Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain 9780226311906

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Politics as Unusual
1. Liberal Formalism in an Informal World
2. A Body of Thought: The Form of Liberal Individualism
3. A Frame of Mind: Signature Liberalism at the Fortnightly Review
4. Thinking Inside the Box: The Ballot and the Politics of Liberal Citizenship
5. Occupational Hazards: The Irishness of Liberal Opinion
6. A Body of Opinion: Gladstonian Liberalism
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Living Liberalism

Living Liberalism Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain

ELAINE HADLEY

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Elaine Hadley is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago and the author of Melodramatic Tactics (1995). The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2010 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2010 Printed in the United States of America 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31188-3 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-226-31188-0 (cloth)

1 2 3 4 5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hadley, Elaine, 1960– Living liberalism : practical citizenship in mid-Victorian Britain / Elaine Hadley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31188-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-31188-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Liberalism—Great Britain— History—19th century. 2. Great Britain—Politics and government—1837– 1901. I. Title. DA550.H275 2010 320.510941'09034—dc22 2009036035 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

To Stephen Alexis, Helen Marie, and Grace Hadley Cain

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments / ix

Introduction: Politics as Unusual / 1 1.

Liberal Formalism in an Informal World / 41 2. A Body of Thought: The Form of Liberal Individualism / 63

A Frame of Mind: Signature Liberalism at the Fortnightly Review / 125 3.

4. Thinking Inside the Box: The Ballot and the Politics of Liberal Citizenship / 175 5. Occupational Hazards: The Irishness of Liberal Opinion / 229 6. A Body of Opinion: Gladstonian Liberalism / 291

Bibliography / 341 Index / 369

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

Ars longa, vita brevis. —Hippocrates

By this epigraph, I mean rather less than did the worthy physician. Life is short, and busy, and where I tend to spend my time, while art—or, in this case, scholarship—is long, painstaking, and often a luxury. And this is just a fancy way of saying that this book shared its space with a life and thus took a while to complete, and during its creation, I received help, inspiration, and provocation from so many people that I cannot begin to list them all in this small space. Please know that I am grateful for all the forms of assistance, and if each of you finds something to like in these pages, give yourself credit, and if you find something not to your liking, blame me alone. This book could not have been conceptualized, written, or completed without the aid of a long and valued genealogy of research assistants, each of whom I wish to thank first: Kelly Amienne, Robert Raoul, Mary Gehrz, Laura Powell, Adam McGrath, Tony Miller, Kristi McGuire, and especially Becky Mumaw, Carolyn Briones, Kerri Hunt, and Michael Meeuwis, who generously tolerated the end stages of manuscript preparation. Lori Meek Schuldt, my copy editor, Megan Cox, my indexer, and Alan Thomas, my editor, made the process from project to book surprisingly easy and painless. I would also like to thank the American Association of University Women, a wonderful organization, which funded my work during a year of research leave at a moment when it seemed the project would not otherwise have taken root. I have many colleagues, past and present, at the University of Chicago

x / Acknowledgments

who have helped this book in ways small and large: Sandra MacPherson, Josh Scodel, Jay Schleusener, Saree Makdisi, Tim Campbell, Janel Mueller, Paul Hunter, and, in the important final stages, Bill Brown, Leela Gandhi, and William Weaver. Elizabeth Helsinger, my Victorianist colleague, deserves special thanks for her exemplary engagement. Colleagues at other places have contributed through reading, conversing, suggesting, and supporting: Kevin Gilmartin, Victor Luftig, Yopie Prins, Janice Carlisle, Ivan Kreilkamp, Andrew Miller, David Vincent, Jerome Christensen, Michael Warner, Dorice Elliott, Lauren Goodlad, Robert Matz, Joseph Sitterson, Miriam Burstein, Irene Tucker, Zarena Aslami, Cornelia Pearsall, and James Epstein. At a moment of profound stress, my old classmate and friend Nicholas Watson generously read a rough draft of this work in progress. And at a later moment of indecision, Mary Poovey read a more finished draft, offering her usual dose of bracing insight and enabling advice. For their fine, improving suggestions, I would also like to thank my readers for the Press, Dror Wahrman and Bruce Robbins. My intellectual life is sustained and deeply enlarged by the Late Liberalism Group at the University of Chicago, whose brainy camaraderie suffuses this monograph: Bradin Cormack, Patchen Markell, Mark Miller, Candace Vogler, and Lauren Berlant, in particular, whose own unmatched intelligence, friendship, and willingness to challenge my bad habits has truly pushed this book to completion. Sarah Winter and I started our careers together and shared our work throughout, and she continues to be the serious-minded Victorian scholar whom I imagine as I write. I have taught many students during the development of these pages, at Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Yale, and Chicago. I have been so lucky to learn with and from them, in particular my graduate students at Chicago who participated in two courses on Victorian liberalism and all of my dissertation students. I cannot name them individually, but they have a part in these pages. All the while, my life has also taken shape, and it is to me the real story. To my mother, Olive Reitz Hadley, as always, thanks for the loving nudge. I dedicate this book to Alexis Cain, my enduring partner, whose healthy skepticism has never once eroded his robust belief in me and my work, and to my beloved daughters, Helen Marie and Grace Hadley Cain—powerful, whip-smart, lovely young women—whose contributions to my life deserve so much more than the dedication of this book.

INTRODUCTION

Politics as Unusual

This is a book about mid-Victorian political liberalism. That sentence accurately describes the book that follows, but even so, its simplicity belies its subject. Despite the many, many books written on British liberalism in the nineteenth century, the topic resists easy definition. Writing in 1865, when the Liberal Party was in the ascendant, when liberal ideas were the fashionable form of opinion, and when J. S. Mill was the leading intellectual, G. R. Gleig, writing in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, could nonetheless state: “In the first place, the Liberals, as a party, are but a heap of sand.”1 Commenting on the motley political party that consisted of old Whig families, former Peelite conservatives, Nonconformist northerners, intellectual agnostics, philosophical radicals, a younger generation of utilitarians, free-market ideologues, and, increasingly, any number of single-issue groups (Sabbatarian, nonsectarian), Gleig evokes a ruling party susceptible to shifting winds, collapses at its center, driftings into nothingness. Given that each of these segments of the party also espoused political positions often quite distinct from one another, the political philosophy of liberalism could boast no more solid structure than the party itself.2 That such a consequential political party and its ideology could be thus described suggests that an account of this liberalism demands an approach that can encompass this conundrum. This, then, is a book about mid-Victorian political liberalism in Britain between the mid-1850s and the early 1880s. It commences around the

1. Gleig, “Late Elections,” 257. Please note that full citations of sources in footnotes appear in the bibliography. 2. Martin Pugh argues that historians and, implicitly, Victorian observers, overstate the disarray of liberalism. Pugh, Modern British Politics.

2 / Introduction

time when the Liberal Party was officially founded (1859) by a group of Whigs, Peelites, and radicals at Willis’s rooms in St. James Street, London, moves through the first waves of liberal political and social reforms in the 1860s and 1870s (franchise, electoral, education, civil service), and concludes with the early years of the 1880s when most political historians espy substantive shifts in party organization, ideology, and constituency, a time when more collectivist and state-interventionist tendencies modify the midcentury’s individualist strain.3 The book ranges widely in its materials and methods, but its focus is in some respects rather narrow. In the first instance, I wish to make a case for the heuristic value of this particularizing historical designation—“mid-Victorian political liberalism.” In the second instance, I seek to revisit and thereby contest the conventional wisdom regarding some of the most valued categories and practices that inform liberal politics in the nineteenth century—individualism, opinion, sincerity, discussion. And finally, and perhaps most important to my purposes, I will add some new terms to this familiar ensemble in order to describe features of this political liberalism that have been overlooked: liberal cognition and abstract embodiment. The book is not by any means a political history that seeks to provide as comprehensive an account as possible of the actors and events of the party, nor is it an intellectual history in its most familiar manifestation, which outlines the major thoughts and thinkers that inform liberal philosophy. Although the book indulges in sustained literary readings of a few novels,

3. The years I’ve designated, 1859 to the early 1880s, are perhaps not ordinarily referred to as “mid-Victorian.” I am co-opting this phrase for ease of use in order to isolate a period of political liberalism in the British nineteenth century that for working purposes is distinct from an earlier period of nineteenth-century liberalism as well as a later period of liberalism, generally referred to as the “New Liberalism.” This coinage therefore requires readers to shift their presumptive notion of the “midcentury” throughout the book. Political historians might be disconcerted to see me fold the late 1850s and early 1860s into the Gladstonian years of the late 1860s and 1870s, when, as Asa Briggs notes, most intellectuals of the day would call these earlier years “the age of Palmerston.” And perhaps even more disconcerting to historians, I am arguing for the particular cogency of idea and an especially thoughtful form of political opinion in the years when Palmerston was known for his anti-intellectualism and resistance to reform. He famously said, “There is really nothing to be done . . . we cannot go on legislating forever” (quoted in Macdonald, Age of Transition, 67). On the one hand, I am not trying to define a discrete period in accordance with contemporary usage. On the other, I would concede that the cognitive formalism I see taking shape is perhaps more subterranean in these earlier years, not fully operative within the penumbra of actually existing politics, but would become far more explicit and instantiated by the late 1860s. You see this reflected in the topics of each chapter. For work that elaborates on the turn into new liberalism, see Freeden, Reassessing Political Ideologies; Freeden, New Liberalism. For a discussion of the “age of Palmerston,” see Briggs, Victorian People, 88.

Politics as Unusual / 3

it is not, even so, a literary monograph on the political novel of the liberal era. It owes much to these myriad disciplines and settles in the overlaps among literary study, political history, and political philosophy, but, for reasons that I will specify more fully later, it consistently veers away from completely inhabiting their methods in its efforts to ask and work toward answering questions that have arisen historically from mid-Victorian political liberalism’s own prime directive: how does one live liberalism? In this era, after all, liberalism was a practical politics; it had a party, it informed legislation, and most crucially, it had individuals identifying with and expressing it as opinion. One could perhaps go so far as to say it was the first mainstream British political movement that depended so fully on people rather than property, opinion rather than interest. The project thus seeks to provide a thorough account of how liberal politics in the midcentury imagined its liberalized political subjects to operate. In this regard, the book takes midcentury liberalism at its word, describing and assessing the way in which an insistently self-described practical political theory conceptualizes the practice that is so central to its self-understanding; hence the chapters that follow are not a history of politics but, rather, a study of a particular historical moment’s theorization of politics as practice. Of course, as most scholars agree, mid-Victorian liberalism imagined its politics in terms of individuated subjects, not nearly so much in terms of groups or classes or masses. But most commentators, ranging from political philosophers to literary theorists to literary critics, despite the exhausting ubiquity of the term the liberal subject, have not focused on features of this individuation that are central to an understanding of this period’s politics and that ought to alter our sense of the trajectory of political liberalism and, in turn, its relations to democracy.4 This book will not transform major historical accounts of mid-Victorian liberal politics. It accepts the standard view that the mid-Victorian era of “liberal” reform by and large continues, with varied intensities and 4. In my own field of literary criticism, during the 1980s and 1990s in particular, the “liberal subject” was both the most ubiquitous and ironically the least historicized category during a period of scholarship when the motto “always historicize” had only intensified in a field— Victorian studies—that had always already been historical in its orientation. Despite this emphasis, the term the liberal subject remains by and large unspecified. A Google search of abstract liberal subject reveals that its most welcome home is in the pages of literary criticism. In most instances, the liberal subject of Victorianists evoked the Foucauldian revision of liberal individualism, a revision necessitated by his new understanding of the epistemic shifts of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century outlined in Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 195–308; Foucault, “Governmentality,” 87–104; Foucault, “Lecture: 17 March 1976,” 239–64. See also Anderson, “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism,” 265–89; Thomas, Cultivating Victorians.

4 / Introduction

unevennesses, the triadic traditions of modest centralization, moralizing secularization, and laissez-faire political economy that characterized the Whig and utilitarian reforms of the late 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s (Catholic emancipation, franchise and poor law reform, Corn Law repeal).5 Like James Vernon and some others, the book presumes that mid-Victorian liberalism sought to delimit the social parameters of politics and thereby to slow the country’s progress toward democracy, an outcome many observers felt was inevitable.6 It considers the Second Reform Bill of 1867 a useful historical marker for decisive changes in the political terrain, for it not only added one million men to the political rolls but also contributed thereby to profound alterations in the way that politics and governance were understood and enacted.7 The candidate form in Victorian politics, for instance, displays the evidence of these alterations. In the older electoral system, the candidates

5. L. Goodlad’s book, Victorian Literature, suggests that an emphasis on libertarianism occludes the civic component in Victorian liberalism. I don’t entirely disagree, but I think that the midcentury’s relation to the social is less about engagement with society than about an engaged disengagement, a description that takes more seriously the prevalence of disinterestedness and detachment in bodily comportment, modes of thought, and social organization. In this regard, the presence of self-help societies in Britain is less a sign of liberalism’s communitarian commitments than its aloofness from the poor. And the proliferation of volunteer societies that delivered charity and judgment could be seen as the disengaged engagement that a disinterested state demands. One need only look for signs of, say, Gladstone’s interest in and efforts on behalf of the poor and one will see just one instance of how much midcentury legislation is about formalizing politics, enhancing free markets, and occasionally rationalizing governance but only rarely managing the impoverished portion of the population. For books that emphasize, in different ways from my own, the disinterestedness of liberal government, see Parry, Rise and Fall; J. Harris, Private Lives; G. Best, Mid-Victorian Britain. Parry argues elsewhere that “laissez-faire” somewhat ill describes the mid-Victorian period of liberalism, which was less about free markets than opposition to the vested interests that appeared to liberals still pervasive within the state. He suggests that by the 1870s the state seemed strikingly less vested and more representative of the full electorate, and hence the standard mistrust of the state as a bar to liberty noticeably declined. See Parry, “Liberalism and Liberty,” 71–100. 6. See Vernon, Politics and the People; McWilliam, Popular Politics; J. Black and MacRaild, Nineteenth-century Britain. See also Lawrence, “Tradition and Modernity.” 7. Bentley, “Democratic Citizenship,” for instance, argues for the “revolutionary” period of 1868–74. See Hanham, Elections and Party Management, for a detailed account of the 1867 suffrage. The bill introduced the better-skilled tradesmen and shopkeepers to the voting rolls. It did not include working-class householders, whose rents fell below the high minimum, rural residents who shared homes (with their relatives, for instance), and short-term occupants. The small towns and mining villages were especially underrepresented. The reform emphasized differences already in place between urban and rural. As Jon Lawrence reminds us, the Reform Bills did not produce a simple mathematical increase in suffrage. Before the 1832 reform, there were actually more manual workers qualified to vote.

Politics as Unusual / 5

were routinely handpicked by the aristocrat whose property, commercial investments, and family influence dictated the politics of the constituency. More important, the very coherence of the political party across constituencies was premised on a community of interests that cannot simply be understood within a strict political economic understanding of interest (of monetary costs and benefits) but must encompass as well a common cultural embedment in rituals and customs, a variety of organicism, not solely Burkean, persistently associated with locality and the flow of influence localism made efficacious. Political liberalism at the moment of its emergence into party thus largely understood itself to be revising this story on multiple levels. In place of these parties constituted by status and the status quo, real property, and influence, the Liberal agenda substituted character and progress, liquidity and persuasion. Parties would no longer be expressive of local communities of reflexive custom. Instead, parties consisted of individuals (the phrase “independent electors” becomes current) conjoined by shared, deliberative political opinions formed out of self-reflexive thought.8 J. S. Mill gives succinct expression to this aspiration: “I cannot see why the feelings and interests which arrange mankind according to localities, should be the only ones thought worthy of being represented.”9 Although the development and management of an individualized opinion politics strikes me as a crucial period in political history to examine precisely because of its emphasis on opinion as a version of agency, major histories of Victorian liberalism, like the justly influential works of Jonathan Parry and Eugenio Biagini, narrate the liberalism of this era as part of an ongoing elaboration of early-century commitments to free markets and individual liberty based on constitutionalism (Biagini describes a plebeian liberalism, while Parry refers to the “fall” of liberalism) as they look ahead to the more collectivist and democratic and even demagogic tendencies of the later century that then seem to usher in the welfare state of the first 8. Miles Taylor would suggest that I am simplifying the political terrain. He would not disagree that candidates came increasingly to represent “mandates” but would emphasize that they remained far more a local, constituency-driven representative than an independent broker of national issues. I won’t disagree entirely with his caveat, as later chapters will show, but the shift to a man representing the people’s mandates, however locally pertinent, from a man representing a regional interest still holds. See M. Taylor, Decline of British Radicalism. 9. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, 141. Of course, actual politics was often something quite different than this liberal account. See Rubinstein, Britain’s Century; Dandeker, Surveillance, Power and Modernity; Cannadine, Decline and Fall; this last on the continuation of aristocratic influence.

6 / Introduction

half of the twentieth century.10 Both historians rightly note that laissez-faire principles had become so commonplace by midcentury as to not especially denote any particular political orientation and thus no longer functioned as a signal rallying cry for political liberalism. Parry’s measured understanding of Protestantism’s contribution to liberalism is unmatched, not least because he indicates its fluctuating centrality to liberalism’s efforts to differentiate itself from its political foes. In both books, however, a desire to explain continuity rather than discontinuity favors a flattening of distinctive periodic contributions. Put simply, and with their allegiances set aside, the differently inflected histories of nineteenth-century liberalism that are told by Biagini and Parry tell of a slow, bumpy movement from a somewhat mixed story of negative liberty to a final chapter of positive liberty. A book that overlaps in time and topic with my own, Lauren Goodlad’s admirably comprehensive Victorian Literature and the Victorian State, also seeks to make sense of this trajectory. In this sort of narrative, midcentury liberalism’s distinctive contributions regarding political individuation and ideation, the political public sphere, and political agency seem to me too refracted by earlier understandings of Homo economicus or later communitarian aspirations. This disjunction gives me license as I provide a more synchronic study of midcentury political liberalism.11 10. Parry’s work has been especially illuminating in regard to the religious dimension of liberalism during this period, a topic that admittedly gets less attention in my book than it perhaps ought. That questions of incarnation, of free thought, of evolution’s impact on the creation story, and of the Protestant ethic of self-examination deeply infiltrate this politics, and perhaps especially the politics of W. E. Gladstone, is undeniable. Biagini’s work has emphasized the communitarian qualities of liberalism and shown well the commitments of workingclass liberal electors. 11. It could be said that I do too little in this book to show how the utilitarianism and political economy of an earlier era ushered in this period. Likewise, that I provide no explanation for how this type of individuated liberalism, largely committed to libertarianism, moves into a more social democratic movement as the “New Liberalism” achieves dominance in the early twentieth century. To a certain extent, my aim is to amplify this period’s specificity and so to quiet the roar of teleology. It is also true that I think other work has done much of this labor, including what is now amounting to a masterly account by Mary Poovey of the British historical epistemology of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. See chapter 4 in Poovey, History of Modern Fact; also Poovey, Genres. I think Lauren Goodlad’s work on the liberal state and the novel also provides a map into the later era. As with my more delimited project on midcentury political liberalism, she shares some of my own exhaustion with the disciplinary subject promulgated by Foucault and rightly notes it compresses the relatively slow progress of centralization in Britain into a European model of statist governance. Goodlad’s work on the role of character in Victorian governance and in the novels of the period is a salutary intervention in this period, but this book will not concentrate as completely on “character” as work like hers suggests it ought. “Character” is indeed something new to my period of liberalism, and at various points in the book, I will evoke the term and think through its implications, but I

Politics as Unusual / 7

The tendency to tell a seamless tale is inevitable in historical work, but throughout this book I will try to concentrate on contradictions within those practices and attitudes evinced in liberal politics that nevertheless seem characteristic of this period. For instance, in its emphasis on disinterested pleasure, motivated social generosity (altruism), and cultivated thought, the mature J. S. Mill’s liberalism clearly and famously departs from Jeremy Bentham’s and James Mill’s hedonistic calculus, in particular their presumption that a common happiness can be calculated only through the aggregation of each individual’s search for self-interested pleasures.

Liberal Cognition What most distinguishes the later era of nineteenth-century political liberalism from its utilitarian ancestor is its idealism concerning the role of cultivated thought in political individuation. In A Turn to Empire, Jennifer Pitts felicitously distinguishes the younger Mill’s thought from Bentham’s commitments. Pitt notes: “For Bentham, nothing was at stake, morally speaking, in a great number of questions of taste or aesthetics, and he considered it particularly egregious to base legislation or public policy on judgments of taste.” She then juxtaposes the following passage from Mill: “as if men’s likings and dislikings, on things in themselves indifferent, were not full of the most important inferences as to every point of their character: as if a person’s tastes did not show him to be wise or a fool, cultivated or ignorant, gentle or rough, sensitive or callous, generous or sordid, benevolent or selfish, conscientious or depraved.”12 That individualism in this later period is synonymous with choice, with predilection, with judgment, of course marks its deep imbrication with a capitalist economy of consumers, but it also emphasizes how moralized and moralizing qualities of mind designate the individual. To be an individual capable of self-government, visible as a citizen in the public sphere, one must have character, and character consists of certain mental capacities. When, for instance, Edwin Chadwick, the exemplary utilitarian reformer of the 1830s, sought to reform the poor through the revision of the poor laws or the introduction of sanitary practices in impoverished urban areas, also want to suggest that it seems more important to me to focus on how the central category of political liberalism—the individual—in some sense folds character into its assumptions, so that political individuality itself is defined by the subject having character. A midcentury liberal individual is a man of character, and a man of character is a liberal individual. 12. Pitts, Turn to Empire, 137, including quotation from Mill’s On Liberty. See also Mill, “Coleridge.” I think Pitts overstates somewhat the virtue implicit in Bentham’s indifference.

8 / Introduction

he did not seek thereby to teach them how to think, as midcentury liberal legislation often did. Nor did he seem likely to tolerate the potentially unique and eccentric ideas generated from that thinking. Far more concerned, as was Bentham, with the manipulation of consequences, Chadwick was convinced that such consequentialism would alter the behaviors, not the thoughts, of the poor.13 He hoped to change the traditional habits of the poor through profoundly externalized processes of bodily regulation and repetition, one might even say chains of sensory associations, that left the poor person’s higher cognitive practices largely untouched or unrealized: hence his emphasis on pleasure and pain that had little intrinsically to do with reason, reflection, deliberation, and intention—or character.14 It is no mere coincidence that the objects of this reform, the poor, had at this point in history no political citizenship rights and thus no obligation to develop and mobilize opinion in the political public sphere during these years.15 By midcentury, two suffrage extensions had crucially shifted

13. In arguing for Bentham and Chadwick’s consequentialism, I realize that I am departing from Foucault’s famous consideration of Bentham’s panopticon in Discipline and Punish. In that reading, the regulation of daily activities (whether in the panoptic workhouse, school, or prison), supervised by a seeing but unseen punitive presence, results in the internalization of disciplinary forms of thought. I have always felt that this interpretation is a strong misreading of Bentham’s “Panopticon” and inaccurately anticipates in utilitarianism a disciplinary subject of cognition. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Bentham, Panopticon. 14. One piece of evidence from Chadwick’s report on the New Poor Law might suffice. In considering “whatever impels a man into a course of steady industry,” Chadwick notes: “If a man be driven to work hard during the day, it is no small security that he will not be habitually upon the prowl as a pilferer or as a poacher during the night.” In subjecting the body to regular, hard labor, Chadwick predicts a reduction in its irregular labor, as if the body is dislodged from its habits and itself learns regularity. See [Chadwick], “New Poor Law,” 517. See, as well, Chadwick, Papers Read before Statistical Society; Chadwick, Report on Sanitary Condition. To some extent, this tradition carries through into the midcentury, so that we can see a continued emphasis on bodily fitness and bodily self-regulation in the reform debates of the early 1860s—but there is an increasing tendency to discuss fitness in terms of not only moral behavior but also moral intentions, ideas, thinking. Although I think she overstates the corporeality of bodiliness in her account, see Gilbert, Mapping the Victorian Social Body, for a fuller description of this tendency. 15. I am not implying that Bentham aimed to keep the impoverished illiterate and ill educated, for he supported universal suffrage and assumed that all human beings developed in these ways. I am simply indicating that the emergence of a full-fledged opinion politics in an imperial context creates an environment where political-opinion formation exerts new pressures on a wider population’s capacity to comprehend and express political content. Jennifer Pitts sees in Bentham a deeply egalitarian agnosticism, such that his indifference to distinctions—in thought, taste, and character—produced a politics of deep inclusion. It seems to me she may overstate this case because many other scholars suggest that his indifference to taste was less a virtue than an incapacity, but hers is an extremely productive way to capture

Politics as Unusual / 9

this dynamic just a bit so that opinion and indeed the people expressing that opinion were presumed the engine of politics and of the legislative policies that were the governmental instantiation of that politics. Just what political opinion consisted of and in, how it ought to operate, and how individuals were to have and hold it became a central series of conundrums in this period and form a significant theme of this book. It is a core contention of Living Liberalism that mid-Victorian political liberalism was, in contrast to this earlier era, stoked by particular—and clearly still influential—practices of moralized cognition. These practices are genealogically related to, but markedly revised from, their enlightenment ancestors, such as those associative mental operations so prized by John Locke or the refined thoughts of David Hume.16 For the mid-Victorians, these cognitive practices still carried with them the Enlightenment promise of a better world but also the promise of a “good life,” a phrase that ought to suggest in this period a yoking of disinterested virtue to worldly pleasure in the actions of the singular person. By cognition, I mean the generic mental procedures of reasoning, knowing, and judging. By liberal cognition in particular, I mean a wide range of strikingly formalized mental attitudes, what the Victorians might call “frames of mind,” such as disinterestedness, objectivity, reticence, conviction, impersonality, and sincerity, all of which carried with them a moral valence. Included under this category of cognition are also what seemed to them quite specific techniques of thought production and judgment, such as “free thought,” reflection, abstraction, logical reasoning, and internal deliberation. Such attitudes and techniques produced liberalized ideas in the individual, whose ideas then entered the political domain as “opinion”—liberalism’s version of political agency.17 some of the important differences between this era of liberalism and the later period that is the subject of this book. 16. For a signal, and very able, instance of the continuing attraction of what I’m calling liberal cognition, see Anderson, Powers of Distance; Anderson, “Victorian Studies.” For my estimation of liberal cognition’s contemporary attractions, see Hadley, “‘On a Darkling Plain.’” 17. My emphasis upon the cognitive processes allied with liberal political agency does not, however, align my work with newer trends in literary scholarship, such as that of Andrew Elfenbein, which seeks to apply the cognitive science of reading to historical readers, or differently inflected work, like that of Nicholas Dames, which unearths in the mid-Victorian period a rich interest in the neurophysiology of reading and seeks in so doing to raise questions about the novel’s function. Although Dames is most interested in how Victorians imagined the cognitive effects of reading novels, he shares with me an interest in “the social norms of cognition of given historical moments.” See Elfenbein, “Cognitive Science and the History of Reading”; Dames, Physiology of the Novel, 19. For a once influential literary and intellectual history of the Victorian period that borrows the terminology and the presumptions of this phrase frame of mind, see

10 / Introduction

By “formalized” attitudes of mind, I mean to evoke the choreographed, rule-bound tenor of these attitudes. The admiring G. M. Young notes of this period: “But here we must remember that in England public opinion and discussion were bound by conventions—moral, social, and religious— stricter, I should reckon, than in any European country enjoying the same amount of political freedom.”18 I also intend formalism to capture how these mental attitudes function as “formal” approaches rather than particular contents. Mid-Victorian political liberalism outlines how one ought to think but not precisely what to think. Through this formalized cognition, however, the liberal subject’s ideation is itself prone to formalist predilections that continually seek to harmonize the disagreements, dissensions, and general disarray that otherwise upset the liberal mind, the liberal individual, the liberal political sphere, and society more generally. A contrast to democratic politics will illuminate these formal predilections. Adam Phillips elegantly observes: “Democracy . . . extends the repertoire of possible conflict. It fosters an unpredictability of feeling and desire. It makes people say, or people find themselves saying, all sorts of things to each other.” Despite Mill’s famous call to eccentricity and discussion, despite Arnold’s championship of “free play,” this period of liberalism, unlike Phillips’s democracy, yearns above all for order and predictability, for people knowing exactly what they will say to one another.19 Through the liberalized mind of ideas, a liberal individual might be extracted from conventional and habitual notions, abstracted from the corporate and physical bodies that traditionally bound human aspiration, and Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mind. Habermas notes the temporality implicit in the relation between thinking and acting in Structural Transformation, 94. 18. G. Young, “Liberal Mind,” 114. 19. Phillips, Equals, 21. The prevalence of cognitive categories in liberal discourses, both popular and technical—the repetition of “idea,” “reflection,” “conviction” and other related descriptors of thought—suggests that the political realm played some role in the lively debates occurring at this time in the fledgling fields of psychology and physiology. As this book will suggest occasionally, liberal cognition shows itself at times indebted to the associationist utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill and its revisions in J. S. Mill and Alexander Bain. However, the not-quite-metaphysical emphasis on a distinction between mind and body, the focus on certain mental practices, and especially the younger Mill’s persistent reliance on introspection rather than experimentation, could quite easily morph into language more in keeping with the alternative disciplinary camp of faculty psychology. Liberal political discourse evinces no settled philosophy of mind. As I will show in more detailed fashion in the next chapter, although its developmentalism relies on associationist principles, its ambivalent but vigorous promotion of formalism also shows at times a Kantian, metaphysical bent. Midcentury liberalism as a political discourse values the mind above all things but only absorbs rather than settles the epistemological and ontological questions of the day. For illumination of these psychological debates, see Reed, From Soul to Mind; Rylance, Victorian Psychology.

Politics as Unusual / 11

detached from the collision of insistent, competing interests that seemed to so many liberals of the era to debase and constrict public life. In stepping aside from contemporary partisanship, liberal cognition is routinely informed by historicist procedures, an attempt both to situate liberal thinking, liberal subjects, and liberal policies in a developmental lineage and to contextualize political thought beyond the present moment. J. S. Mill is perhaps only the most famous liberal of the period to insist on the midVictorian age as a “period of transition,” succeeding an era of relative stasis.20 And liberals as diverse in position as Matthew Arnold, Frederic Harrison, and Leslie Stephen could agree that European peoples were far ahead of colonial peoples in their capacity to self-govern—all of these men with varying degrees of awareness were revising the developmental models of the conjectural historians of the eighteenth century.21 As a vocal proponent of these practices and attitudes of liberal cognition, John Morley, editor of the Fortnightly Review and later Liberal Party stalwart, well delineates this distinctive frame of mind: “The speculative distractions of the epoch are noisy and multitudinous, and the first effort of the serious spirit must be to disengage itself from the futile hubbub which is sedulously maintained by the bodies of rival partisans. . . . This effort after detachment naturally takes the form of criticism of the past, the only way in which man can take part in the discussion and propagation of ideas while yet standing in some sort aloof from the agitation of the present.”22 The individual’s ability to think abstractly in the present and thus to simultaneously be in the moment but think outside it, marked his eligibility for other sorts of abstractions (for instance, the voter in an election, the citizen of the nation), but it also, oddly, made him an individual, immune from conventional and majoritarian assumptions. In this regard, a liberal mind was not only distinct from the reflexive habits of

20. Mill, “Spirit of the Age.” This cultural developmentalism of course authorized imperial domination. Dipesh Chakrabarty notes: “Historicism enabled European domination of the world in the nineteenth century. Crudely, one might say that it was one important form that the ideology of progress or ‘development’ took from the nineteenth century on. Historicism is what made modernity or capitalism look not simply global but rather as something that became global over time, by originating in one place (Europe) and then spreading outside it.” Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 7. 21. For a nuanced account of how Mill, for instance, altered the developmental model of the conjectural historians and moral philosophers of the eighteenth century and in so doing rationalized imperial governance, see Pitts, Turn to Empire, 123–62. 22. Morley, “Mr. Pater’s Essays,” 469. In this passage, Morley is specifically referring to the religious debates of the era, but these religious debates are arguably a crucial location for the animation and exemplification of liberal cognition.

12 / Introduction

the unthinking masses but also different in some respects from a reflective subject who engaged in what might be called “habits of thought,” such as those of a Burkean traditionalist or a Coleridgean associationist.23 Midcentury political liberalism valorized an individual’s repeated but perpetually renewing cognitive practices. Such cognitive practices were generally considered capable of reforming the subject and the subject’s world but not revolutionizing them, as liberalism’s radical predecessors, such as Godwin, had hoped would occur with the ascendancy of reason. In the gradualist history of Victorian liberalism, an idea could budge the course of history.

Abstract Embodiment Many political theorists and revisionist historians have thoroughly and quite rightly exposed both past and present liberalisms for the extravagant registers of abstraction that adhere to the liberal subject, abstractions that blithely erase particular physical and socialized bodies—women, the poor, the disabled.24 Integral to Victorian liberalism’s abstraction, then, is a masked and often disavowed reliance on particular sorts of physical bodies as well as their material and cultural prerogatives. Put bluntly, the white, male body of property and high social standing—as Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Catherine Hall, and many others have already noted in various ways—informs the normative category of the universal liberal subject.25

23. Jon Klancher refers to Coleridge’s interpretation of habit as a habit of thought, which is a kind of redoubled self-consciousness. Klancher, English Reading Audiences, 48. Mid-Victorian liberalism’s fraught relation to “habits of thought” will be addressed several times over the course of this book. Although liberals certainly wanted political subjects to reason in specific ways over and over again, many were worried by the reflexive quality inherent in habit, such that the routinization of liberal cognition was a continual source of anxiety. 24. For just a very few of the many instances: I. Young, “Polity and Group Difference,” 117–42; Gagnier, Subjectivities; C. Hall, White, Male and Middle Class; Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience. 25. Mary Poovey makes a similar if dissimilarly classed point in her pellucid essay on abstraction, liberalism, and modernity, “The Production of Abstract Space,” in Making a Social Body. Poovey provides a subtle and convincing account of the paradoxical status of another sort of body in labor: that of the laboring classes in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. In her account, Smith’s version of liberalism does not utterly eradicate bodies in its civilizing mission but, rather, oddly reemphasizes the materiality of the laborers’ bodies even as the laborers become “an instance of the same abstract entity, a representative of ‘human nature.’” Poovey quite rightly shows how liberalism maintains a necessary if mostly unacknowledged dependence on specific, corporeal bodies, a reading that seems analogous in this instance to the otherwise distinct interpretations of liberalisms by Harvie, C. Hall, and Negt and Kluge. Poovey argues that the body that remains central to Smith’s conception of modernity is a contradictory residue, and she later suggests that it might be an archaic remnant—”the persistence of older rationali-

Politics as Unusual / 13

Mid-Victorian political liberalism is indeed dependent on the particular, physical, and socially privileged bodies subsumed into its normative categories, which vitally influence its content. For instance, during the period under discussion in this book, “the University Liberals,” to use Christopher Harvie’s useful label, helped shape the contours of liberalism, consolidating its peculiarly pedagogical investment in liberal cognition. The evangelical upbringing of many influential liberals privileged self-examination, while the exclusive sociability of Oxbridge often situated intellectual exchange in private, among the intimate company of tutorials and college clubs. Moreover, the rigid orthodoxy of the classical curriculum produced, in response, the often equally narrow countercanon of utilitarianism and Comte and, later, the works of J. S. Mill, particularly his A System of Logic.26 Particular bodies, male and female, past and present, do not, however, constitute the chief subject under investigation in this book, though such bodies will continually circulate in and out of my account of mid-Victorian political liberalism. If mid-Victorian liberalism denies the importance of these bodies, it does so in part because their persistence reveals that liberalism’s liberatory mission was and remains unsuccessful, for gendered and classed bodies are, in fact, among the subjects who constituted liberalism’s object of reform. They are among the situated and habituated bodies of the “futile hubbub,” those excessively classified or habitually cast, whom the practices of liberal cognition aimed to replace with abstracted bodies thinking disinterested thoughts in an abstracted time and place of serene meditation. The sharp distinction between abstraction and embodiment implicit in these critiques of liberalism, therefore, misses some of the deepest commitments in mid-Victorian political liberalism. In retaining this bifurcation, I would be misrepresenting as antinomies the more nuanced relations between a liberal subject’s body and mind, the subject’s universalist yearnings and individualist tendencies, and the subject’s interests and disinterests. For instance, even though liberal individuals of mid-Victorian Britain were to be no longer hampered by “mere” personality, self-interest, and bodily

ties” (“Abstract Space,” 53). I do not disagree with this reading. I wish to suggest, however, that Victorian liberalism in particular evinces its own conception of embodiment, vitally constitutive of its political project, but by no means as disavowed as the role performed by this more fully corporeal conception of the body. 26. Harvie, Lights of Liberalism; Mill, System of Logic. For related general studies of midcentury to mid-late-century liberal “culture,” see J. Harris, Private Lives; and much of the invaluable work of Collini, e.g., Collini, Public Moralists; Collini, Winch, and Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics.

14 / Introduction

desire, their objectivity was presumed to be passionately embraced, their disinterested ideas sincerely articulated, and their abstracting techniques suffused with altruistic sentiment, all expressing an affect of rationality that needs to be accounted for in any description of Victorian liberalism. Most especially, a strict demarcation between the body and the spirit, seemingly evoked in Morley’s distinction between “partisan bodies” and the “serious spirit,” underestimates liberalism’s complex relation to embodiment. Occupied in abstract thought, in the domain of “ideas,” the individual seems, in Morley’s directive, ardently “disengaged” from time and space, cerebrally disembodied as a “serious spirit.” As the following chapters will show, however, midcentury liberalism’s core political techniques preserve abstracted traces of the bodily, at times an insistently situated body. Liberalism asserts a categorical distinction between mind, as private formulator of thought, and body, as public agent, but in establishing this distinction, it does not obviate some sort of coordination between the two because liberalism’s politics sought to effect reform in its present moment and on the ground—sometimes in quite literal and local ways. Liberal cognition thus engenders a liberal political subject and liberal political practices best described as “abstractly embodied.” In each of the chapters that follow, I will concentrate on distinctive forms of liberal abstract embodiment—the individual and then, in turn, the signed opinion piece, the elector in the ballot box, the liberal politician, and finally Gladstone as the abstracted embodiment of midcentury liberalism’s “cause.” I take these cases as illustrative of a pattern but not determinative; indeed, I very much hope that scholars and students will, after reading these pages, see instances of abstract embodiment elsewhere, in this period and in the longer history of liberalism more generally. Addressing quite diverse political issues and immanent crises, the liberal discourse that brings these cases into visibility nonetheless manifests uniformity because in each instance it posits a spatially imagined political place and a series of spatialized practices in the social domain. In each instance, furthermore, these places and practices are intended to replicate cognitive practices that are themselves imagined as spatial but also bodily experiences, as if the body carried with it invisible sites of abstraction.27 For instance, as I argue

27. In this regard, I am describing a liberal commitment to formalism that perhaps seems to accord with David Lloyd and Paul Thomas’s examination of the British nineteenth century (Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State). In particular, they discuss the nineteenth-century educational reformers David Stow and James Kay, who in describing their model classrooms

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in chapter 4, “Thinking Inside the Box,” the abstracted space of the balloting booth, isolated from face-to-face electioneering, contained an elector whose electoral “choice” was deemed comparably abstract in conception but located in a private space of the body now saturated with abstracted sensation, so that the elector felt intensely the moral and rational imperatives of the nation, the state, and the empire.28 Liberal discourse was trying to imagine the design and dissemination of the good life, such that the two modalities of abstraction that constituted liberal subjectivity, that distance between the private realm of cognition (a place of impersonality) and the public realm of abstract politics (a place of nation, citizenship, empire) could be elegantly and effectively bridged.

“constitute . . . a form rather than a content for education” (19). Thus far, I will follow their richly suggestive and polemical argument. As the book proceeds, I will contend that architectural formalism, even that which is presumed to individuate and “teach” liberal citizenship to students, is not necessarily the familiar account of, as Lloyd and Thomas put it, “simultaneous surveillance of multiple subjects and, more importantly, their simultaneous interpellation as individuals through their ‘training’ on the same elevated object, the teacher” (20). My interest in cognitive formalism seeks to suggest that form is not necessarily and immediately disciplinary in its intent or result. One does not have to concur with Lloyd and Thomas’s conflation of student, citizen, and criminal: “the emergence of the citizen may seem inseparable from the efficacy of another kind of reform and another mode of pedagogy, that of the reformatory” (58). 28. The empire and its subjects are integral to any study of nineteenth-century liberalism, especially the utilitarian branch headed by Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, George Grote, and the younger John Stuart Mill, most of whom were instrumental in the creation and persistence of an administrative state in Britain’s colonial possessions in India. This is a rich and deep field of inquiry. A few books are especially resonant with my project. For my purposes, Uday Mehta’s Liberalism and Empire expertly identifies the reasons why even this later period of liberal reform in the 1860s and 1870s found most imperial subjects unlikely candidates for cognitive reform, while Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest impressively demonstrates how integral to the metropole colonial pedagogical projects were. Needless to say, a liberal life well lived would face perhaps its most signal challenge in bridging its private realm of cognition with the hybrid and variegated publics of Britain’s colonies. Any study of liberalism, and in particular mid-Victorian liberalism, has to attend to the logic and presumptions that produce a discourse about harmony, moderation, and humanism and yet can write this sentence written by Anthony Trollope of the Australian aboriginal peoples: “Their doom is to be exterminated; and the sooner that their doom be accomplished,–so that there be no cruelty,–the better it will be for civilisation,” Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, 91. In my fifth chapter, I concentrate on colonial Ireland in particular. I do so not because I think it can stand in for all other colonies but because it proved to be such a central political issue throughout liberalism’s period of political dominance. It is the Irish liberal’s paradoxical status as voting citizen and imperial subject, abstracted embodiment and abjected body, which makes it relevant to and particularly illuminating of the political dimensions of liberal individualism at this time. Another text that is proving useful for me in considering the relations between midcentury liberalism’s formalism and empire is Dumett, Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism. For a useful survey of contemporary attitudes, see Eldrige, Imperial Experience.

16 / Introduction

Each case examined in subsequent chapters represents distinctive efforts to resolve tensions, to envision “transitional spaces” without pain, which enable the liberal subject to live an effective, happy, and tranquil life. As an ensemble, I think these cases encompass if not definitively constitute what might be considered a specifically liberal political domain in the midVictorian period.29 These abstracted forms are instances of the necessary social construction of what is imagined as an abstracted political mobilization of liberal cognition, sites where the idea becomes opinion and does its unique political work. In de-emphasizing the corporeal body and reemphasizing the social construct at this juncture, however, I do not want to be labeled a radical constructivist who is indicted, in Judith Butler’s translation of the critique, “as a linguistic idealist,” who “refutes the reality of bodies.”30 Rather, these forms of abstract embodiment are better described and analyzed as “materializations,” a term I borrow and adjust from Butler’s Bodies That Matter. Recognizing “that there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further formation of that body,” Butler calls for a conception of matter “as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter.”31 The forms of abstract embodiment under examination in this book are not, then, physical bodies per se—at least, not primarily physical bodies—but are always in a complex relation to them. For instance, although abstract embodiment at midcentury aimed in some ways to liberate subjects from the determinations of a sexed identity, Victorian political liberalism could not, even so, imagine a purely gender-neutral subject. Morley, for instance, must necessarily posit a “man of ideas” rather than, say, a “subject of ideas.” However, Morley’s “man” cannot be construed only in a purely biological or even in a strictly sociological sense, for his manliness is defined by his practices of detachment, which render him an abstracted man. As a result of these historical suppositions, I too will retain the male pronoun when referring to most of the following subject-forms of abstract embodiment but with the understanding that the term he ought to invoke for the reader the abstracted male body of liberalism even as it inevitably will also remind one

29. On the “case” as a form and for a rich examination of the presumptions at play in the selection of cases in historical thinking and criticism, consider this statement from Chandler, England in 1819: “The relation of choices to the normative schemes that inform them defines one way of conceiving the ‘particular nature’ of the case form, one way of understanding its peculiar mediation of generality and particularity” (197). 30. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 10. 31. Ibid., 10, 9.

