbearably risky environment to potential investors. Africa had to be retrieved from at least some of the sensationalism in which, by the middle of the nineteenth century, it was steeped, and represented as a rational place in which a desire to engage in “free” trade with the British was alive and well. The need to expand – geographically, economically and subjectively – finally requires the dismantling of a thoroughly dangerous world. But by representing Africa as safe for travel and for trade, Livingstone and Kingsley also endangered the continent: the stereotypical dangers attributed to Africa in the conventional nineteenth-century discourse about it had to some degree protected it from the depredations of formal empire that would later result from the “scramble for Africa,” as well as the preceding informal empire of free trade. The cultures so admired



Victorian Writing about Risk

by both authors would be destroyed; “stuff” would be removed from Africa on a grand and devastating scale. Indeed, the logic of imperialism made it impossible for Africa, or for Livingstone and Kingsley as Britons in need of the Africa that imperialism would destroy, to win: the continent was put at various risks throughout the century by a weave of discourses that suggested, in their different representations of Africa and Africans, ever-new strategies of symbolic and material exploitation. The inclusion of Africa within the possible regions of light and of Africans within the concepts of culture and subjectivity does more, however, than open up new avenues for exploitation; it also plays havoc with various conceptual systems that were important to nineteenthcentury ideologies of race, nation and empire. By broadening the data that constituted a “culture” or a “self,” Kingsley and Livingstone reveal that writing about culture in its wide ethnographic sense produces “a deeply unstable form of discourse which may become more incoherent the more intensively it examines its special data.”62 Indeed both writers advert to the instability of a discourse in which an ever-expanding base of data continually threatens to overwhelm the possibility of making useful generalizations. Livingstone records, in regard to the Makololo, the tribe among which he had a signal lack of success as a missionary, that “[a]fter long observation, I came to the conclusion that they are just such a strange mixture of good and evil, as men everywhere are” (p. ). Mary Kingsley warns her readers, in discussing the varieties of African religions, that the “study of natural [sic] phenomena knocks the bottom out of any man’s conceit if it is done honestly and not by selecting only those facts that fit in with his preconceived or ingrafted notions” (p. ). Their comments echo the German anthropologist and archeologist Leo Frobenius (–), who noted that “far from bringing us answers to our questions, the travelers have increased our enigmas with many an addition.”63 The ethnographic idea of culture raises the paradoxical specter of a world that could be interpreted, understood and thus experienced as a safer place, but one that becomes, at the same time, a less coherent place because of an ever-increasing base of data that constantly requires new interpretation and arrangement if it is to be made to cohere into the complex, comprehensible whole promised by Tylor. The reasons for representing Africa as a reasonably safe place – for trade (as Kingsley wanted) or for trade and colonization (as Livingstone wished), are also, paradoxically, reasons that threaten to reveal England as a potentially unsafe place. England needs Africa in the accounts of

A field for enterprise



Livingstone and Kingsley: it is an excellent place for excess British population, its raw materials are of great value, and it represents a potentially vast market for goods of British manufacture. This valuation of Africa – whether it is largely “true” historically, or a culturally pervasive fantasy – suggests that England cannot be safely imagined as selfsufficient, and therefore cannot cordon itself off from the rest of the world as a fully secure place. Harking back to the statistical sublime of J. R. McCulloch for a moment, we see that infinite numbers of herring and endless supplies of coal do not exempt England from having to engage with the world outside British borders. England must confront the dangerous world; in order for this to be made possible, the dangerous world must be represented in at least some accounts as a place that can be survived. The geography of risk requires constant remapping to accommodate the psychological, economic and political restlessness of the Victorian moment. The geography of risk must always, like the geography of capitalism here described by David Harvey, negotiate a knife-edge between presenting the values of past commitments made at a particular place and time, or devaluing them to open up fresh room for accumulation. Capitalism perpetually strives, therefore, to create a social and physical landscape in its own image and requisite to its own needs at a particular point in time, only just as certainly to undermine, disrupt and even destroy that landscape at a later point in time. The inner contradictions of capitalism are expressed through the restless formation and re-formation of geographical landscapes. This is the tune to which the historical geography of capitalism must dance without cease.64

The geography of risk must also continually reshape itself, restlessly rearranging the locations of safety and danger to accommodate muchneeded fantasies of security, in which risk is managed, contained and tamed once and for all, yet again.

Conclusion

If risk can be mapped only temporarily, how can it be tolerated? What cultural mechanisms allow for risk to be endured, or better still, denied as a permanent feature of the landscape of modernity? Mary Kingsley suggests an answer with reference to mountaineering memoirs, her “most favorite form of literature,” despite the fact that she has never . . . seen a glacier or a permanent snow mountain in my life. I do not care a row of pins how badly they may be written, and what form of bumble-puppy grammar and composition is employed, as long as the writer will walk along the edge of a precipice with a sheer fall of thousands of feet on one side and a sheer wall on the other; or better still crawl up an arrete with a precipice on either side. Nothing on earth would persuade me to do either of these things myself, but they remind me of bits of country I have been through where you walk along a narrow line of security with gulfs of murder looming on each side, and where in exactly the same way you are as safe as if you were in your easy chair at home, as long as you get sufficient holding ground: not on rock in the bush village inhabited by murderous cannibals, but on ideas in those men’s and women’s minds [i.e., the minds of the mountaineers], and these ideas, which I think I may say you will always find, give you safety. (p. )

Readers can “always find” ideas of safety if they look to the works of those who have engaged risk and lived to write about it – even if such risk-takers write with “bumble-puppy grammar and composition.” In Kingsley’s idea of it, such works – mountaineering memoirs, but also works like her own on West Africa – will not fail us, but neither can they completely stabilize or protect us: they can only help us to feel safe, to maintain the idea of safety, as we walk a narrow line with “gulfs of murder” on either side. Feeling safe may prevent us from losing our footing, but on the other hand, it may not. Safety is an idea that is located in subjective rather than geographical space. The texts of Livingstone and Kingsley, like the other works considered in this book, bear out the impossibility of confining risk to 

Conclusion



predictable places and peoples: these texts not only fail to locate risk according to the consoling geographical scheme of a safe England in a dangerous world, they suggest that safety and danger traverse borders and boundaries with the same peripatetic flair exhibited by so many of their authors. When I say that the borders of this geography are always in the process of being breached or of failing, I do not mean to discount the idea that they are also always being redrawn, in the endless attempt to construct cultural artifacts capable of containing risk and anxiety: “culture” and its steady stream of artifacts perhaps replaces the stable structure of “cosmos” as the system for providing deliverance from the contingency of risk. This deliverance occurs not once and for all, as in a cosmology, but again and again in the consumption of various cultural objects, including popularizations of political economy that promise economic stability, texts on sanitary reform that project the end of epidemic disease, narrations of balloon ascents in which fear gives way to profound tranquility once the earth is left behind, mountaineering memoirs in which long falls down icy crevasses are miraculously survived and accounts of African travel and exploration in which the paradigmatically dangerous place provides an experience of unparalleled psychic security to Britons who were not particularly safe, because of their gender and class, at home. These texts provided relief from cultural anxiety at the margins of culture; many of them are now beyond the margins of most studies of Victorian culture. And yet modern cosmologies are often found in such highly disposable, ephemeral texts. They seem to have provided their readers with immediate and portable ideas of security – as mountaineering texts provided Kingsley with an idea of safety that made it possible for her to walk through “gulfs of murder” with relative psychic ease. But no one set of such ideas could form a permanent cosmology; the rapidly changing foci of cultural anxiety in the nineteenth century required ever-new sources of relief. Modern cosmologies are most clearly elaborated in popular and ephemeral texts because, like the works in which they are found, the cosmologies themselves are of necessity temporary and disposable, able to assuage the anxiety of one moment, but not the next. The need to be relieved of the permanence of risk has been an oftenneglected or contradicted feature of the landscape of modernity: does the very phenomenology of modernity include an acceptance of risk as ineradicable? I have tried to suggest how defining and locating risk – as a means of containing and taming it – was a persistent feature of the



Conclusion

Victorian moment of modernity, a feature that is most legible in texts that, although widely read in the nineteenth century, are now scarcely read. In these texts we have seen particularly clearly both the persistence of strategies to control and thereby eliminate risk, and the political and ethical consequences of such strategies, including some of the consequences for those people and places selected to contain the danger that stronger people and places have had the power – however temporarily – to displace. Displacements of danger continue to be constructed; the “new world order” of the late twentieth century is only the latest in a continuing series of geographies of risk. Certain spaces, from the neighborhood to the nation state, continue to suffer endangerment because of the dangerousness attributed to them by these geographies, while others bask in a sense of well-being that is all too local, and that continuously proves to be as ephemeral as the cultural processes – from crime statistics to insurance tables to pulp fiction – that promise to tell us where we can find refuge in a dangerous world. We other Victorians, as Foucault so aptly called us, might usefully analyze the tenacious vestiges of nineteenthcentury domestic ideology, with its consoling promise of safe and uncomplicated places – whether these be homes or hemispheres – so that we might take up a fuller residence in the dangerous world that is always, already and anyway our home.

Notes

:      The idea of colonizing the future is from Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, see especially pp. ‒.  The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), p. .  The paraphrase is Fredric Jameson’s, from The Political Unconscious: “History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its “ruses” turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention,” p. .  Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), p. .  Josephine Guy, The Victorian Social-Problem Novel: The Market, the Individual and Communal Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, ), p. .  Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, –, quoted in John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), p. .  See Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction – (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), Part Two, “The Family versus Society” for a discussion of the often contradictory ideological uses of the private sphere in “industrial” novels. See also Armstrong for an analysis of the functions of public and private spheres as they were constructed in eighteenthand nineteenth-century texts.  Guy, The Victorian Social-Problem Novel, p. .  Kathleen Tillotson, The Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), p. .  In, respectively, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction; The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, ); Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).  “The Social Psychology of World Religions,” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, ), p. .  William Farr, quoted in Michael J. Cullen, The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain: the Foundations of Empirical Social Research (New York: Barnes 



    



Notes to pages – and Noble, ), p. . Cullen describes Farr as the “greatest statistician of his time” (p. ). He is also the author of the chapter on vital statistics in McCulloch’s Statistical Account of the British Empire, st edn. (London: Charles Knight and Co., ). See Simon Szreter, “The GRO and the Public Health Movement in Britain, –,” Social History of Medicine (): pp. –. Aaron Wildavsky and Karl Drake, “Theories of Risk Perception: Who Fears What and Why?” Daedalus : (Fall ): p. . Leroy C. Gould, et al., Perceptions of Technological Risks and Benefits (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, ), p. . Aaron Wildavsky, Searching for Safety (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, ), p. . Ibid., p. . See also Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living With High Risk Technologies (New York: Basic Books, ). Wildavsky maintains that we must accept the contingency of safety and that, as a society, we lose more by not risking than by risking. Perrow argues that there are risks, like those that inhere, ineradicably, in many high-risk systems, that are simply not worth taking. Niklas Luhmann, Risk: A Sociological Theory, trans. Rhodes Barrett (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, ), p. .     : . . ,                                     

 William Farr, quoted in Michael J. Cullen, The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain, p. . He is also the author of the chapter on vital statistics in McCulloch’s Statistical Account of the British Empire.  In addition to the works considered in this chapter, see Jane Marcet, Conversations on Political Economy () and G. R. Porter, Progress of the Nation ().  McCulloch’s Statistical Account of the British Empire went through four editions between  and ; sales of Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy took her from bankruptcy to financial security and from obscurity to literary celebrity.  Quoted in D. P. O’Brien, J. R. McCulloch: A Study in Classical Economics (New York: Barnes and Noble, ), p. .  E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, ), pp. –.  See Harold Smith, The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge –: A Social and Bibliographic Evaluation, vol.  (Dalhousie University Libraries and Dalhousie University School of Library Service Occasional Paper Series, ed. Norman Horrocks [Halifax, Nova Scotia: Dalhousie University Libraries, ]), p. .  Quoted in R. K. Webb, The British Working Class Reader –: Literacy and Social Tension (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., ), p. .

