Figures of Finance Capitalism: Writing, Class and Capital in Mid-Victorian Narratives (Literary Criticism Andcultural Theory)

LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY OUTSTANDING DISSERTATIONS

Edited by William E.Cain Professor of English Wellesley College A ROUTLEDGE SERIES

LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY WILLIAM E.CAIN, General Editor

EUGENIC FANTASIES Racial Ideology in the Literature and Popular Culture of the 1920s Betsy L.Nies THE LIFE WRITINGS OF OTHERNESS Woolf, Baldwin, Kingston, and Winterson Lauren Rusk FROM WITHIN THE FRAME Storytelling in African-American Fiction Bertram D. Ashe THE SELF WIRED Technology and Subjectivity in Contemporary Narrative Lisa Yaszek THE SPACE AND PLACE OF MODERNISM The Little Magazine in New York Adam McKible THE FIGURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS William James, Henry James, and Edith Wharton Jill M.Kress WORD OF MOUTH Food and Fiction after Freud Susanne Skubal THE WASTE FIX Seizures of the Sacred from Upton Sinclair to the Sopranos William G.Little WlLL THE ClRCLE BE UNBROKEN? Family and Sectionalism in the Virginia Novels of Kennedy, Caruthers, and Tucker, 1830–1845 John L.Hare

POETIC GESTURE Myth, Wallace Stevens, and the Motions of Poetic Language Kristine S.Santilli BORDER MODERNISM Intercultural Readings in American Literary Modernism Christopher Schedler THE MERCHANT OF MODERNISM The Economic few in Anglo-American Literature, 1864–1939 Gary Martin Levine THE MAKING OF THE VICTORIAN NOVELIST Anxieties of Authorship in the Mass Market Bradley Deane OUT OF TOUCH Skin Tropes and Identities in Woolf, Ellison, Pynchon, and Acker Maureen F.Curtin WRITING THE CITY Urban Visions and Literary Modernism Desmond Harding

FIGURES OF FINANCE CAPITALISM Writing, Class, and Capital in the Age of Dickens

Borislav Knezevic

Routledge New York & London

Published in 2003 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE www.routledge.co.uk Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge's collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Copyright © 2003 by Taylor and FrancisBooks, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Portions of Chapter Two have previously appeared in the essay “An Ethnography of the Provincial: The Social Geography of Gentility in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford.” Victorian Studies 41:3 (Spring 1998): 405–426. Copyright 1998 Indiana University Press. Portions of Chapter Four have previously appeared in the essays “A Study of Aggression: A Tale of Two Cities.” Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensia 36–37 (1991–1992): 251–270; and “Dickens and Civil Society.” Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensia 45–46 (2000–2001): 355–372. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Knezevic, Borislav Figures of finance capitalism : writing, class, and capital in the age of Dickens / Borislav Knezevic. p. cm.—(Literary criticism and cultural theory) Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 0-415-94318-3 1. English fiction–19th century—History and criticism. 2. Capitalism and literature—Great Britain–19th century. 3. Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron, 1800–1859–Views on capitalism. 4. Capitalists and financiers in literature. 5. Social classes in literature. 6. Capitalism in literature. 7. Finance in literature. I. Title. II. Series PR878.C25 K57 2003 823'.809355–dc21 2002014229

ISBN 0-203-48513-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-60347-8 (Abobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-94318-3 (Print Edition)

For my father

Contents

Preface INTRODUCTION The Novel, the Class System, and Finance Capital CHAPTER ONE A Historian in the Literary Marketplace: T.B. Macaulay, the English Constitution, and Finance Capitalism CHAPTER TWO Gentility, Capitalism, and Mapping the Nation in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford CHAPTER THREE The Middle Class and the Novel in W.M. Thackeray’s The Newcomes

xi

44 70

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CHAPTER FOUR Banking on Sentiments: A Melodramatic Civil Society in Little 119 Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities

Afterword Notes Works Cited Index

152 157 182 187

Preface IN HIS HlSTORY OF ENGLAND, T.B.MACAULAY STATED THAT THE “FISCAL revolution” unfolding in the 1690s was a crucial part of the settlement of the Glorious Revolution. A statement like this could have reminded his contemporaries that the industrial revolution, which they had the opportunity to witness, was not the first form of capitalism in England. Few Victorian writers of any kind doubted that finance was capitalism, and while most realized that finance capitalism was both different from and necessary to industrial capitalism, quite a few were not sure whether finance was, in the language of much middle-class moralizing about capitalism, “industrious” too, that is, an acceptable and socially beneficial form of endeavor. Other middle-class writers were worried about the class affiliation of finance capitalists, for were they not the most likely candidates to seek co-optation into the patrician elite, that is, to emulate its lifestyle, try to marry into it, and try to assume its social and constitutional privileges? But if finance capitalism had been around for such a long time, why is it that all of a sudden in the midVictorian period it becomes so ubiquitous in the novel? Even in those mid-Victorian narratives in which there are no bankers, speculators, and financiers in the narrative foreground, they populate the background so densely that the simple understanding of the Victorian novel as social panorama cannot explain them away. On the other hand, was the interest in finance capitalism merely topical—is the fact of frequent speculation manias during the 1830s and the 1840s a sufficient context for the discussion of this interest? What role did issues of class relations, especially between the middle classes and the patrician elite and especially in the light of the persistence of the patrician elite that held onto power despite industrial revolutions and political reforms, have to play in this narrative interest? Did the fact of industrialization really reform English fiction around mid-century solely and sweepingly? Did the novelistic fascination with finance capital have anything to do with the fact that a mass market for middle-class literature was now formed for the first time in history, and that middle-class writers writing for this market were now in possession of quite a new stock of social authority, allowing them to address what they considered as the fundamental problems of contemporary British society? It is questions like these that I was preoccupied with as I started to work on this manuscript. As I was reading my primary texts, I realized that some of the received wisdom routinely transmitted by Victorian criticism needs to be reviewed, especially the commonly held idea that 19th-century Britain was socially and politically dominated by the middle class, and that the “Victorian” age was all about some rigorously disciplining emanations of middle-class ideologies and proprieties. The historiography coming out of Britain in the last three decades or so, which I rely on to a substantial degree in the book, took on the question of the class system in the 19th century from a fresh perspective. P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins, for instance, furnished my analysis with a conviction that industrial capitalism was not the sole director of social change in the 19th century, but at

best one of the forces vying for influence. Their notion of gentlemanly capitalism implied that the development of capitalism in England since the late 17th century unfolded under a specific politicoinstitutional and global-economic context, in which a gentlemanly elite functioned as a political and economic manager of this development. In other words, Cain and Hopkins helped emphasize the way in which capitalism in Britain was a specifically British capitalism. In contrast to the commonplaces, familiar to readers of Victorian criticism, that the 19th century saw the definitive rise of the middle class as well as the definitive triumph of a modernizing industrial economy, this book seeks to rediscover the complexities of 19thcentury British capitalism and the fragilities of 19th-century constructions of the “middle class,” and to find a way to read those complexities and those fragilities into the economies and textures of 19th-century literature. In presenting my readings and arguments, I draw on a variety of critical and theoretical approaches. I propose, for instance, that the literary sociology of Pierre Bourdieu could be a very useful resource for students of mid-Victorian literature and culture, especially in trying to examine relations between economic capital and symbolic capital in the contemporary field of culture. The bulk of the study is based, however, on an attempt to integrate into literary analysis the insights and problematizations of recent historiographies of Britain, in which I insist less on their partisan differences than on their conceptual similarities. While the chapters are conceived as close readings of individual novels, in all the readings I try to keep in play the three distinct thematic questions of representations of finance capitalism, the class system, and the social authority of writers. Many people have helped me in the process of writing this book. Ivo Vidan and Sonja Bašić were the important readers of my first attempts in Victorian criticism. During the writing of my dissertation, on which this book is based in part, I benefited greatly from the support and supervision provided by the chair of my dissertation committee, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. I would also like to thank Fredric Jameson, who inspired me with an appreciation for thinking literature through history. My thanks also go to the other members of my dissertation committee—Marianna Torgovnick, Thomas Pfau, and the late Clyde Ryals, for their invaluable support and guidance, as well as to Jennifer Thorn, who was a perceptive reader of the dissertation in its early stages. In composing this work I profited greatly from the help of my friends and colleagues Loren Glass, who read through many draft chapters of this work with patience and discernment, and George Faraday, whose general intellectual good sense was always a good resource to consult. I would also like to thank William E.Cain, the editor of the Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory series, for the interest he showed in this manuscript and the suggestions for its revision, and Damian Treffs, the Routledge editor, for guiding me through the process of preparing this book for publication.

FIGURES OF FINANCE CAPITALISM

Introduction The Novel, the Class System, and Finance Capital The great, broad, true case that our public progress is far behind our private progress, and that we are not more remarkable for our private wisdom and success in matters of business than we are for our public folly and failure, I take to be as clearly established as the existence of the sun, moon, and stars. (Dickens’s speech at the third meeting of the Administrative Reform Association) 1

THE POINT OF DEPARTURE FOR THE ANALYSIS THAT FOLLOWS IS THE PERCEPTION of an unevenness in British social development in the 1850s, a discrepancy between the “public” world still very much of patrician dominance and the “private” world of middle-class economic power. The sentiment expressed by Dickens in support of civil service reform is informed by a characteristic Dickensian frustration with the pace of change in the domain of political society, a frustration that similarly informs much of his writing in the 1850s. The social world that Dickens knew and wrote about, that of the metropolitan middle classes, was still politically underrepresented, as well as socially subservient to patrician influence and interest. Another important thing that the above quote illustrates is the sense of social authority of literature informing its context: Dickens backed the Administrative Reform Association as a writer of great public stature, someone whose social capital was made through literature alone, which in turn speaks of a new level of social influence won by literature as a social practice. This book deals with three interrelated themes that are profoundly inscribed in the literature of the period. One has to do with the class make-up of British society at midcentury. This was still very much a patrician-dominated society, and that was not merely Dickens’s impression. The texts examined in this book can be viewed as attempts to scan the social world of mid-Victorian Britain, and in particular the place of the middle class in this heavily hierarchical society. Secondly, a defining moment of the period is to be found in the restructuring of the field of culture that very much coalesced around the literary practice of Charles Dickens. Professional novelists became not only providers of relatively lucrative cultural products, but also voices of great social authority, and representatives of that middle-class wisdom and success to which Dickens alluded in the above speech. The novel became a locus of middle-class symbolic power in which middle-class novelists tried to come to terms with the fact of patrician persistence in the loci of political power, as well as with what to most of them was an even more annoying fact of the continued power of patrician norms of social prestige. In very simplified but necessarily crude terms, the mid-Victorian middle-class novelist had to contend with

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middle-class snobbishness, tuft-hunting and toadyism—contemporary names for the social obsequiousness of the middle class which effectively supported patrician ideologies. Finally, this book brings into focus, in terms of the first two themes, the contemporary cultural fascination with finance capitalism, for which there is a variety of historical reasons. What is key to my purposes here is the uncertain class status of finance capital itself: a crucial ingredient to Britain’s global commercial and imperial supremacy, since its sudden emergence at the end of the 17th-century finance capital had interests that most often coincided with those of the patrician governing elite, into which it was occasionally absorbed. Over the next two centuries finance capital became a limit to the imagination of middle-class identity, and the texts under scrutiny here can all be read as more or less awkward attempts to come to terms with that limit. Admittedly, this kind of concern with issues of class simplifies the Victorian social world by not taking into account other class relations and dynamics, and primarily the place of the working class in the social imagination of the middle-class mid-Victorian writer. This is partly due to the fact that this relationship historically received much valuable critical attention; the role of mid-Victorian industrial relations in cultural imaginations was discussed with a great deal of insight and influence by Raymond Williams and Catherine Gallagher among many others. On the other hand, I thought it very necessary to show just how much the debates over middle-class identity in midVictorian Britain included a concern with the fact of the persistently governing patrician elite. And that concern is not merely about the relationship between the two social groups (the middle classes and the landed class); it is also about the posi tion of the middle class in a class system dominated as well as constructed by patrician criteria of distinction. Indeed, that is why Mary Barton projects a fragmentary view of the condition of England at the time, irrespective of the merits of its social vision that recorded a new class and new class dynamics; for a complementary and in some senses more complete picture we should look to Cranford. The kind of analysis that follows in this book necessarily involves attempts to paint, in necessarily broad strokes, a big picture of the Victorian world, or rather, two big pictures superimposed on one another. One of these big pictures tries to frame the social and political forces of Victorian society as a hierarchical society; the other takes stock of the mid-Victorian literary field, and while the first is indebted to the work of a number of recent historiographers that undertook a reexamination of the peculiar social, political and economic histories of Britain, the second is indebted to the idea of literary sociology contained in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The influence of historiographers such as P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins and David Cannadine is yet to be felt more strongly in contemporary Victorian criticism. In my view, their analyses of the unique character of the historical British state and the unique character of the historical British class system present strong challenges to the old narrative of the rise of the middle class. More than just rendering the common critical parlance of the hegemony and domination of the middle class in the 19th century highly problematic, these new histories point to a need for rethinking the development of capitalism in 19th-century Britain (specifically the questions of interactions between industrial and finance capitalism, and of different cultures of management of capitalism), a task too complex to be entered upon here. At the same time, using historiographers like Cannadine or Cain and Hopkins necessarily

Introduction

5

makes obvious the need for rethinking the common textualist and/or culturalist bias in criticism so as to come up with more historicist accounts of the interplay between text and context, literature and society. In an obvious way, Bourdieu’s sociology of culture is a form of historicism that sought to understand the big picture of the relationship between the field of culture and the field of power. While many of Bourdieu’s propositions about this relationship are certainly not innovative and a good many appear too much bound to the French historical situations he studied, Bourdieu pursued in unparalleled detail the view that culture is a space of semiautonomy, and that textuality is not the only appearance of culture. The notion that the field of culture is not comprehensively structured by power (political, economic, etc.), but that it functions as a structuring structure itself reaffirms the kind of critical practice that can establish connections between, for instance, the structure of the class system and the habitus of certain kinds of art without losing sight of the ability of cultural producers to set their own laws regarding artistic value and to participate in managing the circulation of economic and symbolic capital in the field of culture. As for finance capital, there are surprisingly few extensive studies of the way it is figured in Victorian novels. The most focused study of this subject is Norman Russell’s The Novelist and Mammon (1986); the book is a valuable source of information on Victorian finance, and Russell did the important job of documenting just how much Victorian novelists knew about the fine print of the world of finance, in which way he was able to reconstruct important aspects of the topical background to specific novels. Among more interesting forays in this field is Mary Poovey’s discussion of midVictorian novelistic concern with the ethics of speculation (in a chapter on Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend in Making a Social Body); her focus is on the way the banking practices in the 1860s became the subject of a “moralizing analytic,” of which Dickens’s novel was a part. 2 Poovey’s reading also gestures in the direction of studying the effects of developments in British finance capitalism on the construction of subjectivity. One significant way in which contemporary conceptions of subjectivity were affected was through changes in legislation of finance, especially the introduction of the category of limited liability into company law, which is the focus of Andrew H.Miller’s essay on Cranford. 3 While my study will occasionally touch on the issues of ethics and subjectivity, my aim is primarily to highlight the representation of finance capitalism in novels by mid-Victorian celebrity novelists in conjunction with specific historical issues of class system, and cultural and social authority—in the context of that Dickensian perception of the British private success and public failure.

A PATRICIAN ASCENDANCY The old historiographic wisdom that the middle class dominated the British 19th century, riding the joint effects of industrialization and political reform, has been subject to a thorough reexamination since the 1970s. The old orthodoxy, up to then shared by the two most influential schools in historiography, Marxist and liberal, has been gradually replaced by a wide consensus that the idea of the ever-rising middle class required at the very least another look. A new society was born in the 19th century, so went the old

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wisdom; that a version of the old society continued is the tenor of much of the new historiography of Britain. The most vigorous and persuasive re-view of British history has come from David Cannadine, who, not unimportantly, is a historian of the aristocracy. In his studies of the British aristocracy and the British class system published over the course of the 1990s, he offered a new interpretation of British history designed to accommodate an explanation for the per sistence of a hierarchically-based culture of class so proverbially associated with Britain. As my choice of phrase here already suggests, Cannadine’s perspective was not entirely new. Among the more recent historians, it was Arno Mayer’s The Persistence of the Old Regime that insisted on the inadequacy of the old narrative of industrialization and the rise of the middle class in the 19th century, by arguing that European aristocratic elites clung to power well into the 20th century. In Britain, at least since Tom Nairn in the 1970s, historians began to claim that historical evidence does not authenticate the old narrative of the ever-rising middle class. It would therefore be scarcely fair to credit Cannadine with a historiographic Copernican revolution. What Cannadine did do is clearly understand that such a revolution has already taken place, and that now an inventory has to be taken of its methodological and ideological consequences, and principally, of the changing position of the notion of class in historiographic discourse. Undaunted by the old ideological debates in British historiography that were heavily suffused with the idea of reading history through highly abstract notions of class, Cannadine understands his own work as an attempt to read the various articulations of class positions and ideologies as yet another thing to be historicized. The most important casualty of the new historiographic perspective is the simple view of the 19th century as a radical break with an older power system and a massive reorganization into a new social order. Importantly enough, the question of novelty versus continuation weighed heavily on the minds of Victorians themselves. One of the central protagonists of my study, Charles Dickens, famously wanted to believe that British society was changing, but he also often spoke and wrote in great frustration that it was not, as the speech to the Administrative Reform Association in 1855 clearly illustrates. Supremely irritated by the undiminished power of the patrician elite, Dickens presented in Little Dorrit, published around the same time, his most direct renunciation of British political society. The novel’s satire centered on the Circumlocution Office, a thinly disguised allusion to the British civil service, staffed and controlled by the patrician elite. Little Dorrit betrayed impatience not only with patrician bureaucracy, but also with the inability of the middle classes to achieve a distinct identity in opposition to patrician rule. The main political question in the Dickens’s novel is not a political question of representation; it would take a very careful reader to demonstrate that the extension of franchise, let alone the question of universal franchise, even appears as an issue on the political horizon of this novel. What Dickens set out to do was to educate his readership, which I am conventionally calling here middle-class, into a sentiment of primarily civil self-respect and independence; and to wean them from patrician influence. True enough, Dickens was in the main careful to speak of his audiences using the sufficiently vague term of “people,” which evoked a sense of opposition to the elite, but did not mean the population at large. Nevertheless, even beyond the vague and almost feudal binarism of Dickens’s rhetoric (aristocracy/people), Little Dorrit makes the

Introduction

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language of class a problem as it attempts to grapple with a failure of middle-class identity formation. And conversely, part of the appeal of Dickens’s novels lies in that very undefined space of class formation, where fantasies of class mobility are as possible as fantasies of new class identities. Such fantasies are offered as models of reform action in civil society. As we shall later see. How can one best describe that class system that irritated Dickens so much? According to David Cannadine, when speaking of class Victorians utilized three models of social description, the most pervasive being the model of hierarchy. The binary model and the triadic model were used less often. The model of hierarchy describes society as “a carefully graded order of rank and dignity,” the triadic model “place[s] people in discrete collective groups [defined more by] wealth and occupation and [gives] particular attention to the bourgeoisie;” and the binary model of social description “emphasize[s] the adversarial nature of the social order by drawing one great divide on the basis of culture, style of life, or politics.” 4 While at several points during the Victorian period the language of binary or triadic differentiation seemed to enjoy rhetorical ascendancy, Cannadine argues, the reality was that a hierarchical view of society persisted as the main model of social description, and provided the main discursive terms in which different social groups defined their social identity. Cannadine’s models are certainly not exclusive to British society in the 19th century; they have a much wider historical and geographic incidence. Nor are they mutually exclusive; over the last three hundred years of British history, Cannadine maintains, they could regularly be seen competing with one another as part of real political and social struggles. The important question here is this: what is the historical reality that gave prominence to and maintained the rhetoric of hierarchy? And since the hierarchy model is inexplicable without reference to the persistence of the patrician elite that anchored it, the above question is in turn connected with another one: how did it happen that the ascendancy of a patrician elite continued well into the 19th century? A perspective offered by Cannadine in an earlier book was that the “upper class” in Great Britain remained powerful throughout much of the 19th century (until the third Reform Bill which for Cannadine marked the beginning of the end of the “patrician polity”), 5 because it thoroughly refashioned itself in the period from roughly the 1780s to the 1820s. This refashioning was a resultant of a series of changes: “territori al amalgamation” and “internationalization” which gave rise to an increasingly homogeneous British (as opposed to English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish) upper class; a renewed vigor in the creation, hierarchization, and pageantry of the titled orders; a growing monopoly of the upper classes in politics, civil service, diplomacy, and the state apparatus in general; creation of “a more rational, more efficient, more capitalist agriculture;” indirect and often direct involvement of the landed elite in the burgeoning industrialization. The upshot of this process of refashioning of the patrician class, indeed of “the making of the upper class,” was at least twofold. On the one hand, the new, refurbished elite managed to continue in the governing position during the time of the industrial revolution and the corresponding strengthening of the middle classes that pushed for more political influence. On the other hand, the elite managed not only to reinvent itself as a dominant group, but also to perpetuate the very terms in which society, social relations, and especially relations of dominance were perceived—the terms

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of hierarchy (as opposed to other possible markers of distinction such as wealth, property, industry, labor, etc). On this view, even the Reform Act of 1832 cannot be seen as a great landmark in class relations, and certainly not a landmark in changing the parameters of social description. In the long perspective, the Act was important in that it inaugurated the era of gradual extensions of the franchise that would continue over the next hundred years, a very slow pace indeed. But it did not have the immediate consequence of empowering the middle class(es) at the expense of the patrician elite; if anything, the aftermath of the Act showed that greater political representation did not necessarily translate into greater political power for the middle classes, just as the 1867 or 1884 Acts did not immediately result in greater political power for the working classes. For many Victorians the promise of political change was so slow that by the 1850s the frustration we find in Dickens was a cultural commonplace. Cannadine’s analysis takes into account the rise of the language of class in the 19th century, but he is also very careful to distinguish it from the language of the rise of class: “if the middle class arose as anything during those years [the early 19th century], it was largely as a new rhetorical formation.” 6 The very term “middle class” only emerged at the end of the 18th century, succeeding but not entirely superseding the older appellations such as “middle ranks” and “middle orders,” and its use, according to Cannadine, intensified in the years leading up to the First Reform Bill. While certain social groups identified more readily with the term than others, it would be wrong to assume that middle-class identity was a discursive reflection of an objective social reality. Rather, it is much more useful to see it as a rhetorical construct that sought to impose a sense of class interest and sentiment on an otherwise rather diverse seg ment of society. That the term middle classes was equally commonly used in the Victorian period testifies to the fact that even the triadic model (upper, middle, lower or aristocracy, middle class, working class) often appeared in a hybrid triadic/hierarchical form. 7 In fact, much of Victorian literature participated in that project of making—rhetorically—a single middle class, and Dickens in particular invested both his civic activism and his writing with the discontent that there was no unified middle class where he wanted to see one. However, in order to understand the success of the patrician elite in the 19th century and Dickens’s anxieties about the failure of the middle class, we must move in ever wider circles of historical context. If traditional power, albeit refashioned, had such a way of asserting itself over the course of the 19th century, then part of the reason for its ascendancy must lie in the character of the political and social process in which this power was couched and exercised. No less than a constitutional perspective needs to be brought to bear on this question—what was it that allowed the patrician elite to not only keep reinventing itself, but also to impose on the rest of society its own idea of the British polity? In The Break-up of Britain (1977), Tom Nairn argued that the settlement of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 set the course of British history for the next couple of centuries. The Revolution created and institutionalized a culture of compromise between the landed aristocracy and the middle class, one of the results of which was that political modernization in Britain ended up on a slower track than on the continent, where representative democracies were emerging through revolutionary transformation, that is, presumably through a clean break with the old regime. Tom Nairn wrote his book on the break-up of Britain in the 1970s, spirited by both a

Introduction

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neo-nationalist and a neo-Marxist opposition to the structure of the British state. Twentyfive years later, his expectation that before long the British state was going to undergo a constitutional change, possibly to the point of break-up, has a peculiar resonance. The British state is now being reformed, though the ultimate outcomes of that reform process are still not in sight. Certainly, Nairn’s expectations from the 1970s were not quite accommodated by the gradualist devolution espoused by Tony Blair nor by the transnational context supplied by the European Union, itself an unfinished process that will most likely continue to have an impact on the future evolution of national identities and polities in the British isles. But there still is validity to Nairn’s overall analysis of the historical character of the British polity over the last three hundred years, and it lies primarily in his assumption that the British polity developed a form of state substantially different from continental polities. The British revolutionary era, which lasted from the 1640s to 1688, produced the British state; the second revolutionary era, unfolding from 1776 to 1815, suggests Nairn, gave birth to modem constitutionalism, in imitation of the British example. The British state was “the first state-form of an industrialized nation” (14), but its peculiarity was that it remained a “transitional” one, characterized by a form of government that was “patrician as well as representative” (19). This transitional state, forged by the settlement of 1688, inaugurated the idea and the era of representative democracy, but it never fully implemented that idea. It retained significant trappings of the pre-modern state, including a hereditary house (which is only now being dismantled by the government of Tony Blair). Another aspect of the British state-form that was not repeated by postrevolutionary continental situations has to do with the relationship between civil society and the state: in Britain, “one social class was the State […] one part of civil society wholly dominated ‘the state’ and lent it, permanently, a character different from its rivals” (25). This class monopolizing the personnel of the state was the territorial aristocracy (which was, let us not forget, well-versed in agrarian capitalism, unlike continental aristocracies). This class was not a rigid, exclusive club, but a “co-optive elite,” absorbing certain elements of the middle classes. After 1688, Nairn claims, the elite established a state-form that eventually “turned into ‘the nightwatchman state’ of the Industrial Revolution, and presided over the most dramatic initial phase of world industrialization” (26). Unlike the continental stateform, with its insistence on formality and impersonality of the political process, the British was a “low-profile” state. It cultivated a climate of informality and personal domination in civil and political life—the boundary between civil and political societies in Britain was soft and loose, allowing for easy patrician access to government and administration, and the political process favored the agency of dominating personalities. At the same time, this state was marked by an “absence of a strong, centralized state armature” (27), underscoring the low-maintenance image of the whole constitutional arrangement. This state, which Nairn occasionally calls “patrician” and occasionally “crypto-bourgeois,” was supported by a particular “constitution of civil society itself” (27), in which patrician influence remained strong. Nairn locates the defining element of post-1688 British civil society in the “upper-class compromise.” Cooperation between the landed aristocracy and the middle class in avoiding political modernization was first cemented in the realm of civil society. The interests common to the two classes had to do with the expansion and defense of the

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empire, which supplied the patricians with administrative jobs and the middle classes with an international political framework for the laissez-faire economy; economic homogeneity between the two classes, with a sort of capitalist agriculture emerging in the late 17th century (an agrarian revolution preparing some of the ground for the subsequent industrial revolution); and a joint stance against the industrial working class emerging with the industrial revolution as a social force seeking political representation, which strengthened the reasons for a political alliance of the upper classes in the political realm and reinforced the cautiousness and gradualness in reforming the political-institutional infrastructure of the country. 8 In this perspective, the history of the relationship between the patrician elites and the middle class(es) in Britain is less one of grudgingly accepted compromise, than of convenient cooperation. While there were frictions between these two classes and their various segments, Nairn argues that the compromise was such that it “furnished sufficient homogeneity among the upper strata for mutual adjustments to be possible, and for the question of power never to be made too acute.” 9 While in The Break-up of Britain Nairn did not examine in great detail the role of the British constitution in supporting that homogeneity, he made the important point that the unique character of the British state—and the British constitution as the legislative infrastructure of that state—is indispensable to any discussion of the “upper-class compromise.” Nairn rightly argues that the patrician elite exercised power, and combined its civil and political identities, in a manner that was both very personal and informal. It almost goes without saying that the very informality was possible due to some very formal attributes of the British constitution. Due to its decentered existence as a series of acts enacted and modified over many centuries through complicated negotiations between forces of tradition and forces of innovation, the British constitution is of course a notoriously complicated concept to fix in discourse. But that complicated legal entity had always involved quite uncomplicated and quite conspicuous modes of securing patrician privilege and creating the framework of law and custom that ensured that the state remained, formally and informally, a preserve of the landed elite throughout the 18th and 19th centuries (and of other elites, some would argue, in the 20th century). Interconnectedness among the upper classes, the parliament, the government, the administration, the Anglican Church, the ancient universities, and the military had been for a long time a central part of that intricate arrangement of law that made up the British constitution. It is only slowly and with a great legislative reluctance that disabilities were lifted against Catholics and Jews over the course of the 19th century, granting them full privileges of political citizenship—to name a few cases of formal inaccessibility of the state apparatus on the grounds of religion. One should consult Cannadine’s Aspects of Aristocracy for more complete information on the formal exclusiveness of the British state in class terms, and in particular on the class make-up of the personnel of government. Of course, the upper-class compromise of which Nairn spoke goes beyond the purely constitutional context. Therein lies precisely one of the driving questions of new British historiography—trying to explain why even after the various religious emancipations and franchise extensions the patrician elite at mid-19th century continued to dominate the state apparatus, including the legislature, the government, the civil service, the diplomatic service, the military, and the Anglican church (which remained an established, that is,

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state religion). Regardless of whether this domination was facilitated by a lack of middleclass political ambition or through patrician familiarity with the mechanisms of power, or both, it is certain that it was supported by the complicated constitutional informality of the British state, which defined its constitution in terms of privilege, not of right. If Nairn’s diagnosis of “informality” carries explanatory weight, it is because of this constitutional privileging of privilege. As any reading of Dickens’s Circumlocution Office satire will show, Dickens did not merely denounce the incompetence of a patrician bureaucracy; what fueled his frustration was the formal armature of the British state that facilitated patrician informality in the exercise of power. Nairn’s analysis raised a fundamental question about the way we imagine the operations of capitalism in British history. It is easy to confuse the commonplace of England as the “first industrial nation” with the idea that it was also a nation in which industrialization was the foremost force of social formation. In contrast to what was once a conventional wisdom, Nairn argued that the English class compromise had entailed “the containment of capitalism within a patrician hegemony, which never, either then or since, actively favored the aggressive development of capitalism or the general conversion of society to the latter’s values or interests.” 10 In other words, not only did not capitalism in Britain form a political structure suited to its own purposes, but the very opposite happened: the structure of British political hegemony created a form of capitalism suited to its own purposes. A somewhat similar view can be found in the work of P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins, whose recent history of British imperialism was written in the like spirit of reappraising the forces and agents that shaped British history in the last three centuries. Seeking to explain the economic context of British imperialism, Cain and Hopkins have argued that “the metropolitan economy” needs to be at the “center of the analysis” (5). In the process of examining that economy, they de-emphasize (but profess not to minimize) the significance of industrial capitalism, and focus instead on service-sector capitalism, for the understanding of whose role they “lay stress on the concept of gentility and its relation to economic activ ity and political authority” (4). Starting their analysis with the revolution of 1688, Cain and Hopkins follow the development of a gentlemanly order, born out of co-operation between the landed elite and service-sector capitalists, the latter primarily composed of City financiers and merchants. Without explicitly referring to Arno Mayer’s book, Cain and Hopkins seek to demonstrate that the “gentlemanly order” presiding over British capitalism from 1688 to deep into the 19th century, was not a continuation of the old regime; rather, the regime inaugurated by 1688 was substantially a new order, much of whose “innovative character stemmed from the financial revolution it helped to sponsor.” This resulted in “the creation of a new form of capitalism headed by improving landlords in association with improving financiers who served as their junior partners.” 11 The emphasis on the historical newness of the gentlemanly order is indeed helpful in allowing for a distinction to be made between the persisting forms of feudalabsolutist states on the continent and the British state-form. This eliminates some of the problems of Mayer’s approach, which came close to conflating the two developments under the category of old regime. By seeing the post-1688 British regime as distinct and new, one can also better appreciate its ability to act as an agile power regime and to opportunely keep reshaping itself under pressures of new social developments such as

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industrialization while still preserving an elitist position and composition. That the change of 1688 revolved around a substantially new position of finance capitalism, as Cain and Hopkins suggest, is by no means a novel argument. A modern proponent of it is P.G.M.Dickson, who placed the discussion of financial developments in the center of the study of the revolution of 1688. 12 A Victorian who had arrived at pretty much the same conclusion much before Dickson was T.B.Macaulay. In his History of England, Macaulay argued that the establishment of the Bank of England and the creation of national debt created a dynamic of mutual dependence of finance capital from the City, economic growth, imperial expansion and interest in political stability. But if Cain and Hopkins’s interpretation of 1688 is not new, they gave a new name to what they saw as the specifically British type of capitalist economy arising from the 1688–“gentlemanly capitalism.” In addition, trying to explain the British empire through metropolitan contexts, they also produced a more complete understanding of how the metropolitan polity itself was to a large extent arranged the way it was arranged because of imperial concerns. The empire, whether it be the “formal” or the “informal” empire under British domination in the 19th century, created the playing field for service-sector capitalism which is at the center of Cain and Hopkins’s analysis. The temporally long and geographically expansive perspective assumed in their analysis allows them to argue that the history of Britain during the British Empire requires a discussion of the continuity of the governing elite, its ability to reinvent itself over the period of three centuries. This is of course similar to the positions taken by Nairn and Cannadine; what Cain and Hopkins bring into focus more than the other two historians is the smoothness of transition from the patrician regime as it existed at the close of the 17th century to the gentlemanly governing elite in Britain at the beginning of the 20th century, an elite that was no longer exclusively patrician but that certainly was not merely bourgeois, and that definitely did not represent the triumph of industrial capital. The very term gentlemanly capitalism comfortably embraces the fact that the patrician caste managing the revolution of 1688 was already composed of genteel capitalists (in fact, capitalist landowners), and that the revolutionary settlement could not have been possible without the supporting role of newly arisen finance capitalism. Equally comfortably does this term embrace the fact that by the end of the 19th century service-sector capitalism was the most important and most dynamic part of the British economy. Of course, the constitution of the gentlemanly elite changed over time: by “the late nineteenth century, […] the amalgamation had taken place and the landed interest, once the senior partner, had come to lean heavily on money made in the service sector, especially in the City of London. The nineteenth-century gentleman was therefore a compromise between the needs of the landed interest whose power was in decline and the aspirations of the rising service sector” (33). Thus, while the term “gentlemanly capitalism” does not make visible the actual evolution of the gentlemanly elite—its many editions and internal gradations and distinctions that shaped up and disintegrated over the centuries—it does emphasize the continuity between elites at different points in British history after 1688. This continuity in turn had to do with reproduction of a specific “gentlemanly” attitude towards both governance and wealth. As in the case of the gentlemanly prototype, the medieval knight, the idea of gentleman came to be associated with “adher[ing] to a code of honour which

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placed duty before self-advancement” (23). The making of a gentleman, while requiring support in the form of wealth, was not constituted by wealth alone; in fact, “[a] gentleman required income, and preferably sizeable wealth, but he was not to be sullied by the acquisitive process any more than he was to be corrupted by the power which leadership entailed” (23). The duties of governance were accepted as a responsibility not to be compromised by hunger for wealth and power. It is of course one of the commonplaces of Victorian studies to point to Victorian revivals of chivalric medievalism in literature, architecture, and art. The Victorian fascination with the medieval world of chivalry, Cain and Hopkins point out, went hand-in-hand with an unyielding emphasis in public schools and in the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge on classical studies—both forms of retro-culture worked to reinforce the ideological formation of “an elite cadre dedicated to the service of the state” (31). Under the gentlemanly regime of distinction, not all kinds of wealth were equally valued: aristocratic status ranked as the most prestigious manner of possessing wealth, which often came with a “contempt for the everyday world of wealth creation and of the profit motive as the chief goal of activity” (24). In course of the evolution of gentility over the centuries, other classes affected such contempt, including service-sector capitalists, higher clergy, commissioned officers, and the learned professions. One of the corollaries of the casual attitude towards acquisition of wealth, but also towards performance of work, claim Cain and Hopkins drawing on Jonathan Powis’s study Aristocracy, was the genteel penchant for the cult of the amateur in every kind of political or social activity. Finally, part of the reason for the historical success of the gentlemanly ideology is that, as Cain and Hopkins point out, “the English gentleman was made as well as born” (22). Certainly, any history of the genesis of gentlemanly culture and ideology would have to account for the fact that the “gentlemanly” had always been meant as more inclusive than “noble” or “aristocratic” (already Chaucer’s tales offer telling evidence of the difference)—a concept with a built-in space for further inclusivity. The concept of gentility proved flexible enough to allow for gradual expansion and co-optation over centuries, even as it remained subject to the sanction of the elite (genteel status was ultimately a matter of perception by the social groups already secure in their possession of it). While Cain and Hopkins offer of necessity a sketchy attempt to discuss the genealogy and ideology of gentility, the brunt of their argument is that the “gentlemanly” ideology established itself as a crucial factor in the overall development of British capitalism. Since the normative aristocratic model of wealth acquisition boasted no visible connection with the world of work, under this system of prestige the forms of acquisition that involved a greater degree of invisibility were seen as more eligible for co-optation into the elite than the forms that involved a direct connec-tion to production. A literary example, among a myriad, in evidence: one of Dickens’s arch-scoundrels, Mr Rigaud in Little Dorrit, defines himself as “not so much a man of business, as what the world calls (arbitrarily) a gentleman” (399). While Rigaud’s statement is a reminder that gentlemanly status is an uncertain affair that requires in-group sanction, it also suggests that the idea of gentility presupposes a distance from the visible and striving production of wealth. In the 19th century, the model of coming into wealth associated with territorial aristocracy continued to serve as the norm, so that an indirect and inconspicuous relation to the

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creation of wealth certainly facilitated the ideological incorporation of first finance capital and then commercial capital into the governing elite. By now numerous studies have been done on the co-optation of different segments of the middle classes into the patrician elite; typically, such co-optation involved an emulation of the lifestyle of the aristocracy—middle-class magnates typically aspired to purchase a broad-acred estate in the country, as well as to achieve ennoblement, i.e. official conferral of patrician status. Both the emulation and the ennoblement were significantly sooner and much more often accessible to service-sector capitalists, especially financiers, and much more rarely, and much later, to industrialists. 13 Cain and Hopkins show that the manner in which the ranks of the gentlemanly elite were replenished has to be read side by side with the ascent of service-sector capitalism in the British economy and the relegation of manufacturing capitalism to a subordinate role. A related development, British loss of the leading role in industrialization in the second half of the 19th century, cannot be fully explained without reference to the persistence of the ideology of gentility. Charles Dickens, without the benefit of hindsight that we have, often mused in frustration that technological modernization in Britain was not accompanied by political modernization, and even predicted that the British technological edge would soon be lost. That Dickens (among others) became preoccupied with such uneven speeds of modernization is one of the reasons why the mid-Victorian period merits special attention. As Dickens clearly saw in the 1850s, the terrific transformative potential of industrialization was stymied by the structure of British civil and political societies. Retroactively, historians have come to refer to the mid-Victorian period as the age of equipoise, implying some sort of a historical truce during which the level of social conflict ebbed in the face of economic growth and social cooperation. It is opportune at this point to remember that industrialization in Britain was a worldfirst experience, and therefore in some measure a learning process. Eric Hobsbawm divided British industrialization into two phases, the first one based on textile industry (1780–1840), and the second one on coal and iron (1840–1895). By the time the second phase began to unfold, Hobsbawm argues, industrialists were no longer unfamiliar with the rules of the industrial game. In the early, pioneering years of industrialization manufacturing capitalists sought to create profits by long working hours and low wages, but already by the 1840s they began to realize that shorter working hours and higher wages did not mean decrease in productivity. Factory legislation, such as the Ten Hours Act of 1847 sped up such processes, but it did not initiate them—they were already being set in motion by the northern industrialists who became known as “New Model” employers. Certainly this does not explain fully the reasons for the relative social peace between industrial workers and manufacturing capitalists in the 1850s, but it does help put in perspective the tremendous novelty and the terrible human cost of the early years of industrialization, and offset those years by the subsequent improvements in the condition of the working class. The fact remains that by 1850 the condition of England, of which Thomas Carlyle wrote, was in the public eye no longer as dramatically tied to the condition of the working class, of which Friedrich Engels wrote. On the other hand, the achievements of industrial capitalism opened up new ways of perceiving the condition of the country within a narrative of modernization. As Hobsbawm put it, “the railway became a sort of synonym for ultra-modernity in the 1840,” 14 and many a

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Victorian writer marveled at the social consequences of the railway boom. In 1851, the Great Exhibition was staged in London, and this spectacle of unprecedented proportions projected to Britons as well as the world an image of British industrial superiority. But if at the outset of the 1850s technological innovation seemed to provide a uniquely British promise of social progress, it also could not help but foreground the anachronism of other aspects of British society. It is in this gap between the possibilities and failures of modernization that much of Dickens’s writerly ethos resided. At the beginning of the 1850s Dickens started Household Words, a miscellany in which he often ran editorials exposing and condemning the obsolescence of British political society, and summoning wishfully the power of the steam engine to dispel it. Dickens’s most concentrated novelistic critique of British political society was presented in Little Dorrit, one of the first modern critiques of state bureaucracy (admittedly, we could say after Nairn that the bureaucracy itself was a “transitional one). In the Circumlocution Office Dickens created the image of a state apparatus whose defining principle was “how not to do it,” 15 meaning how to avoid taking care of public business—and “all the business of the country went through [it].” 16 The obscure and absurd inefficiency of the Office conveys a recognizably Dickensian topos of labyrinthine wastefulness of British institutions (akin to the later portrait of the Chancery in Bleak House). The Office is mainly staffed with members of an aristocratic family, the Barnacles, who “were dispersed all over the public offices, and held all sorts of public places.” 17 Indeed, of the Barnacles there are “shoals.” Irresistible colonization of the state apparatus by the Barnacles is accompanied by their attitude of casual entitlement towards the business of government. An advocate of meritocracy, Dickens was a keen critic of aristocratic entitlement, the culture of informality, and the cult of the amateur that informed the British civil service at mid-century. One of the corollaries to Little Dorrit in Household Words was a 1856 article published under the title “Nobody,” a scathing attack on the posture of unaccountability assumed by the patrician civil servant. 18 However, Dickens did not portray the Barnacles’ attitude towards government as a mere habit, a leftover from an older order of things, but as a matter of political choice and expediency. A junior Barnacle in the Circumlocution Office “fully understood the department to be a politico-diplomatic hocus-pocus piece of machinery for the assistance of the nobs in keeping off the snobs.” 19 Dickens barely had a class war in mind: the Barnacles use the armature of government not so much in a power struggle as in a jockeying for compromises with the “snobs.” What is left unsaid, but is nevertheless strongly assumed, is that the “snobs” cannot be entirely kept off; rather, they are gradually and selectively brought into the fold of the governing elite. That indeed is the premise underwriting the story of Merdle the banker, whose position in the City of London also ensures him “Society” connections, and whose finance capital is needed for the support of the gentlemanly governing elite and its regime of power. Another form of middle-class failure in the novel is William Dorrit’s pursuit of a genteel lifestyle. It takes two to reproduce this particular regime of power—the novel condemns, in its melodramatic way, what it perceives as middle-class collusion with the patrician political culture. A Barnacle member of the Circumlocution Office is described as “altogether splendid, massive, overpowering, and impracticable” 20 —while there is an obvious

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exasperation here with the indifference and ceremonious inefficiency of British political society, there is also a sense that it is hard to imagine for this order of things to change— the latter clearly coinciding with Dickens’s view that the middle class lacks enthusiasm for attempting political reform. Middle-class sub-servience in the contemporary field of power was all the more lamentable to Dickens because he felt that one of the results of the persistence of the patrician elite is devaluation of precisely the social achievements and attitudes associated with the middle class. For instance, the indifference of the patrician bureaucracy forces the industrial inventor Doyle to peddle his inventions abroad—a distinctly Dickensian proposition that Britain is losing its position of world leader in new technology and industrialization. For Dickens, the failure of political modernization (or the absence of administrative reform) also led to economic failure. What needs to be stressed here is that in lamenting the slowdown in British political and social modernization Little Dorrit is not merely an indictment of the political society in Britain, but also of its civil society—inasmuch as Dickens held that the British middle class failed to build an effective civil society in opposition to the patrician political monopoly. Another remarkable contemporary critique of British civil society that I want to bring into focus came from W.M.Thackeray, who in fact popularized the term snob that Dickens was to use later in Little Dorrit In The Book of Snobs, a satirical piece published serially in Punch in 1846–47, Thackeray gave the term snob its modern meaning. The work amounts to an exercise—albeit a satirical one—in class ethnography. Asserting that “Snobs are to be studied like other objects of Natural Science,” 21 Thackeray summoned the image of a systematic discourse of social analysis. The idea of ethnography (or ethnology as it was known at the time to disciplinary pioneers like J.C.Pritchard) was in its disciplinary cradle at the time; the founders of ethnology saw the discipline as a branch of natural science, aspiring to both the perceived methodological solidity and the prestige that natural science was beginning to enjoy in this age of scientific and technological progress. Disciplinary ethnography started out as a way of interpreting accounts of unfamiliar cultures in other parts of the globe, very often in the imperial realm. But some areas of the domestic social world were increasingly becoming opaque, necessitating some form of systematic exploration and explanation, so that a protoethnographic idea of putting presumably unfamiliar domestic cultures on record informed a good deal of contemporary discourse, literary and otherwise. For instance, another Punch contributor, Henry Mayhew, started publishing his own form of class ethnography of the London poor a few years after Thackeray’s catalog of the snobs of England. An ethnographic design was built into the premise (again a satirical one) of Pickwick Papers, Dickens’s novel that ushered in a new novelistic era. Another novelistic form of ethnography followed with the industrial novel: the novelists such as Disraeli and Gaskell offered detailed descriptions of (their perception of) the working-class way of life. Such novelistic documentarism was meant to record and explain the ways of a part of the national culture presumably unfamiliar to the implied readership of such works (the middle- and upper-class audiences), and it participated in creating an image of the culture of the working class and the urban poor in ways similar to the governmentcommissioned reports such as Chadwick’s Sanitary Report and the journalism of amateur documentarists like Henry Mayhew. To use Cannadine’s terminology, the Victorian

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industrial novel (as well as much of non-literary social documentarism) put forth a binary model of class description, concerned as it was about the social rift to which Disraeli gave the name of two nations. Such ethnography attempted to promote a discourse of social reform and interclass sympathy as ways of addressing that rift. Thackeray’s Book of Snobs was a peculiar event amid this type of social ethnography, since it placed under a form of ethnographic scrutiny a wholly different class—or rather, class culture, which was not binary but hierarchical. Thackeray’s ethnography focused on the governing elite. It was a catalog of governing classes, primarily in professions servicing the British state: military snobs, clerical snobs, university snobs, and City snobs (finance capitalists). In addition, there are snobs in other walks of life (such as literary snobs—the kind of statement that will later cause a quarrel with the Dickens camp), suggesting that the snobbish attitude extends beyond formal affiliations with the power regime. The text catalogs the “respectable” propertied classes; it makes little mention of industrial laborers, tenant farmers, the urban poor, or northern industrialists, but even those groups are suggested, both here and in Thackeray’s other works, to be in different degrees involved in the culture of snobbery. Presiding over all the ranks of snobbish society are aristocratic snobs; however, at the heart of the culture of snobbishness Thackeray saw not merely the existence of hereditary aristocracy, but a “prodigious national institution” which he describes as ennoblement. In Britain, “we say to any man of any rank, get enormously rich, make immense fees as a lawyer, or great speeches, or distinguish yourself and win battles—and you, even you, shall come into the privileged class, and your children shall reign naturally over ours.” 22 With the patrician order continuing in position of privilege, Thackeray implied that it was the constitutional practice of co-optation into this privileged patrician order that was the driving force behind the snobbish class culture. A decade earlier, Disraeli described the spirit of English political revolutions in similar terms: ‘There is this difference between the revolutions of England and the revolutions of the continent—the European revolution is a struggle against privilege; and English revolution is a struggle for it.” 23 If we substitute political process for revolution, Disraeli’s formula captures succinctly a commonplace about English history: that the political process in England had in the main been unfolding through a gradual expansion of privilege (and rights), rather than through a radical revision of privilege. Thackeray pointed to extension of privilege not necessarily only in political terms, but also in terms of prestige: the British practice of ennoblement, while having obvious political effects, also had a pervasive effect on the social attitudes of all classes. In relation to the snobbish system of distinction and prestige, exclaims Thackeray, “we are all implicated in it, and more or less down on our knees.” It is a system exported wherever British political rule extends, that is, “throughout an Empire on which I am given to understand the Sun never sets.” 24 The book offers countless anecdotes detailing the irresistibility and ubiquity of snobbishness, always insisting on internalization and customization of the snobbish attitude. The peculiarly British system of aristocratic distinction with its forms of co-optation, implies Thackeray, profoundly structured all walks of life. Translating Thackeray’s satirical catalog into a systematic, not to say thickly descriptive, taxonomy is necessarily an interpretatively elastic process, but it is obvious that Thackeray’s “ethnography” had some very significant implications for social description. It suggested, firstly, that there is a culture of class, practiced and

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reproduced in the realm of civil society, that should be recognized as a social force in its own right, and a central characteristic of British society; secondly, that it was a neopatrician culture and not a middle-class culture that was still dominant in the realm of civil society; and lastly, that the prevalent model of class differentiation was a hierarchical one creating many local cultures of distinction all deriving from and subscribing to a national model of social hierarchization. It is easy to perceive similarities between Thackeray’s and Dickens’s social analyses. Both writers maintained that British political institutions affected the goings-on in civil society, but both equally stressed the constellation in British civil society as an important factor in the persistence of the patrician power regime. By civil society I mean, after Jurgen Habermas, the sphere of the marketplace, the household, and the structures of everyday human relations, practices and ideological beliefs—the sphere that is independent of the institutions of political society. Not that this is an entirely waterproof definition, for reasons of historical complexity. The idea of an independent civil society historically evolved in opposition to the state of the ancien regime—it had to be independent of politics since all political-institutional life took place within the framework of absolutist monarchy. Needless to say, such an opposition (in Habermas’s account, between a bourgeois public sphere and an absolutist state apparatus,) is difficult to clearly establish in British history after 1688, which is for Habermas the period of the classic bourgeois public sphere. It is precisely in post-1688 Britain that the absolutist state has been dismissed as a political option, to be replaced by a “transitional” state, as Tom Nairn would put it. A unique aspect of this transitional state, in Nairn’s analysis, was the atypical measure of the civil society’s “dominance over the state”—atypical in comparison to the continental second-generation state formations, which did not recapitulate the developmental sequence of the British state so much as its idealized and universalized end-result of representative democracy. In Britain there persisted an ascendancy of an aristocratic civil society over the political society, thwarting political modernization and resulting in a political society that was representative (in a limited way) but also patrician-dominated. It is the powerful prestige of the patrician elite in civil society that provoked both Dickens’s satire of patrician bureaucracy in Little Dorrit, which targets the state apparatus and its profound monopolization by the patrician culture, and Thackeray’s anatomy of snobbishness, which targets the pervasive acceptance of the hierarchical patrician model of social prestige. Both these models of social description imply a patrician ascendancy even in the realm of civil society, where presumably the middle class was on the rise.

INDUSTRIALIZATION AND THE NOVEL Even though the Victorian period gave birth to the professional novelist working in a mass cultural marketplace, there have been few systematic attempts to address the relationship between literary themes, forms, and practices and the economic and social fields in which they existed. Such landmark works in Victorian literary criticism as Catherine Gallagher’s The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction and Mary Poovey’s Making a Social Body illuminated very important thematic and discursive parameters of

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mid-Victorian social imagination, but they paid only sporadic attention to the manner in which the discourse they analyzed was produced, marketed, and read. Needless to say, the preoccupation with language alone, especially when it comes to the kind of literature that was so preoccupied with the social significance of its language, is not without limitations. On the other hand, the kind of analysis attempted by Richard D.Altick in A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 in 1957 stood alone for a long time. Altick “attempted to study, from the historian’s viewpoint, the place of reading in an industrial and increasingly democratic society.” 25 Altick was primarily interested in the forms and genres of mass literacy in the 19th century, and he was the first to systematically explore the hardly controvertible thesis that the century saw the birth of a mass reading public. Much more recently, critical attention has shifted to the issues of the industrialization of the publishing industry and the emergence of the mass market for literature, and of how these new processes affected literature as a social practice and a social institution. However, how to define industrialization of literature and new economies of literature in the 19th century is a question under some debate. One kind of answer was advanced by Lee Erickson, who proposed to study the “economy of literary form,” that is “the effects on literary forms resulting from the changes of scale in publishing made possible by technological and economic developments in early 19th-century England.” These technological changes that industrialized printing and thus “made economies of scale possible in publishing” included “the developments of the Fourdrinier papermaking machine, stereotyping, and the power press.” 26 Erickson points out an interesting connection between the textile phase of the industrial revolution and the general level of the price of paper in the 19th century. Until roughly the 1860s paper was manufactured from cotton and linen rags, made relatively plentiful ever since the textile boom in the latter part of the 18th centu ry; this ample supply, according to Erickson, brought the price of paper down. The implication is that such availability of cheap paper created the conditions for the tremendous expansion of the publishing industry, and perhaps even for the tremendously voluminous novelistic production in the Victorian period. And conversely, when the paper supply tended to run low, less voluminous genres of literature gained more exposure. For instance, the cost of paper went up during the Napoleonic wars, so that Erickson argued that poetry, for its brevity, became more interesting to publishers than say fiction—an interesting corollary to the fact of the lively poetry scene of the Romantic period. That is interesting and speculative, but hardly sufficient to explain fully either the swing in taste that favored poetry at the time or qualitative aspects of the poetry itself. It certainly can shed some light on the publishers’ willingness to print poetry, but it cannot explain other, more important questions. Such as those of literary recognition—why does a writer choose to write poetry at the time, or why does one’s poetry get validated by other institutions bestowing literary recognition, such as critics, reviewers, other literati, etc. Another problem is the methodological trap of the underlying proposition on the connection between the price of paper and the popularity of a genre—are we to assume that fluctuations in the price of paper always create similar effects in other literary-historical periods? Yet another problem suggested by Erickson’s analysis is that of the status of technological change as an explanatory model: what kinds of changes in form can be wholly explained away by technological innovations alone?

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Probably the most important single theme that runs through different accounts of industrialization of Victorian literature is the idea that the real Victorian novelty in the publishing industry was the emergence of economies of scale in literary production, or the emergence of a mass market for literature. This has been acknowledged, in different ways, as the central development in Victorian publishing by Erickson, N.N.Feltes, and Jonathan Sutherland alike. Like Erickson, Feltes sought for the interpretative, formal significance of the moment when the literary mass market came into being. Unlike Erickson, who traced such significance mainly to the horizon of technology, Feltes sought to connect, in a neoMarxist manner, the question of form with the question of the mode of production. For Feltes, the real question of the Victorian break is that of industrialization of literature: just as other spheres of production were being industrialized in the Victorian era, so was literature (and culture in general). Like others before him, Feltes identified the moment of transition to the mass market in the publication of Pickwick: in his view, the novel’s publication marked a shift from pettycommodity production in literature to what he called commodity-text production for a mass bourgeois market. Before Pickwick literature was a luxury commodity pro duced and marketed for a limited number of the rich, and publishers made money by charging high prices for literature. After Pickwick the generation of surplus-value became a factor of market size, an economy of scale. According to Feltes, this new mode of production profoundly structured the literary text itself: the result was a new literary product, whose “specific ideological content [was] achieved […] in the struggles over its production,” 27 meaning the struggles between authors and publishers. Erickson did the important job of suggesting the complexity of the new economy of literature in Britain, by appreciating the role of technological innovation as well as the role of various historical contingencies, even though his approach is less convincing when trying to show the mediation of such factors in literary form. In contrast, the account offered by Feltes does not suggest a multifaceted dynamic, but is informed by the idea that there must be a more fundamental, single historical process underlying the transformation of Victorian literary economy—the process of commodification. Feltes’s ultimate interpretative horizon is a Marxist view that industrial capitalism is a universal process manifesting itself under the same laws in all manner of production, material as well as cultural: “The publication of Pickwick Papers took place within a determinate subensemble of emerging industrial capitalism, the production of written texts” (3). The moment something like a literary mass market is formed, the production of literature becomes subject to the same laws of industrial capitalism as those governing the production of any other mass-produced commodity. For Feltes, the “moment of Pickwick” is the moment when literary production gets absorbed into the general capitalist mode of commodity production. Literature is now thoroughly industrialized, and the literary text has become commodified. That process was indelible from a simultaneous emergence of a sizeable reading public with a sufficient buying power; the result was the historically first mass market in literature, catering to a middle-class audience. There is for Feltes a determining mutuality between the marketplace and class formation, that is, between the industrialist mode of production and the making of the contemporary middle class: this “mass bourgeois audience” is constituted by the Pickwick moment as well as constitutive of it.