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of actual physical bodies and particular liberal men, especially, of course, in the instance of William Ewart Gladstone, the subject of chapter 6.32 This decision to retain the convention of the male pronoun as universal seems to me most in keeping with the paradoxes of Victorian political liberalism. Thus, although traces of corporeality continually complicate these forms and in most cases make them possible, the embodied forms are distinctive formations of the bodily, materializations of the liberal individual that attain fixity and surface through their reiterated performance over time, whether, as in the case of the periodical signature, in its repeated presence on the page of a periodical, or, as in the case of the citizen, in the ritualistic use of the balloting booth and ballot box. This conception of bodily matter as a social process of materialization is especially crucial for forms of abstract embodiment in the mid-nineteenth century in Britain. Given its pragmatic goals, its commitment to instrumental reason, its desires to change Victorian society and the people who lived in it, Victorian liberalism still required a body to practice what it preached—to act and speak and realize liberalism’s political aims and to do so within the agential locus of the opinionated individual as he occupied the social domain.33 32. This study of liberalism is therefore necessarily engaged in thinking about Victorian formations of masculinity and femininity. In examining processes of abstracted manliness, I hope to contribute to what some have called Victorian masculinity studies, already admirably begun by others: see Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints; Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet; Sedgwick, Between Men; Sussman, Victorian Masculinities; C. Hall, White, Male and Middle Class; Dawson, Soldier Heroes. For a study examining the period just prior to the one under investigation here, see Fulford, Romanticism and Masculinity. In examining the fraught relations between domesticity and abstracted manliness, I am also building on a large body of historical and literary work, all of which cannot be cited here, concerning women, femininity, and spheres of influence. See, for instance, Langland, Nobody’s Angels; Poovey, Uneven Developments; Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction; Ingham, Language of Gender; Russett, Sexual Science; and, for a study engaged with questions of womanly embodiment, see Matus, Unstable Bodies. The abstracted manliness apparent in all the forms of embodiment under consideration here occludes a sexuality expressed through the physical body. 33. My central category, abstracted embodiment, may sound to some readers like a very distinctive type of “habitus,” as Pierre Bourdieu has described it: “systems of durable, transposable dispositions,” a subject’s “embodied history” (Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 20). Bourdieu argues that “the habitus could be considered as a subjective but not individual system of internalized structures, schemes of perception, conception, and action common to all members of the same group or class and constituting the precondition for all objectification and apperception” (Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory, 86). “Habitus” might seem a useful analytic insight into the forms I’m describing, especially insofar as—from a historical perspective—the abstracted embodiment of liberalism will be seen over the course of these several chapters to encompass what I’m calling the practices of liberal cognition but also its dispositions and gestures. Bourdieu’s own conception of “practice” aims to dissolve what he considers the incorrect divisions between “determinism and freedom, conditioning and creativity, consciousness and the unconscious, or the individual and society” (Logic of Practice, 55). Consequently, his term can

18 / Introduction

This book’s concentration on midcentury political liberalism’s forms of “abstracted embodiment”—a purposefully paradoxical neologism that seeks to encompass liberalism’s desire for a political subject who is abstract (and capable of abstract thought) but also individual, abstract and yet concretely materialized, “free,” though in its place—seeks to specify the peculiarly sociocognitive contributions of this era of political liberalism and thereby to deepen our account of liberalism’s genealogy more generally. These types of embodiment took into pragmatic account the temperamental and historical determinants that many liberals believed limited the developmental possibilities of each human subject. Earlier radicalisms often denied the determinations of history and temperament, but midcentury liberal theory asserted that civilizations commenced their histories at different times and progressed at different paces, and each individual came into the world not as a blank slate but as an engraved one with specific in-

be helpful to me in my efforts to see what I consider the important social constitution of the liberal individual in spite of liberalism’s own efforts to locate autonomy, originality, and creativity in specifically cognitive practices. What one might call, under Bourdieu’s direction, liberalism’s dispositions (e.g., reticence, reserve) and gestures (bodily abstraction) are frequently in liberal discourse of this period disavowed as intrinsic to mid-Victorian liberalism’s primary mental investments. Alternatively, gestures and dispositions are often folded into the agency and volition of the liberal individual. Because I wish to invest certain constitutive powers in the “mechanisms” (the balloting booth, the periodical signature) under investigation in this book as well as the practices those mechanisms codify, I depart in many ways from liberalism’s own ambivalence. I am, therefore, in need of some type of sociological perspective which registers this distinct position that can account, as I try to do in chapter 2, “A Body of Thought,” for both the conscious and unconscious domains of liberal subjectivity. Nevertheless, I am hesitant to mobilize Bourdieu’s “habitus” in this book. First, I worry that the premise of this sort of sociological analysis of mid-Victorian liberalism will encourage readers to simply collapse “abstract embodiment” into preexisting sociological categories of class, upper-middle class, “the intellectual classes.” These categories are indeed descriptive of many “actually existing liberals” at this time—a useful form of liberal critique—but are not the only thing that can or ought to be said about liberal subjectivities. Liberalism’s forms as I describe them might be read as merely disingenuous. At the most mundane level, this interpretive move loses sight of the simple fact that the forms of abstract embodiment I describe in this book are at any given moment and in any given text always a theoretical construct; they do not fulfill the material requirements of actual, “real” subjecthood that define the objects of Bourdieu’s sociological project. There is a strain of determinism in Bourdieu (which he at times addresses) and, especially, in some more popular uses of Bourdieu that, in collapsing cognition into social formation, can lose sight of the particular presumptions and commitments that any given historical discourse will distribute among these two central categories. Butler’s theorization of social embodiment more appropriately helps me focus on one important component of this project: what I want to call an “analytical description” of embodied liberal subjectivity in the mid-Victorian period. This description of embodiment also includes, therefore, an analytic critique, but one perhaps slightly more attuned to liberalism’s subtleties.

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tellectual and emotional traits.34 Conceding these verities—indeed, finding them complementary to its commitment to moderate reform—political liberalism was still able to infuse enormous optimism into the autonomous self-development that designates the liberty of thinking beings. The liberal individual, it needs hardly be said, is the ur-form of abstract embodiment, that which informs and complicates all the remaining embodied forms under investigation here. As I will discuss in fuller detail in chapter 2, “A Body of Thought,” the liberal individual as defined in the 1850s is the private subject who nonetheless is committed to realizing his distinctive ideas in a transfigured political domain. Beneficiary of liberalism’s laissez-faire, noninterventionist, and proretrenchment attitude toward governance, the liberal individual was an “abstracted” individual. Simultaneously comparable to other liberal subjects (“formal equivalence”), the liberal individual was nonetheless distinctive in his cognitive individuality and, in the political domain, his distinction hinged largely on the possession of a thoughtful opinion.35 Equivalence in this instance is founded on assumptions concerning a common “human nature,” or a set of common natural rights, the sort of categorical abstractions that Mary Poovey has described in her essay “The Production of Abstract Space” as functioning at many levels of social knowledge production during the mid-nineteenth century—political economy, economic production, and sanitary reform. Midcentury liberalism is therefore pointedly unlike the politics of nepotism that was presumed to typify “Old Corruption,” through which political subjectivity was constituted by the contents of one’s estate and one’s pedigree and thus inherited membership in traditional interest groups. Mid-Victorian liberalism’s abstracted individual was to operate according to principles of cognition—disinterest, impersonality, and individuality— that were not expressly partisan or contingent on any vested interests. Inspirited by abstract reason, the re-formed subject of politics could become liberated through “free thought,” releasing him from the class distinctions, or from the hoary habits and devastating impulses that had for centuries

34. J. S. Mill was especially sure of historical determination, influenced as he and his father were by Scottish conjectural history. The younger Mill had planned to initiate a new field of study, which he dubbed “ethology,” a scientifically based “study of character” that would carefully identify and assess human intention so as to predict ultimately the actions of a subject in any given circumstance. Mill makes a foray into the topic in his System of Logic in chapter 5 of book 6, entitled “Of Ethology, or the Science of the Formation of Character.” For more on this unfinished project, see Carlisle, John Stuart Mill. 35. Foucault describes this paradox in Discipline and Punish, 192–93.

20 / Introduction

consigned the masses to their subordinate fates, and instead constituting him in and through ideas that only then sought their public voice as opinion. In this view, freeing the liberal individual from the body required not disembodiment but reembodiment, a perhaps visionary project but one still dedicated to experiencing these new principles of political life in a bodily way. Consistently concerned with the newly enfranchised workers, with the tectonic shifts in party formation and with the daily demands of imperial governance, this variety of political liberalism wished to mobilize the individual of abstract thought in the realm of the concrete everyday, as a necessarily embodied life, as if a subject, in his role as public intellectual, were to function through a periodical signature in the public sphere or, in his role as citizen, were to carry a balloting booth around with him wherever he went, so that he might use the booth’s citizen-inducing powers whenever he was called on to do so.36 For mid-Victorian liberalism, the citizen is a profoundly cerebral and privatized subject form, and yet he is simultaneously a citizen of the nation among many equivalent national citizens who all live their lives with political aspirations in the here and now, seeking effective change. Even Morley’s intellectual subject, dedicated to the “form of criticism of the past,” is imagined as a vibrant member of the Victorian community, in effect, living his detachment.

The Distractions of Abstraction That forms of embodiment, especially those deeply concerned with cognition, are vitally pertinent to and constitutive of the historical construction of liberalism is overlooked or downplayed in many critiques as well as de36. Of course, the “everyday” can only be a mutually constitutive construction in relation to liberalism. Laurie Langbauer has referred to the everyday as “the very universe people take for granted around them, a firmament within which they can consciously locate themselves only (and only fleetingly) through a cognitive wrench.” Langbauer, Novels of Everyday Life, 36. In some sense, midcentury liberalism imagined its forms of abstracted embodiment as just those cognitive wrenches—moments and spaces of cognition where a certain sort of very conscious location occurs. In liberalism’s case, however, the “location” is always fraught. The liberal subject is both located and unlocatable, in an abstracted relation to its location, which, by the way, makes certain liberal, Victorian conceptions of cosmopolitanism rather difficult to comprehend. Langbauer’s representation of the everyday as an unconscious absorption does not, I think, adequately encompass the chaotic nature of the everyday that moves writers, such as Trollope, to, in her words, represent a “cultural totality” in its place (127). On a discussion of cosmopolitanism that seems informed by Victorian liberal categories, see Anderson, “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism.”

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fenses of liberalism more generally.37 John Rawls seems to me an influential and exemplary instance of this inattentiveness to embodied form, for he continues in his own work on liberalism a tradition of abstraction that seems consistent with accounts of liberalism (and implicitly modernity) that overemphasize its investment in abstract conceptions of subjects and societies.38 Most famously, Rawls self-consciously limits his subject of investigation to the exercise of what he calls “public reason.” Rawls is insistent that this form of liberal cognition—this “public reason”—is effectively abstracted from “the background culture.” In Political Liberalism, Rawls defines the central criterion of the “reasonable” as “general and wide reflective equilibrium.” Rawls continues, “Wide reflective equilibrium (in the case of one citizen) is the reflective equilibrium reached when that citizen has carefully considered alternative conceptions of justice and the forms of various arguments for them.”39 This reasonable and serene state of broadmindedness involves a complex, exhaustive, and exhausting consideration of political justice, a practice richly evocative of a liberal tradition that celebrates self-reflexiveness, devil’s advocacy, and a formalist attention to the shape of an argument, a tradition that centrally includes Victorian political theorists. Rawls demonstrates an assertive and recognizably liberal desire to sequester the citizen in the realm of cognitive abstraction, evinced in his parenthetical sequestration of the “one citizen.” The absence of embodiment as a theorized, constitutive category in work such as this registers liberalism’s ambivalent relation to its social mission and the hermetic and elitist traces in liberalism that recoil from the bodily, both the bodiliness associated with the masses and the sensing, feeling, material being that encapsulates the individual. Writers working within diverse disciplines and often motivated by different allegiances than Rawls have since the 1980s also referred to a univer-

37. Anderson’s Powers of Distance notes in Matthew Arnold’s work a “concept of enacted universality” (97). In her reading, understanding more fully this feature of his work operates as a kind of defense against familiar criticisms that he is “authoritarian” in his approach. Although I consider my own book very closely aligned to, using Anderson’s words, “the project of imagining how universality might be lived” in the era of mid-Victorian political practice, I am generally less sanguine than she that what I’m calling “abstracted embodiment” necessarily renders Arnold’s politics more hospitable to a left-of-liberalism assessment. 38. Rawls does deny a certain kind of abstraction from society: “Political philosophy does not, as some have thought, withdraw from society and the world. Nor does it claim to discover what is true by its own distinctive methods of reason apart from any tradition of political thought and practice.” Rawls, Political Liberalism, 45. 39. Ibid., 384.

22 / Introduction

salized liberal subject awash in abstractions. Whether benighted or inspired in his or her operations, this liberal subject has become a banality through the accumulation of shorthand references, as Alan Norrie notes, even as he proceeds to use it: “Generalizations always do violence, but there is an identifiable core to the liberal tradition which involves its conception of the individual as an abstract, universal subject endowed with capacities for rational action, autonomy and self determination.”40 In political philosophy and theory, this liberal subject sometimes originates in the French republican context, where rationality’s abstraction is absolute and absolutist.41 Mary Poovey has delineated how a conception of Euclidean space emerges in a range of discourses and domains in mid-Victorian England. In so doing, she shows how the period’s understanding of homogeneous space brings into focus new abstracted subject categories (e.g., the human being, class), which were mutually constitutive with the abstract production of value in the capitalist economy. Although Poovey elsewhere concentrates on the knowledge produced in and through these various registers of abstract representation, thereby engaging in “historical epistemology,” she does not primarily reflect on how a particular identity category of the period—say,

40. Norrie, Law and the Beautiful Soul, 78. Paul Passavant wishes to show how certain bodies are presumed by the abstract liberal subject, a point established earlier in this chapter, but references the same commonplace as Norrie. Passavant writes: “It is a commonplace of diverse forms of legal and political theory that the modern liberal subject is an abstract individual, unencumbered by social or cultural baggage.” He adds, thinking of the white male of privilege, “The liberal rights-bearing subject, however, is not as abstract and disembodied as the critics claim.” Passavant, “Governmentality of Discussion,” 115. Just one case in point is the work of Wendy Brown, who critiques but also assumes the abstract, universal subject in her book, Regulating Aversion. Patrick Joyce in Rule of Freedom also refers to “‘modern abstraction’” in reference to “new political subjectivities” that come into being through “‘repetitious actions; reproducible products; interchangeable places, behaviours and activities’” (108–9). 41. Claude Lefort, for instance, seems to imply this shorthand in writing about the advent of modernity. Lefort references the foundational crisis that occurs with the overthrow of the king (who had formerly represented the embodiment of the political realm) as a “disincarnation” of society, which leaves an empty space, where “the people” must anxiously supply the legitimacy that the king’s body once supplied. In asserting the king as the body visible and the people as that which lacks a body, Lefort implicitly posits subjects who are disembodied and, in existing through their rights, are abstract. See Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, 233. Also helpful is Flynn, Philosophy of Claude Lefort, xiii–xxx. Although mid-Victorian liberalism grapples with religious freedom and doctrinal skepticism, and it struggles with foundational anxieties regarding authority, this fall from visibility and embodiment to invisibility and abstraction that Lefort describes, one that resonates with Foucault’s own account in Discipline and Punish of the panoptic regime’s efforts to internalize discipline late in the eighteenth century, overlooks the creative and, admittedly, often unsuccessful techniques of cognitively informed embodiment in the decades after the French Revolution, in a country where revolution had been preempted by reform.

Politics as Unusual / 23

the Liberal elector or the Liberal politician—might be imagined to live and function through these new abstract categories (domains, discourses, disciplines), or how, in fact, these ordering abstractions might structure any given individual’s cognition.42 In looking for the lived practices of liberalism, then, I can supplement this account of proliferating abstractions because many of the abstractions that define this period, especially the human being, become complexly encoded in the forms of embodiment that liberalism supplies. The “disciplinary subject” of Foucault, governed and coerced, which reappears in less rigid but still singular form in Poovey’s book, cannot sufficiently caption the complexities and difficulties of a lived abstract embodiment that is intrinsic to the form of the mid-Victorian liberal subject. In moderating the claims made by Foucault in regard to the disciplinary subject, it is not my intention to rescue liberal political philosophy and political practice from a leftist critique nor to lobby for its continued attractions for our present-day political predicaments; indeed, this book is dedicated to describing political liberalism in a way that is, as much as is possible, disencumbered by liberal suppositions and investments. It would be comically disingenuous of me to claim that I am fully divested of the liberal suppositions that form of the object of my study, for the liberal ambivalences that take up my time in these pages are often ancestors of my own ambivalences. Even so, I am a skeptical delineator of this tradition. The contemporary vestiges of the processes I trace here have made it both much harder to see how liberalism of this mid-Victorian period actually imagines itself to work in the political domain and much harder to assess its success.43 To move beyond this current analytic impasse between the liberated

42. Poovey admirably maps the forever-receding horizon of abstraction made possible in empty space. She ultimately attains the prospect of a “single tendency” in what might otherwise look like a crowded topography of domains, discourses, and practices: “At this more abstract level, the history I have been presenting as a process of disaggregation assumes the appearance of consolidation or self-duplication. At the most abstract level, in other words, and in the register of representation, the disaggregation of domains, the specification of discourses and kinds of practice, and the institutionalization of protocols associated with specific rationalities constitute facets of what appears as a single tendency—a tendency whose terminus has been variously described as formal rationality, commodity fetishism, modernity, and what I have called mass culture” (Making a Social Body, 13). The periodic amplification of “abstraction” in Poovey’s passage, such that rationality, commodity fetishism, modernity, and mass culture can all be seen, and convincingly so, as a single tendency shows the extent to which my own study of the abstracting liberal subject might fill in a missing subjective category of abstraction in this account. 43. For discussions of the championship of Victorian liberalism for the present day, see Hadley, “Past Is Foreign Country”; Hadley, “‘On a Darkling Plain.’” Malachuk, in Perfection, makes a plea for a reconsideration of the way in which a state can assist in the perfection of a society and is thus a strong instance of this variety of rescue mission.

24 / Introduction

citizen of liberal idealism and the disciplinary subject of post-structuralism, mid-Victorian liberalism must come back into sharper focus. By providing this account, I also hope to enrich and, perhaps, to initiate revision in literary and cultural scholarship that has been deeply reliant on Jürgen Habermas’s influential rendition of the eighteenth-century public and private spheres and his theory of communicative rationality, both of which draw inspiration from this idealized liberal society.44 Committed to establishing normative standards of rationality for political exchange, Habermas shares this period’s belief in discussion and logical argumentation but has only modest interest in the way in which mid-Victorians sought to embody the circulation of opinion. Nor does he care much about the interlocutors’ character, as did Victorians, nor indeed how a particular character was understood to determine the very textures of liberal interchange, so that the necessary criteria of discussion—honesty, sincerity, and conviction— become deeply important and deeply elusive to Victorians themselves. Given Habermas’s influence, in particular his account of the eighteenthcentury public and much less his impressive description of its decline in the nineteenth, scholars are prone to drawing trajectories from an idealized moment of sociability and enlightened politics to their own periods of investigation without stopping in the Victorian period at all. For example, Lauren Berlant’s theorization of citizenship in the modern American public sphere has described its project in the following way: The intimate public of the U.S. present tense is radically different from the “intimate sphere” of modernity described by Jürgen Habermas. Habermas portrays the intimate sphere of the European eighteenth century as a domestic space where persons produced the sense of their own private uniqueness, a sense of self which became a sense of citizenship only when it was abstracted and alienated in the nondomestic public sphere of liberal capitalist culture. In contrast, the intimate public sphere of the U.S. present tense renders citizenship as a condition of social membership produced by personal acts and values, especially acts originating in or directed toward the family sphere.45

I find Berlant’s argument about the “U.S. present tense” impressively convincing, and my own work draws inspiration from her thinking on citizenship and its often incoherent rites of passage. I wonder, though, how

44. There is, of course, a tendency to dilute Habermas’s thinking, resulting in a very watered-down caricature of his description of the public sphere. 45. Berlant, Queen of America, 4.

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that present might be rendered if one had to redraw the line of intimacy through the intimate but obviously nondomestic, nonfamilial, nonpersonal and decidedly grown-up private sphere of a liberal individual, whose ideas become abstractly embodied in various ways in the public sphere.46 That mid-Victorian political liberalism was so wary of the domestic sphere’s insidious influences—its collective, even corporate practices and its modes of sociability—and yet privileged a domain of privacy, at the very least complicates an easy identification between the sentiments of liberalism and the sentimentality of the familial sphere.47 As the next chapter will more fully explore, the political public sphere in Victorian Britain shared little in common with the coffeehouse culture of the eighteenth century, idealized or not.

Thinking About Liberalism Throughout this introduction, I have made repeated reference to “midVictorian political liberalism,” as if it were a self-evident entity, requiring no further explanation. This description works well at dinner parties but is barely functional for this book unless I define it further. I am interested in a political liberalism that posits liberal subjects living liberalized lives in political settings.48 In part the book adopts this emphasis because the otherwise welcome post-structuralist expansion of “the political” into the domestic, the personal, the sexual, and all sorts of domains not formerly considered pertinent to the distribution of power among a population has by now diluted the potency of an actual politics that still exercises its will in the world. “Politics” also enables me to distinguish between a politics per se and governance. My book primarily concerns itself with the way that midcentury liberalism seeks to construct political behavior in the public sphere through political discussion and debate, in elections, and in the formation of legislation but not necessarily in the enactment of that legislation; my focus is on liberalism’s efforts to realize its theory in practice but not in ascertaining how the practice worked in actually existing realities or in

46. Berlant, Queen of America; “Poor Eliza”; “‘68, or Something.’” 47. On the constitutive yet marginalized role of woman to the domain of liberalism, see Dillon, Gender of Freedom: “The position marked out for women—particularly white women— within liberalism is private and familial. Yet rather than simply standing as external to liberalism, this private position—and indeed, the entire notion of privacy and private property— must be seen as crucial to the structure and meaning of liberalism” (3). 48. For work interested in liberalism as an aesthetic philosophy, see Thomas, Cultivating Victorians; Dowling, Vulgarization of Art; Stoddart, Ruskin’s Culture Wars.

26 / Introduction

identifying actual populations of people who voted as liberal electors.49 All these considerations bear on my work but are not its subject. Having stated my commitment to politics per se, though, I am not therefore referring to a political liberalism that strictly aligns with and is sufficiently described by the Liberal Party or its official ideology, topics that have been thoroughly researched by political historians. The day-to-day actions of Liberals and the Liberal Party necessarily inform this study, but its aim is not to detail the party’s self-description or to limit its sense of political liberalization only to those principles and procedures that were officially sanctioned by the party. I am also not circumscribing the boundaries of my topic according to the leading politicians or the leading intellectuals whom we customarily associate with this era. Mill, Arnold, Morley, James Fitzjames Stephen, Leslie Stephen, and Gladstone, for example, will be discussed, but I seek no comprehensive account of their varieties of liberalism. The object of investigation for many accounts of mid-Victorian liberalism as a politics or as a social movement are, in fact, these individual Liberals and their authorial and political corpus, and therefore, the most common methodological approaches are a particular sort of variation on the life story. In the aptly titled Free Minds: John Morley and His Friends, Frances Knickerbocker describes her method as “this story of a mind in movement, which is necessarily not a biography.”50 In so writing, she echoes J. S. Mill in his own anti-autobiography, where he denies a personal interest in the narrative and subsumes a nervous breakdown into the teleology of intellectual formation. “I do not for a moment imagine that any part of what I have to relate, can be interesting to the public as a narrative, or as being connected with myself . . . there may be somewhat both of interest and of benefit in noting the successive phases of any mind which was always pressing forward, equally ready to learn and to unlearn either from its own thoughts or from those of others.”51 Knickerbocker is writing neither a full biography of her subject, which would include more expansive details concerning the physical, intimate,

49. J. R. Vincent’s study of the pollbooks from the nineteenth century—spotty, inconsistent, but still of interest—suggested to him that the divide between Liberal and Conservative was largely distributed thus: “The essential division was between distributed property (mainly urban) and concentrated property (mainly rural), between capitalist agriculture and distributist urban petty production and exchange, between an urban ‘free peasantry’ and the great capitalists who ruled the only real Marxian proletariat that England had, the labourers in husbandry.” Vincent, Pollbooks, 25. 50. Knickerbocker, Free Minds, x. 51. Mill, Autobiography, 25.

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and otherwise personal events of a subject’s life, nor, strictly, a history of ideas, disarticulated from the men who thought them. Instead, she writes what might be a called a biography of ideas, a life narrative focusing on “a mind in movement” that tantalizingly qualifies as another variation on the abstract embodiment so typical of this period. Christopher Harvie, in his lucidly informative study of the second-generation Oxbridgian Liberals, The Lights of Liberalism, echoes Knickerbocker’s sense of the fluid movement of liberal cognition when he notes that “academic liberalism was protean; its stock of ideas and social preoccupations changed over time.” Because of this fluidity, Harvie eschews a history of ideas that might rely mistakenly on the presumption of an internal coherence in an idea over time, and he resorts to what he calls biography, but again, a biography that J. S. Mill could love—one that concentrates almost exclusively on what Knickerbocker might refer to as “minds in movement.”52 In this genre, then, liberalism’s trademark diversity of opinion is best brought under control by a formalized narrative of mental development, a life of the mind, a mind that possesses ideas.53 A focus on individuals, or individuals in groups, defined by their possession of ideas, describes a good deal of the best work on this era of liberalism. In Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, a justly influential political history of these years, Biagini notes: “I have followed an established trend in both Italian and British historiography by assuming that ideas matter and that they have a social and political influence, since people’s behaviour is deeply influenced by what they think, and especially by what they believe firmly.”54 Biagini’s description of his method and, indeed, of the Cambridge school of historiography to which he belongs echoes my own descriptive terms for this era, but unlike me, he treats the categories of “idea” and implicitly “conviction,” what he refers to as “what they believe

52. Harvie, Lights of Liberalism,19. 53. This approach also seems to inform the work of Martin Pugh, where strong political leaders are both his focus and the cement that makes sense of a liberalism otherwise but a “heap of sand.” Pugh, Making of Modern British Politics. 54. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, 2. Biagini’s position is specifically a counter to historians such as Patrick Joyce and D. C. Moore who, Biagini complains, consider party identification not “a matter of reasoning, opinion, understanding but of a discipline exacted or, more often, of identification with a ‘community.’” (5). In other words, he wishes to confer cognitive agency on the subjects who vote Liberal. To some extent, I am not participating in this historians’ argument regarding how party members become party members. Alternatively, I am suggesting that at this point in our common work on this period, we need to be more analytic about how the politics itself informs our agency; how liberalism has influenced the way we understand ideas, opinions, and a subject’s enactment of them.

28 / Introduction

firmly,” as ahistorical givens rather than key tactical constructions of the period that still, apparently, inform our deepest suppositions. Although Biagini privileges ideas, he understands them largely as midcentury liberalism does, as a priori informers of an agential opinion in the public sphere. Similarly, Public Moralists, by Stefan Collini, a valuable study that shares some of my interests in the mental attitudes displayed by liberal subjects, treats character, idea, and other central terms of liberalism as mostly descriptive terms rather than the prescriptive constructions they seem to me to be.55 As a result, these authors, for instance, replicate as content the diversity of opinion so dear to Liberal politics rather than approach it as one of the formal principles that structures what is thinkable as liberal. For my purposes, therefore, these methodologies too closely replicate the suppositions that inform their object of study and, as a result, treat as given the status of “idea,” of “diversity of opinion,” of “free thought,” of “the liberal individual” rather than examining them as organizing formulations, forged in the foundry of a liberalizing society.56 Too many features of this earlier period seem so familiar, so explicable to a certain present-day liberalized, scholarly perspective that the core practices of liberalization— individuation, opinion, sincerity, political intention, citizenship—simply are not seen as the immensely creative responses and, frankly, immensely weird and taxing practices they were and are. The inheritance of this liberalized perspective is by no means an exclusive possession of scholars who explicitly espouse liberal positions. David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, in their impressive critique of the liberal state, Culture and the State, nonetheless insufficiently analyze the mid-Victorian liberal bequests that shape their argument. They argue persuasively that work influenced by Foucault’s thinking on what he calls liberal governmentality underemphasizes how an existing “idea of the State” shaped contemporary

55. Collini, Public Moralists. 56. Anderson’s Powers of Distance, for instance, organizes its chapters by author and authorial ideas, likewise Thomas, Cultivating Victorians. Some observers might suggest—quite rightly—that my own efforts are shot through with liberal presuppositions. However, this sort of response to the left-critique of liberalism, which I identify with the Habermasian “performative contradiction,” assumes that liberalism is in effect the origin of rationality and detachment more generally, rather than an ideology that adopts and revises. As Anderson’s book shows, for instance, detachment characterizes a whole range of what we might call emergent, modernist attitudes, and liberalism surely does not have the corner on rationality. Indeed, my book hopes to show how little this is so. For more on the performative contradiction, see Panagia, “Force of Political Argument”; also Anderson, The Way We Argue Now, 134–60, where she espies performative contradiction in the work of Foucault.

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liberal practice.57 Certainly they are right: an “idea of the State” operated as a vehicle of political policy and made government’s relation to individuals legible. This “idea of the State,” however, is itself a mid-Victorian construction that not only conceptualizes the state as an idea but in so doing understands its operations in terms of midcentury political liberalism’s particular valuation of the location, production, and mobilization of the idea as opinion in the public sphere. For instance, the beautiful form of the Arnoldian state, which is the book’s signal instance of this era’s “idea of state,” and in fact later liberal conceptions of the state, which are profoundly influenced by this era of liberal cognitive formalism, are generated from a notion of individual “agentiveness”—for Arnold, “the best self.” According to Timothy Mitchell, a number of modern political theorists imagine the state as an entity that stands apart from society “in the unproblematic way in which intentions or ideas are thought to stand apart from the external world to which they refer.”58 The “idea of the state” comes to seem like the state as an idea and then, implicitly, the state “behaving like” the autonomous liberal subject who has ideas: the state who reasons, deliberates, and then achieves something not too unlike Rawls’s “wide reflective equilibrium.”59 As Mitchell suggests, some political theorists describe state activity in ways that derive quite directly, it seems to me, from these earlier figurations of the state as a liberal individual—a line of argument left untouched by Lloyd and Thomas. Mitchell describes such a state as “a machinery of intentions”—a phrase that uncannily echoes mid-Victorian liberalism’s tensions, as I will describe them in the next chapter, tensions between form and content, between mechanism and originality, will and reason. “A machinery of intentions,” then, seems to me a phrase that also registers the continuing resonance of Victorian liberalism in political theory. Although my book works in these same contexts and inherits these 57. Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State, 1. Despite our common interest in the pedagogical component of liberalism, this project’s focus differs from Lloyd and Thomas’s Culture and the State, which looks for a period prior to the mid-nineteenth century when what now appears to be the inevitable course of a profoundly disciplinary liberalism did not seem so inevitable, and thus to focus on a world of thought (1830s plebeian radicalism, especially) that has not been accorded its own formations of knowledge but only those refracted through the long shadows of liberalism. Such a project is commendable but very difficult to realize because it presumes the idea’s sovereign efficacy, as if the idea itself were an autonomous being, a liberal individual. 58. T. Mitchell, “Limits of the State,” 82. Theda Skopcol represents for Mitchell one of the theorists who has argued for “the return of the state” in political theory. Mitchell argues for a constitutive relation between the state as an intentional structure and the “modern individual” (93). 59. See Trouillot, “Abortive Rituals.”

30 / Introduction

same presuppositions and therefore cannot entirely avoid their replication, its aim is to identify and analyze crucial mid-Victorian categories—such as “idea”—despite their deep continuities with our own ways of thinking. Work by theorists such as Jacques Rancière and to a lesser extent Alain Badiou have especially stimulated this project as it has endeavored to “get outside” the long shadow of liberalism, while feminist political theory has assisted me as I consider the more irrational elements of liberalization. Both Rancière and Badiou posit a democracy divested of liberalism’s reification of discussion of opinion, a divestment that results in a radical reimagining of both the political domain and what qualifies as a political dispute, in Rancière’s case what he elsewhere labels the “distribution of the sensible,” a punning term that encompasses both rationality and more visceral sensations, such as bodily movement, vision, and speech.60 Rancière’s Disagreement engages the terms of Habermas’s communicative rationality and argues that politics lies not in a rationally productive exchange of opinion between two differing parties but in the more fundamental question “as to what understanding language implies.”61 He notes that conventional political interlocutors participate as speaking subjects in a debate that always already designates what counts as speech, such that there remains “the part,” to use his Aristotelian term, that simply makes “noise” outside the boundaries of the sayable, what Bonnie Honig might describe as a “remainder.”62 Only when this noisy part interrupts “opinion politics” does a real politics occur. Although I resist Badiou’s desire to reassert truth claims in philosophy, his impatience with liberal apparatuses— the vote in particular and parliamentarianism more generally—is perhaps even more bracing than Rancière’s skepticism, as it challenges as ineffectual what has seemed in commentary on liberalism and liberal democracy to be elemental to any political functioning.63 60. Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 12–19. 61. Rancière, Disagreement, 48. Rancière’s investment in the aesthetic as a potential site of political radicalism, most notably in his account of “the redistribution of the sensible” in Politics of Aesthetics, seems to me to produce a kind of backdoor formalism. 62. Rancière, Disagreement, 50; Honig, Political Theory, 127. McClure, “On the Subject of Rights.” Also see Mehta, Liberalism and Empire. 63. Since I am interested in how exhausted the “discussion of opinion” in politics and pedagogy has become, Badiou’s proclamations can open an exciting if somewhat dizzying perspective: “It is clear, then, that what politics is the name of concerns, and only concerns, public opinion. What is overtly eradicated here is the militant identification of politics (which, for me, is nevertheless the only identification which can ally politics and thought).” Badiou, Metapolitics, 13. In writing about Arendt and Revault d’Allonnes, Badiou comments on the reflective, indeed consumerist features of liberal democracy, expressed in both debate and the vote: “That ‘politics’ is the name of what concerns, not determinant judgement, but reflexive judgement. In

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These skepticisms inform my work throughout and in particular my decision to explore the more irrational emanations of bodiliness and cognition that equally define this era of liberal politics. This book gives credence and space to the utopian and thus appealingly optimistic impulse motivating midcentury political liberalism, which seemed to have freed itself from a Malthusian providential pessimism. It considers liberalism’s creative response to what were perceived as utterly new realities, its efforts to redefine and ennoble male intimacy, its aesthetic urge, most famously evident in Matthew Arnold. However, the book also aims to examine the mostly unremarked contradictions that characterize the performance of abstract embodiment in the political domain and its cognitive forms and mechanisms, contradictions that make its instructions for a good life so difficult to follow and that exert particular pressures on the rhetoric of liberal discourse, producing such oddities as the style of impersonal sincerity at work in issues of the Fortnightly Review or the studied distinterestedness that looks like distracted indifference.64 Given my concern with the sociocognitive component of a discursive liberalism, my work is perhaps most closely aligned with scholarship that describes itself as “historical epistemology.”65 I bring to this field, however,

fact it is not a question of laying down maxims for action, or of analyzing objective configurations. Politics is to be found in a public judgement which states whether this—which is not an object, but an appearing, a taking-place—pleases me or displeases me, and is exercised in the debate of such judgements” (16). It is Rancière’s Disagreement that has proven most helpful to my project, however. In his more recent work, Slavoj Žižek is thinking through the limitations of a standard left critique of liberalism and its replication of liberalism’s own reflexivity. In so doing, he is imagining how abstraction in modern societies is experienced. This work thus seems to be mirroring in the contemporary setting the sorts of questions I am exploring in an earlier era and, furthermore, is extremely suggestive in regard to why the conflict between liberalism and a post-structuralist attack on liberalism has been so persistent and without result. Žižek wonders: “How, in what specific historical conditions, does the abstraction of universality itself become a fact of (social) life? In what conditions do individuals experience themselves as subjects of universal human rights? Therein resides the point of Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism. In a society in which commodity exchange predominates, individuals themselves, in their daily lives, relate to themselves, as well as to the objects they encounter, as to contingent embodiments of abstract universal notions. What I am, my concrete social or cultural background, is experienced as contingent because what ultimately defines me is the abstract universal capacity to think or work.” Žižek, “Tolerance as Ideological Category.” 64. The theoretical claim that disinterest and indifference are like is certainly not a new one, but the aim to demonstrate precisely how mid-Victorian disinterestedness struggles with this dilemma in politics, and quite often fails, is the inspiration for portions of this book. Jacques Derrida makes mention of the relation between disinterest and “interestlessness” in “Economimesis.” Bourdieu also echoes this position in Distinction, 34. 65. Poovey defines historical epistemology in this way: a history of “the assumptions and conventions that constitute the epistemological field that underwrites the salience acquired

32 / Introduction

a concern with what one might call the practicing subject, who lives in and through the structural grid that constitutes its historical epistemology. I therefore employ a now-familiar type of discourse analysis in a few chapters of this book that enables me to see the more general trend lines across the range of individual practitioners of liberalism. In looking for these patterns of lived liberalism, I will sometimes lump together various policies and people not ordinarily put in relation to one another by historians. For instance, both the secret ballot and Anthony Trollope’s work are designated by me as constitutive elements in this midcentury liberalism, even if Trollope detested the ballot. Similarly, I cite an article by the conservative James Fitzjames Stephen as evidence for a cognitive liberalism celebrated by his famous foe, the radical John Stuart Mill. And more generally, I treat as a coherent ensemble both activist legislation and the commentary of legislative skeptics like Arnold, who was deeply suspicious of suffrage extension, and like Trollope, the civil servant who disdained its new exams. This may seem to diminish the vibrant divisions within the liberal spectrum at this time, but my book wishes to bracket off this diversity to some extent in order to see what it can find outside these reified categories of “individual opinion.” Some readers will certainly yearn for a wider representation of individual liberals and liberal texts (Henry Sidgwick, Thomas Hill Green, etc.), but I believe it is essential to treat the very presumption of “individual opinion” and liberalism’s commitment to diversity as objects of scrutiny in a history of becoming. In so doing, I hope that I can avoid what Michel Pecheux has wittily labeled the “Munchhausen effect,” the sort of theoretical analysis that unhelpfully posits “the subject of discourse as the origin of the subject of discourse.”66 Having said this, it might seem confusing to some readers that a good fraction of this book is spent thinking about one particular Liberal’s texts and that one Liberal, Anthony Trollope, is perhaps the least intellectual of them all.67 In these portions of the book, I engage in fairly lengthy and by identity categories at various times. . . . This epistemological field allows for the production of what counts as knowledge at any given moment. This field changes over time—it has a history—and it has its own distinctive categories—categories like domains, genres, discourses, disciplines, and specific rationalities” (Making a Social Body, 2–3). Also see Daston, “Historical Epistemology,” 282–89. 66. Pecheux, “The Mechanism of Ideological (Mis)recognition,” 150. Butler’s elaborated conception of performativity in terms of materialization in Bodies That Matter helps me counteract Victorian liberalism’s own tendency to posit the subject as producer of its subjectivity. 67. Vincent points out that the Liberal Party, for all its emphasis on ideas, could not always claim the intellectuals on its rolls (Formation of British Liberal Party, 22). This was always true, but especially so in the later nineteenth century, when Gladstone’s commitment to home rule

Politics as Unusual / 33

detailed literary close readings of his novels The Warden and Phineas Finn and a much less lengthy but still detailed reading of a scene in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The decision to isolate these texts for literary exegesis might seem to imply that, despite my disavowal, I privilege some lucky (or unlucky) individuals and their work, and my account of midcentury political liberalism is, in fact, literary liberalism. Long close readings also seem to suggest that the complexity of literary production trumps the textual richnesses of nonfiction prose and its variants, whose pages do not receive comparable attention in Living Liberalism. Writing at length about these particular novels, I am not seeking to describe Trollope’s liberalism or Eliot’s liberalism, though both might nonetheless take some shape in the process. Rather, I am implicitly suggesting that these two Trollope novels, for example, do an especially good job of narrating two varieties of political liberalization of the subject that are central to this period—the individual and the Liberal politician.68 If novels attempt to narrate lives, then, these specific novels attempt to narrate politically liberalizing lives and thus, by definition, to depict their characters’ thinking as liberal individuals in politicized domains.69 Dickens’s later novels, for instance, reveal sealed a split between Gladstonian liberals and unionists, the latter group including a large portion of the British intelligentsia of this era. 68. Because I am reading certain novels as narratives about living liberalism and the processes of liberalization, my critical approach differs from some other literary studies of politics in the Victorian period. Typically, literary studies have tended to think of novels as containers of political events, political figures, and political ideas rather than as discursive sites that contribute to the constitution of political meaning. Gallagher’s Industrial Reformation of English Fiction is a striking exception to this trend, but this admirable study of the industrial novels of the 1840s necessarily refracts the political primarily through the economic discourse of that period. Also see Brantlinger, Spirit of Reform; and the first section of Childers, Novel Possibilities. Looking at political novels of the early Victorian period, Childers considers the “Condition of England” question and engages how novels address utilitarian paradigms. A more typically conventional conception of the relation between politics and literature has certainly been true in studies of Anthony Trollope’s so-called political novels. In John Halperin’s comprehensive Trollope and Politics, he mobilizes what seems to him a self-evident term, “politics,” and writes, “Trollope’s political novels . . . tell us much about the politics of the time, the role of individuals in politics and of politics in the lives of individuals, and the way in which political and social systems interact and interdepend” (vii). Also see Pollard, Trollope’s Political Novels; Wall, Trollope and Character. 69. In focusing on liberalization and living liberalism, my chapter on Trollope’s The Warden perhaps most resonates with a text written, tellingly, by the political theorist Maureen Whitbrook. Writing on Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Angus Wilson, Whitbrook describes her method as “literary political criticism” and describes the mission of her book in this way: “The defining concepts of classic liberalism—liberty, equality, tolerance, openness, pluralism, for instance—are, in practice, difficult to reconcile with each other. That these concepts may be contradictory or incompatible is a major theme of this study; literary examples show this to be the case for individuals who try to live a liberal life. The incapacity of liberalism to offer

34 / Introduction

real engagements with the social policies of this liberal age, but they do not focus in any sustained way on how politics functions nor on how political opinions work. And although George Eliot merits more space here than Dickens, and in both Felix Holt and Middlemarch she portrays political events, her novels are comparatively less interested in politics as a distinctive domain, abetted in part by her profound pessimism about the functionality of any politics.70 Despite my comparatively limited range of novelistic reference, my readings of these few novels ought to work suggestively in relation to a number of other novels and poems in this era, even as this study strives to retain its focus on politics per se. As I discuss more fully in chapter 2, “A Body of Thought,” a good number of novels and a few poems in this era seem rather perfect elaborations of the social formalism that mid-Victorian political theorists and liberals attributed to their valorized processes of liberal cognition, such that the narrational practice models the relation between the liberal individual and the social that midcentury politics seeks to codify in the political domain. The literary domain as defined later in the century may even become a kind of refuge for the cultivated liberal individual who can no longer be imagined out and about in society. For example, George Gissing’s disappointed protagonists could be viewed as the representatives of real-life liberal individuals consumed by mass journalism who sustain their individuality in the pages of his narrative, which functions as one of the few remaining “spaces” where social heterogeneity and liberal cognition itself can be formalized. Many of these

practical guidance for living a liberal life, the weaknesses of liberalism as a doctrine that can inform the lived life of the individual . . . may be redressed in part by attention to what literature can do for politics through its complexity and ambiguity, its alternative presentation of political themes, its depiction of character, and its capacity to restore a moral element to political studies.” Whitbrook, Real Toads, 2. In Whitbrook’s readings of novels, character and individual are largely interchangeable, self-evident, and ontologically given terms. Nonetheless, her laudable aim to put political theory and literature in conversation with one another and thereby to think about the “lived life of the individual” anticipates a few of the central ambitions of this book. 70. Eliot’s occasional interest in politics also shows her to be fairly conventional in relation to gender. Although one could reasonably provide a reading of her heroines in relation to the procedures of liberalization at work in this period—as Dorothea seeks a way to put idea into social practice, for instance, or as Dinah preaches virtue in the public sphere—their femaleness inhibits their access to a fully liberalized political status and thus bars them from achieving an abstracted embodiment. Indeed, in Middlemarch, Dorothea’s acceptance of her desiring, irrational self is portrayed as necessary, domestic, and markedly apolitical, while Will Ladislaw’s volatility is eventually coded, as it is with Phineas Finn, as the necessary but also unfortunate reality of the politicization of opinion. This risky transition from private idea to political opinion works for men, but womanly volatility, at least for Eliot, cannot travel this path in the midVictorian period.

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novels therefore have broadly liberalized formal aims, but they do not also focus on politics per se. Given these commitments to political liberalism’s everyday functionality, Trollope is a good place to settle, but Living Liberalism also performs a closer reading of Mill’s Autobiography and looks as well at autobiographies by Trollope and Gladstone, and an essay by James Fitzjames Stephen—not to reify their particular ideas or their particular lives but to find the formalizing assumptions that make the texts signal theoretical expressions of this era’s liberal individual—distinguished by its cultivated thought, the impersonality of its self-presentation, and its developmentalism. Parliamentary debates, periodical essays, and travel literature, by contrast, may provide brief vignettes of liberalism as a lived political practice and are thus generously cited as evidence, but they offer nothing as sustained as these novels by Trollope or an autobiography by Mill. I am perhaps making particular claims for Trollope. The first claim is by no means surprising, for it simply states that of all well-known midVictorian novelists, he produced the work that was most engaged in representing the specifically political liberalization of his society, and, in so doing, his novels render into narrative what are also imagined elsewhere, in other genres, as the lived protocols of liberalism. In this regard, then, I am asserting that the novel as a genre of this era operates on certain assumptions regarding its relation to the quotidian, to the probabilities associated with the quotidian nature of living, to the developmental model of human growth, and certainly to the role of individual character in the unfolding of narrative, and so on. I am perhaps not equally focusing on the generic specificities of parliamentary papers or newspaper leaders as I do on the form of the Fortnightly Review, and surely some portion of this incommensurability reflects my training as a literary critic, but it is by no means a sufficient interpretation. Although readers usually read monographs selectively and teach individual chapters in their classrooms, this book’s claims will perhaps seem the most compelling to those who read the entire book, as each chapter approaches core liberal practices from new angles, accumulating along the way the widest range of evidence. Phineas Finn, for instance, garners a good deal of my attention because it explicates in time and space a concept of “occupation” that is supported by land and electoral legislation of the period and evokes crucial liberal practices that the subsequent chapter on Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign revisits and fills in. My second claim for Trollope adheres closely to his own habits of ordinariness, manifest in so many registers: Trollope’s dampening of literary

36 / Introduction

ambition in his day job in the civil service, his bland recourse to maxims in the face of human inscrutability, and his embrace of characters that are no better or worse than they ought to be. Midcentury liberal politics seriously and skeptically accepts the intrusion of the ordinary into the political domain, and Trollope’s committed mediocrity, his own mixed bag of insight and obtuseness, adequately formulates the energetic ambivalence of this particular political era and of a liberal politics more generally. In the end, as with many scholarly projects, my conscious decisions and less-conscious capacities have produced a book whose use of evidence and methodological practices will look quirky to some readers. Its ultimate justification will have to rely on the value of the insights it offers to the range of readers it attracts. Readers coming to this book with a primary interest in literary analysis and the novel will find in chapters 2, 5 and 6 the most sustained engagement with the liberal subject and its realization in literary practices, such as narrative, characterization, and authorship, while those intrigued by the notion of Victorian liberalism as an elaboration of an opinion politics will discover the strongest instantiation of that claim at work in chapters 2, 3, 4, and 6. Even as I provide these guides to reading, however, I must emphasize that the book’s strength wishes to reside in its ability to operate between and across disciplinary divides, and I therefore welcome my readers to mix it up.

Liberalization in Chapters In chapter 1, “Liberal Formalism in an Informal World,” I describe by way of context the Victorian society that midcentury political liberalism ambivalently inhabits and its distinctive response to it. With increasing numbers of voices, both within the political sphere and in the public sphere of mass entertainment more broadly mapped, mid-Victorian Britain seemed a cacophonous mystery which liberalism sought to formalize into political legibility. In describing these formalizing tendencies, I will also start to explain how mid-Victorian liberalism’s complex relation to its own formalist tendencies retains the traces of its deeply mixed response to social and cultural expansion within Britain and its colonies. In chapter 2, “A Body of Thought: The Form of Liberal Individualism,” the “liberal individual” will be the subject of discussion. Although celebrated for his ode to individuality and discussion in On Liberty, Mill wrote an autobiography whose narrative underscores how the disorder of personality and the risks of people saying, in Adam Phillips’s words, “all sorts of things to each other” produces a character, in response, who

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eschews the personal for impersonality and regulates the impolitic to the formalized exchanges of internal deliberation.71 The normative nature of this liberal individual becomes clear when I show how it is repeated in more depth in Trollope’s novel The Warden. Not known for its particularly political themes, the novel even so represents in the character of Septimus Harding the way in which certain High Victorian novels, long considered the home of the “abstract liberal subject,” actually dramatize the abstracted embodiment so central to midcentury political liberalism’s procedures of individuation. In so doing, The Warden registers both the possibility and impossibility of living liberalism. In chapter 3, “A Frame of Mind: Signature Liberalism at the Fortnightly Review,” I turn to this liberal periodical to examine midcentury political liberalism’s attempted revision of the public sphere through the journal’s own privileged form of abstract embodiment: the signed opinion piece. Founded in the mid-1860s, the journal declared its reformist intention to introduce a diversity of opinion in its pages and to append authors’ signatures to published articles. Prior to this decade, most mainstream Victorian publications and newspapers were considered to represent easily recognizable interests—political parties, religious sects, moral reform movements, and so forth. In these publications, editorial policies strictly enforced the party line in all published pieces so that the universe of journalism was characterized by its calcified factions. The Fortnightly Review in effect imagined the pages of its journal as its own highly controlled public sphere, where popular opinion, continually bemoaned for its inconsistency and factional partisanship, could be replaced by a formal exchange of disinterested ideas within the journal’s pages that concluded with an authorial “signature”—in effect, the materialization of “individual opinion.” In the view of John Morley, the periodical’s second and most influential editor, sectarian thought gives way to “free thought.” The journal then functions as an abstract space for liberal cognition, for it managed the potential explosiveness of public opinion by formalizing its potentially factionalized collision as “a play of ideas” whose diversity of content nonetheless resulted in a predictable homogeneity of form. Chapter 4, “Thinking Inside the Box: The Ballot and the Politics of Liberal Citizenship” explores another version of abstract embodiment in the political public sphere: the liberal citizen of the ballot box, a formation that emerges in the debates concerning secret balloting, which was made into law in 1872. Unlike other chapters, this one focuses on particular leg71. A. Phillips, Equals, 21.