Notes to pages –



 See Derek Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State: A History of Social Policy since the Industrial Revolution, nd edn. (London: MacMillan Press, ), p.  for a discussion of the influence of the Blue Books. See also Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) for a discussion of the impact of the “avalanche of numbers” that landed on the British public in this period.  Theodore Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking – (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), p. .  The Taming of Chance, p. vii.  Quoted in D. P. O’Brien, J. R. McCulloch, p. .  Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, ), p. . Although given the state of government statistics, it would have been impossible for Malthus to attain anything like “numerical precision.”  Stefan Collini, Donald Winch and John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. .  Quoted in Maxine Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. .  Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), p. .  See Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), pp. – for analysis of the “Ricardo-Malthus” debate about the proper method and object of political economy.  R. K. Webb, Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian (New York: Columbia University Press, ), p. .  See Gallagher, “The Body versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew,” in Gallagher and Laqueur for an analysis of Malthus’s theory of human sexuality.  D. P. O’Brien, J. R. McCulloch, p. .  In Hard Times, Mr. M’chokumchild is based on McCulloch (Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, p. ). Carlyle and Marx both saw McCulloch as a shameless defender of capitalist greed. Carlyle, in Latter Day Pamphlets, caricatured him as an apologist for the “single-minded pursuit of wealth”(Quoted in D. P. O’Brien, J. R. McCulloch, p. ). Marx, after a string of disparaging references throughout the first volume of Capital, calls him, in a moment of acute exasperation, the “Scotch genius.”  Quoted in D. P. O’Brien, The Classical Economists (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), p. .  J. R. McCulloch, A Descriptive and Statistical Account of the British Empire exhibiting its extent, physical capacities, population, industry, and civil and religious institutions, th edn. (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longman, ), :. Since I have used both the first and the fourth editions of this work (the first edition has the title by which the work is known, A Statistical Account



                   

 

Notes to pages – of the British Empire, etc.), it will be cited hereafter parenthetically in the text by edition, volume and page number. See Mary Poovey’s A History of the Modern Fact for an account of the slow ascendance to authority of numerical representation. Mark Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect, rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. . Mark Blaug, Ricardian Economics: An Historical Study (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, ), p. . Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, ), p. . Mary Poovey, “Figures of Arithmetic, Figures of Speech,” Critical Inquiry  (Winter ): pp. –, p. . (Emphasis mine.) Quoted in Bernard Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism: Classical Political Economy and the Empire of Free Trade and Imperialism – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. . John M. Eyler, Victorian Social Medicine: The Ideas and Methods of William Farr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), p. . See Richard Ned Lebow, White Britain and Black Ireland: The Influence of Stereotypes on Colonial Policy (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, ), pp.  ff. See F. B. Smith, The People’s Health – (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, Inc., ), ch. . Philip Abrams, The Origins of British Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), p. . Ibid., p. . See The Taming of Chance, p. . Quoted in R. K. Webb, Harriet Martineau, p. . Ibid., p. . “By a lucky hit, Miss Martineau took the tide at its height, when the world was all agog for political economy” (Webb, Harriet Martineau, p. ). Harriet Martineau, Deerbrook () (Garden City, NY: Dial Press, ), p. . Harriet Martineau, Autobiography () ( vols., London: Virago, ), :. See R. K. Webb, Harriet Martineau, p. . Harriet Martineau, Autobiography, :. See Mark Blaug, Ricardian Economics, pp. – for a discussion of the popularity and the impact of Martineau’s Illustrations of a Political Economy: “Readers as diverse as Victoria and Coleridge waited anxiously for each new number. Sir Robert Peel sent a private letter of congratulations and Richard Cobden publicly endorsed the work. Members of Parliament and cabinet ministers showered the author with bluebooks and suggestions for new tales to pave the way for legislation” (p. ). Harriet Martineau, Autobiography, :. Valerie Sanders, Reason Over Passion: Harriet Martineau and the Victorian Novel (New York: St. Martin’s Press, ), p. .

Notes to pages –



 Alex Preminger, Frank J. Warnke and O. B. Hardison, eds., The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), p. .  Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature () (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, ), p. .  Webb, Harriet Martineau, p. .  Harriet Martineau, Illustrations of Political Economy, vol. , p. . Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page number. The pagination is discontinuous, beginning again with each tale.  Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment () (trans. by John Cumming, New York: Continuum, ), p. .  Martineau was diagnosed with a terminal heart condition in . Although she did not leave the house again, fearing to die in the street, she lived for another twenty-two years.  Deirdre David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), p. .  Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations () (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), book V, ch. , p. .  Ibid.  Simon Dentith, “Political Economy, Fiction and the Language of Practical Ideology in Nineteenth-Century England,” Social History : (): pp. –, p. .  Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty, p. .  Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), p. . Giddens critiques the idea, in both liberal and Marxist thought, that nation-states are “little more than an epiphenomena of, or . . . mere impediments to, the natural propensity of capitalist production to dissolve political and cultural differences.”       :  ,           The eighteenth century had experienced a steady decline in epidemic disease and falling death rates. See Anthony S. Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), p. .  Neither disease was the leading cause of death. M. W. Flinn points out that tuberculosis, which “dwarfed” both cholera and typhus as a cause of death, “scarcely stirred the imagination of any social group in this period” (“Introduction,” Edwin Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain () [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ] p. . Hereafter cited as “Introduction.”  See R. J. Morris, Cholera : The Social Response to an Epidemic (New York:







 



 

Notes to pages – Holmes and Meier Publishers, ) and “Cholera,” in Kenneth F. Kiple, The Cambridge World History of Human Disease (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). The Victorian designation of “typhus,” used interchangeably with “fever,” included typhoid, relapsing fever and other febrile illnesses. Typhoid is in fact more like cholera than typhus in that it is spread by sewagecontaminated water. Florence Nightingale contrasts contagionist and anticontagionist theories this way: “Is it not a mistake to look upon diseases, as we do now as separate entities, which must exist, like cats and dogs? Instead of looking upon them as conditions, like a dirty and a clean condition, and just as much under our own control . . . For diseases, as all experience shows, are adjectives, not noun substantives” (Notes on Nursing and Notes on Hospitals (Birmingham, AL: The Classics of Medicine Library, ), p. , n. Germ theory, in our sense of it, was not developed until the s. Tenth Annual Report of the Registrar-General () p. xv, cited in M. W. Flinn, “Introduction,” p. . Although the hygienic recommendations of the sanitary reformers were obviously beneficial, their insistence on the theory of anticontagionism blocked the discovery and acceptance of a more complete – that is, contagionist – understanding of the causes and effects that operate in infectious disease. Most notably, the correct explanations of the origin and spread of cholera by William Budd and John Snow were initially rejected because they were contagionists. See F. B. Smith, The People’s Health –, pp. –. It is important to remember that the theory of contagion was inadequate in the nineteenth century, and remains inadequate. Sylvia Tesh points out that “modern germ theory only explains a population’s response to microorganisms; why person A contracts an infectious disease and person B doesn’t, why person C experiences a fulminating illness while person D has a mild one – these variations have never been satisfactorily explained” (“Political Ideology and Public Health in the Nineteenth Century,” International Journal of Health Services : []: pp. –, p. ). This mystery suggests why a theory like anticontagionism would have been able to gain wide acceptance, especially before the advent of germ theory in the s. According to M. W. Flinn, Chadwick’s Report sold between ten and twenty thousand copies, although estimates run as high as one hundred thousand (see Flinn, “Introduction,” p. ). Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing sold fifteen thousand copies within a month and was reprinted three times; Notes on Hospitals went into three editions (Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale – ([] London: The Reprint Society, ), pp. , ). Niklas Luhmann, Risk: A Sociological Theory, p. . After recommending reforms in regard to British nursing, the British army, and the British hospital system, Nightingale took on the Asian subcontinent, collecting data on the public health of India and, although she never left

Notes to pages –

 



 



England after returning from the Crimea, was regarded as an authority on Indian public health due to her work, especially “Life or Death in India” and “Life or death by irrigation, .” (See Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale –, pp. –, –, –, –). William Farr, Second Annual Report of the Registrar-General, Appendix, (), cited Anthony S. Wohl, Endangered Lives, p. . Wohl describes the Thames-side residence of the royal family as besieged by the stench from cesspools and blocked sewers, and the periodic saturation of their lawn with raw sewage from the Thames. (Endangered Lives, p. ). F. B. Smith recounts a case from the Lancet () in which Nicholas Dawkins, a policeman, was hospitalized with a compound fracture of the leg: “After twelve weeks he and his bed were ‘alive with maggots’ and the bed was sprouting mushrooms. Dawkins had not complained, and his wardmates had seen ‘nothing particularly dirty about it.’ ” A division, however, is occurring in the s between the laboring or lower-class view of cleanliness and that of the middle class, as evidenced by the fact that the Lancet reporter is appalled at the condition of this patient, although the patient and his ward-mates are not. (The People’s Health –, p. ). See Alain Corbin’s The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ) for an analysis of the ways in which “olfaction was caught up in the refinement of nineteenth-century practices and divisions” (p. ). Corbin notes that in the reign of Charles II, the authorities of London ordered the opening of all cesspools in order to drive out plague with the foul odor. A. J. B. ParentDuchâtelet, who deeply influenced Edwin Chadwick, was still praising the therapeutic qualities of excrement in his Hygiene Publique of . (Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, p. .) Virginia S. Smith argues that the nineteenthcentury sanitary movement was something of a throwback to medieval sanitary methods, which included the idea that foul odors and disease were connected (“Cleanliness: The Development of an Idea and Practice in Britain, –” [PhD diss., University of London, ], pp. –). S. E. Finer, The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., ), pp. –. Chadwick’s Report inspired the Health of Towns Association, “a powerful . . . pressure group in many ways similar to the Anti-Corn Law League into which were channeled much of the humanitarian energy and scientific skill of England” (David Roberts, Victorian Origins of the British Welfare State [New Haven: Yale University Press, ], p. ). Visiting sanitary societies sprang up all over Britain. (F. K. Prochaska lists them comprehensively in Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England [Oxford: Clarendon Press, ].) There are several novels of this period with distinctly sanitary themes, most notably Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend () and Charles Kingsley’s Yeast, A Problem (). Additionally, mentions and metaphors of miasma abound from the s through the s – see the citations from Dombey and Son () at the end of this chapter for a characteristic example.