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In Feltes’s view, a satisfactory understanding of Victorian literary economy cannot be reached solely through the often-invoked slogans of the rise of the publisher or the rise of the professional novelist. Instead, Feltes writes, it is important to see Chapman and Hall, the publishers of Pickwick, as “the new publishers of industrial capitalism, just as Dickens can be seen as a free, professional writer, and [just as] their mutual antagonistic struggle to produce a commodity-text [can be] analyzed as a whole process” (12). But in trying to tie the realm of textuality entirely back to the industrialization of textproduction, Feltes’s account runs into problems of reductionism and determinism. For instance, he suggests that the commodity-text mode of production entailed a direct generic embodiment, that is, that the commodity-text first emerged in the form of serial publication, which he sees as particularly well suited for the extraction of surplus value from the labor of a professional novelist. However, he fails to show just how the role of surplus-value extraction in a commodity-text production differs from the creation of profit in pettycommodity production. For, to argue that surplus-value extraction in the literary market only comes into existence with industrialization in effect implies that there was no capitalism before industrialization. This in turn, takes away from the clarity of Feltes’s emphasis on literary economies of scale and the emergence of the mass market—for it is indeed hardly contestable that with the “industrialization” of fiction the business of generating profits for publishers is of a quantitatively and qualitatively different kind. Similarly difficult to prove is his view that the ideological form of serial fiction is created by struggles over profit between publishers and authors: this position entails a rather feint, but still vexed suggestion of some sort of class conflict between author and publisher, cultural capitalist and cultural laborer. While there undoubtedly was economic exploitation of Victorian authors by Victorian publishers, and while quite a few Victorian writers fought hard to increase their share of literary profits, Victorian writers resembled Victorian workers very little. Dickens’s ability to keep renegotiating the degree of his “control of the work process” demonstrates that he bargained from a position of some power, very much unlike the contemporary working classes in their struggles with their employers. It is often said that Victorian authors came from the same class background as their publishers and as their audiences; the important thing here is not that they were formed by their background as “middle-elass,” but rather that they actively sought to create, consolidate and anchor a middle-class literary culture. It is, to speak a little crudely, Dickens’s ability to amass social capital as a spokesman for the middle classes that made his economic fortune as well. In some way, Feltes acknowledges that by insisting on the simultaneous constitution of “Dickens” and the mass-market audience through the moment of Pickwick. But it is not enough to attribute that mutual constitution to the sudden emergence of surplus-value extraction in publishing practice; it is more than necessary to address the very conspicuous agency of Dickens and his publishers in creating a national mass audience (through marketing, as well as through a quality of the novel’s social appeal, which was in turn predicated on the author/audience dialogue enabled by the serial form). It sometimes appears in Feltes’s account that Dickens’s assumption of a greater degree of control over his work on Pickwick is the central narrative explaining the importance of the moment of Pickwick, which kills the thesis of struggles over surplusvalue extraction that it is supposed to illustrate. The point here is not that the success of mid-Victorian novelists can hardly be

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explained without some reference to a mutual dependence between novelists and publishers, or that Dickens and a few others commanded impressive profit splits that subsequent generations of novelists found hard to achieve, although such facts are certainly hard to reconcile with the drift of Feltes’s thesis. The fundamental problem of his thesis is the reduction of a complex new literary economy to an “industrial” system for extraction of surplus value, and the form of Victorian fiction to antagonism over such extraction. The most diversified analysis of the novelty of the institutions of the new literary economy in the Victorian period is still J.A.Sutherland’s study of Victorian novel publishing. In his view the mid-Victorian literary economy emerged through a gradual consolidation of new forms of literary production, marketing, and consumption. Sutherland attributed the new political economy of literature to such refurbished or newly invented literary institutions as part publication, circulating libraries, prompt and cheap collective reissues, and magazine serialization. This variety of formats had the obvious advantage of facilitating the marketing of novels to audiences whose reading habits and buying power varied widely. The use of these new or refurbished formats in effect meant a rationalization of the British publishing industry, a restructuring under conditions of an economy of scale. As the new marketing mechanisms got increasingly routinized, the cost of (some formats of publishing) fiction fell, and the returns from the selling of fiction became higher and more secure. While the publishing industry certainly tried to take advantage of the popularity of an author or a genre, it showed a longer-term interest in profit from literature, by actively cultivating a mass demand for fiction. 28 This new economy of literature involved the emergence and consolidation of a relatively small group of giant houses in novel publishing, which were able to run their operations on a much larger scale than their predecessors. Technological improvements, and especially the railway, opened up new possibilities of literary marketing and consumption, as evidenced by the quick establishment of W.H. Smith’s Railway Library in 1848. The railway had another important consequence: by reducing temporal distances between the metropolis and the provinces, it allowed for a greater cultural simultaneity across the nation, and boosted book sales in the provinces. Because of the railway, to use an image deriving from the kind of analysis Benedict Anderson suggested in his Imagined Communities, the novel became a powerful vehicle of representing the nation as a community running on one clock. 29 Needless to say, the new literary market was both a mass market, which mobilized a new system of production and marketing to cater to a large and geographically dispersed audience, but also a limited market, whose general public was constituted by middle-class economies and ideologies. The middleclass mass market existed alongside the very large but also very different economies and ideologies of the penny presses. However small its scope in comparison, the development of the middle-class literary mass market, with a dramatic rise in the amount of capital circulating in that market, allowed the novelists writing for that market to begin commanding respectable incomes. Charles Dickens was in the forefront of this novelistic revolution. Publishing fiction in self-standing monthly numbers was not new historically, but in the mid-1830s it was uncommon. Chapman and Hall’s decision to publish Pickwick Papers in parts was an experiment that started off poorly, and for a while it seemed that the publishers was

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bound to take a loss, until they adopted a marketing strategy that was both aggressive and innovative. The publishers entered into an arrangement with provincial booksellers who agreed to receive a certain number of copies, with a provision to send back the unsold ones. Within a few months, the sales soared from several hundred to about 40,000 per number. The first railway lines radiating out of London into the provinces were used to promptly ship the later parts of the novel to provincial booksellers. Both the form (serial publication) and the content (a survey of the metropolitan middle-class world) of the novel’s ideology had undoubtedly much to do with its popularity, but so did the attempt of the publishers to market the newly rediscovered format to a national audience by creating a nation-wide buzz. 30 In the next few decades part publication was the dominant form of novel publishing, to be modified in the early 1850s by the rising popularity of fiction-carrying journals, among which Dickens’s Household Words was again the trailblazer. However, serial publication in either form did not spell the demise of the three-decker; novels often preserved the tripartite division of the dignified format introduced by Scott, not least because now a novel could be profitably reissued as a three-decker after a successful run in numbers. Apart from still having a regular public in wealthier private buyers, the threedecker remained an important format for circulating libraries. There was another crucial link in the economy of the novel-publishing trade, creating another outlet for the literary economy of scale: a nation-wide library chain was launched by C.E.Mudie, both a symbol and a vehicle of the stability of the new mass market. In comparison with part publication, which exposed novelists to pressures from popular opinion, the three-decker was also becoming associated with more serious or stylistically accomplished writing: for instance, Thackeray’s decision to write Henry Esmond as a three-decker was meant as a statement of artistic seriousness and autonomy. The final innovation that Sutherland singled out is the practice of prompt and cheap reprints of collected works. When Chapman and Hall started publishing their edition of collected works of Dickens in 1847 at an affordable price, they were among the first publishers to set a trend that was not only profitable, but established a central mechanism for the canonization of authors in the literary marketplace. Reprints in general, whether in three-deckers or collected works editions, allowed the publishing industry to define and support the celebrity status of its major sellers. It also allowed (or asked) the reading public to develop a habit of collecting and consuming the kind of literature that was not anointed by tradition. This new attitude to literature required a continual reaffirmation of the prestige of contemporary literature itself. Reissuing modern greats meant that the modern marketplace was capable of producing and validating modern greats, that other modern greats would follow, and that ultimately the publishing of literature was becoming a stable business. The fact of reissues may look like a peripheral part of the publishing business at the turn of the 21st century, but for the Victorians it constituted an investment both in the cultivation of the desire for literature itself and in the longevity of the literary business. Of course, one might say that the whole array of Victorian fiction marketing devices, that included part publication, three-deckers, circulating libraries, fiction-carrying journals, and collected works reissues, was an impressively agile, mutually complementary, and efficient mechanism for exploring and expanding the possibilities for making literature a mass-marketable commodity.

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THE FIELD OF THE NOVEL AT MID-CENTURY—AFTER PICKWICK So what did the literary scene look like after the moment of Pickwick? Taking inspiration from the literary sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, who sought to reaffirm the idea of textuality as a complex social event, I would like to point out some of the main characteristics of the literary field established in Britain after the moment of Pickwick. By “literary field” Bourdieu meant a “field of forces” as well as a “field of struggles” waged for the maintenance or restructuring of these forces. The underlying idea of Bourdieu’s literary sociology is an appreciation of both the institutions and the agents of literary production (and distribution, consumption, legitimation), which are perpetually involved in negotiations over the structure of possible aesthetic positions. In this view, a literary text is not merely a fact in some historical genealogy, or a commentary on some extraliterary reality; it is also a position taken in struggles over the definition of literary value against other positions existing simultaneously. The struggles internal to the literary field are simultaneously affected by interactions and tensions between the literary field and the field of power, which in turn structure (and are structured by) the relations between symbolic, cultural, and economic capital. Bourdieu studied these interactions mainly under the rubric of two opposing principles of legitimation of literary products, namely the heteronomous principle, which seeks to impose definitions of value based on criteria external to the literary field (such as ideology and profit), and the autonomous principle, which defines literary value in purely aesthetic terms (as “pure art,” which is a kind of “production for producers”). Now, in Bourdieu’s view the literary field itself, taken as a whole, is always partially autonomous; that is, the literary field is never purely a reflection or a translation of some infrastructure of power, whatever one might understand by it; it is always active in its absorption of heteronomous pressures. 31 As Peter McDonald stated, for Bourdieu “the theory of the field […] stands precisely at the perilous junction between culture and society, and it represents the focal point of his sustained analysis of their indirect connection. A literary field is, Bourdieu contends, a social ‘microcosm’ that has its own ‘structure’ and its own ‘laws.’” 32 While a thorough reconstruction of the mid-century literary field in Britain cannot be attempted here, I would nevertheless like to call attention to several characteristics of the novelistic field in particular. I want to trace out connections between the new position of the novel as a genre of great social authority and the new aesthetic and social concerns that began to emerge in the literary and public work of the new generation of novelists. But an important prefatory remark has to be made as to the appropriateness of Bourdieu’s theory of culture to the discussion of the mid-Victorian literary field. For obvious reasons of periodization, Bourdieu of Distinction, where he analyzed the 1960s French field of culture, is much less pertinent than the Bourdieu of The Field of Cultural Production, where he mapped out 1850s French culture. The basic problem, however, in using either Bourdieu for the analysis of the mid19th-century British field of culture is that it is not constituted as a field of culture in the sense Bourdieu applies to the different French situations. The very term culture the way Bourdieu uses it (as more or less synonymous with the arts), will only begin to be conceptualized in Britain in Arnold’s writings in the 1860s (and even then in a rather exclusionary sense). But more importantly, the British

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mid-century field of culture did not really correspond to its French contemporary in structure—in addition to all the other differences in what Bourdieu called the field of power. In the British field of culture the ideology of pure art did not emerge the way it did in mid-century France, and consequently, the hierarchization of the cultural field into highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow could not evolve as quickly and as clearly as it did in France of the second half of the 19th century. With the exception of Thackeray’s work, the question of artistic autonomy was not widely raised, and even in Thackeray the question did not lead to more than an ironic aestheticism. Thackeray never became the English Flaubert. Groupings into artistic schools, sparring of literary manifestos, and the wholesale rejection of “bourgeois” art, central to Bourdieu’s analysis, were not part and parcel of the British field of culture. Not even the autodidacticism of a Dickens flared into open conflict with the patrician educational capital of a Thackeray. Most midVictorian writers routinely believed themselves, and represented themselves, Dickens and Thackeray included, as spokespersons for the middle class. Even when the British literary field produced public differences of opinion, those were restricted to the different views on behavior in the mass marketplace. The mid-Victorian man-of-letters acted and behaved as an artistically slightly more talented interlocutor of the mass middle-class audience, but the basic assumption of interlocution between equals with similar tastes and dispositions was never seriously questioned. But Bourdieu’s analysis is useful for contexts other than the French because of its emphasis on the indeterminate character of the field of cultural production, whose internal boundaries and internal definitions of value (or what Bourdieu calls cultural capital) are always in dispute, under pressures that are both internal to the field and external to it (generated in the political and economic fields). The idea that capital comes in many forms and that it often gets converted from one form to another is another useful tool of analysis. For Bourdieu, “capital […] represents power over a field,” that is “over the mechanisms which tend to ensure the production of a particular category of goods and thus over a set of revenues and profits.” 33 In short, capital is accumulated value that can be converted into other forms of value, and that thus authorizes power and influence in a particular social field. Depending on different “fields” and “subfields,” Bourdieu routinely distinguished between economic capital (measurable in economic wealth), social capital (measurable in status and social background), symbolic capital (level of prestige, as in reputation and celebrity) and cultural capital (knowledge and competences necessary to participate in the field of culture). Cultural and symbolic capital should be clearly differentiated: while the former encompasses the ways in which various forms of education are appropriated (through the family, educational institutions, self-teaching and diffuse intellectual tutelage), the latter is the measure of recognition that various agents in social and cultural struggles receive from others—the measure of social author ity possessed or won. It is interesting to describe in these terms the position of someone like Dickens in the mid-1830s before his rise to fame—a man with no economic capital or political influence (his brief stint as a parliamentary reporter was a matter of taking down speeches), who chooses to write a novel, that is, to write in a genre that carried little social capital and symbolic authority—only a few decades earlier Scott would rather publish novels anonymously than sully his gentlemanly status. Before Dickens, the novel was a genre carrying little cultural capital too—secondary in most writers’ minds to

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poetry and the essay. But Dickens was soon to have great economic wealth and political influence. His autodidacticism will prove compatible with ideological postures of selfhelp that the middle classes sought to propagate in literature like Dickens’s own. His symbolic capital will hardly be matched by another writer for a decade, and when that other writer (Thackeray) comes along, among the two of them the symbolic capital of the novel will be even further consolidated, and the hierarchy of genres will now see the novel at the very top. In my map of this literary field that consolidated itself with the rise of Dickens, and that roughly coincided with Dickens’s professional career (the period between the late 1830s and the 1860s), I would like to emphasize the following characteristics: 1. A generalist understanding of literature as a product designed for a generalized (middle-class) audience and the dominance of the novel as a literary genre, 2. The couching of the social authority of middle-class literature in a star system; and, 3. The marketplace as both an economic problem and a resource for literature—the mobilization of middle-class cultural capital ism against the patrician dominance in political society. 1. Generalist literature The Victorian period is often regarded as the age of the novel; yet some scholars claim that the most dominant publishing format was the periodical, “the most dependably profitable [format]”at the time, according to Lee Erickson (7). These claims are far from mutually exclusive. For one thing, the novel appeared in a variety of publishing formats; quite often periodicals carried novels, which was an effective way to unite the affordability and variety of a periodical with the attraction of fiction. The novel was without question the commercially dominant genre among the genres of imaginative literature. But the popularity of the periodical is not to be overlooked, if for one reason pertinent to this analysis: the periodical was an important medium of creating a generalist understanding of literature as a practice that included fictional as well as nonfictional writing. While the periodicals were often recognizably profiled along religious or political lines, and while some primarily provided entertainment and some criticism, they most often addressed a general, non-specialized audience assumed to be able to read and form opinions on any and every subject. For the Victorians, everything published in a periodical was literature. The mid-century novelists were not merely novelists: the 18th-century term “men of letters” was still used to describe professional writers who were more often than not able to write in a variety of genres. As T.H.Heyck points out, Victorian men of letters “shared a market relationship with a general reading public.” 34 It is important to underscore that, seemingly paradoxically, the revolution in the novel led by Dickens occurred within the context of this non-specialized understanding of literature. The mid-century novelists, even after achieving commercial success with their novels, regularly tried their hands at other genres, especially those favored by the periodicals, such as the sketch and the essay. Often they wrote lengthier non-fictional works, such as travelogues and histories. This generic versatility was profoundly connected with two important aspects of midVictorian novel writing. On the one hand, it nurtured and encouraged the novelists to take an interest in the totality of social life, and assume the posture of competent discourse

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about anything and everything. The simplistic way of putting this is that the novelist becomes an all-round social commentator. But before the mid-century novelists got to the actual business of social commentary, something else had to come into focus for them: the question of how to gain the knowledge of society at large. The pursuit of knowledge about society took the form of a documentaristic or ethnographic imagination which permeates the novel-writing of the period: Pickwick’s setting out to observe the societies beyond his street, Disraeli’s use of parliamentary blue books on the social habits and manners of the working class, and the field report format of Gaskell’s Cranford are all manifestations of this impulse of studious social documentarism. As noted before, the novel did become at this time a standard of literary success and literary expression affecting other genres of midVictorian generalized literature. In the field of historiography, the work of Macaulay occupies a central place in my analysis because Macaulay deliberately designed his History of England as a literary work in the literary marketplace. The book turned out to be a bestseller of the first order: writing in 1876, George Trevelyan pointed out that “the annual sale of his History has frequently since 1857 surpassed the sale of the fashionable novel of the current year,” estimating that since publication the four-volume history sold 140,000 copies in Britain alone. 35 Trevelyan’s description acknowledges the fashionable novel as the standard of literary success; Macaulay was indeed moved by similar considerations, declaring in a letter that his intention with the History was “to produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.” 36 As a work trying to compete with contemporary novels in the same marketplace, his History was designed to appeal to the popular literary taste rather than that of the specialist historian (the market for specialized taste was not very large). Contemporary critics often praised Macaulay for this popular quality of his writing. The Edinburgh Review, for instance, extolled his “singular felicity of style,” and asserted that “he is the first we think who has succeeded in giving to the realities of history (which is generally supposed to demand and require a certain grave austerity of style,) the lightness, variety, and attraction of a work designed only to amuse.” 37 Of course, Macaulay’s style of writing history was not merely an attempt to imitate the novel; it was very much compatible with the man-of-letters culture. The role of the Victorian man of letters, in the words of Terry Eagleton, was “to be commentator, informer, mediator, interpreter, popularizer; like his eighteenth century predecessors he must reflect as well as consolidate public opinion, working in close touch with the broad habits and prejudices of the middle-class reading public.” 38 This describes the Macaulay of the Edinburgh Review and History of England, the Carlyle of any of his works, and even the Dickens at various times in his career but especially as the editor of Household Words: the historian, the social critic and the novelist/journalist all addressing the same generalized public with the same generalized discourse, assumed to be equally relevant, accessible and intelligible to the breadth of the reading audience. Eagleton quotes a telling remark by a Victorian analyst of this literary culture, Walter Bagehot, who explained the relative cultural irrelevance of expert discourse in the early years of the Edinburgh Review by highlighting this peculiar connection between writing style and the mass reading public: “It is of no use addressing them with the forms of science, or the rigour of accuracy, or the tedium of exhaustive discussion. The multitude are impatient of

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system, desirous of brevity, puzzled by formality.” 39 During the second half of the century the modern foundations for specialization of intellectual labor were laid down, which would end the cultural dominance of the man of letters, and Bagehot already writes as if that shift towards specialization is winning the day. But Bagehot’s comment is interesting for yet another reason. It suggests that the style of Victorian writing was dictated by the necessity of reaching a mass audience, and in doing so it obviously begs the question of why the idea of generalized literature flourished under the specific market conditions of the period, while the forms of specialization and expertise to which Bagehot alludes did not. The network of established cultural institutions at the beginning of the 19th century hardly favored specialization, and especially not specialization in the newly emerging disciplines of which modern history was one. With a monopoly on higher education in England, the ancient universities (Oxford and Cambridge) were not a place where the drive towards specialization could thrive. In 1832 Macaulay deplored the obsolescence of the curriculum taught at Oxford and Cambridge, and campaigned for the chartering of the University of London not just because it would, as a non-sectarian and middle-class institution, break the Anglican and patrician monopoly on higher education, but also because he wanted an institution that would reform and update the curriculum. Selforganization as a way of promoting new scientific and humanistic disciplines became increasingly popular among their proponents, so that the first half of the 19th century saw the creation of such specialist organizations as the Geological Society (1807) and the Ethnological Society (1842), and quite a few others in between. Another form of professional organization, designed to gather all existing scientific disciplines, and implicitly to confer professional recognition to the emerging ones, sprung up with the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which even provided modest financial support to research projects. Interestingly enough, T.H.Heyck suggests that the professionalization of history as an academic discipline proceeded at a slower pace than that of other disciplines. Describing the professionalization of history as “application of the critical method to original sources, specialization of interests and bureaucratization of historical study and publication,” Heyck dates the beginning of this process in England to the late 1850s; it was finished around 1900. 40 Macaulay’s History falls firmly into the period when specialism in history had very little currency, and when the bustling generalist mid-Victorian cultural marketplace revived the (by then) somewhat weakened tradition of the enlightenment generalist—the ideal of the man of letters who can confidently discuss all areas of knowledge, to which the reader can equally competently relate. The midVictorian idea of general literature and culture would not have been possible without a mass public to buy (into) that ideal, and a marketplace to give shape to such transactions. The generalist culture of letters found a central form in the essay, a form that required the essayist to move with ease among a variety of subjects. For Macaulay, the shift from writing essays in the 1830s to historiography in the 1840s and 1850s was therefore a smooth one, inasmuch as his historiography remained structured by generalist, popular expectations. In the genre of the novel, the generalist culture meant that the novelist was expected to be able to address an ever-increasing variety of social experience. Again, Dickens’s Pickwick exemplifies a moment when the novel becomes aware of the

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enormity of this task; Samuel Pickwick’s aim is to document and explain the social world of small towns in the metropolitan south. The novel satirizes Pickwick’s project (especially its first half, before the sentimentalization of Pickwick in the second half), but that does not affect the novel’s premise that the contemporary novel is now facing the daunting task of representing and making sense of the social totality, which, as Dickens intuitively knew, was by no means an immanent totality any more. How much is the totality of social experience accessible to novelistic writing is a question underlying the inscription of the culture of generalism into the basic assumptions of the Victorian novel. The industrial novel in particular aspired to representation of the entirety of social life. On the other hand, there were also voices questioning this generalist stance of the novelist, among whom Thackeray was the most vocal. In response to the second-hand social research of Disraeli’s Sybil (derived from parliamentary reports) Thackeray attacked the all-surveying social panorama of the industrial novel, and advocated the doctrine of writing about what you know. Calling for a working-class Dickens, Thackeray implied not only that literature should proceed from personal experience, but also that there are social areas in contemporary England that are outside the middle-class novelist’s realm of experience. Thackeray in particular objected to what he called Disraeli’s “disquisitions,” meaning the long essay-like passages of political philosophy and political history with which Sybil was interlaced. 41 In his attempt to defend the uniqueness of novelistic writing, Thackeray thus raised the question of novelistic vocation at the level of form—at the same time when Dickens was raising the question of novelistic vocation at the level of profession. But importantly, Thackeray thus helped define a basic ideological dilemma of middle-class Victorian writing—if the novel aspires to social documentarism, should it be a self-ethnography or an ethnography of cultural others? 2. The mid-Victorian star system From around 1836 to around 1847 Dickens had a unique place among British novelists. This had to do with the fact that he was largely recognized as the pivotal figure of a new order in the literary field. A telling novelistic example of this recognition came in Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1851 story “Our Society in Cranford,” which identified some very important elements of the moment of Pickwick—coincidence with industrialization, new pan-national reach of middle-class literature in a middle-class mass market, and last, but not least, a new encouragement for a plural representation of English sociolects and a new, plural, and inclusive definition of cultural politics (in opposition to the uniformity of an older paradigm of a uniform and polished language and culture associated in the story with Samuel Johnson). The reign of Dickens as the undisputed ruler of the new field lasted for about a decade, during which time Dickens published a number of topical novels consolidating his stature of a great social commentator. By the early 1850s, the novelistic field in England consolidated into a small galaxy of established figures, with the reputations of Dickens and Thackeray towering over the rest and forming a sort of a dual star system with specific rivalries and alliances, as well as specific scales of achievement and influence. Among the literati themselves Thackeray was received as a writer of Dickens’s caliber after the publication of Vanity Fair in 1847—the novel

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offered a distinct style of social satire in which Charlotte Brontë famously saw potential for social regeneration. The bipolarization of the novelistic field happened with astounding rapidity, and in 1851 David Masson, a critic for the North British Review, was able to state bluntly: As the popular novelists of the day, Dickens and Thackeray, and again, Thackeray and Dickens, divide the public attention […] One party of readers prefers Dickens, and points out, with an ardour almost polemical, that Thackeray wants such and such qualities which are conspicuous in their favorite; another party wears the Thackeray colours, and contends, with equal pertinacity, that Thackeray is the superior writer. 42 The consolidation of this dual star system in the 1850s had several important consequences for the practice of novel writing. First, it allowed the newly restructured novel-publishing industry to attempt to assert and stabilize its control over the sanctioning of literary value under the conditions of a literary mass market. When publishers deployed the full array of new publishing formats to sell their writers’ work, that was most often a sign that the writers came to be held in such high popular esteem as to be regarded classics in their own lifetime. At the same time, the multi-format publication of novels became an important marketing tool in making literary reputations. The success of the novel-publishing business was a historically new achievement, and the industry showed an interest in making it a durable one. It was conducive to the industry’s proclivity to longer-term planning, Sutherland argues, that most of the new novelpublishing terms came to existence almost simultaneously, run by entrepreneurs who belonged to the same generation as their novelists. 43 In this mutually beneficial evolution the publishing industry was careful to accommodate its star writers. For instance, Dickens’s tremendous initial success allowed him to negotiate 75–25 percent splits for new fiction in his favor (reruns usually went at 50–50). Such arrangements made the novel-publishing industry all the more interested in establishing long-term popularity for the authors whose books it had under contract. Since the scale of sales was supremely important to mid-Victorian publishers, logically it was additionally profitable to be able to publish large editions of novels by the authors whose names alone could be enough to sell the books, thus avoiding all the costs of launching a new product. But in order to secure a level of profitability in novel-publishing, it was crucial for the industry to maintain more than just the star status of a select group of writers. It also had to maintain the popularity of the novel as a commodity. This also meant the ability to occasionally induct new stars to coexist with the old, which is probably one of the reasons that led to the creation of fiction-carrying house magazines, usually run by established novelistic names entrusted with the job of supervising the grooming of novelistic novices. These journals, such as Dickens’s Household Words (which helped establish Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins) or Thackeray’s Cornhill (which helped Trollope’s career along), gave their editors with a new sense of editorial independence, additional symbolic capital, and an enlarged sense of vocation (especially in Dickens’s case), while to the publishers the journals served not only as direct sources of revenue, but also as indirect investment in future novelists and audiences.

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The second important property of the novelistic star system at midcentury was a qualitative surge in the novelist’s economic and social stock. Dickens and Thackeray were the first true professional novelists whose living was entirely made by writing. Dickens’s was a veritable ragsto-riches story, whereas writing helped Thackeray bounce back to affluence after frittering away his patrimony. At the height of his popularity, Dickens was given the formidable sum of £10,000 for Our Mutual Friend. Reading and lecture tours opened up new sources of income; Thackeray was especially adept at this kind of promotion in America, where English writers could not count on the same certainty of revenue from their novels, due to nonexistence of international copyright agreements. But as public figures, Dickens and Thackeray were more than just novelists, and even more than just literary figures. Throughout his career, Dickens lent his backing to a number of reform causes: reform of prison conditions, emigration policy, education, the civil service. Even Thackeray, who was nowhere nearly the social activist and whose social vision seldom channeled into practical avenues, ventured to run for Parliament, albeit unsuccessfully. Just as their novels were profoundly structured by the close relationship with their audiences enabled by serial publication, so was their symbolic capital structured by their ability to represent themselves as spokesmen for the middle class. In doing so, the novelists primarily assumed the stance of purveyors of moral sentiment meant to provide guidance to the middle class. Their public authority did not derive from an autonomous authority of the literary field, but to a very large extent from what they saw as the authority of their class. In other words, the recognition accorded to Dickens or Thackeray as public voices in the society at large was constructed by the writers as well as their audiences as an extension of a real or idealized authority of their class. 3. The marketplace as an economic problem and a resource of literature The new order in the novelistic field was marked by its own set of tensions focusing on the position of literary producers. With the booming literary marketplace beginning to yield handsome profits to a few novelists, writers like Dickens began to feel that there was a disparity between the increasing economic weight of the profession and the economic, institutional and power constellation within which it existed. It was commonly felt among the literati that the new literary mass market offered little regulative protection to literary producers. George Warrington, a literary critic in Thackeray’s Pendennis, pronounced that in the literary marketplace “capital is absolute, as times go,” 44 repeating the impression of many contemporaries that the literary marketplace was a domain of an exemplary pristine and ruthless laissez faire. For instance, a decade earlier Carlyle wrote: “Much had been bought and sold, and left to make its own bargain in the marketplace; but the inspired wisdom of a heroic Soul never till then, in that naked manner.” 45 Carlyle’s call to writers to close their ranks and forge some sort of heroic sense of their metier in spite of the new mass-market conditions did not go unheeded. Dickens’s impact on the literary scene was not only in his realization that in the new, commercialized literary field professional writers found themselves contending with a laissez-faire business ethic: he also defined some of the ways in which the writers as a professional class were to attempt to redress this situation. Famously, Dickens accompanied his debut

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as a novelist by a plea for improvement of domestic copyright legislation, an indication that he was making his entry on the literary stage already in a mode of reform activism. By the late 1840s, Dickens came to believe that in the new literary economy, following a substantial increase of capital circulating through the production of literature, literary producers had to try to expand their intellectual and economic control over their own profession. Although he stopped short of actually starting a publishing house, an interesting history could be written of his successive attempts at broadening the boundaries of his entrepreneurial and artistic independence, starting with his daily paper to the two periodical magazines of the 1850s and the 1860s, Household Words and All the Year Round. Thackeray, otherwise reserved in matters of professional enterprise after his rise to fame, imitated Dickens’s model by serving as the first editor of Cornhill magazine, founded in 1860. As the literary field configured itself towards a star-centered system, over time Dickens’s lit erary stature drew into his orbit a host of writers and critics, who not only contributed to his periodicals, but also formed the power base for his attempts at professional reform. The most controversial of Dickens’s innovations came in the early 1850s, when he tried to reform the Royal Literary Fund, which he thought was too contaminated by the aristocratic connection. After he failed to gain support for reform from the RLF membership, Dickens turned to the project of an autonomous professional organization, the Guild of Literature and Art (which had a Carlylean inspiration at least in name). The Guild was meant to help the struggling writer and artist. Money was to be raised by appealing to the financial support of the middle classes through a series of melodramatic theatricals featuring celebrity novelists as actors. Thackeray and a few other literary potentates flatly refused to participate, which coincided with the already ongoing debate between the Thackeray camp and the Dickens camp over Pendennis and the dignity of literature—which in effect was a debate about the social capital of the profession. Terry Eagleton suggested that Thomas Carlyle’s appeal to the “heroic“ethos of the literary class attempted a nostalgic reinvention of the classical public sphere. Carlyle wanted to reverse the effects of the pristinely laissez-faire marketplace that favored the domination of the hack (a mercenary parody of the man-of-letters), and that rendered the Carlylean fantasy of the literati as a guild-like organism of great social responsibility and influence quite out of reach. 46 Macaulay certainly did not entertain the nostalgic fixation on guild culture and the medieval society that made it possible; when Dickens approached him with an offer to join the Guild, Macaulay flatly refused, making the standard freemarket argument that such an organization would promote mediocrity. While Carlyle and Dickens were fascinated with the question of the existence of the literary profession as a class, Macaulay was primarily interested in what he thought literature had already achieved—persuasiveness in the marketplace where it could reach and instruct the widest cross-section of the middle class. In fact, Macaulay believed that English literature was by far the most important product of English civilization, prefiguring the Arnoldian invention of culture and its potential for nation-making. In their different ways, Carlyle, Dickens, and Thackeray tried to come to terms with a heteronomous pressure exerting an influence on the literary field—that of the marketplace. The debate over the dignity of literature—waged between followers of Dickens and Thackeray over Thackeray’s satirical representation of the London literati in

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Pendennis—was a peculiar event. On the one hand, the very fact that the debate could be seen as a family affair, joined as it was by people who were largely perceived as part of the same literary culture, affirmed the autonomous principle of literary validation—the idea that producers of literature are best judges of literary matters (affording, as Bourdieu says, “recognition by those whom [literary producers] recognize” 47 ). Superficially, the debate was about whether or not it was fair for Thackeray to make fun of his fellowwriters as a group, and to attribute to them greed, lack of political conviction, and lack of respect for literature in general. Thackeray’s response was predictable—that he did not mean to attack the profession, but the individuals who gave the profession a bad name. In effect, the debate brought into focus two important questions. One was the general issue of autonomy vs. heteronomy in literature: what happens to writers and writing under conditions of mass production and intense competition in the literary field? The other was the specific issue of the social capital of writers as a class—should there be an ethic governing the self-representation of novelists as a group in light of the social influence they command or wish to command? In Pendennis and especially in The Newcomes Thackeray presented the most complete contemporary map of the field of culture. In this self-sociology of middle-class culture, we see the mid-Victorian novel trying to elucidate its own aesthetic and sociological predicament. Thackeray’s novels were certainly more self-reflexive than Dickens’s in their relation to the contemporary literary field, but what is important to stress here is that similar questions about the ethics of literature led Thackeray in a very different direction than that taken by Dickens; instead of focusing on the possibility of forging a new middleclass identity in civil society, as Dickens did, Thackeray turned to the questions of novelistic form and aesthetics of the novel. While the dignity of literature debate opened difficult questions, mid-Victorian novelists did not renounce the marketplace in the way the later generations of modernists seemed to do. Dickens marks the moment when the marketplace becomes the chief principle of novelistic legitimacy; Dickens also already marks the moment of recognizing the marketplace as a source of great difficulties for the profession. In fact, Dickens’s narrative and public practices show that the marketplace for him was both the problem and the solution. The problem, because it was insufficiently regulated which rendered a professional existence precarious, which in turn threatened the public image and prestige of the profession—its symbolic capital and its social responsibility. What was ultimately unacceptable to Forster, a member of Dickens’s inner circle who started the dignity of literature debate by attacking Pendennis, was the notion that a writer of Thackeray’s star status should use the forum of literature to diminish the social prestige of the literary profession itself—exactly the thing that Dickens took pride in as one of his great achievements. Yet for Dickens the marketplace was also the solution, and not only because he thought it preferable to the older forms of heteronomy, such as the aristocratic patronage that he profoundly detested in the Royal Literary Fund. Dickens in fact actively embraced his status as a marketplace novelist, believing that this mechanism of literary consecration suited the middle-class novelist much better. It is in the marketplace that the novelist can present his work to the middle class, which he once described, speaking to a Birmingham audience, as a “great compact phalanx of the people, by whose industry, perseverance and intelligence, and their result in money-wealth […] literature has turned happily from individual patrons.” 48 The connection between middle-class economic

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capital and improvement of the social position of literature is not only a step forward from the previous system of patronage, but is directly linked to middle-class ideologies of effort and self-reliance. More than just fundraising rhetoric, as we shall later see, this encapsulates a crucial Dickens project, that of using literature to convert the economic competence and capital of the middle class into social competence and capital. This also means that Dickens’s concern with his vocation in principle did not entail a strong attention to aesthetic implications of marketplace heteronomy—it remained oriented towards the institutional questions of legal regulation and professional organization. 49 I am far from saying that Dickens’s work is not in a variety of ways a sophisticated aesthetic affair in its own right. I approach A Tale of Two Cities precisely as an example of Dickens’s highly self-conscious literary dramatization of his social strategies. However, the fact remains that throughout his career Dickens sought authority for his writing by addressing it to the popular opinion as formed in the marketplace. In other words, Dickens acted as a cultural capitalist who used his cultural capital and the symbolic capital of his profession as a commodity whose exchange in the generalized cultural marketplace was meant to contribute to an increase of middle-class social influence. Which brings us back to the situation in the political society; for Dickens capitalism, for all its deplorable social and professional sideeffects, was the strongest asset the middle class had in its vying for power with the patrician elite, but it was not automatically aligned with middle-class interest. In order for capitalism to be turned into a truly effective instrument in this struggle, Dickens attempted to imbibe it with middleclass ideological sentiments that would at the same stroke be constitutive of a new middle-class habitus, capable of pursuing social reform beyond the pace dictated by the patrician elite.

FINANCE CAPITAL AND THE SOCIAL AUTHORITY OF THE NOVEL This study seeks to bring into focus a centrality of finance capitalism for the novelistic imagination around mid-19th century. There is an abundance of textual evidence to suggest that finance capitalism was an object of great fascination for the contemporary novel. In 1843 Catherine Gore’s The Banker’s Wife presented a common mid-century story of new money emulating the lifestyle of old money, not always to the delight of the latter. There were minor novelists specializing in telling stories of new wealth, such as Dudley Costello who published a novel called A Joint-Stock Banker in 1856, at a time when the parliament was passing legislation designed to regulate and buoy up corporate capitalism. There were countless literary characters engaging in speculation, mostly failed, from the father of the Rivers cousins in Jane Eyre to Deborah Jenkyns in Cranford to Thornton’s father in North and South. There were bankers as main characters such as Merdle in Little Dorrit and the Newcomes in The Newcomes, and, a few decades later, Bulstrode in Middlemarch and Melmotte in The Way We Live Now. 50 There is hardly a Victorian novel that is not about money, and hardly a Victorian novelist without some grasp of the operations of contemporary finance capitalism. The texts I deal with come from the late 1840s and the 1850s, and I have deliberately

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chosen this period to call attention to the profound interest of Victorian writers in a different kind of condition-of-England debate than the one conventionally dominated by the question of the effects of industrialization. Coined by Arnold Toynbee in 1880, the term “industrial revolution” has often been attributed a great measure of explanatory power when it comes to studying 19th-century society and culture. Some economic historians on the other hand sought to bring into question the very idea that there was a revolution: Michael Veseth, for instance, preferred the term “industrial evolution” as a more appro-priate designation of the long and slow processes of structural change in the British economy and society, to which industrialization was only a contributing component. 51 For historians, one of the problems in assessing the impact of industrialization on 19th-century Britain has traditionally been a widely held perception that in the second part of the century Victorian Britain (or rather its industrial economy) “failed,” as Veseth puts it—that is, that it started to lag behind its then competitors, the United States and Germany. The problem involved difficult questions about the relationship between industrialization and capitalism, and generally about theorizing capitalism as a historical formation. For instance, it is relatively persuasive to argue with E.J.Hobsbawm that Britain’s slowing down in the last third of the 19th century had to do with its failing to compete in the second stage of industrialization (1840–1895), 52 the one which involved targeted search for new technologies and concentration into large, often monopolistic enterprises, while the British industrial economy still rested on smaller-size companies which did not invest into technological innovation, and which received no favored status from the state, or simply put, no protection ism. Already Dickens registered the governmental neglect of British research and development potentials in Little Dorrit. But while Britain’s industrial economy started to flag as the 19th century drew to a close, Britain’s capitalist economy overall did not: this is the era in which London is commonly seen as the banker of the world. No longer leading the world in coal or steel output, Britain was now the leading provider of global financial services, thus continuing to play a major role in the global economy, in no small way aided by its formal and informal imperialism. On a long perspective, the industrial “revolution” thus appears less a turning point than an episode in the development of British capitalism (and an episode which, as Nairn argued, was supervised by a patrician elite). Finance capitalism had been one of the resources of British global power ever since England and then Britain started to vie for world dominance, and even though economic historians sometimes entertain the view that British finance was not deeply involved in supporting British industry, 53 it is hardly imaginable that the industrial revolution could have happened the way it did without a preexisting environment of relatively structured financial business. The early stages of capital accumulation in the history of English capitalism had to do with the economies of imperial conquest and trade as well as with the emergence of a qualitatively new style of finance capitalism. During the financial revolution at the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century, Britain had invented and deployed a whole new array of financial practices and institutions, including joint-stock corporations, national debt, and a central national (though private) bank—the Bank of England; in addition, it further developed the already existing ones such as the stock exchange and the insurance business. 54 As Giovanni Arrighi succinctly commented on the relationship between

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finance and industrial capitalism in British history, “England’s role as the clearing house of the world-economy preceded and outlasted its role as the ‘workshop of the world.’” 55 It is therefore not exactly accurate to say that at the end of the 19th century England lost the role of the workshop of the world and replaced it with the role of the banker of the world. Rather, in the last third of the 19th century England lost its position as the global industrial superpower but retained (and even strengthened for a while) its position as the global financial superpower, the role that it had already began to play since much earlier than the industrial revolution. Just as British finance capitalism played a decisive role in the long period of wars with France from the 1690s to 1815, so it did in the long period of relative peace from 1815 to 1914. Let me also add that Arrighi brought into focus the centrality of finance capitalism for the understanding of capitalist world systems over the past 500 years (the period spanning the history of global capitalism in his account). Trying to explain the succession of different cycles of global capitalist dominance and capital accumulation (which he identifies as the Genoese, Dutch, British, and the US cycles of accumulation), Arrighi posits a dialectic of alternation between periods of “material expansion” and periods of “financial expansion,” with the current global power as a rule financing the rise of its successor. To simplify his schematic, the “typical” rise to global economic dominance thus involves a stage of borrowing capital, a stage of material expansion, and a stage of lending capital, which, according to Arrighi is also the end of one cycle and the beginning of another. In other words, it is obvious that the dual dynamic of expansion in Arrighi’s accumulation cycles (material/financial) is in fact a triadic one (financial/material/financial), and that finance capital is the driving force of it. (As for the original resources for that process, Arrighi stresses that world-system analysis should take into account that the initial expansion of finance in Western Europe had a good deal to do with the proceeds of early imperialist expansion). While the question of patterns of “recurrence and evolution” that Arrighi sought to establish between the different accumulation cycles requires a much more extensive world-system analysis than can be attempted here, suffice it to say that his notion of historical capitalism is a useful deviation from the traditional historical accounts privileging the role of industrial capitalism. Following Fernand Braudel, Arrighi argues that “the essential feature of historical capitalism over its longue durée—that is, over its entire lifetime—has been the ‘flexibility’ and ‘eclecticism’ of capital rather than the concrete forms assumed by [it] at different places and at different times.” 56 While in certain periods capital seems to “specialize,” such as during the industrial revolution, such specialization does not represent its true or mature manifestation. But while the insistence of worldsystem historians such as Arrighi on the long history of finance capitalism is very useful for the understanding of the adaptability and eclecticism of capitalism in general, the economic history of Britain has to be regarded as a unique development for at least one reason—for inventing and developing much of the modern infrastmcture of finance capitalism. The fascination that finance capitalism held for Victorian novelists was caused by several factors. Finance capitalism was certainly not a new event in the 19th century— since the end of the 17th century it was a very important aspect of the British economy. One thing that was new, however, was the scale on which not a few but many were involved in the operations of finance capitalism. The consolidation of Britain’s position

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as the world’s leading imperial, mercantile, financial, and industrial power in the first half of the 19th century was accompanied by a feverish culture of speculation, and several speculation manias swept across Britain in the 1830s and the 1840s. Again, speculation manias were not a new thing—the early 18th-century disaster known as the South Sea Bubble remained a point of reference in the 19th century as well. However, in the 19th century speculation became a mass experience for the middle classes. At the beginning of the 18th century speculation flourished in the City of London, but the number of people involved in speculation was still relatively small in comparison. More importantly, the speculation manias at the time were fueled not so much by a history of success, or by economic expertise, or by the promise of some great technological advance. The main driving force, to simplify things maybe too crudely but necessarily, was the new availability of a network of instruments of finance capitalism (banking, joint-stock companies, insurance, stock exchange, etc.), providing more avenues and safeguards for investment of disposable capital. The situation at the beginning of the 19th century was very different. The British economy at that time had a long history of expansion, its share of world trade and manufacture had been continually growing, and industrialization, and the railways in particular, presented the lure of investment in new, revolutionary, and potentially highly lucrative technologies. The institutions and practices of finance capitalism were now much older and much-tested; they were more regulated than before, and they were still being regulated. The state of company law received some legislative attention in a series of acts beginning in 1825, and perhaps the culmination of that legislative history was the Joint-Stock Companies Act of 1856, which introduced limited liability. There were cyclical crises, and panics regularly followed manias, but the level of confidence in the overall strength of the economy obviously outweighed the risks of speculation. In the first half of the 19th century anyone with disposable capital was a potential speculator. In practice that meant the growing “middle classes,” but also some members of “labor aristocracy,” the better paid among the working classes. The amount of disposable capital was not so much of an issue, given the existence of joint stock companies that could attract small investors as well as large. Simultaneously, the practice of speculation was now more in the spotlight because of a new moral offensive by the middle classes. Countless novels tirelessly repeated the same story: that self-reliance is the prime virtue. This was an old ethos, entertained already by medieval town-dwellers who opposed the aristocratic definition of social prestige, conventionally defined as gentle birth. In the 19th century, middle-class ideology of industry and frugality was still defined in contrast to inherited, landed wealth, and it was not uncommon in the early part of the century to lump together very different social groups into the category of “industrious classes” (and sometimes even “working classes”), meaning everyone who worked for a living. The ethic of industry proposed that there were two kinds of wealth, one of which is effortless and inherited, and the other hard-won by some great investment of personal effort. In addition, there had circulated for a long time a variety of Protestant ethics that underscored a connection between personal effort and material wealth. In light of such religious and moral emphasis on selfhelp, finance capitalism proved itself a thing resistant to ideological digestion. Speculation, above all, had little to do with effort, and a great deal to do with luck, which indeed is the main reason why speculators in mid-Victorian novels are invariably meted

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out the poetic justice of failing. Having them succeed would have meant sending the wrong moral message and renouncing the ideology of self-help. Not to mention that the ideology of self-help was also an important ideological mechanism of toning down social conflicts, because believing in it meant also believing that a poor mill worker could pull himself or herself out of poverty by the bootstraps. Encouraging speculation would thus have seemed to compromise the position of the middle classes towards the classes both below and above. Another reason for the topicality of finance capitalism in the first half of the 19th century has to do with the widespread perception of mid-Victorian novelists that Britain now functioned as an anonymous mass society based on economies of credit. The spectacle of industrialization and the series of speculation manias spurred by it did not raise only ethical questions about work and wealth, but also questions about the structure of a modernizing society, and especially the role of credit in it. As the forces of modernization were turning British society into an increasingly complex, interdependent and abstract modern society, fantasies of knowable communities as a form of resistance to modernization were occasionally dramatized in British novels. For instance, in Gaskell’s Cranford the central narrative conflict is between the knowable local economies of deference in a small-town “genteel society” and the imposing global economies of capitalism, which the ladies of Cranford prove incapable of mapping. The story of Matty Jenkyns is in fact the story of obliviousness to the functioning of British capitalism (much as Gaskell adds an interesting perspective that Matty’s, and by implication Cranford’s, social capital remains an economic resource for her and her class). In spite of her sympathetic portrayal of the eccentric parochial society, Gaskell’s novel functions as a satire that points out the underwriting of such fantasies of desistence from modernization by the twin effects of British capitalism and imperialism. Similarly, Thackeray’s Colonel Newcome can be read as a Quixotic capitalist whose main failure is trusting his business associates too much, to the point of actually disregarding the fact that finance capitalism operates on trust and confidence that are as fragile as they are necessary. In his feud with Barnes Newcome, he fails to effectively recog nize that social capital constitutes a large part of the credibility of finance capital. Finance capitalism was from its inception based on a relationship of trust—one entering into a transaction of, for instance, purchasing stock has to entertain the simple belief that one will not be bilked out of one’s investment. There is always the possibility of fraud that comes with part ownership. But by definition, an investor assumes by the act of investing that his or her money is entrusted to perhaps an unknowable, but a dependable community of other participants in the investment. Norman Russell mentions in passing in his The Novelist and Mammon that credit was “the prime mover of commerce,” 57 citing the widespread use of bills of exchange and checks as methods of deferred payment that underwrote the Victorian economy. At a time when transport and communications were slow but commerce global, such financial mechanisms proved indispensable for conducting trade. However, finance capitalism presupposes a broader sense of credit that goes beyond deferred payment. A purely economistic argument could be made that any money economy presupposes trust in the value of money, or moreover, that any financial transaction presupposes trust in the economic-institutional network supporting such transactions. But with the latter proposition the concept of credit ceases

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to be purely economic, because it can only be defined in relation to the whole network of institutions and phenomena that constitute modern society. As Anthony Giddens suggested in The Consequences of Modernity, it is necessary to regard trust as a fundamentally modern category: “the nature of modern institutions is deeply bound up with the mechanisms of trust in abstract systems,” 58 and by abstract systems Giddens means “symbolic tokens and expert systems” that serve to manage social relations across indefinite spans of time and space, among which the tokens and systems of finance capitalism clearly belong. Different observers drew different conclusions from the fundamental dependence of finance capitalism on trust—Thomas Paine for instance predicted at the turn of the 19th century a speedy breakdown of what he saw as the mirage of paper money; T.B.Macaulay regarded the economy of credit as the great engine of British development. Unlike Paine, who sought to make a case with the exactness of mathematical proof that paper money is worthless, Macaulay realized that finance capitalism represents a measure of a society’s confidence in itself, a sort of credit feeding on credit. At the same stroke, Macaulay claimed that this economic relationship of credit could not function without trust in British social and political institutions. It required a dependable society. And that was a major source of anxiety for Victorian novelists—can the unknowable modern mass society based on a credit economy be dependable? What can be done to make it more dependable? What makes and unmakes the social capital of finance capital? What generates embezzlement and fraud? Are there any clear criteria for distinguishing between different forms of wealth acquisition and of capital? And finally, what is the impact and place of an industrial economy in a society obsessed with speculation—the period under study in this book, the 1840s and 1850s, coincides with the end of the first industrial revolution, when questions about the reach of industrial change begin to be voiced. These are the central questions of Dickens’s social analysis. Carlyle, Ruskin and many other social critics of the day looked back with great nostalgia to the monasteries and guilds of the Middle Ages, believing that modern society could be refashioned after such knowable communities, and that their values of solidarity and respect for labor could be restored. Dickens paid more than lip service to Carlyle’s gospel of work. The new partnership between Clennam and Doyle at the end of Little Dorrit, formed after Clennam’s disastrous decision to speculate, is meant to extol the virtues of industry and industrialization, in contrast to the moral pits of speculation and finance capitalism. Dickens thus reframed Carlyle’s opposition between Mammon and work as an opposition between finance capitalism and industrialization. But it would be wrong to assume that Dickens rejected finance capitalism in a wholesale fashion (after all, he invested in the stock market himself). By putting the banker Merdle in the spotlight, Dickens presented the practices of finance capitalism as a moral and political drama, and Merdle ultimately appears as much a crook as himself a victim of a specific social and political regime. In A Tale of Two Cities Dickens sought to create a positive role model for bankers—Lorry appears as an agent of benevolent social paternalism that does not exclude good business sense. In a society that was no longer knowable and transparent, Dickens implied that the best that can be done was to cultivate the values of hard work and benevolent paternalism.

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Which brings me to the third important moment in the mid-Victorian fascination with finance capitalism that I want to highlight—the uncertain and contested class position of finance capitalists as a Victorian narrative dynamo. Finance capitalism had had a more or less visible and more or less immediate impact on society since the financial revolution of the end of the 17th century. It seemed to be able to affect and restructure some very entrenched relations of power. It became indispensable to the British state and the legislative apparatus worked diligently to accommodate and supervise the development of British finance capitalism. It also became indispensable to the governing classes that provided the personnel of the state, which meant that the doors to the institutions of power were kept ajar to influential financiers. The cooper ation between the patrician politician and the influential financier in the early 18th century was the foundation of the emergence of what Cain and Hopkins call gentlemanly capitalism in the 19th century, a specific culture of both governance and capitalism. But the wealthiest players in the world of finance were not the only ones affected by the development of finance. The fortunes of many who had any measure of disposable capital were made or lost in banking and speculation, causing rapid bumps up or down the social ladder, which entailed all kinds of difficult questions about class identity. In a society so profoundly structured by a class hierarchy and its attendant forms of class mobility, it is less than surprising that the typical novelistic hero is most often caught between classes—orphans and children of impoverished middle-class parents, governesses, bankers, and (less often) writers and artists. The drama of class was the ultimate Victorian narrative mover. Financiers and speculators in Victorian fiction roughly fall into four categories, both foregrounding the issue of social mobility and the class system in general. The first type is characterized by social climbing over several generations, and a good example is the Newcome family of the eponymous Thackeray novel. The second figure is the imprudent and gullible speculator who seeks to increase the wealth of his family and/or his friends but ruins them instead, either on the outskirts of the main narrative (for example, Thornton’s father in North and South), or as a protagonist (like Deborah Jenkyns in Cranford or Clennam in Little Dorrit). The third figure is the naïve small investor who unquestioningly or even unconsciously rides the coattails of other speculators (such as Matty Jenkyns in Cranford or any number of characters in Little Dorrit). The fourth figure is the upstart financier (such as Merdle in Little Dorrit or Rummun Loll and Colonel Newcome in The Newcomes), whose grand schemes attract a mass of speculators but whose wealth is always presented as mysterious and suspect. The stories told about these characters of social striving are varied to an extent, but they all foreground some of the main features of the British class system— hierarchy, social mobility, co-optation, snobbism, etc. In short, discrepancies between economic and social capital are a major wellspring of narrative conflict in Victorian fiction, which allowed mid-Victorian novelists to bring into focus the entire British class system with particular clarity. In some of the narratives, including Dickens’s Little Dorrit and Thackeray’s The Newcomes, finance capital is represented as the crux of the class system, and even the main component in the social construction of Englishness. There exists a hardly contestable commonplace that mid-Victorian novelists and their audiences shared in principle the same values about things in general. That does not mean that all the novelists thought and wrote the same way. Rather, they viewed and used

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literature as a forum for conducting a conversation with their audiences about those things in a modernizing society that they thought needed to be changed. After Pickwick, the novel functioned as a genre with specific social commitments to the idea of reform, and the novelists were public figures with a substantial amount of symbolic capital that demanded and were accorded attention. This book makes a simple point: that midVictorian novelists used their social authority to present middle-class critiques of the contemporary class system, and that finance capitalism was featured in their work as the most problematic area of middle-class social identity. The texts I examine are chosen for a particular reason—because they tell with great force the story about these issues in mid-Victorian Britain that I wish to highlight—the story of middle-class amazement at the persistence of a neopatrician power system. Some of these texts are structured as pseudo-analytical or even ethnographic expositions, and my purpose in reading them is to bring out the methods and goals of their social analysis. One of these narratives is a historiographic text (Macaulay), in which the central narrative place in English constitutional history is given to the birth of finance capitalism. Certainly other texts could have been chosen or added to this group, but my intention was not so much to exhaust this topic as to show its centrality for students of Victorian culture. However, I did want to focus on some areas of interest that I think more important than others: finance capital and British constitutionalism in the chapter on Macaulay’s History of England, the pannational spread of the neopatrician culture of prestige and the Dickens moment (Gaskell’s Cranford), the issue of the symbolic authority of the artist in the context of negotiations between middle-class economic capital and patrician social capital in Thackeray’s The Newcomes, and the place of finance capital in Dickens’s project of reinventing an autonomous middle-class public sphere in Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities. In the first chapter, “A Historian in the Literary Marketplace: T.B. Macaulay, the English Constitution, and Finance Capitalism,” I read Macaulay’s History of England as a text in English constitutional history. Reading Macaulay’s History against conservative interpretations of English constitutionalism (such as Disraeli’s Vindication of the English Constitution), I examine the originary significance that Macaulay gave to the Revolution of 1688, which he saw as both in harmony with the constitution and as a constitutional improvement—and he attributed a big part of that improvement to the financial revolution of the 1690s, which aligned the interests of the government and the interests of capitalists. Macaulay did not just defend the idea of constitutionalism against conservative interpretations; he also strove to write the middle classes as the prime agents of capitalism into the center of recent English history through a celebration of the national brand of finance capitalism, and, somewhat paradoxically, a celebration of the national debt as a measure of popular confidence in English capitalism and the English constitution. In the second chapter, “Gentility, Capitalism, and Mapping the Nation in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford,” I examine the interplay between an “ethnography” of provincial gentility and a historical narrative about (different speeds of) modernization in Cranford. The novel charts out a complex political geography, encompassing a triangular relationship among the industrial north, the metropolitan south with its political society, and the provincial culture of Cranford. Discussing the alliance of the parochial Cranford

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with the patrician state culture of the south rather than the industrialist culture of the north of England, I argue that as a historical narrative the novel attributes the success with which the provincial society desists from modernization to the vitality of the national class system and its Cranford interpretation. The third chapter is entitled “The Middle Class and the Novel in W.M. Thackeray’s The Newcomes.” The Newcomes is a sort of sequel to Thackeray’s neo-picaresque revival of the historical novel (in Henry Esmond) and his portrait of the literary world (in Pendennis). In The Newcomes Thackeray presented both an elaborate study of the middle class in the first half of the 19th century and a Künstlerroman set in the context of the contemporary British art scene, so that this novel can be seen as Thackeray’s most comprehensive portrait of the national middleclass culture. Examining the novel’s figuration of the relationship between class habitus and artistic possibility, class formation and artistic formation, I scrutinize in particular the narrative armature of The Newcomes. I read the novel as a cynical comment on the class habitus of the British middle class and a reluctant affirmation of the symbolic capital of art. The fourth chapter, “Banking on Sentiments: A Melodramatic Civil Society in Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities,” juxtaposes the politics of Dickens’s journalism in the 1850s and the melodramatic imagination in Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities. These texts functioned as vehicles for Dickens’s project of reinvigorating melodramatically the middle-class public sphere and remedying what he saw as a shortage of middle-class selfrespect. I read Little Dorrit as a cautionary tale about speculation and about the class alliance of the patrician elite and finance capital, and A Tale of Two Cities as a rhetorical overview by Dickens of the methods of both his literature and social reformism. Discussing the novel’s comparison of 18th-century England and France in the novel, I focus on the centrality of (English) finance capital. I argue that the novel dramatizes a melodramatic concurrence between the two private realms of middleclass civil society— the family and the marketplace. In this concurrence Dickens saw his main resource for mobilizing middle-class opinion against patrician dominance.

Chapter One A Historian in the Literary Marketplace: T.B.Macaulay, the English Constitution, and Finance Capitalism It may be desirable to add a few words touching the way in which the system of funding has affected the interests of the great commonwealth of nations. If it be true that whatever gives to intelligence an advantage over brute force and to honesty and advantage over dishonesty has a tendency to promote the happiness and virtue of our race, it can scarcely be denied that, in the largest view, the effect of this system has been salutary. T.B.Macaulay, History of England (vol. III, 516).

MACAULAY’S HISTORY OF ENGLAND IS COMMONLY THOUGHT OF AS A popular history. Macaulay deliberately targeted a generalized middle-class audience by a language and a style of exposition that had often been admired for their popular and narrative qualities. He made no attempt in this work to advance an elaborate philosophy of history, or to reinvent the conventions of historiography, or to endorse a standard of disciplinary rigor (other than in the amount of research that went into the writing of the book). The work was supposed to achieve its effects primarily through the assumed narrative persuasiveness of English history itself, appealing to its readers as agents in that same narrative of great national prosperity and world domination that it purported to reconstruct. It is equally commonplace to recognize in Macaulay’s work a very important example of a Whig interpretation of history, or more specifically, a Whig interpretation of British constitutional history. History of England presents a national-constitutional narrative in which the accession of William III in 1688 is a historical watershed that represents the political triumph of the Whig cause in a manner that was both a preservation and improvement of the spirit of the English constitution. 1 My goal in this chapter is to discuss a largely ignored element of Macaulay’s constitutional theory—the role of finance capitalism in Macaulay’s understanding of the post-1688 national narrative. In the wake of 1688, suggests Macaulay, there emerges a ‘modern system’ for regulating the relationship between the government and finance capital, and this new arrangement assumes in Macaulay’s history the kind of farreaching importance consistent with his view of modern England as a ‘commercial country.’ Particularly deserving of attention is Macaulay’s account of the origin of national debt (1692) and the incorporation of the Bank of England (1694). These were important events in the juridical regulation of government borrowing, and Macaulay depicted them as constitutive of the

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post-1688 constitutional arrangement itself; indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that finance capitalism was in Macaulay’s view the linchpin of the English constitution itself in the country’s transition to the modern age. In these relatively brief passages in Macaulay’s work, the true heroes of modern English history are the institutions of finance capital. Macaulay lived in an era when the British middle class, having been rising for a few centuries, still only played second fiddle to the aristocracy, especially in terms of participation in institutional politics and the personnel of government. Much as Macaulay’s political career exemplified a degree of social mobility within a class system defined by patrician privilege, he himself had occasion to ponder the limits to his political career posed by his lack of adequate social capital, finding it much easier to advance in the imperial administration than in metropolitan politics. Young Macaulay saw in the middle class the mainstay of national progress, but it would certainly be wrong to assume that his political inspiration or allegiance lay with middle-class radicalism that sought to challenge the patrician hegemony. Macaulay was a Whig, and the opposition between Whig and Tory, liberal and conservative around mid-19th century did not mean an opposition between middle-class and aristocratic. However, Macaulay’s Whig notions of gradual but continual progress in political freedom also meant that the rise in influence of the middle class had to make part of the national narrative, and it is therefore logical to expect him to play up the role of segments of the middle class in the events of 1688, even though the direct protagonists of those events were mostly parliamentary patricians. History of England was a phenomenal Victorian success, and a great print event that exemplified the great explosion of print culture around mid-century. The book had a slightly polemical tinge to it, as it dismissed the conservative view of English history such as the one articulated by Disraeli, but I could also say it had a slightingly polemical tinge, as it in the main avoided mentioning contemporary historiographers and polemicists who propounded the conservative view. Macaulay’s own view on the constitution ultimately hinged on the question of generating confidence in the constitution, and it is in that regard that he came to single out the defining role of finance capitalism in English constitutionalism as it developed after 1688. In fact, Macaulay projected an understanding of English history according to which the tension between the patrician elites and the middle classes is not seen as a disruptive tension. In addition, the middle classes are featured in his account as the cornerstone of both English constitutionalism and social progress. What I want to do in this chapter is focus on the popular appeal of the history based on its emphasis on narrative, examine the constitutional ideology of the book, and, finally, underscore the importance of finance capitalism (and of the Bank of England and the national debt in particular) to Macaulay’s interpretation of English history after 1688.