38 / Introduction

islation or, to be more precise, on the aspirations invested in secret voting and the mechanisms presumed capable of achieving them. Despite the persistent ambivalence regarding “machinery,” liberal supporters saw in the ballot box a liberal method of re-cognition, where the impositions of personal interest—the wife, the income, and so on—could be abstracted into registers deemed more necessary for a self-governing citizen in a liberal society, such as the nation and the empire. Chapter 5, “Occupational Hazards: The Irishness of Liberal Opinion,” shifts the book into new territory by turning not only to midcentury political liberalism’s deeply fraught relation to Ireland and in this way placing midcentury liberalism in its appropriate imperial context but also to a consideration of how midcentury liberal politics seeks grounding authority in a precarious world of opinion. This chapter concerns itself with how a political philosophy so aligned with disinterest and detachment accommodates itself to the professionalization of liberal politics. In effect, the chapter asks: What constitutes the occupation of the liberal politician? And how does a politician take a stand in the “heap of sand” that is the Liberal Party? Through an extended examination of the Irish Land Act of 1870 and the novel Phineas Finn, I argue that a conception of “occupation,” emerging in electoral and land legislation at the time, becomes a surprising foundation for the liberal citizen in an imperial nation. As Catherine Hall asserts, “critical moments in the construction of the British nation cannot be made sense of outside the colonial context.”72 In Trollope’s novel Phineas Finn: The Irish Member, a liberal politician is shown, to the shocked surprise of Trollope’s racially sensitive readers, to be nothing less than an Irishman and just as prone to volatility and sentimentalism and impulsiveness. Though others read this novel as thus a scathing criticism of a failed liberalism, I hope to show how integral and yet disruptive these qualities are to a practical liberal politics that must realize its liberal convictions in a distractible, preoccupied body rather than in landed property. “A Body of Opinion: Gladstonian Liberalism,” the last chapter of the book, investigates the arduous means by which a liberal politics circulated into the larger population, when “plebeian liberalism” and party politics seemed to be rapidly transforming the political terrain to a mass politics organized by ideology rather than ideas, by sentiment rather than thought. In particular, it will explore the changes incurred in the candidate form as regional concerns give way to national ones and the individual elector was newly asked to have efficacious opinions regarding locations and ob72. C. Hall, “Rethinking Imperial Histories,” 29.

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jects alien to him. Middlemarch shows itself acutely alert to these changes, portraying the electoral process as worryingly improvisational, a performative challenge that is elaborated by actual Liberal candidates in this period. This chapter expands on the earlier examinations of liberal individualism, abstract embodiment, and character by studying their conversion into another form—the liberal celebrity—embodied in the persona of William Ewart Gladstone, by the late 1870s the “Grand Old Man” of political liberalism. Rather than promulgating a “cult of personality,” as many scholars argue, the famous open-air Midlothian campaign of Gladstone’s later political career was an improvisational response to these alterations of the political landscape.

Politics as Vacation The active voluntary part of man is very small, and if it were not economized by a sleepy kind of habit, its result would be null. We could not do every day out of our own heads all we have to do. —Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution

Cognition, individuality, and conviction define the midcentury variant of British liberalism, values that seemed to promise a tranquil and predictable political domain in an era when the recent history of politics had been turbulent and arbitrary—a long period of revolutionary foment, war, and pervasive social unrest. In this search for a less-intense, less-saturated political domain, midcentury liberal principles codify arduous, earnest civic practices that paradoxically pacify the liberal subject in unplanned ways, for, after all, “we could not do every day out of our own heads all we have to do.” Walter Bagehot, the most ornery pragmatist of mid-Victorian liberals, often foregrounded that which most liberal practice minimizes or disavows. Emphasizing sleepy habit at moments of intense cerebration, and imitation of social betters when originality was most highly prized, Bagehot’s quirky view reveals the vexed impulses and consequences of liberalization, of living as a liberal, which the next two chapters begin to elaborate.

CHAPTER ONE

Liberal Formalism in an Informal World

In 1862, a few short years after the official founding of the Liberal Party, James Fitzjames Stephen, brother of Leslie and soon to be an influential member of the viceroy’s council in India, sought to define liberalism at midcentury. The essay could be considered a sort of founding document for this period’s liberalism and will operate as a principal piece of evidence in this chapter as it attempts to provide a more global account of midcentury liberalism’s peculiar formalisms. Noting that many commentators conflated liberalism with democracy and the liberal with the libertine, Stephen assertively reestablishes distinctions in his essay “Liberalism,” published in the Cornhill Magazine. Blaming Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens for massproducing “stern and somewhat terrible looking working men who are always embodying profound observations in studiously bad grammar,” Stephen urges his readers “to watch the way in which real mechanics and labourers talk, speak, and argue, and to observe the tone of the books and newspapers which they really like to read.”1 By comparing the false embodiments of a literary ideal with the literal real, readers would see that a political liberalism that blurs into democracy is in danger of “deifying almost casual public opinions and slight and ineffectual public sentiments” (“Liberalism,” 80). Despite the rich imaginations of the novelists, which Stephen concedes, the workingman of democracy and the thinking man of liberalism are not in any way alike. As Stephen insists, “there is more difference and a more durable difference, between minds which have and

1. J. Stephen, “Liberalism,” 78 (hereafter cited in text as “Liberalism”).

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have not been formed by a liberal education than between the bodies of a sedentary invalid and a trained athlete” (“Liberalism,” 78). Although Stephen is perhaps best known now for his stringent attack on On Liberty and his veneration for force rather than discussion and truth rather than opinion, his essay in the Cornhill Magazine uncannily describes the way in which midcentury liberalism in virtually all its varieties worries about the “embodying” of “casual public opinion.” Stephen seems equally troubled by the actual bodies of opinion—“labourers, mechanics, and small shopkeepers”—and by the way those bodies comport their opinion, how they “talk, speak and argue” (“Liberalism,” 77). In response to these casual bodies of opinion, whose casualness declines into physical and mental invalidism, Stephen supplies another body of opinion—the “trained athlete” who is “formed by a liberal education” and more than able “to classify, to distinguish, or to infer.” And, indeed, as Stephen himself commences to distinguish between laborers and liberals, he exemplifies the cognitive capacities that a liberal education forms, which in turn formalize the body of opinion, no longer the libertine of the Byronic era, or the laborer who lacks grammar, but the liberal “guided by a highly instructed, large-minded, and impartial intellect” (“Liberalism,” 72). “Those only are entitled to the description as well as to the name of liberals, who recognize the claims of thought and learning, and of those enlarged views of men and institutions which are derived from them, to a permanent preponderating influence in all the great affairs of life” (“Liberalism,” 80). Arguably more enamored of the law and order that makes liberty possible than the creative expression of liberty itself, Stephen even so echoes more radical liberals of the era as he emphasizes the role of thought and ideation in opinion formation. For more reform-minded liberals of this era, like the authors of the famous 1867 Essays on Reform, a widely noted volume arguing for suffrage extension, the working classes deserve political representation precisely because they are, to use R. H. Hutton’s words, “so open to the influence of a few great ideas.” Stephen and Hutton, at this time on distant ends of the liberal spectrum, agree that political opinion should have something to do with ideas. And despite their different estimation of the laboring population, they both seem to agree that the workers are more likely to be “influenced” by ideas than to think them. Indeed, though he determines them ready to vote, Hutton also shows some concern about what Stephen calls the “embodying” of “casual public opinion.” Invoking a permeable surface and obliquely positing a sort of spongelike body, Hutton notes that working-class enthusiasm for an idea can go too far; workingmen can be “too porous, too open to such influences, to discriminate

Liberal Formalism in an Informal World / 43

sufficiently between the great ideas and the small.”2 Whether too casual or too zealous, these workingmen may be willing to sacrifice for a cause at the same time as they lack the cognitive capacity to make distinctions that a liberalized perspective also demands. At midcentury, as Stephen’s and Hutton’s articles evince, cognitive criteria for opinion formation were pervasively offered and debated. It was at this time that liberalism was trying to formalize opinion by revising the relations between thought and political practice, between interest and disinterestedness, and between embodiment and abstraction in a world filled with bodies of “casual” and “porous” opinion. Victorian liberals across the spectrum were deeply disconcerted by this contemporary world full of new readers, new books, and new newspapers—a period of transition, as J. S. Mill, and Comte before him, asserted, when what counted as the public was no longer recognizable. Although the years following the end of the Crimean War (March 1854–February 1856) were considered by contemporaries to be years of peace and prosperity, a period of “equipoise,” they were also years of cultural ferment when the social and political domains seemed to be undergoing profound transformations.3

The Public Sphere at Midcentury By the mid-nineteenth century, the “reading public,” which Habermas postulates as the occupant of the early eighteenth-century bourgeois public sphere, was expanding quickly. The newspaper tax was abolished in 1855 and the paper duty by 1861, such that during the 1860s, affordable reading material exponentially increased and “daily papers became for the first time a mass-market staple.”4 The rapid increase in reading materials and readers led to the formation of demographic market niches. The complex, 2. R. H. Hutton, “The Political Character,” 35, 36. Hutton concludes his essay, “I believe, then, that while the working class show undoubtedly less intellectual range than the so-called ‘educated classes,’ they show, partly on that account a more sure instinct as to which are the great political ideas of the day, and a more unwavering fidelity to them, which will be of the greatest use in increasing the efficiency of Parliament” (44). Largely written by university liberals, Essays on Reform was an expression of the educated, radical arm of the Liberal Party collective, for whom, admittedly, ideas mattered greatly. 3. For the age of equipoise, see Burn, Age of Equipoise. For a prehistory of public opinion, broadly conceived, see Wahrman, “Public Opinion,” in which Wahrman helpfully notes that “public opinion” in the late eighteenth century “was perceived as divinely ordained, the manifestation of the hand of providence in human affairs; as one speaker put it with unbound confidence, these were indeed ‘magic words’” (93). As the decades pass, public opinion loses this providential provenance, and increasingly its worthiness is questioned. 4. Stoddart, Ruskin’s Culture Wars, 14.

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creative flux, which Jon Klancher argues characterized earlier generations of radical, romantic, and reactionary readers, gave way to a public perceived to be rigidly partisan, with each “serious” periodical, for instance, merely reflecting a clearly defined interest group, be it the Conservative Party, the temperance community, or little girls at home.5 At the same time, most of the new newspapers, although they, too, were sectarian, nonetheless promoted in their rhetoric a “public opinion” that many contemporary readers could not fathom. As new readers and new electors flooded traditional domains of public discourse (print circulation and political debate), the boundaries that defined the public sphere and thus its public were blurred. “Public opinion” seemed almost indistinguishable from mass opinion. Fronting an increasingly literate but unknown society, Matthew Arnold, for instance, found in the “culture” concept a way to make meaningful degrees of distinction within a neutral notion of literacy that too generously, he thought, included those who could just barely sign their names, read only the simplest journalistic prose, and submit to the most blatant expressions of rhetorical persuasion, themselves untrained to consider “the forms of various arguments,” as Rawls in Political Liberalism describes the truly liberalized citizen. Note how Arnold in Culture and Anarchy shares James Fitzjames Stephen’s impulse, as he responds to “public opinion” by making his famous distinctions—“Barbarians,” “Philistines,” “the Populace.” Mass culture’s lack of any detectably concrete origin or recognizable constituency and its proliferation of “mass subjects,” to borrow Michael Warner’s term, seemed to operate without orderly and responsible principles of cognition and volition, without ideas.6 Fueled by a policy of anonymity, the newer journalism seemed to occupy an abstract subject position (“public opinion”) while serving another abstract subject position (“mass society”), thereby producing a world devoid of thinking individuals. For mid-Victorians, the mass public’s variety of abstraction was worryingly invisible because this politicized population no longer made itself known to the police by congregating in a square but read newspapers during private time. They no longer seemed recognizable as the tenants, merchants, and laborers populating one’s county but were the unfamiliar masses, undifferentiated by and indifferent to status in a society where hierarchy was still

5. Klancher, English Reading Audiences, 38–46. The contentiousness of this factionalism was exhausting to many critics, notably Arnold and Ruskin, who both sought harmony and order in their different aesthetic programs. On Ruskin’s project, see Stoddart, Ruskin’s Culture Wars, 1–22. 6. Warner, “Mass Public,” 382.

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supposed to render the external world legible.7 Such paranoia-inducing abstraction was only compounded by the practice of anonymity employed by all the newspapers because the entire exchange between readers and writers was without human referent. As one writer for Saint Paul’s Magazine writes of the anonymous author in the popular press, “It claims a right to speak in the name of that strange abstraction, public opinion.”8 Unlike the republican public sphere described by Michael Warner in The Letters of the Republic, unlike the Augustan public sphere described by Habermas, the mid-Victorian public sphere is by no means the object or organ of valued public discourse but rather a phantasmagoric threat to the given realities of liberal status.9 Such utterly mediated mass publicity and its mass audience signified a new era of politics, liberals averred, where the rational publicity grounded in the virtues of sociability that was celebrated by so many notable political thinkers of the past could no longer be realized.10 In the mid-eighteenth century, Hume had genially described the overlapping layers of intercourse that helped constitute the admirable public of his great nation. Economic commerce amplified and sustained social commerce, which in turn enhanced and sustained artistic and intellectual commerce, an account of commercial society he shared with his good friend Adam Smith. Print discourse, as Habermas has famously asserted, combined with conversational discourse in coffeehouses to produce the temperate and civilized souls that Hume celebrated in his essays.11 Paine had later in the century exerted pressure on the exclusivity of this civilized public and championed a sphere of absolute publicity, where the significance of face-to-face commerce was translated into open-air politics, a conception of political publicity that survived among certain socialists and radicals, such as George Holyoake, well into the nineteenth century. For much liberal opinion of the mid-Victorian period, however, a Humean sociability or Painean politics was simply impossible to imagine; 7. See Plotz, Crowd. 8. [L. Stephen], “Anonymous Journalism,” 218. 9. Warner, Letters of the Republic. 10. Mackinnon, in Public Opinion, 15, defines public opinion in 1828 as “that sentiment on any given subject which is entertained by the best informed, most intelligent, and most moral persons in the community” and “gradually adopted by nearly all persons of any education or proper feeling.” The charming certainty of this definition could only depress mid-Victorians, who needed to build a whole new politics to realize this goal. 11. “That nothing is more favourable to the rise of politeness and learning, than a number of neighbouring and independent states, connected together by commerce and policy.” Hume, “Rise of Arts and Sciences,” 119. See Habermas, Structural Transformation of Public Sphere.

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many observers hesitantly accepted that “publicity” and “face-to-face politics” were not only no longer possible but were directly responsible for electoral corruption and “undue” influence. Arnold, for instance, writes of the public activities of those he labels the “Populace,” “that vast portion . . . of the working class, which, raw and half-developed, has long lain halfhidden amidst its poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from its hidingplace to assert an Englishman’s heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes”—a decidedly darker version of circulation than Smith’s.12 In July 1866, what are known as the “Hyde Park riots” were instrumental to the writing of this passage in Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. Organized by the Reform League, a group seeking franchise extension, the protest resulted in the trampling down of the iron railings of Hyde Park, a gesture of “leveling” whose symbolism was easily interpreted. Overwhelmed, some observers argued, by its own sheer size, the protest turned destructive. In the Ballot Act of 1872, on the one hand, the transposition of political choice from the open-air setting of political confrontation to a doubly interiorized setting of the balloting booth and the internalized deliberation of the elector was reaction against a public sphere seen to be entirely too fractious, too dependent on the use and abuse of faceless and mindless bodies; on the other hand, it was also a policing sequestration of political thinking to the bounded walls of a voting station where newspapers and other reading matter were banned. Meeting the dangers of a “phantom public sphere,” mid-Victorian liberals did not, however, retreat to their homes, there to find the consolations of individuality and sociability that mass culture could not provide. Early in the second decade of the nineteenth century, as Kevin Gilmartin has observed, one can see in Leigh Hunt’s Examiner an effort to transfer political authority from the intemperate sphere of open-air politics to the “calm domestic circles” of the middle class, a population to whom Hunt accorded the powers of a “plain-thinking” disinterestedness.13 By midcentury, however, “domestic circles” could only mean one thing: homes presided over by wives and mothers, who had by then become synonymous with interest. Rather than a disinterested domesticity, which registered then as an oxymoron, midcentury liberals carved out a distinct region of privacy, the pri12. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 107 (hereafter cited in text as C&A). 13. Hunt, Examiner, 609; cited in Gilmartin, Print Politics, 222–23.

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vate realm of liberal cognition, largely antagonistic to the private spaces of the domestic and its narrow interests. It was in the mind, conceived as an original but by no means personal or familial site for the “propagation” of ideas, that midcentury liberalism found one of its foundational places. Because Victorian liberalism continually distinguished this zone of “free play” from other intimate and presumably problematic sources of identity, it would be misleading to think of its relation to the public sphere as identical to the one Michael Warner glosses for the republican subject: “the republican notion of virtue, for example, was designed exactly to avoid any rupture of self-difference between ordinary life and publicity. The republican was to be the same as citizen and as man.”14 The liberal individual in Victorian Britain was perhaps no less committed to consistency and sincerity than his republican counterpart but was far more suspicious both of “ordinary life,” especially the ordinary lives of the expanding electorate, and “publicity,” especially that of the mass public sphere.15 To a great degree, as I will show, mid-Victorian liberalism sought to bridge the private and the public and thus to secure consistency, but it did so in a world riddled with self-difference, which necessitated important revisions of “man” and “citizen” in the political domain. The usual private sphere of ordinary life and ordinary men was antipathetic to midcentury liberal political practice. At home, impulse, influence, and reflexive attachments to one’s personal self, to one’s spouse, to one’s children, and to other sorts of detail, inhibited “free thought.” As Stephen describes laborers, “the subjects which attract their attention . . . in politics especially are either trivial, or, if important, are treated in so narrow a way” (“Liberalism,” 78). Fueled by reflex and habit, the ordinary life of the factory operative, constrained by the repetitions of machinery and regulated time, had to be strictly cordoned off from the “play” of the mind situated in a leisured body. In mid-Victorian liberalism, the domain of political thought was by necessity a private, individuated one but one which 14. Warner, “Mass Public,” 378. 15. In seeking detachment from the home and its bonds, midcentury liberalism celebrated a kind of abstraction from personal interests. Such a tactic, however, should not be confused with the early republican ideal. In “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,” Warner writes of the abstracting impulse that characterizes this ideal subject of the early republican world, a subject produced and sustained through the democratized mechanisms of print publication. These republican subjects strive for “self-abstracting disinterestedness,” which assumed “a utopian universality that would allow people to transcend the given realities of their bodies and their status” (Warner, “Mass Public,” 384). Needless to say, liberals of this era eschew transcendentalism, with mixed results, and, as will become clearer, have a highly ambivalent relation to the abstractness that releases them from embodiment.

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sustained purposely oblique relations to the quotidian, personal life of any ordinary man, but especially the ordinary workingman. In this cerebral context for politics, the affect of sincerity as evidence for integrity across the public/private divide is presumed to have little to do with a man’s personal affairs and affections or with his social display of status but with an entirely different register of character, having to do with the ways in which thought and opinion are produced, possessed, and transferred into the public domain of politics. The requirement of being embodied in liberal political formations transports feeling from the private to the public domain, but these feelings are most often feelings for abstractions, such as nation or empire, or abstract feelings, such as tolerance, the acceptance of unknown others, or altruism, a generosity toward unknown others without regard to self. Put another way, midcentury liberalism continually tinkered with the problematic of mediation between self-interest and the disinterestedness required to realize “national” or “imperial” policy. James Fitzjames Stephen considers it essential “to diffuse a knowledge” “of the powers and duties of the Nation” (“Liberalism,” 82) to all citizens in Britain, thereby replacing “hot-headed and narrow-minded bigots” with a “magnanimous and truly liberal temper” (“Liberalism,” 80). Equally reforming the abstraction of the mass public and the concretions of ordinary identity, the embodied forms of midcentury liberalism incorporate liberal cognitive practices into the political public sphere, so that liberalism can be lived.

Liberal Formalism Mid-Victorian liberalism contributes forms of abstracted embodiment to the long tradition of liberalism. Continually insisting on the formalism of these mental and political practices, I nonetheless know that form is an admittedly diffuse and allusive concept on which to build a book-length study of mid-Victorian liberalism. Susceptible to the analytic imprecision that harries such a polysemous and ubiquitous word, it is equally susceptible to an attributional confusion with literary and aesthetic formalism, especially so in a book written by someone trained in literary criticism. And to complicate matters further, the formalism of liberalism represents only one sort of formalism extant during this period. For instance, legal historians often locate the consolidation of “legal formalism” (or legal positivism) in the mid-Victorian period. And political theorists might well wonder why something like “proceduralism” could not be used just as well. Even so and precisely so, I find it necessary to mobilize “form” in this

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historical context. The term form and its variants punctuate the discourse of mid-Victorian liberalism, as we see with James Fitzjames Stephen, whose liberal citizens are “formed” by liberal education. Form and reform are central conceptual categories during this period that do and undo a good deal of theoretical labor, that become the focus of foundational debates within liberalism, and that writers therefore continually use and abuse. Most centrally, perhaps, the relation in liberalism between the cognitive forms of abstract embodiment—the individual, the signed periodical piece, the Liberal politician—and the institutional forms that often situate them in the social world constitute a central dilemma for midcentury liberals, as I will explore. Liberalism in mid-nineteenth-century Britain encompassed such a diversity of opinion and personality that it has always frustrated efforts at definition, reducing many descriptions to seemingly banal references to progress and reform, themselves dating back to Victorian formulations.16 Convinced that history was a narrative of progress, so goes this typical account, liberalism was frustrated with traditions of governance and social convention that seemed resistant to history’s mission. Reform was therefore liberalism’s gradualist response to the political obstruction of progress. Reformism, understood in general terms as a belief in progress and in the means of achieving change, expresses the political and personal optimism suffusing this era of liberalism. Such optimism even touches liberalism’s many pessimists, such as Matthew Arnold, who, as I will discuss subsequently, retained doubts about the efficacy of concrete political action and legislation. J. S. Mill, who in Principles of Political Economy could predict only a “stationary state” as the optimal development of capitalist production, nonetheless wrote On Liberty as an expression of the boundlessly transformative role minority opinion could exert on a society and government prone to stasis.17

16. Such as “those principles of advance and reform,” a phrase written by A. P. Stanley in reference to the liberal philosophy of Thomas Arnold. Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Arnold, 1:174. 17. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 106. Many historians argue that there is a clear demarcation between an “old liberalism” and a “new liberalism.” The old encompasses Arnold and Mill, a generation that had serious doubts about sustained economic and political progress. The new liberalism, a generation including Morley, Stephen, and the economists Alfred Marshall and T. H. Green, felt great confidence in society’s capacity for mental and moral transformation. I am less convinced by this division of generations because I think many advanced liberals of the later part of the century continued to have anxious views of the electorate and the proletariat, including worries about the resistance of the “common people” to change, especially as seen in the work of Green. Moreover, the earlier generation of liberals were themselves

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Despite its apparent banality, a definitional emphasis on liberalism’s investment in reform seems both necessary and illuminating, for the liberal conception of progress centered on formalist suppositions, as Victorians themselves realized. For instance, it was thought that a measure of political progress could be achieved through a revision in the form of suffrage or in a redesign of the form of polling or, especially, in a re-formation of the elector himself. Committed to inclusion, if not always wholly dedicated to it, liberals relied on the generic denotation of “form” to organize their policies in an era of increased political heterogeneity. A concentration on form, as opposed to content, evinces liberalism’s liberality, which, at least in its theorized version, does not seek to dictate particular opinions but simply to formalize their expression through suffrage or the poll or through the political subject as an abstracted individual. Form in this instance makes equivalence possible. “Form” also informs mid-Victorian liberalism’s conception of cognition. Although liberalism remains committed to the emancipatory reason that perhaps better characterizes the optimism of an earlier era of liberalism, it uniformly relocates the generative site of rationality from the highly idealized public sphere of collaboration, debate, and circulation to an equally idealized private site of cognition, mental deliberation, and devil’s advocacy.18 Here, the fractious contestation, heterogeneous claims, and incommensurate publics of Victorian politics could be passionately thought through in formalizing practices such as the systematic and measured pace of reflection, resulting in more-seasoned and more-manageable ideas about the relations between the individual and “the other” and between the individual and society, the nation, and the empire.19 This formalized under-

capable of imagining a better world through reform—spiritual, political, intellectual, and cultural. And these various registers of reform were not that unlike the schemes and plans of the newer liberalism of the 1870s and ’80s. See G. Jones, Outcast London, 1–16; also Sykes, Rise and Fall of British Liberalism, in which Sykes’s long view of liberalism leads him to date “new liberalism” to much later in the century. 18. Even in this instance, Locke is an intellectual precursor. As Martel reminds us, Locke values what he labels “indifferency,” which in Martel’s words means “not indifferency as in ‘I don’t care,’ but rather meaning that one is able to temporarily suspend one’s desires and to make a decision based on rational weighing of the relative good and evil of each potential choice” (Love is a Sweet Chain, 45). One way to articulate the shift in the mid-Victorian value of disinterestedness is the extent to which this way of thought becomes at midcentury a kind of prosthetic for social policy per se, a substitution for social reform. One might even say these internal deliberations in the Lockean subject, which make his actions in the world most efficacious, become, in effect, a form of social interaction rather than a precursor to it. 19. Trilling notes the relation between idea and form and intriguingly suggests that politicians better understand this relation than anyone else: “Governments nowadays are very simple

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standing of cognition remains apparent to Rawls, who defines his own version of liberal reflection as a process that assesses “the forms of various arguments” for political justice, which in his telling results in a state of “equilibrium.”20 Implicit, then, in this emphasis on “form” is more than a hint of Kant’s aesthetic and ethical formalism—perhaps a surprising claim to some critics who see an unbroken chain between the empirical associationism of Locke and J. S. Mill. Form ought also to suggest literary formalism, which speaks to the congruence between certain novels of this period and Victorian liberalism, a discussion pursued in the next chapter. All these formalisms envision the harmonizing parts that make up a beautiful, integrated, and serene whole, a whole, moreover, that can at times detach, to use Arnold’s term, from the worldly realm of interests and thus manifest what Kant refers to as “purposiveness without purpose.”21 As the next chapters will show, a politics that verges on “purposiveness without purpose” nurtures an ambivalent relation to its own obligation to progress. Form also importantly evokes “good form,” the exercise of decorum, as when James Fitzjames Stephen declares, “Liberalism, in a word, ought to mean the opposite of sordidness, vulgarity, and bigotry” (“Liberalism,” 72). Such “politic” practices ensure that even “free thought” follows formal (as opposed to informal or casual or habitual) practices, formalities which maintain social order as the idea mutates into opinion, guaranteeing a society still subject to prediction and inductive formulation—these latter being requirements of a philosophy significantly infused by political economy, empirical science, and positivism. Even Walter Bagehot, whose evolutionary predilections make him the least harmonious of midcentury liberals, prefers an orderly public: “A vigorous moderateness in mind and body is the rule of a polity which works by discussion; and, upon the whole, it is the kind of temper most suited to the active life of such a being as man in such a world as the present one.”22 “Good form” in this era does not merely posit the contractual minimum for virtue, the guarantee in a commercial society that one will do as

and accurate in their perception of this—much more simple and accurate than are academic critics and aestheticians—and they are as quick to deal with the arts of ‘pure’ form as they are to deal with ideas stated in discourse: it is as if totalitarian governments kept in mind what the rest of us tend to forget, that ‘idea’ in one of its early significations exactly means form and was so used by many philosophers” (Liberal Imagination, 274–75). 20. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 384. 21. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 64. This feature of formalism is perhaps most famously manifested in Matthew Arnold’s social essays—in his account of the reformed subject as a “best self.” 22. Bagehot, Physics and Politics, 203.

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one promises.23 In this era of liberalism, it also matters a great deal that you in fact think what you say and do.24 “Good form” thus assures a standard of consistency in the midst of the contingencies of the market, but this good form must embrace both intention and action, not simply actions over time, and so constitutes what Victorians more generally refer to as “character.” In this regard, in its inclusion of a moralized intentionalism, midcentury liberalism expands the range of codification much more than many proceduralists would comfortably embrace. Although “good form” must necessarily assume historically specific values, themselves grounded in economic and social privilege, mid-Victorian liberalism was more ambiguously invested in the category of the “gentleman” than were its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century precursors, not least because of a skepticism held by most liberals toward aristocratic origins and the unjust privileges presumed to be lodged there. The good form of liberal cognition will be most fully elaborated in chapter 3, “A Frame of Mind: Signature Liberalism at the Fortnightly Review,” which argues that the Fortnightly Review’s editorial policies modeled a formal, reticent, and reasonable public sphere of ideas. In spite of their reserved and what might plausibly be labeled their “impersonal” style, the Fortnightly’s founders and its first editor, George Henry Lewes, favored a tone of sincerity, what might be called “impersonal sincerity,” that was pointedly unlike the performative tact that seemed to compromise the “character” of Whiggish gentlemen of an earlier generation. Disengaged from the intimacy of personalities, then, liberal discourse reveals an equal disaffection with personas, the highly theatricalized social identities that men of inherited privilege donned in the public sphere. The cognitive component of Victorian liberalism in its most generic register is not in itself this period’s original contribution to the history of liberalism nor, certainly, is the formalism that characterizes its approach to cognition. Locke’s oeuvre, in particular Some Thoughts Concerning Education, evinces an unwavering ambition to inculcate in the pupil a cognitive framework for the regulation of the thinking individual. Uday Singh Mehta’s trenchant reading of Locke’s political theory emphasizes the cognitive categories that mark the seventeenth-century thinker’s work: “Locke

23. Mary Poovey discusses this feature in Defoe’s work in her History of Modern Fact, 167. 24. Compare this to the period that is the subject of Jenny Davidson’s Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness. Davidson demonstrates that thinking one thing and doing another was a perfectly acceptable and often powerfully pedagogical way of living in the world of the eighteenth century.

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is concerned not merely with settling the boundaries between individuals, that is, questions of peace, order, and authority, but also while being concerned with these very questions, with settling the internal boundaries of individuals.”25 Locke’s awareness of the vagaries of passion—its immoderation and secrecy—and the equally unpredictable powers of the imagination inform his liberalism as much as his consideration of rational selfinterests, which, Mehta quite rightly asserts, are too often overvalued as liberalism’s primary objects of study.26 Locke’s body of theory consistently influences the political thinking of the mid-Victorian years, evident in Arnold, Mill, Morley, Leslie Stephen and many others who recognize the full range of human response. However, if Locke’s pedagogy is primarily conventional in its emphasis, or, in Mehta’s terms, designed to “close off forms of individual selfexpression, to raise barriers against the eccentric” and does so in part by relying on aristocratic assumptions of good breeding, then mid-Victorian liberalism—most explicitly in Mill’s work but also apparent in Arnold’s “play,” in Eliot’s exceptionalist heroine, and so on—is far more fascinated by an individualism that celebrates individuality, even struggles gamely to embrace a passionate eccentricity, in a world where categories of class, party, and sect have induced a categorical sameness. That mid-Victorian liberalism still seeks a normative order amid this programmatic eccentricity and pursues passionate eccentricity even in the midst of a studied reliance on “good form” is what makes it such a fascinating and frustrating model for living the good life.27 25. Mehta, Anxiety of Freedom, 3. Mehta distinguishes interests from appetitive drives and aligns the latter more fully within a category of cognition. Although this distinction may be in keeping with those made in the seventeenth century, it aligns appetite with imagination in a way that is not consistent with the most common conceptions operative in the midVictorian period, where imagination and appetite have become more distinct, as they become in Coleridge. In brief, there are types of imagination that are not merely appetitive. Because of these and other grounds of dissimilarity, I use the term cognitive somewhat less broadly than Mehta does, reserving it for mental functions of a higher order, those valued by midcentury Victorians. 26. Ibid., 6. 27. Ibid., 11, 18. Mehta’s compelling version of Locke shows, Mehta claims, that “perhaps we have simply exaggerated the distance between Locke and Burke” (Anxiety of Freedom, 19). Mehta is here emphasizing both Locke’s implicit reliance on and Burke’s explicit championship of the “English gentleman” and his social, economic, and cultural advantages as they are defined in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, respectively (a collapse of historically distinct “gentlemen,” which in itself makes Mehta’s argument somewhat less compelling than otherwise). If the “gentleman” is indeed common ground, then mid-Victorian liberalism’s desire to unanchor the individual from aristocratic gentlemanliness distances it from Burke’s social vision.

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Changing conceptions of the masses as a national population, quite specific extensions of the political populace, and the amplification of social diversity in the experience of empire—all these historical trends infuse enormous optimism and equally profound anxiety in mid-Victorian liberalism as a specifically political program of reform for a specifically transitional period in history. Admitting new peoples into the political process, this era of liberalism was particularly invested in linking idea to practice, thereby defining the ways in which opinion was produced, judged, and mobilized in the social realm. In Social Formalism, Dorothy Hale has described the way that literary critics in the long twentieth century have compressed the social into the formalist presumptions that infuse their literary analysis. From a Victorianist’s point of view, this appears as the literary critical instantiation of a dynamic within mid-nineteenth-century liberalism, whose own social formalism emanates from the formalist tendencies that saturate liberal cognition. Like the novel as imagined by Bakhtin’s linguistic category of heteroglossia, for instance, the liberal mind formalizes the social—its diversity, difference, and foreignness. The social domain becomes, most signally in the texts under discussion in this book, an idea of the social. Through mental deliberation, the liberal mind is itself imagined as dialogic. It is possible to mistakenly correlate this feature of Victorian cognitive formalism with Locke’s formulation of cognitive formalism. In both versions, the disinterested mind’s cognitive practices are designed to, in Sarah Winter’s words, “approximate the world’s totality.”28 The similarity ends here, however. In Locke’s description, the mind’s “approximation” of totality presumes its perception of an “intellectual world.” Here are Locke’s words: “God has made the intellectual world harmonious and beautiful without us.”29 Confronted with a world in transition, with a biblical criticism and a scientific method defacing the terms of natural religion, with a historic

28. Sarah Winter has suggested that in both Locke and Victorian liberalism, there is a presumption that through “rational self-scrutiny” the “‘impartial’ thinker can approximate the world’s totality by cultivating the mind’s ability to incorporate and order impressions through strenuous intellectual efforts” (“Mental Culture,” 438). Although I differ on the degree to which these two formalisms are similar, I consider her description of this formalism suggestive and, in many respects, apt. 29. The entire quotation, from Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education, and Of the Conduct of the Understanding, is resonant: “God has made the intellectual world harmonious and beautiful without us; but it will never come into our heads all at once; we must bring it home piecemeal, and there set it up by our own industry, or else we shall have nothing but darkness and a chaos within, whatever order and light there be in things without us” (215). In Victorian liberalism, darkness and chaos reside “without,” order and light within.

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transformation of the British citizenry, and with an imperial horizon of extraordinary diversity, Victorian liberalism’s approximation of the “world’s totality” could no longer be dependent on the presumption of God’s “harmonious” and “intellectual” world; Victorian liberalism had to rely on the mind’s own formalizing capacities, its own harmony and intelligence, so that a person could live liberalism in an otherwise fragmentary world. What remains distinctive about mid-Victorian liberal formalism in comparison to its predecessors is its commitment to materializing these cognitive practices into embodied forms. Victorian liberalism embraces practices of cognitive detachment—disinterest, reserve, objectivity—but wishes to mobilize them in the social world as modalities of embodied living. The social reproduction of liberal cognition into forms of embodiment, the transition from the idea to opinion, is a continually vexed problematic for Victorian liberalism, not least because the actual social is so disorienting to form.

Formal Ambivalence Midcentury liberals were to a significant extent aware of their investment in form and, at times, impressively aware of the rich complexities induced by formalism in particular. Faced with an unknown and expanding electorate, not to mention an unfathomably extensive empire, all of whose occupants were only accessible for most elites through their mediated expression and representation in mass-culture journalism, liberals imagined reform as a measured means of reproduction. Through the use of the signature in periodical journalism or the codification of the liberal Irish citizen in land reform legislation, through these specific “practices of embodiment,” at least some portion of the populace could become formal individuals, abstracted from their habitual interests and therefore disinterestedly abstract in thought. It was this reproductive function of formalism expressed through specific reforms that in part elicited Carlyle’s sharp accusation that the ballot box, for instance, was simply a form of machinery, thereby linking liberalism to industrialized modes of production.30 Many professed liberals shared his concern with mechanization. Arnold writes of “our bondage to machinery, on our proneness to value machinery as an end in itself” (C&A, 83).

30. Carlyle writes: “‘If of ten men nine are recognisable as fools, which is a common calculation . . . how, in the name of wonder, will you ever get a ballot-box to grind you out a wisdom from the votes of these ten men?’” Carlyle, “Parliaments,” 202. Lionel Trilling notes this theme: “Through the nineteenth century runs the thread of anxiety that man may not be man, that his relation to the world may cease to be a human one.” Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 124.

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As a mechanism of liberal reproduction, these institutional forms (the balloting booth, the civil service exam, Irish land legislation) were to some extent like any piece of machinery that mass-produced a product. The adulteration of reform into mechanical reproduction registers liberal politics’ haunted resemblance to capitalist modes of production, a correlation that usually horrifies avowed liberals. The revered category of “character” demonstrates how market value can so easily capitalize liberal value. “Character” signifies both the priceless qualities of sincerity, conviction, and disinterestedness and also the reference that enables a liberal subject to circulate as alienated labor in the market. The scale of production was not in itself the most troubling problem for a politics resigned to inclusion and one, after all, whose formalizing practices carefully regulated the range and degree of reform. Rather, part of the problem of mechanization lay in the possibility that institutional forms could produce cognitive forms that were themselves mechanistic, that neither the balloting booth nor the Fortnightly Review nor land legislation would reproduce liberal individuals defined by their powers of abstracting cognition but instead mass-produce automatons—a concern already expressed generations earlier by Locke.31 In this nightmarish result, the deliberative subject is in fact the automatic subject, impelled not by reason and reflection but unthinking reflex fueled externally, “one whose desires and impulses are not his own . . . no more than a steam engine has a character,” as J. S. Mill averred.32 This is a threat that persistently haunts lived liberalism and constitutes one of the potential “deformations” this book charts. Liberal formalism can, at times, keep this worry about mechanization in check, as evidenced in Arnold’s writings. Many liberals did not believe that formal changes—by which they mostly mean mere changes in political machinery—can remake political subjectivity on their own; such fatuous optimism Arnold ironizes in Culture and Anarchy: “that the having a vote. . . . has in itself some edifying and perfecting effect upon human nature”(C&A, 75). This skepticism is shared by both Stephen brothers— James and Leslie—despite their otherwise quite opposite positions on the liberal spectrum.33 Leslie Stephen articulates the terms of this debate, won-

31. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 202–12. 32. Mill, Collected Works, 18:264. 33. James Stephen takes a stronger position than Leslie does, asserting that most political reform has made little substantive difference in the course of English history. He writes, “On the one hand, we have seen great alterations made in the form, and some alterations made in the spirit, of almost all the doctrines and institutions which were formerly in undisputed possession of our national belief and affections; but, on the other hand, those doctrines and

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dering whether political reform begins with people’s selves and people’s social arrangements or with political forms, like the constitution: “Are we to infer that the whole act of constitution-making is simply futile? The spirit, shall we say? is everything; the framework nothing. Alter men’s thought and passions, or change the social organization, and you alter their political condition. Change the superficial arrangements and you necessarily lose your labour.”34 Skeptical toward specific legislative reforms like the ballot, Arnold was deeply attracted to the more general liberal project of reforming the political subject into what he called in Culture and Anarchy “the best self.” In his particular version, the abstracted individual, especially abstracted from class politics, carries with him an aestheticized formality, a bearing touched by what Arnold calls “sweetness and light,” and borrows his serenity of self from the formal harmony attributed to culture, a version of form that explicitly counters institutional reform’s mechanistic and impulsive proclivities. For Arnold, actual political reforms always seemed too external in contrast to the internal insinuations of an enculturation (not his words) that truly, to quote Leslie Stephen, “alter men’s thoughts and passions.” In this way, Arnold makes a distinction between cognitive formalism (the “best self”) and institutional formalism (“mere machinery”). Liberalism’s consistent conviction that “ideas” are fundamentally private in origin always already tempers for men like Arnold the efficacy of any kind of mere political reform. Because of these mixed investments, then, liberals will at times concede that formal institutional changes only serve as a nourishing environment, a political platform, as it were, for the performance of the liberal individual and the expression of liberal opinion, essential spirits that otherwise exceed the temporal and spatial boundaries of any particular institutionalized embodiment. The balloting booth, so this argument goes, is just a site for the enactment of abstracted citizenship rather than its constitutive incarnation. Leslie Stephen writes, “The ballot, is, I fancy, discredited with most serious thinkers as possessing any mysterious efficacy.”35 Such moments of skepticism, however, cannot adequately represent on

institutions have, subject to these alterations, and to such others as may be agreed upon, been maintained, and in their modified form are as firmly and as widely rooted as ever. The deep changes which have been made in our institutions have made no one permanent and fundamental change in the sentiments or conduct of the nation. Nothing in the history of England is more striking than its continuity” (“Liberalism,” 71). 34. L. Stephen, “Value of Political Machinery,” 836. 35. Ibid., 842.

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their own a political philosophy defined by its reformist optimism, in particular one so fascinated by and dedicated to cognitive reform in society, to the promise of pedagogy. Matthew Arnold, for instance, spent many years as a middle-school inspector, assessing English schools and studying European models, and the civil service exam, perhaps the most important reform imagined by the midcentury liberal administrators, certifies a “liberal” education as the path to “forming” an imperial policy maker.36 This exam in effect asserts the distinctions between the clerks doing menial labor and those who engaged in more intellectual work. More generally, the 1860s and 1870s were themselves a period of intense debate concerning the role of the state in comprehensive education, culminating in the Universal Education Act of 1870, devised and sponsored by the Liberal Party. By no means a truly universal mandate, it nonetheless made schooling compulsory. Although the bill was considered by many liberals an ineffectual compromise that preserved local control of schools and by many Nonconformists as too forgiving of Anglican values, it was the first of several pieces of national legislation addressing education.37 This pedagogical optimism suffuses a more reflective moment in the same article by Leslie Stephen, where he softens his sharp distinction between spirit and machine, substance and form, acknowledging liberalism’s formalist desires: “Mere mechanism, let us grant, is useless; but then we must add that the separation between the form and the substance, between the mechanism and the impelling forces, is not so applicable as it may appear to be at first sight. The change in the mechanism has a moral and intellectual influence.”38 Loath to go much further than that, to continue on the path that ultimately leads to a fullfledged theory about the very processes of political pedagogy, the ways in

36. The Northcote-Trevelyan Report comes out in 1854, but the exam is instituted later. 37. Liberalism’s relation to education has been addressed fairly extensively by scholars. See Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State; Fontainerie, French Liberalism and Education; Ruth, Illusory Freedoms; Shuman, Pedagogical Economies; Richardson, Romanticism, Race and Imperial Culture. The contemporary debates are themselves quite useful for an understanding of liberalism’s relation to a more generic conception of cognitive development and privacy. State-run schools were considered vital to many liberals, who imagined them as effective efforts to remove education from the domestic and/or personal setting. Eventually, as Arnold’s written and administrative work had already suggested in the 1860s, literature as a subject plays a vital role in enculturating students, and by the early decades of the twentieth century, the novel itself becomes valued, in the writing of someone like F. R. Leavis, as the pedagogical exemplar of a sort of “harmonic wholeness” that liberalism has always celebrated. Like the spread of statesponsored education, however, literary study and in particular the study of the novel in schools did not really occur for generations, one indication of liberalism’s ambivalence regarding the feasibility of universal education. 38. L. Stephen, “Value of Political Machinery,” 837.