Notes to pages –

 Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society – (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ), p. .  Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett et al. (New York: Zone Books, ), p. .  Chadwick, who came from a struggling middle class family, served in government but in subordinate roles. Nightingale exerted influence through her personal relationships with powerful men like Palmerston and Sidney Herbert.  See Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society –, especially ch. , “The Triumph of the Entrepreneurial Ideal.”  M. W. Flinn, “Introduction,” p. .  See Great Britain. Poor Law Commissioners, Report of an inquiry into the sanitary condition of the labouring population of Great Britain (London: William Clowes, ). Unfortunately, Flinn’s edition of the work does not reprint illustrations, maps and many of the tables. It also lacks the appendices of the original.  Including the two leaders of French public health in the nineteenth century, Louis René Villermé and Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet.  See James Phillips Kay-Shuttleworth, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes in the Manchester Cotton Trade (); Southwood Smith, On Fever (); as well as the “Sanitary Report” of  to the Poor Law Commission by Kay-Shuttleworth, Smith and Arnott.  M. W. Flinn, “Introduction,” p. .  Edwin Chadwick et al., “Duties of the Officer of Health, as Directed by the General Board of Health, under the th section of the Public Health Act,” , cited in C. Fraser Brockington, Public Health in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh: E. & S. Livingstone Ltd., ), p. .  A “union” was the administrative district defined by the New Poor Law of .  Edwin Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, p. . Cited hereafter parenthetically in the text by page number.  For example, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life () and Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, Or the Two Nations (), and Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (). These novels are actually only slightly less constraining of their poor protagonists than is Chadwick. Within the confines of English laboring-class life, the only narrative resolution from Chartist rioting, cholera, fever, starvation, and opium is death. Happy endings must take place elsewhere – in Canada, as in the case of Gaskell’s Mary Barton and her husband, Jem Wilson, or in the other nation of the upper class, as in the case of Disraeli’s Sybil and Egremont.  J. R. McCulloch in A Statistical Account of the British Empire; discussed in ch. .  “In Britain the more extreme forms of ‘cameralism’ of which medical police was a part, were fundamentally at odds with an institutionalized mistrust of powers of a centralised government” (V. S. Smith, “Cleanliness: the Development of an Idea and Practice in Britain, –,” p. ).

Notes to pages –



 See ch. .  M. W. Flinn, “Introduction,” Report, p. . Flinn quotes from the Report of the Poor Inquiry (Ireland) Commission, App. G, “Report of the State of the Irish Poor in Great Britain,” P. P. , XXXIV, pp. , xi.  James Phillips Kay-Shuttleworth, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester, nd edn. (New York: Augustus M. Kelly Publishers, [] ), p. .  See S. E. Finer, The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick, pp. – for Chadwick’s ideas on health administration at the time of Report.  Waste matter was, after all, a significant source of income for many Victorians. Our Mutual Friend (), for example, is the chronicle of the fate of a fortune derived from the dust-heaps of London. The entire novel is concerned with various ways of earning a “living” from that which is dead or discarded, including the personal effects of the many corpses floating in the Thames. See also Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (‒) on dustmen, rag-and-bone men and so on.  Mary Poovey, “Domesticity and Class Formation: Chadwick’s  Sanitary Report,” in Subject to History: Ideology, Class, Gender, ed. David Simpson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ).  Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), p. .  M. W. Flinn, “Introduction,” p. .  Simon Szreter discusses the ways in which the newly established GRO very consciously strove to popularize its reports, with their alarming statistics on rates of disease and death, and thus foster public health activism (“The GRO and the Public Health Movement in Britain, –,” Social History of Medicine []: pp. –).  David Roberts has observed that in the many studies of the laboring classes in this period there “runs like a leitmotiv the phrase ‘the social and moral condition of the labouring class.’ It was sometimes varied by adding the word ‘physical,’ or omitting ‘social’ ” . . . but scarcely ever did it include economic.”(The Victorian Origins of the British Welfare State, p. .)  Chadwick cites, for example, the Reverend G. Lewis, reporting from Dundee: “Apart from the waste of human life, and the indescribable suffering and sorrow which annually fall upon the working classes . . . from this periodical scourge [typhus] and viewed only as a matter of profit and loss to the mercantile and monied interest . . . it were easy to demonstrate, that the expenditure of several thousand pounds per annum in providing the means of cleanliness . . . would have been rewarded by a saving to the community of a vast sum” (pp. –).  David Roberts, for example, describes the strategy of utilitarian MPs as “laissez faire in commerce, government intervention in social matters.” (“The Utilitarian Conscience,” in The Conscience of the Victorian State, ed. Peter Marsh [Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, ], p. ).  The utilitarian idea of liberty associates it indissolubly with security, and with the need for government regulation and intervention to provide this





 

 

 

    

Notes to pages – security. (See L. J. Hume, Bentham and Bureaucracy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ], pp.  ff.) Chadwick wavers between the public and private sectors as the best venue for the implementation of his sanitary measures. See the biographies by R. A. Lewis and S. E. Finer for detailed accounts of his changing views. M. W. Flinn, “Introduction,” p. . Sewage farming was tried in the suburbs of several Scottish towns (and in Paris), but the odor became unbearable (paradoxically, probably partly due to Chadwick’s efforts to connect this odor with disease) and it was abandoned. The practice was condemned by Scottish and French health authorities, and M. W. Flinn suggests that Chadwick’s obsessive and irrational adherence to the idea “detracts in no small measure from the value of the Report . . .” (“Introduction,” p. ). R. A. Lewis, Edwin Chadwick and the Public Health Movement (London: Longmans, Green and Co., ), p. . Literally, the presence of pus in the blood. The basis for belief in this condition was the zymotic theory of disease, which held that the body underwent putrefaction during disease-states. (See Christopher Hamlin, “Providence and Putrefaction: Victorian Sanitarians and the Natural Theology of Health and Disease” [Victorian Studies (Spring ): pp. –].) Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing, pp. –. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by N and page number. A year in which the debacle of the Crimea and the near-success of the Indian rebellion generated serious concerns about the British Army. In regard to the rebellion, Nightingale, in a typical formulation, asked, “What are the murders committed by these miserable Bengalese compared to the murders committed by the insouciance of educated, cultivated Englishmen?” (cited in Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale –, p. ). Nightingale argued throughout her campaign to reform Army conditions that no one and nothing was killing off British soldiers as much as British sanitary policy was, and thought that their death rates, like those of hospital patients and other Britons, could be radically reduced by sanitary measures. Florence Nightingale, Cassandra (Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, ), p. . Florence Nightingale, Notes on Hospitals, p. . Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by H and page number. A forerunner of the hospital, literally a residence for the sick. Cassandra, p. . Nightingale refused to participate in explicitly feminist causes, most famously, she refused J. S. Mill’s request to become a member of the London National Society for Women’s Suffrage (see Cecil WoodhamSmith, Florence Nightingale –, p. ). In Notes on Nursing, she warned women away from using “the jargon about the rights of women” (N, p. ).

Notes to pages –



     



    





My sense is that, at least in part, she feared that the label would undermine her credibility as an authority on nursing, hospitals and sanitary reform. For an apposite discussion of the discomfort of middle and upper-class women with the collectivism of feminist causes, see Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ), p. . The now-obvious danger of this line of essentialist argument, powerful though it was for Nightingale’s immediate purposes, is that nurses and others who perform “women’s work” soon found themselves trapped in a narrow range of duties designated as belonging, in some natural or biological sense, to women. Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women – (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), p. . Charles E. Rosenberg, “Florence Nightingale on Contagion: the Hospital as Moral Universe,” in Healing and History, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg (New York: Science History Publications, ), p. . Wohl, Endangered Lives, p. . See F. B. Smith, The People’s Health –, pp. –. See ch. . George P. Landow describes Nightingale’s rhetorical style in Cassandra as “sage writing,” a risky argumentative strategy in which the author takes an “aggressive attitude toward the audience and its beliefs.” “Arguing from unpopular positions, the sage employs all his techniques to transfer the allegiance of his audience from popular or received ideas to him” (“Aggressive (Re)interpretations of the Female Sage: Florence Nightingale’s Cassandra,” in Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse, ed. Thaïs E. Morgan [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ], pp. , ). Mary Poovey has argued that “two narratives about patriotic service” converged in the figure of Nightingale: “a domestic narrative of maternal nurturing and self-sacrifice and a military narrative of individual assertion and will” (Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ], p. ). Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale –, p. . Ibid., p. . This testimony forms part of Notes on Hospitals. Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale –, pp. –. See Monica E. Baly, Florence Nightingale and the Nursing Legacy (London: Croom Helm, ) for an account of Nightingale’s contribution to nursing. She notes that “the early histories like to portray the Nightingale reforms as a dramatic break with the past. But there was no sudden beam from Miss Nightingale’s lamp; reform came slowly and painfully and what became known as the Nightingale system [of nursing] was not an ideal scheme of . . . Nightingale’s devising but pragmatic experiment and the result of enforced compromise” (p. ). Although anticontagionism has been discredited, the value of Nightingale’s





           

Notes to pages – emphasis on nosocomial and iatrogenic contributions to illness has not been. E. W. Kopf contends that she “may well be assigned a position in the history of social statistics next to those occupied by Quetelet and Farr” (“Florence Nightingale as Statistician,” Journal of the American Statistical Association (): pp. –, p. ). Ibid., p. . Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance, p. ix. See E. W. Kopf, “Florence Nightingale as Statistician,” p. , and John M. Eyler, Victorian Social Medicine: The Ideas and Methods of William Farr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), p. . Cited R. J. Morris, Cholera , p. . The phrase is from Charles E. Rosenberg’s essay, “Florence Nightingale on Contagion.” See F. B. Smith, The People’s Health –, pp. –. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, ), p. . Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Ark Paperbacks, [] ), p. . Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), p. . I follow Erwin Ackerknecht’s periodization in his classic article, “Anticontagionism Between  and ,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine  (): pp. –. Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, ch. . Ibid., ch. .

   :       ,         A Chartist publication. (Quoted in Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, ], p. .)  The Montgolfier brothers, paper makers from the vicinity of Lyon, invented the first viable hot air balloon, and launched one successfully in September of . In December of that year, J. A. C. Charles, a physicist, launched the first hydrogen balloon. Balloon aerostation was made possible by the convergence of three discoveries: Henry Cavendish’s  discovery of hydrogen; Joseph Priestley’s  discovery of oxygen; and the simultaneous discovery by Cavendish and James Watt in  of the composition of water and how it might be decomposed to produce hydrogen. Joseph Montgolfier read a French translation of Priestley’s Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air in , and it was this work that inspired him to experiment with the use of hydrogen for balloon flights. See L. T. C. Rolt, The Aeronauts: A History of Ballooning – (New York: Walker & Co., ), pp. –.