HISTORY AS NOVEL Macaulay designed his History to be competitive in the cultural marketplace dominated by novels. In a letter, he expressed hope that his History would “produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young

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ladies.” 2 Never losing sight of market success, Macaulay wanted to make the same kind of splash that he saw regularly accomplished by popular novelists of the day. The style of the History, which brought together breadth of learning with emphasis on narrative, was calculated to appeal to the middlebrow taste of audiences capable of appreciating the entertainment value as well as the moral and political implications of the work. Contemporary critics often praised Macaulay for the combination of serious subject matter and the persuasiveness of the packaging. The Edinburgh Review, for instance, extolled his “singular felicity of style,” asserting that “he is the first we think who has succeeded in giving to the realities of history (which is generally supposed to demand and require a certain grave austerity of style,) the lightness, variety, and attraction of a work designed only to amuse.” The work, the reviewer goes on, has a remarkable power of evocation: “We have pictured to ourselves the living and actual reality of men, and the times, and the actions he describes,—and close the volume as if a vast and glowing pageant had just past before our eyes.” 3 As Christina Crosby put it, “Macaulay set out to reclaim from the historical novel the narrative interest of fiction while writing history itself.” 4 Interestingly enough, in the only negative review of the first two volumes of Macaulay’s history, John Wilson Croker objected in the Tory Quarterly Review that Macaulay’s work was too much like a historical novel too much a romance in the manner of Walter Scott. In Croker’s view, the novelistic connection was a shortcoming: “Mr. Macaulay deals with history, evidently, as we think, in imitation of the novelists—his first object being always picturesque effect […] For this purpose he would not be very solicitous about contributing any substantial addition to history, strictly so called.” 5 One manner in which Macaulay claimed the narrative interest of the historical novel was through an expanded sense of the province of the historian. It is almost a truism to claim, after Georg Lukacs, that the founding gesture of the “historical novel,” say with Walter Scott, was the application of the realist idea to the representation of the past. Macaulay’s own definition of the proper subject matter of historiography approximates an aesthetic of narrative realism. The historian, Macaulay argued, should not fixate exclusively on a particular subject, but rather attempt to review the totality of social life: I should very imperfectly execute the task which I have undertaken if I were merely to treat of battles and sieges, of the rise and fall of administrations, of intrigues in the palace, and of debates in the parliament. It will be my endeavor to relate the history of the people as well as the history of the government, to trace the progress of useful and ornamental arts, to describe the rise of religious sects and the changes of literary taste, to portray the manners of successive generations, and not to pass by with neglect even the revolutions which have taken place in dress, furniture, repasts and public amusements. I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history, if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors. 6 The panoramic movement of the historian’s eye—the suggestion that “a true picture” of history necessitates a representation of the multifariousness of life, resembles, if only superficially, the stance of panoramic authorial narration often found in contemporary

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novels. Macaulay politely rejects the old precepts about the “dignity of history” (which focused on the history of high politics, and which will be similarly rejected by Thackeray in Henry Esmond). Moreover, the attention to the everyday and the routine, traditionally a more likely business of novelists than historians, to Macaulay’s mind enlarges rather than degrades the true mission of historiography. The subject of novelistic writing, by implication, becomes incorporated into this new understanding of historiography’s proper subject. Equally important in Macaulay’s understanding of the province of history is the underlying assumption that the proper idiom of the historian is a non-expert one, or at least one that in its melange of various idioms can count on the same kind of broad appeal as that enjoyed by contemporary literature. As a reviewer observed, Macaulay’s discourse was “epigrammatic,” 7 a good description of the mode of commentary Macaulay attaches to his accounts. In place of expert jargon, Macaulay employed a style that moves with great swiftness from subject to subject as they come along in the course of events described, amassing commentary in a scattered heap of pithily encapsulated positions and assessments—with the thematic flexibility and randomness that is customarily associated with authorial narration in novelistic discourse. At times, a more rigorous analysis, such as the one of the new finance system, breaks out of this mold of rapidly shifting perspectives, but even then specialist jargon is toned down. It goes without saying that Macaulay’s animosity towards abstract reasoning and his preference for the empiricist method of demonstration found an adequate expression in this style with its vast panorama of induction. Equally, it is less than surprising that realistic literature, with its foregrounding of the variety of human experience, would appear to Macaulay as a mode of writing close to his idea of what historiography should be doing. The work of Macaulay the historian was still very much shaped by the ideas of young Macaulay the critic writing in 1828: “It may be laid down as a general rule, though subject to considerable qualifications and exceptions, that history begins in novel and ends in essay.” 8 In another piece from the same early period, he compared these two necessary ingredients of good history, the literary and the argumentative, or the novelistic and the essayistic, to the difference between a painted landscape and a map—one is imitative and imaginative, the other informative and orientative. 9 Young Macaulay was convinced that no great histories were written yet, and that there is a lamentable dissociation between the two strands of historical writing, taking as an example Walter Scott’s historical novels and Henry Hallam’s analytical Constitutional History. Sharp separation between these two kinds of discourses was for him evidence that This province of literature was a debatable land. It lies on the confines of two distinct territories. It is under the jurisdiction of two hostile powers; and, like other districts similarly situated, it is ill defined, ill cultivated, and ill regulated. Instead of being equally shared between its two rulers, the Reason and the Imagination, it falls alternately under the sole and absolute dominion of each. It is sometimes fiction. It is sometimes theory. 10 Far from welcoming the specialization of the two modes of historical discourse,

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Macaulay opposed their dissociation, at the same time seeing the two as subordinate to a broader concept of literature. Not only should history be in part like a novel: it is already understood as a genre of literature. When Macaulay was later praised for his “contribution to our literature,” 11 this was possible on account of both his “literary” style and this broad understanding of literature as print culture. In a very material sense, the assumption of the unity of the literary marketplace was routinely made by the midVictorian writers. With the arrival of Dickens, the prestige of the novel rose rapidly on the literary market; still, the novelist’s economic and symbolic capital was maintained by a much more varied practice of writing. Dickens and Thackeray were professional writers (and not just novelists) whose income depended solely on writing (and not just of novels). They were men-of-letters who dabbled in a variety of matters of interest to the general (middle-class) public. The emergence of the professional writer as celebrity in the 1840s seemed to reinforce even further the old understanding of literature as any practice of enlightened debate in print. The professional writer and the cultural marketplace supporting it worked to shape the public sphere less as a space regimented by disciplinary boundaries than as one where universally appealing discourse could widely circulate. As the spectacular sales of the History show, Macaulay’s attempt to anchor historiography in literature and the novel made for a remarkably successful marketing strategy. Finally, Macaulay’s claiming the literary connection as the indispensable part of historiography had a very specific purpose in his view of the history of England. He maintained that English literature was “the most splendid and the most durable of the many glories of England” (I, 13). In Macaulay’s supergeneric understanding of literature, national literature was conceived as broadly coincidental with the arena of free debate and thus a fundamental instrument of the progress of ‘civilization’ in England, and Macaulay’s own practice as a writer and a politician was strongly informed by such a view on the relationship between extra-institutional print and institutional politics. His opposition to the specialization of historiographic discourse precluded having an interest in historiography as an academic profession or a disciplinary language. It is likely that he saw expert historiography as having an appeal too marginal under the new conditions of the print marketplace. Instead, he sought cultural validation of his historical narrative by allying himself with the cultural prestige of the marketable “literary” domain. This imaginative/essayistic notion of historiography clearly informed the style of Macaulay’s exposition. On the one hand, there is no separate place in the book where his theory of history would be elaborated in its own right; on the other hand, there is a hyperproduction of narrative. The book does not have a formal thematic organization— not even a simple chronological breakdown (the chapters are rather measures of space than indications of any systematic elaboration of a given subject). The four volumes of the book read like a story into which the readers plunge from page one, without extensive preparatory orientation on how to read the text to follow. In the first couple of pages, we find, in terse form, statements of the outline of the history and its main subjects. Straight from this introduction, which is less than four pages long, Macaulay proceeds to treat Roman Britain. In the brief introduction, Macaulay repeatedly refers to his book as a narrative, thus reminding his readers about the centrality of the storytelling properties of the work rather than its analytical, systematizing or theoretical properties. It would seem that the book had been written in a barren disciplinary context, since there is no explicit

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mention of any other historiographic texts in the introduction—in fact, no mention of any other texts at all. 12 The pose that Macaulay strikes is that of a storyteller who stumbled upon virtually uncharted territory, and is now reporting on his extensive findings in the field and arranging them into a particular narrative in such a way as to address the audience in what Pierre Bourdieu would call the field of large-scale pro-duction. The interest of this middlebrow audience in the subject matter is piqued by an appeal to established qualities of the “literary” rather than the less widely appealing qualities of a disciplinary or a professional discourse. We should at this juncture not lose sight of the fact, to which Hayden White was the one to allude the most vocally, that historiography is always a narrative. Historiography shares the element of narrative with fiction. Of course, not even Croker, who accused Macaulay of too much fiction, did deny that history and the novel are related through narrative; his objection was that in Macaulay’s book there was an imbalance between the two. At any rate, the fact that Macaulay’s narrative style drew both praise and criticism is evidence to the conspicuousness of what was widely regarded as “literary” qualities of his work, but also to the underlying question of respective cultural prestige of novels and historiographies. Regarding this, Macaulay’s use of narrative may be seen as more than just a matter of historiographic style—claiming the authority of narrative was an important vehicle in Macaulay’s project of putting forward a rhetorically and didactically effective story of the nation. If his idiom in the book is not that of the specialist but of a popular narrator, it is not too much of a stretch to ascribe this strategy of appeal to Macaulay’s alertness to a type of public validation that he could have observed in the consumption of popular novels—and which involved the principles of public approbation and free competition in the marketplace. 13 As for methodology, Macaulay had a general distaste for abstract reasoning, and he saw himself as rooted in the empiricist tradition that relied on inductive reasoning as its fundamental method. In an early essay that discussed James Mill’s utilitarian theory of government, Macaulay addressed the question of how “the Science of Politics” should proceed in making its conclusions: Surely by that method, which, in every experimental science to which it has been applied, has signally increased the power and knowledge of our species […]—by the method of Induction;—by observing the present state of the world,—by assiduously studying the history of past ages,—by shifting the evidence of facts,—by carefully combining and contrasting those which are authentic,—by generalizing with judgment and diffidence,—by perpetually bringing the theory which we have constructed to the test of new facts,—by correcting, or altogether abandoning it, as these new facts prove it to be partially or fundamentally unsound. 14 This explains, at least in part, the fact that History of England almost immediately launches straight into narrative and that no attempt is ever made in the book to systematize something like the philosophy of history or even discuss the method of presentation and analysis. There is no place for a statement of deductive principle. Rather, the book is designed to unfold as a gradual and comprehensive preparation for the

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portrait of an age. Macaulay’s preference for inductive reasoning informed the very structural properties of his exposition. It also reflected his position that realistic narrative is an important vehicle of historiography. 15 It is as if Macaulay wanted to have the story itself to be the message, or at least as if the story had to make its own meaning clear, without too much help from an excessively doctrinal or disciplinary language. The story his History was to tell was the story of national progress, as slow and gradual as the inductive method is. That Macaulay trusted the narrative part of his history to be the main vehicle of meaning is indeed an exaggeration, for any reader of his History will easily find many moments in his text where the point is in the particular interpretation of an event, rather than in the act of its recounting. But it is a useful exaggeration, inasmuch as it foregrounds the importance of the novelistic connection as part of the specific ideology of Macaulay’s History. He believed that one of the greatest challenges of his historiographic exposition is in putting together miscellaneous pieces from the manifold walks of social life to present “the English of the nineteenth century with a true picture of the life of their ancestors” (I, 3). This true picture in turn was meant as a historical-narrative corollary to the constitutional success of the English polity as Macaulay saw it.

MACAULAY’S NARRATIVE OF CONSTITUTIONAL PROGRESS It is of course a commonplace to observe that historically England did not have a written constitution. Some, like Thomas Paine, even disputed that England had a constitution at all, lamenting over “the superstition of the country with respect to a nominal non-existing thing which is called a constitution.” 16 The fact of the constitutional matter is that there were a number of legal documents in writing (for instance, the Magna Charta or the Act of Settlement or the Reform Act of 1832, etc), which were not declaratively compiled into a single constitutional text but which crucially determined the character of the political-institutional framework in England and Great Britain. As Hallam’s constitutional history shows, the term “constitution” was routinely used in the 19th century to describe that institutional framework. In fact, the historically more recent meaning of the supreme written law of a country was derived from the earlier meaning of constitution as political arrangement, which, however, had remained in use in Great Britain. The fact that the British constitution was not a single document, and the fact that it was frequently modified by acts of Parliament, facilitated extensive public debates over what represented the true spirit of the constitution. In mid-19th century, constitutional history became a very lively and very contested area of historiographic writing, and Disraeli’s Vindication of the English Constitution was only one of several texts enjoining the battle over constitutional definition. 17 Walter Bagehot, a constitutional commentator later in the century, observed that “[t]he difficulty” in trying to describe “a living Constitution […] is that the object is in constant change.” 18 Often in change in the century, and its spirit often in dispute. After the Reform Bill of 1832, which seemed to tilt the balance of political power in favor of the Whigs, Disraeli composed a number of political essays and political novels in which he propagated the view that 1832 was not true to the spirit of the constitution, and attempted to show that this aberration had a long

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prehistory, begun with the establishment in power of the Whigs following the events of 1688. For Disraeli the Tory party represented what he believed were the true constitutional interests of the entire nation, and in his idiom this representation became a relation of complete identity: “the Tory party—that is, the English nation.” 19 (In the 1830s Disraeli first rehearsed the idea of reforming the Tory party and renaming it National party.) On the other hand, in Disraeli’s mind the Whigs, whom he sometimes referred to as the antinational party, were all about establishing a small oligarchy: “I do not wish the country to be governed by a small knot of great families, and therefore I oppose the Whigs.” 20 The Whiggish, or “Venetian” constitution as he sometimes called it, established in England with the revolution of 1688, had as a consequence the disempowerment of the two legitimate sources of political sovereignty in Disraeli’s political philosophy, the crown and the people, and facilitated the split of Britain into what he called the two nations. 21 Recent national history was thus marked in Disraeli’s account by a series of constitutional coups by the Whigs, so that the Tories are called upon to restore some presumably original constitutional arrangement (in practice meaning the one most favorable to their interests). Disraeli regarded the English constitution as the best of all existing constitutions, and at the same time continually threatened by corruption. Macaulay unquestionably shared the first part of that belief, but not the second one. The interpretation that the present condition of England was somehow caught in a constitutional deviation was not very appealing to Macaulay, whose view was that the state of the country was being continually improved, especially after 1688: The history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement. Those who compare the age on which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in their imagination may talk of degeneracy and decay: but no man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present. (I, 2) There is little direct evidence that Macaulay intended to respond to Disraeli’s history that all that is wrong with England can be traced to the events of 1688, but he obviously wrote in sharp contrast to constitutional pessimists and conservatives like Disraeli, and his view of English history was assuredly optimistic, if not downright triumphalistic on occasion. The period of which he intended to write began with the revolution of 1680s, which is where an older Tory history stops—the one by David Hume published from 1754 to 1761. In contrast to Hume, and later Disraeli, Macaulay saw the events of 1688 as the preservation and improvement of the constitution. The period that started with the dethronement of the Stuarts and ended with the second unsuccessful Jacobite rebellion had a special significance for history-writing in the 19th century. Both the historical novel and history in the 19th century were drawn to what they felt was the end of the old era or a beginning of the modern one. The first classical historical novel of Scott occupies itself with the symbolic end of the struggles over the right divine—the second Jacobite rebellion. Waverley is set in the time of the last gasps of the right divine and in the

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geography where the older power regimes (the absolute monarch as well as the clan society of the Highlands) are dealt the final defeat by the new regime of things political; the subject of the historical novel is thus defined as the period in which the old made its last desperate stand against the new. 22 Macaulay published his celebration of the Whig cause 30 years after Waverley, but still within the same paradigm of locating the beginning of the modern period in the defeat of the right divine. In addition, another classical historical narrative of the 1850s, Thackeray’s Henry Esmond, which couched its historical description in an ironic mode, was set in the time of the first Jacobite rebellion. Although their generic predilections were quite different, Scott, Macaulay and Thackeray all found the proper period of history-writing not in remote antiquity, but in recent history that still had appreciable bearing on the understanding of the present. Macaulay’s History is a fragment of the original plan. He died before he could finish his work, so that it never reached “down to a time which is within the memory of men still living,” as was Macaulay’s intention declared on the first page of the book. The History was meant to cover the period starting “from the accession of James II,” as advertised by the subtitle, but the four published volumes of the History principally discuss events that hardly span a fifteen-year period. Needless to say, the choice of this initial period and its meticulous rendition speak of the special significance that Macaulay wished to attach to it. The history of this brief period is stated to be the history of the moment when one era came to an end, and a new, the present one, began: I shall trace the course of that revolution which terminated the long struggle between our sovereigns and their parliaments, and bound up together the rights of the people and the title of the reigning dynasty. I shall relate how this new settlement was, during many troubled years, successfully defended against foreign and domestic enemies; how, under that settlement, the authority of law and the security of property were found to be compatible with a liberty of discussion and of individual action never before known; how from the auspicious union of order and freedom, sprang a prosperity of which the annals of human affairs have furnished no example; how our country, from a state of ignominious vassalage, rapidly rose to the place of umpire among European powers; how her opulence and her martial glory grew together; how, by wise and resolute good faith, was gradually established a public credit fruitful of marvels which to the statesmen of any former age would have been incredible; how a gigantic commerce gave birth to a maritime power, compared with which every other maritime power, ancient or modern, sinks into insignificance; how Scotland, after ages of enmity, was at length united to England, not merely by legal bonds, but by indissoluble ties of interest and affection; how, in America, the British colonies rapidly became far mightier and wealthier than the realms which Cortes and Pizarro had added to the dominions of Charles the Fifth; how in Asia, British adventurers founded an empire not less splendid and more durable than that of Alexander. (I, 1–2) True enough, not all of his purpose in writing the history is rendered in such tones of patriotic triumphalism—Macaulay promises also to detail two failures, of “imprudence

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and obstinacy” in North America, and of “domination of race over race, and religion over religion” in Ireland (I, 2). But the mood of this introduction is without a question celebratory, with the present condition of the country described in terms of unprecedented grandeur. It will easily be observed that the idiom of this passage is not inflected in any particularly expert or disciplinary way; rather, it is clad in a phraseological simplicity designed to appeal to popular sentiment. This is not to say, however, that the passage is without a singularly nuanced political purpose. The actual series of clauses describing the national splendor in fact makes for a catalog of political tenets which gestures towards a larger picture of the cataloger’s political and historical creed (with such buzz-words as authority of law, security of property, liberty of discussion and individual action, order and freedom, public credit, commerce, unionism, empire, etc.). The effect of all this cataloging is one of making a claim about the foundation of the national greatness that is being cataloged. On the other hand, in terms of its model of historical explanation it seems to me that this catalog is constructed in the way that after Hayden White could be characterized as contextualist. That is to say, no single foundational situation is singled out and credited as the cause for the national history to be described, even as it would seem that the “new settlement” of 1688 is ostensibly referenced as precisely one such foundational situation. Yet, the careful wording of the paragraph shows that the relationship between the highlighted developments—for example in the sphere of the law and in the sphere of public opinion—involved a logic of confluence and not causality. The same deemphasizing of linear causality in the catalog is even clearer when we look at the syntax of the sequence of national accomplishments—while all of them were reinforced by the settlement, they are marched before us as relatively independent developments that furnished parts without which the entire structure of achievements would have been unimaginable. In Hayden White’s Metahistory contextualism refers to a type of explanatory strategy about the historical field. The contextualist historian assumes that historical events can best be explained by “the specific relationships they bore to other events occurring in their circumambient historical space.” 23 This position is not radically relativistic (such as one that White calls formism) or foundationalist (as mechanicism or organicism); it is a functionalist position whereby historical events are interpreted in terms of their often complex functional interrelationships. An important implication of the contextualist argument is that the intelligibility of the subject of study derives from a perception of structural relationships that dominate a synchronically delineated moment or event in the passage of historical time. However, the emphasis on the synchronic approach logically raises the question of the conceptualization of historical process, transition or change— the question of how one synchrony succeeds another one. It could be asserted with Hayden White that the task of accounting for diachrony always potentially places the contextualist historian on the verge of adopting a different kind of metahistorical argument—”toward either a mechanistic reduction of the data in terms of the ‘timeless’ laws that are presumed to govern them or an Organicist synthesis of those data in terms of the ‘principles’ that are presumed to reveal the telos toward which the whole process is tending over the long haul.” 24 In other words, the contextualist is potentially always— whenever faced with the task of thinking through diachrony—on the verge of drifting into a deterministic argument or a teleological one. The middle road that White suggests

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is available to the contextualist historian is the narrative of development or evolution. This narrative will most often be couched in the language of what White calls “trends;” the term denotes a particular arrangement of forces that make up a specific historical field. As with all structural typologies, White’s metahistorical argument should be regarded as one that describes ideal types, with their hybrid forms most frequently found in actual productions of historical discourse. Nevertheless, with Macaulay the structure of the historical argument tends to be quite consistently contextualist and evolutionist, at least in his general understanding of his historical project. As has been already suggested above, the contextualist stance informs decisively the depiction of the “new settlement” as a historical event in Macaulay’s introductory remarks. The settlement is viewed as an event that “terminated” a long struggle between the monarchy and the Parliament—both the end of an older regime of things and the beginning of a new one. It is almost as if one long synchrony has been replaced by another synchrony, in a relatively short period of intense reorientation of the historical field. Once the new synchrony is established, there follows an evolution of the potentials and trends combined in and by the new political settlement. And this is not merely an evolution but also a progress, or, in Macaulay’s terms from the following page—an improvement. In White’s understanding contextualism is an explanatory model in terms of its ideological implication typically liberal in character. 25 It could be argued that contextualism in historical explanation necessarily entails a contextualist attitude in historical evaluation too, and that liberal ideology will most often view its own methods of evaluation as relational rather than essentialist Macaulay certainly believed his own evaluation methods were based on practicality and circumstance. He often announced that he does not subscribe to any general theory of society. Nevertheless, that does not mean that his actual political attitude was utterly relativistic. The method of his formal argumentation may be contextualist, and such is quite commonly his evaluative stance, but the structure of his prevalent political attitude is comparatively fixed. Macaulay demonstrably held a series of beliefs as to what constituted progress in civilization, and these in principle had to do with what Macaulay called the “science of government,” or progress in the actual techniques of civil government that he saw as interdependent with such contexts as security of property, authority of law, free trade, freedom of discussion, etc. When it came down to making important practical decisions, Macaulay commonly defined the purpose of government as maintaining the security of property—this is what he believed to be both the source and the goal of civil government. 26 On the other hand, he tended to judge the success of the actual forms of government primarily as a function of the degree to which they were suited to what Macaulay perceived as actual historical circumstances. Upon this view, some constitutional frameworks are presented as adapted to the advance of this definition of progress better than other ones. And conversely, there are constitutional arrangements for which this idea of progress may be considered as ideally the best one, but not contextually. Even the idea of the ideally best form of government, which Macaulay seldom discussed, is referred to as the one definable as best relative to a specific context, and not relative to an aprioristic theory of government. 27 Under Macaulay’s preference for the “science of government” (that is, for civil government in the British constitutional tradition), over any “theory of government,” the

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practical-evaluative basis for describing government (or stage of civilization) is the ability to best reform itself or best adapt to new circumstances. Needless to say, there was a considerable degree of snug anglocentrism in Macaulay’s thinking about progress in civilization or government: he occasionally referred to the current age in England as “an age of good government.” In a parliamentary speech made in 1842 in response to the People’s Charter, Macaulay asserted that England has “institutions which, though imperfect, yet contain […] within themselves the means of remedying every imperfection.” 28 In fact, the driving spirit of Macaulay’s History consists almost entirely in the assumption that the actual yardstick of progress was already imperfectly realized in the present state of English society, with its achievements in commerce and civil government. The progress of civilization in England has some-how come to generate itself by itself—free trade and f ree discussion under authoritative law should enable the gradual spreading of free trade and free discussion under authoritative law across the social domain, and, due to the imperial structure, even wider. Thus, in England the institutional arrangement that is contextually best is already understood as in tendency the ideally best arrangement. Some readers of Macaulay have deplored his pragmatism and what they found was a lack of coherent historical and political doctrine. The position has recently been made popular by commentators such as Joseph Hamburger, who criticized the pragmatism of Macaulay and branded him a trimmer first and a Whig second. 29 Of course, such a critique made sense only on the assumption that a “Whig” was a much more principled political creature than a “trimmer.” Rosemary Jann, the author of a book on Victorian historiography, emphasized Macaulay’s deliberate pragmatism in a similar manner: “Macaulay’s reductively pragmatic approach to historical laws effectively ruled out any absolute, political or moral. […] He favored not a consistent party line, but rather those forces that stabilized opposing political interests in order to achieve the balance necessary for prosperity and progress.” 30 Such assessments necessarily raise the issues of party ideology and Macaulay’s relationship to liberal doctrine. Without examining these issues too closely, suffice it to say that they are best discussed in the context of the shifting political designations of the era. In a study of liberal government in 19th century Britain, Jonathan Parry pointed to several difficulties in talking about 19th century British liberalism as a coherent movement, even in name, let alone in doctrine. The terms Whig and Liberal were used almost interchangeably in the first half of the century, and only in the late 1850s did the term Liberal begin to displace the older term Whig as the designation for the party. At times the terms Whigs and Radicals gained much currency to distinguish between the more conservative landed interest in the party and the more demanding middle-class interest that included a wide spectrum of positions gathered around religious toleration, free trade and parliamentary reform. There was no national party organization until approximately the 1860s, with MP discipline being especially hard to maintain in the 1840 and 1850s. The liberal governments of the two decades, under Russell and Palmerston, functioned primarily by forming alliances between various sections in the party around very specific issues. Party doctrine, Parry argues, was secondary to MP management in the parliament. What did then make possible a successful parliamentary management for the liberals, their very existence as a party, let alone their staying in power for the greater part of Victoria’s reign? In the main, it was a

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loose commitment to reform and a limited receptive ness to grass-roots movements, especially within the electorate—which was over the course of the century still variously defined by property. The Liberals responded to popular pressure for more extensive enfranchisement successfully avoiding popular discontent, but they did not do this with the fervor of democrats—after the three big parliamentary reforms, still “in 1890 Britain had almost the least democratic franchise in Europe.” 31 Still, the commitment to reform, however reluctant, allowed the liberals to advertise themselves as a party of inclusion, inviting the obvious contrast with the exclusivist Tories (which is what Tory populists like Disraeli tried to change). Parry argues that from the 1830s to the 1850s the Liberal party was in principle characterized by assumptions that were more pragmatic attitudes than results of a coherent doctrine: First, whereas the Conservative party was always essentially English, the Liberals were a British party, a genuinely unionist force committed to the integration of all parts of the United Kingdom. Secondly, whereas the Conservative party remained preoccupied with the defence of government authority, and innately suspicious of popular political activity, the Liberals were committed to open politics, anxious to demonstrate a willingness to respond to popular grievances. Third, whereas the Conservative party never broke free of landed influence, the Liberals were much happier with arguments drawn from political economy, arguments that stressed that different social groups had common, not clashing, economic interests. And fourth, where the Conservatives remained specifically an Anglican party, Liberals sought to rally public opinion behind a notion of religion as a broad, modern and essentially undogmatic creed, capable of speaking to and uniting the whole nation. 32 It is within such a delineation of these general impulses of contemporary political liberalism that Macaulay’s own doctrine and politics as a practicing politician and historian are best understood. Even as a historian, Macaulay wrote as someone who was mostly interested in the advance of the “science of government,” which means that his historical attitude was very likely to closely resemble the pragmatism of his political attitude. As a party writer, Macaulay consistently assumed the Liberal version of political inclusivity, which was one that cultivated caution and compromise. In general, he saw himself as the spokesman for the nation just as the Liberals saw themselves as a party of national toleration and integration. And just as the contemporary political liberalism saw itself paternally presiding over social reform that very conservatively approached extending the definition of the political nation, so was Macaulay mostly concerned with advocating this controlled process of change, much more than with a definition of abstract political or historical philosophies. Needless to say, Macaulay based his appeal both as a politician and a historian on claiming for himself the role of the defend er of the pragmatic spirit of English history.

THE UNIQUENESS OF ENGLISH CONSTITUTIONALISM There is a relative lack of concern for the issue of constitutional origins in Macaulay’s

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historical narrative. Formed in his political impulses by a high esteem for stable, legalistic, civil orders, Macaulay had little patience for the constitutional archeology of Saxon history, and in the Saxon period he found little precedent for the later constitutional arrangements. Moreover, he did not seek for the modest governmental achievements of early English history in indigenous traditions, but attributed them to Christianity, which he saw as the best institutional order under the circumstances of the early Middle Ages. It is much later, in the late 13th century and the early 14th century that “commences the history of the English nation” (I, 12). The period is loosely located in the aftermath of the Great Charter and of the separation of England from Normandy, and is again related in the recognizably contextualist spirit of delineating a synchronic cluster of developments that invokes a figuration less of cause than of coalescence, coincidence and compatibility: Then it was that the great English people was formed, that the national character began to exhibit those peculiarities which it has since retained, and that our fathers became emphatically islanders, islanders not merely in geographical position, but in their politics, their feelings, and their manners. Then first appeared with distinctness that constitution which has ever since, through all changes, preserved its identity; that constitution of which all the other free constitutions in the world are copies, and which, in spite of some defects, deserves to be regarded as the best under which any great society has ever yet existed during many ages. Then it was that the House of Commons, the archetype of all the representative assemblies which now meet, either in the old or the new world, held its first sittings. Then it was that the common law rose to the dignity of a science, and rapidly became a not unworthy rival of the imperial jurisprudence. Then it was that the courage of those sailors who manned the rude barks of the Cinque Ports first made the flag of England terrible on the seas. Then it was that the most ancient colleges which still exist at both the great national seats of learning were founded. Then was formed that language, less musical indeed than the languages of the South, but in force, in richness, in apti tude for all the highest purposes of the poet, the philosopher, and the orator, inferior to the tongue of Greece alone. Then too appeared the first faint dawn of that noble literature, the most splendid and the most durable of the many glories of England. (I, 13) In the passage Macaulay points to the simultaneous developments that he apparently believed had to do with both the formation of the nation as a body of people (emergence of a single national designation of English vs. Norman and Saxon, emergence of a single national language, stabilization of an insular territoriality), and the formation of a national character (founding of specific political institutions, consolidation of a specific legal order, founding of the universities, first signs of naval supremacy, birth of modern literature). Yet if this loosely delineated period of the 13th and the 14th centuries was the beginning of national history, the question necessarily presents itself of why Macaulay chose the later watershed of 1688 as the focus of the book. There are two implicitly suggested perspectives in which this question is handled in Macaulay’s book. One

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perspective focuses on the struggle between royal prerogative and Parliament as a specifically English model of political reform: while the House of Commons had its first sittings in the 13th century, it is only with the settlement of 1688 that the question of the constitution and government of the country was fully stabilized by terminating the struggle between royal prerogative and parliament. There is also a more complicated perspective that suggests that before the country’s history could be said to truly begin there had to be a cluster of specific preconditions that inform something like Macaulay’s view of modernity and that were absent in the earlier birth period—a generalized capitalist marketplace and competition, free discussion that can avail itself of print, ever improving infrastructure of communications, travel and commerce, and an overall momentum of progress discernible in all domains of social life. This then means that the struggle between royal prerogative and parliament could only have been terminated once such a cluster of prerequisites constituted itself as an ambience that can be drawn on. In Macaulay’s national-historical narrative, the events of 1688 represent emphatically the beginnings of national modernity (or modern nationhood), a certain understanding of modernity retroactively serving as the standard for evaluating the past. 1688 is to be singled out as central inasmuch as the present condition of the nation testifies to the soundness of the course taken then, just as the 13th century needed to be singled out because it was perceived to be in direct lineage with both 1688 and the mid-19th century. 33 When Macaulay claims that the English “constitution […] in spite of some defects, deserves to be regarded as the best under which any great society has ever yet existed during many ages,” he is in fact saying that it has the best track record, and that it continues to prove its effectiveness in the present. It is what the constitution means in the present that counts, a stance which evokes Macaulay’s stance that “no past event has any intrinsic importance,” 34 namely that the present gives the meaning to the past. This national present Macaulay thought decidedly started in 1688. Hayden White asserted that various metahistorical positions tend to differ, among other things, by the way they locate the ideal (or utopian) social condition in relation to the present. The liberal position in the 19th century, White argues, typically tends to place its utopia in a remote future, “so as to discourage any effort in the present to realize it precipitately, by ‘radical’ means.” 35 Instead, the liberal is in favor of “fine tunings” of the existing social institutions. Perhaps there is no shorter way of defining Macaulay’s political attitude than belief in “fine tuning.” Macaulay’s gradualism was informed by a more or less articulate under-standing that the subject of historical evolution is civilization itself. In the Saxon times this was the civilization centered around the Church of Rome, with its rudimentary forms of civil law; in mid-19th century, it is the civilization of England that is seen as enjoying a position of comparative influence and dominance. “Civilization” is the only notion in Macaulay that approximates the role of historical agency, but it is predictably difficult to find in his work anything resembling a very elaborate theory or definition of civilization. Or at least anything beyond the requirement of a congruence of the authority of law, individual rights and security of property: the congruence that in turn presupposes a view of modernity where these simultaneously emerge and reinforce one another. On the broad historical canvas spanning millennia, progress in principle means for Macaulay the progress of civilization—and he under-stood civilization not so much as a way of life or the totality

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of a social world, but a process through which a polity moves forward improving all of its institutions—the character of this process being always in Macaulay’s work defined in historically specific, contextualist terms. The march of civilization takes place almost unwittingly, to amalgamate an axiom out of the informing spirit of Macaulay’s letter, because civilization is nothing else if not this progress that generates itself. The most desirable pace of the march of civilization is one in which even revolutions are as gradual, conservative and peaceable as possible. Part of the uniqueness of English national history consisted in Macaulay’s view was that the revolution of 1688, while launching a new era and facilitating national greatness, was in its very execution observant of a sense of tradition: As our revolution was a vindication of ancient rights, so it was conducted with a strict attention to ancient formalities. In almost every word and act may be discerned a proud reverence for the past […] To us who have lived in the year 1848, it may seem almost an abuse of terms to call a proceeding, conducted with so much deliberation, so much sobriety, and with such minute attention to prescriptive etiquette, by the terrible name of Revolution. And yet this revolution, of all revolutions the least violent, has been of all revolutions the most beneficial. It finally decided the great question whether the popular element which had, ever since the age of Fitzwalter and De Montfort, been found in the English polity, should be destroyed by the monarchical element, or should be suffered to develop itself freely, and to become dominant. (II, 378–79) 36 Large sections of the History are dedicated to documenting, with minute attention that cannot be reproduced here, that the parliamentary discussions and resolutions surrounding William’s accession generally hinged on matters of precedent and legal formality by which the Whig leaders of the revolution attempted to validate both the rightfulness of William’s claim to the throne and the parliament’s supreme authority to decide such matters, as well as to arrange its future relationship with the crown. Of course, the very fact that the parliament was able to direct the whole affair was a powerful indication of legalistic continuity of the government and the constitution. Macaulay was very fond of the explanation that the revolution of 1688 proceeded as coolly and conservatively because a certain constitutional tradition had been in place facilitating this manner of constitutional change. 37 Revolutionist in spirit, the out-come of 1688 was not revolutionist in its comparably mild methods; it came on the tail of a long tradition that favored cultivation of compromise as the method of choice in political change. Another reason for Macaulay’s focus on the 17th century is that in the Middle Ages limited monarchy was not specific to England alone, but had existed in a variety of forms across the continent. Monarchic absolutism, he maintained, started developing across Europe in the 16th and the 17th centuries. Its strengthening was accompanied by the rise of standing armies whose existence created the power base of absolute monarchy, while it at the same time pushed the monarchs to try to raise taxes without the potentially annoying interference of the old parliamentary institutions. A critical junction had been

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reached at that point regarding the strengthening of despotism and the weakening of parliamentary bodies: ‘The policy which the parliamentary assemblies of Europe ought to have adopted was to take their stand firmly on their constitutional right to give or withhold money, and resolutely to refuse funds for the support of armies, till ample securities had been provided against despotism.” Macaulay continues: “This wise policy was followed in our country alone” (I, 32). All the major political events of the 17th century in England, from the Civil War to the accession of William III, are interpreted by Macaulay as scenes in the great drama by which the question of the possibility of absolutism was settled in England with finality, very much in contrast to the continent, which in his view remained facing the twin dangers of “despotism” and “anarchy” up to his own day. The peculiar character of this political settlement in England, offset by its sharp difference from the ascendancy of absolutism elsewhere in Europe, seems to define for Macaulay in essence the kind of historical landmark that he saw it as his task as a historian to revisit, in order to understand and celebrate the genesis of that national form of civilization that he described on the open- ing page of his History.

A FINANCIAL REVOLUTION In Macaulay’s national narrative the accession of William III in 1688 represented the political triumph of the Whig cause in a manner that was both a preservation and improvement of the spirit of the English constitution. Yet, Macaulay saw in the wake of the accession other important events that seemed to him to contain the seeds of the current state of the country, primarily the setting up of a “modern system” for regulating the relationship between the government and finance, to which there were two founding moments—and the creation of national debt (1692) and the incorporation of the Bank of England (1694). The transformations in the English system of finance did not just occur at a stroke, but they did not have a long prehistory either: “In the reign of William old men were still living who could remember the days when there was not a single banking house in the City of London.” 38 The banking business spread so rapidly and so successfully that the idea of starting a national bank soon came to the fore—not unsurprisingly in a society preoccupied with trying to find a more durable solution to the question of financing government. It is a recurrent claim in Macaulay’s History that the modernity of England’s constitutional arrangement was more or less begun as a process of wrenching away the financing of government from the privilege of the monarch, and putting this matter into the hands of a parliamentary body. The story of the Bank’s incorporation is presented in the fourth volume of Macaulay’s History, which appeared in 1854. Several years before that, in 1849, John Francis published History of the Bank of England, Its Times and Traditions, From 1694 to 1844. Macaulay’s much shorter account drew freely on Francis’s work, especially for incident, but Macaulay played up the political context and implications of the founding of the Bank to a much greater degree. 39 In the 1690s, Macaulay points out, the idea of a national bank was under public discussion for some time, with the development of a financial economy unfolding at remarkable speed: “No sooner had banking become a

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separate and important trade, than men began to discuss with earnestness the question whether it would be expedient to erect a national bank” (86, IV). Occasioned by economic and political circumstances and exigencies, and circulated in public debate, the idea attracted the interest of projectors and politicians alike. The speculator who first presented to the government a plan for a national bank was “the poor and obscure Scottish adventurer” William Paterson. With some circumspection Macaulay describes Paterson’s early attempts at acquisition of wealth in the West Indies: “His friends said that he had been a missionary; his enemies that he had been a buccaneer” (90, IV). 40 Paterson’s plan for a national bank was favorably received and taken up by two zealous Whigs: the “ingenious and enterprising” parliamentarian Charles Montague (84, IV), and Michael Godfrey, “one of the ablest, most upright and most opulent of the merchant princes of London” (90, IV), people with what to Macaulay were obviously more acceptable credentials and connections, and therefore his true heroes of the era rather than the adventurer Paterson. A significant cooperation between patrician parliamentary clout and middle-class financial clout marked the moment: Montague rallied parliamentary support for the idea, while Godfrey worked the City for capital subscription. The plan cleared the two parliamentary houses, and in 1694 the Bank of England was set up. Macaulay’s high praise for the sagacity and persistence of these men in pushing the plan through followed from his conviction that the Bank of England was from the beginning instituted on sound principles, not only of economy but also and emphatically of governance. The Bank was founded as an independent financial institution, run by capitalists who subscribed money for it. In its dealings with the government it was subject to parliamentary review, and its charter was renewed periodically. It may have been started with the immediate aim of relieving the burden of the expenses incurred by the government in the wars following William’s enthronement; Macaulay makes a point of this circumstance in explaining why even the Tories in the Lords supported the bill. But Macaulay also maintained that the long-term effects of the incorporation of the Bank were tremendous. The Bank of England meant that the business of lending to the crown was now firmly under parliamentary supervision; it also meant that now there was a reliable mechanism for mobilizing finance capital in the interests of the state apparatus in such a way as to give yet another legalistic stamp to the ongoing process of limitation of monarchical power. At the same time, the Bank potentially presented the possibility of enlisting finance capital against the landed interest, which indeed is why it had been initially received skeptically by Tory aristocracy. 41 For all these reasons, then, it is hardly surprising that Macaulay regarded the Bank as a Whig body, and one that “was Whig, not accidentally, but necessarily” (94, IV). The Bank’s incorporation allowed for a close interlocking of the interests of the parliament and independent finance capital, adding a new element to the constitutional equation of power in England: “It is hardly to say too much that, during many years, the weight of the Bank, which was constantly in the scale of the Whigs, almost counterbalanced the weight of the Church, which was as constantly in the scale of the Tories” (95, IV). Ultimately, the Bank’s founding amounted in Macaulay’s view to a pacifying answer to the entire political turbulence of the 17th century: the consolidation of the power of finance capital was a decisive blow to the threat of absolute monarchy. In fact, the measure of British modernity is exactly that Britain eschewed the drift into absolute monarchy and its continental neighbors did not.

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Macaulay’s celebration of national debt is shaped by the same argument. Of course, the Bank of England’s incorporation followed the institution of the national debt in 1692, and the Bank was initially established as banker to the state and manager of the national debt (whereas in the 18th century it assumed other banking functions in addition to being a public creditor). In his account of the origin of the English national debt Macaulay emphasizes that it was in William’s time that the national debt received its modern institutional form. True enough, banking existed before William’s time, and the national debt was not a Williamite invention. But just as Macaulay hailed the Bank of England as a reform event that affected the very core of the English constitutional arrangement, so he maintained that a similar and complementary reform was achieved by the legal elaboration of the national debt effected during William’s reign: “From a period of immemorial antiquity it had been the practice of every English government to contract debts. What the revolution introduced was the practice of honestly paying them” (217,1). The immediate cause of the juridical arrangements that led to the creation of the English national debt in its modern form was a series of continental wars following William’s accession, the expenses of which could not even remotely be defrayed by the extant levels of taxation. Instead of resorting to the seldom popular device of more taxation, the Whigs decided upon another scheme—that of subjecting borrowing to the government to firm legislative regulation. Macaulay ascribed the popularity of the scheme to a coexistence of two separate causes. First, there was a need to borrow presented by the costly wars; secondly, there was a ready supply of money to be lent: How indeed was it possible that a debt should not have been contracted, when one party was impelled by the strongest motives to borrow, and another was impelled by equally strong motives to lend? A moment had arrived at which the government had found it impossible, without exciting the most formidable discontents, to raise by taxation the supplies necessary to defend the liberty and independence of the nation; and at that very moment, numerous capitalists were looking round them in vain for some good mode of investing their savings, and, for want of such a mode, were keeping their wealth locked up, or were lavishing it on absurd projects. (510, III) 42 The last sentence refers to the stockjobbing mania that swept across England at the end of the 17th century. Macaulay tells us that “[i]t was about the year 1688 that the word stockjobbing was first heard in London” (508, III). In his view, stockjobbing was symptomatic of the advent of a new era in the economic history of the country, with surplus capital becoming available for investment in unprecedented proportions. One of the results of this new surplus of capital was that “[a] new form of covetousness” emerged, causing an explosion of speculating schemes: Our country witnessed for the first time those phenomena with which a long experience has made us familiar. A mania of which the symptoms were essentially the same with those of the mania of 1720, of the mania of 1825, of the mania of 1845, seized the public mind. An impatience to be rich, a contempt for those slow but sure gains which are the proper reward of industry, patience and thrift, spread through society. (509, III)

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The stockjobbing mania that Macaulay describes with the moralistic disapproval of a mid-Victorian novelist is presented as evidence that investment opportunities somehow fell short of the amount of disposable capital. Macaulay may have been none too slow to condemn the practices of stockjobbing and speculation from a moral point of view, but the main purpose of his account of this new development in English capitalism was principally to insist that the time was ripe for something like stockjobbing: “The truth is that society had, in the natural course of its growth, reached a point at which it was inevitable that there should be stockjobbing” (510, III). This perspective was in turn meant to provide the backdrop against which the prospect of lending to the government could be described as an attractive and a plausible option to be consid ered, discussed and resolved upon in that particular historical context. Made possible and strongly exacted by the circumstances, it was finally resorted to under the auspices of ingenious Whigs such as Montague. However, it would be wrong to conclude that at this juncture in his book Macaulay had any particular interest in laying out the specifics of a political-economic perspective for the understanding of the genesis and impact of national debt. His main purpose was to approach against the grain the subject of national debt as less a measure of weakness than a seemingly unlikely symbol of the strength of the English economy. Ever since its beginnings and throughout its unceasing growth all the way up to Macaulay’s own time, the national debt had regularly been a cause for alarmist sentiment. 43 Branded as a national curse, and a source of numerous evils and grievances, it was a subject of numerous reflections, tracts and pamphlets, even an occasional sermon and poem. Honest schemes and practical plans for its immediate and equitable liquidation, or at least relief, were proposed, and its constitutionality and morality were questioned. Adam Smith prophesied that a steady rise in national debt would “in the long-run probably ruin […] all the great nations of Europe.” 44 Smith attached so much importance to this problem that his Inquiry, published in 1776, ends with his own proposals for the alleviation of the national debt, which grew in part because of the British wars against their colonial rivals in North America. Smith presented two solutions to the national debt crisis: either a political union between Great Britain and the American colonies and Ireland that would allow more political and trade freedom in the latter two while helping to discharge the British national debt more equitably, or dissolution of Britain’s expensive ties with the “provinces” so as to “endeavor to accommodate her future views and designs to the real mediocrity of her circumstances.” 45 A good indication of Smith’s integrationist Britannic perspective, whereby the interests of Great Britain were deemed as superior to the interests of its constituent nations, and even superior to the interests of the British empire—let alone the colonies—these remarks also communicated how profoundly concerned Smith was over the size and tolerability of the British national debt. During another war, another prominent 18th century figure predicted a speedy collapse of England’s financial system—indeed, that “it will not continue to the end of Mr. Pitt’s life.” 46 Thomas Paine stated this in a pamphlet prophetically entitled “The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance;” he wrote it in 1796 in France. Paine was a more relentless critic of England’s financial system than Smith, if less sophisticated in his application of political economy. Smith proffered a warning that rising national debt

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would in the long run break the nation’s back; Paine on the other hand wrote the above remark with the passion of someone who was convinced that the nation’s back was wellnigh broken. The English financial system had not fully caved in yet, he believed, yet the collapse was just a matter of time, rather than of additional pressures and burdens. Immersing himself with characteristic enthusiasm in a war of rhetoric, Paine took it upon himself to show that Prime Minister Pitt’s assessment that the financial system in revolutionary France was “on the verge, nay even in the gulf of bankruptcy,” was indeed much more true of England. Believing that any system of public credit is based on issuance of paper money, which always inevitably leads to overissuing and bankruptcy, Paine even attempted a mathematical demonstration of the imminent end of the English system of finance. In effect, he made a simplistic economic argument that if a bank cannot redeem all of its notes in circulation at any given time in coin (silver or gold), than it is as good as bankrupt—and that by the same token the Bank of England can be easily shown not to be liquid any longer. He even considered the national debt a “trifle” in comparison with the very institution of paper money: “The bank notes make the most serious part of the business of finance […] yet the case of the bank notes has never been touched upon.” 47 As a piece of political economy, Paine’s argument was hardly too profound; indeed, it was something of an analytical overkill—for he claimed to be exposing as a weakness the very paradoxical logic that Adam Smith had already described as the foundation of the capitalist banking system. 48 Very much informing Paine’s predictions about the downfall of the English system was an anxiety about inflationary economies made possible by introducing a paper money economy, and in giving expression to that anxiety they also had a quite specific political purpose at the time. 49 Nor was in Macaulay’s own time the growing burden of the debt viewed more favorably. Disraeli acerbically saw “the triple blessings of Venetian politics, Dutch finance and French wars” 50 as the main causes of English social troubles of the previous hundred and fifty years, that is, the time, since the accession of William. In this shorthand assessment of William’s reign, “Dutch finance” stood for those new arrangements made between finance capital and the government in the 1690s which Disraeli believed William transplanted from Holland. Asserting that debt became a national habit, Disraeli in effect (though for all practical purposes only declaratively) denounced the entire system of finance capitalism in England following the Glorious Revolution. Other contemporary historians were equally critical of this financial system, and, more specifically, of national debt. Writing for Cassell’s Illustrated History of England several years after Macaulay, William Howitt followed Disraeli’s cue in attributing the idea of national debt to William’s Dutch experience. In most other respects indebted to Macaulay’s account of the debt’s inception (and of the Bank of England, “that wonderful institution”), 51 Howitt criticized the debt as a consequence of the “mingling up of ourselves with the questions of continental politics,” 52 that started with William’s continental wars and culminated in the Napoleonic wars. Following the debacle of the Crimean War such isolationist sentiments were not surprising, even as imperial warfare was still extolled in the volumes of the very same History. At any rate, the positions of both the conservative Disraeli and the populist liberal Howitt indicate that national debt was commonly felt an encumbrance in the historical literature of the period.

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Nor would it be exactly correct to assume that Macaulay did not appreciate the burden of the debt. Rather, his contention was that English economy prospered in spite of the enormous and still growing debt, which in turn testified to enormous confidence invested in that economy itself. The national debt, “the greatest prodigy that ever perplexed the sagacity and confounded the pride of statesmen and philosophers” (512, III), coincided with what Macaulay viewed as the period of increasing prosperity and irreversible progress in the country. If the debt grew, to the anxiety of so many, so did the ability of the country to repay it. The array of evidence to that effect summoned by Macaulay includes primarily images of progress intended to ridicule the rhetoric of economic disaster: “A sum exceeding the whole amount of the national debt at the end of the American war was, in a few years, voluntarily expended by this ruined people in viaducts, tunnels, embankments, bridges, stations, engines” (515, III). The enthusiastic readiness of the English to invest was Macaulay’s key argument against debt pessimists. Interestingly, Macaulay gestures away the need to demonstrate his stance on national debt in terms of political economy—implying such a task to be in the province of another, specialized discourse that he as a popular historian does not want to claim as his own. Nevertheless, he points out two fallacies most often committed in the economic argumentation of debt pessimists: Here it is sufficient to say that the prophets of evil were under a double delusion. They erroneously imagined that there was an exact analogy between the case of an individual who is in debt to another individual and the case of society which is in debt to a part of itself; and this analogy led them into endless mistakes about the effect of the system of funding. They were under an error not less serious touching the resources of the country. They made no allowance for the effect produced by the incessant progress of every experimental science, and by the incessant efforts of every man to get on in life. They saw that the debt grew; and they forgot that other things grew as well as the debt. A long experience justifies us in believing that England may, in the twentieth century, be better able to bear a debt of sixteen hundred millions than she is at the present time to bear her present load. Be that as it may, those who so confidently predicted that she must sink […] greatly overrated the pressure of the burden: they greatly underrated the strength by which the burden was to be borne. (515, III) In spite of Macaulay’s professions to the contrary, some sort of economic theory is contained in these arguments. Let us remember that he uses the national debt to demonstrate, in a fashion meant to be as spectacular as it is apparently paradoxical, the success of the system of finance capitalism under which England worked ever since William’s reign. The first argument against debt pessimists is that no analogy can be made between the behavior of private individuals in the marketplace and the marketplace behavior of a state that supplies the institutional environment for the marketplace itself. Under certain conditions a society’s being indebted to “a part of itself” can provide a climate generative of economic growth. On the other hand, Macaulay insists that the national economy has been historically growing, and that as long as it continues to do so,

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the burden of the debt would remain tolerable. Without expressly evoking or positing an economic axiom, Macaulay suggests that an economy of growth is interdependent with an economy of credit, of which national debt is an important device. Some reference is made to undefined national resources, asking the reader to fill in the gaps, and the resources of scientific progress and the ideology of economic individualism are summoned as additional contexts that have historically supported the growth of English economy. As an empiricist in the British tradition of inductive reasoning, Macaulay carefully avoids phrasing his observations in terms of general laws of economy or history. However, the brunt of his argument here, unelaborated as it is, is that the introduction of this “system of funding” proved itself as historically beneficial in England. In other words, Macaulay does not demonstrate any interest in national debt in the abstract, but only in its effectiveness within the specific parameters of recent English history. And in that context it is clear that Macaulay celebrated national debt as a measure of society’s confidence in itself—that is, confidence in the viability of its economic, political and juridical institutions that have proven itself over a long period of time. The economy of debt and general progress are seen as nourishing each other, with this crossenhancement being possible because the ability of the society to service the debt is symbolically an expression of credit accorded to the existing social institutions. Therefore, while the size of the debt on occasion “tasked the powers of public credit to the utmost” (514, III), more significant in Macaulay’s view is that the very existence of the debt is emblematic as well as partly constitutive of (a beneficial form of) public confidence vested in the available institutional mechanisms. The British economy of credit has been co-created with public trust in the constitutional arrangement. Obviously relishing the paradox of his argument, Macaulay drives home his celebration of the culture of credit in the last paragraph of the section dealing with national debt: it can scarcely be denied that, in the largest view, the effect of this system has been salutary. For it is manifest that all credit depends on two things, on the power of a debtor to pay debts, and on his inclination to pay them. The power of a society to pay debts is proportioned to the progress which that society has made in industry, in commerce, and in all the arts and sciences which flourish under the benignant influence of freedom and of equal law. The inclination of a society to pay debts is proportioned to the degree in which that society respects the obligations of plighted faith. Of the strength which consists in extent in territory and in number of fighting men, a rude despot who knows no law but his own childish fancies and headstrong passions, or a convention of socialists which proclaims all property to be robbery, may have more than falls to the lot of the best and wisest government. But the strength which is derived from the confidence of capitalists such a despot, such a convention, can never possess. That strength,—and it is a strength which has decided the event of more than one great conflict,—flies, by the law of its nature, from barbarism and fraud, from tyranny and anarchy, to follow civilisation and virtue, liberty and order. (516, III)

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Here Macaulay brings together all the most central tenets of his political attitude with a circularity that exemplifies well his concept of civilization. The economic relationship of credit, reasons Macaulay, requires a debtor with both sufficient capital to service debt and sufficient readiness to honor it. The first is a function of industrial and commercial growth, as well as of “progress […] in arts and sciences,” neither of which can happen without a specific political and juridical (that is, constitutional) framework—without “the benignant influence of freedom and equal law.” The latter requirement of a credit economy is the willingness of the debtor to pay off the debt, which means the “confidence of capitalists.” In a circular turn, this confidence of capitalists is suggested to function as a further boost to “civilization and virtue, liberty and order.” This creates a subtle but perceptible asymmetry in the course of Macaulay’s argumentation. Certainly the confidence of capitalists, social stability, political freedom, equality under the law, scientific progress, flourishing of arts, appear all to be mutually dependent developments. But the “confidence of capitalists” is at the same time given a special place among the many ingredients of progress, for it is coterminous with the trust of a society in itself. Macaulay does not see capitalist trust as a symbol so much as a powerful, and short of saying it explicitly, a central, method of the strength of a society and its institutional arrangement (needless to say, Macaulay is echoing here Adam Smith’s conviction that capitalism comes with its own moral force that reshapes all aspects of society). Of course, it takes little scrutiny to conclude that Macaulay is speaking of potentially any present society—“a society”—but that his description of it really proceeds from an idealized image of the achievements of the “England” of his History. An attitude that pervades Macaulay’s work is a more or less articulated contention that such concepts as “freedom,” “progress,” “civilization,” cannot be fully understood without the context of the narrative that is the history of “England.” Macaulay undeniably took a great degree of pride in his image of “England” and its achievements, political, economic, imperial, as well as cultural and literary, and he undeniably relied on some degree of national triumphalism to boost the book’s marketability; however, his anglocentrism is a very specific species of flag-waving. The bottom line of Macaulay’s narrative is that the whole edifice of modern English civilization is underwritten by a financial-institutional arrangement: the confidence of capitalists and the system of public credit that frames it. This confidence is not the sufficient cause of Macaulay’s civilization, but it is a necessary precondition. In this light, his national triumphalism was a function of the twofold assurance in the functionality of the English capitalist habitus and the English constitutional habitus. Did Macaulay see in the financial developments following William’s accession a “financial revolution,” to borrow a phrase from P.G.A.Dickson? 53 A literal connection is readily available: Macaulay referred to the institution of the national debt as a “fiscal revolution” (511, III). But more importantly, the general drift of Macaulay’s exposition was that the new finance system was socially transformative in two separate but related ways. First, the system constituted a watershed event in the economic history of the country, as a revolution in finance: it crucially affected and changed operations of finance capitalism. Secondly, Macaulay’s account also offers an interpretation of the significance of this financial revolution—a suggestion that the political revolution of 1688 was in great part carried out as a financial revolution. In this sense, the financial transformation

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of the 1690s was a determining event in the political and constitutional history of the country. In attaching such centrality to the financial revolution Macaulay is a precursor of such modern historians as P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins, who offered the most elaborate current version of the financial revolution argument, namely, the view that the post-1688 events laid the foundation for what they call “gentlemanly capitalism” of the next two centuries. Taking the cue from Dickson’s event-naming work of economic history, Cain and Hopkins argue that the significance of the financial revolution was twofold: on the one hand, it prepared the ground for the development of a capitalist economy in England; on the other hand, it was the work of an alliance between finance capital and the landed interest that set the tone for the culture of “gentlemanly capitalism” that would continue to preside over the economic and political development in Britain well into the 19th century. Similarly to Macaulay, Cain and Hopkins argued that “the regime founded in 1688 was essentially new and that much of its innovative character stemmed from the financial revolution it helped to sponsor.” 54 In those terms, Macaulay could be seen as not only merely an ideologue but also a very astute historian of that species of capitalism that began evolving with the rise of the political and economic clout of the City of London. This perspective plays a central role in Macaulay’s account of national history. It allowed him to weave together several themes that were particularly close to his political sensibility: evolution of capitalism, legalistic pace of social change, and the rise of a modern government predicated on the “confidence of capitalists.” Since for Macaulay the principal end of government was the security of property, it is no wonder that he should have attached so much importance to a financial transformation that he thought increased trust in the operation of capitalism itself: the “confidence of capitalists” is an expression of this routine trust that subjects in the marketplace place in the security of property, a trust tied up with reliable behavior of state institutions. Like Adam Smith before him, who claimed that the Bank of England “is a great engine of state,” 55 Macaulay had a great appreciation for the new arrangement between capital and government. In terms of the 1690s events, the financial revolution immediately rearranged not only the relationship between the crown and the parliament, but also between the landed interest and the City. The finance capital in the City of London was in this way constituted as a locus of political power, as well as tied more closely with the interests and vicissitudes of the government. The new arrangement caused the government in turn to have an interest in establishing a good relationship with its creditors. 56 In this context, there is more to this economic arrangement than a purely economic understanding between the parties concerned. As the above quote on capitalist “confidence” shows, the new system of finance was taken in Macaulay’s account to be the most comprehensive force of communal cohesion, which ties the viabil ity of economic credit with a wide public trust in the institutional framework (effectively, in the English constitution itself). Thus, the term “public credit” in Macaulay is invariably on the verge of transcending its narrow economic definition to assume the meaning of the trust invested by the capitalist public in the routine functioning of national institutions. Similarly, this idea of public credit, embodied in the institutions of British finance capitalism, becomes in Macaulay’s account an admittedly implicit, but unquestionably central element of the British constitution. In 1781 Lord North made in parliament the often-quoted remark that the

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Bank of England “from long habit and usage of many years, was a part of the constitution.” By the early 19th century the Bank, as H.V.Bowen succinctly put it, was transformed from “a London bank to a national bank,” by which its position as a central bank was legally formalized. 57 In Macaulay’s understanding the Bank, and British finance capitalism in general, assume the proportions of not only a part, but also a linchpin of British constitutionalism. T.H.Heyck made a telling observation about the character of Macaulay’s partisanship in the History: “He was a partisan for consensus and civil peace.” 58 Heyck alluded to the fact that the political mood of Macaulay’s book was not aggressively polemical; rather, the book was meant to offer assurances about the fundamental constitutional sanity of the British polity. As much as Macaulay wrote against the rhetoric of constitutional corruption such as that propounded by Disraeli, he believed that the two-party dynamic had been one of the most important aspects of British constitutionalism, and that the differences between the two parties were “rather of degree than of principle.” 59 But Macaulay never embraced the problematic position, attendant on the kind of view of the 1688 settlement explored for instance by Thackeray in Henry Esmond, that 1688 was an intra-aristocratic conflict. Such a view, with its focus on aristocratic politics as a family affair, and its implication that an aristocratic political consensus crucially informed the revolutionary settlement, was not enough in Macaulay’s account of modern British constitutionalism—because it could lead to an exclusion of the middle class from the historical constitutional narrative. That is why the financial revolution is accorded such importance in Macaulay: it enabled him to represent the public trust in the operations of capitalism as an indispensable, perhaps even pivotal, ingredient in the history of modern English constitutionalism. That was Macaulay’s solution to the riddle of the continuing patrician dominance in his own time—in his view of things the current political inferiority of the middle class was not a cause for concern, since the stability of the constitutional order after 1688 had become predicated on capitalist confidence and not on aristocratic politics.