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which minds are formed and can be changed through political operations, Leslie Stephen reveals a fundamental ambivalence about the usage of political forms, about the political subject’s capacity for reform, and, indeed, about the liberal pedagogue’s own success, an ambivalence circulating in and around all the forms of abstract embodiment under examination in this book.39 Ambivalence also circulates around cognitive formalism itself, if much less frequently. In many ways, liberalism argues for autonomy between form and content so that, for instance, the content of individual opinion remains to some degree independent of its formal, cognitive setting: the voter may vote any way he wishes as long as he votes as an embodied citizen. However, Leslie Stephen’s equation between substance and “men’s thoughts and feelings” suggests, at least momentarily, that the substance of ideas that emerge from the abstract individual may, at times, matter more than the formal practices that produced them, as Liberals in parliament often had to admit and as John Morley realized when he dispensed with his predecessor’s commitment to the publication of eclectic opinion in the Fortnightly Review. Moreover, while making a distinction between form and substance, Leslie Stephen also distinguishes between the spirit, “which is everything,” and the machinery of reform, at the very least implicitly raising the possibility that the spirit of liberalism is not originally embodied in form, not even cognitive forms, but precedes and exceeds them; perhaps for some liberals this spirit emanates directly from God, and man’s acceptance of the deity’s compact.40 Original, spiritual, invisible: this ghostly version of political liberalism poses potentially insurmountable obstacles to teaching, learning, and living liberalism.41 In part symptomatic of liberalism’s

39. Amanda Anderson, it seems to me, articulates a modern expression of this liberal ambivalence when, in trying to overcome the impasse between the intrasubjective politics of Judith Butler and the intersubjective politics of Seyla Benhabib, she lobbies for a “self-reflexive questioning of norms, or postconventionality, as the moral idea that undergirds the subject’s acts of affiliation and disaffiliation.” Anderson, “Debatable Performances,” 21. A Victorianist by training, Anderson articulates what sounds to me like a slightly revised version of Mill’s own conception of deliberation. Anderson would differently define than Mill which sorts of norms would be open to question, as evidenced in her tolerant consideration of sadomasochism. Although I, too, am rather attracted to this prescription, I am also aware that it opens itself up to the problems of ambivalence and profound uninterest that plagued Victorian liberals, whose “self-reflexive questioning of norms” could be registered and/or represented as an emptying out of one’s commitments. 40. Recall Morley’s “serious spirit,” quoted in the introduction, who also seeks transcendence in abstract bodiliness. 41. Liberal embodiment is always abstract embodiment in this period, and therefore somewhat inspirited or ghostly. The liberal citizen of this period therefore is an heir of other ghosts

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abstracting impulse that pushes embodied forms to their most attenuated extreme, this haunting spirit certainly registers the extent to which a secularizing liberalism was not yet fully secularized.42 If, at times such as those enumerated earlier, liberalism subtilizes into spirit, it far more often seeks solid ground to stabilize its abstracted bodies. As politics transfers its value from property to person, from land to opinion, the minds of liberalism may become free but not free-floating. If landed property was presumed the explicit and implicit ground for political authority in a preliberalized era, liberalism in an era of opinion politics both relies on bodies and is haunted by their instability, their lack of gravitas, their distractions, all habits that abstraction never wholly eliminates. As the rest of this book will elaborate, midcentury forms of abstracted embodiment regularly generate locations to ground their authority. These locations can be abstractions, like metaphoric allusion, or actual places, like Irish land. In his remarkably symptomatic essay, James Fitzjames Stephen manifests this tendency, which most often but not always operates at the figural level, as if metaphors of place, of weight, of standing will compensate in the domain of abstraction for the loss of some more real foundation. In outlining the sort of liberal politician and liberal citizen the British nation requires, James Fitzjames Stephen writes of a metaphoric owner of an estate and his heir: “He would look upon himself as a man charged to introduce to his estate an heir who had attained his majority; he would teach those whom he addressed to see in the institutions of their native land neither a prison to escape from nor a fortress to storm, but a stately and venerable mansion which for eight centuries had been the home of their ancestors, in which they were now to take their place and play their part” (“Liberalism,” 75). In this utterly unmechanical reproduction of political authority, James Fitzjames Stephen quite cunningly situates a “mature” liberalism within an unbroken lineage of proprietorship, where the “free play of the mind” bethat haunt the civic sphere of liberal discourse, such as “the Image, Phantom, or Representative of the Commonwealth” in Locke. This spirit is the executive who is “the public person vested with the power of the law.” See Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 167. 42. H. S. Jones appropriately emphasizes the extent to which some strains of Christian Socialism informed midcentury liberalism, as did the Protestant Evangelicalism of an earlier generation, a movement in which many midcentury liberals’ parents participated. Jones notes that the Christian Socialists’ peculiar soul-searching, their commitment to schooling, and their religious intensity “were absorbed into the mainstream of mid-Victorian Whig-Liberalism, which, in consequence, acquired a tone far removed from secular utilitarianism.” H. Jones, Victorian Political Thought, 51–52. For the earlier generation of Nonconformist contribution to liberalism, see Hilton, Age of Atonement; Parry, Democracy and Religion.

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comes a part to play, and the abstracted and abstracting liberal mind settles its thoughts in a stately and venerable mansion. In this extended conceit, James Fitzjames Stephen can enforce the Burkean conservation that best expresses his variety of liberal politics, but he also demonstrates how proprietorship of real land (the heir, the estate, the mansion) situates rhetorically a “formal opinion” that otherwise would seem disturbingly casual, the illegitimate sentiments of “labourers, mechanics and small shopkeepers.” Oscillating between spirit and form, midcentury liberal optimism is thus almost always ambivalent, wanting change yet fearing it, committed to embodiment yet repulsed by bodies, aiming to liberalize society even as it retires from it. I see these stunning moments of self-conscious ambivalence as fundamental features of mid-Victorian liberalism ripe for an analysis that political discourse at the time mostly resisted. Disparaging of the “political quackery” of more radical thinkers who, Leslie Stephen says, attribute “magical influence” to reform, he and other liberals did not formulate an account any more rational or scientific to explain the “moral and intellectual influence” that was supposed to differentiate their sensible optimism from the magic incredulously worshiped by democrats, socialists, and communists.43 After all, Leslie Stephen the rationalist dwells with spirits. Moreover, contemporary liberals themselves could not control all of the ideological significances and effects of the formal, abstracted embodiments of liberalism. The Stephen brothers’ ambivalence about form is, in part, an explicit recognition of the problem of embodiment in the social domain. Liberal forms of embodiment are by no means limited to their anticipated results, especially the individual: he may think, or not, as he wishes. The rest of the book aims to elaborate on this odd and yet oddly familiar political terrain of mid-Victorian liberalism. In so doing, it will not only describe the abstract embodiments that designate this political period, it will also examine the mostly unremarked contradictions that emerge in their enactment, contradictions that make liberalism’s instructions for a good life so difficult to follow.

43. L. Stephen, “Value of Political Machinery,” 839.

C H A P T E R T WO

A Body of Thought THE FORM OF LIBERAL INDIVIDUALISM

The habits of a docile member of society and the habits of the citizen do both depend on precepts and consensus. But the first are a matter of reflex, the second a matter of reflection. —David Bromwich, “Victoria’s Secret,” New Republic

Early in July 1872, the Conservative Lord Northumberland, along with other titled gentlemen in the House of Lords, was asked to debate a Liberal bill already passed in the Commons that would institute secret balloting for parliamentary elections. He was not amused. To a deeply traditional man like Northumberland, infamously betrayed by his own prime minister in the electoral reforms of 1867, the demand for the ballot was the catastrophically logical result of that earlier franchise extension, which had admitted larger numbers of the lower middle classes and urban working classes into the electoral fold. During the ballot debates, he could not help but remind his peers that their Conservative Party counterparts in the lower chamber were ultimately responsible for this lamentable legislation. If the franchise had remained unchanged in 1867, he argued, few electors would need the ballot as a form of protection from intimidation and harassment because men of property and circumstance who already had the vote were impervious to brazen forms of coercion. Northumberland complained that his colleagues in the lower house “have bestowed the franchise on an immense class of voters peculiarly exposed to intimidation and personal violence on the part of members of their own body.”1 Northumberland thus envisions 1. Northumberland, quoted in Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., vol. 212 (July 8, 1872), p. 764.

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these humble voters of the lower classes as part of a corporate “body,” whose “members” are only momentarily disaggregated from the collective torso to become hands and feet—or among this group of rowdy plebeians, fists and boots. Northumberland believed the newly enfranchised to be a class at war with itself; its “head” had no control over its appendages.2 The liberals who advanced the cause of the secret ballot did not disagree with this analysis of the lower orders, but they were much more hopeful than Northumberland was that the balloting booth could protect this “class of voters” from “the members of their own body.” Through the miraculous distillation effected by the balloting booth, these classes of harassed electors would become, instead, serenely individuated and therefore independent voters, liberated both physically and intellectually from that corporate “body” now in disarray, becoming instead liberal individuals. To this extent, then, the ballot promised to realize on a mass political scale and within a transformational instant the “idea,” as Mary Poovey has described it, “that individuals were alike in being responsible (economic and moral) agents”; “members of what had once seemed a social body now appear as disciplinary individuals capable of governing themselves.”3 In place of the brutal social body, riven by violent divisions of interest; in place of the vulgar, classed body, burdened by impulses and habits; even in place of the physical body, determined by its biology, mid-Victorian liberalism offers the promise of abstracted individuality, which emancipates the subject from these diverse formulations of bodiliness and their constitutive social spaces through its twin practices of privatization and abstraction. In so abstracting the liberal individual, midcentury liberalism does not, however, reject or dismiss bodiliness per se. More specifically, liberalism required a body through which its individualizing practices of cognition could be thought, felt, and enacted.4 The thoughts and sensations of

2. Northumberland’s figuration is perhaps a specifically political rewriting of a more economic depiction that Catherine Gallagher, in her now canonical essay “The Body versus the Social Body,” has termed a “typical” description in Victorian social discourse: “Society is still imagined as a body, but as a corporate body menaced by those very overly physical individual bodies that distribute its sustenance” (91). 3. Poovey, Making, 22, 24. Although I agree with Poovey’s argument concerning the overt promise of liberal reformist ideals, part of my project in this book, and especially in this chapter, is to explore and limn the ways in which the once dominant concerns about the sociability of the social body had become in the liberalizing years of 1850–85 the more covert and often unacknowledged “tics” of liberal individualism. 4. In this regard, liberal embodiment’s need for a body is not unlike that described by Gallagher, when referring to popular Victorian conceptions of productive labor: “Some kind of ‘fixed’ embodiment remained central to the popular understanding of productive labor, attest-

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liberalism are themselves always expressed through an abstracted body, but it would be mistake to assume as a result that midcentury liberalism had no feeling. Despite their intellectual differences or rather because of the intellectual differences that as difference designate them as liberal individuals, Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, Anthony Trollope, and many others now less well-known were deeply invested in the romance of liberal individualism, which seemed to offer prudent resistance against the manifold systemic powers of midcentury England—in particular, aristocratic hegemony, popular opinion, and class society. Theirs was a commendable wish for a calm world populated by free subjects, where the violence circulating within and without the corporate, classed, and personal bodies of Victorian England could be quelled, and the diverse claims of the social domain could then be thought into harmonious relation in the abstracted, self-governing body of the liberal individual. In this chapter, I will explore what seems to me a pervasive, transgeneric pattern of subject liberalization in the mid-Victorian period, primarily through an examination of Anthony Trollope’s 1855 novella The Warden and Mill’s Autobiography. Delineating this pattern results in a reexamination of certain valued categories of liberal theory during this period: character, disinterest, critical publicity, deliberative exchange, and self-development. Initially, I will show how these categories within the texts persuasively (and surprisingly to some readers of Trollope) parallel and resonate with the central terms of liberal political theory at midcentury. Both Trollope’s and Mill’s texts define the liberal subject in terms of standardized and therefore replicable practices of cognitive individuation. Through these practices the liberal individual is characterized by a specific mental organization that formalizes the relations among the subject’s self-interests, ethical principles, social convictions, and political opinions. This mental organization contrasts with preliberal subject formations that were more invested, so a liberal account asserts, in habituation than cognition and more invested in the specific content of one’s instinctive affections than in the form ideas ought to take. In so defining the liberal individual, both texts describe a society arguably more even in temper but one nonetheless inhabited by liberalizing subjects at odds with themselves and others. The worries Northumberland raises concerning bodily self-governance therefore remain unresolved, perhaps even exacerbated, by liberalism’s commitments. As I ing to the importance of physical being in economic thought.” Gallagher, “Body versus Social Body,” 98.

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will suggest, this “oddness” is a constitutive feature of the liberal individual, a feature practitioners embraced as theoretically necessary to individuation but which they also overlooked, ignored, and denied in practice. I will also suggest that such oddness ought to be conceptualized formally rather than psychologically, a function of the logic of the individual as form rather than a feature of the individual’s psychic richness. Since the form of liberal individualism at midcentury newly defines the liberal subject’s relation to the social, and the Victorian novel as a genre addresses this relation in its form, I will provide a rather extended reading of The Warden. In this reading, I will focus on both methods of characterization and the contested public and private “sites” in the novel where the protagonist seeks liberal self-actualization: his occupation, the newspapers, his home, his mind. Through this initial investigation, then, I hope to proffer revised accounts of central liberal tenets, accounts which will now address more specifically the formalist quality of Victorian liberal individualism; to speculate on why the mid-Victorian novel as a genre is itself so amenable to this cognitive formalism; and to argue—along the way—that cognitive formalism is in turn a significant prehistory to what Dorothy J. Hale has called the “social formalism” of much twentieth-century novel theory.5 The Warden, then, is a novel that rather perfectly narrates the process of liberalization—the formation of the liberal individual—but in so doing, it also inevitably charts the tensions, paradoxes, and impossibilities of a lived liberalism: the deformations that are attendant on a daily enactment of its requirements.

The Form of the Liberal Individual The liberal individual presumed to emerge from the myriad procedures of Victorian liberalization is a complicated ideological, theoretical, and historical construct, more often referenced in Victorian literary criticism than intensively examined. It is necessary, then, to carefully locate this subject, who is almost always an amalgam of the characteristics and characteristic practices most consistently iterated in canonical texts of classical liberalism (e.g., Locke, Kant, Hume, Smith), the revisions made to those premises in contemporary Victorian political and social theory (e.g., J. S. Mill and Matthew Arnold), and the modern reformulations of that genealogy (Foucault, Habermas). My own work seeks to contribute to as well as to complicate 5. Hale, Social Formalism.

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these accounts of the liberal subject, but it starts with some of the same shared assumptions. A full history cannot be rehearsed here, so I will start with a simplified definition, culled from this history. The liberal subject is one who originates in a private sphere that predates the public sphere of civic duty but whose status as private property owner enables his disinterested participation in the privileged, deliberative exchanges of civil society, such as journalism, which at midcentury remained significantly distinct from the operations of the state. Through spoken and printed media of exchange, the values, laws, and procedures of a just society were adjudicated and approved. In the Victorian period, a partial commitment to gradual democratization and an expansion of conceptions of proprietorship encouraged liberal thinkers, such as John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold, to newly emphasize a pedagogy of self-development that would, in David Lloyd and Paul Thomas’s term, “educe” the citizen, who would only then be prepared for the privileges and responsibilities of liberal citizenship.6 With often distinct aims and emphases, Mill and Arnold celebrated the efflorescence of individuality that was always the implicit promise of self-development. For them, individuality took on multiform significance in a society that seemed to them simultaneously too conformist and too fractious. For Mill, especially in response to the unthinking majoritarian will of the general public, “the initiation of all wise or noble things, comes and must come from individuals.”7 For Arnold, the only response to the average person’s primary loyalty to class, a conformism that led to irresolvable and ugly political factionalism, was to disdain the “ordinary” selves of class identity— “separate, personal, at war”—and foster instead “best” selves—“united, impersonal, at harmony”—who transcend class designations and offer their primary affiliation, as individuals, to the community as a whole (C&A, 99). Arnold’s conception of a harmonious, fully enculturated self differs in some degree from the more deliberative and explicitly political citizen that inhabits the pages of Mill’s 1859 work On Liberty, but both men are

6. Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State, 7. There is an implicit and intended paradox in my phrase “pedagogy of self-development.” The paradox lies in the ambiguity of the term self-development, which, according to one understanding, can easily accommodate the educative process and the democratization it can imply but which, according to another, signifies a development that is self-generated, independent of and indeed unbeholden to external direction or coercion. This ambiguity shadows several central ongoing debates about nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberalism concerning, for instance, the extent to which liberalism is committed to inclusiveness or built on essentialist presumptions of privilege. 7. Mill, On Liberty (1975), 63 (hereafter cited in text and subsequent notes as OL).

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committed to the social benefits of liberal individuation that are attained through their respective practices of self-development, especially the calming order that descends on a society populated by “impersonal” and disinterested beings. Admittedly, my primary object for study, The Warden, might well seem an insistently unrepresentative text of Victorian liberal individualism as I have briefly sketched it. Explicitly concerning midcentury debates about the legal and moral stature of the Anglican church establishment, The Warden has hardly seemed to most readers a novel engaged with the central premises of liberal political theory, let alone, as I will suggest, a story that can help explain the mutual imbrication of the novel and liberalism at this time and in particular of the heroic attainment of liberal selfhood by its protagonist, the Reverend Septimus Harding. Although few have doubts that either Mill or Arnold was capable of developing a distinctive and principled individuality, readers might well wonder whether Trollope’s mildmannered Harding, a “retiring humble-spirited man,” could likewise liberate himself from the banalities of public opinion. So conventional, so easily accommodating, so belated, “Septimus” seems more a creature of the past than the progressive future.8 His love of church ritual and his longsettled comfort with the paternalist habits of his wardenship seem to mark him as a tenderly rendered anachronism in a sadly altered world. Harding’s anachronism, however, functions in the novel as just the right sort of challenge for the educative practices of liberalization. Victorian liberalism promises to usher in a progressive society of progressive individuals, and the story of Mr. Harding’s liberalization functions as a working out of that promise, even if the fulfillment looks like something less than the “perfection” of which Arnold dreams. It is my contention that the novel endeavors to depict Harding as an ideal student of liberalization, one who learns the full complement of liberal strategies and modalities of being. Harding proves to be so fine a student, in fact, that his acquisition of liberal individuality probably exceeds the overt rhetorical aims that the novel establishes. Harding’s individuality manifests liberalism’s embodiment of its abstract and abstracting tendencies but also the odd disjuncture between that form of embodiment and the human body which lives it. This disjuncture produces peculiarities in Mr. Harding’s behavior that one might not otherwise associate with a political theory so dedicated to establishing normative and thus normal categories of value and subjectivity. What might seem like Mr. Harding’s 8. Trollope, The Warden, 60 (hereafter cited in text and subsequent notes as W).

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old-fashioned habits of manner and action—his introversion, his idiosyncratic gesticulations—are not isolated moments of nostalgic indulgence on the part of Trollope or, less simply, the text’s intimations of Harding’s limited educability. Rather, as I will suggest in the following pages, these behaviors are, perhaps surprisingly, constitutive functions of liberal practice and identity representable within the novel and, as following chapters suggest, recognizable in Victorian society as well. Mr. Harding seems in some ways antagonistic toward progress and disinclined toward singularity; even so, the backward and conventional Harding does learn the lessons of liberalism—perhaps too well. Despite appearances to the contrary, The Warden is deeply engaged with and deeply complicated by the issues of individuation that inform contemporary liberal thinkers in the 1850s and 1860s, most notably J. S. Mill.9 The novel relates the circumstances of Reverend Harding, the endearingly benign warden of Hiram’s Hospital, a charitable home for aged and impoverished laborers. At issue is the warden’s right to his main source of income, which comes from the proceeds of Hiram’s now ancient and bountiful estate, a right questioned by an aggressively reformist physician (appropriately named, Mr. Bold) and in turn the press, specifically a London daily called the Jupiter. Long allied with a passing and now seemingly corrupt culture of patronage, exemplified in this novel by the ecclesiastical aristocracy of the Church of England, Mr. Harding decides, not unlike the historical Liberal Party, that it is necessary to reject this old order and the sinecures that would bestow a public identity on him. In liberal parlance, he decides to choose, to choose a plan of action, not according to the presumptive, unexamined, and often highly theatrical traditions of an unreformed church, but according to the considered and privately held convictions of his own character.10 In short, Harding determines to quit the wardenship and, despite the sacrifices and sadnesses occasioned by his decision, live as happily as such an undemanding fellow can. Through this ethical crisis, it appears the novel plots Mr. Harding’s arduous but ultimately successful acquisition of a principled individuality that manfully resists other more

9. It is worth noting, however, that Trollope continually makes grander historical claims for his liberal tale than I suggest. Mr. Harding’s story draws ironic parallels to Greek themes; he draws comparisons to Apollo, Iphigenia, Mount Olympus, and so on. Irony notwithstanding, Trollope seeks to authorize his liberalism in a very familiar way by affirming its origins in the ancient polis. 10. The lukewarm opposition to patronage typical of liberalism and apparent in The Warden contrasts with Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, a novel of the Whig era, in which sinecures prove to be a solution to the protagonists’ problems.

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corporate claims for his identity. In so doing, Trollope’s protagonist seems to exemplify the Millian motto: “the free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-being” (OL, 54). In fact, as I will argue, Mill’s influential On Liberty seems interestingly anticipated to a certain extent in the pages of The Warden, even its internal contradictions. In primarily referring to On Liberty, I am, many critics would assert, representing Mill’s liberalism with his most uncharacteristic text. Moreover, the socialism that Mill arguably adopted later in his career makes him a problematic icon of liberalism and an especially unlikely partner for Anthony Trollope, whose more conservative liberalism often put him at odds with Mill concerning particular Liberal Party legislation.11 These reservations are reasonable, but it is precisely these authors’ differences locally and throughout their careers that make the resonances between The Warden and On Liberty more compelling as exemplary instances of a more generic form of liberal individualism in the mid-Victorian period. Even the evident tonal dissonances between Mill’s descriptions of heroic singularity and Mr. Harding’s diffident idiosyncrasy reveal crucial tensions within the liberal conception of individuality that are central to my thesis. I will first discuss Mill’s liberated individual as elaborated in the pages of On Liberty. According to On Liberty, there are three types of liberty that are crucial to “the free development of individuality,” all of which seem especially relevant to Trollope’s narrative. Mill famously enumerates them. First, there is “human liberty,” elaborated as “the inward domain of consciousness . . . liberty of thought and feeling, absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects.” Second, there is “liberty of tastes and pursuits,” the freedom to frame “the plan of our life to suit our own character, of doing as we like” (OL, 13). The third form of liberty is “the liberty . . . of combination among individuals; freedom to unite, for any purpose not involving harm to others” (OL, 13–14). A liberal individual is a free individual, in mind, in action, in society. Despite Mill’s recognition of temperamental determinants in the formation of subjectivity, his truly liberated person is a conscious but also highly conscientious individual, what Victorians and indeed Mill himself would describe as a man of character. The conservative political theorist Maurice Cowling reminds those prone to radicalizing the Mill of On Liberty that Mill’s notion of individual well-being, related but by no means identical to his father’s idea of happiness, requires the approval of ratio11. For instance, Mill championed a system of meritocracy for bureaucratic appointments, while Trollope vehemently protested it.

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nal reflection and is “not any pleasure a man happens to pursue.”12 For Mill, as many scholars have noted, development of the liberal individual is first and foremost a matter of character formation. As Stefan Collini has remarked of Mill, one should never underestimate the degree to which he was a “moralist.”13 As Mill describes it, the developing character seeks to build an “inward domain of consciousness,” which presumes “absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects” (OL, 13). Moreover, this character respects independence so thoroughly that he is obliged to respect equally the independent opinions of others. In On Liberty, Mill describes this sort of liberal individual as one who manifests and thereby guarantees individualism by his willingness to listen and even—at times—to give voice (as devil’s advocate) to opinions he neither believes nor supports. In so doing, he shows his capacity for recognizing the truth that might emerge through exchange of diverse opinion. In this formulation, the person of character, though surely full of opinion, is nonetheless quite astonishingly capable of momentary disinterestedness, of in some instances becoming a bystander even in relation to his own most precious convictions and pursuits such that he may even see fit to change his mind or even his actions—“it is on the calmer and more disinterested bystander, that this collision of opinions works its salutary effect” (OL, 50). Mill’s account of the liberal individual thus emphasizes a specific relation between interest and disinterest. He describes a man of decided interests, a man of “tastes and pursuits,” who can yet view his opinions disinterestedly and calmly see them debated. That the liberal individual is supremely liberal when simultaneously most and least opinionated produces a much more contentious and awkward form of liberal individuality than Mill’s sturdy prose here suggests, but this insight will be pursued more fully later. Now I simply wish to remark on the formalism that imbues Mill’s liberal individual, how this figure is defined primarily by his 12. Cowling, Mill and Liberalism, 170. 13. See Carlisle, John Stuart Mill, for an extensive and helpful examination of Mill’s longstanding engagement with “character.” Mill rather famously responds to the criticism of utilitarianism that condemns its apparently hedonistic pursuit of happiness by insisting that not just any pleasure will suffice: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied” (J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, 14 ). On Mill’s positive liberty, see also J. Gibbons, “J.S. Mill,” 106. Collini notes, “There is little in Mill’s speeches that could really be described as an appeal to what was ‘expert’ or ‘scientific,’ but considerable evidence of how, like Gladstone, he exercised a moral authority, not least in his constant denunciation of the habitual selfishness and indifference of the possessing classes” (Public Moralists, 163). See also Kinzer, A. Robson, and J. Robson, Moralist In and Out of Parliament.

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rationally disinterested relation to his opinions, tastes, and interests rather than by their particular content. The individual that readers often envision and celebrate from a reading of On Liberty is a heroically independent and principled figure, doing battle in a discursive public sphere.14 He is heroic precisely because, Mill asserts, mid-Victorian society is largely populated with a most dangerous hybrid: aggressive conformists. The hero who speaks with splendid autonomy the reasoned but also reasonable opinions that make him (or her) a person of character must speak within a vehemently contested social domain. Early in On Liberty, Mill passionately attacks the unquiet majority for their compliance with what he calls “mass opinion” and “received opinion,” distinct kinds of opinion that nonetheless equally impede the formation of the “individual opinion” that he so admires. In speaking of those most susceptible to mass opinion, Mill complains, “Their thinking is done for them by men much like themselves, addressing them or speaking in their name, on the spur of the moment, through the newspapers” (OL, 63). This theory of representation, in which a representative member thinks—and instantaneously so—for the group, clearly fails to live up to Mill’s own conception of a representative polity. For Mill, representativeness ought not to extend to the regions of thought, “an inward domain of consciousness” that must always remain individuated and private, indeed distinct from the social body, if more amiably inclined toward one’s friends and lovers. Moreover, by languidly listening to “men much like themselves,” these Englishmen succumb to the seduction of sameness, implicitly the opposite of individual opinion, which presumes difference throughout: at its origin, in the individual; in its form, since the hallmark of individual opinion seems to be its capacity to make, appreciate, and even sustain distinctions; and in practice, in the iconic exchange of differing opinion. Like mass opinion, received opinion—that other disreputable opinion that attracts Mill’s contempt—is portrayed in On Liberty as the consequence of laziness. In the treatise’s pages, received opinion becomes the precise counterpoint to the productivity and rigor manifest in the cerebration of the liberal individual who must weigh and assess his every thought. Indeed, received opinion, what Mill insultingly aligns with religious “creed,” does not even manage to penetrate the brain. As subcognitive possession, it “remains as it were outside the mind, encrusting and petrifying it against all other influences addressed to the higher parts of our nature” (OL, 39). That Mill focuses on the pressures exerted by both these types of majority opin14. See Appiah, Ethics of Identity.

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ion is itself a sign that liberal theory has shifted into a distinctly Victorian variant where the early eighteenth-century faith in the liberal public sphere has given way to doubts—doubts in particular about the public sphere’s capacity to foster free individuals in an era of classed subjects and mass publics. The formalism of Mill’s individualism is to some extent explicable as a response to the kind of generality that such majority opinion epitomizes. The precise and by no means antagonistic relation between interest and disinterest in the liberal subject who holds opinions and has tastes is a revision of the generic impulse that in another register constitutes mass and received opinion, opinions that seem to Mill fundamentally unspecifiable, ultimately without agency or thought, at bottom not opinions at all. When Mill abstracts the subject from an overinvestment in particular interests, thereby attributing to it a necessary disinterestedness, he not only devises a form of individuality that by definition is replicable as form, he runs the risk of rendering each subject indistinguishable from other subjects, generic in his objectivity, not just like everyone else but interchangeable with everyone else. Mill, however, insists on distinguishing the liberal individual, in part through the specificity of his “tastes and pursuits.”15 These are designations that implicitly evoke an embodied and agential, if not exactly personal, dimension in a subject otherwise dedicated to cognitive practices of abstraction, but an embodied dimension which remains abstracted, imbued with disinterestedness.

The Character of Liberal Individualism Like Mill’s On Liberty, Trollope’s novel is chiefly concerned with the liberalizing individual, his possession of tastes and opinions, and the political effects of his tastes and opinions. Opinion in particular becomes increasingly important as a society liberalizes, in part because it gains the ability to influence law and legislation. If opinion does not make the man, it nearly does. Indeed Trollope, like Mill, quite closely aligns “character” and opinion in his own An Autobiography when he describes “how frequently I have used [characters in novels] for the expression of my political or social convictions.”16 Although in this instance Trollope refers to the literary defi15. A subject defined by “tastes and pursuits” is strikingly similar to the subject of modernday advertising, which itself can trace its roots back to the increased interest in the demand side of economics often associated with William Stanley Jevons. It is of course possible that Mill is aware of these emergent changes in economic perspective that valorizes, indeed designates, the individual in terms of his market behavior. See Gagnier, Insatiability of Human Wants. 16. Trollope, Autobiography, 180. Quotation cited in Barnett, “Public Figures,” 94.

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nition of character—the linguistic representation of a person on the page— Trollope’s literary conception of character and Mill’s theoretical conception of character share a presumption, for both are constituted by opinions and their relation to those opinions. Trollope’s more morally neutral formulation enables the novel to characterize men both good and bad, but even here, it should be emphasized, moral evaluation hinges on the way in which each character possesses his opinions, the degree to which one is disinterested or interested, sincere or insincere, in relation to them.17 And, moreover, the moral evaluations that are implied in The Warden seem profoundly evocative of Mill’s own estimations of mass, received, and individual opinion. Paralleling On Liberty’s categories of opinion, The Warden labors to distinguish the otherwise undistinguished Septimus Harding. In The Warden, Mr. Harding’s son-in-law Archdeacon Grantly seems almost a personification of “received opinion.” Fully affiliated with the institutional customs if not precisely the religious “creeds” of the Church of England, Grantly is an Anglican and therefore an anachronistic version of the company man. When the novel represents the archdeacon’s relation to his own opinion concerning the wardenship question, it corporealizes him, transposing what could be understood as a mental state of certainty in terms of a combative body; unlike Mr. Harding’s doubts and misgivings, “no such weakness perplexed the nobler breast of his son-in-law” (W, 36, emphasis added). Robust and virile, his state of mind likened to an “indomitable cock” that “erects his comb,” Grantly does not worry over the fine moral points of Harding’s case but aggressively aligns himself with the interests of his party, urging his father-in-law to embrace the litigation about the rightful possession of Hiram’s proceeds that Grantly assumes will decide in favor of the church (W, 36). The novel seems to suggest that Grantly so immerses himself in the corporate body of his church that his own body becomes a metonymic muscle of resistance against any opinions that counter the church’s view; his body becomes a physical embodiment of his religious creed and, to adopt Mill’s formulation, works at “encrusting and petrifying [Grantly] against all other influences addressed to the higher parts of [his] nature.” The novel describes the archdeacon: “He was

17. Janice Carlisle argues that Mill most often deploys a more generic notion of character, one without explicit moral valence, such that all persons have a character. See Carlisle, John Stuart Mill, 1–2, in particular. For my purposes, this distinction is inconsequential because in both formulations a notion of “good” character is in play and is contingent on the way in which individuals relate to their positions and actions within a delimited cultural terrain.

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about to defend the holy of holies from the touch of the profane; to guard the citadel of his church from the most rampant of its enemies; to put on his good armour in the best of fights” (W, 36). His phallic and martial hypermasculinity emphasizes the degree to which his intellectual energies are dislodged from his brain and removed to a more partisan region of his body but also measures the distance between his “impassioned” interest in the church and Harding’s more disinterested, even comparatively disembodied, stance. For the archdeacon, the central moral dispute about the wardenship is never about Mr. Harding per se, whatever that might mean, but about the position of the warden, which Harding merely occupies, like a trust. Insofar as Grantly wholly identifies himself with his position as archdeacon (even his family members call him “the archdeacon”), he is represented as continuous with his creed, one who does not make thoughtful distinctions between his church role and a separate, individuated self. Early in the novel, Grantly complains about Harding’s seemingly contradictory treatment of John Bold, the de facto prosecutor in the case against Harding’s wardenship and at the same time the suitor of Harding’s younger daughter. Through this complaint, Grantly shows how alien to him are fine distinctions between the “establishment” and any available conceptions of individual privacy. When he learns that Bold, despite his responsibility for the warden’s troubles, has visited Harding at home, “he could not bring himself to understand how so declared an enemy of the establishment could be admitted on terms of intimacy in the house” (W, 26). As the leader writer for the Jupiter (a.k.a. Times), Tom Towers resembles the newspapermen whom Mill represents in On Liberty as the mouthpiece of that other threat to liberal individualism: “mass opinion.”18 Increasingly in midcentury, newspapers were seen by leading intellectuals as mere party organs, engaged in the consolidation of special interests and the intensification of partisanship, as Arnold dismissively notes in “The Function of 18. “Mill deplored that ‘the outward signs of public opinion are at the absolute command of professional excitement-makers, to which category most of the journalists . . . belong.’” Kahan, Aristocratic Liberalism, 66. Perhaps it should be noted here that, unlike Mill in On Liberty, Trollope emphasizes the disingenuousness that fuels the newspaperman’s affiliation with the masses. Rather than Towers adequately representing the masses, being one of the “men much like themselves” that Mill describes, Towers is portrayed as a disreputable demagogue, indeed a typical method of Trollope’s for representing characters more politically radical than himself. In so aligning mass journalism with demagoguery, Trollope also seems to align mass journalism with Catholicism, since the Jupiter’s institutional form and the private quarters of Tom Towers would have evoked for readers this other kind of “undue influence” upon the minds of the masses.

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Criticism at the Present Time.”19 Egged on by Dr. Bold’s reformism, Towers has publicized Harding’s ethically dubious status as warden by naming his name and passing judgment on him in a series of anonymously authored newspaper leaders (editorials), gauged, as leaders in newspapers always are, to mobilize public opinion. If Grantly sees only the warden in Harding, Towers sees only a rhetorical figure of villainy in the name, a figure that sustains the endless dialectic of party politics. This is a much more discursive, indeed more worryingly modern, version of publicity than that performed by Grantly. In contrast to Grantly and Tom Towers, who live public lives masked and dissociated from a somewhat deviant private life, Mr. Harding must successfully formulate an individual opinion, that bulwark of mid-Victorian liberalism, which expressively and consistently bridges the private and public worlds.20 In part, the text locates the virtues of Harding’s liberal opinion not in the able execution of his official duties as warden, which are merely the unthinking rituals authorized by a patriarchal aristocracy, an organ of received opinion, but in his ability as an individual to make distinctions.21 For instance, the novel describes in detail, in extended omniscient descriptions of consciousness, Harding’s broad-minded ability to see quite clearly a variety of ethical distinctions. Unlike Grantly, Harding distinguishes between Dr. Bold’s public role as reformer and his domestic life as the smitten suitor of Harding’s daughter Eleanor. The novel describes Harding’s train of thought: “and had he considered that he had ground

19. “Our organs of criticism are organs of men and parties having practical ends to serve, and with them those practical ends are the first thing and the play of the mind the second.” Arnold, “Function of Criticism,” 528a. Writing anonymously, Greg seconds this view when he refers to the Times as exercising a sort of “despotism” because it is “read every morning by hundreds of thousands who read nothing else, who imbibe its doctrines, who accept its statements, and who repeat both to every one they meet” ([Greg], “Newspaper Press,” 492). 20. Trollope’s depiction of Grantly in the novel constitutes a typically liberal critique of what Mill calls “received opinion,” represented in this instance by the aristocracy of the Anglican Church. Trollope offers a humorously definitive exposé of a seemingly pious man who only “acts” his moral superiority in public while in private he indulges in the bawdy and bodily excesses of Rabelais. Trollope’s Tom Towers is another sort of aggressive conformist, whose challenge to the liberal individual must also be managed by Trollope through a similar tactic of characterization. Towers is a troubling expression of the social body’s mass voice, who is then revealed to be hiding behind his professional anonymity because as a leader writer he does not sign his name. 21. In a useful essay, Hennedy remarks that “the book is less concerned with institutions than it is with those who run them” (“The Warden,” 29). I consider this “individual,” rather than institutional, interest characteristic of midcentury liberalism, but I am by no means suggesting that the individual is that which is the opposite of the institutional and that which is equivalent to the personal.

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to disapprove of Bold, he would have removed her, or forbidden him his house; but he saw no such ground” (W, 15).22 Harding may despise John Bold’s public actions, but he feels he cannot ethically justify a retaliation that would deny him Eleanor’s hand in marriage. In this respect Harding may be more heroically liberal than the novel’s readers, who are encouraged to dislike the romantic match. More important for the unfolding of the central moral plot, the text emphasizes that Harding seems to see quite clearly the distinction between his own individuality and the position he holds, a cognitive operation of abstraction of which others in the novel seem incapable. The novel states, again in third person omniscient, “As he paced up and down the room he resolved in his misery and enthusiasm that he could with pleasure, if he were allowed, give up his place, abandon his pleasant home, leave the hospital and live poorly, happily, and with an unsullied name, on the small remainder of his means” (W, 15). By the middle of the novel, in what seems a direct consequence of these musings, Harding has given up his need to seek permission and determined—all on his own—to resign from the wardenship of Hiram’s Hospital; by the end, he is no longer the warden, but he remains Mr. Harding, character—and name—intact. Clearly, the novel aims to represent Harding’s resignation as heroic disinterestedness; he is more concerned about justice than his reputation: “he was not so anxious to prove himself right, as to be so” (W, 24). Harding sees easily the ethical compromises in retaining the wardenship he otherwise so adores, and he cares little about money or prestige. Willing to live on a pitiable income he earns from his position as canon at the cathedral and to preside over the merest parish in the district, Mr. Harding seems to arrive at his decision by becoming the “disinterested bystander” so applauded by Mill. In so doing, he detaches himself from a constitutive relationship with his institutional position and its interests, placing the wardenship in a merely arbitrary relation to himself, Harding the individual. Indeed, these omniscient passages of conscientious consciousness are themselves representative of the crucial cognitive form of liberal individuality in mid-Victorian England that I have already delineated in Mill’s On Liberty. Such passages figure both the narrator and then the central character as simultaneously disinterested and interested subjects. In the formal harmony of liberal individualist theory, interest is not inherently at odds with disinterest or vice versa: the interest presumed by the posses22. Kincaid, “The Warden and Barchester Towers,” 67, also notes this discerning capacity of Harding.

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sion of property, for instance, is just what enables civic disinterestedness to emerge. What appears as Trollope’s artistic decision to represent the inner consciousnesses of his characters in the third-person omniscient form of a narrator’s voice is in fact only irregularly omniscient and never divine. The narrator is depicted as only human, prone to the same sorts of prejudices and longings as the readers of the novel; he even at times declines out of a sense of propriety to intrude on his characters’ thoughts.23 In so doing, he establishes his own position as an interested narrator, but one who aims to render himself disinterested and “just.” After Mrs. Grantly is shown to be justifiably dressing down her husband, Trollope’s narrator intervenes to give the husband some cover: “The tone of our archdeacon’s mind must not astonish us” (W, 38). The Trollopean narrator is continually endeavoring to achieve a tone of fair-mindedness and to encourage his readers to do the same, despite their “all-too-human” tastes that might make them loathe Grantly. Assuming this position, the narrator demonstrates his humane concern for his characters, his altruism, even perhaps his intimacy with them, but nonetheless seems to respect his and their own individuality. The novel often emphasizes the narrator’s respectful distance from Mr. Harding. When narrating the scene in which Harding sees himself lambasted in the Jupiter, the narrator interrupts: “I must for the present leave my readers to imagine the state of Mr. Harding’s mind after reading the above article” (W, 60). The narrator refuses to speak about his own personal story despite occasional references to “I.” However, he also declines to “take over” the voice of his characters so seamlessly that his own interests are thus misleadingly mingled in their own words.24 Continually foregrounding the fictionality of the narrative, a technique that contemporary critics often bemoan as the author’s ultimate lack of moral seriousness, the text thereby frames the narrator’s objectivity not as 23. When referring to Eleanor Harding’s meeting with Mary Bold, John Bold’s sister, Trollope writes, “What had passed between Eleanor Harding and Mary Bold need not be told. It is indeed a matter of thankfulness that neither the historian nor the novelist hears all that is said by their heroes or heroines, or how would three volumes or twenty suffice!” (W, 54). 24. Interpreting third-person omniscience in this way, as a kind of high-minded respect for others’ liberties and indeed privacies, admittedly goes against the grain of some narratologists, who read “stream of consciousness” as the more liberating form of narration, the sign of an author’s powerful libertarian “respect” for his characters’ distinctiveness that he lets them think aloud. And yet in so arguing, Cohn, for instance, necessarily must collapse the distinction that surely obtains between an author and a character in a written novel. See Cohn, Transparent Minds. Third-person omniscience also obscures the tonal and perspectival distance between the narration of events in the world and the narration of a character’s thoughts, enhancing the impression that epistemological and empirical events are equally available to the narration of an interested and disinterested narrator.

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mimetic empiricism, the unmediated telling of the facts, or as narcissistic mirroring but as the self-consciously motivated but also disinterested practice of judging fairly, what John Rawls defines as the central project of the liberal citizen, who “carefully consider[s] alternative conceptions of justice and the forms of various arguments for them.”25 In the instance of altruism, interest is itself abstracted into a more generic investment in “humankind,” but, even so, practices of disinterest continue to redound to the liberal individual’s benefit. As Mill himself realizes after his famous breakdown, as recounted in the Autobiography, in seeking their own serenity, people ought to be “fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end.”26 Because of Harding’s similar capacity to make role distinctions, to tell the difference between himself and the roles he discharges, he is not merely one of the many characters in the novel whose depiction verifies the narrator’s disinterest. Instead, he demonstrates through this parallel, indeed simultaneous, process of differentiation his own disinterestedness. The depiction of Harding’s internal cogitations should be understood as the formal organization of his thoughts, as if Harding himself is thinking in and through the third-person narrative voice that thereby enables the hero to refer to himself as “he.” Admittedly a somewhat revisionist account of indirect discourse, this narratological representation of Harding now makes him seem like the disinterested bystander that Mill values. What this indirect discourse emphasizes, then, is the cognitive capacity to make moral distinctions, an abstracting capacity that produces liberal individuals because it enables them to practice the devil’s advocacy of disinterestedness that marks them as liberal individuals. The novel, through its representation of the relation between the narrator and his characters’ inner thoughts, and Harding, by means of his mental substantiation of devil’s advocacy, reenact in the cognitive realm the one-on-one exchange of differing opinion that is always the implicit model in Mill’s own definition of the liberal individual. Through third-person narration, Mr. Harding can be represented as simultaneously rehearsing opposing positions and yet all the while maintaining his own position within the context of scrupulous dialogue, the consideration of “alternative conceptions of justice” that Rawls continues to consecrate in his modern-day version of liberalism. Here is how Harding is portrayed as conscientiously thinking through and 25. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 384n. 26. Mill, Autobiography, 100.

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then rejecting the various positions he might take: “Doubting, as he had begun to doubt, the justice of his own position in the hospital, he knew that his own self-confidence would not be restored because Mr. Bold had been in error as to some legal form; nor could he be satisfied to escape, because, through some legal fiction, he who received the greatest benefit from the hospital might be considered only as one of its servants” (W, 80). The model of one-on-one exchange of opinion is deeply embedded in the foregoing passage, with the opposing position of Archdeacon Grantly articulated but never, explicitly, attributed to him. In referring to an “error as to some legal form,” the novel evokes the approach that Grantly wishes to pursue with their barrister, Sir Abraham Haphazard, but does not submerge the position into the vibrant personality that espouses it. Rather than a public exchange, the dialogue is a profoundly mental one, which speaks to the insistently privatizing impulse of Mr. Harding’s thoughts and indeed the novel’s project itself. In Trollope’s tale, Harding does not hash out his position in the fray of public discourse but mentally dramatizes opposing positions—in terms of conceptual categories like “forms” and “fictions”—making his decision without significant social debate, except for a few failed exchanges between himself and his son-in-law. In this respect, Harding’s dialogic practice at first seems inconsistent with Mill’s more public-spirited evocation of the liberal individual. I would like to argue a bit more obliquely, however, and suggest that these formal evocations of cognitive disinterestedness help me see the extent to which Mill’s model of opinion formation is at times in On Liberty and in his Autobiography as well lurching toward a more private and more cognitive location than is perhaps initially apparent. Alongside passages that celebrate the public airing of diverse opinion, On Liberty privileges devil’s advocacy, an enunciation of social alterity that, however, never needs to become public or, in becoming public, remains insistently about the exchange of ideas, not the circulation of people.27 By setting Mill’s most passionate treatise beside Trollope’s The Warden, I can better detect the former text’s rhetorical emphasis—that individual freedom is located not primarily in the liberal public sphere, nor mostly in the process of opinionated exchange among diverse peoples. These practices are in fact enabled by rather than consti-

27. A case in point in On Liberty: “So essential is this discipline to a real understanding of moral and human subjects, that if opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skilful devil’s advocate can conjure up” (OL, 37). My point is shared to a certain extent by Roberts, “John Stuart Mill,” 67–87; also Haskell, “Persons as Uncaused Causes.”

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tutive of individuality. Instead, they emerge from “the inward domain of consciousness” where resides “liberty of thought and feeling, absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects.” From this vantage point, liberal disinterest, as manifested through internal devil’s advocacy, fosters a cognitive expression of social alterity, and, as an internal form, it organizes the otherwise incommensurable contents of social difference, renders their cacophony in the newspapers or in the garrulous bullying of Archdeacon Grantly into a privately beautiful concordance. When Mr. Harding first must take in the sophistic stance of the archdeacon, he does not answer back but rather plays a tune on an imaginary cello: “’Twas his constant consolation in conversational troubles. While these vexed him sorely, the passes would be short and slow, and the upper hand would not be seen to work . . . but as his spirit warmed to the subject—as his trusting heart, looking to the bottom of that which vexed him, would see its clear way out—he would rise to a higher melody, sweep the unseen strings with a bolder hand, and . . . create an ecstatic strain of perfect music” (W, 39). Responding in this way, Harding transforms political contention, menacing social alterity, and his potentially panicky response to them both into imagined musical counterpoint and ultimately—as “perfect music”—into harmony. What I wish to call cognitive formalism in The Warden helps demonstrate that mid-Victorian liberalism is a prior moment in the history of what Dorothy J. Hale has termed the “social formalism” of novel theory, “a belief that the novel can formally both encapsulate and fix a social world.”28 In The Warden, the political meaning and social consequences of Mr. Harding’s position are barely addressed, nor are the opposing positions even adequately represented, let alone given “autonomy,” as narratologists are fond of suggesting is at work in the novel as form. Contemporary critics also found Trollope’s own political position elusive: did he or did he not favor ecclesiastical sinecures?29 In fact, the content of these positions is nearly irrelevant in the formalism I’m tracing. What counts is the form those opinions take, and all those opinions ought to take the form of disinterested interest, a balanced relation between the interest that propels action and the disinterest that moderates it. Political effectivity takes a secondary value to the social formalist idea itself. Hale impressively charts the

28. Hale, Social Formalism, 5. 29. See especially Review of The Warden, Eclectic Review, 359–61, where the unsigned review states, “A moral is wanting.” For a twentieth-century discussion of Trollope’s ambivalence, see S. Hawkins, “Mr. Harding’s Church Music.”