Notes to pages –



 Warwick Wroth, The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century (London: MacMillan and Co., ), pp. –. See also James G. Southwork, Vauxhall Gardens: A Chapter in the Social History of England (New York: Columbia University Press, ).  See Hatton Turnor’s encyclopedic Astra Castra: Experiments and Adventures (London: Chapman and Hall, ), an anthology of writings on ballooning from the s to , including comments by Samuel Johnson and William Cowper, illustrations of mythical flights, biblical quotations relevant to ascension, lists of aeronauts, a bibliography of ballooning, reprinted newspaper articles; and lengthy excerpts from many of the memoirs discussed in this chapter – including those of Monck Mason, James Glaisher, and Henry Coxwell.  Fulgence Marion, Wonderful Balloon Ascents (New York: Charles Scribner & Co., ), p. . Cf. J. E. Hodgson, The History of Aeronautics in Great Britain from the earliest times to the latter half of the nineteenth century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ): “It is probable that the balloon excited at the moment of its inception, and for years after, a more universal interest than any other invention which the ingenuity of man has devised” (p. ).  Letter, June , quoted in Hatton Turnor, Astra Castra, p. .  Fulgence Marion, Wonderful Balloon Ascents, pp. , ix.  J. E. Hodgson, The History of Aeronautics in Great Britain, p. .  L. T. C. Rolt, The Aeronauts, p. .  See Hodgson, The History of Aeronautics, pp. –.  Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, p. .  I am paraphrasing Michael Balint’s explanation of the mechanism of “thrills” in Thrills and Regressions (London: The Hogarth Press, ), p. .  A passenger, Mr. Maxwell, of Henry Coxwell’s, quoted in My Life and Balloon Experiences (London: W. H. Allen & Co., ), p. .  Travels in the Air, nd edn. (London: Richard Bentley & Son, ), p. .  Monck Mason, Aeronautica or, Sketches Illustrative of the Theory and Practice of Aerostation (London: F. C. Westley, ), p. .  Of the four memoirs discussed in this chapter, only Mayhew’s is an article concerning a single ascent; those of Coxwell, Glaisher, and Mason are all book-length accounts of numerous ascents.  Henry Mayhew, “In the Clouds,” Illustrated London News, September , , p. .  Mason, Aeronautica, p. .  Coxwell, My Life and Balloon Experiences, p. .  Travels in the Air, p. .  Freud’s description of this feeling is similar to that of primary narcissism. See “On Narcissism.”  Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., ), pp. –, , . Cf. Michael Balint, who, in an object-relations elaboration of this stage, describes it as one in which there are as yet “no objects, although there is already an individual, who is



    

  

      



Notes to pages –

surrounded, almost floats, in substances without exact boundaries; the substances and the individual mutually penetrate each other; that is, they live in a harmonious mix-up” (Thrills and Regressions, p. ). Michael Balint, The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, [] ), pp. , . Mason, Aeronautica, p. . Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), p. . See Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement –, nd edn. (London: Longman, ), pp. –, . “By the middle of the nineteenth century any kind of open space for recreation was very much at a premium. The custom of playing games on public thoroughfares was no longer tolerated; enclosure usually eliminated any public use of agricultural land; and the rapid growth of cities involved the appropriation of much open space, some of which had served as customary playgrounds, for commercial buildings” (Robert W. Malcomson, Popular Recreations in English Society – [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ], p. ). See Hazel Conway, People’s Parks: The Design and Development of Victorian Parks in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –. See Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and women of the English middle class, – (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), p. . E. P. Thompson points out that in the “better-organized” trades work hours actually shortened during the eighteenth century. This trend was reversed toward the end of the century, with increasing hours and the imposition of a “more exacting labour discipline” due to a “greater sense of time-thrift among the improving capitalist employers” (“Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present  []: pp. –, pp. , ). Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, ), p. . See also James Walvin, Leisure and Society – (London: Longman, ), pp. –. Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold, London, a Pilgrimage (New York: Dover, ), p. . Glaisher, Travels in the Air, p. . See ch. . Hodgson, The History of Aeronautics, p. . As in popular works like Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (). “Infants begin to experience a sense of an emergent self from birth. They are predesigned to be aware of self-organizing processes. They never experience a period of total self/other undifferentiation” (Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology [New York: Basic Books, Inc., ], p. ). For a vivid description of these relations and their effects, see Georg Simmel’s classic essay, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in On Individuality

Notes to pages –

      

     

     



and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ) Sandor Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, trans. Henry Alden Bunker (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., ), p. . Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), p.  and passim. Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, ), p. . Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, ), p. . Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [] ), p. . See ch. , “Of Individuality, as one of the Elements of Well-Being.” Hugh Cunningham, Leisure and the Industrial Revolution, –c. (London: Croom Helm, ), p. . The related increase in the popularity of sports, games, and athleticism in general will be discussed in detail in the following chapter that concerns alpine mountaineering. Quoted in Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold, London, A Pilgrimage, p. . Ch. . Coxwell, My Life and Balloon Adventures, p. . Edwin Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, p. . Cunningham, Leisure and the Industrial Revolution, p. . Cf. the civilizing influence of the “Jew-baskets” and “missionary-baskets” of Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (): these “willow repositories, of the capacity of a good-sized family clothes basket, [were] dedicated to the purpose of conveying from house to house a monster collection of pin-cushions, needle-books, card-racks, work-bags, articles of infant-wear, &c. &c. &c., made by the willing or reluctant hands of the Christian ladies of a parish, and sold per force to the heathenish gentlemen thereof, at prices unblushingly exorbitant. The proceeds of such compulsory sales are applied to the conversion of the Hews, the seeking up of the ten missing tribes, or to the regeneration of the interesting coloured population of the globe”(ch. ). Henry Mayhew, “In the Clouds, or, Some Account of a Balloon Trip with Mr. Green,” Illustrated London News, September  (), p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir and the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, ), p. . Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, trans. Colin Gordon et al., ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, ), p. . The hopes for ballooning in this regard were initially quite high: Henry Coxwell pioneered the military use of balloons in the nineteenth century, and thought that balloons would be highly useful in collecting intelligence that could not be obtained on the ground.



Notes to pages –

 Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography from  to the Present Day (New York: Museum of Modern Art, ), p. .  Monck Mason, Aeronautica, p. .  I.e. a wise king and a vigorous warrior.  See Gisela Kutzbach, The Thermal Theory of Cyclones: A History of Meteorological Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Lancaster, PA: American Meteorological Society, ), pp.  and .  Quoted in Turnor, Astra Castra, pp. –.  Glaisher, Travels in the Air, pp. –.  On the invention of tradition, see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, ).  On the development of “Englishness” see Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, Englishness: Politics and Culture – (London: Croom Helm, ); on Victorian ideas about masculinity see Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since  (London: Longman, ), esp. ch. , and James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ).  This is of course only one form of Victorian masculinity.  John Tosh, “Domesticity and Manliness in the Victorian Middle Class: The family of Edward White Benson,” in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since , ed. Michael Roper and John Tosh (London: Routledge, ), p. .  A newly defined effeminacy (which is the opposite of the newly defined masculinity; femininity is another problem altogether) becomes increasingly associated with homosexuality and degeneration in this period. See Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, ch. , “The construction of homosexuality.”  Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, ch. .  See the essays collected in John Mackenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: (Manchester University Press, ) and also Gauri Viswanathan, “Raymond Williams and British Colonialism,” Yale Journal of Criticism ().  Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, ), p.  (emphasis in the original).  Ch. .  Quoted in Lisa Bloom, Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), p. .  Quoted in Turnor, Astra Castra, pp. –.  The information on decrease of temperature in the upper atmosphere gathered by Glaisher was indeed among the first such empirical data available, and his findings did reverse the previously-held theory of a constant temperature drop (see Kutzbach, The Thermal Theory of Cyclones, p. ). Whether or not this information was worth the risks taken to obtain it is difficult to say. Glaisher and Coxwell risked their lives for information which, twenty years later, would be gathered routinely by unmanned balloons – the precursors of weather satellites. At the time of their flights, however, the only

Notes to pages –

     

    



other access to the upper air was by mountaineers, who were not able, because of the physical exertion involved in climbing, to take the kind and the amount of measurements that could be taken by the occupants of a balloon. Quoted in Bloom, Gender on Ice, p. . Glaisher, Travels in the Air, p. . Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., ), p. . Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, ), p. . Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. –. Kipling’s Kim, which would seem to contradict this trend, features a hero who takes considerable pleasure in his adventures in the “Great Game.” However, the fact that Kim is Irish and a child allows the adult, English reader to both enjoy Kim’s pleasures vicariously, and to disavow them, since it is unthinkable that an English person, especially an adult, would be able to enjoy such intimate encounters with the indigenous people of the Indian subcontinent. Coxwell, My Life and Balloon Experiences, p. . Glaisher, Travels in the Air, p. . Ibid., p. . Quoted in Turnor, Astra Castra, p. . See Corrigan and Sayer, The Great Arch, ch. , for an account of the radical increase in government services in the nineteenth century and how this “[s]tate intervention . . . regulated into dominance that market on which laissez-faire theory depends. The government could be oriented to the rights of property, the laws of the market – in other words ‘non-interventionist’ – whilst ‘the State’ was actively and very extensively engaged in stabilizing that form of . . . society without which capitalist production could not be realized” (p. ). The indemnification of risk in this period is also due to the rise of the insurance industry, and the government regulation of banking. (See H. A. L. Cockerell and Edwin Green, The British Insurance Business –: An Introduction and Guide to Historical Records in the United Kingdom [London: Heinemann Educational, ], and on banking, Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement –, pp. –, –, –.)

      :               The Physics of Industry (). For further biographical information, see Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, ); F. S. Smythe, Edward Whymper (London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., ), the Dictionary of National Biography entry for Mummery; and for information about Edwards, Jane Robinson’s Wayward Women: A Guide to Women Travelers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, )



     

  

  

 

Notes to pages –

and Phillipa Levine’s introduction to the  Virago edition of Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find any biographical information for Frederica Plunket. Marjorie Hope Nicholson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), p. . John Evelyn, a traveler in the s, quoted in Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (London: Frank Cass, ), p. . For accounts of the changing perceptions of mountains, see Nicholson, Mountain Gloom, and the first two chapters of Leslie Stephen, The Playground of Europe (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, ). Hussey, The Picturesque, pp. –. See Ronald Clark, The Victorian Mountaineers (Boston: Charles T. Branford Co., ), pp. –. James D. Forbes, Travels through the Alps of Savoy and other parts of the Pennine Chain with observations on the phenomena of glaciers (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, ), p. . Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number. I must add that Smith was also an erstwhile balloon traveler: he made a near-fatal flight in  with Henry Coxwell. James Ramsey Ullman, The Age of Mountaineering (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., ), p. . The Alpine Club was founded in ; the Alpine Journal began publication the same year. Beginning in , the Alpine Journal issued periodic volumes of essays from the journal, entitled Peaks, Passes and Glaciers. In the second series, Edward Shirley Kennedy notes the success enjoyed by the first: “Its publication was thought a bold experiment, inasmuch as the writers were mountain climbers and not experienced authors. The success, however, was complete. The work evidently appealed to feelings, widespread among the nation, and shared, even by those who had never been narrated actors in adventures such as in the book” (p. i). The Alpine Club included among its members Leslie Stephen, Richard Burton, Matthew Arnold and Anthony Trollope – although these last two were not climbers. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, in The Works of John Ruskin on CD-ROM, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), vol. , p. . See Clark, The Victorian Mountaineers, –. Speech made at commemoration of the foundation of the Commercial Travellers’ Schools, Dec. , . Quoted in J. Monroe Thorington, Mont Blanc Sideshow: the Life and Times of Albert Smith (Philadelphia: John C. Winston Co., ), p. . Illustrated London News, quoted in Thorington, Mont Blanc Sideshow, p. . A typical space on the illustrated board reads: “The Glacier du Tacconay is always full of large crevices. Here you see an accident by which a guide, named Tissay, was nearly lost. He slipped on the ice and went over the precipice. If the party had not been fortunately tied together with cords, he would

Notes to pages –

   

 

 

     





have been dashed to pieces. Pay two [pre-paid markers] here to have a new rope” (quoted in Thorington, Mont Blanc Sideshow, p. ). The first player to reach the summit won the game and collected the money in the pool. Gilles Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” in Masochism (New York: Zone Books, ), p. . Albert Smith, The Story of Mont Blanc (New York: G. P. Putnam and Co. ), p. . Theodor Reik, Masochism in Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Co., ), p. . See Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ): “Under conditions of modernity, the future is continually drawn into the present by means of the reflexive organisation of knowledge environments. A territory, as it were, carved out and colonised. Yet such colonisation by its very nature cannot be complete . . .” (pp. –). Edward Whymper, Scrambles Amongst the Alps in the years –, th edn. (London: John Murray, ), p. ii. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number. Whymper’s conquest of the Matterhorn was followed by tragedy: on the descent, four of his party were killed when a rope broke. See Scrambles Amongst the Alps, pp. –. Part of this chapter originally appeared as a letter in The Times, August , , in which Whymper defended himself against accusations that he had cut the rope to save himself. Annan, Leslie Stephen, p. . Leslie Stephen, “Alpine Climbing,” quoted in David Robertson, “MidVictorians Amongst the Alps,” in U. C. Kneopflmacher and G. B. Tennyson, eds., Nature and the Victorian Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), p. . Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., ), p.  (emphasis in the original). The phrase is from Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, ), p. . Freud, “The Economic Problem in Masochism,” in Sigmund Freud, General Psychological Theory (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., ), p. . James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, p. . Richard Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), p. . Cf. Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture; Michael Roper and John Tosh, eds. Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since  (London: Routledge, ); and Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The ideal of Christian manliness in Victorian literature and religious thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). See Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch, ch. , on the rapid increase of state formation and cultural regulation in the nineteenth century.