Chapter Two Gentility, Capitalism, and Mapping the Nation in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford 1 ‘Elegant economy!’ How naturally one falls back into the phraseology of Cranford! There, economy was always ‘elegant,’ and moneyspending always ‘vulgar and ostentatious;’ a sort of sourgrapeism, which made us feel very peaceful and satisfied. (4) “Have you seen any numbers of “The Pickwick Papers? […] Capital thing!” (8). Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford

THE SERIES OF SKETCHES THAT RAN IRREGULARLY IN HOUSEHOLD WORDS between 1851 and 1853 and that was soon after published as a single-volume novel under the title Cranford has a special place in Elizabeth Gaskell’s fictional mappings of England. With its apparently modest focus on the structure of a small-town society run by women of the rentier class, it is emphatically not a condition-of-England novel in the way Mary Barton or North and South are; not surprisingly, critical discussions of the industrial novel, such as Raymond Williams’s and Catherine Gallagher’s, hardly mention this text at all. Some readers have been led by the novel’s conversational tone to regard it as a sort of breather from the weighty matters of class relations and the grimness of working-class life. 2 But Cranford is Gaskell’s most determined experiment in ethnographic narrative, a continuation on different ground of the type of undertaking already discernible in Mary Barton. The industrial novel often took upon itself tasks we have come to associate with the practice and discourse of ethnography, which was just beginning to emerge as part of a comprehensive epistemological reorganization of sci ence in the 19th century. Even though Gaskell did not use the ethnographic concept of culture, a novel like Mary Barton does seem to be predicated on the idea that there is such a thing as a distinct culture of the Manchester working class, and that this thing can be isolated for the attention of a concerned middle class. Like other industrial novels written by middle-class authors, Mary Barton was based on the assumption that its material was unfamiliar to its reading public. Unlike many Victorian realist novels in which a variety of class and cultural bonds were tacitly or expressly assumed to exist between the reading public and the depicted world, the industrial-ethnographic mode of fiction required the perception of radical social division, the perception to which Benjamin Disraeli resoundingly gave the name of two nations. The industrial novel offered itself as a mode for reconciling the polarized segments of the nation, claiming to discover grounds for understanding and sympathy between the class for which it wrote and the one of which it wrote. The way working class people behaved,

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what they believed, and, especially, how they spoke were all parts of a way of life that would participate in, and not be swallowed up in, the national reconciliation. The culture of the workers was to be recognized by the readers not just as a culture of deprivation and ignorance, but as a respectable form of English difference. The first edition of Mary Barton had a supplement of explanatory notes on the Lancashire dialect, written by Gaskell’s husband, and the fifth edition in 1854 contained two lectures on the dialect also supplied by him—telling evidence of an impulse towards documentation and analysis of what emerges as an unfamiliar cultural domain in need of such explication. The ethnographic imagination at work in Mary Barton is also exercised in Cranford. 3 But Cranford is an anatomy of a “genteel society” of women in a small northern country town (Cranford is commonly identified with Gaskell’s birthplace, Knutsford). In terms of class, the Cranfordians are considerably less remote from the middle-class novelistic audiences than are the Manchester workers; yet there is a Cranfordian quaintness, generated by an assumed contrast between the provincial world of Cranford and the metropolitan world of London readers, to which the narrator, Mary Smith, makes repeated references. 4 Gaskell first formulated and explored the idea for Cranford in an essay she published in a Philadelphia journal in 1849, under the title “The Last Generation in England.” The title advertised the essay as a presentation of English culture to an American audience. Gaskell cited Robert Southey’s proposal that “a history of English domestic life” as her stimulus to put upon record some of the details of country town life, either observed by myself, or handed down to me by older relations; for even in small towns, scarcely removed from villages, the phases of society are rapidly changing; and much will appear strange, which yet occurred only in the generation immediately preceding ours.5 The documentary project is made necessary by historical change: the rapid pace of modernity renders ever more visible the divide between the ways of the past and the ways of the present. The premise of Cranford, that a significant historical difference may be measured in the passage from one generation to the next, strikingly resembles Walter Scott’s approach to historical narrative in Waverley. In a preface to a later edition of that work, Scott suggested that he was drawn to the story of Jacobite rebellion because of the recentness of this piece of the past, whose narrative reconstruction could still rely on first-hand information from actual participants in this turning point of history.6 Gaskell similarly under-takes to tell the story of a recent past, proposing that the ways of the last generation are still in evidence, though already sufficiently alien to the present ways as to be regarded antiquated and curious. Underscoring both Scott’s and Gaskell’s preoccupation with the recent past is an attempt to understand periods in national history when older social forms seem to be on the demise, but the demise itself is still a matter of some relevance. But Cranford does not focus on the same kinds of social events: in contrast to Scott’s wide political panorama, it does not dwell on dramatic events in political history, but on small changes in the routine of a small town. In doing so, it addresses the question of social change in its preoccupation with the complex

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redefinitions of economic and political life going on in the industrializing north of England, and with the increasing cultural and institutional ascendancy of London and the south over all of British social life. In great measure, the charm of Cranford lies in its invocation of these two conflicting processes, as they bear upon the small, provincial and eccentric town of Cranford. Just how is Cranford culture to be mapped and measured in its relationship to the industrial modernization of the north, or in its relationship to the state culture of the south, is the central question posed by the novel. In its narrativization of this question, the ethnography of class in Cranford serves more than just the purpose of putting on record a presumably disappearing microculture; it also aspires to explore, in the context of the small-town culture, the economic and political currency of the competing claims on the definition of what constitutes national modernity. The world outside Cranford is seldom directly represented in the novel, but it hovers on the edges of representation as an immense field of forces affecting the internal dynamics of the town in many ways. Industrial modernization is the chief form of external pressure, and the town not only tries to keep it at bay, but also defines itself in opposition to the novelties brought about by it. The town’s informal ruler is Deborah Jenkyns, the elder daughter of the rector, who takes the lead in trying to curb the town’s contacts with the modern world, resembling the Emperor in her favorite reading, Johnson’s Rasselas, who tries to keep foreign influences out of the Happy Valley. Occasionally residing with the Jenkynses is Mary Smith, the amateur reporter who provides the narrative voice, assumes the job of observation of the provincial town from a specific symbolic vantage point, that of the nearby industrial town of Drumble (the novel’s pseudonym for Manchester). In addition, there is yet another term in this exercise in cultural comparison, since Mary’s reporting is not offered either to a provincial or an industrial-urban audience; it is explicitly oriented towards the metropolitan audience designated in the novel by “London.” In my reading, the main interest of the narrator lies in the durability of the class order of Cranford, its “genteel society,” or in the interaction between its internal structure and the external forces that exert pressures on it. Gaskell’s implicit map of the national space is modeled on the complex triangular relationship that obtains among the local culture of Cranford, the industrialist culture of Drumble (or the north), and the metropolitan culture of the south of England. In this triangular political geography, Cranford is featured as an outpost of the state culture of the south, which accounts for its tenacity in resisting the style of modernization taking place in the north.7

ETHNOGRAPHY OF GENTILITY Hilary Schor suggested that the relationship of the narrator of Cranford to her subject matter resembles that of an anthropologist to the strange culture she tries to decipher.8 The attitude fundamentally informing Mary Smith’s narration in the novel is that the town’s “genteel society” is not merely strange; it is also a system unto itself, an organized totality requiring outsiders to immerse themselves in it if they are to understand any of its aspects. Of course, to compare the narration of Mary Smith in Cranford to ethnography can only be done in an anachronistic manner, since the discourse we now associate with ethnography had only begun to emerge by Gaskell’s time. However, there was a

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widespread and longestablished practice of amateur collecting and publishing observations on unfamiliar locales encountered on travel or sojourn in foreign, and especially imperial, domains.9 Like other amateur reporters from foreign parts, Mary is a traveler removed from her home culture, collecting data on the foreign culture she happens to sojourn in. True enough, her traveling is a rather home-bound affair when compared to the world-wide exploits of a gentleman voyager: she journeys out of her own home into yet another sphere of domesticity—that of the Cranford ladies, availing herself of the kind of opportunity to travel well inside the boundaries of gender-coded behavior in the period. But even as the scope and character of Mary’s journeyings are determined by the constraints of a sexual division of labor, she conveys a consciousness of change and modernity that is alien to Cranford. Mary’s sojourns in Cranford involve a great deal of the kind of work that Clifford Geertz attributes to the modern ethno grapher: “interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, tracing property lines, censusing households, [and] writing a journal.”10 Mary does all this, in a way that is surprisingly methodical. Her exposition is occasionally of the order that Clifford Geertz would call thick description: it often congeals into moments of concerted interpretation, whereby the local idiosyncrasies of speech, diet, dress, sexual custom, class and political economy are all registered and explained. However, her detachment is not one of perfect neutrality, and she does not pose as a professionally disinterested observer: her tone, like that of most contributors to Household Words, is one of a concerned and empathic amateur, whose connections with her subject are based on chance and benevolence. There is no intradiegetic account of Mary’s reasons for reporting in Cranford, but it would have been easy for readers of Household Words to assume that the installments of the novel resembled field reports from a provincial town, if not even to mistake them for such: the novel blended quite easily in style and tone with non-fictional contributions to the Dickens journal, whose mission was to “bring into innumerable homes, from the stirring world around us, the knowledge of many social wonders, good and evil.”11 And Mary Smith occasionally postures as a contributor to a journal reporting on her sojourn in a strange culture; for instance, she writes: “Soon after the events of which I gave an account in my last paper, […]” (80).12 Cranford’s first chapter, entitled “Our Society,” begins: “In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses, above a certain rent, are women.” Mary identifies the constitutive element of the local regime as gender-economic status: the society comprises the wealthiest of the town’s householders who are all women, a relatively unusual situation under the patriarchal property customs of the day, and one that immediately identifies the women as spinsters or widows.13 The town is not without men, especially lower class men, but the gentlemen are either in the army, on a ship, or “closely engaged in business all the week in the great commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty miles on the railroad” (1). The economic requirement (house above a certain rent) is a local, social, female equivalent of the standard used nationwide to determine which men could vote (the renters of houses above ten pounds). By this tacit yet transparent analogy, the novel quickly points to a parallelism between positions of privilege in the town’s social regime and in the political order obtaining on the national stage. The most prestigious family in Cranford are the Jenkynses, who occupy a peripheral

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place in the national system of power. While they do not have any familial relations with the peerage, their interpolation in the genteel class culture is made possible by the position of tenure in a state institution (the Anglican Church).14 The ecclesiastical profession resembled gentility in that it had no immediately visible relationship to the realm of production; equally importantly, the Established Church was tied to the national genteel regime with a knot of familial and institutional ties. Gaskell herself came from a very different, nonconformist tradition, but significantly she makes the Cranfordians all staunch Anglicans given to thinking of dissenters as “savages” (149). Economically and ideologically enmeshed in one of the principal state institutions, the Jenkynses partake in a class system whose symbolic center is not in the realm of industrial economy, but in the realm of the state. The Jenkynses, like the Rector, Peter, and his cousin Major Jenkyns, all pursue careers in state-servicing professions, such as the church and the military— another powerful institution of the metropolitan genteel culture, its grip on the state, and of course, its role in the management of the empire. During the Napoleonic wars military promotion was still available only to members of the Established Church; the exclusivity of these institutions and their respective prestige were central to the concentration of power in the hands of the predominantly genteel and predominantly Anglican elite. It is by stressing these southern connections of the Cranfordians that the novel insists on a certain extraterritoriality of Cranford in the context of the industrial north: it is virtually an enclave of the south in the north—an enclave that is in no uncertain terms, albeit peripherally, networked in the power grid that dominates the institutions of state and government, as well as the definition of social prestige. The central mechanism of Cranford gentility, “the trick of the place,” Mary explains, is the claim of “‘aristocratic connection.’”15 Although one of the Cranford ladies is aristocratic (Lady Glenmire), for most Cranfordians their relationship to aristocracy was one of emulation. Mary’s treating the subject of economic status with vagueness (she speaks of “a certain rent”) shows that the visitor has learned the studied indirectness that characterizes the local attitude to these matters: money talk is prohibited in Cranford society, because the society sees itself as free from economic necessity, like the leisure class it emulates. Yet Mary perceives the likelihood that a few of the gentlefolks of Cranford were poor, and had some difficulty in making both ends meet; but they were like the Spartans, and concealed their smart under a smiling face. We none of us spoke of money, because that subject savoured of commerce and trade, and though some might be poor, we were all aristocratic. The Cranfordians had that kindly esprit de corps which made them overlook all deficiencies in success when some of them tried to conceal their poverty. (3) The community’s self-understanding as “aristocracy” is not constituted merely by economic status, but primarily by an active maintenance of a group solidarity—the esprit de corps. Mary explains this bond as a specific response to the economic predicament of the Cranford society, one that affirms Cranford’s indifference to the exigencies of “commerce and trade” that dominate the world outside the town. Despite such claims of independence, the novel proliferates allusions that the Cranford matriarchy is affected by

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the male business world, and that the matriarchy owes its very existence to patriarchal custom: the widows and spinsters of Cranford live on annuities set up for them by their husbands and fathers. Capital previously accumulated and converted into stock (probably in textiles or railroads, and so embroiled in the empire and the global economy) is the basis of the Cranford way of life. That this capital circulates in the larger economic domain, subject to vicissitudes outside the Cranfordians’ control, is the source of the most dramatic peripety in the novel—the failure of Matty Jenkyns’s stock in the crash of the Town and County Bank. On the occasion, Mrs Jamieson, the most conservative defender of Cranford ways, reaffirms the patrilineal logic undergirding Cranford in arguing Matty’s right to retain her status as Cranford gentlewoman: “whereas a married woman takes her husband’s rank by the strict laws of precedence, an unmarried woman retains the station her father occupied” (143). Like economic capital, so is rank as the principle of social capital a matter largely outside a Cranfordian’s control—apart from the device of marriage. Consequently, the most important conflicts in the community center on the problem of what constitutes the correct marriage in terms of rank. The marriage between Miss Matty and Mr Holbrook that did not happen, is contrasted with the marriage between Lady Glenmire and Mr Hoggins that does, illustrating the transition from more to less rigorous interpretations of rank in the local community—one of the signs of transformation recorded in the narrative.16 Even as Mary “had vibrated all [her] life between Drumble and Cranford” (154), her narrative is not an exercise in comparative ethnog raphy: it focuses exclusively on Cranford, and makes little reference to herself or Drumble. We know that Mary may have a tie of kinship with the Jenkynses.17 We know too that her father has some commercial employment in Drumble, and that sometimes he passes along business advice to the Jenkyns sisters. Beyond that her life is largely unrepresented, but the crucial fact about Mary’s position relative to Cranford is that, with her “economic” foot in Drumble and her “gender” foot in the domestic circles of Cranford, she is equipped to assume the roles of both observer and participant in the visited culture.18 In Cranford she can pass for a Cranfordian, slipping into local customs and into the local sense of identity, which is often registered in her reports by a “we,” while to her outside audience she can also speak in a different register about the eccentricities of the place. In asides to the readers, Mary is a vocal satirist of the town’s ways, but Gaskell never puts her in a position to radically question the town’s regime. Her actions are restricted by her function as observer, and indeed they tend only to restore the conditions that existed before her arrival. The first time she interferes in the Cranfordian routine is in her plan to turn Matty Jenkyns into a shopkeeper, in violation of the community’s contempt for the world of commerce. Largely through Mary’s offices, genteel society decides to keep Matty within its ranks, though Matty is only a shopkeeper now; it appears thus that Mary engineers a slight degentrification of the local system of class. Her other disruptive interference, the attempt to find Matty’s long-lost brother, interestingly enough, has the effect of regentrifying Matty, who upon her brother’s return can discontinue her shopkeeping career, return to living “very genteelly” (153). The end result of Mary’s participation in Cranford life is the reestablishment of prior order—as if Mary could erase the effects of Drumble and modernity which she herself partially embodies. The distance from which her observation is carried out is often marked by the stylistic

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device of placing certain terms of Cranfordian phraseology, such as “genteel society,” “elegant economy” and “vulgarity”in quotation marks, foregrounding their status as key ideologemes of the local parlance. Their strangeness is not intrinsic but derives from the fact that they are loans from a class language with a more general circulation. “Genteel society” does not mean in Cranford what it meant elsewhere. Mary’s calling attention to the second-hand character of Cranford idiom suggests that the eccentricity of the local community is produced by its attempt to be like the national paradigm of gentility, not by its striving to be different. In other words, the local oddity is found not in radical difference from a normative culture, but rather in idiosyncratic by-products of an attempt to reproduce the norm. Therefore, if the name the Cranfordian women use for their community reveals a discrepancy in class position between the local and the national elites—for the disadvantages of the Cranfordians’ political and economic status are only too obvious—it also reveals an affinity by which the local regime shapes itself on the national model. The novel seldom ventures out of the provincial world of Cranford, but the local class regime is virtually unintelligible without reference to the national class culture of gentility; the defamiliarizing irony of Mary Smith’s narration points to this larger system of which Cranford is but an eccentric version. Historians studying the evolution of genteel orders in Great Britain, Lawrence Stone and J.C.F.Stone argued that “[t]he glue which held the upper and middle levels of English society together was a common bond of gentility, but the barriers which broke it down into infinite gradations of honor and respect were those of snobbery.”19 The bonds and the barriers were two sides of the same coin, and Stone’s words echo W.M.Thackeray’s account of genteel culture in The Book of Snobs. Publishing his sketches of the snobbish culture several years before Cranford, Thackeray inventoried the snobbish/genteel national culture across a hierarchy of meticulously defined and stubbornly defended differences in rank, especially in the professions servicing the state (City snobs or bankers, military snobs, clerical snobs, university snobs, to follow Thackeray’s own distinctions). The culture of snobbery reached far and wide, everywhere Britons with pretensions with gentility were to be found (though Thackeray excluded tenant farmers and industrial laborers): “Snobs are known and recognized throughout an Empire on which I am given to understand the Sun never sets,” Thackeray wrote.20 What his satire brought to the fore was the idea that gentility/snobbery permeates the national consciousness at virtually every level, not as an imposition from the highest orders of society down, but as a standard actively appropriated at even relatively humble levels.21 In a similar spirit, Cranford demonstrates the powerful appeal of gentility at a very peripheral place. Geographically and economically distant from the southern English ideal, the Cranfordians bear testimony to the long arm of the paradigm.22 Questions of internal stratification dominate social relations in the town; for instance, there is much debate over whether a former shopkeeper, Betty Barker, should be accorded the privileges of society, or whether those should be denied to Mrs Hoggins after marrying below her rank. Describing the Barker sisters, Mary Smith sums up the snobbish mechanism of differentiation central to the maintenance of both specific rank distinctions and the whole genteel system: “[they] only aped their betters in having ‘nothing to do’ with the class immediately below theirs” (61). Consistently raised throughout the novel,

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the analogies between the national and the local genteel cultures destabilize the presumed marginality of the local community as an ethnographic subject. A pseudo-sacral status of the national paradigm of gentility in Cranford is foregrounded humorously in Mary’s description of Mrs Jamieson’s japanned table, “devoted to literature, on which lay a Bible, a Peerage, and a Prayerbook” (75). The placement of the lexicon of aristocracy between the two sacral texts speaks for itself: the class arrangement functions as an article of local faith.

THE ECONOMY OF AN IDEOLOGY The railroad is already at Cranford in the first chapter, and there are the cotton mills in Drumble: the Cranford ideology we are introduced to at the beginning of the book is one already in dialogue with the social effects of industrial capitalism. The townswomen allow themselves to refer to the new realities of industrialization only with circumspection, regarding the new, industrial forms of wealth acquisition as vulgar. They deplore ostentation in talking or displaying wealth; the absence of such ostentation is, for instance, why the community welcomes Lady Glenmire, who “in addition to [possessing] many other genteel qualities […] was far removed from the vulgarity of wealth” (80). As Mary puts it in her analysis of the “phraseology of Cranford” it was considered ‘vulgar’ (a tremendous word in Cranford) to give anything expensive, in the way of eatable or drinkable, at the evening entertainments. Wafer bread-and-butter and sponge-biscuits were all that the Honourable Mrs. Jamieson gave; and she was sister-in-law to the late Earl of Glenmire, although she did practice such ‘elegant economy.’ ‘Elegant economy!’ How naturally one falls back into the phraseology of Cranford! There, economy was always ‘elegant,’ and money-spending always ‘vulgar and ostentatious;’ a sort of sour-grapeism, which made us feel very peaceful and satisfied. […] We had tacitly agreed to ignore that any with whom we associated on terms of visiting equality could ever be prevented from doing anything that they wished. If we walked to or from a party, it was because the night was so fine, or the air so refreshing; not because sedan-chairs were expensive. If we wore prints, instead of summer silks, it was because we preferred a washing material; and so on, till we blinded ourselves to the vulgar fact, that we were, all of us, people of very moderate means. (4) Mary diagnoses the expulsion of money from the vocabulary of Cranford townswomen as an ideological mechanism that allows them to come to terms with the fact that pecuniary considerations do indeed determine many aspects of life in the local community. The chief linch pin of Cranford ideology is this idea of ‘elegant economy/ implicitly contrasted to that other, not so elegant economy epitomized by Drumble. This idea performs two distinct ideological functions in Cranford society. On the one hand, “elegant economy” may be construed quite broadly as a term that arbitrates between different modes of economic activity. In this regard, the term “elegant” provides a link between the economies that maintain Cranford society (which are industrial, commercial,

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imperial, etc.) and the ideological prestige of the model of effortless produc-tion and enjoyment of wealth associated with the national patrician elite. Elegant economy is in this sense economy with an acceptable, genteel face, removed from the unpleasant aspects of various contemporary national and imperial economies (“that ‘horrid cotton trade’”as Betty Barker puts it).23 Elegance and vulgarity evokes differences in the production and enjoyment of wealth between old money and new money, land and industry, as they appear from the point of view of the former. On the other hand, the term is part of an ideological operation of self-delusion, or sourgrapeism, as Mary calls it. “Elegant economy” permits the Cranfordians to interpret the limits on their expenditure as requirements of gentility. But though money may not be a sufficient cause of prestige in Cranford (which is why the former shopkeeper Betty Barker is long kept outside the group), it is a necessary one. As we have seen, membership in the genteel society in Cranford is regulated by the property requirement, that is, belonging to the rentier class—a class that can afford to live off previously accumulated capital (however small), which enables its dissociation from the realms of both labor and enterprise. And despite its “elegance,” elegant economy is a form of economy, by which the women of Cranford exercise what little control they can have over their limited resources without resorting to any sort of work, especially the kind of work which would imply “materially losing caste” (130). Put simply, their culture makes a virtue of necessity.24 Matty is threatened with loss of caste following the most dramatic event to affect the Cranford routine, triggered by the collapse of the Town and County Bank, which strips Matty Jenkyns of her rentier status. This crisis illustrates the depth of the community’s involvement in and vulnerability to that other, broader economy. It also illustrates moral issues attendant on speculation in the stock market. The women rentiers of Cranford, in spite of their disdain for capitalism, cannot avoid being dependent on it: in order to maintain their status as rentiers they have little choice but to place their trust in English capitalism and its institutions. Deborah Jenkyns, whom her younger sister thought to be “quite the woman of business” (120), took her relationship with capitalism a step further by buying shares in the Town and County Bank (since provincial banks were at that time founded to finance local trade and industry, Deborah’s investment choice means of course de facto endorsement of that connection with Drumble that her genteel ideology rejects). Deborah is not an adventurer speculator looking for a quick profit; in a way, by investing on her own she simply recognizes her dependence on the stock market. However, her choice of the Town and County Bank, which went against the advice of Mary’s father, turns out to be an unfortunate decision in the long run. By having Deborah invest in a joint-stock bank, Gaskell alluded to the period following 1826, when the monopoly of the Bank of England as a joint-stock bank ended, and when joint-stock banks started springing up outside London. That was also a period of intense crisis and panic, with the bulk of joint-stock enterprises ending in failure.25 Two factors work against the ability of the Cranfordian women to manipulate the capitalist economy to their advantage. The first is the opacity of that economy, which appears as not fully manageable even to Drumble men such as Mary’s father: “And I fancy the world must be very bad, for with all my father’s suspicions of every one with whom he has dealings, and in spite of his many precautions, he lost upwards of a

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thousand pounds by roguery only last year” (145). Although no details are given of the roguery by which this otherwise “capital man of business” (140) lost the money, the allusion is presumably to common risks of speculation at the time. The second obstacle is the sexual division of labor that disqualifies the Cranford women from becoming familiar with the world of business, as does the ideology of gentility to which they subscribe and which reinforces these constraints. The bank crashes after Deborah is already dead, with Matty now having to live with the consequences of her sister’s investment. When after the bank failure Mary tries to figure out “what in the world Miss Matty could do” (130), the implication is of course that living a genteel life equipped her to do nothing. In addition to exposing the weak spot of the local ideology of gentility, the fact that Matty in her genteel isolation from capitalism was never fully isolated from it, the crash of the bank places Matty in a new relationship with the society at large, and in particular with her local community. In other words, the fictional bank in the novel operated under legislation that envisaged only unlimited liability, which in practice meant that all of Matty’s property became liable following the bank-ruptcy. Matty did not only lose her and her sister’s investment in the bank, but all she had. This could no longer happen after the 1856 Joint Stock Companies Act, which was passed several years after the publication of the novel. The Act introduced the category of company with limited liability, which allowed for investment security, especially for smaller buyers of stocks and shares, simply by protecting their other possessions.26 Following the failure of the Town and County Bank, Matty takes the position that she should accept the full consequences of the bank-ruptcy without thinking of how she herself will fare financially. The novel thus turns Matty, previously an apathetic follower of Cranford ways, into the inadvertent heroine in a subplot of the ethics of bank-ruptcy, who denounces self-interest in the name of solidarity with the poor creditors in her community who might suffer from her inability to pay off her debt. As Andrew H. Miller put it, “Unlike Mary and the Bank directors, Matty does not conceive of the public and economic existing in a different sphere from the private and personal.”27 It is inconceivable to Matty not to take the responsibility for her existence as an investor, however remote she had been from actually assuming the role of one (she merely inherits her older sister’s business decisions). Matty’s act of accepting liability is motivated by the application of the same principle of social paternalism that characterizes the ladies of Cranford in relation to the poor of the town (in the “Stopped Payment” chapter, Matty pays for the purchase made by a poor farmer after his note issued by the bank in which she is a shareholder is refused for reports the bank is failing). It is as if Matty intuitively tries to restore the old order, a sort of genteel knowable community, to Cranford, in which the social roles and agents are familiar and predictable—and hierarchical. At the same time, even as she tries to restore the old social order and her place in it, it would seem that Matty’s acceptance of her unlimited liability constitutes a turning point in the history of Cranford genteel society, as she acknowledges all those commercial and social connections that the society previously sought to minimize. But even though Matty is able to repay her debt, she does not evolve into an independent social or economic agent, the economic conditions of her life continue to be managed by others, and her social capital turns out to be sufficient to support her economically as well. On advice from Mary and with the assistance of Mary’s father,

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Matty is established as a shopkeeper—exactly the solution that Deborah Jenkyns opposed vehemently earlier in the work, when Jessie Brown was suddenly impoverished. Selling tea from India, Matty finds herself at one end of a world-wide system of trade whose incursion the community has dreaded all along. The project is only embarked upon after Mary gained support for the idea from the Cranfordians, making sure that Matty would not “forfeit her right to the privileges of society in Cranford” (143), an expression of the willingness of Cranford society to make accommodations under the pressures of the wider economies of capitalism. However, Matty’s story of dealing with capitalism is not one of complete conversion. Cranford’s methods of coming to terms with the uncertainties of capitalism proceed by producing more local idiosyncrasy. In an attempt to reconcile the genteel abhorrence of a mercantile existence and the necessity to engage in it, Matty hides rather than displays the shop sign on her house. She eschews the practice of competition, and confers with Mr. Johnson, the town’s main shopkeeper, to make sure she will not hurt his business. The merchant not only reassures Matty that she will not, but also refers his customers to her shop. Matty’s enterprise is thus kept afloat out of deference. A new local economy of exchange emerges, with Matty giving her patrons “good weight,” while “they, in their turn, brought many a little country present to the ‘old rector’s daughter;’—a cream cheese, a few new-laid eggs, a little fresh ripe fruit, a bunch of flowers” (148). Based less on money than on barter, this new system pays tribute to the old: in spite of the pressures of world trade, Gaskell seems to say, the genteel society of Cranford finds a form of economic exchange adapted to its class culture. At the same time Mary states that this local eccentricity cannot have anything but local value, quoting her businessman father who says that “‘such simplicity might be very well in Cranford, but would never do in the world’” (145). A clearly drawn bottom line of Cranford’s negotiations with capitalism is that even as the Cranford society is forced to make concessions to extra-Cranfordian economies, it keeps trying to gentrify the economic practices that engulf it. As long as some mode of genteel ideology can successfully maintain itself, the town continues to attempt such economic gentrification. But if the novel registers the fragility of the Cranford order visà-vis capitalism, it also registers its resilience. Matty’s shopkeeping does not transform her into a successful businesswoman, determined to make a living by trade, nor does it fundamentally transform the local ways of relating to the surrounding political economies. In other words, capitalism does not eliminate the regime of class as it exists in Cranford—it only forces it into adapting and transforming into a slightly more relaxed version of itself, but a version of the same thing nevertheless. It is noteworthy in this regard that the novel does not start with a pristine moment before change set in; instead it opens at the period right after the coming of the railroad to Cranford during the first English railway boom, between 1835 and 1837: in the episode Captain Brown is reading an installment of Pickwick Papers, which began publication in 1836. The Cranfordians are uncertain about just how to categorize Captain Brown: the fact that he was a military officer earned him a certain amount of esteem in Cranford, but his other credentials had little currency in the town, as he “had obtained some situation on the neighbouring railroad, which had been vehemently petitioned against by the little town, and […] he was so brazen as to talk of being poor.” And in spite of all that,

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“Captain Brown made himself respected in Cranford” (4). Captain Brown gets killed by the very train that brought him to town, in an episode that registers Gaskell’s disbelief in the speedy and profound transformation of a place like Cranford. Nevertheless, he does affect the ways of the Cranfordians; most importantly, he brings about a change in their literary taste, by introducing them to Dickens, whose productions they continue to follow after Captain’s death. Like the new middle class settling in town, represented by Captain Brown, which asks the Cranford regime to review its rules, Dickens comes to symbolize a literary culture too powerful to ignore. This new taste is again pursued with characteristic Cranfordian delicacy and compromise, as Dickens gets read, yet secretively so in deference to the normative literary taste decreed by Deborah Jenkyns. A form of accommodation is thus suggested whereby Cranford society is able to gradually adapt itself to the economies and cultures of the new middle class, while not compromising its basic premises. In its adaptability, Cranford society shows itself surprisingly dynamic and durable. The society’s willingness to relax its requirements is evidenced by the tolerance of Captain Brown’s improprieties, the failure of Mrs. Jamieson’s campaign to ostracize the “plebeian Hogginses” (156), the acceptance of the Barker sisters’ membership after their career in trade, and most of all, by the acceptance of Matty’s shop-keeping. Analogous to the metropolitan trends the Cranfordians are attuned to, these relaxations are characterized by a gradual expansion of the “genteel” elite through the co-optation of some segments of the middle class. The end of the novel leaves the ranks of Cranford genteel society invigorated by new members, the society actually growing in numbers. Gaskell was obviously a very good reader of social trends. The class of which she wrote in Cranford did not get wiped out by the rapid industrialization spurred by the railway booms in the 1830 and 1840s, but was rather strengthened by it. The railway boom in fact created the economic conditions for the swelling of the ranks of women in the rentier class, such as is found in Cranford. E.J.Hobsbawm observed that the industrial explosion surrounding the second railway boom of (in the 1840s) caused a transformation of the capital market, one of whose consequences was “the growth of a class of rentiers, who lived on the profits and savings of the previous two or three generations’ accumulations. By 1871 Britain contained 170,000 ‘persons of rank and property’ without visible occupation—almost all of them women, or rather ‘ladies:’ a surprising number of them unmarried ladies.”28 While the expansion of the capital market occasioned by the railways in the 1840s did certainly cause a growth of the class, its emergence was by not an overnight process. By the first half of the 19th century setting up annuities for women of “rank and property” had been a long-established practice, designed with a view to protect their property as well as to enable the women from wealthier classes to maintain their rank even with no men around, in cases of spinsterhood or widowhood; in the process, the practice created a space of relative independence from the world of business, or, in light of the contemporary sexual division of labor, from the world of men. This was an obvious prerequisite for the emergence of a genteel society of women like the one portrayed in the novel, and for Gaskell’s sense that the class can grow still further. The co-optation of Betty Barker, a former milliner, into the genteel society of Cranford can be read as the Cranford equivalent of the national phenomenon of the co-optation of wealthier capitalists into what Stone and Stone described as the patrician “open elite.”

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The novel underwrites the story of adaptability and survival of Cranford genteel society by foregrounding the presentness of the local community: it opens and ends in the narratorial present, covering a relatively short period of several years (from about 1836 to the early 1840s) during which Mary reports from Cranford. In the middle of the novel Mary reconstructs the history of the town (in fact, the history of Rector Jenkyns’s family, the core of Cranford gentility), recreating the era when the foundations of Cranford’s antiquity and quaintness had been laid. But the bulk of the story is in the narrator’s present, in the railway age, when a revised form of local gentility is coming into being with its basic economic and ideological structures still more or less intact. Mary’s narrative is organized in part around a topic-by-topic analysis of the local society (definition of society, affairs of love, cultural memory, etiquette of visiting, money matters, etc.). Alongside this social anatomy, and in spite of numerous analeptic excursions it requires, the story of Matty Jenkyns unfolds, framed by the railways’ and Captain Brown’s coming to town and Peter’s return from British India. In this way, the text creates two coexisting narrative spaces the nature of whose relationship is problematic. On the one hand, there is the synchrony of the ethnographic report; on the other, there is the eventful diachrony of the town’s implication in trade and empire. The novel resolves this tension between the stasis of one and the variability of the other narrative space within the diachronic narrative as a reaffirmation of the power of the synchronic one to maintain stasis. The town’s social order is at once represented as subject to historical change and as a limit to the sway of change—just like the national order that it emulates. Of course, Cranford can desist from modernization with such relative success because its way of life is not wholly remade by industry or capital, as is presumably the case in Drumble. Yet in spite of their contrast, Gaskell’s novel treats Cranford and Drumble as places sharing a single regional geography and affected by the same social forces, which are in turn expressive of wider national and imperial geographies. Cranford society is created by the exodus of men engaged in business—whether their business is in Drumble, elsewhere in Britain, or in the empire. This is why the novel does not present Cranford as a pre-modern enclave resisting a modern geography; rather, it is a semi-autonomous space allotted by the modern geography itself.

IMAGINING THE EMPIRE The nineteenth-century evolution of “gentility” in Britain was a process by which some but not all forms of economic capital were granted convertibility into social prestige. Throughout this process, gentility continued to require a distance from the realm of industrial production as the most physically conspicuous form of acquiring economic capital. In defining the “gentlemanly capitalism” that dominated Victorian Britain, P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins point out that “working directly for money, as opposed to making it from a distance, was associated with dependence and cultural inferiority.”29 Landed aristocracy continued to serve as the model of social prestige throughout the century, even as the national genteel elite was being considerably expanded by inclusion of capitalists from the service sector, chiefly bankers and merchants, whose interaction

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with the realm of production was relatively invisible. The manufacturing capitalist, closely associated with production, was considered less genteel and respectable than the banker with whom he conducted business. Needless to say, genteel culture did not ostracize capital as such. The English aristocracy had operated within the context of a capitalist agriculture and market at least since the late 17th century. And the aristocracy controlled a state apparatus vitally interested in trade and in imperial expansion and management, an apparatus selectively accessible to the patrician elite and its gradually co-opted allies from the orders of finance capitalists and wealthy merchants. The system of social prestige thus had little to do with opposition to capitalist economy; rather, it was a matter of licensing certain kinds of capital for membership in the genteel order. Industrial capital obviously was a hugely important engine of social transformation, but its sociopolitical impact was severely limited by the fact that the field of institutional politics continued to be dominated by finance capital, imperial trade, and landed aristocracy, variously combining into formal and informal power structures built around the tasks of imperial and domestic management. It is possible to regard this power order, as Arno Mayer has done, under the aegis of the persistence of the old regime, in the sense that certain demonstrably non-bourgeois political forms and practices carried over into modernity.30 In this regard, much recent history has focused on the relationship between modern capitalism and the class system which does not proceed from it but is a relatively independent sedimentation and disposition of other social arrangements. Cain’s and Hopkins’s concept of gentlemanly capitalism, discussed in the Introduction, addresses precisely this relationship, enabling a perspective under which the social culture of gentility appears less as a historical leftover, than as an agile and opportunistic power regime. In its anatomy of small-town life, Cranford illustrates the alignment of provincial polite society with the national culture of gentility against the industrial culture of the north. The contours of this triangular arrangement are suggested from the start by Mary’s situation as a reporter from the industrial Drumble writing on the small-town culture of Cranford and addressing herself to the metropolitan public. In addition, the novel supplements this national triangle with a fourth term, that of the empire, whence comes the symbolic resolution of the novel in the form of Peter Jenkyns’s return to Cranford and the restoration of social arrangements to their condition prior to the bank crash. This imperial domain that concludes the novel is a realm just as opaque to Cranford society as is the domain of industrial capitalism alluded to (through the railway) at the outset. But the empire is a legitimate subject of genteel curiosity and discussion, whereas the occupations of Drumble clearly are not. The novel’s final few chapters, centering on Peter’s return from his exploits in India, serve to indicate that the relationship between Cranford and Drumble is geographically proximate but ideologically distant because of Drumble’s visible and direct relationship to money-making, whereas the relationship between Cranford and the geographically distant empire is ideologically proximate, since it allows for the business of wealth accumulation to be imagined as indirect and invisible. The function of Peter’s imperial sojourn in the novel is therefore to dramatize the ideological disposition of the Cranfordian society to imagine the wealth accumulated in the imperial domain as compatible with the genteel paradigm. Peter’s imperial career, though different from the kind he would have had in the metropole, does fit into Cranford

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standards. It is coded in terms of genteel possibilities: even though the circumstances of his departure from England make him forsake a profession deemed highly respectable in the small-town social hierarchy (rector-ship), as he makes off to fight Napoleon he has hopes for another gentlemanly career—officer in the navy. In India he is known as Aga Jenkyns and established as an indigo planter, that is, a colonial version of the territorial aristocrat.31 After selling his Indian property and returning to England, he is in possession of a small fortune that is very genteelly disconnected from its source and from a “vulgar” relationship to work and money. The Cranford ladies know little of his Indian life, a circumstance that Peter exploits to test their credulity with tales of adventure so fantastic that Mary compares them to those of Munchausen or Sindbad. By their willingness to credit his absurd accounts, the Cranfordians reveal their inability to think the empire that supports them, outside the categories and exaggerated stereotypes of adventure tales. Deferring to the genteel abhorrence of openly acquisitive economic practices, Peter presents in his narratives a vision of the business of empire as imaginable without reference to the shunned question of how money is made. But the suppression of this central component of imperial reality creates a narration vacuum that fantasy is called upon to fill: the tallness of Peter’s tales is a tacit acknowledgment of the other side to his imperial coin. The Cranford ladies are in fact featured in the novel as a curious species of Orientalist in the senses defined by Edward Said 32—as receivers of imperial spoils they take part in the political and economic mastery over India, but they also take part in their own eccentric and parochial version of discursive mastery over India in which the real story of colonial India is suppressed in the name of fantasies of romantic adventure.33 Mary Smith observes that Peter talks in a very different manner with men: “I don’t think the ladies in Cranford would have considered him such a wonderful traveller if they had only heard him talk in the quiet way he did to [the Rector]” (154). In the company of men Peter discloses the kind of narrative about his life in India that presumably would not have been approved as much by the ladies of Cranford—perhaps a narrative of greed and mastery far removed from the comfortable metropolitan world of genteel fantasies. Even when it appears that he has privately told Matty some sort of realistic narrative about how he made his fortune, he seems to have done so in a very sketchy and perhaps even unreliable form, such that Matty’s repetition of the account leaves Mary lamenting that she “never quite understood the whole story” (152). Mary’s comment succinctly recreates the impertinence—irrelevance and inappropriateness—of a more thorough and accurate relation of imperial experience to the Cranford sensibility.34 The only verifiable story of Peter’s Indian existence that comes to Cranford is about an act of chivalry, of his coming to assistance to a poor Englishwoman (Sam Brown’s wife) traveling alone with a child. Identifying Peter as a protector of ladies in distress, this anecdote prompts Mary to seek him out as potential savior of Cranford’s genteel order. Peter’s usual narratives are like the shawls, muslin gowns and pearl necklaces he has sent or brought from India— consumer products representing distinction and directed to the same taste that savors the performance of the conjuror Signor Brunoni, who claims association with a host of Indian dignitaries (“Magician to the King of Delhi, the Rajah of Oude, and the Great Lama of Thibet,” p. 158). It is much after the show that the Cranfordians learn that Signor Brunoni was associated with somewhat less glamorous aspects of British life in India, where he

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was known as Sam Brown, a poor army sergeant who returns to England as poor as he was before serving in India, and takes up the trade of conjuring. This information is disclosed to Mary by Signora Brunoni, who is sensitive to matters of rank too, as the leitmotif of her account is an attempt to convince Mary that Sam Brown should not be confused with his twin brother, since he is the more genteel of the two.35 As it were, the appeal of Signor Brunoni in Cranford is shown to depend on his ability to invoke the language of gentility to advertise his trade, and on the disposition of the Cranfordians to romanticize the empire in accordance with genteel ideals. Even so, before Signor Brunoni’s performance the Cranfordians are not entirely at ease about just how much conjuring as a profession can have in the way of genteel credentials, so that Matty is only reassured after seeing the Rector Hayter in the audience, which leads her to “conclude that this wonderful man is sanctioned by the Church” (88). In a very material sense, the empire comes to rescue of the Cranford genteel society as the bank crash threatens to shatter its economic and imaginary orders: Peter’s return enables Matty’s economic status to change again, the shop is promptly closed, and she and Peter proceed to live “‘very genteelly’ at Cranford”—Mary’s quotation marks underline the importance of this resolution. Challenges to the Cranford order begin with the railroad, which brings into play industrial modernization as well as a sense of social and cultural change (succinctly epitomized in Captain Brown’s introduction of Pickwick Papers to the town), and they continue with the crisis triggered by a fickleness of finance capitalism (evoking the motif of bankruptcy characteristic in this period of speculation manias), finally, the novel finds a resolution by flaunting the empire as an important resource of the genteel regime. The story of Matty Jenkyns lying at the center of this emplotment is constructed to underscore the possibility for Cranford to remain unperturbed by outside pressures: the story seeks to demonstrate the strengths rather than vulnerabilities of its class arrangement in negotiating market forces in the context of British imperialism. The town is shown to be capable of functioning in a global economic network where it can maintain the illusion of independence from the capitalist market by enjoying the fruits of industrial as well as imperial accumulation. Unlike the story of Colonel Newcome in Thackeray’s novel The Newcomes with its focus on the precarious economic position of Anglo-Indian capital that remains in the imperial realm, Peter’s story focuses on a successful drain of capital from the imperial realm as a way of supporting local resistances to modernization.

CRANFORD AND THE MOMENT OF PICKWICK As Mary Smith’s reports show early on, the most conspicuous form of Cranford’s participation in a national culture of gentility is its adherence to a phraseology of elegance and vulgarity it derives from the linguistic practices of the national elite, mediated by verbal report or by print. Questions of language and literature are shown to be capable of provoking disruptions in the town’s routine almost as dramatic as that caused by the bank failure. The proper Cranfordians obey a linguistic etiquette they share with English gentlefolk everywhere, whereas only the lower orders speak an identifiably regional dialect. The normative upper-class idiom ruling good Cranfordian speech is

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presided over by Samuel Johnson, whose style is championed by Deborah Jenkyns as “a model for young beginners” (9). Captain Brown prefers the “vulgar” Dickens of Pickwick Papers. Deborah values Dr. Johnson’s style not just because she thinks it the most accomplished style of literature, but also because it supplies a pedagogic ideal necessary to propagate a proper and uniform discourse across the geographically divided genteel orders. In Mary Smith’s archival research into the past life of the Jenkyns sisters, represented by their epistolary productions, she comes upon a letter in which Deborah laments, in accordance with her ideology of linguistic propriety, “Captain Brown’s sad want of relish for ‘the pure wells of English unde-filed’” (13). By adhering to the Johnsonian norm the Jenkyns sisters believed they were participating in a culture that not only had a national significance—but that was the one true, pristine and ideal expression of Englishness. Due to Deborah’s shunning of rational debate the positions in her argument with Captain Brown are never fully articulated, yet the stakes of it are clear: a struggle over cultural norm (emblematically embodied in Johnson or Dickens). The conflict between Deborah and Captain Brown and their literary icons Johnson and Dickens is a conflict between a nationally uniform language and a multiplicity of language that is inadmissible in polite society at least in part because it is locatable: the episode Captain Brown chooses to read to the Cranfordians features Sam Weller, whose speech is instantly traceable to the Cockney London (illustrating the difference in linguistic wells that Dickens drew from). The arrival of Captain Brown in remote Cranford thus not only causes an anxiety over possibly adverse effects of industrialization on local genteel culture—it also threatens to dislodge the uniform idiom of gentility in favor of a Dickensian polyphony which gives great prominence to the more plebeian and more local linguistic varieties. The literary taste of the Jenkyns daughters is imparted to them by their father, the Anglican Rector of Cranford, the major event in whose life was his trip to London in 1782 to supervise the publication of a sermon he wrote for the Gentleman’s Magazine (45).36 For the rector, London is the center of the national literary culture embodied by the work of Dr. Johnson. Decades later, in the late 1830s, when most of the story takes place, London is still a seasonal haunt for the genteel elite and the polit ical-economic hub of the national and imperial economies. For the Cranfordians that is the relevant London: the state-institutional and genteel London anchoring the south of England, comparatively untouched as it was by manufacturing capitalism and industrial disputes, and dominated by large estates of landed aristocracy. That is the London that speaks to the Cranfordian imagination; on the other hand, the heteroglot urban maze of Dickens announces a different cultural London, seeking to dethrone the Johnsonian paradigm. Studying the Rector’s correspondence, Mary provides a sketch of a vain man less than immune to snobbery and sycophancy in his public function, and in his domestic life bent on making his wife and daughters mimic the mores of the aristocracy. Apart from Dr. Johnson, the required reading for the Jenkynses and one of the main sources of the sought-after ton was the Tory-Anglican St. James’s Chronicle. Economically and ideologically enmeshed in the Established Church, one of the principal institutions of the British state, the Jenkynses partake in a class system whose symbolic center is not in the realm of industrial economy, but in the realm of the state. Where not connected to the church, the Jenkyns family has been represented in the military: one branch of the family

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features a Major Jenkyns, Deborah’s and Matty’s cousin, who spent several decades in India before coming back to England, and Peter follows in his tracks. These crucial state institutions, symbolically associated with London and the south, bestow a certain extraterritoriality on the Jenkynses, and make Cranford seem virtually an enclave of the south in the north. This alliance of Cranford and the national establishment may explain the assumption implicit in the essay—“The Last Generation in England”—that preceded the novel: the assumption that the story about the country as a whole can be told by the story of a small country town. The substitution of the provincial setting for “England” implies that England is Cranford, writ large. The provincial fiction that followed the essay does not search for Cranford on the map of England, but offers Cranford as a map of an England, where Drumble, empire, and their affairs may be kept at a genteel distance. The reference to Dickens which Gaskell made in the first installment of the novel in Household Words did not survive his conductorship, but she reinstalled it in the 1853 book edition. In the passages where Captain Brown and Deborah Jenkyns clash over the respective merits of Johnson’s Rasselas and Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, Dickens replaced all references to his own novel with references to a publication by Thomas Hood’s, a change that obscured the point Gaskell intended to make about the significance of Dickens’s arrival as a literary figure. Dickens was known to revise texts by the journal’s contributors, and his editorial presence was overall quite strongly felt (his name headed every page of the journal, which had a policy of omitting authorial ascription), so that the journal exuded a stylistic uniformity—which Gaskell herself noted a few years later dubbing its style “Dickensy.”37 At any rate, writing in 1851 Gaskell clearly saw that Pickwick was a cultural turning point: part of the complexity of the historical vision of Cranford lies in its view of Pickwick Papers as a momentous social turning point which ushered in a new literary era. It made great sense to have Captain Brown bring Pickwick Papers in Cranford: the pun is not to be missed when he introduces the topic in conversation, saying: “Have you seen any numbers of “The Pickwick Papers? […] Capital thing!” (8). The Dickens novel marks the moment when the realm of letters and the marketplace merge in a way that enables a consolidation of novel-writing as a profession. In the new literary field that emerged after the novel’s publication, economic and social capital of the middle-class novelist increased substantially.38 Pickwick inaugurated the era of fiction in monthly parts, the dominant mode of literary production for the next three decades, and a new source of economic capital for the literary profession. The very idea of writing for money is repugnant to Deborah Jenkyns, who frames one of her dismissals of Pickwick in terms of the genteel abhorrence of visibility in the marketplace: “I consider it vulgar, and beyond the dignity of literature, to publish in numbers” (9). The term vulgar carries the same meaning here that it does in the rest of the novel—that of proscription of striving for money, and subsequently of all professional business (which, of course, ignores the fact that Johnson was a literary professional in his own right, one of whose commercial successes being periodical essays in The Rambler). As related before, the allure of Dickens in Cranford seems to be irresistible, but it is so in a peculiarly compromising Cranfordian way: while the Cranford women read and enjoy Dickens’s novels, they make sure they keep quiet about it, publicly still paying homage to

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the dictates of taste issued by Deborah Jenkyns. It is important to note that Cranford offers a sort of paraphrase of ethnographic elements in Pickwick. Mary Smith is clearly a northern counterpart to Pickwick: she describes the ways of a northern small-town, just like Pickwick who set out to explore small towns in the south of England. His explorations in the world of the southern smalltown middle class and the affiliated class of domestic servants are presented as comedic peregrinations; that is, the story of the new social figure of scientific enthusiast is rendered in a picaresque mode. Pickwick’s Club denotes an early 19th-century conjunction of social benevolence, scientific enthusiasm and the emergence of new scientific discourse and institutions. The Club’s mission of “the advancement of knowledge, and the diffusion of learning”39 is a thinly-veiled referenee to the various scientific associations springing up at the time, chiefly the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (founded in 1826), and the British Association for the Advancement of Science (founded in 1831). Significantly, Pickwick’s travels are motivated by the shifting of his interest away from natural science (“the theory of the tittlebats”), in which the Club had dabbled before, to observation of the social world. By evoking this powerful cultural moment, Gaskell created a historical frame for her text and brought into focus the moment when the English novel became self-reflexive about its ethnographic work. Something of the comedic tone of the Dickens novel is retained in Cranford, but Gaskell’s novel takes a formal step further towards ethnographic narrative by consistently pursuing the style of field report. It rehearses a possibility that is still not fully developed in Pickwick Papers (told as it is by a third-person omniscience): while in Pickwick ethnography is still only a theme, in Cranford it thoroughly determines the form of narrative. In terms of character, Mary is as curious about social custom as her literary precursor; as a social documentarist she is indeed the more rigorous and by far the more insightful one. And, as an ethnographer writing about a seemingly parochial women’s culture, and as a provincial Englishwoman, Mary presents a perspective that highlights the questions of the relationship between domesticity and global power relations, and of the social geography of the nation in ways that Dickens’s novel did not. But more than just being a provincial and female relative to Pickwick, Gaskell’s novel is a statement on the symbolic power of Dickens in contemporary English culture. Dickens appears in the novel as the emblem of a new literary culture, and an expression of a new rise in social authority of the middle class—a new prominence, as it were, of the middle class in the domain of civil society, at a time when the political society in Britain was still very much dominated by a patrician elite. Cranford associates Dickens with cultural transformation, but also with the economic and social effects of industrialization. Captain Brown is a middle-class reader of Dickens, just as he is an agent in that middleclass enterprise that transformed the society and geography of England by the railroad. The connection made by the novel between the cultural modernity of Dickens and the social modernity of industrialization was of course a great theme for Dickens himself. Dickens had great hope in the power of industrialization to dispel the old social forms and especially the patrician influence in British life. A year before Cranford started publication, for instance, Dickens published in Household Words the first of several articles entitled “Supposing.” The article questioned the rationality of British political institutions and the social habits of the middle and upper classes, and called for a variety

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of reforms in both social manners and political institutions. At the end of the piece Dickens expressed a hope that the demise of the “fictions” and “superstitions” undergirding the contemporary social and political arrangements could be expedited by “iron energy.”40 On the other hand, as the last chapter will show, Dickens believed that English society cannot be refashioned by technological progress only, and that it is impossible without a moral education of the middle class. Cranford tells the story of the persistence of the social ideology of gentility, one of the “fictions” that Dickens’s literature tried to discourage. In Cranford Gaskell registered both the new cultural empowerment of the middle class created by Dickens’s literature, as well as the Dickensian frustration with the aristocratic dominance in British life. It is in reference to the discrepancy between the cultural stature of Dickens (that is, the new authority of middle-class culture itself) and the persistence of patrician dominance in political society that Cranford presented itself as a cultural statement: the novel sought to illustrate the workings of the class culture supporting the patrician elite and thwarting the modernizing potential it associates with Dickens. In Cranford, the resilient cultural regime of the small town serves to show that there are social spaces—defined less by territory than by class—which are not only ideologically resistant to political and social modernization, but are also able to manage the pace, and perhaps even determine the terms of their interaction with the modernizing forces. While acknowledging the increasing social authority of the literary and technological innovations represented by Dickens and Captain Brown, Gaskell brings into focus the vitality of the small town as it successfully accommodates such innovations, without losing much of its class culture. In this way, the novel dramatizes the failure of middle-class culture to displace the culture of gentility. As a cultural icon, “Dickens” is accepted in the society of Cranford with a compromise that suggests the ability of gentility to domesticate Dickens rather than the ability of Dickens to dissolve the social mechanisms of gentility. As a statement on national life, the novel suggests that such local accommodations between gentility and middle-class culture can be made because industrialization and the middle-class literary culture anchored by Dickens are new and powerful but not dominant forces in the British polity in the first half of the 19th century, and because a place like Cranford can draw its strength from association with the national class regime of gentility, whose ability to reinvent itself and continue to preside over both the domestic and imperial polities underwrites Cranford’s own endurance as a culture.