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way in which a surprisingly diverse array of novel theorists (from Henry James to Mikhail Bakhtin to Roland Barthes) claim for the novel and often the novelist the preeminent capacity to adequately represent social alterity, stratification, and difference. Mid-Victorian liberalism both in specific novels and in political practice similarly produces and privileges formal means of representing the social, as Laurie Langbauer has suggested of Trollope’s novels, in particular his series fictions (the Barchester chronicles, the Palliser novels).30 Insofar as literary critics presumed that the novel and John Stuart Mill presumed that the liberal individual possessed the ability, to borrow Hale’s term, “to objectify points of view,”31 it makes a kind of larger historical sense that this novel, The Warden, is about the formation of the liberal individual out of what the novel represents as the dysfunctional ruins of an aristocratic society. Such a convergence between the novel genre and the liberal effort to produce individuals who themselves can think social difference can also lead to speculation concerning the extent to which the liberalism I’m describing here could be seen as primarily resorting in the later decades of the nineteenth century to what might be argued are even more strictly delimited forms. As more socially activist models—political organization, journalism—fail to adequately formalize and order the social world in the second half of the nineteenth century, becoming instead advocates or sensationalists, liberal individualism “retires” to the confines of the novel or to the jealously guarded balloting booth or to the pointedly regulated pages of the Fortnightly Review. Novels seek not surprisingly to educe the liberal individual through their formal operations, such as third-person omniscient narration, when, for instance, other sites of contestation—the newspapers, the hustings—do not.32 While the novel produces a form of social disinterestedness that sanctions many opinions, and thus many characters, these other settings of social life were increasingly considered to produce only one-sided content and at best a limited range of character options; Arnold suggests three options in Culture and Anarchy that morph instantly into social class—the philistines, the barbarians, and the populace.

30. Clearly, I agree with Langbauer’s description of Trollope as far as it goes, but she does not note that this formalized representation of the social “everyday” emanates from the Trollopean narrator and his characters’ cognitive practices of disinterested interest. The cultural totality she sees represented in Trollope’s novels is, in The Warden, shown to be a cognitive idea, and it is this idea, made beautiful, that Matthew Arnold hopes to see instilled in every liberalized self. Langbauer, Novels of Everyday Life, 94. 31. Hale, Social Formalism, 18. 32. See Cottom, Social Figures, 3–32, for a similar claim regarding George Eliot.

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The one-on-one exchange that most often stands in for or as the public sphere in midcentury liberalism becomes during this period increasingly privatized and delimited in its efforts to sustain individuation amid social diversity. Following Hale’s genealogy, one-on-one exchange in a public setting becomes over time formalized in the novel’s panoply of varied characters; then, at a later moment, it becomes internalized as the dialogue in those characters’ voices; and finally it becomes the narratological dialogism of the novel that, as Dominick La Capra felicitously puts it, “inserted the public square into language use itself.”33 Although many narratologists find this transfer of the public sphere to language use a triumphal socialization of the self, from the long perspective afforded by a history of the public sphere, this publicity of language can be registered in the opposite way as a pronounced recourse to privacy. Hale notes in Social Formalism that many twentieth-century novel theorists have argued that language and/or the novel are a particularly privileged objectification of the social and in particular the diversity that resides there; in so doing, of course, the critics resist or at least ignore the role of ideology.34 But most important, it seems to me, this position can mask a narrow, indeed privatized and even homogenized, conception of the social terrain, a conception that cognitive formalism augurs in its valorizing of an internalized devil’s advocacy that does not need to test its presumptions in the open air, or, at least, in an open air inhaled by bodies.35 Rather than suggesting that these narrative techniques I’ve been considering are uniquely constitutive of the formulation of liberal individualism and the epistemology that is imagined as intrinsic to it, I am more modestly observing that narratives of conscience were central to the presentation of liberal individuals in Victorian culture, reaching perhaps their most baroque embellishment in the formal figuration and narrative 33. Quoted in Hale, Social Formalism, 188 n. 10. 34. Not all critics informed by narratology resist ideological challenges. For a summary discussion of narratology’s relation to ideology, see Prince, “On Narrative Studies”; Wright, “Ideological Reading of Narrative.” Laurie Langbauer has interpreted Trollope’s oeuvre as producing this very sensation of the novel’s representational adequacy precisely through the multiple volumes’ exhaustive duplication of cultural ideology. Trollope, she writes, “reproduces the effects of cultural ideology, as we experience it in our inability to experience it as ideology” (Novels of Everyday Life, 94). 35. In so limning the constitutive relations between mid-Victorian liberalism, the narrative features of The Warden, and a certain assessment of the novel that characterizes much twentieth-century novel theory, I am elaborating on Ken Hirschkop’s smart analysis of the political capacities of both Bakhtin’s work and those critics attracted to its politics. Hirschkop insists on the “fantasy” implicit in Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, “a projection of the aesthetic ideal of the novel back onto society as a whole.” Hirschkop, “Heteroglossia and Civil Society,” 70. See also Hirschkop, “Is Dialogism for Real?”

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elaboration of the cognitive disinterestedness of the interested, liberal subject.36 One of the most striking historical resonances with the presentation of conscientious character in The Warden is in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, where Smith describes the process of moral judgment as a practice of self-division: “I divide myself, as it were, into two persons. . . . The first is the judge; the second the person judged of.”37 In what has come to be seen as a singularly influential way of making sympathy more spectacular, Smith holds tight to figures of theatricality and visuality even in the context of what seem specifically internal deliberations concerning morality. In this set piece, moral assessment requires at minimum two subject positions to dramatize a visible social realm in which opinion formation can take place. At the very least, the passage seems to demonstrate a rhetorical commitment to the public sphere defined in terms of exchange perceived as visual and human, one that seems increasingly absent in mid-Victorian accounts of devil’s advocacy, as I am suggesting is even true of Mill, despite his practical commitments to civic action.38 Emphasizing the music that swells from the imaginary cello between Harding’s legs, this novel by contrast invests in an aural rather than visual standard for social exchange: Mr. Harding seeks to be heard rather than seen in the public sphere. In many respects, Harding does not wish to be seen at all; he longs to preserve his privacy. The passage from Smith represents the judge as fully inhabiting the position of the social, a social realm that is therefore singular in its alterity— “the other.” For Smith’s subject, the apparent homogeneity of the social makes the process of self-division comparatively easy, especially insofar as private values are smoothly sustained across the private/public divide

36. As a technique of characterization, indirect discourse, for instance, does not by any means originate in the mid-nineteenth century. These narratives of conscience can trace their literary origins quite far into the past, back through eighteenth-century seduction novels and, as some scholars have argued, the casuist tradition that informed that genre, thereby working for very different projects, such as the elaboration of a feminized site of bodily and moral privacy, or for potentially competing projects, such as the constitution of a space of womanly introspection. See Hunter, Before Novels; Chandler, England in 1819. 37. A. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 113. 38. Joyce in Rule of Freedom, 114–24, makes a special case for Mill’s civic imagination, especially as evinced by his commentary on municipalism in Representative Government. Joyce thereby counters to a degree my emphasis on liberalism’s ambivalence toward social circulation. In Rule of Freedom, he preserves the objectivity and disinterestedness of liberalism by separating liberal administration from liberal politics—a useful heuristic move that he too often mistakes for a historical description. I am not suggesting that Mill did not wish to practice what he preached, but the genesis and contours of his participation still express a strong orientation toward the social formalism I’ve been describing.

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because they are nearly commensurate to the values of the public—the judged recognizes the judge’s values. Put another way, the private domain sufficiently overlaps with the public domain, in keeping with Smith’s conviction that private commerce and social commerce quite literally intermingle. In Victorian liberal deliberation, however, the journey from the self-interested private person to the disinterested judge passes through what is increasingly registered as a chaotic social landscape, a heterogeneous alterity, menacingly bodily, which itself must be disinterestedly formalized by the judging individual. In place of a familiar and homogeneous society, Victorian liberalism encounters a social terrain whose “members,” to borrow Northumberland’s terminology, seem profoundly incommensurate, lacking common denominators. Liberals note, on the one hand, the oppressive conformism of a highly ramified class society; on the other, a mass culture without a conventional referent of any kind, prone to whims, vagaries of opinion. Instead of retreating, the liberal judge in this scenario still inhabits a social position but cannot fully inhabit its diversity or its tangible incorporations. Instead of accepting his status as simply one among many social minorities, however, the judge occupies the social insofar as he disinterestedly thinks through its diversity. Both his social occupation (as practice and location) and his private cognition are inseparable from one another; indeed, his private cognition is his social occupation. The Warden carefully evokes in indirect discourse the mental processes through which Harding struggles heroically to think disinterestedly through the diverse factions that constitute the social. By this, I do not mean that he inhabits their point of view or “embodies” their members; I mean that he thinks through their points of view disinterestedly, using third-person narration to neutrally articulate their divergent opinions in the service of what now is presented as his own cognitive process of judgment among abstract conceptual categories (points of view). In certain passages, Harding thinks through the ecclesiastical faction, in others the reform agenda headed by Bold, and in still others the faceless “public” conjured by the Jupiter.39 In 39. Trollope writes the following over the course of his omniscient narration. First he writes from a domestic point of view: “In the first place, he wished for Eleanor’s sake to think well of Bold and to like him, and yet he could not but feel disgusted at the arrogance of his conduct. What right had he to say that John Hiram’s will was not fairly carried out” (W, 22). And then soon thereafter, he writes from an ecclesiastical one: “Mr. Harding thought long and deeply over these things, both before he went to bed, and after it, as he lay awake, questioning within himself the validity of his claim to the income which he enjoyed. It seemed clear at any rate that, however unfortunate he might be at having been placed in such a position, no one could say that he ought either to have refused the appointment first or to have rejected the income afterwards. All the world—meaning the ecclesiastical world as confined to the English Church—

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Adam Smith’s presentation, he privileges the “sentiments” of his moral judgment, sentiments drawn without apology from a social consensus that Victorians liberals could only increasingly gesture toward nostalgically, as George Eliot does in her fictions of the recent past, or refer to ironically, as Trollope does in his always witty (rather than earnest) efforts to produce agreement among his readers. Harding himself finds that his personal feelings have no analogue in a public sphere populated not by the single judge, who is visualized and sympathetically recognizable, but by a proliferation of judges, figured as antagonized voices: “How was he to open his inmost heart to this multitude, to these thousands” (W, 60). In general, if not uniformly, in this mid-nineteenth-century version of narrated conscience, private thinking about the social replaces social sentiments, and identification with abstract categories of justice replaces feelings in common, while positions take precedence over personalities. Where Smith’s subject may seek to “place myself in his situation,” Harding accesses the true through his own abstract and self-abstracting conceptions of justice. The novel notes, after all, that Harding was willing to suffer if “he was self-satisfied of the justice of his own cause” (italics added). At their most self-reflexively mannered, these Victorian narratives registered the ambivalence intrinsic to theories of liberal individualism, a specifically formal ambivalence I will describe in more detail shortly. By setting aside or minimizing liberal individualism’s insecurities in relation to the realms of commerce and elsewhere in the novel to the realms of female conversation, The Warden goes on to elaborate the special virtues of liberal individualism and liberal opinion.40 The novel does so by

knew that the wardenship of the Barchester Hospital was a snug sinecure, but no one had ever been blamed for accepting it. To how much blame, however, would he have been open had he rejected it! . . . How would Dr. Grantly have shaken his wise head.” (W, 24). However, later in the novel, what might have once seemed a comprehensible division in opinion between Bold and Grantly opens via the Jupiter into the larger world beyond Barchester. Trollope himself seems incapable of narrating Harding’s relation to the geometrically increasing sites of public opinion: “I must for the present leave my readers to imagine the state of Mr. Harding’s mind after reading the above article. They say that forty thousand copies of the Jupiter are daily sold, and that each copy is read by five persons at the least” (W, 60). 40. Harding, then, has no recourse to the masculinized sentimentality narrated by eighteenth-century authors such as Laurence Sterne. His feelings have lost their clear reflection in what Trollope perceives to be the fractured mirror of the Victorian social. However, as I have already suggested, Trollope does not seek sympathetic recognition in an alternative realm of feminized sociability with its own valued representations of interiority. Deidre Lynch, in The Economy of Character, has expertly described both the form and the content of this type of character. Her consideration of what might be called the cognitive architecture of character functions for me as a sort of prehistory of formalism to my own period of historical study. If,

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largely pitting one kind of character against another, by contrasting Septimus Harding to others less liberal: his son-in-law, Tom Towers, and even the beadsmen under his charge. In an extended scene within the hospital, the text implicitly contrasts Harding’s individuality and disinterestedness to his poor wards’ lack of individuality and excess of self-interest, a selfinterest most often associated with the physical body, in this instance, the hand. Abel Handy, a disgruntled inhabitant of the hospital, is lobbying his colleagues to sign a petition to the bishop in the hopes of obtaining the income he now believes is theirs: “‘Take the pen, man, and right yourself ’” (W, 31). In this phrase, the appropriately named Handy associates a kind of writing with a kind of right, and both with the instantiation of a kind of bodily “righting” of the self, whose uprightness is linked to self-interest rather than justice. Harding is tellingly absent during this scene, but Harding’s character is nonetheless implicitly present—continually conjured up by the vocal allegiance of the only beadsman who openly supports him, Mr. Bunce. As an implicit subject of comparison, Harding does not merely submissively comply with or impulsively commit to the petition’s premise; rather, mentally debating each side in the dispute, regardless of its impact on himself, he arrives at “the Right.” Almost all the illiterate occupants at the hospital agree with Handy, however, and demonstrate their agreement by making a mark on the petition.41 One occupant, though, pauses before making his mark. Skulpit, whose social aspirations have convinced him that he can sign his name rather than simply make an X, takes the pen “and made little flourishes with it in the air” (W, 33). Unlike his peers, whose identical marks are visually evoked on the printed page of The Warden, Skulpit wishes to write

in the eighteenth century, women’s crucial role as consumers contributed to a form of literary characterization Lynch calls “interior decoration,” perhaps first fully visible in Fanny Burney’s novels, then the liberal individual’s investment in abstraction results in a literary characterization that attempts to empty out the contents of character, to remove the knickknacks that compel emotional attachment and preserve the now emptied space for cognitive formalism, the mental space realized in the balloting booth (Lynch, Economy of Character, 208). Lynch describes how Austen populates Elinor Dashwood’s mental life with evocations of conventional opinion, what Mill would disparage as “received opinion,” an instance that seems repeated in the Trollopean narrator’s apparently habitual recourse to proverb. In The Warden, however, proverbs no longer function as social opinion per se but as forms that must be assessed on a case-by-case basis, as Laurie Langbauer has argued (Novels of Everyday Life, 98–99). Harding must consider proverbs not as truisms but as “various forms of argument” that as a liberal individual he must evaluate. 41. It should perhaps be noted here that the beadsmen’s illiteracy doubly disqualifies them for participation in liberal society; they can neither vote in upcoming elections nor read The Warden.

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the name that would graphically distinguish him from the rest. Enraged by his procrastination, which is also prolonged by indecision and incompetence, Handy responds, “‘name or mark, it’s all one’” (W, 30). Typical of the illiterate, Handy simply cannot appreciate the distinctiveness of the signature form, satisfied as he is by the row of Xs that renders him and his co-conspirators discrete yet alike, a numerical sum that quantifies their mass resistance. Relatedly, Handy cannot see the difference between a legal conception of “rights” and an ethical conception of “the right.” Neither of these distinctions, however, are lost on Mr. Bunce, the only dissenter among them and the only one who could if he would sign his name. By depicting Skulpit’s flourishes and Handy’s reaction to them, the novel enacts a fairly standard Victorian liberal critique of democratic identity; these beadsmen are the ill-educated ones who aspire to a higher condition but who can only ever affirm their lack of distinction, their virtual anonymity within society. Undistinguished himself, Handy is also unable to make distinctions. Self-interested, he can only appreciate selves like him, just like the persons, Mill opines, who succumb to the mass opinion promulgated in the newspapers. Indeed, Handy mobilizes the petition drive precisely because he has heard about (though not read) the dispute in the papers. Although he may be able in hand, the old man lacks the hand that might make him something more than a mere manual laborer; his status in the novel oscillates between the two extremes of mere bodiliness and extreme discursiveness. An aggregate of identicals, these beadsmen thereby confirm their class designation. The petition itself fully figures their unfitness for the liberal polity, for petitions were the primary means by which the disenfranchised lobbied for parliamentary consideration, while Handy’s strong-arm tactics register their ineligibility for the reasoned disputation of the liberal public sphere. Handy indeed epitomizes, to again recall Northumberland’s words, a “member of their own body” who exposes these weak men “to intimidation and personal violence.” Skulpit ultimately must bow to his destiny, making a mark rather than signing his name, but in the meantime he has furthered the cause of liberal individualism, if only by emphasizing his disqualifications. Unlike his X, or the “faint, wandering, meaningless sign” (W, 32–33) made by the elderly Crumple’s hand, the signature form that is evoked only negatively in this scene is by implication clear, stable, and all-meaningful. Utterly unique, a creation of and representative for individuality, the signature form, as the next chapter will argue more fully, is also the liberal subject’s accepted public substitute, perhaps especially if also astonishingly so when printed. Mill himself laments in On Liberty that the 1850s is a conformist period when

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the “ideal of character is to be without any marked character” (OL, 69) and in response passionately promotes a liberalism that champions individual distinction that, in effect, “marks” the character. In contrast to the irresponsible anonymity of Tom Towers, whose mass-mediated opinion has “no signature at all” (W, 120), or the series of Xs that look all alike, the printed signature possesses an aura but not the fact of individual specificity, what might be called an abstraction of the hand in print that guarantees integrity and authenticity by only suggesting, in contrast to Handy and Skulpit, the physical body that owns it. Negatively evoked but positively substantiated in this scene, the signature evinces the necessary relation between abstraction and embodiment that characterizes liberal instantiation during this period. Harding, of course, never signs his name in this scene, but it seems to me that the narrative sequence in the novel as a whole argues that Mr. Harding will ultimately show himself to have all the virtues that this signature would have confirmed: giving up the title of “warden,” he remains thoroughly and distinctively a liberal individual—“Mr. Harding.” And yet Harding’s distinctiveness seems to many readers a mild rendition of individuality. Although heroic in the disinterested possession of his convictions, these convictions inhabit a man of simplicity most often moved by simple pleasures. Despite the horrors of his public embarrassment, Harding retains his mild manner throughout the novel, returning in the end to his creature comforts: his favorite daughter, his dear friend the bishop, and his beloved church music. Despite the novel’s efforts to distinguish Harding from the rest of the novel’s characters, Harding still seems “without any marked character.” This is a common reaction to the novel’s depiction of Harding, for readers are often accustomed to finding their central protagonists, especially those confronted with subtle moral dilemmas, as striking individuals, what might be called the “Dorothea Brooke effect” in the Victorian corpus. That readers frequently think Harding undistinguished is, I would suggest, a very odd response, for it overlooks his most characteristic gestures, suggesting to me that those gestures are at once crucial to liberal individuation and worryingly inimical to it.

Liberal Eccentricity In his fluent interpretation of Barchester Towers, the sequel to The Warden, D. A. Miller argues that Trollope’s mild characters and mild manners express the extent to which midcentury liberal society had transcended the

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need for an overt policing function, its liberalizing principles having so successfully permeated the social domain that its dictates had become normative, even downright comfortable. By midcentury, liberalism’s battles, it seems, were over; one needed only enjoy the spoils. Miller observes, “what we typically see in Trollope are not repressed characters sternly denying themselves in the interest of the social good that in return guarantees their own well-being, but rather characters who uninhibitedly desire what Trollope calls, in one of his own favorite legitimizing phrases, ‘the good things of the world.’”42 Miller, then, quite rightly registers the naturalizing effects at work in these novels, which produce a comparable “relaxative” affect in the reader of Trollope’s novels, who “sinks into the half-slumber in which his pages there may be safely skimmed,” who “falls into the usual appreciation of his appreciation of the usual.”43 Indeed, applying Miller’s elegant formulation of the “usual” to The Warden, one could productively read Trollope’s story of Mr. Harding’s character formation as a liberal moderation of the caricature more popularly disseminated at this time in Dickens’s fiction, which itself appears briefly in The Warden as The Almshouse, a novel written by “Mr. Popular Sentiment.” In those sentimental pages, Mr. Sentiment distorts the story of Barchester, describing Mr. Harding, so Trollope’s narrator claims, as “a man well stricken in years, but still strong to do evil: he was one who looked cruelly out of a hot, passionate bloodshot eye; who had a huge red nose with a carbuncle, thick lips, and a great double, flabby chin, which swelled out into solid substance, like a turkey-cock’s comb, when sudden anger inspired him” (W, 136). Perhaps evoking Grantly, the “indomitable cock” of an earlier passage, in this repetition of the cock’s comb, The Warden implicitly measures Trollope’s difference from Dickens, who might use the fowl metaphor as a vehicle for a bodily tenor, a direct correspondence between body and intention that seems simplistic in comparison to this novel’s more abstract characterological commentary on Grantly, which expresses a cognitive insight more appropriate for a liberal mind such as Trollope’s. Moreover, in recalling Grantly, the text’s caricature of Dickens’s caricaturing style reminds us how downright moderate is the archdeacon’s maliciousness. In place of what the novel portrays as the Dickensian tendency to exaggerate people and their intentions into stark polarities of good and evil, a fiction of the unusual, The Warden insistently populates its pages with the usual, insisting all along that the morally questionable desires and interests of the 42. Miller, Novel and Police, 111. 43. Ibid., 107.

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typical (atypical?) Dickensian caricature ought to be replaced by the diffident disinterestedness and modest amusements of a character with character, who surely does not need the haranguing sermonizing of Dr. Pessimist Anticant, a thin pastiche of Thomas Carlyle, in order to do the right thing. When, however, Miller suggests that Barchester Towers is merely more of the same, he ultimately succumbs to Trollope’s narcotic even as he beautifully registers its administration. It seems right to me to deny the presence of repression in Trollope’s novels and so, accordingly, to refuse to substitute the psychoanalyst for the police, the latter a favored metaphor of social control in Miller’s now-classic book. Yet, I wonder if there isn’t a middle term between these wardens of privacy and publicity, respectively, a term more appropriate for the liberal individual who aspires to travel freely between the private and the public spheres, a term more appropriate as well for Mr. Harding. Seen in his duration in The Warden, Harding is perhaps neither repressed nor transgressive but is nonetheless far more unusual than Miller allows Trollope’s creations to be. In short, Mr. Harding is eccentric. When Harding finds it necessary to make his circuit from the private to the public sphere, he does not sign his name, either on a petition or in a letter to the Jupiter; rather, he decides to go in person to Sir Abraham Haphazard, the barrister in charge of his case, in order to inform him that he will resign from the wardenship and drop the legal suit. The novel does not represent Harding’s signature, but in this scene with Haphazard, Harding manifests other manual gestures that are described here and elsewhere as even more profoundly characteristic of his individuality. That Harding’s “signature,” his “marked character,” is here expressed in bodily as well as vocal registers speaks to mid-Victorian liberalism’s efforts to negotiate the arduous transition from private to public life. Crucially, Harding’s gestures are the embodiments of abstracted individuality that make the liberal subject both possible and productive. Through a thorough examination of Harding’s gestures, and what I will argue are related formalistic constructions of liberal individuality by Mill and Arnold, I hope to register the distinctiveness of liberal individuality, its historical and epistemological unusualness, which our modern habits of “half-skimming” what sometimes seem overly familiar narratives of Victorian liberalism have perhaps missed. These gestures perform the embodiment of abstracted individuality that both enables and, as we will see, disables the liberal individual, and it is perhaps their harrowing contradictions that have made them so uncomfortable to acknowledge. During moments of conversational distress, when—crucially—Mr. Harding must speak to another, especially someone speaking in his public role

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as archdeacon or barrister, the novel describes in detail Harding’s nervous habit of playing what one might call “air cello.” I will quote here in full a passage I have already referred to briefly, in order to evoke the full dynamic of Harding’s gestures. When facing the irate Dr. Grantly: The warden still looked mutely in his face, making the slightest possible passes with an imaginary fiddle-bow, and stopping, as he did so, sundry imaginary strings with the fingers of his other hand. ’Twas his constant consolation in conversational troubles. While these vexed him sorely, the passes would be short and slow, and the upper hand would not be seen to work; nay the strings on which it operated would sometimes lie concealed in the musician’s pocket, and the instrument on which he played would be beneath his chair; but as his spirit warmed to the subject—as his trusting heart, looking to the bottom of that which vexed him, would see its clear way out—he would rise to a higher melody, sweep the unseen strings with a bolder hand, and swiftly fingering the cords from his neck down along his waistcoat, and up again to his very ear, create an ecstatic strain of perfect music, audible to himself and to St. Cecilia, and not without effect. (W, 39)

Or when confronting the officious Sir Abraham Haphazard somewhat later in the novel: [Harding] was standing up, gallantly fronting Sir Abraham, and his right arm passed with bold and rapid sweeps before him, as though he were embracing some huge instrument, which allowed him to stand thus erect; and with the fingers of his left hand he stopped, with preternatural velocity, a multitude of strings, which ranged from the top of his collar to the bottom of the lappet of his coat. (W, 155)

Though the novel refers to these embodied gestures with an exaggerated phrase—“wild gesticulations” (W, 155), their apparently unproblematic instrumentality for Harding makes them seem less than likely repressive symptoms, while their harmlessness renders them unlikely threats to the social order. Consequently, although some critics of the novel notice these sweeping movements, they, paralleling Miller’s reading practices, skim right over them, as do some of the characters.44 Referring to Sir Abraham Haphazard, the text asserts that “the meaning of these wild gesticulations was 44. With one partial exception: Saldivar, “Trollope’s The Warden.” His interpretation of the gestures as parodic seems to me unconvincing.

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lost upon him.” Such a generalized lack of curiosity attests to the willed blindness that is necessary for a liberal culture and a literary critical tradition to practically ignore the gendered body, performative gestures, and material conditions that make both possible and seemingly impossible a liberal character’s abstract individuation in the social realm. Unanalyzable and unguarded, Harding’s tic ought to be registered, and then recorded as, to adopt Mill’s terminology, a sign of “eccentricity” because this historically specific term gives us access into the nervous as well as, perhaps surprisingly, the narcotic systems of the liberal individual.45 Although Mill considers eccentricity merely a heightened version of liberal individuality, I would like to suggest at a later moment in the chapter that the novel’s intensification of idiosyncrasy is also an often unacknowledged sign of the formal failure intrinsic to the liberal individual, a failure the text contains but does not register as failure. In so rerouting our investigation from the usual to the unusual, “eccentricity” will also revise the significance of the sleepiness that descends on Harding in one particular scene within the novel and a similar drowsiness that affects his late-twentiethcentury readers—that boredom, which Miller and others have identified as a common reaction to reading a Trollope novel. The dulling effect of the novel, exerted on its characters and readers alike, is much less an insidious coercion of other subjects than an infectious personal fantasy of escape from the difficulties of living liberalism. In order to resist all sorts of corporate bodies (the Anglican Church, the mass public who read the Jupiter) that aim to enforce their opinions,

45. Mr. Harding’s eccentricity is superimposed on an otherwise very unremarkable character. Neither his eccentricity nor his ordinariness should be simply conflated with other literary antecedents that notably emphasize these traits. For instance, Mr. Harding’s behavior is not the “eccentricity” of the “demonic hero” as Georg Lukács describes him in The Historical Novel. The demonic hero is “the literary expression of the social eccentricity and superfluity of the best and sincerest human talents in this period of prose, a lyrical protest against the dominion of this prose” (Lukács, Historical Novel, 33). Nor ought he to be then regarded, in pointed contrast, as the other character option Lukács more fully considers, the “mediocre” hero, as devised by Walter Scott, he who “possesses a certain, though never outstanding, degree of practical intelligence, a certain moral fortitude and decency which even rises to a capacity for self-sacrifice, but which never grows into a sweeping passion, is never the enraptured devotion to a great cause” (Lukács, Historical Novel, 33). Although Mr. Harding seems very much a man of “fortitude and decency,” very much capable of “self-sacrifice,” he also positively has a “sweeping passion,” the sweeping strains of his music, both real and imaginary. What makes Mr. Harding distinctive as a character undergoing liberalization is the way in which his mediocrity serves as the moderating foundation for his equally crucial eccentricity. He is at one and the same time mediocre and eccentric: the very paradox of a liberal individualism that posits its individuals as both distinctive and generic.

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Harding fiddles without the cello, in full view of others. Mill writes in On Liberty: “Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric” (OL, 63). As a profoundly characteristic gesture, this performance of eccentricity replaces Harding’s signature as his mark of liberal individuality in the novel. To this extent, Harding fulfills Mill’s positive sense of eccentricity. Insofar as these gestures mimic an actual musical performance, they seem to mobilize the virtues already associated in the novel with Harding’s musicianship: discipline, the unique solo performance, and the noncontradictory relation between his public performances and his private “tastes and pursuits.” Just as the signature elsewhere in the novel stands for a distinctive “type” of authenticity in the public domain, so these bodily gestures certify Harding’s originality in the social settings in which they occur, for they embolden him to say his own opinion. This valorized yoking of the singular self to music should be seen in relation to a more general treatment of liberal individualism at midcentury that is evident in Mill but also in Matthew Arnold. As with Arnold’s deployment of the “best self,” the novel secularizes the transcending individual and at the same time lodges that individual in the abstracting realm of the aesthetic, retaining there the sacred aura of the soul and the aesthetic’s capacity to harmonize through form the disparate elements that constitute the self in society.46 Detaching Harding’s love of sacred music from its religious context, the novel ennobles Harding without sanctifying him, in order to abstract the individual from the petty self without, at the same time, losing him to “received opinion,” the incrustations of creeds. The reverential playing of his cello, like Mill’s reading of Wordsworth as recounted in his autobiography or Arnold’s perusing of great works of literature, can thus function as a sign of Harding’s cultivation of a rational pleasure, steeped in feeling but feeling abstracted to the register of the altruistic. While Grantly secretly sniggers at Pantagruel or Towers clandestinely overindulges in wine and women—or is it men?—Harding’s virtuous pleasures are serenely performed in public and in private: Harding “has played the violoncello daily to such audiences as he could collect, or, faute de mieux, to no audience at all” (W, 6). As with these actual musical performances, his performances of

46. Much later, George Santayana comments on the role of the aesthetic in liberalism: “Liberalism requires culture for its crown. It is culture that integrates in imagination the activities which liberalism so dangerously disperses in practice.” Quoted in Gross, Rise and Fall of Man of Letters, 144.

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eccentricity gracefully choreograph the otherwise jarring journey between his “tastes and pursuits” and his national obligations, individuating the subject capable of both musical and political abstraction through an embodiment of physically abstracted pleasure, an embodiment that notably performs “to no audience at all.” This is indeed a life well lived. The novel, it seems, transposes the male body to the milder register of creative musicianship—its aesthetics, its discipline, its disembodiment, and, to some extent, its disinterestedness—its self-abstraction in the submersion of music. In so doing, the text engages in a liberal redefinition of manliness, for it moderates the “martial virtue, energy, even virility” that John Burrow has identified as a typically eighteenth-century conception of virtue, and which we see in profusion with Grantly. This novel contributes to what Burrow has called the Georgian and Victorian definition of manly but which seems to me a more specifically liberal conception of the individual who now partakes of “connotations of self-mastery and sexual restraint, firmness, candour, and independence.”47 Sometimes depicted as an effeminate little man, quite in love with the Bishop of Barchester (W, 73), neither martial nor energetic and certainly never virile, Harding apparently appropriates some of the bodily benefits of an older conception of manhood for a liberal subject who is presumed in other ways to be less embodied, less performative—particularly in the public sphere—than the now-diminished aristocratic subject. When Harding’s swaying gestures enable him to stand tall in the public sphere—to bring his private tastes to public effect—they operate as a revision of Grantly’s hypermasculinity, in effect, as an abstraction of the male body and its powers. Through abstraction, the novel represents an individual whose manliness is not imbricated in class, status, or other conventional instantiations of manhood, among them the autoerotic, but rather in liberal eccentricity. As gestures of liberal eccentricity, enabling and affirming his individuality, the imaginary fiddlings seem “instrumental” to the processes of liberalization and its formation of character. For D. A. Miller, the repetitive nature of these gestures would, I suppose, finally count as a reflexive habit of liberalism and an indication of Harding’s now-routine internalization of the liberal practices of self-discipline. For Harding, however, these gestures always accompany rigorous, self-reflexive, and perhaps for this reason potentially harrowing practices of liberal cognition. Through processes of disinterestedness, calm reflection, and the virtuous fruits of a mentalized 47. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals, 86, 88. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, provides a somewhat different history.

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deliberative exchange, which are refracted and aestheticized through their figuration in the physical body, Harding composes his distinctive opinions, forms his body of thought. While fingering imaginary strings that play an imaginary tune, an improvisation of sorts, Harding apparently thinks through his troubles and comes to a decisive and disinterested opinion that he can defend with fortitude in face-to-face public debate. Harding’s opinion has in itself little to do with the politics of the relations between church and state, despite the details larding the narrative; instead, it is foregrounded because it is a model of liberal opinion, which is most concerned with formalizing the harmonious relations between the cognitive private and the public sphere and between the interested and disinterested features of liberal character. In the scene between Harding and Haphazard we discover that the warden’s convictions concern his right to an undisturbed life, whose relations with the public sphere are carefully delimited, and in turn a public life that is itself significantly limited in scope, determined in part by Harding’s interests, but interests which themselves are established disinterestedly. As a liberal individual, Harding’s principal interest in this political process is to establish his principled disinterest. Specifically, he demands that Haphazard drop the litigation so that he may go home and conclusively resign his wardenship. These repetitive practices could be read, however, with a less-positive appreciation that returns to some extent to Miller’s insights regarding naturalization and the usual. If The Warden tells the story of Harding’s liberalization, it also tells the story, intentional or not, of how deeply weird living liberalism proves to be. Despite the harmonious personal and social relations that Harding’s fiddlings seem to make manifest, they also seem rather at odds with the very processes of disinterestedness and selfconscious intellection to which they are so instrumental; they imagine the play of the automatic in a subject otherwise defined by deliberation and deliberateness. From this perspective, Harding is in some ways more like a Dickensian caricature than a liberal character is often acknowledged to be, his hand gestures more like the unreflective, absentminded, and mildly deviant hand rubbing of Uriah Heep than The Warden would concede during its most heartfelt textual evocations of the liberal individual. Interpreted as repeated sites of intensification, these scenes of imaginary fiddling continually dramatize the formal breakdown of embodied abstraction that is constitutive of the liberal individual; they enact, in part, the persistence of a concretized physical body that simply will not become abstract. Instead, the “wild gesticulations” embody the disorganized relations between interest and disinterest that, as following chapters will outline, often character-

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ize the liberal subject as it moves in and out of the balloting booth, the public sphere of letters: all of its political occupations. Notwithstanding liberalism’s vision of a tranquil society, the eccentric is, in a sense, never wholly at peace, for he must continually resort to the gestures that characterize his individuality. Harding’s imaginary motions seem a rather perfect performance of what living this liberalism would have been like. Despite their faintly evoked autoeroticism, Harding’s sweeping movements are clearly not, for instance, the sexual jouissance that Eve Sedgwick attributes to the masturbatory trope in nineteenth-century literature, nor are they, precisely, symptomatic of a repression that Miller quite appropriately discounts.48 Rather, they display disorganization because they signify the detachment of bodily pleasure from the singular human body, a dynamic which seems intrinsic to liberalism’s conception of disinterested interest. Rather than associating Harding’s sensation of pleasure with the resonance of the cello against his legs and torso, the text deploys this (un)musical gesturing as a phantasmic abstraction of that bodily sensation (of sound and touch) in the service of a discursive embodiment of disinterest—to give voice (which is in fact not voice) to the distinction between himself and his job, his interests and the public good. Insofar as these gestures seem emptied out—silent, musically unproductive, lacking referents, unconscious—they accurately represent the predominance of form over content in the liberal individual. In their repetitiveness, however, they attest to the structural unsoundness of a form that simultaneously lodges in and dislodges from the physical body and thereby deploys bodily sensation without recording it as felt experience: during these performances, Harding is passionately thinking but generally unconscious of his thinking as bodily movement. These gestures are therefore a kind of metonymic pantomime of what liberalism contradictorily demands from its subjects—a kind of affectively intense rationality—that is frequently, indeed habitually, articulated in liberal discourse without a convincing demonstration that it creates personal and social tranquility.49

48. See Sedgwick, “Austen and Masturbating Girl,” 150, 141. 49. In referring to passages in liberal discourse that articulate affectively intense rationality, I am trying to suggest that a certain kind of existential impossibility haunts their enunciation. Here is just one instance from John Morley, when responding to a favorable account of his ideas: “For instance, you say that the key to the unity of so miscellaneous a collection is a passion for truth—and what estimate could place a man on a higher or more splendid pedestal, whether he be lawyer, statesman, divine, or other man in a front place? For myself I would fain add passion for Freedom and passion for Justice? Don’t think me vain if I covet the whole trinity of them.” Quoted in Morgan, John, Viscount Morley, 38. The nervous disavowal of the

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The problem of disorganization that attends the definition of the liberal individual in The Warden is evident in its intensification as “eccentricity” in On Liberty, but even in Mill’s early discussion of the more mild-mannered “character” in that same text there are indications of the same disorder that hampers the representation of Harding in The Warden. This is a “disorder” that persists in Mill’s autobiographical account of his own liberal subject formation in his Autobiography. The proliferation of these instances demonstrates the constitutive difficulty built into the form of liberal individuality. In the pages of On Liberty, and presumably in the public sphere, the aspiring individual engages in a process of character development in which he learns to become a man of character by exercising “liberty of thought and feeling” and through these exercises achieving “an inward domain of consciousness” marked equally by its inwardness and its proprietary attitude. However, this novitiate, it seems, becomes a character by already being a character, for On Liberty defines the second crucial kind of liberty—the “liberty of tastes and pursuits”—as the liberty to frame “the plan of our life to suit our own character, of doing as we like” (OL, 13). There is, of course, a clear tension here between these nonidentical definitions of character, between a principled independence, a state of mind won in the throes of an exercised liberty, accomplished over time, and an eccentric temperament always already awash in its liberated and presumably at times exclusively bodily desires: the difference, it seems, between building a character and being a character, the latter peeking through On Liberty almost like a Dickensian caricature, he who unselfconsciously does as he likes, “even though they should think [his] conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong” (OL, 13).50 In the liberated realm of “tastes and pursuits,” unlike the “inward domain of consciousness,” rationalized pleasure can apparently give way to perversity. association between a passion for justice and Morley’s own vanity only accentuates the tense relation between interest and disinterest that dogs liberal cognition. 50. The uneasy relation between a character of temperament and becoming a man of character is to some extent a Victorian variation on what Uday Mehta has carefully traced in Locke. Mehta writes persuasively about Locke’s veiled recourse to social convention and instruction to constrain and render coherent the free subject’s potentially anarchistic desires in his natural state. From this insight, Mehta then shows how exclusivity is intrinsic to liberal principles of universality. I agree with this latter assessment, but I also wish to register how a later version of this collision between what a nineteenth-century intellectual would call temperament and self-development becomes a formal feature of liberalism that does not by any means veil social convention and instruction in the making of a free subject but is quite explicit about the mutual necessity of natural freedom and rational instruction. Nonetheless, both Mill and Trollope are perhaps no more able to resolve these contradictions in their own period’s contribution to the tradition of liberalism: the abstracted individual. See Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 46–76.

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There is a related and by now familiar way of defining the logical tension in these two sorts of character—the tension between what now seem potentially discordant values of disinterest and interest in the formation of the liberal individual. Recall that “liberty of thought and feeling” is consistently regulated by reason, producing a hybrid value of “passionate rationality,” which instills the liberal individual with his capacity to speak as or, at the least, to “hear” in the mind’s ear the devil’s advocate. This is the man or woman who speaks and then listens patiently, in principled objectivity, presumably while the other sort of character—the supremely interested participant teeming with tastes and pursuits (a phrase at least potentially evocative of the sensuous, physical body)—is busy doing as he or she likes. By anthropomorphizing these two central forms of liberty, I clarify their potentially differing capacities. However, I also sidestep On Liberty’s assertion that they are equally constitutive of the liberal individual who is most liberal when both most and least opinionated, when both most interested and disinterested, when both a specific subject and an abstract citizen. From this vantage point, interest increasingly seems incapable of rationalizing itself, of abstracting itself from the physical body and in turn from the personal and domestic attributes that are most often considered embedded there. Locked in an embrace with biological and cultural determination, interest cannot then come into easy relation with disinterestedness and form the beautiful whole of the liberal individual. Rather, it can degenerate into selfishness and sentimentality, tastes and pursuits that do not submit to reason, perversions that seem resistantly entrenched in the self as a given. In this admittedly exaggerated rhetorical juxtaposition between the virtue of disinterest and the pleasures of an opposing and indeed oppositional interest we can at least bring into high relief the complexity of living liberalism, a difficulty that seems grafted onto Mill’s account of his own life in the Autobiography, where the text struggles mightily to make the process of becoming a character consistent with the preordained interests of being a character. Commencing with those infamous scenes of father-to-son pedagogy (each a crucial chapter of character formation), this autobiography tells a tale of the development of what looks like disinterestedness, for James Mill asks his son to play devil’s advocate in the margins of his and others’ work. When, however, this narrative is interrupted in its progressive teleology by the younger Mill’s nervous breakdown in his early manhood, the text retrospectively interprets the father’s project as a pedagogical failure, an education of uninterest, not disinterestedness, that vitiates its pupil: “All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this

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end [his father’s intellectual and social reform goals]. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means?”51 In response to his breakdown, which the book characterizes as a crisis of interest and which involves bodily collapse, Mill decides to disenroll from this unbalanced and obviously unbalancing program in the training of abstract thought and to become instead happily preoccupied by themes quite alien to his former course of study. This alternative pedagogy induces what the autobiography calls “tranquil contemplation,”52 a cognitive practice of measured reflection that suggests both pleasurable relaxation and practiced distantiation. Such contemplation is triggered by reading Wordsworth’s lyric poetry (in fact, the two-volume 1815 edition of his collected works). The Autobiography claims that Mill’s health is restored through an alternative and far superior process of character development: a Wordsworthian education of the sympathies that at first glance seems to resolve life-threatening conflicts between the uninterested and certainly uninteresting pedant and the interested but possibly egoistic and perhaps even conventional man of sensibility; for the textual Mill seems to yearn to some extent for the “normal” feelings of which Wordsworth provides a heightened version, the feelings of the common man. The Autobiography aims to pen a stable narrative of liberal self-development that attempts to filter admirable attitudes and practices of disinterestedness through the affect of what might be called abstracted interest. In its description of the recuperation, the text suggests that Wordsworth’s poetry teaches the reader to transform his personal feelings of pleasure into if not precisely purely disinterested pleasures, at least universal ones—“pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings.” No longer tormented by the tensions between uninterest and self-interest, the Mill of the narrative becomes a subject at peace with himself (through “tranquil contemplation”) but also, simultaneously, at peace with the world. In this particular regard, the solution offered by the Autobiography’s version of Wordsworth parallels rather precisely Culture and Anarchy’s conception of the “best self.” Arnold’s text complains of the “ordinary self,” who, like the character of habitual “tastes and pursuits,” takes “pleasure only in doing what it likes or is used to do” (C&A, 99). In response to this selfish and habitual soul, Culture and Anarchy proffers instead a “best self,” who likewise seems a revised version of James Mill’s too-disinterested scholar. In this context, Mill’s subsequent response to utilitarianism pushes against 51. Mill, Autobiography, 112. 52. Ibid., 121.

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its indifference to kinds of pleasure but also against its presumption that virtue is only a function of conduct: it matters how one thinks, too. Rather than a desiccated man of reason trained on the classics of abstract disputation, the “best self” is cultivated by poetry and other great works of art and thereby becomes, individually and socially, “united, impersonal, at harmony” (C&A, 99). Although Culture and Anarchy translates this conception of the “best self” into a type of state authority and therefore clashes with Mill’s particular understanding of individual liberty, both bodies of work privilege a sort of aestheticized abstraction of the subject. The humane arts—music, poetry, “the best that is thought or said”—invest formal “harmony” and “tranquility” in the potentially disordered subject: Septimus Harding, the ordinary self, the young John Mill. They help universalize as human the “tastes and pursuits” of the mere personal self, embedded in the physical body, even as they still embody the human(e) in a range of occupations—the musician, the poet, or the intellectual—the latter that passionately rational individual of On Liberty whose primary interest becomes his disinterested investment in humanity. Through this humanistic pleasure, a reformed egoist or reanimated logician might participate in the human community, but with a difference: he now occupies the social domain as someone who continually is thinking of humankind; indeed, the sympathetic benefits of this pleasure seemed to resolve a central intellectual dilemma for Mill’s thought. In his assessment of his father’s utilitarian orthodoxy, Mill found it difficult to establish the otherwise self-interested individual’s motivation for the promotion of social good. How bring the private man of pain and pleasure into the public realm of politics? If men were purely self-interested, there would be little incentive to contribute to society, but, alternatively, an utterly objective examination of the social condition merely sapped motivation from men, rendering them uninvested in any sort of action. In these passages of the Autobiography, we encounter as a resolution to this problem the sort of altruistic and aesthetic self-development that culminates in the apotheosis of the abstracted individual, whose self-realization Cowling defines as “not an end in itself but a means to achieve the utility of a general happiness defined by a collective search for truth.”53 The Autobiography, then, seeks to synthesize the virtues of the father’s imperfect pedagogy with a temperate education of the feelings. In so doing, on the one hand, the text downplays the resonances between the father’s lessons of devil’s advocacy and the 53. Cowling, Mill and Liberalism, 171. Mill’s search for an altruistic impulse was, of course, derived from his reading of Auguste Comte, who coined the term altruism.