Notes to pages –

 Silverman, Male Subjectivity, p. .  Annan, Leslie Stephen, p. . Annan describes mountaineering as an “uppermiddle class sport,” and suggests that many of its adherents were, like Leslie Stephen, part of an aristocracy of intellect.  Freud suggests a masochistic origin of sexuality in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “The child’s sexual researches, on which limits are imposed by his physical development, lead to no satisfactory conclusion . . .” (p. ).  Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, ), p. .  See Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes for an account of the formation of public and private spheres in the nineteenth century.  “Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power” (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley [New York: Vintage Books, ], pp. –).  Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, “Venus in Furs” (in Gilles Deleuze, Masochism [New York: Zone Books, ], p. ).  This problem is that “. . . if mental processes are governed by the pleasureprinciple, so that the avoidance of pain and obtaining pleasure is their first aim, masochism is incomprehensible” (“The Economic Problem in Masochism,” p. ).  Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p. .  Quoted in Derek Sayer, Capitalism and Modernity: An excursus on Marx and Weber (London: Routledge, ), p. .  A. F. Mummery, My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus ([] rpt. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), p. . Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number.  Amelia B. Edwards, Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys ([] nd edn. London: George Routledge and Sons, ), p. . Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number.  See entry on Edwards in Jane Robinson, Wayward Women: A Guide to Women Travelers.  Scarry, The Body, p. .  Quoted in Scarry, The Body, p. .  Holt, Sport and the British, p. .  See also Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture.  The time discipline of factory life combined with the fact of having to largely stand still at a machine repeating small motions of the hands and arms was a particularly brutal, and disabling, form of physical exertion.

Notes to pages –



 See Holt, Sport and the British, p. , and on female mountaineering dress, Frederica Plunket, Here and There Among the Alps (London: Longmans, Green and Co., ), ch. , “Hints to Lady Pedestrians.”  I. A. Richards, “The Lure of High Mountaineering,” in Complementarities: Uncollected Essays, ed. John Paul Russo (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), p. .  John Gloag, Victorian Comfort, A Social History of Design: –. (London: Adam and Charles Black, ), p. xvi.  Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, Book , ch. .  Quoted in Clark, The Victorian Mountaineers, p. .  James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture’ – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).  Little Dorrit, Book , ch. .  Buzard, The Beaten Track, p. .  See ch.  for a discussion of the hectic relationship between the theory and practice of laissez faire in the s and s.  See Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, p.  for a table detailing the differences between the lower and higher ranks of the middle class: the lower ranks are characterized as owning a single person enterprise rather than the partnership or trust of the higher; they use mainly family labor rather than a workforce; they are educated at small private day schools or free grammar schools rather than private academies or fee paid grammar schools; they are Methodist, Baptist or Independent Anglican versus Quaker, Unitarian, Congregational or Anglican.  See Annan, Leslie Stephen, p. .  See F. S. Smythe, Edward Whymper, p. .  “A large mass of ice broken off the main body of a glacier and remaining behind in a crevasse after glacial movement or melting” (American Heritage Dictionary).  A snow-bridge is a covering of snow over a crevasse: sometimes they can be used as bridges to cross a crevasse, sometimes a climber will sink into it, and through it to the crevasse it hides. The ubiquity of snow-bridges in the Alps is one of the chief reasons for the use of ropes – so that a climber can be pulled out of the bridge before sinking through it.  Quoted in Clark, The Victorian Mountaineers, p. .  In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, for example, the crass materialism of Belgian imperialism makes it seem patently inferior to the British variety, which is represented as motivated by the allegiance to an “idea” rather than to ivory. See Edward W. Said’s discussion of Conrad in Culture and Imperialism.  Steven Marcus, “Mt. Everest and the British National Spirit,” in Representations: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Random House, ), p. .  Marx, Grundrisse, ed. and trans. David McLellan (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, ), p. .



Notes to pages –

 Frederica Plunket, Here and There Among the Alps, “Preface,” no page number. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number.  Of the numerous mountaineering memoirs written by women, only that of Edwards has been reprinted in a contemporary edition. By contrast, those of Mummery and Whymper have been reprinted in various editions.  Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), p. .  Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. .  “. . . lofty summits like Mont Blanc, the Jungfrau and even the ‘awful’ Matterhorn were climbed a hundred or more times a summer, and in fine weather it was a not uncommon occurrence for there to be  or  parties on the one of them at the same time” (Ullman, The Age of Mountaineering, p. ).     :           For discussions of this dominant discourse, see for example, Patrick Brantlinger, “Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent,” in “Race,” Writing and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago, ), and H. Alan C. Cairns, Prelude to Imperialism: British Reactions to Central African Society – (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ).  See Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism, nd edn. (London: MacMillan Education Ltd., ) for the argument that free trade created an informal empire in Africa.  Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, – (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), ch. , “Selling Darkest Africa.”  Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism and the Fin de Siècle. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), p. .  The Spectator, December , : pp. –.  The Spectator, December , : p. .  The Spectator, December , : p. .  Previous to Tylor’s work, culture was only considered to be the efflorescence of civilization, and the use of the plural “cultures” is rare before . See George Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Evolution (New York: The Free Press, ), p. .  Victorian Britain had, of course, other significant Others. The “Orient,” although regarded as vastly different from, and obviously inferior to, Europe in general and Britain in particular, had had, nonetheless, its moments of civilization; it had declined from these moments, but their vestiges remained, and were duly recorded by European observers. But the prevail-

Notes to pages –







              



ing nineteenth-century consensus was that Africa had never developed a civilization; indeed, Africa had no history. Monogenists held that all races were part of a single species derived from the same ancestry; polygenists that the various human races were separate species. See George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, ) for a detailed discussion of nineteenth-century anthropological and biological theories of racial and cultural difference. Richard Burton, for example, asks, “When will the poor man realize the fact that his comfort and happiness will result not from workhouses and almshouses, hospitals and private charities, but from that organized and efficient emigration, so long advocated by the seer Carlyle?” (Two Trips to Gorilla Land, and the Cataracts of the Congo [London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, ], p. ). Robert Knox, author of Races of Man: a Fragment () was the leading British racist, and polygenist, of the nineteenth century. See Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa, vol. , ch. , “The Racists,” (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, ) for a survey of European racism in this period. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), p. . Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, ). In The Fatal Shore (), Robert Hughes suggests that Australia served this function for Victorian Britain. David Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (London: John Murray, ), p. . Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, ), p. . L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan, The Rulers of British Africa – (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), pp.  and . Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa (London: MacMillan and Co. Ltd., ), p. . Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, pp. , . Davidson The African Genius: An Introduction to African Social and Cultural History (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., ), p. . Tim Jeal, Livingstone (London: Heinemann, ), p. . H. G. Adams, The Weaver Boy Who Became a Missionary (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, ), p. . Ibid., p. vi. Neil Parsons, King Khama, Emperor Joe and the Great White Queen: Victorian Britain through African Eyes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), p. . See, for example, the biography by Adams cited above. The problem of European discovery is of course that it becomes subsumed under the heading of discovery, tout court, when indeed it should probably



   

 

  

     

Notes to pages –

always be modified as European, since Africans and Arabs knew many putatively “undiscovered” locations well before any European found them. Gann and Duignan, The Rulers of British Africa –, p. . Jeal, Livingstone, p. . See Jeal, Livingstone, p. . Even by the standards of the day, Burton wrote unusually extensively on Africa. His works on Africa are: First Footsteps in East Africa (); The Lake Regions of Central Africa (); The Lake Regions of Central Equatorial Africa (); Wanderings in West Africa,  vols. (); Abeokuta and the Cameroons Mountains,  vols. (); A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome,  vols. (); Wit and Wisdom from West Africa (); Two Trips to Gorilla Land,  vols. (); Marocco and the Moors (). See also John Hanning Speke, What Led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (), and Stanley’s many works, including his Autobiography () and How I Found Livingstone (). Curtin, The Image of Africa, vol. , p. . Neil Parsons argues that Sechele, as Livingstone’s single convert, has “been used as a stick to beat David Livingstone with” and that “the fact remains that Sechele was remarkably consistent in Christian belief and practice,” even after he nominally reverted to his previously-held beliefs (King Khama, Emperor Joe and the Great White Queen, p. ). Curtin, The Image of Africa, vol. , p. . In a related instance of undermining the radical alterity of Africa, Henry Stanley, in How I Found Livingstone, repeatedly compares the African landscape to that of Central Park. The division of African peoples into discrete “cultures” was in large part an effect of imperialism: “ethnic groups were, to a great extent, fabricated, both to facilitate political and administrative control and for religious purposes” (Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Africa: Endurance and Change South of the Sahara, trans. David Maisel [Berkeley: California University Press, ], p. ). Indigenous “ethnic nationalisms” were founded on long and ongoing processes of adjustment. The ethnic group created by colonization nonetheless would later “be appropriated as an expression of resistance to colonization” (Africa, p. .) Katherine Frank, A Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, ), . Quoted in Stephen Gwynn, The Life of Mary Kingsley (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., ), p. . Frank, A Voyager Out, p. . Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), p. . Erin O’Connor suggests that this is actually “mock forbearance” that tempts the reader to “read on and to invest imaginatively” in the text (personal communication). This accent got her into some trouble with reviewers of her public lectures who chided her for dropping her “H’s.” She remarked that they would not

Notes to pages –

   

          

  



have been so critical had they known how hard she was trying to hold onto her “G’s.” (See Frank, A Voyager Out, p. ). Quoted in Gwynn, The Life of Mary Kingsley, p.  (emphasis in the original). Tim Youngs, Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, – (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), p. . Letter to Matthew Nathan, March , , quoted in Frank, A Voyager Out, p. . Although the “mythology” of the fatality offered by the West Coast of Africa has historical roots: “Until the middle of the nineteenth century, people who had been brought up in Europe died in tropical Africa at appalling rates. That loss of life was part of the social cost of any European activity, whether commercial, missionary, or military. In early nineteenthcentury West Africa, the annual mortality of newly arrived Euopeans varied between  and  per thousand.” In the s, quinine was found to be effective as a prophylactic against malaria, and mortality rates dropped to – per annum (Philip Curtin, et al., African History (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., ), p. ). Kingsley did in fact die in Africa, in  at the age of thirty-five, of enteric fever while nursing prisoners in Simonstown, South Africa during the Boer War. Heart of Darkness, ch. . Rudyard Kipling, Mary Kingsley (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc. ), pp. , . (This work is a five-page “book.”) A. Adu Boahen, African Perspectives on Colonialism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), pp. –. Robinson and Gallagher with Denny, Africa and the Victorians, p. . Although “fetish” usually refers to a belief in the power residing in certain objects, Kingsley usually uses fetish in a large sense to cover all African religious practices. Julie English Early, “The Spectacle of Science and Self: Mary Kingsley,” in Barbara T. Gates and Ann B. Shteir, eds., Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, ), p. . See Frank, A Voyager Out, p. . Quoted in Gwynn, The Life of Mary Kingsley, p. . Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, ), pp. –. Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), p. . I quote from Bowie rather than from Lacan himself because I think that Bowie is a lucid interpreter of ideas that it is difficult to find in the form of brief citations in Lacan. The idea of L’Immoraliste as a job application is Edward W. Said’s Seminar, Columbia University, on Culture and Imperialism, . D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, ), pp. –. E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. , (th edn. London: John Murray, ), pp. – (emphasis mine). Kingsley was an ardent admirer of Tylor’s work



   

Notes to pages –

and subscribed to his ideas about culture; Livingstone’s work, although it predates Tylor’s, anticipates the ethos of “rational ethnography.” See ch. . Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), p. . Quoted in Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, p. . David Harvey, quoted in Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, ), p. .