Chapter Three The Middle Class and the Novel in W.M.Thackeray’s The Newcomes [C]apital is absolute, as times go, and is perforce the bargain-master. (416) W.M.Thackeray, Pendennis

[T]he writer act[s] as chorus to the drama […] In the modern the-atre, as the playgoing critic knows, this explanatory personage is usually of quite a third-rate order. (319) W.M.Thackeray, The Newcomes

WHILE FINANCE CAPITALISM AND SPECULATION IN PARTICULAR ARE recurrent themes in Thackeray’s novels, The Newcomes occupies a special place in this regard, as a novel about a writer writing about artists and bankers. Appearing in installments from 1853 to 1855, at the peak of Thackeray’s popularity, The Newcomes was his most ambitious and comprehensive novelistic statement on two questions that dominated his writing as an established literary figure: the question of the social status of literature and art and the question of the social identity of the middle class within a society that he saw as profoundly structured by a snobbish class culture. It would be misleading to see in The Newcomes an example of the Victorian multiplot novel, primarily because there is not much of a plot to the novel—which scarcity, when dragged over a thousand pages, can indeed be seen as an accomplishment in its own right that merits an explanation. But while not excessive in plot and peripety, at least nothing on the scale of Dickens’s novels of equivalent length, The Newcomes is excessive in one other department: in its exercise of a wide range of generic modes. Let me mention just a few: First, the novel is a memoir, a biography, a family chronicle. It traces the lives of three generations and two branches of the Newcome family, from humble beginnings to a position of some prestige and wealth. The subtitle of the novel is “Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family,” suggesting that the Newcome family is in some ways representative, and that its social typicality has to do with the notion of respectability.1 The chronicle is narrated by Arthur Pendennis, a Newcome family friend (and the protagonist of the eponymous novel by Thackeray). Reconstructing the story of the Newcome family, Pendennis presumably sifts through and edits accounts, written and oral, from the Newcomes themselves as well as from a gallery of characters populating the spheres in which its several branches move: aristocrats, domestic servants, tradesmen,

Literary criticism and cultural theory 92 military men, clergy, journalists and artists—and, in the character of Pendennis himself, a professional novelist who puts their world into a narrative. Most of the novel dwells on the marriage marketability of the painter Clive Newcome and his cousin Ethel Newcome. Ethel is marketed by her branch of the Newcome family as an object of exchange in a trade of economic and social capital; she is expected to marry into the aristocracy to consolidate the patrician connections of the Newcome bankers. In this marriage market Clive’s social capital as a painter and Colonel Newcome’s son is insufficient, and the Colonel strives to increase his son’s stock of respectability by becoming a finance capitalist. On the margins of the main storyline, the novel tells what could be a rare example of a mid-Victorian story of adultery (culminating in a divorce), the story of Jack Belsize and Clara Pulleyn. The various marital misalliances in the novel are given a quasi-ideal counterpoint in the marriage of Pendennis and Laura, which is rendered in almost Austenian terms of temperamental compatibilities—a possibility no longer entertained in the mercenary world of Newcome marriages. As a family chronicle spanning the lives of three generations, the novel has a foot in the province of the historical novel. It covers the period from about 1770 to the mid 1840s, roughly coinciding with the period of the industrial revolution. However, the novel does not make much of industrial capitalism, even though there is some sense that the early fortune of the Newcomes was made in textiles, as well as that they continue to operate manufactories in the town of Newcome, in the north of England. The important trajectory in the history of the family seems to be its gradual gentrification. Their capital with northern origins is converted to southern finance capital, and they become one of the most powerful City families. The Newcomes is in some sense a supplement—thematic, ideological and even generic—to Thackeray’s historical novel published in 1852, Henry Esmond. Set at the turn of the 18th century, Henry Esmond presents an interesting parallel to another contemporary account of the same period in English history—T.B.Macaulay’s History of England, the first two volumes of which appeared in 1848. In Henry Esmond the period from the Restoration to the Hanoverian accession appears to be defined primarily by intra-aristocratic conflict—quite literally, as a family affair, which is reinforced by the novel’s extensive reference to the Oedipus myth. While Macaulay strove to show a wide and complex play of forces underpinning the revolutionary events, and to give a central role to London capitalists in those events, Henry Esmond featured little attention to the middle class (admittedly, with the notable exception of the literati, whose presence underscores the ideological changes of the post-1688 period). In contrast, The Newcomes, written immediately after Henry Esmond, presents a view of the role of the middle class in recent British history—as historical newcomers. Since the family name is an allusion to a language of class condescension, the title already promises that this history of the middle class is part of a larger history, the history of snobbery, which is also a history of an alliance between certain segments of the middle class and the patrician elite. There is a Bildungsroman narrative in the novel—the narrative about the education of Clive Newcome, that follows Clive’s development from childhood to adolescence to his married and professional life, in what could be seen as another in the series of Thackeray’s attempts to write a “middle-aged novel.”2 The novel is also a

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Künstlerroman, the story of an artist’s formation—that is, Clive’s formation as a painter. The story of Clive the painter is not so much a narrative of artistic maturation, but rather of artistic stagnation. At the end of the novel, there is a sense that there is very little room for Clive’s improvement as an artist and very little hope that he may achieve any kind of reputation. In its preoccupation with the theme of the social status of art and writing, The Newcomes directly segued from an earlier novel, Pendennis, and a cultural polemic provoked by it—the “dignity of literature” debate. The Newcomes came as palpably yet another rejoinder in the debate, a recapitulation of Thackeray’s views on the profession of writing that was now inscribed within a narrative about the middle class itself—implying that the two formations, the artistic and the class one, were to be seen as somehow subject to the same social process. As it traces Clive’s and the Colonel’s exploits, the “biography” takes on several other generic possibilities, rehearsed as narrative digressions, such as the novel of the Grand Tour (and one which moreover stages a differentiation between tourist travel and artistic expatriation, both in the figure of Clive); an international society novel (a genre rehearsed in Vanity Fair already, and giving Thackeray an opportunity to compare different national regimes of power, class, art, etc.); a political novel (dwelling on the election campaign for a by-election in the town of Newcome); and even a drawing room drama (centering on Clive’s relationship with Ethel, who is both a social rebel and a resigned conformist on the marriage market). All these different generic modes are usually marked in a formal manner; for instance, the Grand Tour narrative is reported through letters, the political narrative is mediated through newspaper reports, and the drawing room drama is rendered not in a narrative mode, but in a full-scale dramatic mode, with divisions into acts and scenes, stage descriptions, etc. There is also a Quixotic or a neo-picaresque narrative in the novel. The Quixotism is dramatized in several ways. First, Colonel Newcome is a naive and idealistic reader of the Quixotic text itself—he believes Don Quijote to be one of “the finest gentlemen in the world.” Secondly, there is a Quixotism that characterizes Colonel Newcome’s feud with the other branch of his family. In this feud, the Colonel fights a losing battle, failing to compete in terms of both finance capital and social capital. Furthermore, if the Cervantes text originally performed a specifically literary task of burlesquing a literary tradition (chivalric romance), can The Newcomes be read under the aegis of parody or burlesque of another type of literature? If there is an antiromantic streak in the novel, what is it trained on—what kind of blindness, naiveté or idealism? As I will later show, the idealistic text criticized by the novel as Quixotic is not so much a literary genre as a narrative trope that could be called the paternalist romance—a common Victorian idealization of paternalism as a remedy for social conflict. Finally, there is also the question of how the Quixotism, as a narrative procedure engendering a certain range of ideological possibilities, affects the “historical” narratives of the novel—the stories of class formation, individual formation and vocational formation. The entirety of Thackeray’s oeuvre displays the kind of emplotment that can be understood as either picaresque or Quixotic. From Barry Lyndon to Becky Sharp to Pendennis to Henry Esmond, Thackeray presented a series of characters whose adventures are episodic and repetitive rather than teleological and developmental. This type of plot is equally characteristic of both the Quixotic narrative and the picaresque (a circumstance widely exploited in the 18th-century English novel,

Literary criticism and cultural theory 94 for instance in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, where a conflation of both traditions takes place). Speaking of the ideological implications of the picaresque generic model, Michael McKeon noted its inclination towards what he called a type of “conservative” ideology marked by an extreme skepticism, in that it “lacks any utopian vision, however remote or contradictory, of an alternative.”3 The Cervantes novel, in McKeon’s reading, similarly enacts a movement towards a conservative ideology, since its secularizing work ends in a position of skepticism that bars the articulation of any affirmative social ideology. Without examining the subtleties of McKeon’s analysis, I will be treating the picaresque and the Quixotic as two kindred narrative modes, featuring characters whose peregrinations through the totality of the social world serve as a vehicle for a satirical critique of that totality. But some sense of a possibility of functional difference between the two modes cannot be ignored: it matters whether the protagonist is a dupe or a rogue, Quixotic or picaresque. For instance, while the picaro has in principle little trouble in figuring out the ways of the world, and often can see through them more clearly then other characters, the story of a Quixotic buffoon proffers a potential narrative trajectory from an ignorance of the world to a knowledge of the world, that is, for instance, dramatized in Dickens’s most Quixotic novel, Pickwick Papers. The status of Colonel Newcome’s story in this respect is an important arena of the novel’s ideological work; he is not one of the string of Thackeray’s rogues, such as Catherine, Becky Sharp and Barry Lyndon, but he is rather one of his fools and dupes, who include Pendennis and Esmond and who seem to be capable at least in part of developing towards a recognition of their illusions. Finally, the family chronicle is itself framed by another narrative instance: by what appears to be authorial discourse, which at the beginning and the end of Pendennis’s narrative offers to read that narrative as a fable—in the tradition of say La Fontaine, complete with its cast of characters of crows, foxes and wolves in sheep’s clothing. The fable as a genre inevitably suggests a sort of naturalization of society, which is a recurrent trope in Thackeray, but it could also be seen as an index of an ironic literary selfreflexivity that requires to be taken with a grain of salt. The fable allows Thackeray to play up the sense of exhaustion of social and artistic possibilities—“[t]here may be nothing new under and including the sun” (5); on the other hand, it offers a sort of selfdeprecating or ironical self-inventory of the novel’s procedures (“a farrago of old fables”—4), which necessarily falls short of capturing its complexity—functioning in turn as a sort of self-deprecating advertisement for itself. A duality between artistic selfdeprecation and some sort of a seriously entertained aesthetic eclecticism thus constitutes a defining trait of the novel. What does this multimodality do for the novel? An obvious answer is that the eclecticism of narrative styles, formats, and emplotments is designed to encompass the multifariousness of an entire class culture—the middle-class culture represented by the Newcome family. The complex narrative procedure is intended to match a complex culture, as it were. The novel’s scope of reference, historical as well as contemporary, is so extensive and meticulous that it makes for the most difficult of Thackeray’s texts to read, so much so that a companion guidebook may not be a bad idea.4 A related interpretive possibility is to view the novel as actually deliberately going about the task of cataloging the range of conventional plots, stock situations and tropes available to the

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contemporary novelist, a narrative encyclopedia of sorts. A more complicated take would have to approach this multimodality as a function of the birth pangs of a reconceptualization of novelistic work itself—perhaps an experimental striving for a different kind of novel. Finally, the coexistence of these various modes sets in motion various interactions and tensions between them: for instance, the developmental Bildungsromanesque narrative of subjectivation as socialization is in conflict with the neopicaresque narrative that emphasizes the lack of developmental options and repetitiveness of failure. In my reading, this tension is resolved in favor of the neopicaresqe, which informs the persistent reenactment of some sort of a failure in the novel—of paternalism, Anglo-Indian capitalism, respectable marriage, art—in a way, the failure of an entire class way of life. Thackeray’s name for this failure was snobbishness. The Book of Snobs published in 1846 was an anatomy of the snobbish orders—a species of ethnographic taxonomy especially of the professions servicing the state apparatus—the military snobs, the clerical snobs, the university snobs, the City snobs, etc. Despite heavy-handed burlesque, the claim that “Snobs are to be studied like other objects of Natural Science” registered a sense that there is a specific national phenomenon deserving of a specific kind of social analysis. Thackeray attributed snobbishness to the practice of ennoblement, “a prodigious national institution,” which encouraged the middle classes to strive for co-optation into the patrician order. There are two important implications to Thackeray’s analysis of snobbery. First, it focused on the realm of civil society (by which I mean the marketplace, the household, the structures of everyday human relations, practices and ideological beliefs), and quite explicitly proposed that there is a culture of class practiced and reproduced in the realm of civil society, that should be recognized as a social force in its own right, and a central characteristic of British society. Secondly, Thackeray’s anatomy of snobbishness proposed that it was a neopatrician culture and not a middle-class culture that was winning out in the realm of civil society. The literary culture, on the other hand, in which Thackeray participated, was a powerful factor in civil society, which enjoyed the economic support of a booming middle-class cultural marketplace. In this sense, The Newcomes needs to be read as Thackeray’s attempt to recalibrate his view of snobbery as a national disease to accommodate the growing prestige of his own vocation.

DIGNITY OF LITERATURE During a time when many cultural commentators stressed the virulent laissez-faire of the cultural marketplace, Thackeray offered one of the most memorable images of the marketplace as a heteronomous principle. In “A Plan for a Prize Novel,” a burlesque he published in Punch, a literary man advises his friend, a novelist, “to write an advertisement novel,” namely, to incorporate paid advertisements in the fabric of his novel. For instance, there would be passages such as: “Lady Emily was reclining on one of Down and Eider’s voluptuous ottomans, the only couch on which she now reposes, when Lord Bathershins entered, stepping noiselessly over one of Tomkins’s elastic Axminster carpets.”5 Soon after, in Pendennis, Thackeray attempted a comprehensive map of the literary scene, articulating, mostly in the voice of the character named George

Literary criticism and cultural theory 96 Warrington, an astute analysis of marketplace heteronomies. For Warrington, who is the closest Thackeray’s novels come to depicting a cultural critic, “capital is absolute, as times go, and is perforce the bargain-master.” Arthur Pendennis, the hero of this Künstlerroman, accordingly becomes not so much an artist, as a “prose labourer.” But the novel also suggests that while the marketplace makes or breaks writers based on marketability; what defines marketability is a different matter. The cultural marketplace is crisscrossed by a number of competing ideologies organizing taste, Pendennis finds his own place by writing a “fashionable novel,” which caters, with great commercial success, sappy genteel fantasies to an essentially middle-class audience. Pendennis provoked a brief but passionate and often peevish controversy that came to be known as the dignity of literature debate. Thackeray was attacked by John Forster, a friend of Dickens’s, for ridiculing the profession of letters in the novel—an attack which had a particular significance at a time when Dickens was busy trying to improve the social position of writers. Dickens’s sentiments about the status of the literary profession are interestingly expressed in a letter written at the end of the 1840s: “Although literature as a profession has no distinct status in England, I am bound to say that what I experience of its recognition, all through society, in my own person, is honorable, ample, and independent.”6 Dickens wrote with a detectable measure of pride in his own symbolic and economic capital, but he also realized that the profession as a whole did not enjoy the same honorable, ample, and independent recognition. In the early 1850s Dickens came to believe that in the new literary economy, with a substantial increase of capital circulating in the realm of letters, there was now room for literary producers to try to expand their intellectual and economic control over their own profession. Dissatisfied with the social status of literature he first tried to reform the Royal Literary Fund (an organization still dependent on patrician patronage), and when that failed, he set up the Guild of Literature and Art, whose aim was to help writers and artists struggling in the ruthless laissez-faire of the cultural marketplace. Thackeray did not join Dickens in this campaign. Still smarting after Forster’s attack, he had Pendennis assert in The Newcomes: “The artists, for the most part, do not cry out against their woes as loudly as some gentlemen of the literary fraternity, and yet I think the life of many of them is harder; their chances even more precarious, and the conditions of their profession less independent and agreeable than ours” (938). Judging by this grumpy sentiment alone, it would appear that The Newcomes was meant as a rewrite of Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence,” with a message to the writers: if you think the conditions of your profession are hard, look at the artists. Thackeray set out on a career in letters in the mid-1830s, after gambling away a substantial patrimony. He started in a literary environment in which the status of the novel as an art form and the status of novel-writing as a profession were none too exalted; yet, the literary field was already caught in a restructuring, with the shape of the transformation becoming recognizable by the late 1840s, when a novelistic celebrity system based in a mass-market for the middle class consolidated itself. This transformation was a peculiar affair coming together through a confluence of many factors. But it is around that time that Dickens’s and Thackeray’s views on the profession started to diverge publicly. Pendennis ran parallel with Dickens’s David Copperfield, and shared with that novel a similar Bildungsroman narrative of the making of a professional

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writer. But unlike Dickens’s novel, which hardly dealt with its protagonist’s pro fession, Thackeray devoted a series of chapters to the world of London writers and publishers of the late 1830s—the world before the moment of Pickwick, as it were. The chapters dealt with the entire “Corporation of the Goosequill,” that is, the world of professional writers to which Thackeray belonged as a struggling apprentice in the same period as that described in the novel. After the notorious chapters XXX to XXXIV had been published, an editorial appeared in The Morning Chronicle politely questioning the appropriateness of Thackeray’s portrait of the literary world. John Forster attacked Thackeray with less restraint in The Examiner, charging him with a disparaging attitude to the literary profession. In response, Thackeray wrote a piece for The Morning Chronicle, entitled “The Dignity of Literature,” in which he tried to defend his portrait of the literary world by claiming that his attack was leveled not at the profession in general, but at “improvident, vulgar, snobbish” literary men.7 The debate did not produce a large body of polemical text, but it made obvious the differences in Thackeray’s and Dickens’s views on the social position of the literary profession. Thackeray wrote numerous bur lesques such as “A Plan for a Prize Novel,” and the depiction of London literary Bohemia in Pendennis was not more hard-hitting. The difference was that Pendennis was the work of an established novelist who was using a genre that by then (the late 1840s) had come to enjoy a good deal of social prestige, and not least because of Dickens. The picture of the literary scene was relentless indeed—as George Warrington introduces an impoverished young gentleman and literary hopeful Arthur Pendennis to the London literary scene, its every aspect is satirized: feuding publishers, mercenary editors, incompetent reviewers, third-rate poets. Forster rightly observed that not one literary character appears in a positive light. Nor does Arthur Pendennis amount to the role of precursor of a new type of novelist; his career does not presage new social capital for the literary profession, and his writing is no better than that of anyone else in the novel. Coming to contemporary audiences as an insider’s satire of the literary business, the novel read as an authentically deglamorizing statement, a finger pointed at the mercenary spirit permeating the literary world. The heteronomous forces in the literary field are underscored by the narrative of Pendennis’s education as a professional writer. Pendennis’s professional formation is dramatized in relation to three social forces: the prestige of the aristocratic model of inherited wealth, which is Pendennis’s starting position in the story; the alternative pull of the middle-class model of self-making, which is where his writing profession takes him; and the literary marketplace, which furnishes the literary fashion and tastes with which he has to grapple. The tensions and confluences between the three forces continually generate contradictions that Pendennis cannot resolve. As the plot is constructed so that eventually Pendennis has to earn his living, the aristocratic paradigm seems to be rejected in the name of middle-class self-reliance. At the same time, his literary success is facilitated by his ability to advertise himself as an aristocrat, and his fiction recycles genteel fantasies.8 Simply put, Pendennis capitalizes on selling neo-aristocratic ideology to middle-class audiences. This apparent paradox re-invokes Thackeray’s favorite theme of middle-class subservience, i.e. the snobbery that he named and taxonomized in The Book of Snobs. While Pendennis reinvents himself as a self-made man, his writing is rendered as inextricably bound up in the heteronomies attending the literary profession.

Literary criticism and cultural theory 98 Though these heteronomies are mediated by the marketplace, marketability is in turn informed by wider social relations of power and prestige that still hinge on neoaristocratic ideology. The trajectory of Pendennis’s education is thus designed to highlight the social ascendancy of the genteel culture, even in environments that seem quite thoroughly transformed by capitalism. At the same time, however, Pendennis is in its own satirical and self-deprecating way crucially about the production of specifically literary value. Despite its protestations to the contrary, the novel is a sort of production-for-producers, to use Bourdieu’s term. Within the narrative, the independent space for the sanctioning of literary value is coded as cynical acceptance, exemplified by Warrington, of the new marketplace system structured by various political and social alliances. Warrington’s cynical musings create some sort of space for negotiation of the heteronomous pressures by allowing the literary profession, subject as it is to the marketplace, to engage in the very act of self-reflection. Notwithstanding his radical denigration of literary work and his emphasis on the nearabsolute heteronomies of the market and patronage mechanisms, and indeed because of it, Warrington engages in practices of critique and judgment that are informed by a distance towards the literary mores of the day. Concretely, Warrington makes aesthetic evaluations that establish a hierarchy of value not necessarily identical with consecration in the marketplace. The main mode of his criticism is conservative: he offsets the triviality of contemporary literature by comparing it with the unattainable greatness of past literatures. Another function he takes on in the novel is that of judging both “natural gift”9 among the multitudes of contemporary hacks, and their marketability: “the rubbish is saleable enough,”10 is his verdict on Pendennis’s first novel. Warrington’s aesthetic judgment does not really congeal into any sort of comprehensive critical theory, rendered as it is merely as a simple language of endorsement and dismissal. Thus, Warrington comes to signify the institution of aesthetic criticism, more than any sectarian critical position, and the only palpable position he takes is the conservative regard for the past (when the marketplace was not so much an issue), which makes him into an ideological relative of many a Victorian social critic. The conservatism of Arthur’s writing is somewhat different—it is the opportunism of the marketplace. As I mentioned before, Pendennis’s novel Walter Lorraine, with its sappy genteel story, does not constitute a novelistic step ahead of the contemporary situation; instead, it is just a formulaic fashionable novel, which Pendennis thinks “was as good as most books of the kind that had the run of the circulating libraries and the career of the season.”11 Pendennis’s novel writing is a reference to popular silver spoon novels of the 1830s. In other words, there is nothing innovative about his writing. There is no fuss over what constitutes a good novel in the novelistic field depicted in Pendennis. In fact, the novelistic scene in the novel is undifferentiated, featuring few struggles over literary value. That is clearly in contrast to Thackeray’s actual career as a literary critic and novelist who parodied and criticized other novels extravagantly. But that is also clearly in agreement with the novel’s statement of the radical submission of the literary field to political and social heteronomies. In spite of the fact that Thackeray did not support Dickens in his RLF and Guild projects, neither writer really sought to reject the marketplace. Dickens wanted to alleviate the ills of the marketplace from the professional point of view (in order to help

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the struggling writer), but Thackeray raised the difficult question of the relationship between the marketplace and the very aesthetic aspects of literature. Interestingly, without acknowledging Dickens or contemporary novelists, the narrator of Pendennis suggests that things have changed for the better: “It is different now, as we know; but there were so few great historians, or great poets, or great actors in Pen’s time.”12 Still that does not mean that now writing is less a matter of business: “When you want to make money by Pegasus […] farewell poetry and aerial flights; Pegasus only rises now like Mr. Green’s balloon, at periods advertised beforehand, and when the spectators’ money has been paid.”13 So what is the difference between the 1830s when Pen was starting and the 1840s when the story is told? That difference is implied by the very thematization: it is the difference between the theme and the thematizer. The protagonist of Pendennis’s novel is a gentleman of fashion, meaning someone with no particular occupation; the protagonist of Thackeray’s novel is Pendennis who undergoes a transformation from an idle gentleman of fashion to a professional novelist. The commodification remains, but the novelty is that Thackeray’s novel finds its very subject in the making of the writer and of the literary world. In other words, the making of the writer has become an interesting story, and maybe even a marketable story. While Forster was right to comment on the disparaging satire of the literary scene in Pendennis, he failed to appreciate that the novel was in its own (often grumpy) way a celebration of the rise in the social authority of the novelistic event marking the newly won authority for the novel. The literary profession that took place in the 1840s. Pendennis itself was a paradox of Thackeray’s view of the literary profession in Pendennis is easy to locate: in spite of the social and economic subservience of literary labor, the aesthetic and professional self-examination undertaken in the novel ended up by producing the idea of aesthetic autonomy for the profession of letters, albeit by negative and conservative example only.

NARRATION AND CLASS Thackeray’s interest in issues of the novel as a form surpassed that of any other novelist before Henry James. Early in his career Thackeray took on the role of an iconoclast who was out to expose and satirize the clichés in the novel of the day. His iconoclastic practices informed all of his early writing: novel reviews, literary burlesques and parodies, and novelistic exercises of his own. He wrote burlesques spoofing the popular novelistic genres in the 1830s, such as the Newgate novel or the silver spoon novel; he ridiculed the conventional novelistic devices such as poetic justice, and wrote a novel with a declarative purpose of debunking the convention (Barry Lyndon); he satirized the novels that ended with the marriage of the main characters and demanded that novels portray “middleaged” life (in Rebecca and Rowena). In his criticism for The Morning Chronicle he attacked the “political novel” of Disraeli. In contrast to Disraeli, who attempted to represent all of society, Thackeray campaigned for a reduced understanding of “the tendency and the province of the novel.” Criticizing Disraeli’s Sybil he wrote: “Morals and manners we believe to be the novelist’s best themes; and hence prefer romances which do not treat of algebra, religion, political economy, or other abstract

Literary criticism and cultural theory 100 science.”14 Questioning the competence of Disraeli to write about “the mill and the mine,” Thackeray claimed that his descriptions of those fail “from want of experience and familiarity with the subject.” Instead, Thackeray called for “a Boz from among the miners and the manufactories to detail their ways of work and pleasure—to describe their feelings, interests, and lives, public and private,” that is, arguing in effect for a write what you know doctrine that went against the premise of the industrial novel. In addition, Thackeray found the conventional plot resolutions in industrial novels, which reduced difficult political questions through “a misty reconciliation between the rich and the poor,” especially unconvincing.15 In contrast to the novelistic production of the day for which he largely had contempt, he offered to rediscover the literature of the 18th century, in particular advocating the kind of unrestrained humor he associated with Fielding. His fascination with the 18th century comes through in a string of historical novels as well as a series of lectures published as The English Humorists of the 18th Century, a work of emphatic homage to his formative literary traditions, and an attempt at their popularization for contemporary readers. 18th-century novelists appeared to Thackeray to be more truthful in their representation of morals and manners, because they were less constrained by convention. In his own writing the operative word for mimesis was fidelity to nature, but interestingly enough, already in the early 1850s English reviewers began to use the term realism in conjunction with Thackeray. In 1851, a reviewer for Fraser’s magazine dubbed him “the chief of the realist school,”16 rather out of the blue. A little later the same year, David Masson offered a distinction between the real and the ideal styles of art in an article about Pendennis and David Copperfield, which were published almost simultaneously, and which encouraged the public perception of the rivalry between Dickens and Thackeray.17 While some of the critics were undecided about the merits of realistic fiction (Masson especially thought it belonged to the domain of low as opposed to high art), they in the main argued that Thackeray’s novels were more successful in accurately representing reality. The operative words, more so than realism, still remained “nature and truth,” but the critics’ attention was directed to the representation of the social world, or as a reviewer of Henry Esmond in the Westminster Review put it, of “the men and women who compose the sum of that life in the midst of which we are all moving.” Thackeray’s novels, the reviewer held, can help reveal “the framework of society in the nineteenth century.”18 The Newcomes was hailed by another contemporary reviewer as “the most faithful and actual transcript of actual life which is anywhere to be found.”19 For my purposes here, the most relevant formal element of Thackeray’s strategies of realism is the narrative point of view—his insistence on the realism of the narrative act itself. More often than not Thackeray’s narratives deploy motivated narration—a narrative situation where the very act of narration is given an explanation. Barry Lyndon, for instance, is a fictional autobiography of the eponymous character, whose narrative happens somehow to get into the hands of the novel’s “editor,” another fictional character. Famously, in Vanity Fair, where the narrative situation can easily be confused for naïve omniscience, and where the narrator is completely absent from the peripeties of the plot, the narrator drops an occasional but unmistakable hint that he has been told the story by the protagonists themselves, that is, that he inhabits the recounted world—to use Gerard Genette’s terms, he is an intradiegetic rather than extradiegetic narrator.20 While

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Barry Lyndon belongs to the convention of found text, Vanity Fair is a testimony (like Pendennis later). In The Newcomes, the act of narration is a complex combination of different narrative situations. There is a pontificating authorial presence occupying the very edges of narrative—the first few and the last few pages of the novel, from where it flaunts the artifice of the whole endeavor (this is similar to the author as puppeteer in Vanity Fair). However, the story framed by this authorial presence is in its own terms presented under the category of true history, recounted by a character named Arthur Pendennis, a character from an earlier novel. His narration is part reconstruction based on a series of first-hand testimonies, oral or written; it is also part testimony, as Arthur witnesses some parts of the story. Arthur is little involved in the story, yet involved enough in the capacity of a family friend: he is what Franz Stanzel called the peripheral first-person narrator.21 Arthur’s most important source is Clive Newcome, his artist friend, to whom Arthur is bound by ties of class, education, and artistic sensibility. In his frequent metacommentary on his narrative method, Pendennis refers to himself alternately as the chronicler, compiler, biographer and historian of the Newcome family. Putting the story together, Arthur proceeds as a literary specialist who takes great pleasure in experimenting with various modes of literary representation—for instance, there are sections written in full dramatic mode; there are epistolary sections, and some presented in what might be called indirect epistolary form;22 there are sections of multiple embedded narration; there are newspaper reports, excerpts from exhibition catalogs, etc. The polyphony of languages thus evoked conveys a sense of the complexity of the modern experience presumably embodied by the Newcome family and their social world. Though Arthur is primarily a chronicler of the family, throughout the narrative he keeps discussing his strategies of narration in great detail, which makes it impossible to ignore that the novel is not only about the world of high finance, but also about the business of novel writing. As he highlights his craftsmanship, he also highlights the heteronomous character of contemporary literature. Arthur self-representation is that of a professional writer who writes for money: he states he is publishing the chronicle for “the public’s future delectation, and the chronicler’s private advantage” (535). Arthur’s narration is doubly formed by the experiential horizon of his characters. On the one hand, he assumes the stance of an editor who tries to let the entire social order represented by the Newcomes speak for itself. Often he proceeds as a “reporter” who gathers information from his “informants,” who occupy a range of distances from the Newcomes, as relatives, family friends, acquaintances, and whose views reflect not only personal bias but also a range of fine differences in social position. On the other hand, Arthur inhabits the same world as his characters, and he subscribes to the same social values that characterize other characters in the novel. He is not only intradiegetic, but is, in a very broad sense, co-ideological with his characters. Very much like the social taxonomist of his Book of Snobs, who declares himself as “one of them” (the snobs), the narratorial figure in The Newcomes often claims to be just a fellow passenger in the world of his characters. In a casual bit of self-identification, Arthur speaks of “us of the middle class”(562), an appellation meant to include the protagonists, the audiences, and of course, the narratorial persona. Let me add that this narrative posture goes very comfortably hand-in-hand with the neo-picaresque streak in Thackeray’s writing. Namely, in picaresque narratives the wanderings of the hero/rogue expose a certain

Literary criticism and cultural theory 102 universal corruption affecting the social system, and the picaro plays along with this corruption even as he makes it visible; Thackeray’s narrator similarly declares himself subject to a similar kind of universality of failure, even as he criticizes it. But while Arthur does occupy the same world, he does not occupy the exact same social position as the Newcome family—not even as his friend Clive. At one point, the Colonel finds it necessary to reproach Clive for commenting on Arthur;s humble quarters: “and I am surprised you should think of reflecting upon Mr. Pendennis’s poverty, or of feeling any sentiment but respect and admiration when you enter the apartments of the poet and the literary man” (49). In spite of such rhetoric, the Colonel will try to discourage Clive from pursuing the painter’s calling for not being respectable enough. Other Newcomes view Clive’s circle of friends with predictable condescension. Ethel deplores Clive’s choice of profession, wishing he had chosen a military or diplomatic career. She speaks of Clive’s “low Radical literary friends” (618), of which the narrator is one. Pendennis has a few transactions of his own with the Newcomes, with whose bank in the City he keeps a small account. Mrs Hobson Newcome occasionally invites Pendennis to dinner to fill a vacant spot, and Pendennis occasionally obliges, imagining in the process, “rightly or wrongly, from Mrs. Newcome’s manner […] that she knew [he] had but thirty shillings left in the bank” (54). Walking into the Newcome bank, Pendennis is filled with “trepidation which most poor men feel upon presenting themselves before City magnates and capitalists” (643). Thackeray’s novels offer numerous examples of the writerly figure Pierre Bourdieu called “the poor relative of the bourgeois family,” some-one who “possess[es] all the properties of the dominant class minus one: money.” In Bourdieu’s view the position of the writer in the field of power in 19th century France is that of the “dominated among the dominant.”23 But this formula, with its assumption of the bourgeois hegemony in the field of power, does not neatly fit the British context. In mid-Victorian Britain, the position of the writer is better described as the dominated among the segment of the dominant that are not entirely dominant: because professional writers could aspire to a sense of social identity commonly understood as middle-class, but not as its most respectable members; and because the middle class continued as a socially and politically less powerful partner in the governing class, bowing to a persistent old regime, to borrow a phrase from Arno Mayer.24 This was not a new trope in Thackeray’s work. In a series of literary spoofs he wrote during the 1840s, the notion of writer as a poor relative of the governing elite pervades, most often in the form of caricature, a long string of Thackeray’s literary pseudonyms: George Savage Fitz-Boodle, Michael Angelo Titmarsh, and Charles James Yellowplush are all hyperbolic names representing voices that conspicuously struggle for respectability.25 In The Newcomes the writerly figure literally becomes a poorer friend of protagonists who occupy a higher social rank. In one of his many musings on his narrative method in The relative—the narrator as “chorus to the drama.” “In the modern theatre,” Newcomes, Pendennis offers yet another version of the same trope of poor Arthur writes, this explanatory personage is usually of quite a third-rate order: […] the two walking gentlemen friends of Sir Harry Courtly, who welcome the young baronet to London, and discourse about the niggardliness of Harry’s old uncle,

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the nabob […] He is, “Tom, you rascal,” the valet or tiger, more or less impudent and acute, […] or he is Lucetta, Lady Annabel’s waiting maid, who carries the billetdoux and peeps into them; knows all about the family affairs. (319) On the one hand, the chorus model succinctly captures the method of narrative multiperspectivalism employed by Pendennis. Combining the confidences from the protagonists and the reports from the chorus Pendennis can allow the story to be told by its own characters, major as well as minor. This story is thus not only a story about a social group by one of the group; it is also in some senses a story told by the group itself. The chorus model thus parallels closely Arthur’s posture of letting others speak, which method unburdens him of the responsibilities of too much direct valorizing and moralizing. On the other hand, the chorus analogy also repeats the poor relative trope: the cast of chorus characters occupies a vantage point proximate to that of the wealthy and respectable protagonists, but divided from it by status inequality—poor gentlemen friends, valets, waiting-maids. But this “third-order personage” provides a revealing glimpse into the lives of the powerful (because it “knows all about family affairs”), and in this sense the chorus in The Newcomes is a variation on Thackeray’s earlier claim about history-writing from Henry Esmond, where he borrowed a scene from Montaigne about Louis XIV and his valet-de-chambre, who routinely sees the king stripped of his official trappings.26 The scene serves in Henry Esmond to declare a rejection of courtly history: history-writing should not be official and celebratory, but familiar and demystifying. The implication is that the best and most authentic stories are told by the writer as a poor relative of the dominant class.27 Arthur’s representational methods are all about minimizing narrative mediation, which explains both the unmediated material taken from letters, newspapers and other written sources, and the minimally edited narrative accounts, ranging from phrases to whole paragraphs, compiled from the protagonists themselves and the characters who flank the world of the protagonists, including the narrator himself. In contrast to the extradiegetic detachment of omniscience found, say, in a variety of Dickens’s novels, the novel searches for its reality-effect in the very act of narratorial proximity—in the intradiegetic mediation of narrative. In overview, it is evident that the novel combines a preference for found or reported accounts with a preference for a low level of narrative mediation; but in rejecting omniscience the novel also rejects direct access to the interiority of characters: All this story is told by one, who, if he was not actually present at the circumstances here narrated, yet had information concerning them, and could supply such a narrative of facts and conversations as is, indeed, no less authentic than the details we have of other histories. How can I tell the feelings in a young lady’s mind; the thoughts in a young gentleman’s bosom? (616) In exercising very rigorously the idea that the novel should be objective like a work of biography and history, Thackeray’s method did not allow for what later will become the main representational traits of modernism (such as interior monologue). Already in some novels by Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, the convention of unlimited omniscience often opened up the possibility of unmediated narrative access to the

Literary criticism and cultural theory 104 interiority of characters, anticipating the technique of interior monologue that Henry James was going to make the mainstay of his style and a defining moment of the modernist novel. While later the modernists would seek to realistically represent the workings of the mind, Thackeray’s narrative method sought to realistically represent the polyphony of narrative itself as a fundamentally social act. The emphasis is on collecting and representing speech: [a]s is the case with the most orthodox histories, the writer’s own guesses or conjectures are printed in exactly the same type as the most ascertained patent facts. I fancy for my part, that the speeches attributed to Clive, the Colonel, and the rest, are as authentic as the orations in Sallust and Livy, and only implore the truthloving public to believe that the incidents here told, and which passed very probably without witnesses, were either confided to me subsequently as the compiler of this biography, or are of such a nature that they must have happened from what we know happened after […] In this manner, Mr James, Titus Livius, Professor Alison, Robinson Crusoe, and all historians proceeded. (297) The passage reminds us that Pendennis’s narrative is designed as a biography or a history. In that sense, Thackeray’s novel pretends that it is not a novel. The passage also brings into focus the circumstance that both history and biography are presumably documentaristic narratives that involve a good deal of narrative artifice, or of imaginative reconstruction. History, biography and fiction have a great deal in common (and the variable names for the writerly figure in the passage already play on such a perspective). They all share the same narrative apparatus (characters, plots, narrators). Indeed, the above passage stages a conflation of biography, historiography and fiction into a narrative supergenre of “history”—a conflation which is completed in the last sentence of the quote, in which a historical novelist, a modern historiographer and an ancient one, and a literary character are jokingly all grouped together into the category of “historians.” The abruptness of the conflation foregrounds the question of generic and professional demarcations, betraying a satirical attitude to the literary regime within which such conflations are possible. Namely, this is the kind of conflation that could be said to characterize the position of a hack—someone who dabbles and deals in a generalized notion of literature in a none too fastidious cultural marketplace. Yet the analogy is also an endorsement for the narrative method that Thackeray did practice with a lot of consistency: the idea that the novel should stay within the narrative possibilities available to historiography. This is an important sense in which The Newcomes is a historical novel—it is a novel that declares to use only the narrative methods practiced in historiography. Another way of insisting on the objectivity of the process of collecting and editing is rendered by an image of the novelist as a natural historian: As Professor Owen or Professor Agassiz takes a fragment of a bone, and builds an enormous forgotten monster out of it, wallowing in the primaeval quagmires, tearing down leaves and branches of plants that flourished thousands of years ago, and perhaps may be coal by this time—so the novelist puts this and that together: from the footprint finds the foot; from the foot, the brute who trod on

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it; from the brute, the plant he browsed on, the marsh in which he swam—and thus in his humble way a physiologist too, depicts the habits, size and appearance of the beings whereof he has to treat;—traces this slimy reptile through the mud, and describes his habits filthy and rapacious; prods down this butterfly with a pin, and depicts his beautiful coat and embroidered waistcoat; points out the singular structure of yonder more important animal, the megatherium of his history. (616) Apart from being a sort of palaeozoological fable in its own right—an interesting hint at the obsolescence of the Newcomes, the passage is a sort of homage to the growing prestige of natural science around mid century, and another advertisement for the objectivist narrative method. The naturalist analogy is more than just a passing theme in Thackeray: he occasionally thought of the contemporary novelist as the “naturalist of society,”28 which raises complex questions about Thackeray’s ideas on the epistemological status of the novel. The above meditation would suggest that the novelist has both a well defined object as well as objective instruments of reconstructing, representing and classifying that object. The naturalist model thus assigns to novelistic practice the task of social taxonomy, and possibly even of an evaluative analysis of the social space, for this novelist as physiologist “points out the singular structure of yonder more important animal”—the “megatherium” of this history, which can only be understood as the Newcome family as a social phenomenon. The novelistic model that Pendennis offers here in fact repeats the similar proposition from The Book of Snobs, where the author insisted that snobbery be “studied like other objects of Natural Science.”29 Both claims are brought up half-jokingly, and both have to be placed in the larger context of Thackeray’s efforts to ironize and destabilize contemporary concepts of literature and literary labor, as well as their relationship with other discourses of social analysis. In an extreme reading, they can be even seen as a form of self-parody attendant on Thackeray’s understanding of the state of the profession on the whole. Taken at its most literal, the naturalist model implies the idea of natural law in society: like the nature of physical science, society could thus be viewed as a relatively stable and unchanging system with classifiable parts—an attitude that combines well with Thackeray’s largely static-picaresque and satirical vision of society. Finally, by claiming kinship with the methods of natural science, Pendennis claims for the novel the ability to generate a valid form of knowledge of society. And that means that Pendennis claims for his work a certain amount of symbolic capital. The formal realism of the narrative situation in The Newcomes is constructed by the formal claim of biography/history. But in terms of social representation, the novel also insists on the material realities of capital, status and class. The story that the novel dramatizes in this latter regard is the story of economic and social capital in the fields of art, writing, and culture, under the circumstances of a rigorous system of rank and an overwhelming force of the marketplace. The narrative methods used by Pendennis are tailored to perform two distinct tasks: first, they represent an attempt to delegate the storytelling to a social group; secondly, they represent an attempt to emphasize the disparateness of that social group, which is staged as the gulf between social capital and finance capital. The simultaneous inclusion and peripherality of the narrator-

Literary criticism and cultural theory 106 biographernovelist, as well as of the artist/protagonist, relative to the notion of the “middle class,” the novel supplies the basic narrative tension for the story it tells—the story of the failure of middle-class civil society and middle-class art.

FINANCIER AS QUIXOTE: IMPERIAL VS. METROPOLITAN CAPITAL With the three socially climbing generations, the Newcomes are new, but not absolutely new; the present generation have already inherited a baronetcy, and it is vying for social prestige within a system that itself has been around for a while—the practice of co-opting the upper reaches of the middle classes, and especially finance capital, into the patrician elite. I use the term patrician in the manner of recent historians such as Tom Nairn and David Cannadine; the term is sufficiently comprehensive to include hereditary aristocracy, traditional gentry (or untitled large landowners), as well as the newly coopted segments of the middle classes. The social rise of the Newcome family begins with Thomas Newcome, a foundling who leaves his job as a weaver in a northern town in the 1770s to go to London where he becomes a textile merchant. He makes a second marriage to Sophia Alethea Hobson, an heiress from a family of Quaker bankers. The two children born to Sophia and Thomas Newcome marry into different ideological and class connections: one of them, Hobson Newcome, marries an attorney’s daughter, and fashions himself into a dissenter in religion and a liberal in politics; the other, Brian Newcome is High Church and Tory, marries into the aristocracy and soon receives a baronetcy. In spite of their differences, the Newcome brothers run their banking business in unison, benefiting from both the “Dissenting connection” and the aristocratic connection. Brian’s children, Ethel and Barnes, the third generation of the Newcomes, have a comfortable rapport with the patrician elite: the question for Ethel Newcome, for instance, is no longer whether she can marry into aristocracy, but marrying which aristocrat would be of most advantage to the family. The other branch of the Newcomes occupies a different social rank: Colonel Newcome, Thomas’s son from his first marriage, returns at the beginning of the novel from years of service in India, and is received coldly by his relatives in the City. The story about the relationship between cultural capital and social capital is rendered through the novel’s marriage plot. Pendennis ties all these elements together: “The Muse of Painting is a lady whose social station is not altogether recognized with us as yet. […] The polite world permits a gentleman to amuse herself with her, but to take her for better or for worse! […] Many a respectable person would be as much shocked at the notion as if his son had married an opera dancer” (339). Colonel Newcome disapproves of his son’s choice of vocation as unbecoming a gentleman, and Clive’s social capital as an artist is insufficient for him to be accepted by Ethel. An attempt to increase his son’s social capital is what motivates the Colonel’s Quixotic quest for success in the world of finance and metropolitan respectability. The main driver of marital peripeties in the novel is difference in social rank. The marriage of convenience in The Newcomes is characteristically carried out between parties of unequal rank who, in the words of Ethel Newcome, “barter rank against money,

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and money against rank” (425). This simple formula fixates a historically crucial relationship of forging matrimonial alliances between middle-class economic capital (especially finance capital from the City) and patrician social capital—an important mechanism in the reproduction of what Stone and Stone termed the “open elite.” Such marital alliances were mutually beneficial—the landed class sought to replenish its still considerable political influence and power by injections of economic capital, while middle-class magnates sought to increase their social prestige and political power.30 The planned union between Ethel and Kew (and later Farintosh), pursued relentlessly by her family, exemplifies the lure of this kind of transaction. Barnes Newcome’s marriage to Clara Pulleyn is made feasible by the penury of Clara’s father, Lord Dorking, who has several more daughters to marry off and whose “estate is mortgaged up to the very castle windows” (365); Barnes’s calculation in the arrangement is to increase his social capital, and use the Dorking network of aristocratic connections to get into the House of Lords. Of course, the very concept of the parvenu or newcomer registers an incomplete cooptation with regard to the established regime of power—an attempt to consolidate that instability informs the marital speculations of Ethel’s branch of the Newcome family. Although Pendennis refers to his audiences, his characters, and himself by the phrase “us of the middle class,” the novel’s focus is on the fact that the class status of the Newcomes is fluid, and that it represents the trend of middle-class co-optation into the patrician elite. The rise of the Newcomes follows a highly significant path: from manufacture to trade to finance to landed wealth; with every step the Newcomes increase the social capital of their economic capital. In the character of Barnes Newcome, the most agile member of the banking family and the novel’s unambiguous villain, the family has already united economic wealth and patrician connections, securing for itself a pivotal position in an economic system and a system of power centered in London but stretching around the globe. And while segments of the middle classes were new additions to the upper classes it is also important to note that even the “aristocracy” was a new aristocracy. David Cannadine, in Aspects of Aristocracy, saw in the period between 1780 and 1830 the emergence of a thoroughly refash ioned, hierarchically reordered, entrepreneurially savvy and economically rationalized British landed elite. This development is all the more striking if we remember that this was the heroic period of the industrial revolution; yet, patricians continued in a governing position, and there are few historians today who dispute that patrician control of political institutions continued until the 1870s. For instance, in 1870, after two reform bills, the House of Commons was still overwhelmingly patrician (three quarters); at the same time two thirds of all land owned in Britain was owned by 7,000 patrician families. Not to mention that a considerable number of landowners profited directly from the industrial revolution, whether through railroads and coal-mining, through a rationalized agriculture and high land prices, or indirectly, by monopolizing national and imperial administration during a time of immense industrial and mercantile growth. A casual juxtaposition of rhetoric and fact from Cannadine’s account conveys this patrician adaptability well: while in the 1830s Thomas Arnold announced that the advent of the railway was going to bring about “the downfall of the aristocracy,” soon thereafter railway companies saw a proliferation of peerage on their boards of directors.31 A telling example along the lines of Tom Nairn’s

Literary criticism and cultural theory 108 claim that there existed between the middle classes and the patrician elite “sufficient homogeneity […] for mutual adjustments to be possible, and for the question of power never to be made too acute.”32 Among mid-Victorian novelists, Thackeray was probably the one with the keenest eye for the resilience of the patrician elite. It is true that The Newcomes abounds in images of aristocratic dissipation commonly associated with the Regency period—it was Lord Dorking’s gambling progenitors who left him “an estate […] mortgaged up to the very castle windows.” It is also true that Thackeray’s stories invariably ridicule older sons of the aristocracy, whose capacity to fritter away their inheritances is matched only by their simplicity. But it is also true that aristocratic families in Thackeray’s novels act as more than just a sum of individuals, showing collectively a remarkable shrewdness and enterprise in maintaining their elite status. Of course, the very aspiration of the Newcomes to be absorbed into the patrician order testifies to the resourcefulness and adaptability of that order. Significantly enough, the subtitle of The Newcomes identifies the Newcomes not as a middle-class family, not as a patrician family, but as a respectable family. Although the term was used broadly in the 19th century as an indication of both status and ideology, it is perhaps best understood as a key term in middle-class discourse of social identity. The most effective recent analysis of the diffusion of the ideology of respectability in Victorian society is F.M.L.Thompson’s The Rise of Respectable Society, and although this work of social history describes the many and varied ways in which different social classes were immersed in this ideology, it stops short of providing an elaborate discussion of the term itself.33 While it is a little difficult to precisely define the term for the vast range of its diffusion, it is useful to think of it as predominantly part of a middle-class ideological register, which had the primary purpose of communicating status. In comparison with gentility, which in principle included the landed classes only (and their allies in the church and the law), respectability was a less exclusive term, but very much like gentility it derived from a social imagination structured by the image of hierarchy. Phrases such as “respectable poor” or “respectable working man” were often heard in the century, but they did not suggest the weakening of class distinction so much as, quite the contrary, the atomization of the social body into many different class cultures all of which internalized an ideology that carefully regulated all traffic across class boundaries. The ideology of respectability implied a heavily stratified society united by the same ideology of stratification. The regime of respectability, as Thompson’s study amply demonstrates, defined distinction not so much by polarization of class as by gradation of rank. This regime of status was both fluid—in that it allowed a certain degree of social mobility, as well as rigorously hierarchical—in that it encouraged sensitivity to minute differentiations of rank. David Cannadine in Aspects of Aristocracy argued that in the process of its reinvention (and retrenchment as the governing elite) at the turn of the 19th century the aristocracy became more rankconscious, pressuring the rest of society to become more so too. In the Victorian period rank-consciousness was generated by the combined ideological pressures of gentility and respectability, and the latter most often involved a deference for the landed classes, as well as a social condescension towards those below. Thackeray’s described this mildly fluid and rigorously stratified regime of status, in which social striving went hand in hand with rank arrogance, in The Book of

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Snobs. One of the claims that the book made was that “we are all implicated in [snobbery]”—the ideology does not characterize a certain class exclusively, but the whole spectrum of social classes. The Newcomes is another chapter in Thackeray’s ethnography of respectability/snobbery. It portrays striving for respectability among all social groups, but the main storyline is about a family whose fortune was made in finance. The world of the Newcomes and their connections is arranged into a rigid hierarchy that inevitably generates family tensions. Within the family the Brian Newcome branch claims the highest rank (Brian married the daughter of a lord) to the slight chagrin and occasional opposition of the Hobson Newcomes (Hobson married an attorney’s daughter), who appear to be less interested in tuft-hunting but are equally obnoxious to the ranks below. Both these branches look down on Colonel Newcome (Brian’s and Hobson’s halfbrother) his poor relations and for his military career in India. Mrs. Mackenzie, whose daughter marries Clive, treats the Colonel with contempt because he was an officer in the service of the East India Company, not in King’s service. Colonel Newcome in turn cannot quite reconcile himself to his son’s choice of a profession in painting, which causes him to go on his Quixotic campaign for prestige. The central place in the Newcome family chronicle is occupied by Colonel Newcome’s peregrinations in the British field of power, which he is profoundly unable to read. His absence from Britain falls within the period of the remaking of the British upper classes and of the new emphasis on social distinction. Accordingly, on his first return from India he is snubbed by his rank-obsessed relatives in the banking business. His inability to understand society is early on in the novel presented as part of his frame of mind—he comes to us as a character with a Quixotic pedigree. Already in India he is known as Don Quixote, who happens to be his favorite literary character, and whom he, in a blindly Quixotic fashion, reads as a model gentleman. Mixing what one character calls a “monstrous ignorance” and a social idealism that tries to amalgamate an antiquated Tory conservatism and a naive radicalism, the Colonel remains throughout the novel the function of a hubris that is as contradictory as it is unreformable. The recurrent association between Colonel Newcome and Don Quixote casts the Colonel as a remnant of an older era, someone who is, in the words of Alexander Welsh, “lost in a world of time and history.”34 Thackeray makes the Colonel’s notions antiquated in literary terms as well. A proponent of moralistic hauteur, formed by an admiration for the literature of Pope, Goldsmith and Johnson, an idealization of simple military manners and a romanticized perception of English gentlemanliness, the Colonel learns early in the story to his chagrin that Clive and his artist friends have a very different taste in literature—that they dismiss Johnson as one who “talked admirably, but did not write English,” and Pope for his “inferiority and want of imagination,” while praising such new poets as Keats and Tennyson. The Colonel is seized with “a terror that his son had got into the society of heretics and unbelievers” (262). The Colonel significantly disapproves of Fielding, for describing the life of servants: “I am as little proud as any man in the world: but there must be distinction, sir; and as it is my lot and Clive’s lot to be a gentleman, I won’t sit in the kitchen and booze in the servants’ hall” (50). His dislike of Fielding marks him as an incompetent reader of the Quixotic tradition: famously, Joseph Andrews, the novel that

Literary criticism and cultural theory 110 provokes his comments, was subtitled Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes. In his obliviousness to the Fieldingian appropriation of Quixote, the Colonel is of course oblivious to the foolishness and farcicality of his gentlemanly ideal too. This dislike for Fielding is also a measure of his support for the British system of class distinction as he sees it. Like another peripheral interpretation of the gentlemanly ideal, Gaskell’s Rector Jenkyns from Cranford, the Colonel is bound to a metropolitan idea of distinction that he naively idealizes and largely misunderstands. Unlike the Rector who can stolidly depend on the stability of the local regime of Cranford, the Colonel finds himself vying for distinction in the metropolitan world in which for all his wealth he remains an outsider. The Colonel’s biggest Quixotic project, undertaken to secure metropolitan status for his son Clive, involves a massive and aggressively speculative imperialist venture—he sets up an Anglo-Indian bank, the Bundelcund Bank of Calcutta, with the help of AngloIndian and native Indian capital. Vying for distinction in the metropolitan world that he is unable to understand, and incurring the enmity of his metropolitan relatives, the Colonel fails comprehensively in all of his fantasies—paternal, capitalist, and political. He attempts to make war on the metropolitan Newcomes on their own terms: he tries to match their wealth and influence and beat them at their own game, without, as it were, knowing the rules of the game. “Feeling secretly that his son was demeaning himself by pursuing the art of painting” (674), the Colonel pushes his obliging son into the business of banking, and derails Clive’s progress as an artist. The Colonel turns into a ludicrous version of his relatives, sharing quite a few of their ideologies but without their business intelligence, institutional clout, and ruthless adaptability. In having the Colonel refashion himself as a finance capitalist, Thackeray evokes the contemporary fascination with finance capitalism during several cycles of speculation manias and speculation panics in the 1830s and 1840s.35 The Colonel helps found the Bundelcund Bank of Calcutta, a joint-stock company, “at a time when all private credit was shaken by the failure of the great Agency Houses” (646). The Agency Houses were privately owned credit institutions which used to finance Indian exports but crashed after the 1829 depression in England caused the prices of Indian exports to plummet, devastating the Indian economy.36 Unlike the Agency Houses, which were owned by lenders exclusively, the Bundelcund prospectus advertises the enterprise as a jointstock company, based on “the only sound principle of commercial prosperity—that of association,” meaning that its “shareholders […] were their own agents” (647). In fact, the popularity of joint-stock companies rose after the Agency Houses crisis of the early 1830s. Bundelcund was supposed to finance Indian trade and thus reduce the risks of it, and the joint-stock system was supposed to allow smaller Anglo-Indian traders to control the conditions of financing their own trade. Of course, at a time when there was no legislation regulating limited liability (which happened a few years after the publication of the novel), the joint-stock system was also an extremely risky operation, as it rendered the investors liable for all their holdings in cases of failure. In this way, the Colonel’s founding of Bundelcund is constructed as an act of gambling with enormously high stakes, and this would have been very clear to contemporary audiences. Not to mention that his project of tying Indian banking to Indian trade was a bold experiment in itself. Soon, the Bundelcund Bank created a vast network of operations, connecting England, New South Wales and China through trade in indigo, wool, and opium. In this way, the

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bank bears a great deal of resemblance to the East India Company, as a large joint-stock monopoly. The Company’s rule over India was at that time being restructured by the British government (and soon to be dismantled), while at the same time the Company was pushing to expand its possessions and trade monopolies into the areas immediately east and west of India and into China. There is an important proximity between the Bundelcund Bank and the East India Company. The Bundelcund Bank’s commercial operations are in the goods and geographical areas historically associated with the Company, and many shareholders in the Bank are said to be “proprietors of the East India Company” (844). Some of the founders of the B.B. are native Indian capitalists, which is probably an allusion to the policies pursued by William Bentinck, Governor-General of India in the early 1830s. Bentinck’s utilitarian-inspired reforms aimed to enlist the support of Indian entrepreneurs for the East India Company’s Indian state so as to increase its profits, traditionally dependent on land revenue (that is, conquistador acquisitions of land and imposition of a tax collection system). However, more often than not the native Indian capitalists and their projects fared ill during this period, subject not only to cyclical crises, but also to a steady drain of capital out of India, and the ultimate failure of the Bundelcund reflects these vulnerabilities.37 But Bundelcund is also very emphatically unlike the East India Company in that it lacks the close institutional support in the metropole that the Company had. Regardless of his personal motives, the Colonel thus comes to embody the interest of Indian-based capitalism, which the novel codes as a Quixotic step, subject to the infirmities of Indian ventures and especially suffering from the Colonel’s lack of metropolitan connections. This lack of metropolitan prestige finally decides the fate of the Bundelcund, even though the novel rehearses several explanations for its crash. For instance, there is vaguely explained fraud perpetrated by Rummun Loll, an Indian shareholder whose villainy is assumed throughout the novel, making him one of the many fictional financiers in Victorian novels whose propensity for crime is racially stereotyped, and attributed to their un-Englishness.38 Another explanation offered in the novel is that the Bank’s failure was a systemic and routine event at the time: “[it] was only one of many similar schemes ending in ruin” (901), a statement that encapsulates a popular perception of the 1830s and 1840s, the time of a speedy rise and fall of many joint-stock companies, delirious speculation, everyday revelations of financial peculation, and recurrent panics in the financial market.39 Yet another factor is the drain of capital undermining the company’s liquidity: several Anglo-Indian B.B.directors sell out of the company to return to England, where they “entertained the fashionable world, got seats in Parliament, purchased places in the country, and were greatly respected” (841).40 Such Anglo-Indians sought in effect to go metropolitan. While the Colonel harbors a similar fantasy of metropolitan status, he stops short of selling out, remaining committed to his Indian venture—a sign of his unwavering loyalties that sets him morally apart from the other Anglo-Indians, but also a sign of his capitalist Quixotism. Yet, what decisively sets the Bundelcund Bank on course to bankruptcy is an act of metropolitan sabotage— Barnes Newcome refuses payment on a Bundelcund bill, thus torpedoing by a single gesture the reputation of the Bundelcund Bank. While there is fraud in this novel, it is only revealed after the bank started failing, that is, only after its reputation had already been decisively undermined.

Literary criticism and cultural theory 112 To compensate for that sudden reverse, the Colonel tries to get on the Board of Directors of the East India Company, and he also runs for Parliament, in hope these powerful credentials would restore confidence in the Bank. Alexander Welsh points to the political plot in the novel as an important variation on the Quixotic motif of the quest for justice.41 The Colonel runs on a platform that is a curious mixture of his conservative and radical reform policies: He used to speak with the greatest gravity about our constitution as the pride and the envy of the world, though he surprised you by as much by the latitudinarian reforms which he was eager to press forward, as by the most singular old Tory opinions which he advocated on other occasions. He was for having every man to vote; every poor man to labour short time and get high wages; […] every bishop to be docked of his salary, and dismissed from the House of Lords. But he was a staunch admirer of that assembly, and a supporter of the rights of the crown. He was for sweeping off taxes from the poor, and as money must be raised to carry on government, he opined that the rich should pay. (874–5) In a spirit of political burlesque, the novel follows the Colonel’s campaign in the byelection for the Newcome, as it gets embroiled in various party and personal rivalries and manipulations (he is running both against Barnes and against the Tory party), and he ends up winning the seat not because he was a skillful politician but because he became a figurehead in a much larger game. Similarly, the catalogue of his political goals, which are a mixture of idealism and contradiction, is meant in the novel to yet again underscore his peripherality to the metropolitan world and his inability to read it. As the story turns out, not even the prospect of political influence suffices to change his peripherality: even after he wins the race for a parliamentary seat, his business affairs continue to falter— without a network of metropolitan connections, the Colonel remains the true newcomer of the story. In contrast, Barnes loses the election, but in his capacity as a City capitalist he emerges from the feud largely unscathed: “though Sir Barnes Newcome was certainiy neither amiable nor popular in the City of London, his reputation as a most intelligent man of business stood; the credit of his house was deservedly high, and people banked with him, and traded with him, in spite of faithless wives and hostile colonels” (821). This casual assertion of Barnes’s invulnerability suggests that he is by far too solidly entrenched in the financial heart of the British system of power. It also tells us that Barnes as a metropolitan finance capitalist is indispensable to the metro-politan economies of power, which continue to be underwritten by his bank, and which cannot afford to disassociate from it. At the end of the novel, as the authorial narrator takes over from Pendennis to dole out poetic justice, he offers no harsher punishment for Barnes than a second wife who will bully him. The opposition between Barnes Newcome and Colonel Newcome indicates that their respective levels of class prestige are primarily functions of their institutional positions in the field of power, regardless of their individual properties or actions. Tuft-hunting, wife abuse and family disloyalty do not significantly hurt Barnes’s business, his political connections and his class status. Just before the Newcome feud escalated fully, Barnes

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himself points to the Colonel his Quixotism relative to the world of British finance capitalism. The Colonel runs into Barnes in Cornhill, and inquires about Clive’s prospects with Ethel, to which Barnes replies: “Droll place to talk sentiment in— Cornhill, isn’t it? […] In the City we have no hearts you know, colonel” (688). The Bank of England is located in Cornhill, part of the territorial and institutional space of the City of London to which Barnes belongs and the Colonel does not. Once there was a fountain in Cornhill, to which Thackeray alludes early in the novel, in relation to which local distances were measured—the former centrality of the place to London suggests the current centrality of the City to contemporary British society.42 Barnes slyly points to the Colonel not only that sentimental concerns are out of place in this environment, but also that his business habitus, formed as it is by sentiment, is out of place too. The conversation takes place following the Colonel’s attempts (which he feels are legitimated by his new wealth) to enlist Barnes’s help in wooing Ethel for Clive. This exchange is a succinct redramatization of the Colonel’s illiteracy in the ways of the marriage market as well as his illiteracy in the ways of finance capitalism. When the Colonel goes on a vendetta against Barnes, Pendennis emphasizes that the Colonel is foreign to the City: ‘Thomas Newcome, the Indian banker, was at war with Barnes Newcome, the English banker” (873; italics are added). Thackeray’s emplotment of this Quixotic war never sways from that central premise: that the Colonel remains institutionally an outsider to the power regime of the metropolitan London, while in spite of all his faults Barnes remains a well-placed and well-connected insider. The Quixotic narrative is a directed against the common Victorian paternalist romance. Victorian literature is filled with guardians, benefactors and paternal protectors through whose good offices heroes and heroines (usually orphans) enjoy social promotions. On the level of ideological figuration, paternalist characters were expressions of middleclass Victorian paternalist ideologies that used family as a metaphor for society, as a viable model for resolving all kinds of social tensions and problems that concerned those with less economic or social capital. The Colonel’s attempt to remake Clive into a respectable capitalist and gentleman is misapplied paternalism, due to which it is for the greater part of the novel impossible for Clive to “begin the world” (937), that is, to make the first step of a Bildungsroman hero. In fact, the Colonel’s naive fantasy of increasing Clive’s social prestige is rendered as the most significant obstacle to Clive’s maturing either as a person or as an artist. The Quixotism of the Colonel literally snags the Bildungsroman (and Künstlerroman) formation of Clive.