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son’s own adult practices of disinterestedness. On the other hand, the text also pacifies the pleasures of the desiring self who, in reading Wordsworth, becomes a common man having feelings in common with other men and is thus much less eccentric than he who heeds his own “tastes and pursuits,” “even though they should think [his] conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong” (OL, 13). Nevertheless, there are indications that this quite moving synthesis does not always hold, such that the two sorts of character splinter and resist narrative resolution. For instance, the character of “tastes and pursuits” who is at least prone to self-interestedness remains present even in the midst of Mill’s Wordsworthian compensation. Remember that so much of Wordsworthian humanitarianism is justified in the poet’s own texts as compensation for personal losses incurred. Mill himself echoes his master, solipsistically assessing his muse: “I long continued to value Wordsworth less according to his merits, than by the measure of what he had done for me.”54 Likewise, the other character, who nurtures an “inward domain of consciousness” and engages therein in an arduous ethic of abstraction, seems in danger of losing its necessary individuality, a danger expressed in the generic impulse of the narration and indeed of the title chosen at the time of its publication, Autobiography. The Autobiography of this admirable liberal individual shows signs of formal disorganization, a kind of structural indecision about whether the text is indeed a narrative about young John’s life and his “tastes and pursuits” or an exposition of his disinterested opinions. This is especially true of the latter chapters, which are arranged in terms of intellectual rather than strictly chronological units and which become a metonymic expression of “the association of ideas” that Mill and his father before him considered the foundation of all learning.55 Moreover, there exists a certain disconnection between the narrator and

54. Mill, Autobiography, 122. Lepenies suggests, “One rarely receives the impression that Mill really enjoyed the poetry he deals with in his treatises in such detail: it is a reasonable supposition that Wordsworth’s commentaries helped him through his spiritual crisis as much as his poems did. As Mill himself wrote, in the last resort poetry was for him a kind of medicine: one took it, not because one enjoyed it, but because it acted as an aid and prophylactic. His decision to allow poetry a larger place in the culture of his age was taken on theoretical grounds, and his enthusiasm for it thus appears forced and occasionally comical” (Between Literature and Science, 107). 55. Readers of the Autobiography will doubtless recognize this description. The first few chapters follow the stages of Mill’s young life and—at least in contrast to later chapters—seem more expansive, including references to home life and to friendships. As the book advances, however, the narrative increasingly concentrates on Mill’s readings, opinions, and writings, and one loses a sense of the chronology.

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the subject of narration. This narratological design is indeed strikingly like that practiced in The Warden, where the character appears to think through the third-person narration. Given its similarity to the novel’s narratological practice, this narrative form could be interpreted as simply another instantiation of the liberal individual and his cognitive organization. However, when situated within the genre of autobiography, the formal tension hints at the difficulties of living liberalism, of simultaneously being interested and disinterested, of being a body and an abstraction. The Autobiography’s famous disavowal of interest—Mill’s own and others—in the life it plans to tell is a disavowal that can be read as inconsistent with the very premises on which the genre of autobiography rests: “I do not for a moment imagine that any part of what I have to relate, can be interesting to the public as a narrative, or as being connected with myself.”56 The model Victorian individual’s repetitive figuration of disinterested interest, its effort to inhabit an abstracted individuality, emerges from but is ultimately unlike what might be called a “classical formulation” of the liberal subject. While the Victorian formulation shares its classical predecessor’s emphasis on self-proprietorship, Victorian liberal individuality is not constituted in the public sphere of rational exchange, nor is it located in the private possession of material property per se but in the cognitive realm of devil’s advocacy that is presumed ontologically prior to the public sphere. This is the liberal individuality detectable in Mill’s revision in On Liberty. The classical liberal subject has been succinctly characterized by Negt and Kluge in their study of the public sphere. They describe the tradition of “emancipatory bourgeois political thought since Descartes” as one where “‘reason alone has authority,’ and where this reason is the product of a collaborative, communicative, intellectual exertion on the part of those members of society who are qualified for this task.”57 In their pointed account of this tradition, Negt and Kluge detect what seems to them a serious contradiction in this liberal conception, a contradiction usefully manifested in Kant. Although the existence of a bourgeois public sphere depends on the relative freedom and power of property owners, it “cannot base itself on the empirically arbitrary characteristics of these property owners; Kant is thus forced, if he is to establish universally valid rules of public communication, to negate this material base on which the public sphere rests. What he retains is, to be sure, something general; but it is an abstract general, which lacks all the concrete elements of the bourgeois that would constitute a 56. Mill, Autobiography, 25. 57. Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience, 9.

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living public sphere. In a word: he can constitute bourgeois publicity neither with the empirical bourgeois-subject nor without it.”58 These theorists focus on the way in which Kant “negates” a material base that is indeed always already there. Comparable blindnesses are of course discoverable in the liberalism I’ve been tracing here; for instance, the universal impulse that Harding’s music is presumed to infuse into his personal “tastes and pursuits” is of course deeply reliant on access to and acquisition of cultural capital, the training of taste that enables one to play and appreciate “good” music. As I discussed more fully in the introduction, material and cultural and biological determinants (such as one’s sex) surely make possible the Victorian liberal subject. In midcentury liberal individualism’s ideal form, however, these determinants are always in complex relation to more abstracted eccentricities that continually assert the disinterestedness of the individual. Victorian liberalism is most distinctive, then, in its promotion of abstracted individuality, most often made publicly manifest in “opinion.” This abstracted individuality or particularization is therefore not precisely like the “abstract general” that Negt and Kluge suggest is the ignored key to the Kantian public sphere. Victorian liberals are committed in particular to two practices. First, they specify opinion and the individual who possesses that opinion by locating its production in a private realm, localized in the human body that precedes the disputation of the public sphere. Second, they seek to embody the individual, otherwise abstracted through the internal practice of devil’s advocacy, with the now-rationalized “tastes and pursuits” that are intrinsic to the temperament of any given self, that “other” character in Mill’s definition of the liberal individual. In day-to-day practice, for example, the individual required more than just metonymic suggestiveness to distinguish its manly, literate, and reflective liberalism from the masses, who themselves could seem at any given moment both dangerously perverse and dangerously abstracted from their bodies. It required a manly body, but not a merely physical body such as Grantly’s, which is clearly “perverse.” In this chapter Mr. Harding’s gesturing body is perhaps meant to be the perfect form of abstracted embodiment, despite the deformations I’ve indicated, for here the body expresses the interest, specificity, and agency of individuality as well as its disinterest and altruism.59 Victorian liberalism

58. Ibid., 10. 59. Insofar as Mr. Harding is a “proper name explicitly without a physical referent in the real world,” he is a fictional nobody, as Catherine Gallagher has described the emergence of

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is therefore distinguishable from classical liberalism but is equally susceptible to its own contradictions. As I have just explored at length in Mill’s and Trollope’s texts, the liberal individual continually records the disorganized relations between interest and disinterest and between embodiment and abstraction in its formation. Rather than interpreting Harding’s gestures as lovable tics and idiosyncrasies, then, psychoanalytic critics might now read them as indications of the man’s psychological perversities—his indecent desires, his hysterical symptoms, his chronic ambivalences. These are terms that have seemed similarly pertinent to a reading of Mill’s autobiography, a text whose studious articulation of disinterested interest has produced a long and interesting canon of psychological interpretations of Mill’s oedipal complex, gender confusion, and masochistic syndrome.60 This application of psychoanalytic terms reflects the persistence of psychological categories in current readings of character, liberal or otherwise Harding’s richly suggestive gestures, however, can also dramatize what I wish to call a formal disorganization that provokes a different reading of character or, rather, inhibits a definitive reading of character altogether. Although Harding’s “air cello” is rendered as a character trait of the amiable warden and often defined in the text through the language of emotional affect and what looks to many readers as psychologized behavior, these gestures seem to me to address, instead, a theoretical problem in the form of individualism. They attest to the way in which the body—even when abstracted in the gracefully swaying motions elicited by an imagined strain of beautiful music—remains a problem in the liberal conception of the individual. Rather than resolving the tension between interest and disinterest in the form of the liberal individual, the body represents an undecidability, which, for instance, ultimately compromises the significance of Harding’s moral decisiveness. I will label this undecidability formal ambivalence, for Harding’s liberalized body never really definitively shows its audience (the reader, the public in general, even Harding himself) whether the tics, quirks, and other idiosyncrasies that animate it are indications of good eccentricity or bad eccentricity, a sign of decisive character in a diverse but

novelistic character in the eighteenth century (Nobody’s Story, xv). However, as a liberal character of abstracted embodiment, Mr. Harding is not thematizing disembodiment. The “value of exchange” (xxi) implicit in the writing of Gallagher’s female authors, and on which they capitalize, is wishfully open to question in midcentury liberalism, and liberal subjects instead seem more invested in a theory of value lodged in production. See Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, xiii–xxiv. 60. Himmelfarb, On Liberty and Liberalism; see also Carlisle, John Stuart Mill.

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tranquil society or the decided lack of character that makes men virtual caricatures in a fractious world—and it is this undecidability that makes mid-Victorian liberalism so seemingly ambivalent toward human liberty. The formal disorganization that renders the ethical assessment of character problematic is, in fact, integral to the novel’s liberal subject, even if the story itself does not promote this intrinsic quality. Increasingly detectable throughout The Warden, the formally disorganized individual that is Mr. Harding is thus both the dream and the nightmare of mid-Victorian liberalism.

The Dream of Liberal Deformation In The Warden, liberal ambivalence exceeds the conventional psychological boundaries that represent Mr. Harding’s psyche and therefore presents a problem more generally for The Warden as a novel about liberalization and its moralized version of the good life. In order to establish this formal ambivalence, it makes sense to find a fair approximation of Harding’s fiddling in the narration, that is, evidence within the novel more broadly that character and caricature are not easily distinguishable from one another. In the novel’s temporal and spatial dynamics, the effort to demonstrate both becoming a character and being a character ultimately reveals again, in a different representational register, an indeterminate relation between selfdevelopment and predetermined temperament that I’ve already discovered in On Liberty. This is especially evident in a series of scenes in London narrated rather late in The Warden, scenes which include a crucial but brief dream that overtakes Harding while he is visiting a cigar divan. The temporal disorganization of the plot is located in these scenes, which put a sudden stop to the central and arguably sole motivating event in what is otherwise, even by Trollope’s standards, an underplotted novel. These scenes also register a significant spatial remodeling that alters and relocates what might be considered traditional sites of self-actualization and belief formation in the long history of English liberalism—the sanctuary, the coffeehouse, and the newspapers. It is in these scenes—in particular in the dream itself—that Mill’s third category of liberty, “the liberty of combination,” can be heard to resonate, but in perhaps surprising tones. Here, the freedom to combine ought not to be heard as an answering echo of the radical politics of the 1790s or as a whisper of the democratic polity yet to come, nor even as a testimony for the internalized sociability of liberal deliberation. Rather, Mill’s third kind of freedom appears in a seemingly perverse variation, perverse

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at least for a historical period noted for its hegemonic heterosexuality and its ambitions for near universal literacy. In the interstices of a dream, the liberty of combination is represented as the freedom for men to combine without women and without words.61 Mr. Harding must always be replaying the musical gestures that enable him to take his place in those vital one-on-one conversations in the liberal public sphere—a repetitive performance whose apparent irrationality not only complicates the liberal ideals of reason and deliberation but also disrupts—at least momentarily—the developmental narrative that is so central to the pedagogical assumptions of liberalization. The novel finds it challenging to narrate its protagonist’s autonomous development of character, for while in London Harding distractedly falls out of developmental time, momentarily inattentive to its aggregative chronology. Not coincidentally, Harding also wanders out of the privileged historical spaces of what might be called the liberal social sublime and finds himself in a profoundly revised space of socialization—the orientalist atmosphere of a smoking divan. At the climax of the novel, then, when Harding journeys alone to London to confront Haphazard and announce his resignation, the plot awaits its character’s next developmental move, but instead Harding determines to hide out so that his decision cannot be gainsaid—in particular by Dr. Grantly, who is in hot pursuit. Absent throughout this chapter of the novel, Grantly is seemingly entrapped in another novel, perhaps an eighteenth-century novel, more suited to his active and reactive tendencies. Perhaps he is the “characterless, mobile gentleman” that Deidre Lynch

61. In so interpreting character as a form, in particular, I can avoid a moral or psychological reading that assumes, for instance, Mr. Harding’s three-dimensionality. In place of representations of a psyche that elicit critical evaluations concerning whether a writer is either better or worse at capturing character, this formal reading is insistently presentist. Harding’s internal deliberations, therefore, are not an expression of his depths but are simply Harding’s internal deliberations. Revising a Foucauldian turn of phrase, Harding possesses no silent history; he is, instead, a set of practices—cognitive and “instrumental.” In “Politics and the Study of Discourse,” Foucault asserts, “I do not question discourses about their silently intended meanings, but about the fact and the conditions of their manifest appearance” (60). My formalist approach seeks to show that work on the Victorian period that wishes to celebrate the “form of inquiry” marked by disinterestedness, to use Matthew Bevis’s phrase, misses the presumptions that enable this formalism. Bevis wishes to argue that disinterestedness is not by any means a form of political quietism in the writers he studies, but Bevis does not take into account the way in which disinterestedness not only elaborates a cognitive procedure but also posits thereby a social domain which is itself formalist; in effect, a mental construct. See Bevis, Art of Eloquence, 8.

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describes in The Economy of Character, his anachronistic behavior consigning him to the pages of a novel by Tobias Smollett.62 Some literary critics would here expect a more richly psychologized rendering of the protagonist as a direct contrast to the unreflective motivation of Grantly. For instance, Harding could be portrayed as deep in thought and the narrative engaged in conveying through third-person narration the internal disputation that propels the autonomous hero toward “the right” and, at the same time, toward the culmination of his fully developed character—the sort of scene George Eliot provides in Middlemarch when she relates Dorothea’s long night of moral struggle concerning her obligations to the deceased Casaubon. Indeed, we have some hope that such a scene is imminent when Harding wanders into the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey, a seemingly appropriate spatial analogue to soul-searching. But the decision to resign is already made by this point in the narrative, and in its place we are treated to a chapter entitled “A Long Day in London” that shows the provincial man struggling to mark time, until the chapter culminates in Harding giving way to the ticking moments, gently falling asleep in a cigar divan, just after coffee, with an unread periodical in his lap—an even greater anticlimax to liberal aspirations than the monastic retreat of Westminster has already proven to be. This scene in the divan seemingly literalizes the soporific effects that D. A. Miller reads as liberalism’s triumph of naturalization, and yet its value as a site of normativeness aligns uneasily with the next scene, where Harding courageously but also traumatically confronts Abraham Haphazard. The novel does not narrate the development of liberal character through an internalized evocation of devil’s advocacy in the sanctuary spaces of the cathedral, an otherwise perfect space to baptize liberal autonomy with the blessings of transcendent spirit. Nor does it show, while the scene in the cigar divan is narrated, Harding eagerly taking in the reasonable debate elaborated in the pages of a journal. In place of these scenes of cerebration, the text describes what seems to me, in a reversal of Mill’s phrase, an inward domain of unconsciousness. In this scene, Harding is accessorized with all the props one could need in order to engage in the liberal public sphere, especially as Habermas has described that setting during the eighteenth-century emergence of civil society—a sociable setting , a periodical, a cup of coffee, and, above all else, some “free” time carved out of but intrinsic to the increasingly regulated temporality of capitalism. Under these conditions, one ought to expect a liberalized and liberated Harding to become part of the coffeehouse milieu, 62. Lynch, Economy of Character, 104.

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engaged in what Habermas calls the “critical debate ignited by works of literature and art [that] was soon extended to include economic and political disputes.”63 Despite the caffeine, however, Harding seems rather blissfully unconscious of the potentialities that lie all around him. If liberalism has been traditionally characterized (by Habermas and to a lesser extent by Mill) as emanating from a courageous individual disputing in the public sphere, it seems that the novel is here revealing a revised version of liberalism. This version not only significantly differs from that of the putative heyday of critical publicity in the mid-eighteenth century—for Harding comes to this public space only after his decision is made—but differs from midVictorian versions, too, including the one the novel elsewhere delineates. In this revision, lively coffeehouses are empty cigar divans; thick smoke has sedated even the rare imbibers of caffeine, and principled articulations about literature and politics do not produce a “best self” but slur into a delicious nap. The cigar room’s orientalist orientation alters nicotine into opium. Here, Mill’s “tranquil contemplation” is punctuated by snoring. The pleasurable sleep that embraces Harding suggests that the novel might be staging a dream rather than a nightmare of liberal sociability—a utopian, not dystopian, vision of liberal unconsciousness. One could argue that this scenes expresses Trollope’s—and through his representativeness, other liberals’—psychic ambivalence toward what seem the increasingly impossible responsibilities of civil society in an era of social and economic diversification and dispersion, when Mr. Harding—despite his self-consciousness—is as likely to wander unknowingly into a disreputable chophouse as a coffeehouse.64 However, this dream of liberal unconsciousness more certainly reveals, it seems to me, a formal ambivalence, a feature of the text more susceptible to my demonstration than Trollope’s psychic attitudes or his authorial intentions. The relation between processes of self-development that operate within an orderly and accumulative temporality and the preordained temperament that predates time itself is neither precisely defined in the plot nor acknowledged as inherently contradictory but simply gives way to the atemporality of a dream, where a ticking clock dissolves into music. Sitting in the divan, awaiting his meeting with Haphazard, “Mr. Harding

63. Habermas, Structural Transformation of Public Sphere, 33. 64. Trollope expresses in his autobiography a growing doubt concerning the possibility of creating a realm within the public sphere of diverse opinion. He writes of the Fortnightly Review’s commitment to diversity, “That theory of eclecticism was altogether impracticable” (Autobiography, 191).

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then closed his magazine, keeping his place with his finger, and lay, listening with closed eyes to the clock. Soon the clock seemed to turn into a violoncello, with piano accompaniments, and Mr. Harding began to fancy the old waiter was the Bishop of Barchester” (W, 149). This disorganization of narrative time is also apparent in a slightly different way in Mill’s autobiography. The Autobiography seems contradictorily dedicated to telling Mill’s story as both a developmental narrative over aggregative time and a conversion narrative that figures the restoration of his health as crystallized in an epiphanic encounter with Wordsworth’s poetry. Although the conversion model resolves the difficulty that the text encounters in accounting for change in a character of predetermined “tastes and pursuits,” the conversion it records seems increasingly unremarkable as it is folded into additional chapters that relate in dry detail the accumulative model of knowledge acquisition. Neither text, then, can settle on self-improvement; each one tells tales marked by temporal dislocation. In addition to the temporal dislocation so evident in Harding’s extended sleep, there are spatial shifts as well. The spatially regulated relations between interest (hobbies) and disinterest (profession) and between cognitive privacy and public sociability that typify the earlier sections of the novel ultimately give way to the fluid spaces of a dream setting. In the dream, not only does the regimented ticking of the clock transform into the harmonious rhythm of music, but the openly public setting of the cigar divan glides unproblematically into a homely private setting, without Harding consciously registering their distinctions. Here, in a dream but only in a dream, Mr. Harding appears to live the good life defined by Victorian liberalism. Indeed, at first glance, the dream sequence seems to take the serenity of interiorized devil’s advocacy to its logical and successful conclusion, culminating in a harmonious relation between abstraction and embodiment that is imagined to occur during the pleasurable meeting of the minds when the warden and the bishop spend time together. For a moment, in the snatched moments of a nap, Harding dreams of perfect sociability, where the phantasmic body conjured by the performing “air cello” is joined to Mr. Harding’s actual body. At last, the body, though in motion, is at rest. But only in a dream. Defined by its seeming breakdown of formal requirements, so that minutes fall away even as the divan’s walls give way to the bishop’s sitting room, the dream emphasizes content, but the mental content the narrative discovers in the sleeping Harding by no means supports the organization of the liberal individual as the novel has previously mapped it. Harding is blissfully unconscious in his all-male bastion, not needing to think, or

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debate, or to formulate an opinion but instead dreaming his own timeless imaginary of private, melodious pleasures.65 In this regard, Harding is deliciously liberated from what Uday Mehta has called “the enormously significant specifications of time, place, and social status” that typify the complex motivations of liberal pedagogy.66 The text describes Harding’s dream with reference to the cello, which now becomes a wholly privatized instrument of harmonization, not an abstraction for social collaboration. In this dream, the cello is no longer a solo instrument, nor does it emphasize its player’s individual virtuosity or virtue in public performance. Instead, willingly distracted from the rational and lonely workings of private opinion and its imperative to be heard in public contestation, Harding, accompanied by piano, dreams about a subcognitive harmony not only manifested in the imagined music but also elaborated in the sleepy memory of a warm but apparently wordless sociability between himself and the bishop. The novel thus draws an alternative site of “correspondence” to that circulated in the eighteenth-century public sphere.67 Without letters, without periodicals, without even words, Harding and the bishop commune. The dream’s opening images, then, resolve the incommensurability between the private sphere and the public sphere that seems figured so painfully in the emptiness of the cigar divan, but they also “invert” the masculinized cognitive individualism performed in the public sphere that the rest of the novel works so hard to realize. It is a dream, not a reality, of homosocial domesticity, not cognition, that lies just beyond consciousness in the mildly misogynist and exclusively private spaces of a liberal individualism taken to its illogically logical conclusion: “Mr. Harding began to fancy the old waiter was the Bishop of Barchester” (W, 149).68 As a mere dream, this sequence of images emphasizes one of the particular kinds of 65. Lansbury writes, “The music of the violoncello struggles to be heard over the clamor of the argument, symbol of the private self at odds with the public” (Reasonable Man, 138–39). Although she accepts unquestioningly, as I do not, the liberal transcendence implicit in “the music of the violoncello,” she does confirm my sense that in its effort at transcendence it does indeed struggle against “the clamor of argument.” 66. Mehta, Anxiety of Freedom, 62. Mehta is referring to John Locke, in particular his Thoughts Concerning Education, but Mehta considers this feature in Locke’s writing more generally exemplary of liberal instruction as defined throughout the long liberal tradition. 67. For a discussion of “correspondence” in reference to David Hume, see Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, 10–11. 68. This scene also records liberalism’s long-standing uncertainty regarding women’s conversational powers. As Mary Poovey has noticed in Hume’s Essays, women’s conversation is accorded a pedagogical function, a capacity to refine men’s tastes, to persuade, that Trollope has already diminished in his relegation of Mrs. Grantly to a muffled position under the bedclothes. Poovey, History of Modern Fact, 211–12.

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losses incurred in the more conscious and therefore more normative public performances of liberal subject formation. Harding may, at times, long for the intimacy of his home and daughter, but the novel’s narrative of liberal education takes him further and further away from that earlier connection. Unlike the eccentrics in Dickens’s novels, who are always at home, and the Dickensian protagonists who are often abjectly grateful for their domestic education, Harding’s liberal eccentric is ultimately never at home, at least not consciously or permanently so. Moreover, the cultivation of liberal individuality that is measured in the narrative’s progress registers his increasing incapacity for such intimacy, as the dreamy bond between Harding and his bishop becomes the only kind of fantasy available to liberal individualism and so the only one that Harding is able to want.69 Even in dreams, he cannot imagine a liberalized bond between himself and a woman.70 This crucial passage’s dreamlike properties of time and space demonstrate powerfully the difficulty of living liberalism.71 The dream may depict in its content a harmonious self in a harmonious society, as suggested when Harding awakens to the realization that “he was absolutely enjoying himself” (W, 149), but the dream does not portray what most liberals believed to be a liberal individual in a liberal society. In trying to represent a liberalism well lived, a subject capable of gracefully flowing between the particular and the generic, of being both an interesting self and a disinterested citizen, this text produces a fantasy of distraction and uninterest.72 Put another way, these disorganizations of time and place produce what should now be seen as predictable fantasies of the liberal individual, fantasies of cognitive disorder that directly emerge from the formal problematics of liberal individualism. These fantasies therefore provide a fuller accounting of the sort of cognition that necessarily characterizes the liberal 69. This “dream fantasy” is where I locate the function of friendship in mid-Victorian liberalism, which is to say, a friendship both nonoperational in the waking world and whose forms of intimacy and exchange seem much less about diversity and devil’s advocacy than about homogeneity and self-fulfilling fantasy. See Dellamora, Friendship’s Bonds, for a different account. 70. Mill provides a distinctly different account of the relation between man and woman in The Subjection of Women, which often seems to be about the means by which society can make it possible for women to become capable of this sort of conversational equality. 71. That The Warden posits a cigar divan as what seems to be a spatial analogue to private conscience speaks to the atmosphere of crisis that attends a liberal individual’s relation to the social, for the divan is a very fallen—because inclusive, open, and merely sensuous—version of the liberal gentleman’s private club. 72. Carlisle observes a parallel desire for mental rest and relaxation in Mill’s essay “On Individuality”: “In this essay he imagines a world in which the arduous burden of opposition would be lifted and the challenge of finding the courage required for dissent would not have to be met!” (Carlisle, John Stuart Mill, 214).

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subject but is usually disavowed in the materials that form the archive for this book. The rational instrumentality of liberal cognition ought now to be seen as compromised by fantasies of deformation but also locally buttressed by them, for Mr. Harding’s nap is represented as a refreshing rest. The lengthy scenes in London reveal the extent to which cognitive formalism can directly produce informal unconsciousness, where liberalism’s conscious practices of abstraction become habits of distraction and impulse.73 In this regard, a reader ought to remark on the scenes preceding Harding’s nap. Wandering alone the streets of London, wasting time, dining inadvertently in a clophouse, Harding is all the while remaining true to what the novel calls his “unguided opinion,” a resistantly idiosyncratic position not only untouched by public disputation—hence its logical culmination in the unread periodical in his lap—but also untouched by thought. Harding’s decision to resign is not—significantly—made most heroically manifest through the processes of third-person omniscient narration that happen more regularly earlier in the novel nor through the public exchange of differing opinion, in oral or print debate, but is most fully articulated in front of Haphazard during Harding’s imaginary cello playing, itself a habitual distraction to himself and his interlocutors, even if the text suggests that it helps Mr. Harding focus. Harding expresses the clarity of individual opinion not through a process of abstract disputation with the firebrand Grantly or with the magisterial Abraham Haphazard but through a kind of inattention, the “wild gesticulations” now described rather than contrasted in the great barrister’s surname. The decision to leave Hiram’s Hospital represents Harding’s ability to abstract his private interest from the interest of the wardenship but is actualized through Harding’s distracted gestures, themselves abstract but nonetheless evocative of his taste for church music. Although seemingly a refined taste, this very interest had earlier resulted in Harding’s indulgent publication of a costly edition of sacred musical scores, an action forwarded against the advice of his familial and financial advisors. Rather than an “individual opinion” of liberalism, this was an act of irrational impulse, “even though they should think [his] conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong.” When, therefore, the actual cello is no longer in Harding’s hands, the eccentric, gestural 73. Liberal distraction and fantasies of unconsciousness are not directly induced by commodity culture and its external simulations, which Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin posit as radically distracting. But both states of mind (liberal distraction and unconsciousness) are clearly in relation to effects of mass society. Liberal distraction is not narrated in this novel as a direct function of media diversions but rather as a response to the overstimulation or surplus excitation of self-reflexive cognition. See Simmel, Metropolis and Mental Life.

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performance cannot definitively tell Harding, his readers, or the public in general whether this singular man is a man of character or a man of no character at all, or, put another way, a man of character or simply a character, verging on caricature. The novel’s representations of Harding’s deliberations, so central to his characterization earlier in the novel, now give way to this climactic representation of his unconscious, impulsive, and distracted gestures, which are at best difficult to interpret, as Haphazard shows. Reverend Septimus Harding achieves liberal individuality as the novel ends, but the novel’s conclusion is ambiguous, for his heroic story of individuation has rather indeterminate results—Harding’s resignation makes no appreciable impact on the ecclesiastical dispute. The novel narrates the meager effect Harding’s courageous decision has on Hiram’s Hospital. No official revision of the wardenship has occurred, but its controversial history paralyzes its administrative will: “It is now some years since Mr. Harding left it, and the warden’s house is still tenantless. . . . Six [beadsmen] have gone, and the six vacancies remain unfilled!” (W, 182). Nor is Harding’s personal peace conclusively established at the novel’s close: “Mr. Harding, we say, is not an unhappy man” (W, 184). Neither political reform nor personal happiness nor the novelistic convention of a happy ending seems to have been definitively won through Mr. Harding’s acquisition of liberal individuality. Even though the novel clearly logs such modest achievements, it does not, however, advise the reader to read their modesty as failures of liberalization. Even if happiness is not yet fully realized, the life well lived remains— for, regardless of the social impact at Hiram’s Hospital or even the affective result of Harding’s retirement, Harding knows he did the right thing. In the domain of the political or the personal, the novel’s conclusion offers limited benefits, but in the realm of liberal ethics, the novel records success. This success may still seem a pyrrhic one to many readers; to this reader, even the ethical triumph remains questionable. The truly liberal individual must achieve disinterestedness, a principled state of objectivity, but, as I have shown, this detachment is often adjacent to distraction and just short of indifference. As we have seen in Harding, once disinterest relaxes into a longed-for indifference, a mental as well as physical retirement, the mind wanders, inattentive to politics, to self-development, to personal happiness, even to ethics. Even contemporary critics of liberalism noted that the isolation in which private opinion takes shape can render opinion unaffective, ineffective, and inattentive. Such opinion is in effect figured in The Warden as self-reflexively distracted fiddling, a darker figuration of Harding’s liberalization that raises those larger questions about the terms of liberal socia-

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bility and the centrality and significance of public debate in a liberalizing Victorian society. Mr. Harding’s pantomimic fiddlings are cast positively as a kind of harmonious counterpoint to mental deliberation; together they formalize the factionalism of the social as Mr. Harding’s “body of thought.” Insofar as these gestures are represented as imaginary, however, they seem to transpose as mental effort and emotional affect the social contestation otherwise manifested through real physical and verbal confrontation.74 Through the psychic idiosyncrasies, tics, and quirks of liberal eccentricity, conflicts among the classes, confrontations over the distribution of goods, even disputes about the justice of ecclesiastical sinecures are focalized in the individual case that elicits omniscient narratives about character. Rather than showing, for instance, the protagonist giving the beggar a coin, reforming the poor laws, or revising the antiquated laws binding church and state, depictions of mid-Victorian liberals will often replace the social or political act with a sometimes tranquil, sometimes not, cognitive contemplation of the moral pros and cons of giving. As a result of this contemplative reverie, often in the form of third-person narration, the liberal individual is, at its best, a double negative—“not an unhappy man.” Resigned and resignedly, then, Mr. Harding does revisit Hiram’s Hospital, not as a warden, but as a stranger—what a humanitarian often becomes in a liberal public sphere. “Mr. Harding, indeed, did not desert them; from him they had such consolation as a dying man may receive from his Christian pastor; but it was the occasional kindness of a stranger which ministered to them, and not the constant presence of master, a neighbour, and a friend” (W, 182). This is a difficult passage to interpret because it assumes that habits of neighborliness and friendship are somehow intrinsic to the socially authorized wardenship but extrinsic to the liberal individual: in this instance a pastor who chooses to visit the beadsmen on principle even though he no longer officially shepherds their parish. It effectively expresses the way that a liberal conception of the individual shifts sociability away from habits in the public sphere and conventional sites of social feeling to an a priori realm of cognitive calculations of interest and disinterest that produce a formal ambivalence expressed through the moral ambiguity of the prose that described Mr. Harding’s visits—“such consolation as a dying man may receive . . . [but not] the constant presence.” Do these visits make Mr. Harding a man of good character? Or as a stranger is he, alternatively, a 74. Nancy Armstrong’s is perhaps the most famous articulation of this characteristic inversion of social behaviors as psychological depth. See Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 76.

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flawed character, somewhat remiss for his failure to attend them regularly? What, precisely, is the cost of these changes? Here, the novel reveals again the ambivalence attending liberalization. The posited plenitude of the private man can be experienced in the public setting only as circumstantial acts of kindness from a stranger because these acts of beneficence no longer lodge in the traditional obligations of an office that is itself indifferent to individual character. This conclusion is a much darker representation of liberal altruism than Mill’s account, darker even than much of the novel suggests. It registers the contingency of altruism’s consolations—both for the recipient who awaits the stranger’s kindness and the stranger himself, who must now calculate his generosities in each case. All in all, Mr. Harding is a stranger to himself. The courageous liberal who stands by his opinion, nobly alone and confirming his individualism, is also the devil’s advocate—he who stands in principled opposition to his own most cherished opinions. Both interested and disinterested, even at times veering toward a fantasy of escape in the sleepy realms of unconsciousness—Harding evinces at these moments an utterly detached disregard for the issues at hand, or at the most a profound ambivalence. This ambivalence now needs, in the penultimate section of this chapter, to be traced back to cognitive formalism itself.

The Nightmare of Liberal Deformation The formal ambivalence I outlined in Mill—that between the character one is supposed to become and the character one already is, between the disinterested character and the interested character whose interests center in a recalcitrant body—troubles The Warden’s depiction of Harding throughout the novel, not simply in a dream but in a nightmare as well. Formal ambivalence is especially apparent in the representation of Harding’s relation to the newspapers of midcentury England, the public medium from which the liberal individual is most sharply distinguished and yet most nightmarishly resembles, for they both seem prone to the anonymity of excessive abstraction. Despite Harding’s heroic liberalism when confronted by Grantly’s corporatism, Harding finds it difficult either to identify or to maintain his interested disinterest when facing the public opinion voiced in the newspapers. Grantly often warns Harding against the “vain object of proving yourself disinterested” (W, 78), and the novel seems at times to corroborate this judgment. The novel does portray Harding’s deliberations as disinterested, showing, as I mentioned before, Harding’s capacity to detach himself from his position: “Doubting, as he had begun to doubt, the

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justice of his own position in the hospital” (W, 80). Occasionally, however, the text also depicts another train of thought, one that is more interested, perhaps “vain,” far more concerned about Harding’s “name” per se than about the public dispute concerning his position as warden: His hair had stood on end and his flesh had crept as he read the things which had been written; he had wondered how men could live under such a load of disgrace; how they could face their fellow-creatures while their names were bandied about so injuriously and so publicly—and now this lot was to be his—he, that shy retiring man, who had so comforted himself in the hidden obscurity of his lot, who had so enjoyed the unassuming warmth of his own little corner, he was now to be dragged forth into the glaring day, and gibbeted before a ferocious multitude. (W, 82)

If Harding were truly disinterested, fully accepting that his name is simply the rhetorical site where a question about the wardenship is debated—and not an attack on his person—he might discount the publication of his name, not unlike when Mill claims to assert a certain disinterest in his own autobiography. But this novel’s account of Harding’s shame, sensed figuratively as flesh and hair, reveals a virtually somatic interest in the matter. In this passage a reference to a hyper-responsive body takes over a passage otherwise committed to an account of a moral and psychological state of mind and, in so doing, records again the difficulties of formalizing relations of disinterest and interest in the abstracted body of the liberal individual. This nightmarish rendering of the printed name seems to me a commentary on the paradox of the liberal individual’s signature, the one that never made its mark explicitly in the earlier scene about the making of signature, when the beadsmen endorsed their petition. The foregoing passage plays out the problematic of abstracted embodiment that was not necessary in the earlier scene; it does so because it encounters Harding struggling to maintain his fully disinterested individuality amid the din of mass opinion. Earlier in the novel, a contingent of local, illiterate, and archaic peasant craftsmen barely discomfited Harding’s position of disinterestedness. But here a national, literate, and insistently modern mass audience easily reveals his weakness; his deliberative practices of cognition succumb to whining strains of self-pity: “he, that shy retiring man, who had so comforted himself in the hidden obscurity of his lot”! Through a sustained examination of this nightmare of the name in print, I will ultimately explain how abstracted embodiment can all too easily splinter, becoming remnants

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of its former self. In describing how one lives liberalism, The Warden tells two tales simultaneously: the life well lived and the life, to borrow Lord Northumberland’s phrase, “peculiarly exposed to intimidation and personal violence on the part of members of [its] own body.” Unlike the wardenship of Hiram’s Hospital, from which he can retire, Harding’s printed name is represented in the previously quoted passage as more stubbornly intrinsic to him, becoming, it seems, a metonym for his body, as when the name is dragged and gibbeted before the masses. However, a more accurate reading of the passage ought to reverse these terms because the body evoked in these sentences is in fact the metaphor for his name; the body is abstracted into print. In the idealized symbolic of liberal individualism, what seems at first glance a merely figural body in service of a printed name, which otherwise occupies a more mechanized register of materiality, nonetheless contributes a kind of phantom humanity to that printed name. The figural body struggles to fix the name’s discursive play. Unwilling to accept Towers’s example of the private individual’s utter anonymity in the mass-media—a type of invisibility the narrator denounces—Harding seeks specificity. However, in response to the impersonal dynamics of the newspaper exposé, he does not much concern himself, as one might first assume, with the taste and pursuits that determine his personality (his love of music) or his cherished domestic life (his daughter’s happiness). Rather, in this context, he concentrates on “clearing his begrimed name” (W, 77), a phrase that itself evokes an almost bodily dimension to the printed Septimus Harding. Operating, it seems to me, as another figuration of abstracted embodiment, the printed name, when scrubbed clean, borrows specificity and even agency from the body as a template but not from the elderly gentleman as private person, the one who “enjoyed the unassuming warmth of his own little corner” (W, 82). As an ideal, the printed name of Mr. Harding ought to function like his absent signature implicitly does on the beadsman’s petition, formalizing his liberal individuality through an abstracted embodiment, a marked character. Disinterested, the signature is contingent on but by no means identical to the private self who possesses the name, thereby asserting a vital relation between the personal and public realms without eliminating the distinction between them.75

75. In An Autobiography, Trollope writes of the Fortnightly Review: “The matter on which we were all agreed was freedom of speech, combined with personal responsibility. We would be neither conservative nor liberal, neither religious nor free-thinking, neither popular nor exclusive;— but we would let any man who had a thing to say, and knew how to say it speak freely. But he should always speak with the responsibility of his name attached” (Autobiography, 189).

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When writing his autobiography (published in 1888), Trollope the author also capitalizes on this relation. Rather than writing an autobiography about his personal life (for instance, its romances, marriages, and children), Trollope writes a paradoxically generic autobiography, An Autobiography (emphasis added), almost in the spirit of Mill’s own impersonal biography. In effect, Trollope does not write about himself but about his name, in this case, his nom de plume: “In writing these pages, which, for the want of a better name, I shall be fain to call the autobiography of so insignificant a person as myself, it will not be so much my intention to speak of the little details of my private life, as of what I, and perhaps others round me have done in literature.”76 Anthony Trollope, then, is neither a pseudonym that conceals the person nor an anonym that merely produces a series of marks on the printed page. As a published signature, it is a liberal form that ideally integrates disinterest and interest, aligning the public author who writes for the common good with the individualized mental labor of literature, labor that otherwise occupies the private realm of liberal cognition. This signature intimates his private realm of disinterested ideas but also the merest hint of the personal realm that otherwise houses his distinct body with its distinctive “tastes and pursuits”—the one, in effect, that gets up early in the morning to do “the little details of my private life”—to hunt foxes or write the pages of his novels by hand. Harding’s printed name, then, like Trollope’s nom de plume, ought by rights to secure a coherent, productive, and harmonious relation between his cognitive character and a public reputation, but it rests on a mostly unacknowledged conflation of handwriting and print. Unlike a handwritten signature, the printed name does not really retain traces of the author’s singularity; its mechanized and uniform strokes remain resistantly abstract, unspecific. From this perspective, the prose in the scene quoted earlier, which describes his virtual hanging, looks like a compensatory recourse to figurations of the body, as if to offset a too-profound process of abstraction that is implicitly at work in the printed name mobilized elsewhere in mass journalism, as in the pages of the Jupiter. As a compensation for overabstraction, however, these bodily figurations in the gallows fantasy pres-

76. Trollope, Autobiography, 1. Note this early sentence of exposition in The Warden. Having identified the town as Barchester, the narrator writes, “Were we to name Wells or Salisbury, Exeter, Hereford, or Gloucester, it might be presumed that something personal was intended” (W, 1). Barnett suggests a somewhat similar approach to the status of Trollope in An Autobiography. Barnett quite rightly notes the importance that Trollope places on authorial signature, quoting the passage in An Autobiography where Trollope strongly encourages authors to eschew anonymity and pseudonymity (Barnett, “Public Figures,” 86).

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ent their own sort of problem, for the self-interest that is supposed to be abstracted in the printed name and to function as altruism seems unable to detach from this virtual body. In the fantasized scene, Harding recalls a previous period of altruism, when a noble concern for others who have suffered in print elicited virtuous reflections on “how men could live under such a load of disgrace.” This disinterested moment, however, quickly collapses into prolonged metaphoric expressions of bodily pain—“he was now to be dragged forth into the glaring day, and gibbeted before a ferocious multitude.” Put another way, the printed name cannot embody the liberal individual’s disinterestedness; instead, its crucial reliance on bodily figurations registers its profound dissociation from actual bodily pain—for, needless to say, a printed name cannot feel the noose around its neck. In this regard, the gallows fantasy replicates the dissociation of sense that I have already sketched in another of Mr. Harding’s imaginary states—his imaginary cello playing. In addition, a printed name, unlike a handwritten signature, is more easily susceptible to the rhetorical “play” of Tom Towers’s journalism. In those leaders, the name Harding becomes shorthand for ecclesiastical corruption and, more pointedly perhaps, a signifier rather than a signature. In Trollope’s own experience—and much to his dismay—a novel with his name affixed was radically altered into a lowbrow theatrical piece by Charles Reade but, throughout its run, remained attached to his name and thus his reputation. It is a truism of postmodern knowledge that the mass production and circulation of print severs the tendons between the author’s name and the author, the tendons that were presumed to authorize the integral relation between the private realm of intellectual property and the public exchange of that property. And although it seems in his autobiography that Trollope gained some advantage in his life from this disarticulation, The Warden reveals its problems.77

77. As readers of Trollope’s many novels know well, the author was rather obsessed with this disarticulation, which could be described as a lifelong meditation on the multiple, complex relations between a person’s private identity and his public reputation or, put in economic terms, his credit. Trollope experimented with authorial anonymity, writing Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel that way in 1865 and 1866, respectively. Instead of modeling the moral irresponsibility of Towers’s anonymity, however, Trollope claimed a moral agenda for this ruse, insisting that he was simply testing the objectivity of the critics who had too often praised him inordinately in obeisance to his name. As it turned out, the critics easily identified him, thereby only confirming the stable authorial identity his “signature” had theretofore bestowed upon him. “But this at any rate did seem clear to me, that with all the increased advantage which practice in my art must have given me, I could not at once induce English readers to read what I gave to them, unless I gave it with my name.” Autobiography, 206.

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Once the distinction between a handwritten and a printed name is conceded, one might also remark the lack of distinction between a printed name and a printed mark, as Abel Handy averred; little distinction, then, between a liberal character “making his mark” in a public setting and the masses making theirs. Harding’s dislocated sensation of his name being dragged down among and gibbeted before the multitudes is just this nightmare of a paradoxical sort of recognition. The death that would logically result from this hanging is the expression of a specific horror of the anonymity of the mob to which liberal individualism is prone, especially when exposed to a mass public more concerned, so the novel avers, with political gains than the moral form of opinion. In the press, Harding’s position is made to look like all the rest of the ecclesiastical scandals—yet another church abuse— such that Harding’s hard-won independence of opinion, the mark of his character, his liberal individuality, are never recorded in print. Even Harding’s eccentric musical gestures fail to prevent this decline into mass obscurity. Having emboldened him to force a stop to the litigation, the gestures do not—even so—result in an appreciable change in his print reputation. They are more like Skulpit’s ineffectual “flourishes in the air,” for they ultimately do not prevent a mark on the newspaper page, like all the other marks on a printed page. The novel represents the unregulated “typing” of Harding’s printed name as a sort of unfair public punishment initiated by the mechanization of mass production and consumption, but liberalism is by no means an innocent victim of this logic, as The Warden’s own portrayal of Carlyle as Mr. Anticant proves. Although Victorian liberalism celebrates individuality, it also privileges it as the “type” of modern subjectivity—because all subjects in a liberal society eventually ought to become individuals—thereby necessarily exposing idiosyncratic specificity to the sameness of the general, an irresolvable fact inherent to the political terms of abstracted individuality that is repeatedly manifested as a fear of anonymity. Just as the dream of liberal unconsciousness is a constitutive product of cognitive disorganization, so too is the liberal nightmare of anonymity, which perhaps more sensationally represents the difficulty of living liberalism.

Epilogue: Reproducing Liberalism In the parliamentary elections of 1868, Anthony Trollope ran as a Liberal for one of two seats representing Beverley, a borough in the East Riding of Yorkshire. For the first election after the passage of the Second Reform Bill of 1867, the Liberal Party held high hopes, believing what was only partly true—that all the newly enfranchised voters were nascent Liberals

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in spirit if not in fact. Having dutifully spent large sums of money and a lesser sum of words at the hustings, Trollope lost handily to a Conservative incumbent in a contest marked by treating and other forms of electoral bribery exercised by all parties involved, though the ensuing investigation uncovered no wrongdoing perpetrated by Trollope himself. The election in Beverley became one of several during the 1868 general elections that initiated highly public parliamentary hearings into electoral corruption and ultimately set the stage for the passage of the secret ballot, which Trollope did not support. By and by, the election results at Beverley were petitioned, the winners unseated (including the corrupt incumbent), and the district disenfranchised. Trollope recounts the experience with disgust in An Autobiography, complaining bitterly about the electors’ absolute indifference to his “political ideas,” which were “all leather and prunella to the men whose votes I was soliciting. They cared nothing for my doctrine, and could not even be made to understand that I should have any.”78 Deep in the provinces, Trollope encountered the new electorate and found them illiberal: largely resistant to liberal opinion, in both the party and individual sense, and indifferent to the character of the man who held the opinions. In the pages of his autobiography that recall his short political career, Trollope seeks to compensate for this indifference in the open air, by writing down for his readers his “doctrine” of a self-styled “advanced conservative Liberal,”79 a rather perfect expression of the doctrinal ambivalence that characterizes the political opinions of his novels’ narrators and indeed the transitional presumptions that so distinguish midcentury liberalism. Note how Trollope figures the Liberal doctrine as wholly lodged in the mind, in direct contrast to the milling masses that were menacingly standing beneath his podium at Beverley with projectiles in hand: “What is really in [an advanced conservative Liberal’s] mind is,–I will not say equality, for the word is offensive, and presents to the imaginations of men ideas of communism, of ruin, and insane democracy,–but a tendency towards equality. In following that, however, he knows that he must be hemmed in by safeguards, lest he be tempted to travel too quickly, and therefore he is glad to be accompanied on his way by the repressive action of a Conservative opponent.”80 In stating his

78. Autobiography, 301–2. Trollope’s phrase “leather and prunella” literally refers to materials typically used for the making of shoes. One can surmise that his phrase expresses the “low” and insignificant value the electorate accorded Trollope’s liberal ideas. 79. Ibid., 291. 80. Ibid., 295.