Bibliography

Abel-Smith, Brian. The Hospitals –: A Study in Social Administration in England and Wales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,  Abrams, Philip. The Origins of British Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,  Achebe, Chinua. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. New York: Anchor Books,  Ackerknecht, Erwin H. “Anticontagionism Between  and .” Bulletin of the History of Medicine  (): – Adams, H. G. The Weaver Boy Who Became a Missionary. New York: Robert Carter and Brothers,  Adams, James Eli. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,  Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Continuum, ()  Alpine Club. Peaks, Passes and Glaciers. nd series., ed. Edward Shirley Kennedy FRGS. London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts,  Annan, Noel. Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,  Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press,  Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. ed. J. Dover Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ()  Bailey, Peter. Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational recreation and the contest for control, –. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,  Balint, Michael. Thrills and Regressions. London: The Hogarth Press,  The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, ()  Baly, Monica E. Florence Nightingale and the Nursing Legacy. London: Croom Helm,  Barrie, J. M. Peter Pan and Other Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press,  Berg, Maxine. The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,  



Bibliography

Bersani, Leo. The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art. New York: Columbia University Press,  Birkett, Dea. Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers. Oxford: Basil Blackwell,  Blaug, Mark. Ricardian Economics: A Historical Study. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,  Economic Theory in Retrospect. rd edn., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  “The Myth of the Old Poor Law and the Making of the New.” In Economic History and the History of Economics, ed. Mark Blaug. Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books,  Bloom, Lisa. Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,  Blunt, Alison. Travel, Gender and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa. New York: The Guilford Press,  Boahen, A. Adu. African Perspectives on Colonialism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,  Bongie, Chris. Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism and the Fin de Siècle. Stanford: Stanford University Press,  Bowie, Malcolm. Lacan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,  Brantlinger, Patrick. “Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent.” In “Race,” Writing and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,  Briggs, Asa. “Cholera and Society in the Nineteenth Century.” Past and Present  (): – The Age of Improvement –. nd edn., London: Longman,  Brockington, C. Fraser. Public Health in the Nineteenth Century. Edinburgh: E. and S. Livingstone Ltd.,  Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton. Oxford: Basil Blackwell,  Burton, Richard F. Two Trips to Gorilla Land, and the Cataracts of the Congo. London: Sampson Low, Marston Low, and Searle,  Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture,’ –. Oxford: Oxford University Press,  Cairns, H. Alan C. Prelude to Imperialism: British Reactions to Central African Society –. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,  Canguilhem, Georges. The Normal and the Pathological. Translated by Carolyn R. Fawcett in collaboration with Robert S. Cohen. New York: Zone Books,  Chadwick, Edwin. Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, ed. M. W. Flinn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ()  Chadwick, George F. The Park and the Town: Public Landscape in the th and th Century. New York: Frederick A. Praeger,  Clark, Ronald. The Victorian Mountaineers. Boston: Charles T. Branford Co., 

Bibliography



Cockerell, H. A. L., and Edwin Green. The British Insurance Business –: An Introduction and Guide to Historical Records in the United Kingdom. London: Heinemann Educational,  Coleman, William. Death is a Social Disease: Public Health and Political Economy in Early Industrial France. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,  Collini, Stefan, Donald Winch, and John Burrow. That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  Colls, Robert and Philip Dodd. Englishness: Politics and Culture –. London: Croom Helm,  Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Harmondsworth: Penguin, ()  Conway, Hazel. People’s Parks: The Design and Development of Victorian Parks in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  Conway, Stephen. “Bentham and the Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government.” In Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought and Practice, ed. Richard Bellamy. London: Routledge,  Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine. Africa: Endurance and Change South of the Sahara. Translated by David Maisel. Berkeley: California University Press,  Corbin, Alain. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (no translator). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,  Corrigan, Philip and Derek Sayer. The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution. Oxford: Basil Blackwell,  Coxwell, Henry. My Life and Balloon Experiences. London: W. H. Allen and Co.,  Cullen, Michael J. The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain: the Foundations of Empirical Social Research. New York: Barnes and Noble,  Cunningham, Hugh. Leisure and the Industrial Revolution c. –c. . London: Croom Helm,  Curtin, Philip D. The Image of Africa.  vols. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press,  Curtin, Philip, Steven Feierman, Leonard Thompson and Jan Vansina. African History. Boston: Little, Brown and Co.,  Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. Harmondsworth: Penguin, ()  The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Princeton: Princeton University Press, ()  David, Deirdre. Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,  Davidoff, Leonore and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and women of the English middle class, –. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,  Davidson, Basil. The African Genius: An Introduction to African Social and Cultural History. Boston: Little, Brown and Co.,  Deleuze, Gilles. Masochism. New York: Zone Books,  Dentith, Simon. “Political Economy, Fiction and the Language of Practical Ideology in Nineteenth-Century England.” Social History : (): –



Bibliography

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Ark Paperbacks, ()  Dowling, Linda. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,  Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,  Early, Julie English. “The Spectacle of Science and Self: Mary Kingsley.” In Barbara T. Gates and Ann B. Shteir, eds. Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,  Edwards, Amelia B. Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys. nd edn., London: George Routledge and Sons, ()  Eyler, John M. Victorian Social Medicine: The Ideas and Methods of William Farr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,  Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press,  Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Weidenfeld,  Fenichel, Otto. The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,  Ferenczi, Sandor. Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality. Translated by Henry Alden Bunker. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.,  Ferguson, Frances. Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation. New York: Routledge,  Finer, S. E. The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick. New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc.,  Flammarion, Camille. The Atmosphere, ed. James Glaisher. No translator. London: Sampson Low, Marston Low, and Searle,  Fontana, Biancamaria. Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: The Edinburgh Review –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  Forbes, James David. Travels through the Alps of Savoy and other parts of the Pennine Chain with observations on the phenomena of glaciers. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black,  Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books,  Power/Knowledge. Translated by Colin Gordon, et. al. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books,  The History of Sexuality. Vol. I. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books,  Frank, Katherine. A Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,  Fraser, Derek. The Evolution of the British Welfare State: A History of Social Policy since the Industrial Revolution. nd edn., London: MacMillan Press,  Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.,  Civilization and its Discontents. Translated by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 

Bibliography



Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Basic Books,  “The Economic Problem in Masochism.” In Sigmund Freud, General Psychological Theory. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co.,  “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” In General Psychological Theory, ed. Philip Rieff. New York: Collier Books,  The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Avon Books,  Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction –. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,  “The Body Versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew.” In The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur. Berkeley: California University Press,  Gann, L. H. and Peter Duignan. The Rulers of British Africa –. Stanford: Stanford University Press,  Gavin, Hector. Sanitary Ramblings, Being Sketches and Illustrations of Bethnal Green. A Type of the Condition of the Metropolis and Other Large Towns. London: Frank Cass and Co. Ltd., ()  Gerth, H. H. and C. Wright Mills. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press,  Giddens, Anthony. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: California University Press,  The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press,  Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press,  Glaisher, James. Travels in the Air. nd edn., London: Richard Bentley and Son,  Gloag, John. Victorian Comfort: A Social History of Design –. London: Adam and Charles Black,  Gordon, Colin. “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell. Chicago: Chicago University Press,  Gould, Leroy C., et al. Perceptions of Technological Risks and Benefits. New York: Russell Sage Foundation,  Great Britain. Poor Law Commissioners. [Edwin Chadwick.] Report of an inquiry into the sanitary condition of the labouring population of Great Britain. London: William Clowes,  Green, William A. British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment –. Oxford: Clarendon Press,  Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: Chicago University Press,  Guy, Josephine M. The Victorian Social-Problem Novel: The Market, the Individual and Communal Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press,  Gwynn, Stephen. The Life of Mary Kingsley. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 



Bibliography

Hacking, Ian. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  Halévy, Elie. The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism. Translated by Mary Morris. London:  Haley, Bruce. The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,  Hamlin, Christopher. “Providence and Putrefaction: Victorian Sanitarians and the Natural Theology of Health and Disease.” Victorian Studies (Spring ): – “Muddling in Bumbledom: On the Enormity of Large Sanitary Improvements in Four British Towns, –.” Victorian Studies : (Autumn ): – Herbert, Christopher. Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,  Himmelfarb, Gertrude. The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,  Hodgson, J. E. The History of Aeronautics in Great Britain from the earliest times to the latter half of the nineteenth century. Oxford: Oxford University Press,  Holt, Richard. Sport and the British: A Modern History. Oxford: Clarendon Press,  Hont, Istvan and Michael Ignatieff, eds. Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study in the Play-Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press,  Hume, L. J. Bentham and Bureaucracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  Hussey, Christopher. The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View. London: Frank Cass,  Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,  Jeal, Tim. Livingstone. London: Heinemann,  Johnson, Richard. “Educating the Educators: ‘Experts’ and the State –.” In Social Control in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. A. P. Donajgrodzki. London: Croom Helm,  Kingsley, Mary H. Travels in West Africa. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd.,  West African Studies. rd edn., London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd.,  () Kiple, Kenneth, F. The Cambridge World History of Human Disease. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  Kipling, Rudyard. Mary Kingsley. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc.,  Kneopflmacher, U. C., and G. B. Tennyson, eds. Nature and the Victorian Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press,  Kopf, E. W. “Florence Nightingale as Statistician.” Journal of the American Statistical Association,  (): – Kuklik, Henrika. The savage within: The social history of British anthropology, –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 

Bibliography



Kutzbach, Gisela. The Thermal Theory of Cyclones: A History of Meteorological Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Lancaster, PA: American Meteorological Society,  Lacan, Jacques. “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis.” In Ecrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.,  The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.,  Landow, George P. “Aggressive (Re)interpretations of the Female Sage: Florence Nightingale’s Cassandra.” In Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse, ed. Thaïs E. Morgan. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,  Lebow, Richard Ned. White Britain and Black Ireland: The Influence of Stereotypes on Colonial Policy. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues,  Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell,  Levine, Lawrence. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,  Levine, Phillipa. Introduction to Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys, by Amelia Edwards. Boston: Beacon Press,  Lewis, R. A. Edwin Chadwick and the Public Health Movement. London: Longmans, Green and Co.,  Livingstone, David. Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. London: John Murray,  Lowi, Theodore J. “Risks and Rights in the History of American Governments,” :  Daedalus (Fall ),  Luhmann, Niklas. Trust and Power. Chichester: Wiley,  Risk: A Sociological Theory. Translated by Rhodes Barrett. New York: Aldine de Gruyter,  MacLeod, Roy. “Introduction.” In Disease, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion, ed. Roy MacLeod and Milton Lewis. London: Routledge,  Malcolmson, Robert W. Popular Recreations in English Society –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  Marcus, Steven. “Mt. Everest and the British National Spirit.” In Representations: Essays on Literature and Society. New York: Random House,  Engels, Manchester and the Working Class. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., ,  Marion, Fulgence. Wonderful Balloon Ascents. No translator. New York: Charles Scribner and Co.,  Marsh, Peter, ed. The Conscience of the Victorian State. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press,  Martineau, Harriet. Illustrations of Political Economy. London: Charles Fox, – Deerbrook. Garden City, NY: Dial Press, ()  Autobiography.  vols. London: Virago, ()  Marx, Karl. Capital. rd edn., Vol. I. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers, 