CAPITAL—SOCIAL AND CULTURAL For the most part, the story of Clive’s life is the story of a failure to grow as a man and a painter. While his father is a Quixotic capitalist, Clive is a dilettante: both of them seem incapable of developing beyond their type. Yet Clive’s own story barely gets told—one of the last chapters of the novel is one “In Which Clive Begins the World.” Just as the novel is brought to the very doorstep of Bildungsroman territory, it ends. Clive is at the novel’s end finally forced to lead the life a professional painter (“He has to earn the bread which he eats henceforth,” 937), and he has to do so in a cultural field that Pendennis

Literary criticism and cultural theory 114 describes as heavily heteronomous, with the artist having to accommodate patrons who “lay […] down the most absurd laws respecting the arts” (938). As a painter Clive is at best a gifted dilettante, with uncertain prospects for improvement: “His drawing was better than his painting, […] his designs and sketches were far superior to his finished compositions” (939). So, as Clive begins the world after the collapse of the Bundelcund bank, his reputation is minimal, his technique is underdeveloped, and the real story of his travails in the marketplace is yet to unfold. The portrait of Clive as an artist is an unfinished composition, and The Newcomes thus appears to be just a prefatory story to the Künstlerroman that should follow. But though the novel is in some sense a fragment, it is also an elaborate piece of cultural cartography. In strokes that are sometimes broad and blurry and sometimes fine and focused, the novel offers an almost sociological map of the field of British art in the first half of the 19th century. Following Clive’s career as a painter, it takes us from art schools to exhibitions and museums to artist colonies in Rome and Paris. Rivalries between schools and genres are described in detail, as are various commercial arrangements of exhibition and commission. Some of the institutions of the depicted art world are factual, such as the Water-colour Exhibition, and the Royal Academy which keeps refusing Clive’s pictures, and whose annual exhibition was one of the prime sites of showcasing, evaluating and selling art; others, while fictitious, are references to real institutions, such as Gandish’s Drawing Academy, which was modeled on Henry Sass’s Academy, a preparatory school for young painters, the first of its kind in London.43 Clive and his more talented but poorer friend J.J.Ridley enter an art scene dominated by painters such as Cattermole, Eastlake, and Turner, whose work is mentioned and discussed. Neither Clive nor J.J. are big innovators in technique or subject matter; rather, they struggle for recognition within the established conventions of portraiture and historical painting. Clive’s pursuit of painting is made difficult, among other reasons, by his attempt to first gain recognition in a tired genre: that of historical painting. The genre actually received a boost in the first half of the 19th century, following the tremendous popularity of Walter Scott’s historical novels, which fueled a revival of interest in English and Scottish history.44 Subject matter for historical painting was also supplied by British successes in the wars with Napoleon, and by imperial conquests. Clive first studies with Gandish, a historical painter, whose obsession with national history fits in a celebratory courtly-heroic perspective with a long tradition in both historical literature and painting. Clive “deem[ed historical painting] the highest branch of art; and declin[ed] to operate on any but the largest canvases” (270). His “Battle of Assaye,” depicting General Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington) leading a British Army in an Indian battle in 1803, was too large to fit into his father’s house. Thackeray patterns Clive’s artistic education on Henry Esmond’s historical education: the pompous style of official history is ultimately rejected by Clive in painting (as it was by Esmond in historiography), and while he does not turn out to be more than a dilettante, his career takes the course towards a style less grandiose and more “familiar,” to use the term Henry Esmond uses for his brand of historywriting.45 This evolution away from the grand historical style towards ordinary subject matter is more fully illustrated by J.J.Ridley: “to [him] splendours of Nature were revealed to vulgar sights invisible, and beauties manifest in forms, colours, shadows of

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common objects, where most of the world saw only what was dull, and gross, and familiar” (160). In contrast to Clive’s failure, J.J. suggests a different possibility for art and artists, one of accomplishment. J.J.Ridley, who occupies the margins of the Newcome world, is a “good industrious apprentice, who had won the prize of his art” (943). The crucial question here is just in what sense is Ridley a success—what possibility that remains closed to Clive does he embody? The above quote, with its emphasis on industry, explains his success in private terms—as whole-hearted devotion to his vocation, which was in Clive’s case contaminated by his acceptance of his father’s fantasy of status. Clive is clearly the unspoken comparison in the following description of Ridley by Pendennis: “idle thoughts cannot gain mastery over him; selfish wishes or desires are kept at bay. Art is truth: and truth is religion: and its study and practice a daily work of pious duty” (680). In addition to offering praise to Ridley’s ascetic work ethic (deriving from the common middle-class opposition between industry and idleness), this casual comment by Pendennis reveals an attempt to claim for the pursuit of art a place of great social importance, by associating it with religion and philosophy. But just what is the social capital of art according to The Newcomes, and what should it be? In this novel with its massive sociological architecture the central concern from the start is the concern with the social and economic capital of culture. In undertaking this kind of cultural mapping Thackeray broached questions about the social position of art with force and clarity unparalleled in mid-Victorian fiction. His analysis showed in great detail the workings of marketplace and cultural-institutional mechanisms that underwrote the economies of art, and, equally importantly, it traced out the phenomenal impact of the British class system on the field of culture. In this latter regard, the novel registers two cultural positions: one of resignation and the other of aestheticism. The first of course is embodied throughout the novel by Clive, whose dabbling in art exudes an apathy generated by the social limitations of his class position. Clive’s artistic failure is not simply one of talent or application; it has to do with the fact that he resigned himself to his father’s fantasy of respectability. The second cultural position is one of aestheticism: in the character of Ridley, the novel announces the superiority of culture over status. Ridley’s success as an artist is completely independ ent of his social position, and the very fact that the novel can cast him as a success in comparison to Clive’s failure means that the novel postulates an autonomous principle of cultural validation. The novel attends to both these positions, and therefore teems with figures of its own incompleteness and contradiction. Pendennis proclaims that Clive’s life in opulence as a director of the Bundelcund was “unpleasant to describe” (900), and in this way he registers not only a moral judgment on the lifestyle of the newly rich, but also an aesthetic position of embarrassment with (if not even resentment of) this subject matter, which after all is the chief subject matter of the novel. The novel that continually declares that the real story of artistic formation is yet to begin slips into the final pages into the frame of a fable-land in which “anything you like happens.” This generic downgrade, from Künstlerroman to fable, refocuses the novel’s insistence on the heteronomies of the field of culture. While the narrator averred earlier that the painters are worse off than novelists, the novel’s slip into fable-land shifts attention from painters back to novelists, and again raises the question of whether the novelist’s profession is indeed

Literary criticism and cultural theory 116 “independent,” when it comes to “laying down the laws” respecting the art of the novel. By this generic shift into fable the novel completes the frame begun by its introductory pages, which claimed for the story the generic identity of a fable, and invoked a bestiary characteristic of Aesop and La Fontaine as an interpretative key for the novel. The generic territory of the fable was announced by the frontispiece too, which contained illustrations of the conventional fable characters. This kind of self-understanding anticipates Franco Moretti’s proposition that “an English plot [is] like a sort of visit to the zoo,”46 namely, that a taxonomic principle of characterization prevails in the English novelistic tradition (at least until George Eliot in Moretti’s view) to the detriment of the Bildungsroman as a generic possibility in which the narrative of individual formation is intertwined with a narrative of social openness and change. Nevertheless, any reading of Thackeray must take into account what Laura Pendennis in regard to Arthur’s narration calls the “ironic method” (803). In this light, the fact that The Newcomes pretends to be a fable appears not only as a deliberate understatement of its complexity, but also as another way of foregrounding the dependence of the novelist on conventional expectations. The novel’s taking a turn towards the inheritance plot (that sends some capital Clive’s way after the Bundelcund crash) and marriage plot (that sees Clive and Ethel married in the authorial epilogue at the end) go against the sentiments expressed by Pendennis (“I disdain, for the most part, the tricks and surprises of the novelist’s art,” 901), and, of course, against the entire novelistic doctrine that all of Thackeray’s work promoted. The construction of this turn is easily interpreted as ironic, but the fact remains that even the irony at the end serves to emphasize artistic heteronomy. In short, both ironic acceptance of heteronomy and a plea for artistic autonomy are the conclusions this novel makes about the state of the contemporary field of culture. The story of the failure of middle-class art, illustrated by Clive, is in fact the story of the failure of the middle class to form a social identity independent of the patrician regime of prestige. The world of the Newcomes is constructed as a series of failures that extend into all areas of middle-class life: family, sociability, politics, and art. Through the family, the novel figures finance capital, as the segment of the middle classes that was historically most easily and most commonly co-opted into the patrician elite, as a contested class space that throws the entire system of respectability into sharp relief. At the same time, the very idea of class hierarchy, inscribed in the class habitus of all of the Newcomes (“there must be distinction,” as the Colonel says), is a chief cause of the failure of middle-class art. On the other hand, this general social pessimism of the text is accompanied by a plea for an independent aesthetic of art. The novel declares an important autonomist principle: the independence of artists respecting the laws of their art. This principle is recognized, if not always practiced, by Warrington, J.J.Ridley, Pendennis, and even Clive—in contrast, the ideologies of art and regimes of taste embodied by the middle classes are consistently ridiculed in the novel.47 Artists and writers in the novel are represented as the best judges of cultural works, that is, of the very question of what counts as art and what does not. Importantly, the definition of art in this novel becomes the preserve of artists themselves, and the fact that the middle-class world of the Newcomes does not recognize the value of art and the value in art is precisely what creates the possibility for artistic autonomy. The novel thus accommodates a text that approximates what Bourdieu calls production for

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producers. This is not merely a matter of possessing a specifically literary literacy necessary to relate to the novel’s abundance of literary and cultural reference. The Newcomes offered a comprehensive overview of contemporary power and cultural relations, and demanded of its audiences, however reluctantly, to recognize cultural capital as a form of capital, and to accept the very modernist idea that culture be the source of its own validation.

Chapter Four Banking on Sentiments: A Melodramatic Civil Society in Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities1 I shall never overstep, further or for a longer period than I do tonight, the circle of my own pursuits, as one who lives by Literature, who is content to do his public service through Literature, and who is conscious that he cannot serve two masters. (Dickens’s speech at the third meeting of the Administrative Reform Association)

WITH DlCKENS ONE CANNOT OVERSTATE THE OBVIOUS: DlCKENS WAS A topical writer. Not only did he play a pivotal role in the economic and institutional transformation of the literary field that began in the late 1830s, but he also converted his novelistic prestige into a voice of considerable social authority. Dickens wrote about orphanages and slums, about factory conditions and debtor prisons, about education and marriage, about the urban poor and the state bureaucracy, about outlaws and guardians, about the railways and industrial towns, and about vagaries of work and vagaries of law. As a public figure, he was tirelessly active in support of social reform, and while he stayed away from institutional politics, he espoused causes such as international copyright and emendation of domestic copyright laws, supported civic associations and organizations such as Governesses’ Benevolent Institution and Commercial Travelers’s Schools, provided shelter for homeless women, and tried to put together an organization to help the needy and struggling writers and artists—to name but a few things that Dickens supported. He saw his public mission as a medium for expressing and directing public sentiment: as “Conductor” of Household Words. Dickens took on the task of presenting stories of “many moving lessons of compassion and consideration,” imagining a unanimity of response connecting innumerable households: “a multitude moved by one sympathy.”2 In that sense, Dickens did not only aspire to conduct his contributors, but his audiences as well—so as to mobilize them by uniform sentiment. Such ambition was ridiculed by some of the literati: for instance, Dickens received an unflattering portrait as Mr Popular Sentiment in Trollope’s 1855 novel The Warden. But even as the novel relentlessly parodied Dickens, Trollope’s narrator was not altogether facetious when he intoned that “[i]f the world is to be set right, the work will be done by shilling number:”3 the idea that popular literature could create public sentiment for social reform was the result of an enormous increase of social authority that the novel enjoyed following Dickens’s rise to fame. In this chapter I want to examine the relationship between the representation of finance capitalism and the generation of middle-class sentiment in two Dickens novels: Little

Literary criticism and cultural theory 120 Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities. Both these novels feature prominent characters that are representatives of the world of finance, Merdle and Lorry. Neither character is a protagonist, but both are pivotal to the social world to which the protagonists themselves belong. Both characters seem to be invested with powers that make or break the fortunes of other characters in the two stories, and both their powers are themselves represented as problematic social forces. The differences are obvious enough: the story of Merdle embodies a fascination with the awesome fragility of mid-Victorian speculation and cautions against it, whereas the story of Lorry features the possibility for British finance capitalism to be cast in the light of a potentially benevolent agent of social change, as Lorry, a declaratively heartless pursuer of business interest, is from the start imbued with repressed middle-class sentiment. In my reading I will try to show that the stories of Merdle and Lorry are part of Dickens’s overall melodrama of middle-class identity, his central narrative interest. The two novels I have chosen for this analysis are in some sense political novels. By that I do not mean the broad understanding of politics that would include the treatment of such themes as the imposingly inefficient legal system in Bleak House or the tense industrial relations in Hard Times. Little Dorrit and A Tale come very close to the genre of political novel in the narrow sense of dealing with questions of political institutions or even constitutions: there is a scathing satire of government bureaucracy in the first and a somber cautionary tale against political repression and violence in the second. As a public figure Dickens was very consistently not interested in entering the realm of political society, and at a speech of the Administrative Reform Association he announced: “I shall never overstep, further or for a longer period than I do tonight, the circle of my own pursuits, as one who lives by Literature, who is content to do his public service through Literature, and who is conscious that he cannot serve two masters.”4 Dickens was outraged by the British government’s conduct of the Crimean war, and thought the fiasco to be the opportunity to reform civil service, which explains both his participation in the lobbying work of the Administrative Reform Association and his attack on patrician state bureaucracy in Little Dorrit around the same time. The above speech conveyed clearly that his excursion into politics, in his public capacity of celebrity, ended with the ARA meeting. But the above quote is also a strong and succinct statement of Dickens’s view of literature as a form of “public service.” Dickens reminds his audience that in his view literature is a special method of effecting the welfare of British society at large, and that in his own sphere of action “he tried to understand the heavier social grievances and to help set them right.” Using a language that Dickens does not use, but drawing on the tradition of political liberalism on which he does draw, it could be said that Dickens made in his public career a very sharp distinction between civil society and political society. To the latter belong the political parties, the parliamentary system, and the infrastructure of government—the institutional armature of British politics. On the other hand, by civil society, I will mean here, after Jurgen Habermas, the “domain of private autonomy,” which is independent of political society.5 Civil society comprises private citizens in the conjugal family, in the marketplace, and in citizen associations, who in pursuit of their various social goals use non-political-institutional means at their disposal, including literature. Dickens clearly designates civil society as his proper sphere of action, and

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suggests that influencing public opinion is his proper political goal. Dickens the writer claims here and elsewhere an important role for literature, which in effect takes on a form of political action in a wider, non-institutional sense. That is, he wants literature to generate public opinion in the realm of civil society as a crucial mechanism of social reform that in turn might include (stimulate and direct) political reform as well.

THE CIVIL SOCIETY OF HOUSEHOLD WORDS In order to sketch out Dickens’s view of the relationship between political society and civil society in Britain in the 1850s, I shall begin with his critiques of patrician domination in political society and of middle-class complicity in this domination published in Household Words, a miscellany he founded in 1850. While Dickens criticism has traditionally focused on Dickens the novelist, the fact remains that as a professional writer he was more than just a novelist, and that, for instance, his jour nalism was very often co-textual with his novel-writing. As they appeared in Household Words, fiction by Dickens and journalism by Dickens were part of the same textual array directed at a general reading audience supposed to be equally interested in different genres of writing. Dickens’s journalistic texts published in Household Words were not written as rigorous pieces of social analysis; rather they are sketches, allegories, editorials— emphatically literary compositions, designed to appeal to pathos and ethos more than to offer a systematic argument. The journal was meant to contend with what Dickens saw as the lack of social and political independence characterizing the middle class. Quite literally, the journal aspired to use the realm of letters to reform the middle class into an enthusiasm for social reform. Started in 1850, when Dickens was at the very summit of his fame, Household Words was another measure of his literary prestige, as much as an attempt to further advance his professional autonomy. As “Conductor” with unlimited editorial control, Dickens had the opportunity to actively shape the direction and the general tone of the journal. The journal soon became the most popular periodical of the fifties, during the golden age of the periodical and in the segment of the literary market characterized by the stiffest competition.6 A literary miscellany, presenting contributions on almost everything (with the notable exception of book reviews), the journal was anchored by works of fiction provided by Dickens himself, as well as some younger rising novelists such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins. In a preliminary address in the first number, Dickens described the purpose of the journal: “We aspire to live in the Household affections, and to be numbered among the Household thoughts, of our readers.” In addition: We hope to be the comrade and friend of many thousands of people, of both sexes, and of all ages and conditions, on whose faces we may never look. We seek to bring into innumerable homes, from the stirring world around us, the knowledge of many social wonders, good and evil, that are not calculated to render any of us less ardently persevering in ourselves, less tolerant of one another, less faithful in the progress of mankind, less thankful for living in the summer-dawn of time.

Literary criticism and cultural theory 122 Apart from repeating some standard elements of his social philosophy (self-reliance, tolerance, progress), Dickens indicates that the journal was to serve as a vehicle for achieving some sort of social unity: “to bring the greater and lesser in degree […] and mutually dispose them to a better acquaintance and a kinder understanding.” Ultimately, Dickens conjures up the image of the journal’s readership as “a multitude moved by one sympathy,” tellingly emphasizing that the mode of imagining social solidarity in the journal will be primarily sentimental.7 In practice, and in spite of its all-nation rhetoric, Household Words meant to sentimentally move the middle class of British society—in order to cultivate its independence from patrician civil and political societies. In 1850 Dickens started publishing a column in Household Words entitled “Supposing!” A mixture of wishful speculation and wistful satire, the column questioned two things: the practicality of British political institutions, and the political habitus of the journal’s readership. The column is another recapitulation of Dickens’s favorite causes in social reform: Supposing, we were to change the Property and Income Tax a little, and make it somewhat heavier on realised property, and somewhat lighter on mere income, fixed and uncertain, I wonder whether we should be committing any violent injustice. Supposing, we were to be more Christian and less mystical, agreeing more about the spirit and fighting less about the letter, I wonder whether we should present a very irreligious and indecent spectacle to the mass of mankind […] Supposing, we were all of us to come off our pedestals and mix more with those below us, with no fear but that genius, rank and wealth, would always sufficiently assert their own superiority, I wonder whether we should lower ourselves beyond retrieval. Supposing, we were to have less botheration and more real education, I wonder whether we should have less or more compulsory colonisation, and Cape of Good Hope very natural indignation! Supposing, we were materially to simplify the laws, and to abrogate the absurd fiction that everybody is supposed to be acquainted with them, when we know very well that such acquaintance is the study of a life in which some fifty men have been proficient perhaps in five times fifty years, I wonder whether laws would be respected less? Supposing, we maintained too many of such fictions altogether, and found their stabling come exceedingly expensive! […] Supposing, Governments were to consider public questions less with reference to their own time, and more with reference to all time […] Supposing, the wisdom of our ancestors should turn out to be a mere phrase, and if that there were any sense in it, it should follow that we ought to be believers in the worship of the Druids at this hour […] Supposing, we were clearly to perceive that we cannot keep some men out of their share in the administration of affairs […] Mr Lane, the traveller, tells us of a superstition the Egyptians have, that the mischievous Genii are driven away by iron […] Supposing, this should foreshadow the disappearance of the evil

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spirits and ignorances besetting this earth, before the iron steamengines and roads, I wonder whether we could expedite their flight at all by iron energy. Supposing, we were just to try two or three of these experiments.8 Here is a great catalogue of concerns that went into the making of Dickens the novelist as well as Dickens the social activist: tax reform, legal reform, penal system reform, administrative reform, educational reform, election system reform, and finally, a reform in manners, some sort of self-education that “we all” have to undertake. The catalogue is presented in the form of a list of conditionals—or supposings—and the conditional form of the list serves to highlight the difference between the desirable order of things and the order of things as they are. A herald of the desirable state of affairs is found in the emblems of new industrial technologies, iron and steam; but the evocation of these technological achievements is an ambiguous affair. On the one hand, new technology seems to proffer a hope that the persistence of a whole series of troubling failures in British society may prove to be somehow assailable by the salutary spreading of technology/industry. But on the other hand, it also proffers a warning that technological modernization does not necessarily translate into social and political modernization. Industrialization may have a salutary effect, but then it may not; and, at that time, Dickens seems to say, it does not, and cannot—on its own. The tone of the piece is almost self-parodying, almost rendering the supposings as an exercise in foolish hope—do not his suggestions appear to the writer, who knows better as one of “[us] all,” hardly convincing, and thoroughly hypothetical? The rhetorical drift of the pamphlet consists precisely in perceiving this conditionality as very unlikely in order to make its readers wonder why it should appear so unlikely. Even as each supposition presents the possibility of some ultimately more practical and more reasonable arrangement of things, it also raises the question of its feasibility. What chance such calls for economy and reason have of interfering with the current ways, which apparently depend on fiction and waste? In this contrasting of reason and lack of good sense, profitability and waste, the act of supposing simultaneously renders a disbelief in itself as well as a belief in the endurance of the “fictions,” or the irrationality underlying the current order of things. It is because the proposed “experiments” in social reform are clearly taken to be so much more rational and just, that the question of their feasibility is not a function of reason alone. The pamphlet thus works by shifting the focus from demonstrating the necessity for social reform to demonstrating the necessity for action. Note that Dickens again does not speak from an individual, personal point of view, but rather from the point of view of a collective we; it is a voice that speaks on behalf of the pamphlet’s audience. In doing so, he asks his audiences to contemplate two different self-images. There is the image of a community characterized by a lack of belief in and commitment to social reform: while the experiments the piece proposes are deemed just and reasonable beyond the need for demonstration, the almost resigned tone of conditionality with which these supposings are rendered recreates what Dickens diagnoses as the low level of reform enthusiasm of his audiences. But there is necessarily a second identification, suggested by the very list of goals enumerated in the pamphlet—one that creates a call for action. The primary purpose of the pamphlet is not to argue for a list of reform goals; the purpose is not even to

Literary criticism and cultural theory 124 determine what goals should be accorded priority; rather, it is to convince the journal’s audience that something needs to be done about the existing state of affairs. Blending his own voice into the collective “we,” Dickens presents to the middle-class readership of his journal an unflattering mirror that emphasizes frustration and passivity, but through this very emphasis it also cajoles the audience into mobilizing around the idea of reform. In short, the pamphlet has more of a motivational than a programmatic purpose. As Dickens invites a consensus about the obsolescence of the current state of affairs and expresses his frustrated outrage over the pace of reform, he obviously does not intend the piece to demonstrate that there are better ways of doing things; he primarily intends to get his audience to act on this knowledge. “Supposing!” thus exudes a mixed—and characteristically Dickensian, emotion: there is a push for reform yet also not much belief in the push, unless “we” decide to act in the cause of reform. Of course, from the start it is obvious that the “we” are not everyone, the entire population of Britain: the term designates the social strata that are above, “on our pedestals.” One way of interpreting this collectivity is by roughly identifying it as the political nation, the enfranchised, those who have it in their power to steer the proposed reforms, which, in the aftermath of the First Reform Act, meant the electorate of tenpounders, which added to the landowning elite the middle classes and a thin segment of the artisan class. But again, we cannot be fully certain what collectivity is interpellated here by Dickens, other than it is a collectivity defined against “those below us,” as well as by some measure of “genius, rank and wealth.” The social imaginary framing this interpellation is, to use David Cannadine’s terminology, binary—a vision of society somehow divided into us and them, the privileged and the de-privileged. Yet it is also hierarchical, inasmuch as it presupposes a society stratified by the principle of “superiority” (of genius, rank, wealth), in which there are always “those below us.”9 Ultimately, at this juncture Dickens leaves it to his audiences to recognize themselves in the appellation, and behind that deliberate lack of clarity there lies a need to appeal as broadly as possible—as long as his audiences possess some measure of economic or social capital. Without attempting a more detailed analysis of Dickens’s vocabulary of class, I want to suggest at this point that Dickens in his writing often vacillated among various models of social description. In other words, Dickens’s language of class is not unlike the language of class used by a vast majority of Victorian literary figures—it is sometimes binary (the opposition between the people and the aristocracy, or upper and lower classes, for instance), sometimes triadic (upper, middle, lower class), and sometimes hierarchical (the language of degree, rank, status whereby society is minutely stratified into a multitude of class positions).10 Each of these models (and their many versions), as Cannadine reminds us, is a product and function of complex historical forces and relations. At the same time, each constructs social reality in different ways—any language of class is an attempt to affirm and consolidate a particular vision of the social space. Two remarks are in order here. First, Dickens believed the aristocracy to be the main obstacle to British political modernization, which is why he often used the binary model people/aristocracy, simple as it is for mobilizing purposes. Secondly, even when Dickens says “people” he most often means “middle class”—that is, his target audience is seldom defined as all citizens of Britain (even when he speaks of suffrage reform), but

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more often than not it evokes the traditional liberal community of more or less propertied individuals. *** An interesting example of Dickens’s dissatisfaction with the disposition of his audiences to pursue reform causes can be found in another Household Words contribution, “Nobody, Somebody and Everybody,” from 1856. (Little Dorrit, published in monthly parts around the same time, and voicing the same caution, was originally to be entitled “Nobody’s Fault”). The article was another reaction by Dickens to the way the British government handled the Crimean war, but also to what he perceived was a feeble response of the British public to the government mishandling of the war. Certainly there was no lack of media uproar about the war. In powerful reports for The Times, W.H.Russell documented closely the hardships of the common soldier. In most accounts of the failures and the suffering in the press, the War Office and the aris tocratic officer corps were identified as the cause. A liberal Member of Parliament, A.H.Layard called for reforms in the military, and especially for the officer corps to be made open to the middle classes. Layard also founded the Administrative Reform Association, designed to campaign for a more comprehensive political reform, and in particular for wrenching the civil service from patrician patronage, and the ARA attracted Dickens and some other literary figures. In spite of his reservations discussed above, Dickens probably felt compelled to speak for the ARA because he was not convinced that the British public reacted strongly enough to the patrician bungling of the war, in spite of the press coverage. Following the Russell dispatches in The Times, Dickens suggests, the country fell into a “gloomy silence;” this state of shock and inactivity has to be addressed by “the awakening of the people, the outspeaking of the people, the uniting of the people in all patriotism and loyalty to effect a great peaceful constitutional change in the administration of their own affairs.”11 While he felt that a substantial political change was necessary—“a great peaceful constitutional change”—Dickens also believed that a chance for doing something about it was slipping away in absence of more public support for reform. Dickens’s involvement with the ARA turned out to be brief, but he continued to write articles in Household Words that were meant to awake the public and unite it in reform sentiment, and among these articles was “Nobody;” the article attacked the government’s handling of the Crimean war, but more broadly it was a diagnosis of a social situation in which accountability of government officials failed to become an issue. Speaking of the culture of shirking responsibility characteristic of the government, Dickens extends the article's chief metaphor, ironically observing the agency of Nobody in all spheres of public life: Surely, this is a rather wonderful state of things to be realising itself so long after the Flood, in such a country as England. Surely, it suggests to us with some force, that wherever this ubiquitous Nobody is, there mischief is and there danger is. For, it is especially to be borne in mind that wherever failure is accomplished, there nobody lurks. With success, he has nothing to do. That is Everybody’s business, and all manner of improbable people will be invariably found at the bottom of it. But, it is the great feature of the present epoch that all public disaster in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland is assuredly,

Literary criticism and cultural theory 126 and to a dead certainty, Nobody’s work.12 This is an appeal to his readership’s sense of modernity. Though the perspective of modernity is established somewhat jokingly in terms of distance from ante-diluvial times, it certainly evokes the national experience as a vanguard of modernity (“in such a country as England”). Dickens continues with expressions of anxiety about the national image of England, and more specifically about its present inability to live up to the promise of its own political standards, among which should be numbered accountability of public officials. If previously Dickens “remark[ed …] the impression made on other peoples by the stern Saxon spirit with which, the default proved and the wrong being done, we have tracked down and punished the defaulter, and the wrong-doer,” now he believes that the recent failures in the conduct of the Crimean war will leave an impression “more potent and more vivid in Europe (mayhap in Asia too, and in America) for years to come than all our successes since the days of the Spanish Armada.” Describing the management of the war as a “system of false pretence and general swindling,” Dickens calls for a different, accountable kind of civil servant: “I want Somebody who will be clever in doing business, not clever in evading it. […] I want Somebody who shall be no fiction; but a capable, good, determined workman.” But what does “Nobody” stand for? In a caustic commentary on the level of public interest in the matter, Dickens claims some sort of sublimity for Nobody: “It is difficult for the mind to span the career of Nobody. The sphere of action opened to this wonderful person, so enlarges every day, that the limited faculties of anybody are too weak to compass it”— another jab at the middle classes for their insufficient readiness to scrutinize the behavior of the holders of political office. There is in fact no sublime mystery for Dickens as to who is accountable, and he clearly identifies Nobody as the irresponsible yet ceremonious public official: “Reserving Nobody for statues, and stars and garters, and batons, and places and pensions without duties, what if we were to try Somebody for real work?” The broad satire of this article has led some critics to question the focus of Dickens’s political vision. Alexander Welsh, for instance, suggested that the article makes manifest “Dickens’s inability to define a political creed.”13 To Welsh it appeared that “‘Nobody’ is ironic because it stands for somebody, and doubly ironic because Dickens finally does not know who that somebody may be; it may as well be nobody after all.” Granting that Dickens may not have had a clearly doctrinal approach to politics, a convincing case can hardly be made that his political practice was shapeless or directionless. In fact, “Nobody” sums up two important tenets of all of Dickens’s political thought and action. First, Dickens held that the running of the country has been monopolized by an exclusive group of privileged and unaccountable officials. Through the thin allegorical veil of Nobody it is only too easy to recognize the gentlemanly class monopolizing the public domain, as is obvi ous in the following description of what a responsible civil servant should not be like: “I don’t want Somebody to sustain, for Parliamentary and Club entertainment, and by the desire of several persons of distinction, the character of a light old gentleman, or a fast old gentleman, or a free-and easy old gentleman, or a capital old gentleman considering his years.” “Nobody” is given the indifferent face of the patrician tenure of power—the metaphor is an indication of just how little the gentlemanly elite holds itself accountable. Secondly, and equally importantly, the metaphor of “Nobody”

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entails an image of a society characterized by insufficient public scrutiny, or at least by the lack of public momentum in calling for accountability in office—it takes two to let “Nobody” take the blame for misgovernment. That other agency contributing to the successful political existence of “Nobody” is the apathetic middle-class audience that Dickens’s journal attempts to “move by one sympathy.” As Dickens tries to impress on his readers the necessity of mending this state of affairs, he ultimately resorts to an image of national catastrophe: “Something will be the national death of us, some day; and who can doubt that Nobody will be brought in Guilty?” The double-entendre is of course obvious enough. On the one hand, Dickens apportions the blame for any possible disaster that might befall Britain to the political regime represented by Nobody; on the other hand, he implies that even in such a case of national catastrophe the responsible party will get away with it. Note that again Dickens addresses the political nerve of his middle-class audiences in the same manner that was characteristic of “Supposings!”—not through a critical analysis of the political field, but rather by serving up images of the audience’s own social and political inertia. The idea is to shame his audiences into action. *** Let me briefly look at another contribution to Household Words, published earlier in the same year. “Insularities” is one of many Dickens lamentations over the peculiar British class culture. The title concern of the piece is scarcely a matter of some great singularity of insight on Dickens’s part, but its interest lies in the particular political content that Dickens gives to the phenomenon he describes as insularities. While nations, he states, are likely in some measure to glorify themselves and their institutions, “it is of paramount importance to every nation that its boastfulness should not generate prejudice, conventionality, and a cherishing of unreasonable ways of acting and thinking, which have nothing in them deserving of respect, but are ridiculous or wrong.” The stereo typical national traits Dickens dwells on include conservative dress, social formality and constraint, and court press. In talking of such English peculiarities, Dickens assumes a modest task for himself: “Our object in this paper is to string together a few examples.”14 Yet the casu al tone is given a sharp counterpoint in Dickens’s description of the conditions generating English peculiarities: We, English people, owing in a great degree to our insular position, and in a small degree to the facility with which we have permitted electioneering lords and gentlemen to think for us, and represent our weakness to us as our strength, have been in particular danger of contracting habits which we will call for our present purpose, Insularities. The irony on the relative importance of the causes of insularities hardly needs pointing out—the rest of the piece will say very little about the insular geography, physical or cultural, but a substantial deal about the monopolizing of public life by “electioneering lords and gentlemen.” As the text unfolds, it becomes clear that for its writer the fundamental mechanism of English insularities is to be found in the singular arrangements underwriting Britain’s public life. The real target of Dickens’s attack is the character of what he perceives to be the tacit social pact between the “English

Literary criticism and cultural theory 128 people” (rather: “We, English people”) and the political establishment, that is, the patrician and gentlemanly elite. The peculiar character of that pact is the “facility” with which the “English people” have given over political power to the “electioneering club” (whose partisan differences mean little to Dickens here, their control of political society uniting rather than dividing them). In spite of his personal sympathies for the cause of suffrage reform, let me point out again, Dickens in “English people” hardly means all Englishmen and Englishwomen, including those excluded from representation; exclusion from representation is not really at issue in the piece. The general drift of the piece (as in other similar writing by Dickens) is to point to the middle class (a class that already has access to political representation) as the social group responsible for the chief English “insularity” of political and class subservience. For instance, Dickens writes of an admittedly past situation, when “Tory writers” used to ridicule popular entertainment, jeering “the weaker members of the middle class into making themselves a poor fringe on the skirts of the class above them, instead of occupying their own honest, honourable, and independent place.”15 Dickens’s call for a middle-class identity free from aristocratic influence is part of his strategy to appeal to the sense of social responsibility of the social group which he perceives to be, presumably because of their unused enfranchisement and their potential for occupying a more “independent place,” the most responsible for making a difference in the field of social reform, as well as the most responsible for the circumstance that no sub-stantial difference is being made. The final insularity that Dickens presents for “general consideration and correction,” is “that the English people are wanting in self-respect.” Just like “Supposings!” and “Nobody,” “Insularities” attributes the cause for the various national failures not only to the constellation of power in the political field, but also to a certain failure of middleclass self-understanding—a failure of a non-patrician English civil society to assert itself against the obsolescence of the patrician political society. The piece is another in a series of rhetorical attempts to shame the middle class into some sort of civil and political existence, and thus to lend it a civil and political identity. The driving force of Dickens’s social activism and writing in the 1850s is precisely this: the perception of an anemic middle-class posture in civil society. During the decade, Dickens repeatedly proposes that the intimacy between the patrician elite and the state needs to be countered by an attempt to create a critical distance between middle-class civil society and patrician political society. It is as if Dickens tried to impress on his (largely) middle-class readership that in order to restore to the middle class some sense of autonomous influence on the domain of political authority, the public sphere needs to be reconstituted from within civil society, through a reform of middle-class political and social identity, behavior, and sense of purpose. This obviously informed Dickens’s social activism—the many societies and associations that he supported or helped fashion, and that were as a rule independent from the state, and which sought to create, primarily through sentiment, a sense of collectivity and moral responsibility within middle-class civil society itself. As he stated in another attack on the subservience of the English middle class, the first postulate of his social vision is that “[r]eform begins at home.”16

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PATRICIAN BUREAUCRACY AND THE CRISIS OF MIDDLECLASS IDENTITY IN LITTLE DORRIT In the title itself of Household Words lies the core image of Dickens’s literary activism: the literary word becomes a sort of sentimental forum for constructing and mobilizing audiences. The mission of conducting the journal’s readership towards a common sentiment is perhaps best under-stood in terms of the political subject matter of Little Dorrit It does not suffice to describe this novel as a satirical depiction of the inefficiency of British bureaucracy, for it is as much an indictment of the patrician grip on the state apparatus as a cautionary tale about the political lethargy of the middle class. Proceeding from a sense that Britain is paying a high price by clinging to an obsolete political state of things, Dickens’s satirical ire is directed at no less than a failure of political modernization; the tone of the novel is perfectly captured in a contemporary Dickens letter in which he complained “that representative government is become altogether a failure with us, that the English gentilities and subserviences render the people unfit for it, and that the whole thing has broken down since the great seventeenth-century time.”17 Little Dorrit’s attack on British bureaucracy was very topical: it was inspired by the events in Crimea, where a British expeditionary force suffered heavy casualties, some in action, while many occasioned by poor supplies of food and clothing. By way of dispatches from the frontline in many British papers, the British public had a chance to find out about the horrific condition of the troops in Crimea. With most of the upper echelon officer corps staffed by patricians, there was a public feeling that the bunglings were caused by aristocratic incompetence. When the ARA was formed in response to the Crimean events, Dickens found himself on the verge of getting very closely involved in politics and of transgressing the self-imposed limits on his social activism; the fact that he did join the ARA is a strong indication of how important Dickens thought the moment was. At the same time, in Little Dorrit Dickens created his most political novel, in which a central place is occupied by Dickens’s most memorable image of aristocratic domination of British political society—the Circumlocution Office. Little Dorrit voices the same warning as “Nobody” that continued patrician rule might lead to national disaster. For instance, the Bleeding Heart Yard, one of Dickens’s most memorable studies of London slums, serves as an image of where “Britannia herself might come to look for lodgings […] some ugly day or other, if she over-did the Circumlocution Office.”18 The main business of the CO in the “science of government” is deliberate mismanagement, or “how not to do it” (110). Monopolizing the Office are the Barnacles, a patrician family “dispersed all over the public offices, and [holding] all sorts of public places” (113). Ubiquitous in civil service, the Barnacles are often described as “colonies” and “shoais.” This crustacean metaphor depicts the Barnacles’ mode of operation as a sort of multitude without an organizing center and without individual agency, but capable of acting and reproducing en masse in a parasitical manner. Another implication of course is that such a decentralized collective mode of operation makes the Barnacles all the more difficult to criticize or resist.19 “Altogether splendid, massive, overpowering, and impracticable,”20—this is a short sketch of one of the Barnacles, which also encapsulates Dickens’s view of the state of British political

Literary criticism and cultural theory 130 society. The sketch exudes an exasperation with the indifference, ceremonious inefficiency, and labyrinthine wastefulness of this political society, as well as a sense that it is hard to imagine for this order of things to change (a sort of a miniature recapitulation of the tone of Dickens’s “supposings”). The aristocratic political society in the novel is depicted as deeply obsolescent as well as stubbornly persistent. From their position of privilege and power, the Barnacles are consistently harmful, and they effectively undermine what Dickens identified as significant national accomplishments of the British “people” (in Dickens’s language, a designation for the middle class). Throughout the novel they are shown to be out to do exactly what they claim not to be out to do: “to set bounds to the philanthropy, to cramp the charity, to fetter the public spirit, to contract the enterprise, to damp the independent self-reliance, of its people” (391). On another of the novel’s stages—the one dealing with speculative investment—the novel dramatizes the severe challenge to the middle-class attitude of “self-reliance” posed by the promise of easy money in speculation; in addition, the narrative about the Circumlocution Office suggests that the central middle-class ideological attitudes are simultaneously being thwarted and weakened by the posture of the patrician bureaucracy. A very immediate result of the Barnacle administration is that the industrial inventor and entrepreneur Doyle cannot patent an invention of his in Britain and is forced to look for a foreign market to develop it.21 The simple message here is that aristocratic government has become an obstacle to further growth of British industry. This registers another important Dickensian anxiety: that Britain is ignoring the department where it was a world leader—a technologically innovative, industrial economy. Speaking in retrospect, Dickens was quite right in his pessimism about the role of British industry. Already at the end of the 19th century it was evident that Britain ceased to be the industrial leader of the world. Why that happened is certainly a complex affair. There is probably a great deal of truth in Eric Hobsbawm’s remark that the industrial revolution in Britain in the first half of the 19th century was carried out by relatively small enterprises, and that after that Britain did not “take the path of systematic economic concentration—the formation of trusts, cartels, syndicates and so on, which was so characteristic of Germany and the USA in the 1880s,” when these countries surpassed Britain’s industrial output. Britain’s continued commitment to “the technology and business organization of the first phase of industrialization” (from the first half of the 19th century) was coupled with an adherence to free trade when its competitors did not hesitate to protect their home markets by import tariffs.22 But to view the changes in the position of British industry merely in terms of statistics on its global performance could be misleading. Namely, it is at least equally important to ask why the industrial sector in Britain took a back seat to the service sector. Why did Britain in the second half of the 19th century cease to be the workshop of the world, while at the same time it became the banker of the world? Part of the reason, and this is what Dickens saw very clearly in his anxiety about the future of British industry, was in the character of the British state apparatus, and in the historical alliances between landed influence and service sector capital. Dickens anticipated the historical analyses of Cain and Hopkins, who argued that manufacturing capital on the national stage played second fiddle to the economies of British service sector capitalism and imperialism for much of the 19th century.23 While the Circumlocution Office is one force affecting the lives of all characters in the

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novel, the banker by the name of Merdle is another. Politically and socially allied with the Barnacles and the patrician elite, Merdle is a self-made man who runs a vast banking enterprise, in which most of the major characters in the novel, who have money to invest, invest their money. Yet the reader gets to know very little about his business—quite deliberately his enormous financial speculations are rendered as a matter for speculation. Dickens for the most part presents Merdle’s affairs from a distance, never allowing a full glimpse into his many dealings. The motives for his actions, including his suicide, are never directly represented; especially his business dealings are reported in the form of gossip—a chorus-like series of speculations on what Merdle has been doing and what he might be doing next. Perhaps it is only appropriate to represent the operations of finance capital with such indirectness—inasmuch as the indirectness parallels the function of reputation and report in the routine performance of finance capitalism. In other words, by the prevalence of rumor and gossip over first-hand knowledge the novel foregrounds the importance of the symbolic capital of social prestige as an indispensable ingredient of finance capitalism—as Dickens notes, “Nobody knew what [Merdle] had done, but everybody knew him to be the greatest [man] that had appeared” (627). Merdle’s success is coterminous with his good reputation; therefore, his financial failure destroys his reputation—the moment his Bank collapses, he is seen as a social impostor—his chief butler speaks for the first time in the novel to declare that Merdle “never was the gentleman” (774). (The fact that Merdle employs a vast servant staff overseen by a chief butler signifies Merdle’s attempt at inclusion in the genteel world, inasmuch as the haughty butler, who continually surveys Merdle’s social ways with silent disapproval, signifies the incompleteness of that inclusion). Similarly, the moment his financial empire collapses, the polite opinion begins to see in Merdle a “vulgar barbarian” (“for Mr Merdle was found out from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, the moment he was found out in his pocket” 873). Reputation plays a central role in Merdle’s story. During his career as a successful financier, Merdle cultivates his connections with the patrician political and social elite. In a great degree, his business reputation consists in his perceived closeness to the elite. To facilitate his adoption into the elite, there exists a division of labor between him and his wife: Mrs Merdle is entrusted by Merdle with putting a genteel appearance on his social ambition; as he himself states “[she] supplies manner,” while “[he] supplies money” (447). She acts as a host to social events at her home gathering the ruling elite, such as the Barnacles along with a number of characters who are only identified by their position in the patrician-dominated power system: Treasury, Admiralty, Bar, Bishop, Horse Guards (the metonymies foreground the appropriation of power as personal privilege). Together these personages compose what Mrs Merdle refers to as “Society”— the word is capitalized throughout the novel, ironically marking the difference between this exclusive group and the society at large. Like the Circumlocution Office, the Society towards which the Merdles gravitate is shown to us through a lens of broad satire, and is populated by characters that can only appear as types. With his private and political connections to “Society,” Merdle establishes himself as the guarantor of commercial soundness: He was in everything good, from banking to building. He was in Parliament, of

Literary criticism and cultural theory 132 course. He was in the City, necessarily. He was Chairman of this, Trustee of that, President of the other. The weightiest of men had said to projectors: ‘Now, what name have you got? Have you got Merdle?’ And, the reply being in the negative, had said, Then I won’t look at you.’ (293) “The magic name of Merdle” (619), as Bar notes, functions in the business of speculation as a guarantee of success. Importantly, in his circle Merdle is regarded as synonymous with the national role on the global stage, his “daily occupation [being] causing the British name to be more respected in all parts of the civilised globe capable of the appreciation of world-wide commercial enterprise and gigantic combinations of skill and capital” (445). Soon to invest into Merdle’s projects, Mr Dorrit remarks that “Mr Merdle is a name of—ha—world-wide repute. Mr Merdle’s undertakings are immense. They bring him such vast sums of money that they are regarded as—hum—national benefits. Mr Merdle is the man of his time. The name of Merdle is the name of the age” (537). By the end of the novel, the narrator playfully rephrases Mr Dorrit’s words, so that Merdle becomes the mastermind and the master-spirit of the age. While this is said in a broad satirical tone, behind this satire looms a serious suggestion that the political and economic alliances forming someone like Merdle indeed are a defining characteristic of the age and a defining ingredient of the British role in the world. Merdle’s function in the novel is to drive its cautionary tale about speculation. In the preface to the three-decker edition of Little Dorrit (1857), Dickens expressly states that the career of Merdle was modeled on several cases of speculation manias from the 1840s and 1850s. In particular he mentions the case of an Irish bank, which is a reference to the Tipperary Joint Stock Bank, and the career of its founder, John Sadleir. His was a remarkable story: rising from humble origins through speculation on railroad shares, Sadleir eventually became a Member of Parliament, and a Junior Lord of the Treasury. He committed suicide amid reports of embezzlement in early 1856, and soon thereafter his banking enterprise crashed. Little Dorrit began publication in Household Words in 1855, so that the reference to Sadleir could not have been more topical—a telling example of Dickens’s writing to the moment.24 At around the same time debates were going on in Parliament that soon led to the passage of the Joint Stock Companies Act in 1856. Introducing the notion of limited liability, the Act created the legislative security necessary for the functioning of corporate capitalism. In that way, the Act retired the premise on which the cautionary tale of Little Dorrit is based—the premise of unlimited liability, which until then had in practice meant that every failed enterprise inevitably brought about financial ruin to the shareholders. Following the failure of Merdle’s enterprises, Arthur Clennam ends up in a debtor’s prison simply because he owned some Merdle shares; after the Act of 1857 such a narrative is no longer possible. In the structure of the plot, Merdle’s role is pivotal because he allows the novel to focalize two different ways of creating middle-class wealth: the Merdle way, or the way of speculation, and the Doyce way, or the way of industry. The novel’s melodramatic protagonist family—the Clennam/Dorrit family has to be weaned away from the Merdle way (in which both William Dorrit and Arthur Clennam trust and invest), in order to retry its luck with a small-scale manufacturing enterprise (the Clennam/Doyce partnership). This is a powerful though simple allegory, exhorting against financial speculation for its

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susceptibility to the effects of peculation, individually perpetrated fraud. The simple message here is that a middle-class family should forego the opaque and dubious manner of acquiring wealth that characterizes the world of finance capitalism on behalf of the presumably transparent and honest manner associated with manufacturing capitalism. But there is another kind of cautionary tale suggested by the story of Merdle, and this one concerns the ethos of finance capitalism internally. Significantly, Merdle is not entirely cast as a type like the other members of the Society in which he moves. A suggestion that there is more than one dimension to his character is repeatedly generated by references to his “complaint;” his physician, for instance, determines that nothing is physically wrong with him, but that he has some “deep-seated recondite complaint” (300). In fact, that something is wrong with Mr Merdle is the first thing we get to learn about him, in the chapter entitled “Mr Merdle’s Complaint.” Through this “complaint,” or “depression” as it is also referred to in the novel, Merdle’s character is given a psychological depth unassociated with other characters populating “Society.” The complaint advertises that Merdle is riven by some unresolved internal conflict. His wife, his doctor, and his political and business connections, are all aware of his complaint— and as this complaint becomes a matter of speculation, it begins to signify some ambiguity of Merdle’s relative to the power structure in which he moves. For instance, in response to Merdle’s complaint, his wife develops a complaint of her own—she complains to Merdle that he has not adopted the “tone of Society:” “There is a positive vulgarity in carrying your business affairs about with you.” When in Society, Merdle “shows” that he is a City businessman, “while he should care about nothing—or seem to care about nothing—like everybody else does” (447). Mrs Merdle regards him a social failure for not blending well in a social milieu that places an enormous emphasis on not acknowledging its relationship to the business of generating capital. Even though he is a commercial and political success, Merdle does not entirely adapt to the culture of “gentlemanly capitalism,” to borrow a term from Cain and Hopkins. In their account of British history since the 17th century, the two historians highlight the continued control of the patrician (and later gentlemanly) elite not only over the state apparatus, but also over the definition of socially prestigious modes of acquiring and enjoying wealth, which in turn had tremendous ramifications for the historical evolution of capitalism in Britain. Continuing to opportunely reinvent itself throughout the 19th century, the patrician elite also continued to successfully impose its social norms and values and especially the model of inherited wealth, which implied a natural, non-striving possession of wealth. In the language of this culture of prestige the term vulgarity denotes the visible, striving relationship—and that is why Mrs Merdle criticizes her husband for not being able to leave his business behind while in Society. For a variety of complex reasons (because the business of finance is not physically conspicuous, and because its interests had been closely tied in with those of the patrician elite ever since the end of the 17th century), of which most Victorian novelists were acutely aware, finance capital around mid-19th century was still much more easily converted into patrician status than other types of capital. Given the availability of this conversion, the complaint plaguing Merdle emerges as a symptom of his dilemma—an internal drama that we never witness directly, but that clearly suggests that Merdle is not entirely at ease about the ideological consequences of his career. The story of Merdle is

Literary criticism and cultural theory 134 therefore not simply a story of embezzlement; it is also the story of an identity crisis. It may not be a very nuanced story, but it does put in the foreground the fact that Merdle is a discontented parvenu. His pensive comment that he might have been better off as a carpenter than a banker is a telling example of this identity crisis, as much as it is an example of the (perhaps intended) vagueness of Dickens’s vision of alternatives for Merdle. In Merdle’s yearning for the simple life of an artisan Dickens readers will easily recognize Dickens’s general habitus of looking for social ideals in the world of the lower middle class. In the narrative economy of the novel’s plot, there indeed can be no doubt that Dickens sees in the artisan and the industrialist (represented by the Doyce/Clennam partnership) as a morally superior form of capitalist enterprise; likewise, the Merdle story illustrates the morally dubious finance capitalism. But most importantly, Dickens uses Merdle and his identity crisis to denote a liminality of the finance capitalist in the field of power. By equipping Merdle with the “complaint,” a vague discontent with “Society” or an incomplete assimilation into it, Dickens creates a character whose conscience becomes admittedly a quiet, but nevertheless conspicuous ideological battlefield. From his first appearance in the novel, Merdle is already a site of ideological struggle—rifted as he is between the clear prospect of patrician co-optation and the vague, undramatized prospect of non-patrician uses of finance capital. As Dickens thus presents a critique of the patrician connections and aspirations of finance capital, he also proffers another central theme of his novelistic ideology—the moral reformation of finance capital consonant with what he saw as the moral authority of the English middle class. It is important to note that Dickens sought to rhetorically divorce the idea of British economic success from its political system. In his ARA speech Dickens forcefully identified a failure in political modernization as the defining feature of British political society—in contrast to the modernity of Britain’s commercial success: “The great, broad, true case that our public progress is far behind our private progress, and that we are not more remarkable for our private wisdom and success in matters of business than we are for our public folly and failure, I take to be as clearly established as the existence of the sun, moon, and stars.”25 This statement exudes a keen sense of an incongruity between the character of British civil society and the character of British political society. A fundamental Dickensian topic emerges in this statement: the “private” space of civil society (comprising economic individuals and their ethic, or “private wisdom,” unclear as it is what Dickens might have meant by it) as contrasted with the “public” space of political society (which is structured by a patrician domination that Dickens detested so much). Turning to Habermas’s understanding of the classic bourgeois public sphere can help us unpack some of the important elements of Dickens’s view of the role of his literature in British civil society. In Habermas’s scheme of the classic bourgeois public sphere, there is a constitutive tension between bourgeois civil society and aristocratic political society, and the bourgeois public sphere comes into existence (at the turn of the 18th century) as an arena for critical-rational debate of political and social issues, through which bourgeois civil society sought to dismantle the aristocratic state and politically institutionalize its own values that it saw as universal. In the 1850s Dickens insisted on the same tension between civil society and political society that characterized the original context of the bourgeois public sphere two centuries before. In this line of analysis, there is the obvious

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complication following from the fact that the British political society of Dickens’s day had already institutionalized, and arguably quite a long time before, a significant portion of the bourgeois political project. But at issue at this juncture is not whether Dickens was aware of a mixed character of mid-Victorian political society (of its transitional state form, as Tom Nairn would put it); what is important here is his dramatic polarization of middle-class civil society and patrician political society in terms of modernity and obsolescence. The strong message Dickens was bent on conveying is that the political society in Britain is antiquated, that it needs modernizing, and that the modernizing needs to come from the private space of civil society. It could easily be argued, in Habermasian terms, that by insisting on the tension between civil society and political society in Britain Dickens tried to recreate the originary moment of the bourgeois public sphere and primarily its reform enthusiasm. But there is an important difference between the classic bourgeois public sphere and Dickens’s reconstruction of it. Dickens did not really see the classic instruments of the bourgeois classic sphere as primary: the business of debating is almost superfluous at this point, because its outcome has already been “clearly established.” In Dickens’s idea of the public sphere what counts is not so much the enlightenment emphasis on reason but an emphasis on sentiment capable of mobilizing the reading public in the cause of reform—a sentimental reeducation of civil society. What his ARA statement also clearly establishes is that Dickens speaks against the current constellation of power from a place of a specific empowerment. Dickens takes on the role of spokesman for the most obvious national accomplishment—success in business. Though it is not immediately clear to whom exactly the statement is addressed (the capitalists, the middle class(es), the laboring class(es), the “industrious” classes, the “people,” the English people?), and equally importantly, to whom the statement is not addressed (the ruling elite, the idle aristocracy, everyone else who is not a successful businessperson?), it is evident that Dickens’s rhetoric in the ARA speech is rooted in a sense of alliance with economic capital. Moreover, the very fact that Dickens appeared as a speaker at the ARA meeting and a spokesperson for such a ponderous political agenda as the reform of government speaks of his representing another kind of capital—the symbolic capital he accumulated as a professional writer and a public figure. That is, Dickens speaks at this point as the spokesman for a tremendous cultural transformation he was at the very center of—the emergence of the professional novelist and the first mass market for novels. He weighs in his symbolic authority as a literary man and the economic power of industrious Britain against the “folly and failure” of aristocratic politics.

HISTORY AND MELODRAMA How does A Tale of Two Cities fit in Dickens’s preoccupations with the middle-class identity crisis? A Tale is a novel with a double focus: it is a historical novel seeking to interpret the French Revolution as well as a melodrama about the making of a middleclass family. A common explanation for the choice of historical period is that it allowed Dickens to communicate, in the most dramatic of terms, an anxiety about revolutionary turmoil. The story of A Tale, set in England and France, covers the period from around

Literary criticism and cultural theory 136 1775 to 1793, when the Reign of Terror was at its most intense. Amid this revolutionary turmoil, the story ends with the emergence of a new kind of family structure, whose consolidation can also be seen as the emergence of a new ideological event. Christina Crosby discussed Little Dorrit as a melodrama.26 A Tale of Two Cities (1859) 27 is not only a melodrama, but also a historical melodrama set in the period in which Peter Brooks set the birth of the genre in his book The Melodramatic Imagination. Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess. A short recapitulation of Brooks’s understanding of melodramatic mode is in order here. The very choice of typological term—mode—reveals that Brooks found some inspiration in Northrop Frye’s narrative theory. Frye saw melodrama as a subgenre of comedy, a serious comedy or comedy without humor, characterized by “the triumph of moral virtue over villainy, and the consequent idealizing of moral views assumed to be held by the audience.”28 Brooks, however, views melodrama as a mode in its own right, and moreover, one that constitutes a fact of the modern literary imagination. His definition of the melodramatic mode is fairly broad, aspiring to encompass a substantial area of writing in the last couple of centuries (the other eminently modern possibility for Brooks being what he calls, following Frye, the ironic mode). The emergence of melodrama overlaps with the historical moment Brooks defines as “the epistemological moment of the final liquidation of the traditional sacred.” Begun symbolically with the Renaissance, the dissolution of the traditional epistemological edifice reaches its symbolic resolution, its “last convulsive act,”29 with the French Revolution. While it staged the collapse of the old epistemological and social order, the French Revolution also manifested a desire to initiate a new social order and “to legislate the regime of virtue.” In revolutionary oratorical and legislative production, there was a conspicuous concern for “the location, expression and imposition of basic ethical and psychic truths,”30 and in that respect the Revolution and melodrama are alike. In fact, Brooks locates the origin of the genre of melodrama in French postrevolutionary theater. Born in the ideological vacuum created by the demise of the old order, the melodramatic mode was driven by an urge to make obvious a set of ethical imperatives, now conceived no longer in transcendental terms, but through a personalization of the domain of morality. A melodrama typically unfolds as a Manichaean struggle between the good and the evil, embodied in antagonistic characters; these polarities, observes Brooks, lack psychological complexity, but are strongly aligned on one side or the other. The struggle itself is most often a convoluted one, brimming with peripety: it regularly involves persecution of virtue and its ultimate triumph over villainy. The process of melodrama, the demonstration of a moral law embodied in personal actions requires a passage from the initial moral occlusion to the eventual publicization of the moral law. This is why the plot ploys such as mistaken identities, mysterious parentage and sensational about-faces abound in melodrama. In order to become evident, the moral universe must first be uncertain and concealed. The high level of peripety is why melodrama is, as Brooks puts it, a mode of excess. The sensationalism of the mode he explains as the straining of the very “vehicles of representation” to evidence the existence of a moral universe and deliver a moral code. The distance between the initial confusion and the moral reordering is a particularly wide one, and a particularly difficult one to traverse. A Tale of Two Cities illustrates easily enough Brooks’s inventory of melodramatic

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formulas. The good and the bad characters are conspicuously polarized, and none of them can boast a great deal of psychological depth. The good ones, Manette, Lucie and Darnay, are fairly onedimensional, as are the bad ones, the Evremondes and the Defarges, the old and the new persecutors and oppressors. Some of the bad characters are often named as pure types; the Vengeance, the woman who works the revolutionary tribunal’s mood in Darnay’s disfavor, being one example; the Monseigneur, representative of aristocratic cruelty and selfishness, another. The virtuous characters are placed in danger repeatedly, up to the point when the triumph of the villains seems inevitable, but not quite: the good ones always get ultimately extricated from peril—Darnay stands trial in court three times, and always gets released, though the methods of his extrication differ. The sensationalist plot machinery is remarkable: prisons, escapes, resurrectionism, public executions, revolu tion, and terror. Mistaken identities, inadvertent incrimination; martyrdom, clandestine societies, espionage, all work to signal moral uncertainty in this sensationally eventful universe, while also expressing the need for some moral certainty. Arguably, the final reunification of the Darnays seems to advance reward to the good; as for the vengeful Defarges, we are reminded that they will soon find punishment from the same instrument on whose use they relied so much, the Guillotine. The story of Carton’s self-sacrifice (inspired by Wilkie Collins’s drama The Frozen Deep, in which Dickens acted himself and which he probably helped to compose) relied on a strongly melodramatic trope, rivalry of two men over a woman resolved by a sacrifice of one man for the other. And the famous first paragraph of the first chapter (simply called “The Period”) of A Tale clearly announces the melodramatic situation of moral confusion and striving for a moral certainty: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.31 A Tale is more than just a melodrama: it is a historical novel seeking to provide a glimpse of illumination into a historical period. “It has been one of my hopes to add something to the popular and picturesque means of understanding that terrible time,” wrote Dickens in the Preface to the novel.32 The terrible time is in itself a shorthand for the novel’s political cautionary tale—that similar circumstances of social and political oppression could again result not only in political revolution such as the French revolution but also in a regime of violence such as the reign of Terror. As a critic put it quite simply: “The thesis of the novel is: Revolution can happen in England too!”33 If the 19th century ruling elite in England remains as smug and selfish as the French elite in 1770, there is no telling but something similar may happen. With a view to politics, the novel is a study of violence, focusing on two agents in the whole revolutionary drama (a simple binarism not unlike others at work in melodramas): the Monseigneur as the oppressor and the mob as

Literary criticism and cultural theory 138 the product of oppression. The aristocratic attitude to government is singled out as one of the things contributing to the genesis of the Revolution: “Monseigneur had one truly noble idea of general public business, which was, to let everything go on in its own way; of particular public business, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea that it must all go his way—tend to his own power and pocket” (124). Economic oppression is pursued by the Monseigneur as landowner to the point of complete exhaustion of the peasantry: “Habitations, fences, domesticated animals, men, women, children, and the soil that bore them—all worn out. […] Monseigneur as a class had, somehow or other, brought things to this” (276). Speaking of the guillotine, the symbol and instrument of much revolutionary violence, the narrator delivers the message of this cautionary tale: “Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind” (459). This cautionary tale emphasizes that the Revolution is a historical first, and that it unleashed new forms of violence. The most terrifying novelty is “the remorseless sea,” that is the revolutionary mob, “whose depths were yet unfathomed and whose forces were yet unknown” (268). The first three years of the French Revolution, before Darnay comes to France in August 1792 (that is, right before the Declaration of the Republic) are described in terms of a natural disaster: “In such risings of fire and risings of sea—the firm earth shaken by the rushes of an angry ocean which had no ebb, but was always on the flow, to the terror and wonder of the beholders on the shore—three years of tempest were consumed” (286). This imagery of the elements gone wild is soon supplemented by an analogy with the Biblical deluge: “What private solicitude“—meaning Manette’s efforts to get Darnay out of prison—”could rear itself against the deluge of the Year One of Liberty—the deluge rising from below, not falling from above, and with the windows of heaven shut, not opened!” (335). The Biblical analogizing is here intended as a double irony. On the one hand, it foregrounds the issue of novelty and beginnings in the Revolutionary rhetoric and ideology, as well as its promise of freedom. The deluge in the Bible marks a new beginning of history, and this is exactly the ambition of what Dickens renders as the Jacobin deluge. It aimed to start a new era, as manifested by the institution of the Revolutionary calendar in October 1793 (which was antedated to September 21, 1792, the date of the Declaration of the Republic, which means that Darnay’s stay already falls under the new chronology, even though retroactively).34 The novel follows the Revolutionary events up to the climax of the Terror, when Carton at the guillotine sees in his prophecy “long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use.” The Jacobin deluge, failing to achieve its promise, is seen as disposing of itself, creating the way for the “beautiful city and a brilliant people” of Carton’s imagination, “rising from this abyss” (465)—which can be read as Dickens’s perception of Paris in the 1850s. On the other hand, the very analogy with the Biblical deluge delegitimizes itself: the Jacobin Terror is a deluge, but one that takes place in a world without God (“with the windows of Heaven shut”—which corresponds to Brooks’s notion of the demise of transcendence as the historical onset of melodrama). The Jacobin deluge unleashes those “forces yet unknown” associated earlier with the revolutionary mob.35 In the world

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without transcendence, the social world itself becomes both a riddle and the only solution to the riddle. For all of its terror and failure, the Revolution is featured as marking the onset of a new period—the new melodramatized history of the constant redefinition of ethics as a social event. In effect, Dickens’s novel traces out the same historical dynamic as that described by Brooks; for that reason, it is not only a melodrama, but also a melodrama about the birth of the melodramatic imagination itself.