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opinion, Trollope wishes to manifest his liberal (but not exactly Liberal Party) credentials in a language of abstract principles that often eschews pronouncements of position on any given political issue and is, moreover, admirably moderate: his principles are, in fact, “tendencies.” A tendency toward equality evinces his disinterested commitment to the social good; the company of a Conservative evokes the conversational practice of oneon-one exchange of distinct opinion in a public forum. Trollope’s particular brand of enacted liberalism is, however, perhaps most apparent when he retells his Beverley experience in the novel Ralph the Heir (1871). With nearly every detail of his campaign closely parallel to Trollope’s own experience, Sir Underwood runs and fails to win in a deeply corrupt district. And yet, as his title suggests and as the story reveals, Sir Underwood is both an aristocrat and a Conservative, seemingly more like a Grantly than a Trollope and therefore not obviously representative of Trollope’s political or social position. Like Trollope and Harding, however, Sir Underwood is at heart a liberal, a man of integrity, willing to stand up for his opinions, whatever those opinions might be, as Mill envisions of every liberated individual, of conservative or liberal political bent. Formal character as usual takes precedence over political or even social content. Admirably refusing to give electoral bribes, Underwood stands before a rowdy crowd espousing his disinterested position and in so doing suffers bodily harm (no pure abstraction he), breaking his arm when a projectile is thrown at him while he speaks on the hustings. And yet also like Harding and not unlike Mill, he is most at home not on the hustings, nor even with his daughters in their country home, but in his own “private chambers,” a space I will interpret as a metaphor for liberal cognition, including its deformations. The party and class apostasy so evident in Ralph the Heir suggests what Mr. Harding’s tale has already indicated and what the machinery of the balloting booth will reproduce. For the liberal subject, political opinions must be had—they express liberal individualism—but the liberal’s relation to those opinions is necessarily fraught with ambivalence, an ambivalence that ought now to be understood as much as a formal as an ethical ambivalence. As a disinterested individual, the liberal narrator in Ralph the Heir can and should be able to advocate the conservative position. As a disinterested individual, a liberal is also, however, liable to detach from the content of his convictions. In this novel, as in The Warden, the protagonist is most often portrayed as distractedly disengaged, not heroically fronting the politicized crowd. Habitually sequestered in his private chambers, fiddling with a book manuscript that remains unfinished, Underwood incon-

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clusively writes about the legal opinions of other men, an unproductive version of the liberal individual who must always consider the opinions of others. Underwood dramatizes disinterest diluted into an almost paralyzed indifference. The numerous novels that Trollope wrote, especially those Barchester and Palliser series that talk again and again about the same places and people, could therefore represent not merely the overcompensation that political indifference elicits but also the rigorous cerebration of a liberalism that thinks through each new passing moment, taking nothing for granted. As Laurie Langbauer notes, series fiction more generally seems to argue for the longue durée and therefore implicitly proffers a gradualist conception of historical change, a position perfectly suitable to the gradualism of a transitional political theory such as liberalism.81 Relating its tale over a long period of time, the novel series is able to register the subtle shifts that constitute liberal reform and pace its story as if a conservative were accompanying its liberal narrator on his journey. As a specifically transitional politics, however, Victorian liberalism has trouble imagining an end, or at least did not often like to imagine an end, that culminated in universal suffrage and mass culture. As a result, Harding’s story is not really over at the close of The Warden, for it is revisited in Barchester Towers and then remembered again in the Last Chronicle of Barset. From this perspective, it is possible to see the emphasis shift somewhat in liberalism’s transitional politics, which might now seem more about delay and repetition than progress and reform. Despite some appearances to the contrary, there is, then, a politics implicit in indifference: “It was long before the people of Barchester forgot to call Mr. Harding by his long well-known name of Warden” (W, 185).

81. Langbauer, Novels of Everyday Life, 14.

CHAPTER THREE

A Frame of Mind S I G N AT U R E L I B E R A L I S M AT T H E F O RT N I G H T LY R E V I E W

The Fortnightly Review quietly published its first biweekly issue in 1865. The lack of fanfare ought not to be surprising. Between 1830 and 1880, more than one hundred periodicals were introduced to the English public in each decade, no doubt dulling the potentially resonant impact of any one arrival.1 When the Fortnightly managed to receive attention in the press, the discussion centered on two editorial decisions its founders adopted, decisions then considered radical if not original for Victorian England.2 In every issue 1. Heyck, Transformation of Intellectual Life, 33. In the introduction by Gowan Dawson to Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical, the author provides several useful graphs to chart the growth of periodicals during this century, noting that in the first third of the century, the number of titles tripled and there was a continued rise in the numbers until the end of the 1800s (Cantor et al., Science, 7–13). He also notes the astonishing statistic that—especially after the 1850s—the number of periodical titles outpaced the number of book titles: “In an unpredictable market, periodicals allowed publishers to develop relationships with particular groups of readers while at the same time avoiding the financial risks of capital-intensive book production” (8). The Fortnightly soon became a fairly popular journal among its target audience. 2. The New Monthly Magazine, established in 1814, included many articles with initials, pseudonyms, and some full names. The Englishman’s Magazine made use of initials about half the time. Mill’s London Review and Fraser’s Magazine infrequently printed initials. Dublin University Magazine, Bentley’s Miscellany, and Sherwood’s Monthly Miscellany also sometimes signed articles. By the 1850s and early 1860s, signature was becoming more common. Begun in 1850, the Leader adopted a signature policy, and Macmillan’s, begun in 1859, fully rejected the use of anonymity. I will argue, however, that the Fortnightly’s use of signature carried with it a specifically liberal philosophy concerning the meaning and value of individual opinion. See Everett, Party of Humanity, 8–16. The Spirit of the Public Journals, an annual first published in 1797, founded and edited by Stephen Jones, is arguably a precursor to the Fortnightly’s editorial eclecticism, for its subtitle describes the pages as “being the impartial selection of the most exquisite essays and jeux d’esprits, principally prose, that appear in the newspapers and other publications.” Given that the volumes by and large focus on literature and what the editor considers the best of “wit,” the contents themselves hardly mirror the earnest, intellectual exploration heralded by the Fortnightly. In both the first and second volumes’ “Advertisement,” Jones continually recurs

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of the journal, and in pointed contrast to the anonymously authored “party journalism” that typified periodical and newspaper publishing of the era, there would be both a concerted effort to publish an eclectic mix of political and religious viewpoints in the style of the French Revue des deux mondes (Review of Two Worlds) and to adhere to the editorial policy of “signature”— authors’ names would be appended to all contributors’ articles. These two features of the Fortnightly, but especially the latter, will be the focus of this chapter, which aims to provide a long overdue reassessment of the Fortnightly’s significance. After a halting start as a biweekly under the editorial direction of the ailing George Henry Lewes, the Fortnightly Review, guided by John Morley, became an influential, much-cited Victorian monthly, publishing articles by men—and some very few women—who were soon to become a virtual who’s who of the Dictionary of National Biography, both as entries and as contributors. I am less interested, however, in its role within publishing and literary history, than I am in arguing for its revealing exemplarity within mid-Victorian liberalism. Ambitious beyond the already ambitious aims of its founders and subsequent editors, the Fortnightly Review entered the public sphere as if to transform it; its commitment to “the full and free expression of opinion,” as its prospectus phrases it, was an effort not merely to provide a setting for the articulation of “free thought” but to refine this platitude—by a form of publication— into a specific instantiation of thought, that of individual opinion.3 In an era when some men could still remember living under the suspension of habeas corpus, and many more the restrictions of state censorship and the Stamp Act, when party journalism seemed to have a monopoly on print discussion, when political and social expediency seemed always to outweigh what leading liberals compulsively called “principle,” free thought and its circulation were not simply a given but practices that had to be formed and formalized. This new periodical materialized what it meant— epistemologically and ethically—to have an individual opinion. In so meditating, the Fortnightly epitomized mid-Victorian liberalism’s conception of

to his lack of “partiality,” in particular in response to readers’ complaints that the antiministerial interest is better represented by his selections. Jones’s “impartiality,” however, is difficult to merit when these claims seem largely a ruse for arguing that ministerial papers are simply not funny, entertaining, or smart. The tongue-in-cheek nature of this editorial program is nicely captured in one of Jones’s clauses, in which he refers to the editor as “anxious not only to be really impartial but to appear so” (S. Jones, Spirit of Public Journals, [2:]v). James Knowles’s Nineteenth Century, founded much later in 1877, also aimed to be a journal that provided a wide range of opinion. 3. “Prospectus of the Fortnightly Review,” 331 (hereafter cited in text as “Prospectus”).

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the public sphere, one dominated by abstract individuals, whose opinions need not be identifiable as politically Liberal but were liberal in conception and expression, for they all had to originate in systematic thinking and ideas, adhere to an intellectual etiquette of sincerity and disinterest, and comply with the Fortnightly’s fastidiously formal rules of engagement. To a large degree, then, the format of the Fortnightly constitutes its liberalism more than the ideational content of its pages. The Fortnightly was as much a public frame for mind as it was a model for what would become widely recognized as liberalism’s frame of mind. Investing my claims for the Fortnightly’s explanatory centrality for midcentury liberalism in its editorial forms and stylistic uniformities, I am approaching the Fortnightly and mid-Victorian liberalism in a somewhat untraditional fashion. As I mentioned in the introduction, a typical approach in outlining this era of liberalism is evident in Frances Knickerbocker’s book Free Minds: John Morley and His Friends, in which she chooses to focus on individuals possessing ideas, what might be labeled a mental biography.4 In thus presuming liberalism’s conceptual eclecticism, its emphasis on the individual, and in particular the individual as a private man principally distinguished by a mind in possession of ideas and made publicly manifest in opinions, this and other studies like it admiringly recapitulate as assumptions identities and practices that in the 1860s were highly debatable topics within intellectual circles. One can argue, for instance, that midcentury British liberalism, so steeped in positivism, actively lobbied for intellectual biography (in contrast to the histories of great men’s actions on the world stage) as the most accurate means of charting the progress of truth through time, not least because it gave their cohort a newly consequential role. These midcentury liberals, in fact, codified the written form their historians now use. Locally, John Morley’s own intellectual biographies, engaged in reading, through their published materials, the minds of Diderot and the Encyclopedists, Burke, and others, carved for him a niche in the literary world somewhat distinct from his mere heralding of the Fortnightly.5 In resisting biography and by mostly eschewing a close analysis

4. Knickerbocker, Free Minds. 5. On the constitutive relation between “lives of the mind” and the use of signature, it is at least interesting to note that some two decades before the Fortnightly introduced signature as an editorial policy, the New Monthly Magazine wrote in favor of signature even as it introduced biography as a central feature in its editorial mix. In its defense of signature, the magazine claimed that it encouraged the development of writerly character rather than the performance of “caricature.” At the same time, its biography section sought to “give new or brief views of the characters of celebrated men.” See “On Preserving the Anonymous in Periodicals,” 388–89.

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of particular writers and their particular contributions to the journal, I am hoping to describe instead why diversity of opinion, the mind in movement, and the biography of ideas came into assumptive precedence and what function these assumptions performed in a liberal public sphere. During its early years, the Fortnightly was passionately seeking to establish and institutionalize liberal individuality and its cognitive formality as the standards of political subjectivity and value in the public sphere, to yoke new precepts of systematic thought and ethical commitment to political opinion formation and its mobilization in the world. A conception of the political domain as mobilized by opinion is certainly not a new view of civil society, though in the 1860s, opinion was arguably coming into its own as a primary catalyst of legislation. Nevertheless, a conception of opinion as a political instantiation of the newly “scientific” and yet of necessity “sincere” and therefore self-reflexive ideas of private individuals is a refinement worth treating analytically. What can be gained, for instance, by differentiating idea from opinion so as to see them as constitutive parts in a developmental motif of liberal cognition rather than as loose, rhetorical synonyms?6 So familiar and self-evident to Knickerbocker and other historians of this political era are the relations among certain traditional terms of liberalism—the individual, free thought, diversity of opinion—that they remain unexamined; they function as the inviolable and often ahistorical content of liberalism. In overlooking the contested, constitutive forms of liberalism—in this instance, the editorial forms of the Fortnightly—such studies overlook, for instance, midcentury liberalism’s fraught but deep investment in formalism itself, the taxing discipline of a dispassionate sincerity, and the ways in which editorial eclecticism and the use of signature embodied the special kind of abstraction that was to be lived in the ideal world of a liberalized public sphere.

“Brawling Judgments Unashamed on All Things All Day Long” The Fortnightly Review aspired to recast the periodical market of the midVictorian period in order to focus attention on the development and practice of individual opinion.7 In a public sphere dominated by “party” peri6. Habermas notes that even as early as the French revolutionary period, “the opinion of the public that put its reason to use was no longer just opinion; it did not arise from mere inclination but from private reflection upon public affairs and from their public discussion.” Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 94. 7. This chapter is primarily concerned with the periodical press, a term that then encompassed reviews, miscellanies, and monthlies, whose contents were increasingly indistinct from

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odicals, each of which announced its political, religious, or social affiliation and almost all of which promoted the use of the anonymous as the voice of this affiliation, individual opinion was a virtual newcomer to the conversation.8 As its own hybrid genre among the species of magazine, the Fortnightly in its earliest years was both a conduct manual for and contemplative essay on the category of “individual opinion.” The banality of the phrase “individual opinion” masks the originality and ambition of this effort. And surely the greatest challenge for this chapter is to recapture the innovation in a concept now so blandly familiar as to seem redundant. At the middle of the nineteenth century, however, “individual opinion” had a specific cultural and political valence. Quite often evoking its patriarch, the J. S. Mill of On Liberty and equally A System of Logic, individual opinion was quickly becoming valued by many men, if not as the content of their characters, at the least as the form through which character was expressed—that which established and sustained their identities—not simply their social reputation in the public sphere nor their cultural status as educated citizens but their fundamental condition as subjects, liberal subjects. Replacing the all-encompassing identifications of bloodline, class, and estate, the liberal subject possessing individual opinions was surely integral to the professionalization of late Victorian England but was not necessarily a professional himself.9 During these middle decades, the honing of opinion ran parallel to the specialization of knowledges, often overlapping in the Fortnightly and manifested as an editorial preference for writers displaying “expertise” in a given field. Nonetheless, for this journal and liberalism more generally, molding and then expressing an opinion remained in the domain of the amateur, the free-ranging “critical spirit” evoked by Arnold. As the journal’s prospectus emphasized, its primary criteria for inclusion in its pages were insistently (and perhaps surprisingly) about the authenticity

one another. The newspaper press was also under the regime of the anonymous and the firstperson plural, such that many commentators simply fold the two markets into one another, which I will do as well when appropriate. By the end of the nineteenth century, the signature becomes almost standard in periodicals, but the anonymous remained intact in newspapers and has remained so in most newspaper editorial pages. 8. For instance: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, begun in 1817, was an aristocratic Tory rival to the high Whig, eventually moderate Whig Edinburgh Magazine, begun in 1802. The Quarterly Review, begun in 1809, was another competitor to the Edinburgh Magazine, espousing moderate Tory views, while Fraser’s Magazine, founded in 1830, was a more progressive Tory publication. The Westminster Review, begun in 1824, started out as a utilitarian, radical vehicle. The Contemporary Review, begun in 1866, represented liberal Christian Anglicanism. 9. Perkin, Rise of Professional Society; Heyck, Transformation of Intellectual Life; Larson, Rise of Professionalism.

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of the individual’s opinion, not about his mastery of a preordained knowledge or his performative adequacy within a professional sect: “He will be asked to say what he really thinks and really feels” (“Prospectus,” 362). The banality of this phrase masks a dense array of motivations that I will attempt to unpack in the following pages. Why, for instance, does the syntax so studiously differentiate between thinking and feeling yet yoke these two categories of practice in a single sentence? Why would a magazine, in the spirit of a pointed, almost demanding request, need to “ask” the writer? And why would that request require the emphatic really? Continuing a trend that had certainly preceded the nineteenth century and had well suited the two-party politics and radical movements of the earlier part of the century, the world of periodical publishing at midcentury closely mapped its coordinates by the manifold political and social geography of the period, targeting audiences through unquestioned categories of social organization—a political party, a political or religious interest, a class, and, especially as the century progressed, a social topic, such as temperance or Corn Law reform or suffrage. If one can believe a contemporary observer, perhaps unduly influenced by nostalgia, this catering to “special interests” had attained an unprecedented intensity and specificity: In former times a journal might appeal to all classes alike for support, or at most to one or two classes—Whig or Tory. Now, it is more rare, and it is every day becoming rarer, to find a newspaper independent of class support, and addressing itself indifferently to every educated man of whatever party; attentive to every interest and attracted by every subject. Our periodical literature is essentially a classified literature. The sphere of every new publication is more and more limited. Every class has its organ; every topic finds a journal; every interest has a friend in the press.10

The consolidation, even ossification, of what has come to be called “party journalism” seemed to this writer complete by 1859—well before, most historians would have it, the consolidation of nationally organized party

10. [Dallas], “Popular Literature,” 181 (hereafter cited in text as “PL”). Matthew Arnold also expresses a similar opinion in Culture and Anarchy. After praising the Revue des deux mondes, Arnold laments, “But we have the Edinburgh Review, existing as an organ of the old Whigs, and for as much play of the mind as may suit its being that; we have the Quarterly Review, existing as an organ of the Tories, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that; we have the British Quarterly Review, existing as an organ of the political Dissenters, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that; we have the Times, existing as an organ of the common, satisfied, well-to-do Englishman, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that” (C&A, 37).

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politics. According to this perspective, readers of periodicals were beckoned as convinced members of familiar collectivities, were interpolated as adherents to already well-established, conventional positions, and were stylistically merged into the collective by the nearly universal use of the anonymous and the first-person plural: “we believe, we think, we demand.” Frederick Maurice expresses a common complaint against the first-person plural when he writes to George Kingsley that the “symbol We, has more than anything else tended to keep alive the notion of sect fellowship, by which I mean fellowship in a certain more or less accurately defined set of opinions.”11 Moreover, as is implicit in Maurice’s complaint, this plutocracy of ideology seemed to some to lack ideas, demanding constancy but rarely cogitation. As the Blackstone Magazine writer had indicated, the putative reader of a midcentury periodical was fundamentally incurious. The second editor of the Fortnightly, John Morley, echoes Maurice’s religious metaphors and accuses the typical periodical writer and reader of what amounts to “sect fellowship” that leads to a sort of thinking in tongues: “Men who are under [the anonymous we’s] influence, instead of thinking out questions independently, and exercising their own judgment, habitually find themselves consulting this demi-god abstraction, considering what It would dictate, reflecting in modes, almost in phrases, that they might suppose the demi-god using.”12 In this passage, Morley narrates a horror story of opinion formation, one that requires secular exorcism, but what I want to stress here as well is the tendency of midcentury liberal discourse to concentrate more generally on the individual mind at work, a narrative of thought formation which generates multiple genres—gothic, epic, and romantic. In this particular scenario, periodical writers’ only obligation consisted in complying with the company stance and style, a loyalty that seemed to many a sort of fanaticism. At the same time, readers were asked merely to affiliate, their reading a process of recognition rather than reflection, a process facilitated by the mysterious, oracular effect of the “demi-god.” One opponent of anonymity describes the effect of anonymously authored articles: “Because they are not avowedly the product of one man’s brain, we elevate them into the dignity of almost divine utterances.”13 Like a god, so this logic runs, anonymously authored periodicals answer to no one. The stylistics of unanimity expressed another kind of hubris as well. With an absolutism appropriate to the royal “we,” each journal often

11. Maurice, Life of Maurice, 325. 12. Morley, “Anonymous Journalism,” 292 (hereafter cited in text and notes as “AJ”). 13. Kinnear, “Anonymous Journalism,” 327.

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claimed to speak the public’s opinion when it was, in fact, only one of many pretenders to the throne.14 Publishing only those articles that channeled the “anonymous we” favored by the editors’ desk, each periodical frequently treated its utterances as public opinion and thereby achieved rhetorical but by no means actual democratization by conflating the “demi-god” abstraction “we” with the agential voice of the English or British people, however that might be defined in a period when “national” identity and a “mass media” were terms rather new to the vocabulary. Such hubris, however, was not uniformly derided. This is indeed the viewpoint of the author of the Blackstone Magazine piece, himself anonymous and in favor of anonymity precisely because it enforced a public stance: if one is prohibited from writing as a private person, one is instantly a public spokesperson. Anonymity installed what to him seems an uncomplicated transparency in the midst of the physical mediation between writer and reader. The writer without signature “must write on public grounds, it is no longer Smith who writes, but Smith divested of his egotism—Smith, who is compelled by his invisible cap to forget that part of his nature which is peculiar to himself and essentially private—Smith, who is forced to regard only that part of his consciousness which identifies him with every other member of the community—Smith, no longer the individual unit, but the representative man” (“PL,” 187). Donning an “invisible cap,” the “anonymous we” evokes a world of romantic allegory. This “we” is clearly not expressive of a representative democracy but “the representative man,” which can allow the writer to fantasize himself an everyman. Indeed, it was this sort of “magical thinking” for which critics of anonymity had little patience, but, as I will suggest later, “signature” was not without its own illusions of transformation. Throughout this chapter I will emphasize the distinctions between the conventional anonymous journalism of midcentury and the Fortnightly’s use of signature; in fact, Smith divested of his individuality is just what the editors of the Fortnightly did not want. That which was “peculiar to himself” as a thinking man was what the editors wished to cultivate. However, I must at least remark here on the epistemic similarity of the two camps’ respective wishes: a profound, even poignant desire to render print exchange 14. Habermas treats this type of rhetorical claim of representation as a historical fact, and one which seems to him both pedagogical and admirable. He writes: “Wherever the public established itself institutionally as a stable group of discussants, it did not equate itself with the public but at most claimed to act as its mouthpiece, in its name, perhaps even as its education—the new form of bourgeois representation.” Habermas, Structural Transformation of Public Sphere, 37.

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more immediate, more communicative, more expressive than the transaction between writer and reader might otherwise seem. Evidently, those who used anonymity and the first-person plural did not consider themselves dishonest, unthinking, and inhuman.15 For many Victorians, anonymity insured rigor and impartiality. When writers wrote anonymously, supporters argued, they were inoculated from personality, therefore free to express the truth without fear of recrimination. A periodical or newspaper writer who signs anonymously “merges his individuality in the corporate entity of a newspaper when he has not to think of self, or friend or foe, of the political party to which he belongs, or of the social circle in which he moves, of the skins he may involuntarily prick or the toes he may involuntarily tread on.”16 From this vantage point, anonymity was not engaged in a politics of personal attack, the acrimony of intimacy, but aspired to a serene transcendence of self and sectarian interest. At its most ambitious, it sought the exclusive company of objective truth (what one writer calls “the eternal impersonal thing truth”) or, in a more modest, Burkean spirit, perhaps, it sought the favor of traditional corporate bodies of wisdom whose expression through the first-person plural was simply an accurate representation of consensus (“PL,” 288b). In this formulation, writers did not aim to hide themselves behind a cloak of anonymity and the bluster of the peremptory “we” but, rather, to serve humbly its mission of civic fairness. A thorough examination of the midcentury debate on signature, which itself was part of an ongoing debate that lasted throughout the century both in the periodical culture specifically and in the literary culture more generally, suggests to me that many proponents of signed articles found the arguments for anonymity unconvincing for reasons of hypocrisy.17 For instance, hypocrisy was easily detected in the considerable gap between a statement of high-minded “disinterest” and the journals’ consistent and indeed age-old practice of vicious attack. That traditional corporate bodies had in other ways become seen as “more interested” —through the critique 15. This chapter does not seek to provide a comprehensive account of the anonymity debate. See Maurer, “Anonymity vs. Signature,” and Liddle, “Salesmen, Sportsmen, Mentors,” for solid accounts, which, however, focus almost entirely on its literary and literary critical context, thereby raising questions concerning the benefits and costs to the writer of concealed authorship and the relation between aesthetic judgment and disinterest. See also Kent, “Higher Journalism,” for the insight that the anonymity debate centers on the status of the individual. I should also mention here that the anonymity debate does not by any means divide along party lines. 16. Cited in Maurer, 16. 17. Traill, “Anonymous Critic,” 941.

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of “old corruption,” through the consolidation of political economic knowledge—only deepened the apparent hypocrisy. Moreover, the rhetoric of collective certainty, explicit in the anonymous “we,” seemed implausible in the increasingly mobile market of journalism, where hired “hacks” could simply don the mask and execute the script, regardless of their “true” opinions. Hypocrisy in these last instances would count as a personal, ethical failing, but it also seems reasonable to suggest that this gap between theory and practice becomes especially apparent and risible only when one deploys a liberal philosophy to interpret the world in which mid-Victorian journalism operated. In this context, attending to and then judging an individual author’s relation to the opinions he voices itself marks the liberal moment. Critics of anonymity also continually noted the impertinence in the claim to speak the public’s mind when they, at least, well recognized how heterogeneous and dispersed that public actually was. Echoing J. S. Mill, Thomas Hughes argues that “‘the public,’ and ‘public opinion,’ are mere abstractions. The words can’t mean ‘the nation’ and ‘the nation’s opinion,’ because on every question there is a large minority in the nation, and no single newspaper, therefore, can have a right to put itself forward as representing the nation.”18 Emphasizing demagoguery, sectarianism, and stupidity, contemporary critics saw a periodical field of untested, perhaps even feigned certitudes, hidden from each other and their public by their submergence into equal yet separate anonymities and thereby engaged in a battle defined by its reckless and unending trench warfare. As F. D. Maurice demands of Kingsley, “you know that the We covers the most insolent pretension, the most offhand dogmatism, the most haughty scorn of individuals and of mankind.”19 Despite its omnipotent persona, the anonymous “we” was continually immersed in the competition of the marketplace and in the competition for men’s ears and politicians’ notice. Although himself engaged in contributing to the number of periodicals in the public sphere, Morley grumbles about “the multiplication of journals ‘delivering brawling judgments unashamed on all things all day long.’”20 In these references to both “haughty scorn” and “brawling judgments,” critics of anonymity deftly evoked both the malevolent rhetoric of aristocratic imperiousness, epitomized by such dominant journals as the Tory/ conservative Blackstone’s and the Whig Edinburgh Review, and the intemper-

18. Hughes, “Anonymous Journalism,” 162a. 19. Maurice, Life of Maurice, 322. 20. Morley, On Compromise, 65 (hereafter cited in text and notes as OC).

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ance of the burgeoning mass public, whose heterogeneity had not just contributed to the size of the periodical market but to the varieties of public expression. In his history of the Fortnightly, Edwin Everett reminds his readers that only a few decades before the journal’s commencement, gentlemen’s duels often took the place of libel suits in the hostile realm of periodical discourse, while at the time of the Fortnightly’s founding, the Hyde Park riots, believed to be egged on by working-class newspapers, were a recently installed memory. It was between this rock and hard place that the Fortnightly found its setting and unsettling market niche. Consciously modeling the new journal the Review des deux mondes, a noted French journal committed to eclecticism, the founders (James Cotter Morison, Frederick Chapman, Anthony Trollope, and possibly Walter Bagehot) were seeking a medium of moderation. In this historical context, Janet Courtney’s loving recollection of the liberal journal’s inaugural years is particularly pointed: “In place of Bradlaugh and tub-thumping, you had Huxley, Leslie Stephen and W. K. Clifford writing in the Fortnightly; in place of torn-up railings in Hyde Park you had Frederic Harrison fighting the battle of Trade-Unionism in the pages of a first-class Review.”21 The pen is mightier than the sword.

“The Sober Medium of Black Ink and White Paper” The transfiguration of the sword into a pen is made explicitly thematic in the Fortnightly. Not long after taking over the editorship, Morley cannily reasserted the journal’s distinction by writing at length about its editorial investment in signature and eclecticism through an extended fencing conceit. In that article, Morley imagines the pages of the Fortnightly as the boundaries of a fencing ground, where in each eclectic edition, for instance, “religionists of all stripes” “must fight the battle out, without maskes, and with no button at the ends of their foils” (“AJ,” 287). Unlike the masquerade of aristocratic swordplay or, perhaps implicitly, the secrecy of a duel, the match is commenced without cover. And despite the “unbuttoning” of the foils, the inevitable blunting involved in the evolution of sword into pen is meant to evoke the more temperate spirit of the written word, as in Courtney’s description of the early Fortnightly, in which punches become persuasive periods. One commentator in the debate on anonymity represents the conversion of public outrage into printed opinion in this way: “At a public meeting [a minority] would be hooted down or outvoted; on the hustings the show of hands is against them—to whom can they appeal, if not 21. Courtney, Making of an Editor, 108.

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to the reader in quiet moments, in his newspaper or review over the fire? Here Philip drunk has become Philip sober, the most unpopular views win their way through the sober medium of black ink and white paper” (“PL,” 288b). The Fortnightly seeks a change of scene: from public venues of mass cacophony and tyrannous majoritarianism to the abstract intimacy of print consumption and individual opinion. In this study of the morning after, the by-then-familiar association among periodical reading, its serial regulation of time, and the more formal sites for temperate consumption of opinion—most famously developed in Addison’s The Spectator—is reasserted. Addison wrote of bringing “philosophy out of the closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses.”22 The Victorian passage, however, seems a bit anxious in its overstatement, most evidenced in its physical transition from social settings, such as clubs and coffeehouses, to solitary spaces of contemplation—quiet moments before the fire—a transition also charted in Trollope’s The Warden. Note also how a cozy, companionable tête-à-tête is between a man and his periodical—not between himself and his friend, not between himself and his wife. Moreover, ink and paper form precisely the medium that comes “between” a man and the “unpopular views” that might otherwise lead to physical conflict someplace else, as if the abstraction of print through the concretions of ink and paper itself deracinates opinion into an individual and therefore palatable portion for intellectual consumption, not mass contention. As I will elaborate subsequently, among many liberals the alert attention afforded by coffee and the amicable exchange among fellow imbibers, evoked in the foregoing passage, seems at the very least no longer sufficient; privacy needs to be further concentrated by relocating it to interior spaces of reflection, thereby figuring as well the space of the mind and its formal practices. Prizing solitude and reflection, this scene of opinion formation before the dancing embers lacks, on its own, adequate ambition. Sober Philip, taking in his monthly at his hearth, is simply too relaxed—indeed, worrisomely distant from the world he ought to want to improve, at least according to the founders of the Fortnightly. Monthly journals quite appropriately avoid producing “brawling judgments every day,” but their temporal distance from “the moment” remains a signal problem for the contemplative

22. Spectator, no. 10, March 12, 1711, 1:44. The transformation of sword into pen also recalls the way in which Trollope uses mock-epic metaphor in his account of domestic conversations in both The Warden and Barchester Towers, such that war between nations becomes a war of words between spouses. On this latter idea, see D. Miller, Novel and Police, 113.

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imperative in midcentury liberalism. Philip sober is not enough of an activist for midcentury liberalism. Calmly engaged in the retrospection favored by monthly reviews, Philip has missed the political moment entirely. Not surprisingly, the temporality of the journal was a common topic of consideration for its founders and subsequent editor. The growth of the press and its increasing influence on both public opinion and parliamentary behavior or, put more precisely, a fundamental uncertainty across the political spectrum regarding the real and also the proper relation between public opinion and governance, always shadows the project of the Fortnightly. Although committed to some political role for public opinion, the Fortnightly was in the business of postulating something rather different from the rhetorical “public” invoked scattershot from the pages of the daily newspapers, which sought to dictate the parliamentary agenda. Indeed, more often than not, liberals found it difficult to distinguish between the riotous public sphere and what Morley calls the “deliberative mêlée” of the parliamentary floor.23 Both venues appeared to be similarly chaotic, particularly in respect to their protean opinions that seemed always more attuned to pragmatics than principle. As one supporter of signature asserted in Saint Paul’s Magazine, “It is, perhaps, more necessary now than in any period of our history that some one should hold to distinct and unalterable principles amidst the anarchical whirl of conflicting opinions” (“AJ,” 221). The actual relation between the daily requirements of newspaper publication and what was reported as the daily deal making and compromise of the legislative process was not much addressed, but insofar as their rhythms and reversals appeared contiguous and were analogized, it seems likely that the two imperatives were believed to be mutually constitutive. In the prospectus, announcing the arrival of the Fortnightly, the founders argued for its bimonthly publication schedule, yet another strategic moderation, this time between the dailies and the monthlies—“published at intervals which are neither too distant for influence on the passing questions, nor too brief for deliberation” (“Prospectus,” 362). They considered a fortnight timely enough to address political topics of the moment but sufficiently deliberate to ensure rational, methodical, and conscientious opinion formation. As he writes in the journal and subsequently publishes as On Compromise, Morley cherishes “reserve”—a term that encompasses a variety of nuances in midcentury liberalism (OC, 114). There is the reserve that trades on time frugally, watching while others spend, and then spending only at the “right moment” but with time to spare. There is also 23. Morley, “Old Parties and New Policy,” 335.

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the reserve of deportment, the knowledge when to thrust and when to parry. These reserves no doubt helped midcentury liberals practice and promote what Harvie calls, somewhat ominously, “the self-conscious detachment . . . that pervaded their lives,” as if the detachment was so complete as to eradicate agency, becoming an outside force that “pervaded” them.24 When the Fortnightly’s early financial difficulties necessitated its shift to a monthly format, bringing with it that form’s associations with the review and the retrospective, it nevertheless retained its title. Needless to say, its then-misleading appellation was a concession to brand-name familiarity, but it also rather perfectly symbolizes the journal’s difficult, always ambivalent relation to its practical political commitments: wishing to be both pragmatic and philosophical, both timely and timeless, the periodical was unevenly pertinent. In analogizing the sword and the pen, Morley chose his words carefully, for the sword’s transposition into a metaphor for the pen is fully apt. On the one hand, the figure retains for the pen the blue-blooded élan associated with the sport. Played with elaborate civility, with bows and dramatic pauses—a veritable stylized ballet of aristocratic distance and reserve— fencing well captures the competitive formality at work in the pages of the Fortnightly. The journal, as I will discuss in more detail shortly, favored a self-possessed authorial persona, a writer who no longer spoke with divine pretense but nonetheless wrote with considerable presumption, speaking both for himself and for his opponents while rarely directly engaging in hand-to-hand combat, those vulgar brawls so common in the newspapers. On the other hand, writing with “no buttons at the ends,” the writers of the Fortnightly mobilized the sword’s sharpness, seeking always to make points rather than sustain the status quo so prized by the ruling elite. Although ultimately sharing shelf space with reviews, the Fortnightly did not aim “merely” to synopsize the current literature or the current state of politics; rather, its writers were to promote their opinions as arguments within an ongoing contest. As Maurice offers in his defense of the signature, prefiguring the Fortnightly’s appearance nearly ten years later, “I believe a journal with names must be undertaken by men who feel that they dare not be braggarts and dare not be cowards; that they are arming themselves, and so far as they can are assisting others to arm, for a real battle.”25 The martial art lends to the writer’s craft a martial spirit otherwise unattributable to the man of letters. 24. Harvie, Lights of Liberalism, 24. 25. Maurice, Life of Maurice, 322.

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In effect, the physical brawls of Hyde Park would be brought in off the streets. At the same time, the acrimonious disquisition of the demigod “we” would be forced out of its hidden, indecently private quarters, like the salacious den of Tom Towers, the editor of the Jupiter in Trollope’s The Warden. As Morley elaborates, “the assailants of anonymity want the teacher to leave his tub, to come down to the ordinary level of mortals, and to teach and fight on fair ground.”26 Comparing Morley’s phrase to Addison’s, one can see—yet again—how tea rooms and coffeehouses, their clatter of cups and chatter of voices, have become an abstracted space, a Euclidean plane but one rendered sufficiently earthy—smelling perhaps of property as well as propriety—by a foundationalist “ground.” Regulated by the journal’s rules of engagement and with the light touch promised by the editor, all sides would be given a bounded space, a “fair ground,” for the “free play” of the mind in print, neither too exposed nor too secreted. It is this freedom expressed through rule, through a proper appreciation of boundaries and barriers rather than the Hype Park rioters’ disrespect for fences, described ironically by Arnold as a “freedom to do what one likes when one likes it,” that constitutes the liberty of midcentury liberalism.27 Morley’s reference, of course, pointedly evokes an even earlier constitutional crisis by citing “the teacher in the tub,” Jean-Paul Marat. Morley deftly conjures for his readers Marat’s infamous disrespect for order and for a transparent public forum, a publicity that his vaguely indecent seclusion in a bathtub argues against. Midcentury liberalism inherits this game of the level playing field from Bentham, a feature of his thinking that Frances Ferguson has emphasized.28 Bentham championed abstract standards for competition, divorced from more conventional cultural hierarchies of value, as a means of both reforming and restricting the social body. However, in the hands of midcentury liberals, the game of utilitarianism must always carry with 26. “AJ,” 291. That Morley here evokes Marat in this reference to the tub does not diminish, it seems to me, an additional, oblique reference to other kinds of privacy associated with aristocratic privilege that would continue to be associated by both radicals and liberals with physical and even sexual impropriety, as the private quarters of Grantly in The Warden are linked to the salaciousness of his reading materials. 27. The fundamental necessity of social order is perhaps the Hobbesian contribution to Victorian liberalism that seems especially fundamental when politics are seen to be derived from ideas: a liberal simply cannot think liberal thoughts without peace and quiet. Social order, for instance, is simply a given in T. H. Green’s idealist version of liberalism. See Green, “Lecture on Liberal Legislation,” 365. 28. Ferguson, Pornography, the Theory, 5. Liddle also stresses this feature in the signature debate. Although it is important to the debate and, in turn, the editorial philosophy of the Fortnightly, the game conceit can become too central, such that Liddle too quickly compares “fair play” with free competition. See Liddle, “Salesmen, Sportsmen, Mentors.”

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it the remnants of aristocratic rule—its sensibility, its exercise of discrimination and restraint. The sport is not pugilism but fencing. The playing ground is not the commons but the public school field, as when Thomas Hughes shifts his attention from the debate concerning anonymity and directs it toward Tom Brown’s Schooldays, where the fair play of rugby becomes an allegory for liberal bourgeois ascendancy, where one sees acted out the recasting of aristocratic coercion into the liberal persuasion that produces a general consensus to play by the rules, a consensus that, for those left out of the game, can seem not merely abstract but arbitrary.29 This melding of a quickly degenerating aristocratic civility with a more healthy-seeming fairplay is the hybrid formality that infuses the form of the Fortnightly.

A Frame for Mind As Edwin Everett has suggested in his history of the Fortnightly Review, the journal seems in many ways an almost perfect exemplification of the brave new world envisioned by J. S. Mill’s On Liberty. Foregrounding “individual opinion,” in contrast to what Mill had unflatteringly called “received opinion” in On Liberty, the Fortnightly sought to open its pages to a wide range of independent opinion, both familiar and unfamiliar. The Fortnightly’s prospectus refers to “questions which have an agitating influence, and admit diversity of aspects” (“Prospectus,” 362). The prospectus implicitly evokes On Liberty when it suggests that only through eclectic discussion can the truth ever be ascertained. While affording a venue for minority opinion in its many guises and minimizing editorial intrusion on its expression, the journal, however, equally declared its adherence to form—and formality. One ought to note how the aforementioned commentary treats its content as a type of form, emphasizing less the political particularities of the questions published than a standard of complexity (“diversity of aspects”) and social, perhaps mental, impact (“agitating influence”), an emphasis on what I would suggest is a peculiarly liberal form that remains consistently apparent throughout the first decades of the Fortnightly’s run. Aware that the open-ended editorial policy might result in bad behavior, the founders called as well for a standard of formality—“the tact and sympathy of our contributors, and the candid construction of our readers” (“Prospectus,” 362), the sort of good breeding and decency usually presumed to be bred in a drawing room. Such phrasing does not really evoke the rational delib29. For a fascinating discussion of the “arbitrary” at work in liberal democratic politics, see Rancière, Disagreement, 21–42.

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erative standards of Habermas but, rather, behavioral and affective standards of cognitive propriety. In addition to these attitudinal demands, the journal’s founders established ground rules of fair play that defined the form of the periodical. Contributors did not choose to append signatures but were required to; writers had to be willing to see their work printed beside articles that might challenge their positions; moreover, authors were expected to have a particular sort of relationship to the opinions they wrote: they needed to believe in them. Unremarkable as that expectation might seem, it points to a central drama of liberalism, the crucial and often highly fraught effort to establish a clear path between the public sphere of politics and opinion and the increasingly privatized brain, but also heart, of the liberalized subject. Compared to other “sect” publications, the Fortnightly in theory gave its writers the freedom to have and express a variety of political, economic, religious, and aesthetic opinions, so that one can read a piece favorable to the Anglican bureaucracy and a critique of that same establishment, or one might read pieces antagonistic toward and admiring of Swinburne. Nonetheless, the journal did have standards, and one might even argue extremely rigorous standards, mostly centering on the ethics of opinion formation. In accord with Mill’s passionate plea for minority and individual opinion in On Liberty, the Fortnightly was willing to publish, for instance, orthodox opinion on the church establishment, even when many of its founders, authors, and readers did not share these views, precisely because there might be some kernel of truth germinating there. The journal, then, adopted what might be called an agnostic editorial approach, expressing humility in the midst of its belief in the appropriate arrogance of truth. However, orthodox opinion had to comply with the Fortnightly’s code of opinion formation; that is, an opinion that favored orthodoxy had to emerge from the “disinterestedness of the critical spirit” that seemed at this time locatable in what was deemed the codifiable logic of the individual mind.30 One need not think liberally, one need not even think about liberalism, but one certainly had to think through liberalism. On Liberty casts a long shadow over the Fortnightly, but Mill’s A System of Logic, a seminal text for many second-generation liberals who read it on their own time while students at Oxford and Cambridge, is an equally

30. This is the phrase of Basil Willey, when writing about John Morley: “Morley was much influenced, in the early ‘seventies, by Matthew Arnold’s doctrine about the disinterestedness of the critical spirit and the need for a free play of mind on all stock subjects and notions.” Willey, More Nineteenth Century Studies, 260.

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apparent influence.31 Mill’s A System of Logic had shown to many liberalizing gentlemen at midcentury that there was a describable, comprehensive, and rational methodology of mind: comprehensive even at a time when human thought and invention were felt to be accelerating and dispersing, and rational even when some of these advances (for instance, in historical method and early anthropological practice) seemed to show enormous unevenness among societies in the exercise of thought. Even without a providential order, there was order in the mind. As one writer in the Fortnightly asserted, “His book on Logic will remain for a very long time, at all events, the principal organiser and disseminator of positive modes of thought in England, and this, perhaps, will prove the most durable of his contributions.”32 I cannot stress enough the extent to which the Fortnightly sought to inject this sort of mindfulness into the public sphere. As Morley reminds his readers: “Let us never forget that the exertion of mental activity upon public transactions, still more upon questions involving some powers of abstract thought, is thoroughly exceptional” (“AJ,” 291). Certainly writers had thought before the advent of the Fortnightly, despite Morley’s claim of exceptionality, but in this journal their mental powers were newly detached from conventional locations, from familiar bodies of thought, such that thinking as a particular social practice became itself subject to mental scrutiny. Not only did the journal applaud a mindfulness toward other points of view, manifest in its mission of editorial eclecticism, but even more insistently it sought to make opinion formation, in particular political opinion, more mindful, more logical, more systematic, more consistently guided by principle. In emphasizing “principle,” the journal and its contributors were not only complaining that politicians and people more generally were succumbing to expediencies in the accelerating swirl of modern life. Importantly, the Fortnightly’s polemic also helped shift the primary ethical milieu for political practice from the civic sphere to the sphere of individual conviction, another way in which it secularized evangelical values. By 31. “Scientific truth was the sanction of their criticism; rationalism was their method— rationalism, that is, defined as the application of reason to religious belief. This method seemed to stamp a character upon the Fortnightly Review. It was a journalistic inheritance, possibly, from the old Westminster, and it certainly demonstrated the influence of J. S. Mill. All the characteristic work of the Fortnightly—its humanitarianism, its obsession with science, its distrust of theological dogma, its insistence upon human liberties—although it has a distant ancestor in Bentham’s Utilitarianism, springs more immediately from Mill, and if from any particular work of his, certainly from his essay On Liberty, the book which at Oxford John Morley had known almost by heart.” Everett, Party of Humanity, 141. 32. Mill, “Critical Notices,” 124.

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this I am not quite suggesting that the liberalism of this period espoused a philosophy that privileged thought exclusively over action, though such an argument will find its evidence plentiful. Instead, I am pointing to the way in which thinking itself became not only an ethical practice but a highly privileged political act in liberal discourse, most meaningful in the context of the individual, and often portrayed as a solitary, even heroic “frame of mind.” This is the milieu in which Trollope created Septimus Harding.33 In attempting to define a finite set of logical propositions that constituted the process of human thinking, Mill labored in an ancient tradition for which he was well-trained by his father’s rigorous classical tutelage. A System of Logic, however, was most influenced by associationist models of the human mind that, too simply put, asserted that all thinking, whether basic or advanced, was built on chains of associations that first start out as sense impressions. That Mill aimed, despite his admitted lack of scientific training, to elaborate a logic that still managed to comprehend in its own terms both the more traditional fields of philosophy and art and the myriad nascent procedures of scientific practice at midcentury (natural sciences as well as social sciences) marks his book as very much a product of its time, and in that respect what might seem a quaint remnant of an era prior to professional specialization. The totalizing reach of the book also shows one reason why Mill was so intellectually attracted to Comte’s holistic positivism despite their significant temperamental differences concerning the role of religion in the conception of humanism. Both men worked in a period when George Eliot’s Casaubon, the prospective author of a “Key to All Mythologies,” was a recognizable type for educated middle-class readers, albeit a type of totalist whose classicism and Christianity often became an object of critique for liberals aware of the new criticism. Reading through Mill’s A System of Logic as a novice of that philosophical subfield, I am therefore more struck by its implicit narrative drama—to which many Victorians seemed to respond, too—than by its contribution to its field of study or by its influence as a textbook. In his pages, even as they exhaustively elaborate propositions concerning deduction and induction, the abstract and the concrete, Mill seems vitally engaged in codifying the fundamentals of human ratiocination and, in so doing, to afford 33. That what amounts to a privatization of public opinion could be aligned with the privacies of domestic culture certainly accounts for the pervasive compensatory yoking of battle imagery and tropes of manliness in liberal discourse, in the Fortnightly and elsewhere. See Collini, “‘Manly Fellows’”; Hilton, “Manliness,” 41–59, 60–70. See also Christ: “Sage discourse could become a heroic masculine bulwark set up against a democratized and feminized novel” (“‘Hero as Man of Letters,’” 26).