Bibliography

Grundrisse. Ed. and trans. by David McLellan. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers,  Mason, Monck. Aeronautica or, Sketches Illustrative of the Theory and Practice of Aerostation. London: F. C. Westley,  Mayhew, Henry. “In the Clouds, or, Some Account of a Balloon Trip with Mr. Green.” Illustrated London News, September , :  McCulloch, J[ohn] R[amsay], assisted by numerous contributors. A Statistical Account of the British Empire exhibiting its extent, physical capacities, population, industry, and civil and religious institutions. st edn., London: Charles Knight and Co.,  A Descriptive and Statistical Account of the British Empire exhibiting its extent, physical capacities, population, industry, and civil and religious institutions. th edn., London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans,  Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Considerations of Representative Government, ed. H. B. Acton. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., ()  Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: California University Press,  Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking,  Morris, R. J. Cholera : The Social Response to an Epidemic. New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers,  Mudimbe, V. Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,  Mummery, A. F. My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ()  Nerlich, Michael. Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness –, Vol. . Translated by Ruth Crowley. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press,  Newhall, Beaumont. The History of Photography from  to the Present Day. New York: Museum of Modern Art,  Nicholson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,  Nightingale, Florence. Selected Writings of Florence Nightingale. Compiled by Lucy Ridgely Seymer. New York: The Macmillan Company,  Cassandra. Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press,  Notes on Nursing and Notes on Hospitals. Birmingham, AL: The Classics of Medicine Library,  Nunokawa, Jeff. The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press,  O’Brien, D. P. J. R. McCulloch: A Study in Classical Economics. New York: Barnes and Noble,  The Classical Economists. Oxford: Clarendon Press,  Oliver, Roland and Anthony Atmore. Africa since . th edn., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  Pakenham, Thomas. The Scramble for Africa: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent –. New York: Avon Books, 

Bibliography



Parsons, Neil. King Khama, Emperor Joe and the Great White Queen: Victorian Britain through African Eyes. Chicago: Chicago University Press,  Pelling, Margaret. Cholera, Fever and English Medicine –. Oxford: Oxford University Press,  Perkin, Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society –. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,  “Individualism Versus Collectivism in Nineteenth-Century Britain: A False Antithesis.” Journal of British Studies : (): – Perrow, Charles. Normal Accidents: Living With High Risk Technologies. New York: Basic Books,  Pickstone, John V. Medicine and Industrial Society. Manchester: Manchester University Press,  Pinkard, Terry. Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  Plunket, Frederica. Here and There Among the Alps. London: Longmans, Green and Co.,  Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press,  Pollock, Griselda. “Vicarious Excitements: London: A Pilgrimage by Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold, .” New Formations  (Spring ): – Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: Chicago University Press,  Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: Chicago University Press,  “Domesticity and Class Formation” Chadwick’s  Sanitary Report. In Subject to History: Ideology, Class, Gender, ed. David Simpson. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,  “Figures of Arithmetic, Figures of Speech: The Discourse of Statistics in the s.” Critical Inquiry  (Winter ): – A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: Chicago University Press,  Porter, Theodore. The Rise of Statistical Thinking, –. Princeton: Princeton University Press,  Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge,  Preminger, Alex, ed., Frank J. Warnke and O. B. Hardison, assoc. eds. The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,  Prochaska, F. K. Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon Press,  Purdue, J. M. and A. W. Goldby. The Civilisation of the Crowd: Popular Culture in England –. London: Batsford Academic and Educational,  Pyatt, Edward. The Passage of the Alps: From Hannibal to the Motorway. London: Robert Hale, 



Bibliography

Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. nd edn., Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,  Reid, Donald. Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, . Reik, Theodor. Masochism in Modern Man. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Co.,  Ricardo, David. On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. Vol. I. The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. Piero Sraffa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  Richards, I. A. “The Lure of High Mountaineering.” In Complementarities: Uncollected Essays, ed. John Paul Russo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,  Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, –. Stanford: Stanford University Press,  Rivett, Geoffrey. The Development of the London Hospital System –. King’s Fund Historical Series No. . London: King’s Fund Publishing Office,  Roberts, David. Victorian Origins of the British Welfare State. New Haven: Yale University Press,  “The Utilitarian Conscience.” In The Conscience of the Victorian State, ed. Peter Marsh. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,  Robertson, David. “Mid-Victorians Amongst the Alps.” In U. C. Kneopflmacher and G. B. Tennyson, eds., Nature and the Victorian Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press,  Robinson, Jane. Wayward Women: A Guide to Women Travelers. Oxford: Oxford University Press,  Robinson, Ronald and John Gallagher, with Alice Denny. Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism. nd edn., London: Macmillan Education Ltd.,  Rolt, L. T. C. The Aeronauts: A History of Ballooning –. New York: Walker and Co.,  Roper, Michael and John Tosh, eds. Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since . London: Routledge,  Rosenberg, Charles E. “Florence Nightingale on Contagion: The Hospital as Moral Universe.” In Healing and History, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg. New York: Science History Publications,  Ruskin, John. The Works of John Ruskin on CD-ROM, Vol. . Modern Painters, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  Sacher-Masoch, Leopold van. “Venus in Furs.” In Masochism, ed. Gilles Deleuze. New York: Zone Books,  Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books,  Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,  Sanders, Valerie. Reason Over Passion: Harriet Martineau and the Victorian Novel. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 

Bibliography



Sayer, Derek. Capitalism and Modernity: An excursus on Marx and Weber. London: Routledge,  Sayer, Derek and Philip Corrigan. The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution. Oxford: Blackwell,  Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press,  Schapera, I. ed. Livingstone’s Missionary Correspondence –. Berkeley: California University,  Semmel, Bernard. The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism: Classical Political Economy and the Empire of Free Trade and Imperialism –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge,  Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine. Chicago: Chicago University Press,  Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Chicago: Chicago University Press,  Smith, Albert. The Story of Mont Blanc. New York: G. P. Putnam and Co.,  Smith, F. B. The People’s Health –. New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, Inc.,  Smith, Harold. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge –: A Social and Bibliographic Evaluation. Vol. . Dalhousie University Libraries and Dalhousie University School of Library Service Occasional Paper Series, ed. Norman Horrocks. Halifax, Nova Scotia: Dalhousie University Libraries,  Smith, Neil. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell,  Smith, Virginia Sarah. “Cleanliness: The Development of an Idea and Practice in Britain, –.” PhD diss., London University,  Smythe, F. S. Edward Whymper. London: Hodder and Stoughton Limited,  Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso,  Southwork, James Granville. Vauxhall Gardens: A Chapter in the Social History of England. New York: Columbia University Press,  Stafford, William. Socialism, Radicalism and Nostalgia: Social Criticism in Britain, –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,  Stanley, Dorothy, ed. The Autobiography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley G.C.B. New York: Greenwood Press, ()  Stanley, Henry M. How I Found Livingstone: Travels, Adventures, and Discoveries in Central Africa. New York: Negro Universities Press, ()  Stedman Jones, Gareth. Outcast London. Oxford, Clarendon Press,  Stephen, Leslie. The Playground of Europe. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 



Bibliography

Stern, Daniel. The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic Books, Inc.,  Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir and the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press,  Stocking, George W. Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Evolution. New York: The Free Press,  Victorian Anthropology. New York: The Free Press,  Szreter, Simon. “The GRO and the Public Health Movement in Britain, –.” Social History of Medicine (): – Tesh, Sylvia. “Political Ideology and Public Health in the Nineteenth Century.” International Journal of Health Services : (): – Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books,  “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present  (): – Thorington, J. Monroe. Mont Blanc Sideshow: The Life and Times of Albert Smith. Philadelphia: John C. Winston Co.,  Tillotson, Kathleen. Novels of the Eighteen-Forties. Oxford: Clarendon Press,  Tosh, John. “Domesticity and Manliness in the Victorian Middle Class: The Family of Edward White Benson.” In Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since , ed. Michael Roper and John Tosh. London: Routledge,  Turnor, Hatton. Astra Castra: Experiments and Adventures. London: Chapman and Hall,  Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture. th edn., London: John Murray,  Ullman, James Ramsey. The Age of Mountaineering. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co.,  Vance, Norman. The Sinews of the Spirit: The ideal of Christian manliness in Victorian literature and religious thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  Vicinus, Martha. Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women –. Chicago: Chicago University Press,  Vicinus, Martha, and Bea Nergaard, eds. Ever Yours, Florence Nightingale: Selected Letters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,  Walvin, James. Leisure and Society –. London: Longman,  Webb, R. K. The British Working Class Reader –: Literacy and Social Tension. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.,  Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian. New York: Columbia University Press,  Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,  Weeks, Jeffrey. Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since . London: Longman,  Whymper, Edward. Scrambles Amongst the Alps in the years –. th edn., London: John Murray,  Wildavsky, Aaron. Searching for Safety. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 

Bibliography



Wildavsky, Aaron, and Karl Drake. “Theories of Risk Perception: Who Fears What and Why?” Daedalus : (Fall ):  Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,  Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society –. New York: Anchor Books,  Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. London: Routledge,  Wohl, Anthony S. Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,  Woodham-Smith, Cecil. Florence Nightingale –. () London: The Reprint Society,  Wroth, Warwick. The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century. London: MacMillan and Co.,  Young, Robert J. C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in theory, culture and race. London: Routledge,  Youngs, Tim. Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, –. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 

Index

Abrams, Philip,  Act of Union, ,  Adams, James Eli,  Adorno, Theodor, , , – Adventure fiction, – Aesthetics,  Africa, , , , , , , – European Partition, , ,  Alpine Club, , ,  n.  Alpine guides, – Alpine Journal,  Alpine peasants, , ,  Alps, , , , , – American colonies, – Angola,  Annan, Noel,  Anticontagionism, , , – Arctic,  Armstrong, Nancy,  Arnold, Matthew, ,  Arnott, Neil,  Athleticism, , ,  Australia, ,  Babbage, Charles,  Balaclava,  Baldick, Chris,  Balint, Michael, – Barchester Towers, – Barrie, J. M.,  Bentham, Jeremy, ,  Berman, Marshall,  Bersani, Leo,  Birkett, Dea,  Birmingham,  Blue Book Reports,  Boahen, A. Adu,  Bongie, Chris,  British Museum,  Burke, Edmund, – Burton, Richard, 

Bushmen, ,  Buzard, James,  Byron, George Gordon,  Cameroons, , ,  Canguilhem, Georges,  Canonical texts, , , , , – Caribbean, , ,  Carlyle, Thomas, ,  Catholic Emancipation Act,  Cazamian, Louis,  Central Board of Health, –,  see also Chadwick, Edwin Chadwick, Edwin, and government reports –; and the Central Board of Health , ; and Benthamism, ; and the Irish, ; and the New Poor Law, ; and infant mortality, ; and promotion of sewage farming,  Works: Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, , , –, , ,  Chartism,  Childbirth,  Child labor,  Cholera, , , ,  Collini, Stefan,  Colonization, , – Conrad, Joseph, , , ,  Cosmologies: modern, –, , , , ,  Traditional, –,  Cowper, William,  Coxwell, Henry, , , , –, ,  Work: My Life and Balloon Experiences, ,  Crimea,  Crimean War,  Crystal Palace,  Cultural Anxiety, , , , , –, ,  David, Deirdre,  Davidson, Basil, 