A DISINHERITANCE PLOT AND THE MAKING OF MIDDLE-CLASS IDENTITY Analyzing Little Dorrit, Christina Crosby astutely observed that in Victorian literature “the melodramatic imagination and the historical imagination are part of the same problematic.”36 In her view the fundamental melodramatic gesture in Victorian narratives is a separation of the private from the public, familial from historical, social from political realms, which is intended to “consolidate […] the middle class and generalize […] its values.”37 Crosby took a cue from Brooks, who suggested that the melodramatic reordering of things derives its conviction from an assumption that personal ethics may have a communal value, and indeed are a source of it. Crosby reemphasizes this assumption of the genre: in its work of separation melodrama privileges the private vs. public (the familial vs. historical, etc.). For Crosby this separation helps explain the appeal that the mode had for Dickens, who was famously disappointed with the work of political institutions, and whose strong preference was for a “politics without ‘politics,’”38 a suggestive way to describe Dickens’s preference for civil society politics in contrast to political society politics. But for that very same reason, what Crosby saw as melodramatic separation is also a form of reclaiming the social and the historical—as an attempt to export privately defined values back into the public and political spheres. In fact, Crosby’s opposition between private and public does not quite capture the Dickensian melodrama, where the private is already perceived as the regulator of the public, and where civil society, deriving from the private spheres of the middle class is already posited as superior to political society. The plot of A Tale is designed so as to work towards establishing the middle-class family as the moral paradigm of the narrative world. If the novel is to be reduced to a one-line plot summary, it would not be too unfair to summarize it as an initial incompleteness followed by an eventual emergence of a family structure. At the beginning of the story Lucie Manette is a young woman without parents and without a husband; at the end of the novel she is reunited with her father as well as happily married to a husband who escaped death at the hands of inimical political circumstances several times. Throughout the novel the domain of history, which is practically everything that goes on outside the Manette/Darnay home, keeps throwing obstacles in the path of the family, which they keep weathering successfully. Because the making of a family is at the center of the story, neither Darnay nor Lucie nor Carton can individually be the protagonist of the story: the protagonist is the family that at the end of the novel definitively constitutes itself as a moral paradigm. There is a strong sense that everything in A Tale is a family affair. The mutual

Literary criticism and cultural theory 140 relatedness of every character is obvious enough: the story revolves on the Luciecentered group of characters, with Manette and Lorry the banker as father figures, and Darnay, Carton and even Stryver as rivals for Lucie’s affection. Barsad the spy turns out to be Miss Pross’s long-lost brother, and as a maid she is an indispensable part of the Manette household. All the family helper characters, and chiefly Miss Pross and Lorry, are childless, signifying that the only reproduction that counts is that of the core middleclass Manette/Darnay group. As for the Defarges, their connection with the Darnay circle is of course through the Evremondes, who are an aristocratic family, and one of whom, Darnay’s uncle, abducted and raped a wife of a tenant of his, Therese Defarge’s sister— which is the originary event of the whole narrative. Manette is the other link between the Defarges and the Evremondes, the doctor in attendance on the dying woman. From that moment on, the narrative works to unite two families, the Manettes and the Evremondes, resulting in the emergence of the new family of the Darnays; it is as if all the highways and byways of the story—including the revolutionary turmoil—are laid down for the sole purpose of effectuating this emergence. The new family is the hero, rising victorious out of a melodramatically complicated and dangerous struggle with the Evremondes and the Defarges, or the social orders they represent. The new domestic domain is established by emerging out of inimical and confused social circumstances. Some of this confusion is coded in characteristic melodramatic terms as sensationalist coincidence. For instance, Darnay’s trials and tribulations in France are contingent on his decision to return there in August 1792 just before the onset of the Jacobin Reign of Terror, and just before the Law of the Suspect, under which he is later to be tried, was proclaimed. Confusion is also generated by the fact that the world of the characters is rendered as a collection of social geographies with different dynamics of development, and the passages between the different developments and zones of non-synchronicity represent the points of utmost danger: this is where both Manette and Darnay keep running into trouble (for example, Manette’s heeding the call of his civic conscience, only to fall victim to the brutality of the feudal absolutist state, or Darnay’s moving between the different social systems of England and France). At the same time—such is the force with which the family trope maps itself over the entirety of the represented world—the newly emergent family is meant to mark a new set of potentially regenerative social relations. The family trope, advanced in the novel as the foundry of a new morality, comprises two main tropes controlling its internal dynamic. One has to do with the classic Bildungsroman motif—the making of a gentleman and gentlewoman, and I shall call this the trope of vocation. The copula needs to be emphasized, regardless of whether the text in question focuses more on a man or a woman; the premise of the reproducibility (literal as well as discursive) of the family trope in standard 19th century Bildungsroman narratives requires at least the suggestion of a couple. Needless to say, A Tale is in this respect typical enough, what with the fact that it underscores regeneration (in Carton’s final reverie of a Darnay’s and Lucie’s child that bears his name), and what with the consistently distributed narrative focus that seems to be designed to prevent any single character from stealing the show. In the story of the making of the couple, emphasis is not merely accorded to bringing the man and the woman together, but more importantly to their finding, through the marital union, a wider sense of calling. Marriage—a particular middle-class kind of marriage—is coterminous with vocation, profoundly

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arranging the couple’s roles both at home and in the world. The other part of the family trope in the novel is that of guardianship. While the theme of vocation has to do with assuming and defining social status and social roles, guardianship (which I mean here beyond its narrowly defined legal sense) has to do with providing the necessary conditions: setting up, guiding, grooming, and guarding the constitution of the couple. Becoming a gentleman or a gentlewoman arranges the family matters, so to speak, horizontally—amid a variety of competing forces and pressures it involves a specific vocational response to that variety itself. Guardianship, on the other hand, proceeds vertically, as a vehicle of role education and preparation, both a launching pad for vocation and a supervisory instance over it. At the same time, since the family trope keeps advertising itself as a potential remedy for wider social ills, the trope of guardianship addresses itself to the questions of social action and control too. The novel’s introductory chapters dramatize a critical juncture in Lucie’s position relative to the tropes of vocation and guardianship. In her first meeting with Lorry the banker two things immediately come to the fore, both to affect her gentlewomanly status: that Lucie is of marriageable age, and that Lucie is about to experience a change with respect to patronage. The little money she is to inherit was administered hitherto by Tellson’s Bank; when summoned to the meeting with Lorry the bank representative, she is given to understand that it would be about “the small property of my poor father, whom [she] never saw—so long dead—” (23). Instead, the news Lorry gives her is about her father who had been found alive, to which she responds: “I have been free, I have been happy, yet his Ghost has never haunted me!” (29). There is a characteristic Dickens touch to this deployment of the guardianship trope, with an orphan child learning about her real parentage: the horror with which Lucie receives the news resembles much the cold reserve of Esther Summerson in a similar situation in Bleak House. Like Esther’s, Lucie’s expectations about her future and her past get also abruptly thwarted; not only does the best-case scenario not happen (a fortuitous inheritance of respectable lineage and respectable money), but the heroine finds herself having to come to terms with an unpleasant realization. In Esther’s case, it is being born out of wedlock, to a patrician woman who wanted to keep that a secret; in Lucie’s case, it is finding herself with the responsibility of taking care of her father, now infantilized by long years in a French dungeon. But while Esther never fully reconciles herself to her mother, Lucie is represented as finding her proper vocation in nursing her father back to health and helping him to resume his own work—with a little help from her legal guardian and substitute father, Lorry. The supplementarity of the two—Doctor Manette and Lorry—is communicated right there at the beginning of the story, as Lucie learns of the identities of her guardian and father almost simultaneously. One in a long series of Dickens’s infantilized parents, Manette comes to symbolize in the text the extreme lability, if not vulnerability, of the guardianship trope, and consequently the family trope too. His imprisonment and subsequent infantilization readily provide indication of this vulnerability, as does his inability to effectively control the consequences of his own actions. Dickens’s management of this breakdown is highly sympathetic to Manette: while in prison, the Doctor loses his memory and identity, and his only activity in prison is making ladies shoes, which manifests his clinging to the shreds of both a sense of calling (making

Literary criticism and cultural theory 142 something) and a sense of familial purpose (making something for his wife, presumably). The clinging contains a promise of his recuperation, inasmuch as the shoemaking symbolizes an attempt to reconstruct his family and his role in it. But the shoemaking is nevertheless a powerful sign of his infan tilization. It still marks the breakdown of the trope, and the genesis of this breakdown will be re-staged repeatedly in the novel, most notably and most melodramatically in Manette’s lost imprisonment memoir being produced at Darnay’s trial to incriminate him. The high melodrama of that moment, it needs to be observed, derives precisely from the fact that it is not Manette’s intention to incriminate Darnay, by this time his son-in-law; yet, at the time of the writing he sought revenge on all the Evremondes: “And them and their descendants, to the last of their race, I Alexandre Manette, unhappy prisoner […] denounce to the times when all these things shall be answered for” (410). This melodramatic impasse is constructed on the instability of Manette’s own identity, as well as on the precarious nature of his project to take the family trope into the public world. As I have suggested above, it is this zone of passage from private to public that the novel identifies as the area of the utmost vulnerability of the family trope. The Doctor’s imprisonment follows upon his attempt to generalize his values, to test, as it were, the proximity between his sense of civic duty and the particular culture of law underwriting the ancien regime. Having decided to write, although only privately, to a Minister about the rape committed by an Evremonde, Manette sees his step as necessary from the point of view of an internalized sense of civic duty: “I knew what Court influence was, and what the immunities of the nobles were, and I expected that the matter would never be heard of; but, I wished to relieve my mind” (407). The Doctor later rediscovers a social role for himself in tending to the prisoners in Jacobin-ruled France, and a familial role in trying to get Darnay out of prison. But these actions are again taken in a political environment hostile to Manette’s sense of civic and familial duty, and the impression is fixed that the family trope has problems generalizing itself into the public domain—at least under the extremely hostile political circumstances of absolute monarchy and revolutionary terror. Darnay’s career evidences the same vulnerability when Darnay gets involved in public business. An important difference is that Darnay’s public action is motivated by a substantial ideological reformation: unlike Manette, who is and remains middle-class, Darnay has to actively renounce his aristocratic heritage—he has to become middle-class. The novel’s reference here is to the large historical gesture informing middle-class identity: the social power of inheritance has to be replaced by the social power of selfmaking. In this regard, Darnay is featured as the protagonist of what might be termed a disinheritance plot. Disenchanted with his patrimony and its maintenance (“It is a crumbling tower of waste, mismanagement, extortion, debt, mortgage, oppression, hunger, nakedness and suffering”), Darnay decides to live by middle-class self-reliance: “I must do, to live, what others of my countrymen, even with the nobility at my backs, may have to do some day—work” (149). Significantly enough, Darnay’s project of disinheriting his aristocratic identity and reinventing himself as a middle-class person involves not only changing his name, but also leaving France for England. There he becomes “a higher teacher of the French language who was conversant with French literature. In this age, he would have been a Professor, in that age, he was a Tutor.” Still,

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Darnay is definitely the harbinger of a new age in education—he moonlights in Cambridge, teaching modern languages where only classical were taught. Nor is he unsuccessful as a self-made man: “So, with great perseverance and untiring industry, he prospered” (154). Nevertheless, in England Darnay fails to divorce himself completely from his symbolic inheritance. After his uncle’s death, he makes away the estate to his tenants, apparently as far as it is possible for him to do so without actually giving up the property (Dickens provides no details of the transaction), by appointing a steward to the estate who is instructed not to collect any rents. As this form of agrarian reform did not relieve Darnay of the title of ownership, his steward Gabelle got arrested by the revolutionary authorities for managing the property of an emigre.39 At that juncture Darnay finds himself confronted with a moral dilemma, very much like that of Doctor Manette in the rape case: whether to risk his domestic happiness for a sense of civic duty. He realizes that in his handling of the disinheritance project, “he had acted imperfectly. He knew very well, that in his love for Lucie, his renunciation of his social place, though by no means new to his mind, had been hurried and incomplete” (296). The decision to go back to Paris, however, is motivated by more than just the sense of obligation to Gabelle. In his decision there are traces of an unfulfilled political idealism that has finally found an opportunity to express itself: “that glorious vision of doing good, which is so often the sanguine mirage of so many good minds, arose before him, and he even saw himself in the illusion with some influence to guide this raging Revolution that was running so fearfully wild” (297). Darnay seeks a generalization and legitimation of his values, a public role for himself. But the desire to seek public recognition for his newly gained (English) values through some patronage over the revolutionary turmoil goes sorely astray, and it takes a concerted effort of all the Darnay family helpers to extricate him—the help of Lorry, Miss Pross, and of course, Carton, who goes to the Guillotine for him. There is a consistent symmetry between the Manette/Darnay family and the helpers/substitutes. Lorry shores up Manette’s paternal role, Miss Pross provides Lucie with the fierceness needed to withstand the vengefulness of Therese Defarge. Carton saves Darnay twice, first in the English court by virtue of looking like Darnay, and the second time by taking Darnay’s place in the revolutionary prison. The helper/substitute characters operate in that uncertain zone of passage between the private and the public, ensuring that the melodrama completes itself in spite of the roughness of passage. They form the outer circle of defense around the core family. Their liminal role, however, is a reminder of the instability of the family trope, showing that a part of the family’s constitution is external to it, a service buffer contingent on the potentially fickle grounds of employment or loyalty. But then, it may be argued that the instability is really the inherent part of the family trope in this melodrama, and that the liminality of helpers is already taken into account in the narrative as a proper element of its structure. In other words, this melodrama’s main work is to make the appeal for a certain constellation of ethical, ideological and class assumptions and alliances needed to secure the functioning of the family trope and its ideological messages. The liminal place of helpers/substitutes in A Tale communicates the fragility of the family trope as well as of the structural necessity of an alliance between the liminal and

Literary criticism and cultural theory 144 the core areas for the family trope to remain ethically paradigmatic. The melodrama does not merely acknowledge contradictions; it also envisions their resolution through the idea of social alliance (an idea very much akin to the kind of unity effectuated by the sentiment that Dickens generally expected his publications to pro-duce). A Tale is undoubtedly readable as a social allegory, with the protagonists, helpers, and antagonists, and their alliances and conflicts, marking out on some relatively uncomplicated map social positions that are easily decipherable given the right key. If the narrative is coded in simple class terms,40 the Darnays are obviously middle-class, the Evremondes obviously aristocratic, Therese’s family obviously tenantfarmers, the Defarges obviously petit-bourgeoisie, Lorry obviously finance capitalist. Miss Pross may be read as belonging to the poor fringes of middle-class women, occupying that uncertain and intermediary position of governess/companion. Steadily described as a soldier, she is quite literally Lucie’s bodyguard, a vigilante police force charged with Lucie’s safety. All of these characters are necessary for the melodrama to dramatize its success internally, within the story itself. The appeal of melodramatic virtue is most clearly manifested by Carton’s transformation. Carton is a failed middle-class man; while professionally belonging to the class, this “idlest and most unpromising of men” (101), possesses none of Darnay’s perseverance and industry, and no certain sense of vocation. His class failure is not so much an economic one; it is moral and ideological. He surrenders to the competition of his own class, as he remarks to Stryver, his tellingly named employer and one-time rival: “You were always driv ing and riving and shouldering and pressing, to that restless degree that I had no chance for my life but in rust and repose” (105). Carton’s moral failure is delineated in the novel by a symbolic triad of which he is one extreme (insufficient effort), Darnay the middle (the right amount of effort), and Stryver the other extreme (excessive effort). Inevitably, given his central position in the family trope, it is Darnay who represents the norm in effort and frugality. In other things too: his attitudes to work, wealth, conjugal affection, conjugal division of labor, social solidarity and civic duty are all part of the moral package that the melodramatic process in this text is working to articulate. Of course, all these parameters are found in distorted form in Stryver (too much greed, too little solidarity, etc), and in Carton (too much idleness, too much dissipation, etc.). But unlike Stryver, who believes in his uncompromising aspiration, Carton is found very early on to be occasionally susceptible to “a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial and perseverance” (106). Part of the work of melodrama consists in moralizing what it perceives as social conflict and confusion, and part of the moralizing work in A Tale is to reintegrate Carton into the moral order of the family trope. The reintegration is possible precisely because we perceive that Carton’s imaginary identification is already with the trope itself; Carton is, as it were, predisposed to be adopted into the Darnay order. His taking Darnay’s place at the Guillotine finishes the process of his becoming part of the moral allegory of the family trope itself, and provides the most dramatic evidence of its strength—reminding us at the same time that social allegorization of the trope is indistinguishable from its moral allegorization, indeed, predicated upon it. Since Carton is very early fascinated with the Darnay paradigm, it is no surprise that at the end of the novel he is featured as the ideologue of the family trope. He imagines that

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he sees “the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, prosperous, happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see her with a child upon my bosom, who bears my name.” He assumes a chorus-like voice that announces a happy ending envisaging postrevolutionary history as another story of melodramatic struggle: I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out. (465) Carton does not only double for Darnay; by doubling for Darnay he doubles for melodrama itself. He advances the allegorical key to the melodramatic struggle, and he communicates the final outcome—the consolidation of the family trope. He articulates the historical optimism in melodrama—the suggestion, inherent to its narrative economy, that the family trope is generalizable. Himself reformed by melodramatic sentiment, he emphasizes the sentimental-educational impact of melodrama, imagining that his story would be told, in an eminently public place, to a Darnay grandchild, “with a tender and faltering voice” (466).41 By his purely structural place, he reminds Dickens’s middleclass audience that the idea of a radical disinheritance and/or radical self-making is an untenable position for middle-class ideology. Rather, his actions convey a sense that a form of class solidarity is a necessary corollary to the middle-class ideology of selfmaking. Finally, he stands for the most crucial juncture in the melodramatic plot—the melodramatic reversal, the point at which protagonists of the new morality, on the brink of defeat, still emerge triumphant over their adversaries. The reversal sums up the entire melodramatic narrative: its premise is fragility of the family trope, and the triumph of the trope is its conclusion. The melodramatic reversal announces that private virtue can carry out a passage to the public world.

A SENTIMENTAL BANKER The novel focuses on public life while in France and on domestic life while in England, but that does not mean that it refrains from rehearsing a symbolic mapping of the English social space. However, this is markedly different from the mapping of the French space, in that it does not rely on the binary model of class conflict. The configuration traversing the English social space is informed by an image of patronage, and the representative structure of patronage in the text is constructed around Tellson’s Bank—situated in the City of London, very much unlike the city of Paris with its revolutionary citizens. Lucie, let us remember, is “a ward of Tellson’s house” (26). The bank, and Jarvis Lorry, the clerk who manages the Manette case, provide, as it were, the logistical support for the Manette/Darnay melodrama, especially in times of great hazard, such as the evacuation of Manette from France at the beginning of the novel, or Darnay’s escape from prison at the end of it. With its offices in London and Paris, and “a vast deal of travelling” (20) between them, Tellson’s lends backing to the Manette/Darnay alliance in friendly and hostile circumstances both; it appears to have the ability to orchestrate things for its wards from an inconspicuous, back-stage position. The bank itself enjoys very limited

Literary criticism and cultural theory 146 visibility. Quite literally, its location in London’s City is a low-key, almost a secretive one: “the dingiest of windows, which were always under a shower-bath of mud from Fleet-street, and which were made the dingier by their own iron bars proper, and the heavy shadow of Temple Bar” (60). This unassuming edifice, located at the very entrance to the City, is immediately compared to the country itself: Tellson’s Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned place, even in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty. It was very small, very dark, very ugly, very incommodious. It was an old-fashioned place, moreover, in the moral attribute that the partners in the House were proud of its smallness, proud of its darkness, proud of its ugliness, proud of its incommodiousness. They were even boastful of its eminence in those particulars, and were fired by an express conviction that, if less objectionable, it would be less respectable. This was no passive belief, but an active weapon which they flashed at more convenient places of business. […] Any one of these partners would have disinherited his son on the question of rebuilding Tellson’s. In this respect the House was much on a par with the Country; which did very often disinherit its sons for suggesting improvements in laws and customs that had long been objectionable, but were only the more respectable. (59) The tone of the description is much the same Dickens employed in “Insularities,” and so is the theme: the persistence of a national archaism. A great deal of emphasis is placed on the fact that already in 1778 Tellson’s took pride in its old-fashioned aspect, which suggests that the Bank (and English finance capitalism) was by that time a solidly entrenched institution, with a long history that bestowed “respectability“upon it—the term evokes the vocabulary of distinction characteristic of gentlemanly capitalism. For its persistence in ways “objectionable, but […] respectable,” the Bank is expressly compared to the nation, which likewise holds onto obsolescent “laws and customs.” The idea of modernizing (“rebuilding”) the bank (and by analogy, the nation) is stymied not only by opposition from above, but also by an active belief, shared by all levels of employees, in the superiority of the “old-fashioned way.” (The kind of belief, we may parenthetically add, that Dickens saw as an equally great obstacle to social reform as resistance from the actual institutions of political society in Britain.) The loyalty of Tellson’s “confidential bachelor clerks” (20), of which Lorry is one, is said to match only the boastful traditionalism of the “partners.” Irritation in the authorial tone is unmistakable: this “triumphant perfection of inconvenience” is maintained with “idiotic obstinacy” (60). At the same time, the archaism of Tellson’s is juxtaposed in the novel with another kind of social archaism—the condition of France before the revolution. The maintenance of the old-fashioned aspect of the bank suggests a different relationship with modernity than the “state of things that had utterly exhausted itself,” which is the French ancien regime. Whereas the obsolete French aristocratic regime maintains itself entirely by coercive political and economic methods, the Bank’s operation depends on active loyalty internally, and, necessarily, due to the nature of its business, confidence externally. The loyal traditionalist attitude of Tellson’s clerks foregrounds the ideological support from below as a key element of the Bank’s traditionalism. But in spite of its old-fashioned

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aspect and an “objectionable” ideology of respectability, the novel does not associate Tellson’s with social failure—the Bank’s traditionalism appears “objectionable,” in the meaning of unreasonable and impracticable, but there is no indication that the Bank is unsuccessful in managing its business. On the contrary, the Bank’s unceasing and ubiquitous operation serves precisely as a marker of difference between the French and the English settings. As we have seen, Dickens renders France in totalizing, naturalistic/catastrophic metaphors that underwrite the necessity of revolutionary events, but England he renders as metonymic with English finance capitalism, and centrally informed by its ideological ambiguities. There are contradictory valences investing the use of the Bank as a metaphor in the novel. It underscores the conservative, un-modern nature of the English setting, but at the same time it functions as the main logistical resource of the private realm represented by the Darnay/Manette family and its, in the novel’s terms, modernizing project. In order to assess the character of this paradox, let us at this point take a step back to review the role of the Bank in the novel. The one thing about the Bank that immediately meets the eye is that there is more to it than meets the eye: its business lacks transparency as much as its London house lacks visibility. The transactions of the House are seldom explained: the one line of its business that we clearly know about is its French connection, with a large number of its customers belonging to the exiled French aristocracy.42 Of its past, which is said to be a century and a half long, which means it is as old as banking in England, little is known, if anything. Of the “partners” owning it we know as much. Strict confidentiality plays a role in its “respectability;” the sublimity of its business is ultimately best described in the words of Lorry himself: “turning an immense pecuniary mangle” (26).43 Topography is significant, as the Bank is located in the City, the center of British finance capitalism. However, the surrounding decor of this respectable institution presents images of a degraded ecology and a violent society: the Bank, lined with cesspools corroding its vaults, has a view of the exposed heads of executed criminals on Temple Bar. The point of this juxtaposition is to emphasize not merely the facts of urban squalor and social brutality in 18th century England, but also the unaffected operation of the Bank; as it were, the image is thus of a form of capitalism divorced from the surrounding social problems. A figure of England, both of a certain drawback in English modernization and a possible resource for it, the Bank is also more than just English. Even though we do not know whether there were other Tellson’s connections, the French one already makes it into something of a transnational enterprise. This is not a negligible circumstance by any means, for it is that very transnationality of Tellson’s that provides the basic logistical support for the journeyings of the main characters between London and Paris, as well as for their relative safety in Paris in the middle of the revolutionary turbulence. In turn, the transnationality of the bank in turn is an indication of the ability of English finance capital to operate transnationally even under conditions of political instability, a figure of its power as an English institution. The transnationality of the Bank is doubtlessly a big part of the image of Englishness advanced by the novel, the idea that its international commercial connections are a factor in its internal order with its greater measure of stability, very much in contrast to what in the novel appears as the self-contained and self-consuming dynamic of the French upheavals. However, we must emphasize that the

Literary criticism and cultural theory 148 Bank itself does not become an agent (in a literary sense) of events unfolding in the book—it simply constitutes a very convenient infrastructure at the disposal of some characters. In that respect, Jarvis Lorry is not purely a stand-in for the Bank, for it is by his particular use of the Bank’s resources that Darnay and Manette can weather all the storms in the political world. Lorry is the vehicle on which the melodramatic heroes roll along. While insisting that he had “no feelings,” and that he was “a mere machine” (26), Lorry in fact executes his guardianship over Lucie with the greatest care and loyalty from the very beginning. Far from acting merely mechanically in the service of Tellson’s, Lorry functions as a figure that testifies to the central premise of the melodramatic project, which is that moral solidarity can be forged through a sentimental struggle. The extent of Lorry’s patronage over the melodramatic core family is considerable: he reunites father and daughter, finds a place for them in London, sets them up in the world, polices against unwanted suitors for Lucie such as Stryver, arranges Lucie’s wedding, organizes with Carton Darnay’s final escape from revolutionary prison, and, finally, at least so Carton prophesies, wills his property to the Darnays. Throughout, it is Lorry who foots the melodramatic bill, in what is a demonstration of the assumed ability of the melodramatic trope to generate class ties of sentimental solidarity.

A MELODRAMATIC CIVIL SOCIETY The beginning of the Reign of Terror significantly coincides with—as we have observed—the utmost failure of the family trope (or of “private solicitude”). The failure referred to at this point in the novel is Manette’s, in whose power it is no longer to assist Darnay; this follows in the aftermath of Darnay’s failure to guide the Revolution, or even to defend himself against accusations of being its enemy. The point of the furthest symbolic distance between the private and the public, this is also point of the furthest symbolic distance between the English and the French settings of the novel, that is, between the two cities. Fluctuating and unstable until then, Darnay’s personal and national identity are of a sudden fixed. His return to France, undertaken to reclaim his French ties and responsibilities, ironically results in divesting him of the possibility of civic duty as a Frenchman, allowing him only one route of escape from France—into the identity of a private Englishman. The Revolution also signals a departure from the initial analogy between England and France established on the first page of the novel (“In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the Lords […] that things in general were settled for ever.”). In fact, if the French social domain was represented as a volatile system of oppression broken down into large class blocks/types (the Monseigneur, the peasantry, the urban poor), the English social domain is hardly represented as a system at all—for one thing, the Lords from the first page scarcely make another appearance in the novel. But even more importantly, the social telescoping which draws the picture of the systemic relationships in France does not characterize the presentation of the English setting. While in the French scenes there is a distinct sense of a clear arrangement of the actors on the vast proscenium representing the social domain, the English scenes are arranged to provide the consolation of domesticity.

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Occupying the off-stage space relative to the highly regimented space of the French setting is clearly the melodramatic space of the family. It hardly needs pointing out that the home morality is identified with Englishness: for Darnay to cease being an Evremonde, something more than just a class renunciation is needed—a national renunciation accompanied by an anglicization. France, imagined in the novel not so much as a laboratory of the new as the stage for the destruction of the old, does not provide the space for resolution to the melodramatic project. This is exactly what England does for the novel: in spite of all initial resemblances there is a hint of profound difference in the national situations of the two countries, and it is that difference that constitutes the condition for setting in motion all the literal and symbolic traveling and exchange between the two nations *** The novel ends with a self-reflexive gesture that takes stock of the melodramatic assumptions of the narrative. Carton’s fantasy on the way to the Guillotine, which ensures a melodramatic resolution, is literally that—a fantasy. If this circumstance highlights the melodramatic recourse into subjective interiority for the proof of the family trope, it also, by the same token, reinforces the status of the whole narrative as a fantasy that sets out to examine its own premises. It is noteworthy that the final fantasy scenes revolve around the image of the reproduction of the narrative’s moral persuasiveness: Darnays’ son is envisaged taking his son to the Place de la Revolution to tell him the story of Carton (this didactic intergenerational moment is already suggested in the bank’s name—Tellson). The moral affirmation of the family trope is thus effected through the act and affect of story-telling; Darnay’s and Lucie’s grandchild is that intended audience to which the melodramatic story addresses its appeal. The grandchild also serves as the representative of the actual audience which the novel addresses, and whose contemporary it is. Crosby argued that “melodrama creates [a] collective ‘we/ an audience that bears witness by its tears to the truth of representation before it.”44 In A Tale there transpires a persistent concern of the narrative with its own reproduction, with its getting retold and reaffirmed to forge bonds of generational and class solidarity. Manette, Lorry, Lucie, Carton, Darnay, and then the Darnay grandchild are all invested by the narrative’s effort to demonstrate a mode of cohesion informing their existence as a group, as much as the narrative keeps returning to the image of reproducibility of this class cohesion. Looking back at Dickens’s journalistic voice from the pieces contributed to Household Words during the 1850s, it will be remembered that Dickens saw himself as addressing a lack in such cohesion, invariably described as a want of middle-class self-respect. Dickens’s writing during this period endeavored to engage his audience more actively in a more active restructuring of the existing civil society, chiefly by appealing to the melodramatic reenactment of moral direction. Civil society was, so to speak, the historical home of the middle class, the space where private individuals could imagine themselves as important social agents outside the scope of official politics; simultaneously it was the space for imagining redefined modes of social and political relations. In its classical 18th-century form, according to Habermas, civil society found expression for its social imagination through the public sphere, the realm of rationalcritical debate spanning the entire range of concerns from the issues of subjectivity set

Literary criticism and cultural theory 150 forth by the realm of letters to the issues of political arrangements dictated by the need to regulate the relations of private individuals in the marketplace. In addition, this idea of public sphere, Habermas argued, was based on an assumption that both market relations and bourgeois family relations could be subsumed under the common heading of the private, or that the free-trading individual and the moral citizen are emanations of the same principle of privateness.45 While in Little Dorrit Dickens presented a very disappointed picture of the ability of the contemporary British middle class to forge a social identity independent of patrician norms and influence, in A Tale of Two Cities he painted a huge historical canvas presenting a melodramatic polarization between civil society and the (aristocratic as well as revolutionary) state. This retrospective narrative suggested the need for a symbolic reconstruction of the origins of the middle-class civil society in the middle-class home. The novel dramatized in stirring and sentimental terms the moral potential of middle-class civil society (embodied by the actions of Lucie, Manette, Darnay, Carton and Lorry) in its opposition to the (oppressive forms of) state authority. The novel’s melodrama is staged self-reflexively, dramatizing in its plot its very ideological project of structuring the private sphere of the home and the marketplace as a resource for middle-class sentiment and a sense of middle-class solidarity. However, the novel also acknowledges that this project depends for its support on a part of civil society whose allegiance is yet to be recruited. The link between the home and the marketplace is, in the novel’s own terms, highly problematic: it does not follow that the alliance between the two is a given. This is the essential problem that Dickens is trying to address: the two private segments of middle-class life are not homologous in ideological valence. Quite the contrary: it takes the work of melodramatic assistance (the very thing whose necessity the narrative sets out to prove) to complete the alliance of the two segments of the private world of the middle class. Lorry’s function in the novel is to signify that there is no natural benevolence to Tellson’s, as well as that there is a need for such a benevolent association to exist in order to create a space for an efficient pact between (finance) capital and domesticity. This indifference of Tellson’s capital to middle-class domesticity is, as we have seen, already inscribed in the esthetics and ecology of the bank’s topographic position: its “respectability” is defined against and offset by the urban squalor and the violence surrounding it. Tellson’s can coexist with the squalor and the violence, unperturbed. In other words, Tellson’s stands not so much for (finance) capital in the abstract; rather, it signifies that on the national stage capital may turn out to be a failure as a reformative, modernizing force. The perception about capital that A Tale of Two Cities puts forward is that the City of capital, embodied in Tellson’s, is ex-centric relative to middle-class ideology generated in the private realm of the home. At the same time, the novel implies that the private realm of the home needs the support of finance capital, which has to be won over. This noncoincidence that Dickens saw between finance capital and middle-class ideology in Britain was, as we have seen, already a central theme in Little Dorrit. Merdle’s character has one important function in the novel’s rendering of the British class system—to dramatize the class liminality of finance capital, its reluctant position between the middle class and the patrician elite. This liminality suggests that an identity crisis of finance capital is a structural effect of the British class system. But as we have seen, the novel also offers a resolution to this dilemma, in the form of Merdle’s

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“complaint.” It is through the complaint that Merdle is subjected to a slight sentimentalization, and while he does not transform into a ‘bleeding heart’ sentimentalist in practice, he also shows himself ever so slightly susceptible to entertaining the fantasy of a happy and independent form of enterprise (which, as we remember, is the classic Dickensian fantasy actively embraced by the sentimentalist Clennam, not only as the ideal form of occupation, but also as the formula of social patronage for resolving the poverty of Bleeding Heart Yard). But Merdle only goes a little way in the direction of sentimentalization; while he may be a malcontent, he is not a convert, even as he frames the novel’s cautionary tales about finance capitalism. Lorry, on the other hand, is a fully active agent of Dickensian class sentimentalism, and without his loyalty the melodramatic family at the center of A Tale would not be able to form itself. Merdle significantly fails to foster any familial relations in the novel: despite his wife and stepson, he is essentially alone, with no affections, no protégés or wards. In contrast, Lorry is a fully realized example of the Dickensian patron/guardian, the specific ideological construct of social benevolence that reappears in so many Dickens novels. Like Magwitch and Jarndyce, Lorry provides the means (literally the money), as well as the mode (doubling as the father figure for Lucy) of identity formation in terms of Dickens’s middle-class ideals. Lorry is exactly not what he claims (“a mere machine”). The point of all assistance that he provides is that he is already successfully sentimentalized. Pretending to do only what is expected from him as a businessman, Lorry displays an unwavering devotion to the middle-class family as a source of moral ideology. Yet, it has to be stressed that Lorry can never be fully symbolically interchangeable with Tellson’s in the novel. Lorry is a benevolent, sentimentalized vehicle of the novel’s melodramatic plot. The novel’s reproduction of melodrama assumes that enlisting finance capital on its side is prerequisite to having a sentimental middle-class civil society, independent of the patrician culture, and indeed a capable rival to it. But the Bank continues to exist in a different symbolic space. It persists as a fig ure of what Dickens habitually saw as the fundamental problem with British political modernity, the uncontested ascendancy of the patrician civil society and its idea of respectability: “laws and customs that have long been highly objectionable, but were only the more respectable.” A Tale thus allowed Dickens to melodramatize the fundamental ideological design of his writing: the aspiration to forge the sentiment that would unify the domestic and the marketplace realms of middle-class life, in the face of the realization that in patrician-dominated British society such a union had nothing intrinsically necessary about it.

Afterword MY INTENTION IN THIS BOOK WAS TO POINT TO CONNECTIONS BETWEEN THE novelistic revolution coalescing around Charles Dickens and a literary preoccupation with the relationship between middleclass identity and finance capitalism in mid-Victorian Britain. The narratives I chose to illustrate these connections range from a celebration of English capitalism in Macaulay, to a not so optimistic appeal for a sentimental reform of that very capitalism in Dickens, to satirical anatomies of respectability in Gaskell and Thackeray, with their emphasis on the persistence of genteel society, rather than on reform potentials of the middle class. It is not difficult to see that in this preoccupation with middle-class identity, there is a common thread to all the narratives I discussed. This common thread has to do with the attempts by the Victorian writers to dramatize finance capitalism at work, with its effects that were largely seen as running counter to the presumably important part of the middleclass social habitus, that of self-reliance. All these texts assume a centrality of finance capitalism to the mid-Victorian world. In Macaulay’s History of England, English finance capitalism, and even the English national debt, are depicted as a historical linchpin of English constitutionalism. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, the question of who foots the bill of declaratively self-sufficient “elegant economies” is the most important element of the novel’s emplotment. The existence of the local community is literally predicated on the drain of capital from the Empire, a point Gaskell makes all the more plastic for the peripheral position of Cranford on the national map. In Thackeray’s The Newcomes a family of City magnates is rendered as representative of the English middle class itself, and a Quixotic story is told of a feud between Indianbased and metropolitan-based finance capital. In Dickens’s Little Dorrit finance capitalism is an integral part of the patrician monopoly on power, while in A Tale of Two Cities the entire melodramatic sequence of events is predicated on the kind offices of Jarvis Lorry, a banker representing a bank that in turn represents England. One way of accounting for the intensity of interest in finance capital expressed in these narratives is by pointing to the conditions under which the contemporary literary field consolidated itself in the 1840s and the 1850s: on the one hand, the formal and informal dominance of the patrician elite in British society; on the other hand, the dramatic emergence of a novelistic culture that could command the attention of a mass audience composed primarily by the “middle class(es).” The period gave rise to a common perception of discrepancy between the mass-cultural authority of the literary producers and the patrician power regime, which informed in crucial ways the social imagination of the literary producers themselves. In this context, it is not surprising that finance capitalism and the finance capitalist came to occupy a special position in the imagination of mid-Victorian writers, representing simultaneously the pinnacle of middle-class power and influence as well as the gray area of middle-class identity, the point where the middle class begins to overlap with the regime of the patrician elite. For the mid-Victorian

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writers, the realm of finance had the attraction of allowing a clear-cut dramatization of paradoxes inherent in the character of the British polity—where patrician civil society continued to enjoy a relatively informal dominance over the state, and where the patrician elite continued to dominate over the middle class in the realms of both political and civil societies. For this reason, the question of the allegiance of finance capital became a source of narrative effort and contention: finance capital could be conceived as an economic and political resource for the gentlemanly regime—as with Dickens’s Mr Merdle or Thackeray’s Barnes Newcome, but it could also be conceived as a resource mobilizable by the middle class, as with Jarvis Lorry (successfully) or Colonel Newcome (unsuccessfully). In this regard, these novels dramatize a very simple struggle: the struggle over who controls the moral and political education of finance capital, or the struggle between the competing projects of neopatrician (snobbish) and middleclass civil societies. There are of course questions of changes in the constellation of the British literary field immediately after the period that I deal with, which could not have been pursued in this book. Several gestures have been made in that direction, but a much more detailed narrative is needed to give a fuller account. In my opinion, such an account would have to consider further changes in the literary marketplace, which included both an expansion of the reading public and a compartmentalization of literary taste. The generalist/universalist posture entertained in various ways by all the writers I read begins to lose currency around 1870, when an intellectual division of labor begins to take institutional roots, and when a generalized cultural marketplace is gradually replaced by a tangled web of specialized ones. Equally, the mid-Victorian sage and its caricatural/commercial version, the hack, were replaced by a variety of specialists; even in the novel, which as a middlebrow genre is perhaps more resistant to specialization than most other genres, a series of generic segmentations occurred, with the conspicuous polarization between the artistic and the trivial, the high-brow and the low-brow. Most importantly, after Dickens’s and Thackeray’s generation, the novelist’s sense of addressing an entire social class of readers begins to lose in significance. This narrative of what happens next would also have to consider the very slow expansion of political representation in Britain, and an even slower pace of changes in British civil society, where some sort of gentlemanly elitism continued strong, forming a political culture that kept reproduc-ing itself well into the 20th century. In this context, a crucial place would have to be given to the consolidation of the idea of culture as class culture in the period—and the interactions between the formations of different class identities—working-class, middle-class, upperclass. This book can be seen as broaching yet another problematic: the construction of “Englishness” and “Britishness” in mid-Victorian England and Britain, insofar as it suggests that the imagination of class identity was at the time inextricably bound with the imagination of national identity. In my selection of texts I touched on several different ways of mapping national identity, so as to suggest some of the main parameters of imagining class in terms of nation, or nation in terms of class. For instance, much of Macaulay’s ideology can be summed up by the notion of England as a “commercial country:” this is indeed the central conclusion of Macaulay’s discourse on English constitutionalism, and the central point of differentiation between England and the

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continental societies. An implicit but highly visible streak in Macaulay’s History is the equation between “Englishness” and capitalism. In Little Dorrit, Merdle is ironically cast as the synonym of British influence world-wide, and the irony is generated not so much by the hint of the fragility of his economic power as by his problematic class position domestically; the novel suggests that it is this very looseness of his class allegiance that makes him into an apt symbol of the English social space. A Tale of Two Cities proffers a contrast between the political city of Paris and the capitalist city of London, but the equation between England and finance capital is in the novel in constant competition with the Dickensian central fantasy of “Englishness” as middle-class domesticity. In Dickens’s construction of the plot, this conflict is resolved by the programmatic insistence that finance capital is to be reformed away from (patrician) respectability into (middle-class) sentimentality. In Thackeray’s The Newcomes there are several comparative parameters complicating the definition of Englishness: one is the opposition between the metropolitan English and the AngloIndians, which emphasizes the exclusiveness of the metropolitan position; another, which my reading did not highlight, but which is equally interesting in terms of the issue of imagining the nation, is the opposition between England and France which juxtaposes a French envy over the state of the British polity and a British envy over the state of French art. In Cranford, Gaskell offers a narrative in which Englishness is again identified with the lifestyle of the patrician elite, this time in opposition to the industrial north. The content of the national designation in all these narratives is invariably a class one, and invariably evocative of the metropolitan world characterized by an alliance between the patrician governing elite and finance capital. Finally, I have tried to suggest some possible ways of problematizing the notion of mid-Victorian realism, and doubtless this is another aspect of this work that deserves further elaboration. In my reading, the emergence of an “ethnographic” novel in the 1840s is an important event in the English novel. An argument can of course be made that with the advent of realism (or perhaps with the advent of the novel as a genre), the novel immediately shows an impulse towards ethnographic description—inasmuch as it presents a reorientation of narrative interest towards the ordinary and the everyday, in itself associated with the advent of a new social group—the middle class. Notwithstanding this documentaristic impulse that the genre of the novel may have been historically susceptible to since its inception, after Dickens’s Pickwick Papers the writers of novels started showing an increasing concern with the character of social description going on in the genre of the novel, often attempting to formally structure their narratives around the idea of collection and report. In part, I would like to suggest, this ethnographic tendency was a response to the changes in the field of “science,” which began to proliferate specialized models for description and explanation of the social reality, and which were gradually forcing the novel to cope with a new epistemological culture. In part, the ethnographic novel could be seen as taking on the challenge of the generalism that came with the literary profession at the time: a convenient method of coping with the task of conveying a sense of the big picture of an ever-changing social world, as much as a method of alleviating the very generalist pressure placed on the literary professional. In this latter respect, we could see in the institution of the chatty, peripheral first-person narrator in The Newcomes or in Cranford a way of criticizing the posture of sage in the mid-Victorian culture of letters—the posture that came with the job, as it were, since the

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job was one of writing for a general reading public. The ethnographic streak at the same time enables a certain degree of naturalization of the object of its description, and therefore potentially becomes a good vehicle for representing the sense that some social arrangements were none too quick to change in the ever-changing Victorian world: thus, for instance, both Cranford and The Newcomes turn out to be histories of nontransformation or failed transformation. Dickens, on the other hand, was mainly interested in narrative formats that could dramatize social transformation, in general favoring the mode of melodrama to that of ethnography. There is a great deal of interesting work to be done on the formal and generic varieties of the mid-Victorian realist novel, and what this study attempted to foreground was that these novelistic varieties cannot be fully explained without taking into consideration the specific constellation of the mid-Victorian literary field and the specific constellation of power in British civil and political societies.

Notes NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1

Charles Dickens, The Speeches of Charles Dickens (ed. by K.J.Fielding). Oxford: Clarendon University Press, 1960, pp. 200–201. The speech was given on June 27, 1855. 2 Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body. British Cultural Formation 1830–1864. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1995, p.156. 3 See Andrew H.Miller, “Subjectivity Ltd: The Discourse of Liability in the Joint Stock Companies of 1856 and Gaskell’s Cranford.” English Literary History 61:1 (1994): 139–157. 4 David Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, p. 20. 5 See David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. New York: Vintage, 1999. 6 Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain, p. 74. 7 The same is true of the term working class(es); the hierarchization of the working class is extensively discussed by F.M.L.Thompson in The Rise of Respectable Society. A Social History of Victorian Britain 1830–1900. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. 8 Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain. London: NLB, 1977, p. 29. 9 Nairn, p. 37. 10 Nairn, p. 32. 11 P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688– 1914. London: Longman, 1993, p. 101. 12 P.G.M.Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England. A Study in the Development of Public Credit 1688–1756. London: Macmillan, 1967. 13 See Lawrence Stone’s and J.C.F.Stone’s An Open Elite? England 1540–1880. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, and F.M.L.Thompson’s The Rise of Respectable Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. 14 E.J.Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire. London: Penguin Books, 1990, p. 111. 15 Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit. London: Penguin Books, 1985, p. 110. 16 Little Dorrit, p. 147. 17 Ibid., p. 148. 18 Charles Dickens, “Nobody, Somebody and Everybody,” in Miscellaneous Papers, II. The Works of Charles Dickens. The Gadshill Edition, vol. XXXVI. London: Chapman and Hall, [n.d.]. 19 Little Dorrit, pp. 157–8.

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Ibid., p. 152. W.M.Thackeray, The Book of Snobs, in Contributions to “Punch” New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900, p. 303. 22 The Book of Snobs, p. 314. 23 Benjamin Disraeli, The Spirit of Whiggism, in Whigs and Whiggism (edited by William Hutcheon). New York: Macmillan, 1914. 24 Ibid., p. 305. 25 Richard D.Altick, A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998, p. 1. 26 Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form. English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966, p. 5. 27 N.N.Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986, p. 14. 28 See J.A.Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976. 29 In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, this new kind of national temporality is interestingly attributed to Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. 30 This account is based on Fred Kaplan’s Dickens. A Biography. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1988, pp. 78–81. 31 This account of Bourdieu’s concept of the field is based on his The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. 32 Peter D.McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice 1880–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 10. 33 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991, p. 230. 34 T.H.Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982, p. 25. 35 George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. London: Longmans, 1959, p. 621. 36 From a letter quoted in Charles Firth, A Commentary on Macaulay’s History of England. London: Macmillan, 1938, p. 7. 37 “Rev. of Macaulay’s History of England,” Edinburgh Review, no. CLXXXI, July 1849, pp. 250–251. As was standard practice in periodical journals at the time, the review was unsigned. 38 Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism. London: Verso, 1984, p. 47. 39 Walter Bagehot, “The First Edinburgh Reviewers,” quoted in Eagleton, p. 50. 40 Heyck, p. 150. A series of changes underwrote the transformation from amateur history to professional (academic) history: the inclusion of modern history as a course of study (in 1848 at Cambridge, in 1850 at Oxford); separation of history departments from law (at Oxford in 1873) and moral sciences (at Cambridge in 1875); new emphasis on research in academic institutions; the publishing of original historical documents that began with the founding of the Rolls Series in 1857; the founding of an exclusively historical journal—with English Historical Review in 1887; all of which was paralleled by a rise in the idea of history as a specific 21

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academic discipline, and the expansion of an expert audience. See Heyck, Chapter 5, ‘The Impact of Science: The Case of History.” 41 See the chapter on Thackeray. 42 David Masson’s review of David Copperfield and Pendennis in the North British Review, May 1851, American edition, vol. X, p. 30. 43 Sutherland writes: “One may state almost as an axiom that every work written between 1840 and 1870 which is now recognised as a classic was first published by Chapman and Hall, Bradbury and Evans, Macmillan’s, Longman’s, Smith, Elder, Bentley, or Blackwood’s” (44). Most of these, and especially the pace-setting firms of Chapman and Hall and Bradbury and Evans, were barely a few years older than the novelistic revolution they helped along. 44 W.M.Thackeray, The History of Pendennis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 416. 45 Thomas Carlyle, “The Hero as a Man of Letters,” in On Heroes, HeroWorship and the Heroic in History. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966, p. 154. 46 Eagleton, p. 46. 47 Bourdieu, p. 38. 48 Charles Dickens, The Speeches of Charles Dickens (edited by K.J. Fielding). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960, p. 156. The speech was given on January 6, 1853, to an audience of Birmingham citizens. 49 Dickens’s project of reforming the profession of literature is reminiscent of the situation in sciences in the 1830s and 1840s. It is interesting to note that in the period, a controversy rose among English scientists about the “decline of science” in England; it was sparked by Charles Babbage who pro-posed that England was falling behind the continental nations in science, because science failed to constitute itself as a profession. Lack of educational and academic institutions devoted to scientific research and teaching, as well as lack of government interest in promoting scientific research, were seen by Babbage as chief reasons for the decline of science in England. Babbage argued that free enterprise was not sufficient to ensure the vitality of science in England, and advocated more government involvement in encouraging research. The British Association for Advancement of Science was founded soon after, as an organization gathering primarily scientists themselves (See Heyck, Chapter 3, “The World of Science and the Universities”). In Dickens’s writing, one can find many indications that he shared Babbage’s view that English science was in decline; in Little Dorrit the bureaucracy of the patrician government is directly blamed. And even as he early on spoofed the BAAS, in Pickwick Papers, Dickens in fact copied its idea of an independent professional organization in trying to set up the Guild of Literature and Art. 50 A discussion of several Victorian novels dealing with finance and speculation from the last third of the century can be found in John R.Reed’s “A Friend to Mammon: Speculation in Victorian Literature.” Victorian Studies 27:2 (1984): 179–202. Reed focuses on the literature written in the period immediately prior and immediately after the financial crisis of 1873. 51 Michael Veseth, Mountains of Debt. Crisis and Change in Renaissance Florence, Victorian Britain, and Postwar America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

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52

See E.J.Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire. London: Penguin, 1990. See for instance Veseth, pp. 85–6. Veseth notices that a typical Victorian manufacturing firm was relatively small and self-financed, with little support from corporate finance. 54 See Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England. 55 Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century. Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Time. London: Verso, 1994, p. 175. Arrighi’s analysis of what he calls systemic cycles of accumulation, whereby periods of production expansion and financial expansion alternate in such a way that the current primary agency of world capitalism finances the rise of its successor, poses difficult questions for economic history and world system studies (especially the question of the definition of capitalism). 56 Arrighi, p.4. 57 Norman Russell, The Novelist and Mammon. Literary Responses to the World of Commerce in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, p. 16. 58 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990, p. 83. 53

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

1

As J.G.A.Pocock maintained, the Whig interpretation of history in its 19th century formulations was dominated by the constitutionalist argument. The gist of that argument was not so much that the Whigs won the battles over constitutional arrangements waged in the 17th century; rather, the point was that they saw their success as embedded in the very character of the English constitution—they were just making sure that the spirit of the constitution prevailed. (See the discussion of this problem in Pocock’s introduction to Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). 2 From a letter quoted in Charles Firth, A Commentary on Macaulay’s History of England, London: Macmillan, 1938, p. 7. 3 Review of Macaulay’s History of England,” Edinburgh Review, no. CLXXXI, July 1849, pp. 250–251. 4 Christina Crosby, The Ends of History. Victorians and “the Woman Question,” New York: Routledge, 1991, p. 44. 5 John Wilson Croker in Quarterty Review, vol. 47, no. 158, 1849, p. 552. 6 T.B.Macaulay, History of England from the Accession of James II. In Four Volumes. London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1953, vol. I, pp. 2–3. 7 Review of Macaulay’s History of England,” Fraser’s Magazine, vol. XXXIX, no. CCXIX, 1849, p. 16. 8 T.B.Macaulay, “History,” in The Works of Lord Macaulay. (Edited by his sister Lady Trevelyan). London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1866, vol. V, p. 122. 9 T.B.Macaulay, “Hallam,” in The Works of Lord Macaulay, vol. V, pp. 162–63.

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Macaulay, “History,” p. 122. Fraser’s Magazine, p. 16. 12 Macaulay was impatient with philosophical theory of the day. He speaks of reading Kant and not understanding a word. Philosophy of history was of very little interest to him. 13 In this light, the image of his book edging out the last fashionable novel on the table of young ladies is only partially an accurate indication of Macaulay’s intended audience, but a certain indication of his understanding of the book as a commodity entering the struggle for prestige in the arena of middle-class literacy (defined by a sexual division of labor and consumption whereby the young lady is probably imagined more as an index of the spread of a reading culture and less as its representative). It is indisputable that Macaulay would have appreciated a large female reading audience, and there is an ambiguous suggestion in the phrase that he believed history to be a more worthy topic to read for young ladies than just another fashionable novel. A less than veiled reference to a need for better education for women may well have been contained here. But the fact remains that “young ladies” are meant explicitly as a measure of the book’s marketability. 14 T.B.Macaulay, “Mill on Government,” in The Works of Lord Macaulay. vol. V (Edited by his sister Lady Trevelyan). London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1866, p. 270. 15 Macaulay writes of this in his essays on “History,” and “Hallam,” from 1828. 16 From a letter Thomas Paine sent to the French Government upon the publication of his pamphlet “The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance” in 1796, in The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (collected and edited by Philip S.Foner), vol. 2, New York: The Citadel Press, 1945, p. 651. 17 Disraeli’s essay on the constitution was less scholarly than partisan in intention. Others, like Henry Hallam in 1827 and H.S.Tremenheere (in 1854) tried to compose much more scholarly histories. Hallam’s work is echoed in Macaulay’s to an extent. Hallam was a Whig, and his position that the constitutional history of the country often coincided with a “general history of the country” was close to Macaulay’s own understanding. For Hallam’s views on the significance of constitutional history, see “Preface,” in The Constitutional History of England from the Accession of Henry II to the Death of George II. London: Alex Murray and Son, 1870, pp. 5–6. Macaulay wrote an early review of Hallam’s History, and pronounced it “the most impartial book that we ever read.” (The review was published in 1828 in the Edinburgh Review.) It is also very likely that Macaulay was in his own History indebted to Hallam for the idea of the existence of limited monarchies in the early Middle Ages (to show that England was not a singular European development until the establishment of the absolute monarchies in Europe in the 17th century). 18 Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution. New York: Doubleday, [n.d.], p.9. 19 Benjamin Disraeli, Vindication of the English Constitution from Whigs and Whiggism (edited by William Hutcheon). New York: Macmillan, 1914. p. 217. 20 The Spirit of Whiggism from Whigs and Whiggism (edited by William Hutcheon). New York: Macmillan, 1914, p.333. This piece was first published in 1836. 21 Disraeli saw popular sovereignty as derived from royal sovereignty and fully 11

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embodied in it. The idea of positing a common bond between what he saw as a preeminently Tory institution (the monarchy) and the people appealed to Disraeli as a political instrument against the Whigs, who in his opinion refused any idea of politically representing the entire nation. For Disraeli the question of political representation of “the people” was more or less settled once the spontaneous bond between them and their Tory representation (the party plus the monarch) is made clear to everyone concerned. 22 The idea for the novel came to Scott in the Scottish Highlands, where he had the opportunity to converse with many veterans of 1745: “it naturally occurred to me that the ancient traditions of a people who, living in a civilized age and country, retained so strong a tincture of manners belonging to an early period of society, must afford a subject favorable to romance, if it should not prove a curious tale marred in the telling.” (General Preface to the 1829 edition). Scott entitled his work Waverley, or “Tis Fifty Years Since, but because its publication was delayed, he changed fifty years to sixty. His idea was that the period of fifty years ago was still very much present in current social memory, and thus the proper historical distance (or lack thereof) for the new form of fiction that he tried to institute—”neither a romance of chivalry, nor a tale of modern manners” (p. 2), but what very soon afterwards came to be regarded as the historical novel. See Walter Scott, Waverley, or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since. New York: R.F.Fenno, 1900. 23 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, p. 18. White does not discuss Macaulay. 24 Metahistory, p. 19. 25 Liberalism is one of four positions in the typology of ideology that White defines after Karl Mannheim (along with anarchism, conservatism, and radicalism). Very broadly, liberalism is characterized by a gradualist attitude to social change (pursuit of fine tunings), placement of the realistically best form in society in remote future (so as to discourage radical attempts to bring it about in the present), and a belief in studying history rationally for general trends (rather than laws). See White, pp. 24– 26. 26 This comes very clearly across especially at times when Macaulay felt the principle of the security of property was being threatened. In response to the People’s Charter in 1842 he made a speech stating the security of property to be the basis of civilization. See “The People’s Charter,” in The Works of Lord Macaulay, vol. VIII (Edited by his sister Lady Trevelyan). London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1866. 27 Explaining his position on the Reform Bill, Macaulay said: “I consider this, Sir, as a practical question. I rest my opinion on no general theory of government. I distrust all general theories of government. I will not positively say, that there is any form of polity which may not be, in some conceivable circumstances the best possible.” Speech on Parliamentary Reform, of March 2, 1831. Reported in T.B.Macaulay, Prose and Poetry (selected by G.M. Young). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952, p. 664. 28 T.B.Macaulay, The Works of Lord Macaulay, vol. VIII, p. 227. This remark was made in the speech on the People’s Charter, delivered on May 3, 1842.