Index Deleuze, Gilles, – Determinism,  Dickens, Charles, , , , –, , ,  Works: Dombey and Son, , –; Hard Times, , ; Little Dorrit, , ; Our Mutual Friend, , ; Pickwick Papers,  Dictionary of National Biography, ,  Division of labor, – Dolomite Alps,  Douglas, Mary,  Early, Julie English,  East Indies,  Edinburgh,  Edinburgh Review,  Edwards, Amelia, , , , –,  Works: Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys, , –, ; A Thousand Miles up the Nile, ; Pharoahs, Fellas and Explorers,  Effeminacy,  n.  Egyptian Hall,  Eliot, George, ,  Works: Adam Bede, ,  Empire, , , , , –, , , , –, , ,  Empiricism, , ,  Enclosure Acts,  Encyclopaedia Britannica,  Engels, Friedrich,  Englishness, –, , ,  Ephemeral texts, , , , , , ,  Epidemic disease, ,  n.  Ethnocentrism,  Ethnographic definition of culture,  Fabian, Johannes,  Factories, , , ,  Factory labor, ,  Factory school,  Fan or Fang people,  Fanon, Frantz,  Farr, William, , , , , ,  Feminism,  Fenichel, Otto,  Ferenczi, Sandor,  Ferguson, Frances,  Fetish, – Finer, S. E.,  Flinn, M. W.,  Forbes, James David, , – Works: Travels in the Alps of Savoy, ,  Forster, E. M.,  Foucault, Michel, , , –,  France, , –



French Congo,  Freud, , , –, –, – Works: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, , ; The Ego and the Id, ; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,  Gallagher, Catherine, ,  Gender, , , , , , ,  And the symbolics of public health, ; and power  See also: Masculinity; Sexuality General Registrar’s Office, , ,  Geology,  George, Hereford Brooke,  Giddens, Anthony, , , , ,  Gide, Andre,  Gladstone, William,  Glaisher, James, , –, , , –, –,  Work: Travels in the Air:, , ,  Glasgow,  Gloag, John,  Gould, Leroy, C.,  Graham, George and Margaret,  Green, Charles,  Guy, Josephine, ,  Hacking, Ian, ,  Haley, Bruce,  Harvey, David,  Health of Towns Association,  n.  Hebraism,  Hegel, G. W. F., ,  Himmelfarb, Gertrude,  Hobson, J. A.,  Hodgson, J. E.,  Holt, Richard,  Homosexuality,  n.  Horkheimer, Max, , , – Hospitals, – And reform,  Patients,  Hughes, Thomas,  Illustrated London News, ,  India, , , ,  Individualism, , , – Industrialization, , , , , , , ,  Industrial novel, , ,  Infant and child mortality, –, ,  Invisible hand, , , ,  Ireland, , ,  And the Irish, , , – Jameson, Fredric,  Jane Eyre, , 



Index

Jeal, Tim,  Johnson, Samuel,  Kalahari Desert, ,  Kay-Shuttleworth, James, ,  Kingsley, Mary, , , –, – Childhood, ; ethnocentrism, ; study of anthropology, ; cockney accent,  n.  Works: Travels in West Africa, , –, –; West African Studies, ,  Kipling, Rudyard, ,  Labor, – Laboring class, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  And machinery, ; and Livingstone’s origins, , , –; and identity, , ; and unrest, , ; and hospitals, ; and sanitary reform, –, ; and reform of recreation,  Laissez-faire, , , , , , , , ,  Lawrence, T. E.,  Laws General, ; statistical, ; economic, , ; health, ; anticontagionism –; Poissin’s “Law of large numbers,”  Lefebvre, Henri,  Liberalism,  Life expectancy,  “Literary,” the,  Liverpool,  Livingstone, David, , –, – Childhood, –; and commerce in Africa, , –; “discoveries,” ; lack of success as a missionary, ; African landscape,  Works: Missionary Travels and Researches, , –, – London, , , , – London Missionary Society,  London Times, ,  Longman, William,  Luhmann, Niklas, , , ,  Machinery, , , , ,  Machine-breaking,  Malthus, Thomas, , , ,  Machester,  Marcus, Steven,  Marion, Fulgence, – Market, –, , , , ,  Market cycles,  Martineau, Harriet, , , –, –, ,  And phobias, –; and Unitarianism, ; and writing as a professional author, ;

and colonization, –; and economic optimism,  Works: Illustrations of Political Economy, , –, ; Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated,  Marx, Karl, , , ,  Masculinity, , –, , , ,  Masochism, , – Mason, T. Monck, –, –, ,  Master/slave dialectic,  Matterhorn, , ,  Mayhew, Henry, , – McCulloch, J. R., , , –, , , , , , , ,  And American colonies, –; the construction of political economy, ; the Irish, –; infant mortality, –; factories, ; statistical sublimity,  Works: Statistical Account of the British Empire, , –; Dictionary of Commerce, ; Principles of Political Economy,  Meteorological research, , –,  n.  Miasma, –, , ,  Middle class, , , , , ,  Identity, , , ; differentiation of ranks,  n.  Mill, J. S., ,  Miller, D. A.,  Miniature, – Missionaries, , ,  Modernity, , , , –,  Moffat, Robert,  Mont Blanc, ,  Mozambique,  Mummery, A. F., , –, ,  Work: My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus, , – Muscularity, –, ,  Nadar,  Narcissism,  National Association for the Promotion of Science,  Nightingale, Florence, , , –, – And household management, –; ventilation, , , ; hospitals, –, –; as author, ; Crimea, ; nursing, ; nursing history,  n. ; as statistician, –,  n. ; on women’s rights, – n. ; on the Indian Rebellion  n. ; on public health in India,  n. ; on contagionist versus anticontagionist theories of disease transmission,  n.  Works: Notes on Hospitals, , , –; Notes on Nursing, , , –; Cassandra, 

Index Nunokawa, Jeff, 4 Nursing, , – O’Brien, D. P.,  Odyssey, The, ,  “Orient,” the,  Owenite Socialism,  Pain, , –, , , ,  Paris,  Passivity,  People’s Paper,  Peter Pan,  Phobia, ,  Photography,  Pleasure, , , , , ,  n.  Pleasure gardens, ,  Pleasure principle,  Plunkett, Frederica, , – Work: Here and There Among the Alps, , – Political unconscious, ,  Polygamy, ,  Poor Law Commission,  Poor Laws, – New Poor Law,  Poor Man’s Advocate, – Poor Man’s Guardian,  Poovey, Mary, ,  Positivism,  Pratt, Mary Louise,  Private sphere, , –, ,  And industrial novels,  n.  Protestant ethic, ,  Public Health,  Act, ; centralized administration,  Laws,  See also: Edwin Chadwick and Florence Nightingale Public sphere, , –, ,  Race and racial theory, , , , ,  Radway, Janice A., ,  Railroads, , , ,  Rational Recreation Movement,  Realism, –, , , –, , , ,  Reformism, , , ,  Regression, –, ,  Ricardo, , , ,  Richards, I. A.,  Richards, Thomas,  Risk Canonical stories of, ; geographies of risk, , , , , ; and the market, , ; risk-perception, , ; and pleasure, ,



, , ,  n. ; as its own reward, ; and the colonization of time, , ; and the naturalization of profit, , , –; predictions of, ; and statistical representation, , ; and the domestic sphere, –; and hospitals, ; and anticontagionism, ; and technological innovation, ; as a temporal problem, , ; contemporary debates, –,  n. ; voluntary risk taking  See also: Modernity; Cosmologies Robinson Crusoe,  Romance novel, ,  Romanticism, , – Royal Commission on the State of the Army, , ,  Ruskin, John, –,  Sacher-Masoch, Leopold, – Said, Edward, ,  Sanders, Valerie,  Scarry, Elaine, ,  Scott, Robert Falcon, ,  Scottish Highlands, ,  Select Committee on Public Walks,  Semmel, Bernard,  Sewers, , , ,  Sewage farming,  n.  Sexuality, – In the work of Thomas Malthus,  n.  Shelley, Percy Bysshe,  Silverman, Kaja, –,  Simmel, Georg,  Slavery,  Smallpox, , – Smith, Adam, , , ,  Smith, Albert, , , ,  Smith, Neil,  Smith, Thomas Southwood, ,  Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, , ,  Sociology, early British,  South Africa,  Spectator, The,  Spenser, Edmund, ,  Spontaneity, – Statistics, , , ,  Statistical analysis, ; statistical societies, ; and economic laws, –; early statistics, ; statistical sublimity,  See also: J. R. McCulloch; Florence Nightingale Stephen, Leslie, , , –, , , , – Work: The Playground of Europe, , – Stern, Daniel, –

 Stevenson, R. L. S.,  Stewart, Susan,  Sublime, –, ,  Thomson, E. P.,  Tillotson, Kathleen,  Tosh, John,  Tourism, – Trade “free,” –, , ; with Africa, –, , –, , – Tuberculosis,  n.  Turkey,  Tylor, E. B.,  Typhoid, ,  Typhus, , , ,  Unemployment, ,  Unitarianism,  Urbanization, , , , , , , ,  Utopianism, , , 

Index Vanity Fair, ,  Vicinus, Martha,  Wales,  Webb, R. K.,  Weber, Max, , ,  West Africa, – Whately, Richard,  Whymper, Edward, , , –, ,  Work: Scrambles Amongst the Alps, , – Wildavsky, Aaron,  Williams, Eric,  Winnicott, D. W.,  Woodham-Smith, Cecil, ,  Wordsworth, William, , ,  Youngs, Tim,  Zaire,  Zambia,  Zimbabwe, 

                        -                      General editor Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge Titles published . The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill by Miriam Bailin, Washington University . Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age edited by Donald E. Hall, California State University, Northridge . Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art by Herbert Sussman, Northeastern University . Byron and the Victorians by Andrew Elfenbein, University of Minnesota . Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and the Circulation of Books edited by John O. Jordan, University of California, Santa Cruz and Robert L. Patten, Rice University . Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry by Lindsay Smith, University of Sussex . Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology by Sally Shuttleworth, University of Sheffield . The Gothic Body Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle by Kelly Hurley, University of Colorado at Boulder . Rereading Walter Pater by William F. Shuter, Eastern Michigan University . Remaking Queen Victoria edited by Margaret Homans, Yale University and Adrienne Munich, State University of New York, Stony Brook . Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels by Pamela K. Gilbert, University of Florida

. Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature by Alison Byerly, Middlebury College . Literary Culture and the Pacific by Vanessa Smith, King’s College, Cambridge . Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home by Monica F. Cohen . Victorian Renovations of the Novel Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation by Suzanne Keen, Washington and Lee University . Actresses on the Victorian Stage Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth by Gail Marshall, University of Leeds . Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins by Carolyn Dever, Vanderbilt University . Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy by Sophie Gilmartin, Royal Holloway, University of London . Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre by Deborah Vlock . After Dickens: Reading, Adaptation and Performance by John Glavin, Georgetown University . Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question edited by Nicola Diane Thompson, Kingston University, London . Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry by Matthew Campbell, University of Sheffield . Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire Public Discourse and the Boer War by Paula M. Krebs, Wheaton College, Massachusetts . Ruskin’s God by Michael Wheeler, Southampton University

. Dickens and the Daughter of the House by Hilary M. Schor, University of Southern California . Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science by Ronald R. Thomas, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut . Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology by Jan-Melissa Schramm, Lucy Cavendish, Cambridge . Victorian Writing about Risk Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World by Elaine Freedgood, University Pennsylvania