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For Hamburger, Macaulay’s “highest priority was not the achievement of progress but the reduction of the great danger of civil war that arose from extremist politics, and for whom reform was only a means to the more important goal of achieving balance and stability” (x). By extremist politics Hamburger meant, after Macaulay, working-class radicalism and aristocratic privilege, and the respective dangers of what Macaulay called tyranny and anarchy. It is hard to see how such a broad centrist trimming position would be substantially different from a Whig one, whatever Hamburger’s definition of a “Whig.” See Joseph Hamburger, Macaulay and the Whig Tradition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976. 30 Rosemary Jann, The Art and Science of Victorian History. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985, p. 73. 31 Jonathan Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993, p. 12. 32 Parry, p. 4. 33 Macaulay sees the events of 1688 as indebted to the foundations laid in the 13th century; of 1688 he said that it “was a revolution strictly defensive and had prescription and legitimacy on its side. Here, and here only, a limited monarchy of the thirteenth century had come down unimpaired to the seventeenth century. Our parliamentary institutions were in full vigor. The main principles of our government were excellent” (II, 376). 34 Quoted in T.H.Heyck, p. 124. 35 White, p. 25. 36 The reference to “ancient rights” in this passage is not really Macaulay’s siding with the constitutionalist antiquaries. For him the constitutional foundations were laid in the 13th and the 14th century, and their historical significance was in their definition of the political process as a struggle for limiting privilege, more than as a concrete and irreversible achievement in the limitation of the privilege. He also thought that the constitutional continuity was the basis for gradual improvements of the constitution: “The declaration of Right, though it made nothing law which had not been law before, contained the germ of the law which gave religious freedom to the Dissenter, of the law which secured the independence of the Judges, of the law which limited the duration of Parliaments, of the law which placed the liberty of the press under the protection of juries, of the law which prohibited the slave trade, of the law which abolished the sacramental test, of the law which relieved the Roman Catholics from civil disabilities, of the law which reformed the representative system, of every good law which had been passed during a hundred and sixty years, of every good law which may hereafter, in the course of ages, be found necessary to promote the public weal, and to satisfy the demands of public opinion” (II, 379). 37 Macaulay published the first two volumes of his History in 1848, with revolutions in full swing on the continent. He attributed the absence of a violent revolution in England to the settlement of 1688: “Now, if ever, we ought to be able to appreciate the whole importance of the stand which was made by our forefathers against the House of Stuart. All around us the world is convulsed by the agony of great nations. Governments which lately seemed likely to stand during ages have been on a sudden shaken and overthrown. The proudest capitals of Western Europe have streamed

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with civil blood […] meanwhile in our island the regular course of government has never been for a day interrupted” (II, 380). 38 T.B.Macaulay, History of England, vol. IV. London: J.M.Dent & Sons Ltd, 1953, p. 84. 39 As economic history, Francis’s work is mainly interesting for its dedication to facticity in chronology and statistics. Francis was much less bold than Macaulay in pronouncing grand judgments on the financial revolution of the times or indeed on other political developments. In fact, Francis occasionally quoted Macaulay’s works for historical contextualization, and sometimes, very much in Macaulay’s vein, sought to supplement accounts of economic matters with discussions of other contextual developments, especially in literature and public discourse. Interestingly enough, when the Francis book was published for the first time in the United States, the American editor I. Smith Homans added the chapter on the Bank of England from Macaulay’s History. See John Francis, History of the Bank of England, Its Times and Traditions, From 1694 to 1844. New York: Published at the Office of the Banker’s Magazine, 1862. 40 In fact, Macaulay may have reproduced here the sketch of Paterson by John Francis from his History of the Bank of England. While Macaulay admired Paterson for his inventiveness and economic shrewdness, though maybe not for his adventurism, he was more inclined to highlight the roles of Montague and Godfrey, who were likely to fit with his ideal of the political process as a matter of discussion among cultivated, propertied gentlemen. This is why in comparison with Francis’s version of the event, Paterson’s role seems downplayed. As one of the directors of the Bank of England Paterson did not last long. A little later in the decade, he was the chief projector involved in the launching of the Darien Company, of which Macaulay also wrote in the History. The project of the company was very popular in Scotland, and, according to Francis, half the available cash in the country was subscribed to it. The Company was to build a trading colony in the isthmus of Panama, the place with an easy access to the trade routes in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. After the colony was abandoned on account of disease and Spanish attacks, the Company’s failure caused a great wave of financial ruin in Scotland. 41 By many Tories it was seen as a republican institution, to which there seemed to be some truth, at least by historical association of banking with republican governments (Genoa, Holland). 42 This passage largely echoes Adam Smith’s description of the origin of the national debt. Smith ascribed the cause of the national debt to war expenses, and indicated that the debt was only possible under conditions of already established finance capitalism: “The same commercial state of society which, by the operation of moral causes, brings government in this manner into the necessity of borrowing, produces in its subjects both an ability and an inclination to lend. If it commonly brings along the necessity of borrowing, it likewise brings along with it the facility of doing so.” An Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. II. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981, p. 910. 43 Among political economists, Macaulay mentions explicitly David Hume and Adam Smith, who both pronounced the debt to be virtually unbearable. He singled out

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Edmund Burke as “[t]he only statesman, active or speculative, who did not share in the general delusion” (513). 44 Adam Smith, p. 911. 45 These are the concluding words of An Inquiry, vol. II, p. 947. Smith maintained that as a nation Britain only incurred loss from dominating the colonies. While individuals may have profited from this situation, the country as a whole was pushed into still deeper debt—defending basically its trade monopoly with the colonies. Smith’s proposal at that very eventful time was that the monopoly be dismantled, and a federal union established between Great Britain and the North American colonies—or, that they should part as friends. 46 Thomas Paine, “The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance,” in The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. II, p. 652. 47 Paine, p. 673. 48 Smith cautiously supported “judicious banking” and the transition from cash transactions to paper money, as a prerequisite for secure capital investment: in fact, a prerequisite for capitalist economy. He was also a supporter of the bimetallic standard (gold and silver; which was to become the gold standard in 1821), and he wrote in detail about what he saw as necessary regulations of the new paper money economy. 49 More than just an attack on the English system of finance, and a boost to the morale of the revolutionary French in their war with the British, or to the post-revolutionary Americans entering trade competition with the British, Paine’s pseudo-factual tract was also probably meant as an indirect warning to the French and the Americans against following the British example in finance, and specifically against paper money (which was more or less a post-revolutionary novelty in both countries). In both countries the intro duction of paper money was followed by inflation. As for Britain, it is interesting to note that during the wars with France (in fact, from 1795 to 1821) it functioned with a paper money standard. When the wars came to a close, the gold standard was introduced for the first time. For the history of the gold standard, see Edwin Walter Kemmerer, Gold and the Gold Standard, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1944. 50 Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil or the Two Nations, London: Penguin Books, 1985. p. 46. 51 Cassell’s Illustrated History of England, vol. IV (text by William Howitt). London: Cassell, 1860, p. 77. 52 Cassell’s History, p. 3. 53 The Financial Revolution is the title of a book by P.G.M.Dickson (The Financial Revolution in England. A Study in the Development of Public Credit 1688–1756. London: Macmillan, 1967). The book analyzes the establishment of the Bank of England, the national debt and the Stock Exchange, asserting that this “revolution” had far-reaching consequences, not only in affecting the political process but also in preparing the financial ground for the industrial revolution. Macaulay’s views on the subject are not discussed in the book, nor those of other Victorian writers. However, like Macaulay, Dickson quotes an early example of the celebration of the Bank of England’s institution: Joseph Addison’s vision of a statue of Publick Credit, in the Great Hall of the Bank, with various acts of parliament, from the Great Charter to

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the Act of Settlement, hanging on the walls around (from The Spectator, No. 3, 1711). The attraction of the piece by Addison for both writers is, needless to say, in the mutually supplementing relationship between political and financial frameworks in the country. 54 P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688– 1914, London: Longman, 1993, p. 101. 55 Adam Smith, vol. I, p. 320. Smith summarized the importance of the Bank as follows: “The stability of the Bank of England is equal to that of the British government.” 56 Cain and Hopkins make an interesting argument that the long rivalry between Britain and France in the 18th century was eventually resolved to British advantage because of the financial institutions of Britain: ‘The suggestion that Britain was about a century ahead of France in evolving modern financial institutions is supported by recent detailed research on public finance and monetary policy. Both the form taken by the public debt and its management were far more advanced in Britain then they were in France. During the final conflict between the two powers from 1793 to 1815, Britain was able to borrow extensively and efficiently because inventors had confidence that their money would be returned, whereas France was forced to rely much more heavily on taxation because creditors were unimpressed by the government’s record in honouring its obligations” (64). 57 H.V.Bowen, “The Bank of England during the Long Eighteenth Century, 1694– 1820,” in The Bank of England. Money, Power and Influence 1694–1994 (ed. By Richard Roberts and David Kynaston). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. The North remark is quoted on p. 3. 58 Heyck, p. 124. 59 Thus he wrote: “If, in [English] institutions, freedom and order, the advantages arising from innovation and the advantages arising from prescription, have been combined to an extent elsewhere unknown, we may attribute this happy peculiarity to the strenuous conflicts and alternate victories of two rival confederacies of statesmen, a confederacy zealous for authority and antiquity, and a confederacy zealous for liberty and progress. It ought to be remembered that the difference between the two great sections of English politicians has always been a difference rather of degree than of principle” (I, 76).

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

1

This chapter is a revised and extended version of an essay published in Victorian Studies, “An Ethnography of the Provincial: The Social Geography of Gentility in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford.” Victorian Studies 41:3 (Spring 1998): 405–426. 2 Speaking of the conversational tone of Cranford, a Gaskell biographer, Winifred Gerin, suggests that the style of the book is akin to that of Gaskell’s private correspondence; the book being “written under no professional or personal

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pressures, she was herself in holiday mood.” See Winifred Gerin, Elizabeth Gaskell A Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976, p. 124. 3 As a novel, Cranford is indeed a peculiar piece; there is a conspicuous absence about it of formal properties conventionally associated with the contemporary novel. Of all Gaskell’s novels, this one looks the least like a novel even superficially, in its physical appearance, hovering in that territory of just over a hundred pages which novel criticism is ordinarily uncertain how to label. The question of the novel’s genre has been often posed in recent criticism. Tim Dolin, for instance, saw in the novel a good example of what he termed the genre of collection. The term importantly evokes various Victorian practices of assembling a miscellany of things, and Dolin analyzes gender-coded differences in such practices. See Tim Dolin, “Cranford and the Victorian Collection,” Victorian Studies 36:2 (1993). However, the generality of the concept of collection hardly captures the specific generic valences of Gaskell’s text, in terms of both its literary provenance and its larger cultural significance. An important contemporary literary context for this novel was that of the literary sketch: a record of observations of an amateur traveler or enthusiast, in domestic or foreign parts. Gaskell’s first published work was a poem entitled “Sketches Among the Poor” in 1837. Seemingly a simple form, the topographical sketch necessarily involves some sort of mapping, implicit or explicit, of cultural peculiarities as they are found across region and class—the very task that Gaskell will later undertake in her novels. 4“Do you ever see cows dressed in grey flannel in London?”, quoth Mary a propos one of the local eccentricities. The apparent purpose of such jocular asides is to suggest Mary’s ability to view Cranford as eccentric; at the same time, the “London” of the interpellation functions as the ideological paradigm to which the Cranford culture looks up for authentication. Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford. London: Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 5. 5 Elizabeth Gaskell, “The Last Generation in England,” in Cranford. London: Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 161. The essay originally appeared in Sartain’s Union Magazine in July 1849, two years before Gaskell started publishing the novelette. Italics are added in the above quote. 6 In the Preface to the 1829 edition of Waverley Scott wrote of the Highlanders from whom he collected stories for his book and who now lived “in a civilized age and country” but retained “a tincture of manners belonging to an early period of society.” This allowed for a first-hand collection of historical material, which thus embodies a living memory of the moment of historical change and its tensions. See Walter Scott, Waverley, or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since. New York: R.F.Fenno, 1900, p. xi. 7 The necessity for mapping a wider political geography was already registered in Mary Barton, especially as the novel’s resolution takes place in the imperial realm, rather than within the local context of Manchester industrial relations. In many ways, Cranford puts forward a national political map as complex as the one offered in North and South several years later. The main difference between the two regional novels by Gaskell is that North and South continued the theme of interclass sympathy broached in Mary Barton, whereas Cranford was more interested in the

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actual makeup of the class culture of gentility, especially as it reproduced itself at the lower end of the hierarchy of rank. 8 Schor claims that in this novel “the narrator becomes a kind of anthropologist, an ethnographer visiting an alien culture and watching it ‘make meaning’.”In terms of interpretive practice, Schor compares Mary to a LeviStraussian anthropologist reconstructing the conventions of local mythic thought. See Hilary Schor, Scheherezade in the Marketplace. Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 86. 9 George W. Stocking argued that there was a connection between such travel accounts, usually compiled by colonial administrators, missionaries, scientific travelers, and gentlemen explorers, and the disciplinary beginnings of ethnography, claiming that the former supplied the latter with ethno graphic data. See George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology. New York: The Free Press, 1987. This is discussed in the chapter “Travelers and Savages: The Data of Victorian Ethnology (1830–1858).” In addition to this genealogical perspective, there is a modaldiscursive kinship between travelogue and ethnography: the very narrative format of travelogue structurally presents an ethnographic task—of documenting and understanding the workings of the visited culture. Cranford is of course a sort of travelogue or observational narrative; however, the most important thing that Cranford has in common with ethnography is the assumption of culture as a system which can only be properly understood intrinsically. 10 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, p. 10. 11 Charles Dickens, “A Preliminary Word” in Household Words, no. 1, March 30, 1850. Address in the First Number of “Household Words,” in The Works of Charles Dickens. The Gadshill Edition, vol. XXXV, Miscellaneous Papers, vol. I. London: Chapman and Hall, n.d., p. 181. 12 The Household Words version of the text contains another reference to reporting: the second installment is introduced as “the latest intelligence of Our Society at Cranford” (93). 13 By common law late into the 19th century the woman’s property became her husband’s upon marriage; or more precisely, the husband became the guardian of her property. This means that most women householders were likely to be either spinsters or widows. The legal framework regulating the possession of property by women, as Lee Holcombe shows was a matter of complex common law practices, which were invariably calculated to take away legal ownership from women. However, there was a concern in the wealthier classes over protecting family wealth, which resulted in mechanisms set up to protect the property not only of sons buts also of daughters. Women from wealthier families had access to limited protection under equity law, primarily through trust settlements (most often by fathers or male family), which made possible a small and indirect measure of financial independence. The efforts of the wealthy classes to protect their daughters’ property against the common-law rights of husbands, Lee Holcombe suggests, were facilitated by new forms of property becoming available with the growth of capitalism in England (especially the evolution of a financial capitalism in England, with the rise of a banking system and the stock market in the late 17th century). For

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an extended discussion of the property legislation for women see Lee Holcombe, Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in NineteenthCentury England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983. 14 Interestingly, this motif reappears in North and South. Margaret Hale’s move from the south to the industrial north is motivated by her father’s quitting his tenure as an Anglican Rector. 15 Speaking of the Barker sisters’ attempts to join the Cranford ‘elite,’ the narrator remarks that they had “caught the trick of the place, and piqued themselves upon their ‘aristocratic connection’” (61). Mary Smith invariably places the Cranfordian self-identifications in quotation marks; for instance, she talks of ‘genteel society’ (24), or ‘aristocratic society’ (62). 16 Matty is prevented from even contemplating marriage with Holbrook, a yeoman. Lady Glenmire causes some disunity in the town, as her marriage with Hoggins who is a surgeon would seem to be a step down in rank, which is why the conservative Mrs Jamieson, the chief Cranford arbiter in questions of rank, was so opposed to the marriage. Facing the rift in the community, Mary Smith asks herself: “must we choose between the Honourable Mrs Jamieson and the degraded Mrs Glenmire?” (168). Of course, Mary is much more inclined to take Lady Glenmire’s side. There are in fact two things at stake in the quarrel. First, there is Lady Glenmire’s resolution to marry below her rank—an act rebellious enough in the little community. Secondly, there is the question of an interpretation to be put on the marriage: how does it affect the local system of rank? Lady Glenmire drops her title and becomes Mrs Hoggins, which pleases Mrs Jamieson as that seems to be in accordance with the patrilineal principle of rank. On the other hand, Mrs Jamieson is dis pleased, because St. James’s Chronicle (a patrician publication) published a notice of the marriage. Clearly, the idea is that even nationally the “aristocratic” system of rank is capable of adaptation, and that it is incorporating new social groups (the medical profession, for example). Mrs Glenmire thus figures less as a social rebel, than an illustration of the system’s ability to transform itself while maintaining its basic principles; Mrs Jamieson, on the other hand, figures as an embodiment of an untenable conservatism with respect to rank. 17 Mary remarks on the subject: “I have spoken of my father’s old friendship for the Jenkyns family; indeed, I am not sure if there was not some distant relationship” (117). 18 Mary is defined by a similar dependence on male middle-class economies, but in ways that already suggest that the Cranford paradigm of genteel abstraction from the realms of labor and capital is no longer fully valid for her. Her independent geographical mobility as well as the spirit of enterprise she shows by setting Matty as a shopkeeper speak of an immersion in a social environment where the gender barriers are enforced with less stringency. Mary’s last name—Smith—denotes commonalty and a connection to the realm of labor (in contrast to the name Jenkyns, whose very spelling betrays a pretension to archaic distinction). Then there is Mary’s writing, which presumably constitutes an area of public activity that she of all women in Cranford occupies exclusively. 19 Lawrence Stone and J.C.F.Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540–1880. Oxford:

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Clarendon Press, 1984, pp. 423–24. 20 William Makepeace Thackeray, The Book of Snobs in Contributions to “Punch.” New York: Harper, 1900, p. 305. The book was first published in serial form in Punch in 1846 and 1847. The Book of Snobs was a satirical piece; nevertheless, it amounted to an ethnography of class manners in its own right. Thackeray even playfully asserted that “Snobs are to be studied like other objects of Natural Science” (303). Thackeray’s reference to natural science was perhaps a bow in the direction of the currently much more palpable symbolic capital of the established, mostly natural sciences, but the call for a sociology of class was by all means an interesting proposition at the time. 21 Thackeray stated that with regard to snobbery, “we are all implicated in it, and more or less down on our knees.” He attributed the culture of snobbery to a “prodigious national institution,” that of ennoblement (“the increase, encouragement, and maintenance of Snobs”)—pointing to the facility with which the aristocratic orders were able to co-opt some segments of the middle class, and make the prospect of cooptation an attractive one (pp. 313–4). 22 In the “Last Generation in England” Gaskell provided a detailed description of the hierarchy of rank in a small town: “The town in which I once resided is situated in a district inhabited by large landed proprietors of very old family. The daughters of these families, if unmarried, retired to live in on their annuities, and gave the ton to the society there; […] Then there were the widows of the cadets of these same families; […] Then came the professional men and their wives.” The list also includes former housekeepers and widows of stewards employed by local aristocracy, shopkeepers, and finally the “respectable and disrespectable poor” (162). 23 Betty Barker abdicates her connection with commerce and industrialization, in order to join the ‘aristocratic society’ of Cranford—of course, as a milliner, her connection with the “horrid cotton trade” (61) would have been quite direct. 24 On a different occasion, Mary’s description of Cranfordian prohibition of money talk focuses on what is designated in psychoanalytic theory as the fetishistic attitude. The structure of the fetishistic attitude is often explained in psychoanalytic theory as a specific dynamic of primacy of belief against knowledge—the attitude of “I know that…, but I believe that…” (see, for instance, Slavoj Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1990, pp. 31–33). The Cranfordians’ blindness to money is not a matter of complete obliviousness; rather, it is achieved by actively fetishizing the appearances of gentility. Describing a tea party at Mrs Forrester’s, one of the poorer members of the circle, Mary notes how the ladies “talked on about household forms and ceremonies, as if we all believed that our hostess had a regular servants’ hall […] instead of one little charity-school maiden, […] assisted in private by her mistress, who now sate in state, pretending not to know what cakes were sent up; though she knew, and we knew that she knew that we knew, she had been busy all the morning making tea-bread and spongecakes” (3). Such passages point to Mary’s “ethnographic” stance: she is trying to describe and understand the ideological operations sustaining the Cranfordian community. This particular passage points to the mutuality of the ideological belief, its esprit de corps—the

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genteel forms are upheld by the participation of everyone, and in spite of everyone’s knowing that there are other, compensatory economies at work there. In this context, gentility is featured as a collective insurance against an economic disadvantage turning into a class disadvantage. 25 See Russell, The Novelist and Mammon. Literary Responses to the World of Commerce in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 18 and 44. Russell mentions for instance that out of 624 company schemes floated in 1824 and 1825 only 127 survived into 1827. 26 In an essay on the novel Andrew H.Miller called attention to the changes in corporate legislation in mid-century Britain, the most important being the Joint Stock Companies Act of 1856. Miller’s interest is primarily in these changes in terms of their reflecting different concepts of subjectivity (say, the older concept of autonomy embodied by Matty, who takes full responsibility for the failure of her stock, versus the new concept embodied by Mary, who understands subjectivity in terms of limited liability). See Andrew H.Miller, “Subjectivity Ltd: The Discourse of Liability in the Joint Stock Companies of 1856 and Gaskell’s Cranford,” English Literary History 61:1 (1994). The legislation very likely had a consolidating effect on the security of women in the Cranfordians’ position, by exempting them from full liability for their investments. The rentier class as a whole would thus have been strengthened by the legislation—as would its apparent autonomy from some of the vagaries of the marketplace. 27 Miller, p. 152. 28 See E.J.Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire. London: Penguin, 1990, p. 119. 29 P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688– 1914. London: Longman, 1993, p. 23. 30 See Arno J.Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime. Europe to the Great War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981. 31 As an indigo planter Peter was involved in producing one of chief Indian exports under British rule. It is interesting that Peter comes home not fabulously wealthy, but wealthy enough to live as a rentier. Gaskell possibly still remembered the economic depression in 1829 in Britain, which hit hard the East India Company and especially the Indian indigo production. This apparently marginal circumstance evokes volumes about the economies and politics of interplay between the metropolitan and imperial contexts. 32 Edward Said, Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Said discussed three kinds of Orientalism—as Occidental academic study of the Orient, as a “style of thought” characterizing Occidental attitudes towards the Orient, and as a “corporate institution for dealing with the Orient,” that is “for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient” (pp. 2–3). The Cranford ladies and Peter, in their own different ways, are evidently connected to latter two kinds of Orientalism. 33 A more extensive discussion of the novel’s Orientalism can be found in Jeffrey Cass, “The Scraps, Patches, and Rags of Daily Life’: Gaskell’s Oriental Other and the Conservation of Cranford.” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 35:4 (1999): 417–33. Cass’s article focuses especially on the function of Rasselas as “Oriental intertext.”

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Mary has the ability to imagine the empire more realistically than the Cranfordians—or at least to realize that there is another story to be told about it. However, her own imagination has limitations as the passage shows in which she imagines the trajectory of her letter to Peter in India: “I dropped it in the post on my way home; and then for a minute I stood looking at the wooded pane, with a gaping slit, which divided me from the letter, but a moment ago in my hand. It was gone from me like life—never to be recalled. It would get tossed about on the sea, and stained with sea-waves perhaps; and be carried among palm-trees, and scented with all tropical fragrance;—the little piece of paper, but an hour ago so familiar and commonplace, had set out on its race to the strange wild countries beyond the Ganges” (128). Mary’s fascination is not couched in terms of the adventure tale, the genre of which she is a skeptical customer, but in terms of the existence of an uncharted framework by which the “strange wild countries” are already accessible to her English imagination and communication—the framework composed by the mail, the ship that carries it, and the undefined economic and political arrangements that allow for this kind of commerce to take place. Strangely stripped of political and economic content, Mary’s imagination of the letter’s trajectory ironically reproduces the fundamental Cranfordian stance of ignoring the less pleasant actualities of imperialism. 35 Signora Brunoni explains to Mary that on returning to England Sam Brown “had to fix on a trade […] so he set up conjuring, and it answered so well that he took Thomas to help him—as his man, you know, not as another conjuror, though Thomas has set it up now on his own hook. But it has been a great help to us that likeness between the twins, and made a good many tricks go off well that they made up together. And Thomas is a good brother, only he has not the fine carriage of my husband, so I can’t think how he can be taken for Signor Brunoni himself” (110). 36 The subject of the Rector’s sermon was county assizes; most of his sermonizing, we are given to understand, is civic minded, showing a concern over large local and national issues. But, as Mary Smith’s review of his epistolary style reveals, the Rector’s literary practice was not one of originality and invention: he was primarily concerned with emulating the elite and its ton-giving opinions and mores in the field of writing, from the genteel views on national affairs to the Johnsonian sentence to the received way of opening letters sealed with wafers. 37 Quoted in Anne Lohrli, Household Words. A Weekly Journal 1850–1859 Conducted by Charles Dickens, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973, p. 10. 38 See “Introduction.” J.A.Sutherland shows that Dickens and his publishers were at the forefront of all the major innovations in novel-publishing in the 1830s and 1840s: part publication, cheap reissues of collected works, fiction-carrying journals. This transformation of the publishing industry enabled a significant increase in the price that a professional novelist could command (especially a novelistic celebrity). By the early 1850s, Dickens’s name was not only synonymous with novelistic success, but also with attempts to convert his symbolic capital into reforming some marketplacerelated aspects of the profession of letters, such as issues in copyright and professional organization of writers. Of course, Deborah Jenkyns is voicing her contempt for the entire cultural context in which writing was becoming a profession.

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Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers. London: Penguin Books, 1986, p. 67. Charles Dickens, “Supposing,” in The Works of Charles Dickens. The Gadshill Edition, vol XXXVI, Miscellaneous Papers, vol. II. London: Chapman and Hall, n.d., pp. 187–189. This article was published on April 20, 1850.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

1

The Newcome family, with its many branches and connections, represents in the novel a compendium of contemporary middle-class positions. The family wealth goes back to Thomas Newcome, a northern weaver who came to London in the 1770s, started working for a firm of cloth-factors, became a prosperous tradesman in his own right, and improved his fortune by his second marriage, allying himself with a “banking business, which was greatly helped by the Quakers and their religious connexion” (20). Thackeray places the Quaker bankers in Clapham—a compounded allusion to the Clapham Evangelicals (actually a movement within the Anglican Church), and to the prevalence of dissenters among the City bankers. Thomas Newcome soon became sheriff and alderman of the City of London, but shunned a parliamentary career and aspirations for baronetcy, thinking that the “Quaker connection would not like it” (20). Things quickly change in the next generation of the Newcomes, when one of his sons, Barnes senior, already marries into nobility, is made a baronet, and invents a heraldic history for the Newcome family stretching back to the time of Edward the Confessor. The other son’s branch assumes a less exalted social image for themselves, but is still ridiculed for its own form of social pretension: Hobson Newcome affects the appearance of “a plain country farmer” (211), a more modest version of gentrification, while his wife keeps something like a salon gathering “people of science—people of intellect,” whom she prefers “to all the rank in the world” (210). Hobson is in the main uninterested in his wife’s pursuits, and his first concern remains the family banking business, where he accepts Barnes’s leadership. Colonel Newcome is their half-brother from Thomas Newcome’s first marriage; after his father remarries he is made to feel unwelcome by his new relatives, and seeks a career in the service of the East India Company; as he slowly builds his own fortune, he still keeps a banking account with the Newcome brothers. The Newcomes get into Parliament as representatives for the northern borough of Newcome, wherein lies the town of Newcome, named after old Thomas Newcome, and now a great manufacturing town. All things considered, Thackeray has the family draw its wealth and influence from northern industry, southern finance and imperial conquest and trade, all mainstays of British political and economic power. W.M. Thackeray, The Newcomes. Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 2 “Let us have middle-aged novels,” exclaimed Thackeray in Rebecca and Rowena. See W.M.Thackeray, Rebecca and Rowena, in The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, vol. IX. The Christmas Books of Mr. M.A.Titmarsch, etc. New York:

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Harper and Brothers, 1899, p. 106. In contrast to most contemporary novels that end with marriage, Thackeray claims he wrote the piece, a sequel to Scott’s Ivanhoe, as an example of the novel that deals with the married life of its protagonists. 3 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, p. 208. 4 For the density of cultural reference the novel requires an introductory lexicon, the kind which was once needed to read James Joyce, and which has been recently attempted by R.D. McMaster in Thackeray’s Cultural Frame of Reference. Allusion in The Newcomes. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991. 5 W.M.Thackeray, “A Plan for a Prize Novel,” in Contributions to Punch. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1900, p. 536. 6 Charles Dickens, a letter to D.M.Moir from June 17, 1848, The Letters of Charles Dickens, The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume Five (edited by Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Nina Burgis). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, vol. 5. p. 341. 7 This account of The Morning Chronicle article is based on Gordon N. Ray’s Thackeray. The Age of Wisdom. New York: McGraw Hill, 1958. 8 Pendennis wrote “if not like a scholar, at any rate like a gentleman,”W. M.Thackeray, The History of Pendennis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 443. 9 Ibid., p. 395. 10 Ibid., p. 523. 11 Ibid., p. 521. 12 Ibid., p. 451. 13 Ibid., p. 450. 14 Thackeray’s review of Disraeli’s Sybil. In Thackeray’s Contributions to the Morning Chronicle (edited by Gordon N.Ray). Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1955, p. 78. The review was from May 13, 1845. 15 In a review of a novel by Charles Lever, Thackeray wrote: “At the conclusion of these tales […] there somehow arrives a misty reconciliation between the poor and the rich; a prophecy is uttered of better times for the one, and better manners for the other; presages are made of happy life, happy marriage and children, happy beef and pudding for all time to come; […] This is not the way in which men seriously engaged and interested in the awful question between rich and poor meet and grapple with it […] on one side and the other a serious contest is taking place in the press and the parliament over the “Condition of England question.” The novelist as it appears to us, ought to be a non-combatant. But if he persists in taking a side, don’t let him go into the contest unarmed; let him do something more effectual than call the enemy names. The cause of either party in this great quarrel requires a stronger championship than this, and merits a more earnest warfare.” (Thackeray’s Contributions to the Morning Chronicle, pp. 73–74; the review was from April 3, 1845). 16 Review of Thackeray’s Pendennis, Fraser’s Magazine, vol. XLIII, no. CCLIII, p. 86. 17 The North British Review, May 1851, p. 36. Masson bases his distinction on a comparison with painting: “In the real style of art, the aim is to produce pictures that shall impress by their close and truthful resemblance to some-thing or other in real

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nature or life.” The real style is characteristic of figure-painting, unlike the ideal style, which predominates in landscape-painting, and which is a higher form of artistic creativity. Masson struggles to apply the painting analogy to fiction, and lists a series of respective merits and demerits of Dickens and Thackeray based on this analogy, only to conclude at the end that both styles are equally valid. 18 Westminster Review, vol. LIX, April 1853, p. 274. 19 Quarterly Review, vol. XCVII, September 1855, pp. 272–74. 20 Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, New York, p. 228. 21 See Franz Stanzel, A Theory of Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 105–109. Mary Smith from Gaskell’s Cranford could be seen as another instance of the peripheral first-person narrator. 22 Clive’s continental adventures are narrated in this interesting manner—as letters retold in the third person. Pendennis describes his very editing procedure in the process: “From the abundance of the letters which the affectionate young fellow now wrote, the ensuing portion of his youthful history is compiled,” and then he switches to the reported epistolary form: “Now that the old countess, and perhaps Barnes, were away, the barrier between Clive and this family seemed to be withdrawn. The young folks who loved were free to see him as often as he would come. They were going to Baden: would he come too?” (347). 23 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, p. 165. 24 Arno Mayer is an especially astute proponent of the view that ancient regimes persisted into the early 20th century, in Britain as well as on the continent. See Persistence of the Old Regime. Europe to the Great War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981. 25 Some of this sense of social hierarchy goes back to Thackeray’s own professional experience. He entered the literary profession in the mid-1830s, before the dramatic changes in the literary field triggered by Dickens’s rise to fame. Literature would have been conventionally perceived at the time as a step down in the world for someone of Thackeray’s status, since he came from a relatively wealthy AngloIndian background. However, in spite of the often envied wealth that was associated with Indian service in the popular imagination, that very background had its disadvantages in the rigidly rankstructured world of England—the theme of the social status of the Anglo Indian returnees plays a large part in both Vanity Fair and The Newcomes. 26 See W.M.Thackeray, Henry Esmond. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, p. 45. 27 The chorus analogy evokes Thackeray’s favorite theme of snobbishness, as the exemplary theatrical story casually strung together by Pendennis here involves a character called Sir Harry Courtly complaining about the stinginess of his AngloIndian uncle—a stock situation in Thackeray’s stories of snobbery and an interesting miniature counterpoint to the relationship between Clive and his father. 28 Gordon N.Ray, Thackeray. The Age of Wisdom, p. 38. Ray suggests that Thackeray was attracted to the idea expressed in a contemporary pamphlet that philosophers and historians were naturalists of society, and that he liked to number novelists

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among those. 29 W.M.Thackeray, The Book of Snobs, in Contributions to “Punch.” New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900, p. 303. 30 Historically, the use of the marriage market as a way of consolidating the alliance between the landed interest and the monied interest was by no means a novelty in the first half of the 19th century. Thackeray alludes to this rather established practice by making Ethel and her brother Barnes Newcome belong to a generation that is already a product of such an alliance, with their mother coming from a titled family. 31 David Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. 32 Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain. London: NLB, 1977 p. 37. 33 F.M.L.Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society. A Social History of Victorian Britan 1830–1900. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. In particular, see Thompson’s view of Britain in 1900, characterized by “a fragmentation into a multiplicity of sections or classes with differing standards and notions of respectability” (360). While some middle-class proponents of respectability thought it would be a socially cohesive force, in effect it was one of atomization. 34 Alexander Welsh, Reflections on the Hero as Quixote. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981, pp. 10–11. 35 See Gaskell’s Cranford or Dickens’s Little Dorrit. Thackeray had a firsthand experience of financial reverses when his stepfather lost a fortune through the failure of an Indian bank in 1834. Thackeray’s interest in speculation and banking may have also been affected by his working briefly for a bill-discounting firm in the 1830s. 36 See P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins, British Imperialism. Innovation and Expansion 1688–1914. London: Longman, 1993, p. 325. 37 In his account of the economic policies of the Company’s raj, C.A. Bayly suggests that the indigenous entrepreneurs in this period “fell early victim to trade cycles and the short-sighted exclusiveness of British financial interests.” See C.A.Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire. The New Cambridge History of India II. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 125. Among the indigenous entrepreneurs Bayly mentions Dwarkanath Tagore in Calcutta as a pioneer of native joint-stock enterprises, and it is quite likely that in his entrepreneurial capacity Rummun Loll was based on this native capitalist. 38 In Rule of Darkness, Patrick Brantlinger argues that Thackeray made Rummun the chief culprit for the bursting of the Bundelcund bubble: “The ultimate scam for Thackeray is not the Bundelcund Bank, but Rummun Loll himself” (106), which Brantlinger attributes to Thackeray’s unquestioning acceptance of racist and imperialist ideologies. Although Rummun initially saved the Colonel’s investment in an agency house, the novel generally presents Rummun in a clear Orientalist fashion as a wily swindler taking advantage of English dupes such as the Colonel. But Brantlinger misses the point about the novel’s construction of the Bank’s failure—it is brought down by the central feud between Barnes and the Colonel, or between established metropolitan and fledgling Indian interest, not by fraud committed by native Indian entrepreneurs. For Brantlinger’s discussion of the novel, see Rule of Darkness. British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca:

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Cornell University Press, 1988. 39 Writing at the end of the 1840s, John Francis details numerous scandals brought about by successive manias of speculation in the first half of the century. He quotes Canning on the joint-stock companies as a national shame: they “excited the public avidity so as to cover us, in the eyes of foreign nations, if not with disgrace, at least with ridicule.” See John Francis, History of the Bank of England. New York: Putnam, 1862, p. 205. 40 C.A.Bayly writes that in the first half of the 19th century, “investment in internal trade and production remained as it had been in the eighteenth century—a way of laundering profits and returning them to England […] In fact, far from attracting external capital, nearly £20 million was withdrawn from the Indian money market in the 1830s and the 1840s” (119). 41 See Welsh, p. 46. 42 It is worth noting that Thackeray’s conviction of the centrality of the City to British society will receive an interesting expression in 1860, when he invested his cultural capital into the launching of a new magazine that he dubbed Cornhill. 43 See McMaster, pp. 91–92. 44 This part is indebted to the discussion of British historical painting in Roy Strong, Recreating the Past. British History and the Victorian Painter. Over Wallop: Thames and Hudson, 1978. 45 Henry Esmond, p. 46. 46 Franco Moretti, The Way of the World. The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso, 1987, p. 193. 47 Clive’s accession to wealth, through the offices of his father, is accompanied by a ridiculous de-estheticization of his lifestyle. After his marriage, Clive moves into a new house whose tacky nouveaux-riches furnishings take Arthur much derision to describe. Arthur dwells especially on a gift made to Clive’s wife, a “chaste and elegant specimen of British art” (824)—an elaborate example of imperial kitsch representing British and Indian cooperation in the Bundelcund Bank. Of course, Arthur attributes Clive’s failing as an artist to the Colonel’s attempt to turn Clive into a respectable capitalist.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

1

This chapter includes parts from two previously published articles of mine, “Dickens and Civil Society,” Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensia 45–46 (2000–2001): 355–372; and “A Study of Aggression: A Tale of Two Cities.” Studia Romanica et Anglka Zagrabiensia 36–37 (1991–1992): 251–270. 2 Charles Dickens, “A Preliminary Word,” published in Household Words, no. 1, March 30, 1850. Quoted in The Works of Charles Dickens. Gadshill Edition, vol. XXXV. Miscellaneous Papers, vol. I. London: Chapman and Hall, pp. 181–183. 3 Anthony Trollope, The Warden. London: Everyman, 1994, p. 133.

Notes 4

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Charles Dickens, The Speeches of Charles Dickens (ed. by K.J.Fielding). Oxford: Clarendon University Press, 1960, pp. 200–201. The speech was given on June 27, 1855. 5 Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994. This characterization of civil society would roughly correspond to the golden age of the bourgeois public sphere in the 18th century, when bourgeois civil society sought to create and control a space independent of the aristocratic state. 6 Between 1830s and 1880 more than a 100 periodicals were launched each decade. See T.H.Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian Britain. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982, p. 33. 7 Dickens, “A Preliminary Word.” 8 This contribution is dated April 20, 1850. It is reprinted in Miscellaneous Papers, II, in The Works of Charles Dickens. The Gadshill Edition, vol. XXXVI. London: Chapman and Hall, n.d., pp. 187–189. Of course, “supposing” is the word with which Bleak House ends, and arguably the connection is in the destabilizing conditionality between the current condition and the projected sense of unattained social modernity. 9 See “Introduction” for a discussion of Cannadine’s ideas on class. 10 Again, I am alluding to Cannadine’s discussion of social description from The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain. 11 The Speeches of Charles Dickens, pp. 200–201. This is from the speech at the June 27, 1855 ARA meeting. 12 Published on August 30, 1856. The piece is reprinted in The Works of Charles Dickens, vol. 36, pp. 115–119. 13 Alexander Welsh, The City of Charles Dickens. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971, p. 51. 14 This contribution is dated January 19,1856. It is reprinted in The Works of Charles Dickens, vol. XXXVI, pp. 80–86. 15 It is not known to me who the writers are that Dickens has in mind here, or what the popular recreation and entertainment they derided was. However, a little below, speaking of contemporary traces of such attitudes, Dickens points to “unlikely places,” and castigates Macaulay for poking fun at “‘the thousands of clerks and milliners who are now thrown into raptures by the sight of Loch Katrine and Loch Lomond,’” that is, at the lower middle-class nature tourists. Dickens was a strong advocate for popular entertainment, against the dullness of industrial and clerical life. 16 Charles Dickens, “The Toady Tree.” The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens Journalism. Volume 3. “Gone Astray” and Other Papers from Household Words. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1999, p. 299. The article was originally published on May 26, 1855. 17 Quoted in Stephen Wall’s Introduction to the novel, Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit. London: Penguin Books, 1985, p. xv. The letter is dated September 30, 1855. 18 Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit. London: Penguin Books, 1985, p. 165. 19 At the same time, Dickens insists on the political expediency of this political culture

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for the patrician elite, describing the attitude of a Barnacle who “fully understood the department to be a politico-diplomatic hocuspocus piece of machinery for the assistance of the nobs in keeping off the snobs” (157–8). 20 Little Dorrit, p. 152. 21 Doyle goes off to Russia, which was thus presumably to benefit from this exodus of British technological knowhow. Published during the war with Russia, this was obviously meant to reinforce the image of costly patrician incompetence. 22 E.J.Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire. London: Penguin Books, 1990, p. 130–1. 23 See “Introduction.” 24 A case is often made that Dickens drew on more models for Merdle than just Sadleir, that is, that there were many other cases of financial scandals at that time. For a discussion of these see Barbara Weiss, “Secret Pockets and Secret Breasts: Little Dorrit and the Commercial Scandals of the Fifties.” Dickens Studies Annual 10 (1982): 67–76. 25 Dickens, The Speeches of Charles Dickens (ed. by K.J.Fielding), pp. 200–201. 26 See Christina Crosby, The Ends of History. Victorians and “the Woman Question.” London: Routledge, 1991. 27 Dickens attached great value to this novel (which has not exactly been handed down as the greatest of novels in the Dickens lore). Although he published the novel in installments (and not in three-decker format as Thackeray did with his historical novel, Henry Esmond), it is generally believed that he plotted it out carefully beforehand. A Tale was his first novel to be serialized in the new magazine he started in 1859, All the Year Round, which was conceived very much in the same spirit as Household Words. Dickens biographers often point out that Dickens occasionally referred to A Tale as his “best story.” See, for instance, Fred Kaplan, Dickens. A Biography. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1988, p. 415. 28 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Critidsm. Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957, p. 47. 29 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination. Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, p. 14. 30 Brooks, p. 15. 31 Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 1. 32 A Tale of Two Cities, p. xxvii. 33 Earle Davis, The Fllnt and the Flame: The Artistry of Charles Dickens. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1963, p. 253. 34 This retroactive application of the calendar is paralleled by the way Darnay is tried retroactively, as it were, for a crime he did not do—or, by the very incompleteness of his project of middle-class reinvention. Darnay’s reinvention from scratch is both opposed and threatened by the Jacobin reinventions from scratch. 35 The image of “forces yet unknown” may have been inspired by Thomas Carlyle’s view of this period of the French Revolution. The novelty of the situation is described by Carlyle as follows: “Very frightful it is when a nation, rending asunder its Constitutions and regulations which were grown dead cerements for it, becomes transcendental; and must now seek its wild way through the new, Chaotic—where Force is not yet distinguished into Bidden and Forbidden.” Thomas Carlyle, The

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French Revolution. London: Macmillan, p. 118. Carlyle’s book was published in 1857, and Dickens read it and used it extensively, especially for incidental detail. 36 Crosby, p. 76. 37 Crosby, p. 77. 38 Crosby, p. 77. The quote is Crosby, not Dickens. 39 Apparently, that happens before the confiscation of émigré property started in August 1792. Gabelle’s letter to Darnay, asking for his interference, is dated June 21, 1792. The point, however, is that the plot requires at this point that Darnay has a concretely moral reason to return to France. 40 These are the class terms advanced by the text itself. This classification would hardly correspond to the actual English situation in the 1850s, which noncoincidence brings into question the allegorical character of the class terms itself. That is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to read the novel as a clear-cut social allegory. 41 This is the place where Carton is executed, during the revolution named Place de la Revolution. 42 But the state of these accounts is also very uncertain: “What money would be drawn out of Tellson’s, and what would lie there, lost and forgotten; what plate and jewels would tarnish in Tellson’s hiding places, while the depositors rusted in prisons, and when they should have violently perished; how many accounts with Tellson’s never to be balanced in this world, must be carried over into the next; no man could have said, that night, any more than Mr Jarvis Lorry could, though he thought heavily of those questions” (317). 43 The mangle in itself is not a very respectable one. Decay and corruption are images by which the bank’s vaults are described: “Your bank-notes had a musty odour, as if they were fast decomposing into rags again. Your plate was stowed away among the neighbouring cesspools, and evil communications corrupted its good polish in a day or two” (60). This conveys the characteristic Dickensian image of a coincidence between urban pollution and capitalism. There is a similar insistence on the flip side of the melodramatic coin: Lorry’s odd-job man is Jerry Cruncher, an “honest tradesman,” whose trade is robbing graves and selling corpses to surgeons. Miss Pross’s brother is Solomon Barsad, the mercenary spy whose testimony almost condemns Darnay in England. Finally, Carton himself is persistently cast at the beginning of the novel as one such sidekick of a problematic moral profile. 44 Crosby, p. 73. 45 Habermas provides a long history of terms public and private that cannot be repeated here. It is important to note, however, that he reiterates often that the definitions of private and public in the 18th century are not mutually exclusive; in fact, the public sphere realm is seen as an extension and completion of the private realm of the conjugal household, with its institution of critical debate in the drawing room. Similarly, the private realm of commodity exchange is shown to be subject to an elaboration in the public sphere. The point, then, is not that the spheres of the private and the public were disjunctive; if anything, they were perceived as metonymic. This is not to say that their make-up was completely autonomous and self-sustaining; Habermas points out that these spheres were themselves criss-

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crossed by complex constellations of economic, social and political factors. What is important here is that the original bourgeois public sphere saw itself as stemming from the private sphere. To my mind, that is an aspect that needs to be emphasized; the often-remarked 19th-century middle-class attempt at separating the private from the public may be interpreted not only as escape from history or fear of history, but also as an active endeavor to reinforce the “original” autonomy of the private in order to recuperate a sense of the public sphere that would be more autonomous from the forces observed as competing for control over it (the state, in the first place). Crosby sees the relation between melodrama and middle-class “consolidation” (prerequisite also for “tutelary government”), but she does not situate the importance of the idea of civil society (as separate from the realm of political society) in these attempts at consolidating middle-class identity and politics.

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Index

Administrative Reform Association (ARA), 1,4, 117–118, 123, 127; 132–133 Altick, Richard D., 17, 156n aristocracy, 4, 7, 11–12, 15,59, 72–72, 75, 80–81, 84, 90, 104–106, 122, 133, 145–145–145, 201n, 207n, 209n Arrighi, Giovanni, 34, 158n Bank of England, 33, 42–43, 58–59, 62, 66–66, 76, 110, 202n, 204n Anderson, Benedict, 20 Bagehot, Walter, 25, 48, 156n, 200n Bayly, C.A.,215n, 216n Bentinck, William ,109 Bildungsroman, 90, 93, 95, 111, 138 Bourdieu, Pierre, 2, 22–23, 31, 47, 96, 100, 115, 156n, 156n, 214n Bowen, H.V., 67, 204n Brantlinger, Patrick, 215n Braudel, Fernand, 34 British Association for the Advancement of Science, 26, 157n British empire, 9–10, 50, 53, 61, 74, 80–82, 150, 210n British state (form), 2, 6–7, 8–9, 12, 37, 71, 74, 84, 128, 132 Bronte, Charlotte, 28; Jane Eyre, 32 Brooks, Peter, 134, 136, 218n Burke, Edmund, 203n Cain, P.J. and A.G.Hopkins, 2, 9–12, 38, 66, 80–81, 128, 131, 155n, 204n, 210n, 215n Cannadine, David, 3, 4–5, 8, 10, 15, 104–106, 122, 155n, 214n capital, 23, 29, 34, 37, 59, 73, 75, 79, 83, 89, 93, 103–104, 108, 131, 132–133, 148, 203n, 208n, 216n; cultural, 23, 31, 104, 111, 114, 216n economic, 3, 22–23, 28, 31, 38–39, 46, 72, 80, 85, 89, 93, 103, 104, 112, 122; social, 1, 22–23, 28, 31, 47–37, 42, 72, 77, 85, 89, 91, 95, 103–104, 111, 112, 122; symbolic, 3, 22–23, 28, 31, 38–39, 46, 93, 103, 128, 132, 208n, 211n; capitalism, 2, 7, 9, 10, 19, 32–34, 47, 39, 61, 65, 66–68, 75–78, 93, 96, 108, 130, 145, 150, 158n, 219n; industrial capitalism, 18, 75, 80, 84, 130; service-sector capitalism, 8–11, 80, 128; see also finance capitalism; Carlyle, Thomas, 12, 25, 29, 30, 37, 156n, 218n Cass, Jeffrey, 210n Cervantes, Miguel de, 91, 107 civil society, 7, 13–14, 15, 16, 31, 86, 92, 104, 117, 118, 120, 126, 132, 137, 146–148, 150, 153,

Index

188

216n, 220n class system, 1, 2, 8, 15, 37, 39, 96, 124, 208n; binary model of, 4, 14, 122, 143; hierarchical model of, 4, 6, 14, 15, 38, 77, 105, 114, 122, 155n, 206n, 208n; triadic model of, 4, 6, 122 Collins, Wilkie, 28, 119, 135 condition of England debate, 2, 12, 33, 68, 213n Constitution, 6–8, 39, 42–43, 48–49, 52, 54, 56–58, 59, 64, 66, 150, 151, 201n; See also constitutional history Costello, Dudley, 32 Crimean War, 62, 118, 123–124, 127 Croker, John Wilson, 44, 47, 158n Crosby, Christina, 44, 134, 137, 158n, 218n, 219n, 220n Davis, Earle, 218n Dickens, Charles, 1, 3, 5–6, 9, 11, 12–15, 19–20, 23–30, 31–31, 33, 37–39, 46, 71, 79, 84–87, 89, 92, 94–95, 96–97, 101, 117–151, 155n-157n, 206n, 211n-212n, 215n-218n; A Tale of Two Cities, 31, 37, 39, 117–117, 133–149, 150–151; All the Year Round, 29, 218n; Bleak House, 117, 139, 217n; David Copperfield, 94, 97; Household Words, 12–13, 20, 25, 28–29, 68, 71, 84, 117, 118–120, 122–123, 124, 126, 130, 147, 206n, 207n, 218n; “Insularities,” 124–126, 144; Little Dorrit, 12–14, 15, 32–33, 37–39, 117–118, 122, 126–133, 136, 148, 150–151, 155n-156n, 215n, 217n, 218n; “Nobody, Somebody and Everybody,” 13, 122–124, 126–127, 155n; Pickwick Papers, 14, 17–21, 26, 27,39,68, 78, 85–86, 92, 152, 155n, 157n, “Supposing!”, 120–122, 126; Our Mutual Friend, 3, 28 Dickson, P.G.M., 10, 65–66, 155n, 158n, 204n Disraeli, Benjamin, 14–15, 25, 27, 39, 43, 48–49, 54, 62, 68, 97, 156n, 159n; Sybil, 27, 97, 200n, 204n, 213n Dolin, Tim, 205n Eagleton, Terry, 25, 30, 156n, 156n Eliot, George, 114; Middlemarch, 32 Engels, Friedrich, 12 Englishness, 38, 145, 151, 152 Erickson, Lee, 17–18, 24, 156n ethnography/ethnographic novel, 24, 27, 39, 68, 70–71, 75, 79, 85–86, 92, 106, 152,206n, 209n; of class, 14–15, 106 Feltes, N.N., 18–19, 156n Fielding, Joseph, 92, 98, 107–108 finance capital(ism), 1, 3, 10, 12, 31–32, 34, 47–37, 39, 42, 58–59, 62, 63, 66–66, 83, 89, 91, 103, 104, 108, 110–111, 114, 117, 128, 130, 132, 144–144, 148–148, 150–152, 212n;

Index

189

Joint-Stock Companies Act, 35, 76, 209n; credit, 47, 62, 63–64, 66, 108, 204n; confidence/trust, 65–66 financial revolution, 9, 33, 37, 58, 65–66, 155n Firth, Charles, 155n, 157n Forster, John, 94–95, 97 Francis, John, 58, 202n, 215n Frye, Northrop 134, 218n Gallagher, Catherine, 2, 17, 68 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 25, 27, 28, 36, 47, 39, 68–87, 101, 108, 119, 150, 152, 155n, 205n-206n, 210n, 213n, 215n; Cranford, 2–3, 24, 27, 32, 47, 38–39, 68–87, 108, 150, 152, 155n, 205n-206n, 213n, 215n; Mary Barton, 2, 68, 206n; North and South, 32, 38, 68, 206n-207n Geertz, Clifford, 71, 206n Genette, Gerard, 99, 213n gentility, 11, 47, 39, 68, 70, 74–75, 80–80, 83–83, 87, 106, 127, 206n gentlemanly elite, 9–12, 124–125, 131, 151; gentlemanly capitalism, 9–10, 37, 66, 80–81, 131, 144; gentlemanly ideology, 10–11 Gerin, Winifred, 205n Giddens, Anthony 37, 158n Glorious Revolution (1688), 6–7, 15, 44, 49–49, 50, 57–58, 60, 62, 65–66, 201n-202n Godfrey, Michael, 59, 202n Gore, Catherine, 32–2 Guild of Literature and Art, 30, 94, 96,157n Habermas, Jurgen, 16, 118, 132, 147, 216n, 219n Hallam, Henry, 45, 48, 158n Hamburger, Joseph, 53, 201n Heyck, T.H., 24, 26, 67, 156n, 156n, 201n, 204n, 217n historical novel, 39, 43–45, 49–50, 68, 89, 91, 102, 112, 133, 135, 218n historiography, 26, 42, 44–47, 102, 112; constitutional history, 39, 45, 48 Hobsbawm, Eric, 12, 33, 79, 128, 155n, 157n, 210n, 218n, Holcombe, Lee, 207n Hood, Thomas, 85 Howitt, William, 62, 204n Hume, David, 49, 203n imperialism, 9, 33–36, 47, 83, 128, 210n industrialization/industrial revolution, 3–4,9, 7–8, 12, 13, 33, 34–47, 37, 68, 75, 83, 86–87, 90, 105, 121, 128; of literature, 17, 19 industrial novel, 14, 68, 97 James, Henry, 97, 101, 134

Index

190

Jann, Rosemary, 53, 201 n Johnson, Samuel, 27, 70, 84, 107 Kaplan, Fred, 156n,218n Kemmerer, Edwin Walter, 204n La Fontaine, Jean de, 92, 113 Layard, A.H., 123 Lever, Charles, 213n Literary field, 21–22, 23, 28–29, 31–31, 95, 150, 152; and autonomy, 22–23, 28, 31, 96, 113–114; and heteronomy, 22, 30–31, 93, 95–96, 114; dignity of literature debate, 30–31, 90, 93; field of culture, 2, 23; generalist literature, 23, 25, 31, 39, 102, 151; novelistic field, 22, 23; star system, 23, 27–28; writing as a profession, 29–31, 46, 85, 93–95, 96, 99, 133, 152, 156n, 157n, 211n literary (or cultural) marketplace, 16, 18–19, 20–23, 24, 26–27, 29–30, 39, 85, 92–96, 102, 112, 150–151 Lohrli, Anne, 211n Lukacs, Georg, 44 Macaulay, T.B., 10, 25–26, 30, 37, 39, 42–66, 90, 150, 151, 158n-202n, 204n, 217n; History of England, 9, 24–25, 26, 39, 42–66, 150, 151 Mannheim, Karl, 200n Masson, David, 28, 98, 157n, 213n Mayer, Arno, 9, 81, 100,210n, 214n Mayhew, Henry, 14 McDonald, Peter, 22, 156n McKeon, Michael, 92, 212n McMaster, R.D., 212n, 216n melodrama, 30, 40, 117, 130, 133–135, 136, 140, 141–143, 146–147, 148–149, 150, 153, 220n middle class(es), 1–2, 4–5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 15, 18–19, 20, 23, 28, 30, 31, 34, 47, 39, 42, 58, 66, 68, 78, 85–87, 89, 90, 92, 94–95, 99–100, 103–106, 114, 117–120, 121–122, 124–126, 128, 130, 132–132, 136–138, 140, 141, 143, 147–152, 208n, 215n, 218n, 220n Mill, James, 47 Miller, Andrew H., 3, 77, 155n, 209n-210n modernity, 56, 58, 59, 69, 73, 86, 124–124, 132, 144, 149, 217n modernization, 12, 47, 39, 70, 80, 83, 87, 121, 132, 148; industrial/technological, 12, 68, 70, 83, 120; political, 12, 13, 87, 120, 122, 126, 132 monarchy limited monarchy, 57; absolute monarchy, 57–59, 138, 140 money, 62, 72, 75, 82, 97, 99, 128–129, 203n, 204n, 209 Montague, Charles, 59, 61, 202n Montaigne, Michel de 100

Index

191

Moretti, Franco, 114, 216n Nairn, Tom, 4, 6–8, 10, 15, 33, 104, 106, 133,155n, 215n national debt, 10, 33, 39, 42–43, 58–59, 61–62, 64, 150, 157n, 202n,204n Paine, Thomas, 37, 48, 61–62, 159n,203n Parry, Jonathan, 53–54, 201n paternalism, 91, 93, 111 Paterson, William, 58, 202n patrician elite, 1, 4–6, 8–8, 13,32, 33, 39,76, 86–87, 90, 104–105, 125, 128, 131, 148, 150, 152, 217n picaresque, 91, 92, 99 Pocock, J.G.A., 158n political novel, 97, 117, 127 politics, 117, 124, 133, 137; political power, 1,5; political reform, 55; political society, 13, 86–87, 118, 120, 125–127, 132, 136, 150, 152, 220n; and representation, 5, 54, 125, 151, 200n; see also modernization/political modernization. Poovey, Mary, 3, 16, 155n, power, 9–10, 15, 105, 110, 152; field of power, 2, 13, 22, 29, 100, 107, 132 Powis, Jonathan, 11 Pritchard, J.C., 14 public sphere, 30, 39, 46, 132, 147, 216n, 219n publishing industry, 17, 19, 28, 211n Ray, Gordon N., 213n,214n Reed, John R., 157n Reform Bill (1832), 5, 48, 121, 201n respectability, 89, 100, 104–106, 113, 114, 144, 148, 149, 152, 155n, 215n, 219n Royal Literary Fund, 30, 31, 93, 96 Russell, Norman, 3, 36, 158n, 209n Russell, W.H., 123 Sadleir, John, 130 Said, Edward, 82, 210n Scott, Walter, 21, 44–45, 49–50, 69, 112, 200n, 206n, 212n; Waverley, 49–50, 68, 200n, 206n Schor, Hilary, 70, 206n Smith, Adam, 61–62, 65, 66, 203n Southey, Robert, 69 snobbishness, 2, 15, 93, 95, 106, 150, 208n, 214n, 217n social reform, 28, 117–118, 120, 121, 126, 132 speculation, 32, 35–47, 37–38, 40, 61, 76, 89, 108, 109, 118, 128–130, 157n, 215n Stanzel, Franz, 99, 213n Stocking, George W., 206n

Index

192

stockjobbing, 60 Stone, Lawrence and J.C.F Stone, 74, 79, 105, 155n, 208n Strong, Roy, 216n Sutherland, Jonathan, 18, 20, 21, 28, 156n, 211n Thackeray, W.M., 14–15, 21, 23, 27–31, 38–39, 45, 46, 50, 67, 74, 94, 89–114, 150–152, 156n, 156n, 208n, 211n-216n, 218n Barry Lyndon, 97–98; The Book of Snobs, 14, 74, 92, 95, 99, 103, 106, 155n, 208n, 214n; Cornhill, 28–29, 216n; The English Humorists of the 18th Century, 97; Henry Esmond, 21, 39, 44, 50, 66, 89–90, 98, 100, 214n, 216n, 218n; The Newcomes, 38–39, 89–114, 150, 152, 212n; Pendennis, 29–31, 39, 90, 93, 95–98, 156n; Rebecca and Rowena, 97, 212n; Vanity Fair, 27, 98, 214n Thompson, F.M.L., 106, 155n, 215n Toynbee, Arnold, 33 Tremenheere, H.S., 159n Trevelyan, George, 25, 156n Trollope, Anthony, 28, 117, 216n The Way We Live Now, 32 upper class(es), 4, 7–8, 107, 151 Veseth, Michael, 33, 157n Wall, Stephen, 217n wealth, 11–12, 23, 32, 47, 37, 75–75, 105, 130–131 Weiss, Barbara, 218n Welsh, Alexander, 107, 110, 124, 215n, 216n William III, 42, 57–58, 62, 63, 65 White, Hayden, 47, 51, 56, 200n, 201n Williams, Raymond, 2, 68 Wordsworth, William, 94 working class(es), 1, 12, 15, 35, 68, 151, 155n, 201n Žižek, Slavoj, 209n