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them a coherence, cogency, and prerogative at a time when human cognition seemed more alone in the universe than ever. A hopefulness is implicit throughout the text: human beings and their cultures may be radically different from one another, even incommensurable, but we all of us have a mind. When that mind reasons as it ought, it operates in recognizable ways, such clear, penetrating, and accurate ways, that we really ought to have faith in it. Faith may not be a word one reads in A System of Logic, but the total effect of the book, its recognition of but not subsumption into scientific rationality, its concentration of turbulent variety (social, cultural, scientific, etc.) into the mind’s orderly exercise of induction, and its drama of Mill’s own brain at work, all impressed its readers with what can only be called a religious zeal for the schematizing powers of the individual mind.34 It was left to the Fortnightly over its first few decades of publication to develop the rhetoric of an irreligious religiosity toward the powers of that mind. To be sure, particularly under the tenure of Morley, the Fortnightly solidified its identity in the periodical world by becoming the journal most impatient with religious belief and church establishment. Mostly differentiating itself, as did Mill, from Comte’s “Religion of Humanity,” the periodical never lost an editorial opportunity to excoriate lazy adherence to the church or to condemn the sort of thought it associated with a flocklike reliance on orthodox thought, as does Morley when writing on anonymity: “As a rule, the writer of leading articles is in the position of an oracle, or a parson in the pulpit. People do not sit down to read what he has written in a critical attitude. They will quite willingly take all he says for gospel.”35 In this passage, one sees the persistent slippage between an anonymous author and the godhead, between abject readers and religious adherents,

34. In arguing for a certain sort of schematization that emphasizes procedures of thought, and therefore a certain formalism of thought, I am suggesting that Mill’s work is indeed pushing up against a Kantian-inflected theory of mind, more in keeping with the work of a psychologist like William Leonard Courtney than Mill’s associationism seems to suggest. Mark Rylance rightly points out that Mill’s thought lacks a biological model that might have helped him “think through the deficiencies in classical sensationalist associationism,” but it is nonetheless possible that Mill, who did not appear to know much of Kant, was working toward more formalist conceptions of the mind’s operations. Rylance, Victorian Psychology, 207. 35. “AJ,” 291. It should be noted that Frederic Harrison, for years a close friend of Morley’s, wrote often for the Fortnightly until an editorial disagreement led to a parting of the ways. Harrison was an acolyte of Auguste Comte and a colleague of Richard Congreve, the strongest public disciple of Comte in England. His presence in the journal and respectful mention of Comte by both Lewes and Morley encouraged many to consider the Fortnightly a Comtean organ. This seems an excessive overstatement, given the variety of liberal voices printed in the journal, but Comte’s influence on British liberalism and on this variety of liberalism in particular cannot be disputed.

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that is characteristic throughout the first two decades of the Fortnightly’s run. As many writers in the journal argued implicitly and explicitly, a society with a state church maintains a systematic orthodoxy that is operative well beyond the confines of that country’s religious practices, which becomes, in fact, a habit of thought. The deceit inherent in the use of the anonymous “we” becomes almost symptomatic of the larger deception of organized religion and even the state that authorizes its primacy, both of which by the mid-nineteenth century were seen to animate their god, wizardlike, to assuage an otherwise restive audience. While respecting the virtuous intent of the Tractarians, for instance, John Cotter Morison writes in the Fortnightly of that religious movement, “Ritualism is a gorgeous palace, built upon a foundation which is crumbling beneath it every day—a castle in the air, which will vanish like a morning cloud. An iceberg floating in tropical seas is not more certain of dissolving than is Anglo-Catholicism among the critical solvents of the nineteenth century.”36 For a journal so invested in careful categorizing and logical propositions, the Fortnightly freely collapsed religious conviction into routinized cognition and narrowed the emotional, bodily, social, and traditional domains of belief into a compact realm of opinion formation. To many readers of the journal in the 1860s and 1870s, the Fortnightly’s primary mission seemed to be a rigorous, unstintingly rational engagement with the Anglican establishment, Christianity, and revealed religion in general. The journal regularly published articles aggressively addressing all three categories of religious commitment.37 And much of the periodical’s self-presentation cast its intellectual mission in terms of a liberating demystification of “superstition.” All this is true. However, like most people who were then finding themselves detaching from religion and its 36. Morison, “Significance of Ritualism,” 75–76. 37. For a useful overview of the Fortnightly’s religious contents and arguments, see Everett, Party of Humanity. My own survey of the first twenty issues of the Fortnightly indicates that what counted as a “diversity” is mostly a commitment to the scholarly coverage of diverse religions— Anglican, Irish Presbyterian, Catholic, Muslim, Spiritualist, ritualist. These scholarly precepts involve the objective, nonsectarian, and rationalist values of liberalism, which also mostly described the overlapping values—and often practitioners—of the “new criticism” of the Bible, instances of which are also numerous in the early issues of the Fortnightly in articles that addressed not just the Bible itself but other central tenets of Christianity. Some instances of the former: “Maori Mahommedanism” in volume 2, “The Irish Presbyterians” in volume 3, and “The Church of England as a Religious Body” in volume 6. Instances of the latter: “The Fourth Commandment” in volume 3, by Anthony Trollope, which queries that commandment’s modern pertinence; a review of “Strauss’s New Life of Christ” in volume 4; and a critical commentary on miracles’ modern acceptance by John Tyndall, “Miracles and Special Providences,” in volume 7.

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cultural institutions, who were therefore treating it as an object of critical regard, the editors and writers for the Fortnightly found it difficult to sustain a clear division between religion and the state—of mind. So many of the values and practices of cognition that the Fortnightly wished to display clearly derived from early-nineteenth-century Evangelicalism, a movement that directly touched many of its writers and from which no one could escape unaffected, as Noel Annan, T. W. Heyck, and Christopher Harvie have noted in various ways. Heyck succinctly notes that “Evangelicalism dramatically heightened the intensity of the individual conscience and of the drive for personal morality.”38 The emphasis in the journal on the individual opinion, the primacy of introspection, and most especially the moral value infusing them both almost certainly owe much to this specifically religious context. It is this genealogy that probably accounts for Morley’s acknowledgment that “character is doubtless of far more importance than mere intellectual opinion” (OC, 102). As interesting a phrase as it is, “mere intellectual opinion” is indeed an insufficient description of the journal’s philosophical position, in part because it does not adequately describe the details of opinion formation that are so crucial to an understanding of the Fortnightly’s ethic, which presumes that character must be the source of opinion. Even so, it is vital to retain the centrality of intellect in the operation of moral conviction, to show how opinion in the modernizing public sphere of the nineteenth century was somehow to be deeply devised by individual cogitation—its practices of induction, self-reflection, and abstraction. Despite, then, what seems to be a generalized and at times even careless condescension toward religion, the Fortnightly could not abandon belief as thoroughly as it did conventional systems of belief. Morley, for instance, when he writes of a “genuine lover of truth,” describes him as “inspired by the divine passion for seeing things as they are” (OC, 226). Reading passages such as these, it would be inaccurate to conclude, however, that the Fortnightly merely substituted the individual mind for the omniscient godhead and, therefore, simply perpetuated a High Enlightenment apotheosis of reason. Nor is it sufficient to suggest a sort of substitution of psychological cosmologies, as Harvie provocatively does, when he avers convincingly that “the political commonwealth had to occupy in their minds the place that salvation had occupied in their fathers’ and grandfathers.’”39 Rather, I would suggest, the journal’s recourse to a secularized religious sentiment 38. Heyck, Transformation of Intellectual Life, 83. 39. Harvie, Lights of Liberalism, 142.

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centered most forcefully on its attraction to religion’s ethic of belief or, more accurately, a Protestant ethic of belief. For example, in his Fortnightly essay, “Liberals, Conservatives, and the Church,” Viscount Amberley lauds Nonconformists not for the content of their faith but for the form which their adherence to doctrine takes. Unlike Anglicans, Amberley argues, Nonconformists are self-sufficient; they need no “extraneous aid” to sustain their faith.40 Without financial or sacerdotal intermediaries, they have an unmediated relation to their religious belief. The liberal individualism of the Fortnightly emulates this unimpeded relationship between an individual and his principles, but notably substitutes opinion for belief, opinion being a product of cognition that is necessarily more public, more circulated, and therefore more problematically distanced from the individual than are his religious beliefs, at least as liberalism understands religious belief. Rather than being true to one’s god or true to one’s class, a liberal individual must be true to his opinions, of especial importance in the free marketplace of ideas that the Victorian public sphere had become. This ethic of devotion to opinion, rather than religious belief, and its accompanying challenges will become most apparent in my subsequent discussion of the Fortnightly’s use of the signature. Although the journal was in the business of publishing opinion in the public sphere, it was always most invested in the process of opinion formation, which was, in fact, never intended to take place in its pages. As I have suggested in a previous chapter, even in On Liberty, one can exaggerate in liberalism the extent to which public debate per se is seen to be constitutive or formative of opinion. In the Fortnightly, too, the eclectic mix of opinion only stages a public debate for sober Philip; Anglican and atheist do not form or change their opinions in his midst. Lewes described his primary editorial criterion as “decided opinion.” Likewise, the periodical does not generally publish articles as if engaged in direct hand-to-hand combat in the public sphere, especially once Morley becomes editor. No brawling. There is little response/counterresponse over the course of several issues; even the rare placement of oppositional views in a single issue or contiguous issues lacked the sort of debating rhetoric one might expect and which was evident in other journals. If “debate” is consistently displayed at all under Morley’s editorial direction, it is displayed as rhetorical devil’s advocacy, what Basil Willey has called the “ventriloquial method,” a good-faith summary of another’s ideas that nevertheless contains within it or is framed by an oblique 40. Amberley, “Liberals, Conservatives, and Church,” 168.

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critique.41 A fair accounting of the opposing view is what counts as the “proper form” for a disinterested frame of mind whose ultimate aim, however, is the articulation of its individual opinion. Temperately imbibing these varied but already formed opinions before the fire at home, sober Philip thinks through the diverse viewpoints, ventriloquizes them, that is, mentally voices them, before devising his own.42 Perhaps a subtle distinction, sober Philip is not unthinkingly reciting the views of others, as do those abject journalists and passive newspaper readers who merely mouth the words of demigods in Morley’s description cited earlier. Rather, Willey’s description precisely grasps the critical spirit that haunts the locution of a contrary opinion in this sort of liberal discourse. A governing mind as well as a dominant voice enunciate the “other’s” opinions. So pervasive is this Millian style in the Fortnightly and in the other writings of Morley, Stephen, Bagehot, and Trollope that it is arguably the expository style of the midcentury liberal intelligentsia. Here is just one example of ventriloquism, penned by Viscount Amberley in his essay, “The Church of England as a Religious Body.” Arguing in the first-person singular (“I endeavored to show”) against the state church’s attempts to guarantee by legal means a uniform adherence to the Anglican creed among its clergy, Amberley proceeds to voice the church’s argument, only to conclude with his own reasonably elaborated libertarian view: Reasoning like that by which these conclusions were sought to be established is commonly met by an argument which may be thus briefly stated. “The clergy,” it is contended, “are paid and supported by the laity for the express purpose of teaching certain doctrines; it is therefore necessary to require at their hands the strict performance of that undertaking. We cannot permit them to preach any vagaries that may happen to have caught their fancy; for this would be a plain violation of the terms of the contract. If we on our part supply them with the means of subsistence, it is essential that they on their part should supply us with such doctrines only as we approve.” This

41. Willey, More Nineteenth Century Studies, 263. 42. The only evidence that seems to run counter to my contention comes from the elegiac essay written by Arthur Waugh on the occasion of the periodical’s demise in 1929: “Among the judicious the quality and vigour of the new magazine were immediately recognised; it was soon lying on every clubroom table, and its contents were discussed and combated, wherever politicians and scientists were congregated” (“Biography of Periodical,” 515). I will simply point out that Waugh writes long after the fact, in a celebratory mode, and even so, tellingly emphasizes that the Fortnightly was “soon lying on every clubroom table.” Suffice it to say, this is a potentially less-influential position than even that “unread periodical” in Mr. Harding’s lap.

Signature Liberalism at the Fortnightly Review / 149 language is appropriate to the members of a dissenting sect, but not to those of a National Church. It is certainly true that as things at present stand, the clergyman is bound by his contract with the State to teach nothing contrary to certain doctrines. But there is no necessary connection between the fact of paying the clergy and requiring them to adhere to a particular creed.43

Citing the opposing position, as if in the voice of its adherents, and—in this instance—further differentiated, indeed seemingly liberated, from the author by quotation marks, there is both a visual and an aural display of objectivity, of fair play. The local effect of this passage is perhaps akin to the third-person narrator’s role in fiction but none the less remains embedded in the first-person I that had begun the article. Amberley’s prose thus well demonstrates the way in which the Fortnightly is able to construct and foreground the disinterested individual opinion as it considers all sides of a question. In this particular passage, which I at first selected only at random, the topic of religious liberty of opinion is itself enacted through the freethinking made formally manifest on the page. Moreover, in dramatically disarticulating the first-person singular from the first-person plural (“We cannot permit,” “We on our part”), the liberal individual takes the stage of public opinion, quite literally, on his own terms, no dummy is he. The “ventriloquial method” is also at times expressed in the Fortnightly through a free and indirect discourse, perhaps giving the impression that the article’s author has so purposively comprehended his opponent’s position as to be able to think it himself. This is like the omniscient narrator at work in The Warden. In J. Godkin’s piece on Irish land reform, to cite a chance example taken from the first volume of the Fortnightly, he begins by citing an argument in a familiar Fortnightly fashion that emphasizes the groupthink of conventional public opinion. Using the third-person plural, Godkin writes, “they proceed upon the theory that the owner of land in Ireland is in the position of the owner of any other property.” When he finishes his account of this view, he simply voices the position as if it were his own, leaving behind a more reportorial tone (“they proceed upon the theory”) and putting in its place a tone of rhetorical individuality—and decisiveness: “It is simply a case of contract between man and man,–nothing more.”44 In so doing, Godkin demonstrates the brilliant adequacy of Willey’s coinage, the “ventriloquial method.” In writing about Morley and his liberal associates, Willey coins the phrase out of admiration. Like his subjects, 43. Amberley, “Church of England as Religious Body, Part II,” 197. 44. Godkin, “Irish Land Question,” 385.

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he recognizes the thrust of their historical intervention, the “mindfulness” evinced in their measured attention to opposing opinion in a journalistic marketplace usually engaged in ad hominem attack. However, Willey perhaps misses the full irony at play in their performative rhetoric, which is equally implanted in his term. Like a ventriloquist, the writers for the Fortnightly could be accused of treating “the other” as a dummy. In the finale of Godkin’s performance of devil’s advocacy, the voice who asserts “nothing more” could be construed in a less-Millian spirit. No longer an intelligent opinion worthy of mindfulness, not even a reasonable eccentric, the voice is now one of a blunt reductionist, completely submerging himself in sectarian thought—Mill’s “encrustation of creed.” In this less-generous interpretation, the opponent is incapable of forming an individual opinion even if a proper liberal mouths it for him. Evident in this oscillating dynamic is the uncertain line between a pedagogical and a patronizing style, and the mere degrees between a persuasive use of devil’s advocacy and a coercive pastiche. Of course, in general terms, these mechanisms of argumentation are not exclusively liberal expository techniques. I am simply pointing to both their efficacy and their difficulty for liberalism. The rhetorical interplay between the first-person plural and singular is integral to liberal individualism as it formalizes the diversity of public opinion into the private order of thought, but it also captures, as Wendy Brown has argued, the barely veiled impatience, or even disgust, that is often implicit in the liberal conception of tolerance.45 The extraction of the first-person singular from the first-person plural enacted in the Fortnightly is a representative instance of a general trend toward relocating the agential space of the political from the public sphere to the private, from collectivities to individuals. Jacques Rancière, in defining “the political” as those fundamental discussions that negotiate the necessary collocations of “we,” seems to me to suggest that the world envisioned in the pages of the Fortnightly is a world without politics in any meaningfully progressive sense of the term because that particular discussion is over. For Victorian liberals, a fundamental and seemingly mandatory form for discussion—the first-person singular—renders the particular contents under discussion of secondary and therefore of more limited interest.46

45. See Brown, Regulating Aversion, 149–76. 46. Rancière also describes the process in political discourse when individuals posit a thirdperson plural as a crucial stage of political identification, whereby the first-person singular or plural now concedes the presence of an interlocutor but also thereby identifies himself or themselves as part of a community (Disagreement, 47–48). I seek to question mid-Victorian

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If Mill’s systematic approach exerted an influence on the presentation of opinion in any given article, such that authors were uniformly engaged in the “ventriloquial method” and were careful to define their terms and follow, at least loosely, a propositional logic in their exposition, his influence was even more operative in the journal’s editorial presumptions concerning the practices expected of its writers and readers, at the moment when opinion was first formulated through an idea in the author’s or the reader’s mind. In the case of the reader instantiating the anonymous “we”—whose opinions are said to emerge from an ideology always already there and thus by definition already circulated, “in the air,” intrinsically public—he, for instance, simply consumes what he reads as he sips his brandy at the very club whose condition of membership presupposes the same points of view. By contrast, the Fortnightly’s first-person singular was presumed to voice opinions that came from the ideas carefully and systematically thought out in an individual’s brain, a private space more highly privileged in midcentury liberalism than any club, even than any private drawing room, good manners notwithstanding. Morley spoke often of bringing the teacher out of the tub and thus of bringing intellectual discussion “from the library down to the parlour, and from the serious student down to the first man in the street,” but in emphasizing the journal’s genuine commitment to a broader-based pedagogical engagement (manifest in its regular calls for universal education) and timely political intervention, scholars have overlooked the vital temporal progression in this process.47 Before public opinion, there is individual opinion, and before individual opinion there are individual ideas: liberal ideas take time. In the associationist logic that Mill elaborates, ideas, otherwise known as “the secondary mental states,” are the substantive links of thought. Spurred by impressions (“the primary mental states”) or other ideas, they follow “Laws of Association” and “Laws of Ideas” that are uniform among human beings, such that Mill can feel empowered in A System of Logic to speculate on the science of human nature.48 At the same time, ideas are themselves always contingent on experience—the impressions of any given person—and thus the very stuff of substantive individuation.49 In this brief

liberalism’s commitment to a third-person plural and to emphasize its refusal to see its own individualist commitments as emerging from a community of interests. 47. Everett, Party of Humanity, 328–29. 48. Mill, System of Logic, 532. 49. “It is certain that our mental states, and our mental capacities and susceptibilities, are modified, either for a time or permanently, by everything which happens to us in life.” Ibid., 539.

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account of Mill’s associationist logic, I simply hope to emphasize how “the idea” is both the foundation of a common (but not vulgar) human nature and the form through which individuals distinguish themselves. As one of the periodical’s probable influences, Mill’s A System of Logic helps highlight the dual function of the Fortnightly. In its eclecticism the journal acknowledges diversity of thought but insistently conceptualizes diversity of thought not in terms of movements or sects but in terms of the individual mind: “We shall ask each writer to express his own views and sentiments” (“Prospectus,” 331). Or, more pointedly, in a later notice of its inaugural edition, “The object of THE FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW is to become the organ of the unbiased expression of many and various minds.”50 Mill’s guiding assumption that human minds heed incontrovertible rules of association also helps the Fortnightly imagine that its modeling of liberal cognition has a pedagogical value that far exceeds, perhaps even displaces, the content of the opinions it publishes. Here is the way Morley describes the “exchange” of opinion between reader and writer: “Hence the truly important object with every one who holds opinions which he deems it of the highest moment that others should accept, must obviously be to reach people’s general ways of thinking; to stir their love of truth; to penetrate them with a sense of the difference in the quality of evidence; to make then willing to listen to criticism and new opinions, and perhaps above all to teach them to take ungrudging daily trouble to clear up in their minds the exact sense of the terms they use.”51 This is a profoundly formalist description of what I want to call liberal cognition, in which deliberative standards that require time—“general ways of thinking,” “the quality of evidence,” and “the exact sense of the terms”—take a more important place than the content of the actual opinions that are otherwise considered of such urgent moment. One can almost imagine the odd texture of this exchange, wherein the author’s passionate belief in church disestablishment is taken in by the reader as a kind of usable pattern of self-reflexive cognition, with which he will form his own opinion. In this context, Andrew Miller’s work on the Victorian preoccupation with perfectionism is extremely compelling. He notes the importance throughout Victorian society of what might be called pedagogical models of cognition, ranging from such intimate associates as teachers to more public figures, such as Glad-

50. “Notice,” 492. 51. OC, 69. If liberalism’s ethics aim for a good life, the “ungrudging daily trouble” that for Morley constitutes its daily practices indicates at the very least the Protestant asceticism that so often feeds its ethos.

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stone the orator.52 The performance of opinions in the pages of the Fortnightly, functioning specifically as a modeling mechanism, was as important to—or more important than—its mission than were the conclusions arrived at in those opinions. For this reason, certainly, I have continually emphasized how it seems a writer for the Fortnightly is as much a reader of the journal, and as reader always potentially a writer. It is of course true that amid Morley’s phrasing there is, as if precipitated from Morley’s particular position on the state church, a residue of passion now clinging instead to a highly abstract concept—“the love of truth.” In diverting one’s emotional intensity from the specific political position one takes, the writer naturally manifests his disinterested “critical spirit,” but he also inevitably reveals the deflection of purpose that structures liberal ambivalence in the pragmatic realm of politics. I’ll return to this problematic in a later section of the chapter. In his study of Victorian England, Heyck argues that the “idea of the intellectual” first emerged during this period. I think it perhaps more accurate to revise slightly this proposition. As I would like to suggest, with the Fortnightly as evidence, this might well have been the period when “the idea” was linked to the individual in such a way (private, systematic, yet affective) as to imagine, or at least prefigure, a subject category called “the intellectual”—a being defined by his ideas—which itself would ultimately become concentrated into specialized professions late in the century. Melding, for this brief moment in the 1860s and 1870s, the generalist propensities of the amateur with the specialist knowledges of the expert, the liberal individual was, it was hoped, a “best self,” most capable of distancing himself from if not entirely escaping historical determinations.53 At the middle of the nineteenth century, the seeming difference only in degree between the liberal subject and the emergent intellectual demonstrates in one direction the rigorous discipline required by liberalism, the assumption that citizens, for instance, ought to become systematic thinkers. In the other direction, the proximity between the intellectual and the liberal subject bespeaks the optimism that was often explicit in liberalism’s investment in

52. A. Miller, “Reading Thoughts,” 88–9. 53. Note, for instance, in this passage from Hughes, writing in favor of signature, a kind of language that is just short of describing professionalism: “I believe that letters on important questions, signed by persons who are known to understand their subjects, are far more effective than leaders” (“Anonymous Journalism,” 159b). In contrast to expertise, here is the language of a more loosely mobilized public recognition. Valuing those who “understand their subjects,” Hughes evokes the well-informed gentleman, cognizant of but by no means cornering the market on his subject (157–68).

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cognition. At the same time, it expresses the strikingly austere standards— “ungrudging daily trouble,” as Morley describes it—for subject formation.

“The Gravity of an Avowed Responsibility” Reading through multiple volumes of the Fortnightly during its earliest years, it is possible to suppose that the journal’s persistent impatience with sectarianism, orthodoxy, and mere habits of thought produced a journal fully committed to abstraction, both as a mental process and as a cultural medium. From this vantage point, the failed leadership of what Morley calls “the unidea’d rich” had led the journal’s editors and authors to privilege not just ideas but ideas created through the individual’s “powers of abstract thought.”54 These powers consist of the ability to generalize from particulars (e.g., to derive a principle from a series of observable events) as well as the capacity to abstract oneself from the personal investments of any question at hand, a divestment deemed impossible for the “unidea’d rich.” Focusing solely on the logic of abstraction, the Fortnightly could thereby seem a continuation of or variation on the abstracting print tradition of republican America that Michael Warner has written about so persuasively. Dedicated to a kind of impersonality made manifest in disinterestedness, attracted to periodical discourse’s abstraction of actual social conflict into print, the Fortnightly, it might be said, does consider “print the proper medium of the public.”55 In this context, it is necessary to point out that advocates of signature, both within the pages of the Fortnightly and in other publications, were more likely to accuse their opponents of abstraction than to explicitly champion abstraction as their own. Indeed, it is the Fortnightly’s particular conception of signature that distinguishes it from both the abstract impersonality of republicanism and its characteristic mediation of publicity through print. At the moment of its inception, the signature of the Fortnightly was not intended as a symbol for a person but was a peculiar embodiment of liberal individualism in the public sphere. In the debate over signature, participants were strikingly penetrating about the relation between abstraction and print culture and equally cognizant of their distaste for its results. At the center of the signature question was the widespread recognition that the marketplace of print was trans-

54. Both of these phrases are Morley’s. The first comes from “Mr. Pater’s Essays,” 326. The second comes from “AJ,” 291. 55. Warner, Letters of Republic, 33.

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forming the dynamics of political opinion formation. A nostalgia for an undoubtedly imaginary pastoralism, when politicians stood upon the commons and conversed sympathetically with their constituents, haunts the contemporary scene of invisibility. In place of some dream where members of parliament ascertain or envision public opinion through eye-to-eye contact, periodicals and newspapers emerge from the printing press seemingly untouched by human hand, declaring their knowledge of a public’s opinion whose provenance is equally indiscernible. Recall Morley’s description of the “anonymous we” of periodical exposition: “this demi-god abstraction.” Or Hughes’s complaint about interpellated readers: “‘The public,’ and ‘public opinion,’ are mere abstractions.”56 In a setting of invisible exchange, opinion can seem an entirely automated product, as if generated by the printing press and its supply-side imperative. In this context, both writer and reader seemingly have no mental relations to opinion but simply mechanical ones, as producer and consumer. Reduced to cogs in the machinery of the marketplace, writers are alienated from opinion; it matters little whether they believe it or not. Morley implicitly concedes the author’s loss of agency when he describes another sort of periodical ventriloquism: “Writers are not deliberately dishonest who thus give the world instead of the products of independent judgment, the supposed thoughts of a shadowy abstraction” (“AJ,” 292). Even the anonymous writer for Blackwood’s complains that at midcentury “journalistic representation is of . . . abstractions” (“PL,” 184). And yet this last staunchly conservative contribution to the discourse concerning the abstraction of modern life importantly differs from those in favor of signature. The anonymous writer for Blackwood’s—if you recall, a vigorous advocate of anonymity—affiliates the dangerous abstraction of the marketplace with the methodology of cognitive abstraction. For the Blackwood’s journalist, abstractions such as “classes, interests, subjects, opinions” are menacing “things which do not exist except in thought” (“PL,” 184). Castigating the abstractions of thought, he privileges “individuals,” specifically the individuals represented by members of Parliament or, put another way, the citizens who come into representation through the franchise of the mostly unreformed Parliament (“PL,” 184). One need

56. Hughes evokes the phantom in the public sphere: “But power which a man gains from being shrouded in mystery—which he owes, not to his own character, but to the vague sort of belief that he is the representative of some great unknown which haunts the majority of readers of newspapers—is not genuine, and can benefit neither himself nor any one else” (“Anonymous Journalism,” 160a).

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only briefly remember that in 1859, the time of this article’s publication, the individuals represented in Parliament were still a tiny minority of the British population. Allying abstraction with “mere” thought, the anonymous writer therefore dispenses with the kind of thought that is capable of conceiving of “classes” and that is therefore capable of thinking franchise reform. Although it might be unfair to assert that this anonymous writer disdains thought, he certainly favors an individuality that is not formulated through or from thought. For him, individuals exist prior to thought, independent of thought, in the concrete real that does no thinking. As with most critics of signature, the Blackwood’s writer can only imagine one result of its widespread use: the dilution of public opinion into personality. The writer who signs his name is of course nothing like the “anonymous we,” nor is he even the concrete individual of a prereform England, whose solidity seemed materialized in his ownership of land and its permanence through time. Rather than thinking not at all or thinking disinterestedly, the author is too well known, both to himself and to others. He is the I otherwise called a “personality” by the anonymous Dublin Magazine writer who opined, “When contributors drag their names with them into the magazines, it is difficult to keep out personalities.”57 Personalities are besotted, saturated with their mere selves, with their own narrow interests or temperamental crotches. With this emphasis, opponents of signature bemoan the trends of writerly style: “There is as much mannerism in our excessive personality as in the frigid impersonality of a former age.”58 Perhaps directly satirizing, even as he misunderstands, the language of the Fortnightly prospectus, one debater in the Spectator laments the motivations of a writer who appends his signature: “It becomes the writer’s pride to be individual, to be himself alone, to write as nearly as possible as he talks, to be, as he thinks, ‘strong and logical,’ that is, very often unpractical and violent.”59 Given the pervasiveness of this argument at midcentury, which equates the use of signature with self-promotion in the marketplace, it has been too easy for modern commentators—and apparently some contemporary observers—to do the same and, furthermore, to fold the Fortnightly into a metanarrative concerning the rise of the star system in journalism.60 Al-

57. [Brady], “Anon, Anon, Sir!” 287a. 58. Ibid., 289a. 59. “Mr. Congreve on the Anonymous,” 858a. 60. Richard Salmon usefully discusses the link between market practices of abstraction and the rise of “personality” in journalism, identifying two types of personality—the personalizing of subjects, that is, the personality of the author, and the personalizing of objects, that is, a journalistic emphasis on reporting personalities in the news (“Simulacrum of Power,” 28–29).

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though it appears inarguable that the use of signature participated in a general trend toward the marketing of journals and newspapers through the use of popular personalities, it is simply wrong to understand the Fortnightly signature in this way. Indeed, by the 1880s, some prominent liberals associated with the Fortnightly appeared to be backing away from the use of signature. Just as the star system seems to have taken hold, Trollope edited a journal that did not require signatures, and Morley admitted to an unrealized idealism in this editorial policy.61 Clearly, the liberal journal had not sought stars or personalities—at least not as the term was understood at the time. Opponents of signature, like the anonymous writer in the Spectator, may have equated individuality with personality, but liberal proponents of signature equate individuality with a sort of impersonality. Unlike the anonymous writer for Blackwood’s, the liberalism articulated in the Fortnightly strongly distinguishes between the passive evacuation of individuals from the “modern” public sphere and the agential abstraction of rational cognition. In fact, the liberalism of the Fortnightly aims neither to denounce abstraction in general nor to replace it with traditional concretions of identity. Rather, it yokes abstraction with the individual to, in effect, subject public abstraction to private abstraction. The delicacy of this project of abstract individualism ought now to be apparent. To pinpoint with precision the texture of liberal impersonality, it is useful to compare it to the emergent “personality” of the new journalism, which would reach its epitome in the figure of someone like W. T. Stead, a journalist whose writing style was highly idiosyncratic, full of affect and— his critics would say—affectation. At the height of his popularity, newspaper readers did not mistake his prose for any other. Perhaps more important, there seemed to many of these readers to be a direct correlation between Stead’s own public exposure and the sort of journalistic exposé in which he made his reputation, such as the series “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” In these pieces, written in 1885, he made what proved to be a much-overstated case for the existence of white slavery in the prostitution market, never failing, his critics fumed, to dwell on the sordidness of private details. The very premise of the series, that young “maidens” were snatched from the streets against their will and bound into prostitution, itself suggested to some readers the degradation of publicity that Stead

Citing Morley and Hughes to support his argument, Salmon, however, does not distinguish between these two subtle forms of personalization and the impersonality of the liberal signature, the latter of which is the subject of this chapter. 61. Morley, “Valedictory,” 513.

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promoted rather than prohibited. Writing much earlier, in the 1850s, the Blackwood’s Magazine writer cannily foresees this trend. Remarking on the growth of the periodical press and the potential for widespread use of signature, he warned of a revolutionary degradation of the good, as value and attention shifted from the private realm to the public: It means universal publicity; it means a publicity that, if unchecked, will in time regard nothing sacred, nothing private; it means the glare of day without an inch of shadow; it means a compulsory show without the possibility of retirement; it means a desolating publicity, a blasting publicity. . . . We now add that publicity is not everything in life; that the rights of the private individual are to be respected as much as those of the public; that in home there is something sacred, and in retirement there is something inexpressibly sweet; that we are not willing to surrender to the vulgar gaze all our inmost thoughts and all our hidden life. (“PL,” 185)

In conflating publicity with the public, this writer reveals a more typically conservative distaste for the general populace (“vulgar gaze”) than is common among liberals; however, he taps into a nonsectarian discourse about the value of a private life, its guarantee of shelter (in contrast to “the glare of day” and “a blasting publicity”) and its promotion of delicacy (implicit in the quaint phrase “inexpressibly sweet”). Liberals at midcentury uniformly share with him this attitude toward publicity. In his depiction of Tom Towers, Trollope seems to have anticipated what this writer thinks of editors (in the anonymous writer’s case, American editors), who, he claims, crow to themselves, “I am but an engine of publicity; my private character is swallowed up in my editorial function” (“PL,” 186). Note here how the author for Blackwood’s mobilizes the first-person singular to dramatize the advent of publicity, as if to indicate the public sphere’s inevitable preference for journalistic personalities. Although it might seem illogical on the face of it to link the consolidation of personality with the engulfment of the self (“swallowed up in my editorial function”), it made sense to contemporaries. The widespread dispersal of the I was seen to create not a person, by no means an individual with a “private character,” but nonetheless a singular persona dispersed at large, alienated from a private self but in its alienation supremely profitable. Recall the richly, even decadently, furnished rooms of the editor for the Jupiter in The Warden. Deeply concerned by what might be called the abstract personality of newer journalism, equally disturbed by the abstract divinity of the older journalism, the cofounders of the Fortnightly may well have savored, as did

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Septimus Harding, the inexpressible sweetness of retirement and the sacredness of home—what modern critics have recognized was in the Victorian period a nondenominational cult of domesticity. Even so, the privacy privileged by the Fortnightly was not the privacy of the home, and if it was the privacy of retirement, it was a retirement spent in thought, a retirement located not in the sweet drawing room occupied by ladies but in the confines of the mind, occupied by ideas. This sort of impersonality equally informs the biographies that became the trademark literary output of John Morley. When the Gladstone family agreed to allow John Morley to write the authorized biography of Gladstone, they urged him to avoid religious themes out of concern that his own agnosticism would inform his interpretation of Gladstone’s faith. Morley readily agreed because he regarded Gladstone’s personal faith as “domesticities.”62 To think independently, the liberal individual felt it essential to preserve this mental domain from all domestic and public incursions, but as a liberal, the individual must then transpose those ideas into opinions: “Our first question is, have you any decided opinions . . . ?”63 And, finally, he must confer those opinions to the public, hence the Fortnightly’s stated goal: “the purpose will be that of aiding Progress in all directions” (“Prospectus,” 362). Put simply, the liberal individual’s sense of his obligation to the public was the publication of individual opinion in the name of progress, nothing more, but given the complications of the marketplace, also nothing less. The words printed on the page therefore do not encompass the person in his entirety—his sweet home, his mental dominion—these remain unpublicized, but the words must encompass his public individuality; indeed, they must necessarily embody that individuality, give body to, weight to what might otherwise be mistaken in mass-market journalism for the invisibility and abstraction of the first-person plural of anonymity or the first-person singular of personality. Encumbered with this object, mere print would fail miserably, for how could one distinguish between personality and individuality? It is in this context, this search for weightiness in all senses of the word, that the Fortnightly champions the use of signature: “Each contribution will have the gravity of an avowed responsibility.”64 The signature, then, indicated the presence of a weighty opinion in part because it certified the provenance of the opinion, fusing the name on the

62. Quoted in Gardiner, The Victorians, 192. See also Schreuder, “Gladstone’s Posthumous Career.” 63. Lewes, “Principle of Sincerity,” 70; Everett, Party of Humanity, 65. 64. “Notice” 492.

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page to an actual person of physical substance (not an anonymous “we”) whose impress of the hand was certainly implied in the term signature, if not in the actual printed author’s name on the page.65 In this fusion, the signature, however, does not embody the actual person in his entirety or even his personality—the private man, the white male, the Oxbridge graduate; it is the person’s singularity, as an abstract category, that now accretes to the “individual opinion.” In the signature, there also seems to be a metonymic link between the impress of the hand and a handshake, a faintly physical evocation of a gentleman’s agreement, that avowal of “responsibility” more formal, weighty, and embodied than mere rhetoric. In this regard, the signature functions as a public manifestation of liberal individuality as embodiment, extracting the character of the life of the mind without exposing the man of character. That the signature “implies” a handshake, that the handshake is “evoked” by the hand, that the hand “stands in for” the private individual—all these associations seem highly evanescent for such weighty matters. As I read the arguments in favor of signature, I cannot help but sense the philosophical and political burden placed on what really amounts to what Raymond Williams might call residualism because in fact “the signature” at the end of a Fortnightly article looks just like the machine-printed words preceding it, with no visual evocation of the singularity of handwriting. Nevertheless, although there are substantial ironies that attend this usage, the attenuation of the body that stops just short of evaporation is in some sense what liberal politics is after, not a concrete embodiment of a person but an abstract embodiment of an individual. The signature confirms the completion of the liberalizing process wherein ideas, principles, and virtues are abstracted from the mere person to individuate the subject as a mindful character, who then publishes the opinions drawn from that mind. At the same time, these abstractions as abstractions also enable the “individual” to become a nearly universal form in a liberalized society, for, at least in theory, anyone may have, ought to have, ideas and principles and opinions. The weighted body must only be implied because the liberal individ-

65. Warner makes a comparable claim about republicanism in Letters of Republic, 7. Kinnear, in his published defense of signature, demonstrates how easily the signature takes on weight when he simply collapses a speaker’s presence and voice into the “author’s name” in a passage where he compares public figures and printed figures: “Or can fair discussion of public events ask an ampler latitude than is found in Parliament or at Public meetings, where every assertion is endorsed with its author’s name? Does the freedom of the senate and the platform, of the pulpit and the stage, not suffice for our instructors in the press?” (“Anonymous Journalism,” 329).

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ual is ideally constituted not by a person’s body but by a person’s capacity to think abstractly, to abstract himself into disinterestedness. In this regard, the Fortnightly aimed to supply the missing organ in the public sphere that the Blackwood’s Magazine writer had desired. Like each of its disinterested writers, the journal was—to borrow “Mr. Blackwood’s” words—“addressing itself indifferently to every educated man of whatever party.” In emphasizing the use of signature as a method of embodying individual opinion, the liberal journal labors against the abstraction of print insofar as print culture might radically erase or at least equalize the differences among contributors that enables particular writers or magazines to arrogantly speak “as if” for the general public. In this regard, the Fortnightly does not share a republican confidence in publicity; the signature is a wedge inserted in the cogs of rampant self-promotion. No reader, for instance, could mistake an article by Frederic Harrison, championing the cause of unions, for the voice of public opinion. Nonetheless, the journal remains indebted to the abstraction of print, which mediates between the liberal individual at home with his thoughts and the thoughtless arena of public opinion. Print is the necessary means to the liberal end: the print journal is a space where idea can become opinion, can, as it were, “matter.” Although committed to print’s larger audiences, the “educated men” of the Fortnightly—both writers and readers—nevertheless seek some solace in print’s social impersonality, which does not require the merchant’s grandson or the schoolteacher’s son to display his humble home or income or, even in some cases, his informal education, just his individual opinion. Moreover, print sufficiently depersonalizes opinion in a way that public oratory does not; it detaches opinion from the mere person and circulates it. Print journalism, then, operates as both problem and solution in the liberal public sphere: it can mediate too much, but with a proper formalism, it can mediate just enough. In defending the signature, Morley had mobilized, you recall, a fencing conceit, which suggests that a liberal journal ought to unmask its opinions; one might assume, therefore, that Morley implies that a familiar face lies beneath, awaiting recognition. But the “face” of this conceit is the printed signature, distinctive in its features (the particular order of letters) but by no means personable. Although no journal that lasts for decades can be said to have a perfectly uniform style, especially one so committed to “individual opinion,” so conscious of its effort to depart from the “anonymous we,” the Fortnightly’s adherence to an eclecticism of content did not seem to permeate as fully the form of its writing, most particularly on matters relating to religion and politics. Reading volume upon volume of the

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Fortnightly enabled me to get a better sense of the abstract individuality of its discourse. Laboring, as I have suggested already, to accentuate his difference from the “anonymous we,” from abstract “public opinion,” and all other phantom subjects, the typical political writer for the Fortnightly composes what many might experience as detached, dry, even indifferent prose. The reasonable disinterestedness of logical propositions saturates the signature individual of these articles. Employing the first-person singular, authors do not reference a private person with prejudices, or presumptions, or even predilections. This I speaks an opinion formulated and then articulated through procedures of liberal cognition that deracinate the liberal individual from the self, distinguishing it as a form and formality rather than as content. Consider the operation of the first-person singular in this article by Morley on national education, which, by the way, lets slip its own third-person plural, as if revealing inadvertently how even individualism can become the mantra of a sect: “When a distinguished philosopher lectures us for our struggle after ‘superficial intellectualization,’ it is not disrespectful, I hope, to say that he recalls one of those rich men who acquire a great fortune, and then like to stand with their backs to the fire, telling some poverty-stricken hearer how little it is that money can do for a man, and what supreme vanity is the laying up of much goods.”66 Not only is a staged debate evoked, the “ventriloquial method” mobilized, and an appropriate measure of graciousness espoused in this passage, thereby formalizing yet again the liberal terms of argumentative engagement, but the distinguished philosopher is given not just a particularized tone of voice but a body and a homey hearth. Even the “poverty-stricken hearer”— utterly without a voice—is conjured as a face-to-face interlocutor, whose hunger confirms his bodiliness. Meanwhile, the I stands aside, stands as an aside, functioning entirely as a rhetorical formality, (dis)located between commas, evaluating a dysfunctional scene of sympathetic exchange as disinterested spectator but without the benevolent fellow feeling associated with the spectating third person in Smith’s or Hume’s moral philosophy. Despite his proximity to the impoverished thinker in his midst, the philosopher does not feel the body in pain before him; indeed, even his own body seems insensible to “the fire at his back.” Absenting himself from this failed exchange, indeed not substantializing sufficiently to operate as a body in a scene, Morley’s abstracted voice can arbitrate between the interests of rich and poor intellects precisely because he is disinterested. 66. Morley, “Struggle for National Education, Part III,” 425.

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My description of a Fortnightly style is as yet incomplete, for I have only explained the abstractness of abstract individuality and have not sufficiently accounted for individuality per se. The editors and readers of the journal detected individuality in the content of particular opinions, “decided opinion,” to use Lewes’s words: Harrison’s support of unions, Morley’s persistent calls for universal state education, Viscount Amberley’s religious skepticism. Nonetheless, especially as the Fortnightly became increasingly uniform in the espousal of what most observers would recognize as liberal policies—church disestablishment, universal education, Irish land reform, to name a few—individuality, indeed the journal’s individuality, lay as much with its decisiveness as it did with its opinions. A writer for the Fortnightly does not simply have an opinion, he decisively has an opinion, hence one might more easily imagine the justice of the Spectator’s criticism of a signatory’s tone: “‘strong and logical,’ that is, very often unpractical and violent.” And yet the periodical did not simply encourage mere decisiveness, as this criticism implies. At the least, the criticism overlooks the attitude of mindfulness toward other opinions that was so fundamental to the Fortnightly style. Moreover, in the context of the Victorian public sphere, this crucial relation forged between “decided opinion” and the signature was an effort to delaminate the mind from the opinion, even as the opinion becomes print and is circulated throughout the land. To use a Millian formula to which the journal is highly sympathetic, “decided opinion” comes not from the gut or from habit; it comes from a cultivated mind thinking reflexively, which then decides in the context of a choice. These writers not only think but know what they think, or put more completely, they not only think, they also know what they think and think what they know. Their opinions are their own. Here again is the formal emphasis on the individual’s uninterrupted, intimate relation to his opinion. Perhaps surprisingly, and despite all its obvious productive functions as a distancing mechanism, some of which I’ve just discussed, the print signature was also an instrument of intimate contact. For a moment, rather than focusing on the print signature as middle management, that which, for better and for worse, gets between the producer and the consumer, I want to concentrate on the print signature as a medium, that which almost magically brings the private in touch with the public. In this instance, the print signature brings to the public not just the products of a private writer’s abstract cognition nor simply the weight of his ethical character but also his feeling, his sincerity: “We shall ask each writer to express his own views and sentiments with all the force of sincerity” (“Prospectus,” 362).

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“The Force of Sincerity” Sincerity as a concept is absolutely crucial to midcentury liberalism and the Fortnightly in particular. However, “sincerity” as a conceptual category has long been debased, denigrated, deplored, even as it continues its unbroken run as a dominant criterion of evaluation in the public sphere, for instance, as a key determinant in democratic voters’ estimation of their candidates. As I will discuss more fully in chapter 6 on Gladstone, sincerity emerged as a popular political value alongside the consolidation of liberalism, especially plebeian liberalism in the 1870s and 1880s. And, as Patricia Ball ably outlines in her concise literary history of the term, sincerity was also a core value in aesthetic judgments by the mid-nineteenth century, as evidenced in Lewes’s own composition in the Fortnightly, an essay “The Principle of Sincerity,” one of a series entitled “The Principles of Success in Literature.” Ball herself provides a thoughtful if overly condemning version of the general dissatisfaction with sincerity that marks learned commentary of all sorts in the twentieth century. Ball argues that romantic poets harbored a meticulous “psychological sense” of sincerity that had to do with their knowing recognition that “Poetry emerges from some intense inner experience which cannot be manufactured or simulated and is the unique property of the individual.” By the mid-nineteenth century, however, writers as different from one another as Carlyle, Lewes, and Arnold “adulterate” this precise aesthetic formulation into what Ball calls “a confused emotionalmoral test for literature imposed without qualification.”67 Yet again, the sons of the Victorian period fail their complex romantic forefathers by reducing depth psychology to sloppy sentimentality and moral earnestness. And there seems to me evidence for this argument throughout the nineteenth century, both in literary and nonliterary discourse, where the exaltation of sincerity causes truthfulness to be conflated with the truth. In these instances the formal emphasis on one’s moral relation to a belief becomes a measure of that belief’s truth value. One sees in the Fortnightly, for example, Viscount Amberley suggesting that religious truth is not about a search for “true religion”—for how could we mere mortals know—but, rather, the extent to which a people “sincerely” adhere to their belief.68 Likewise, emphasizing one’s feelings in relation to one’s views rather than their adequacy as views, Lewes writes in “The Principle of Sincerity, “Even an error 67. Ball, “Sincerity,” 2. 68. Amberley, “Liberals, Conservatives, and Church,” 167.

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if believed in will have greater force than an insincere truth.”69 I am therefore not countering Ball’s interpretation, not exactly; instead, I am suggesting that romantic sincerity is not always that much different from some of its Victorian variants, especially the liberal version. What Ball describes as an aesthetic value did indeed spread beyond the artist’s ken, becoming one of the literary critic’s tools, as well as defining a type of veracity in the liberal realm of politics. What remains the same is the insistent reflexivity involved in the “intense inner experience” so that one knows what one knows and knows it like no one else. As Lewes describes it, “Speak for yourself and from yourself, or be silent.”70 Those who sign their names indicate, according to Morley, “that they mean exactly what they profess to mean” (“AJ,” 288). Facing a market characterized not only by anonymous authorship but also by a pronounced increase in mass-marketed personalities, the Victorian adherents of sincerity may have intensified their investment in this authenticating emotion, perhaps even democratized it, but for liberal proponents of sincerity it still very much retained its exactitude as a mental and (therefore by necessity) psychological state of mind, originating in that mind’s deeply interior, privately possessed recesses. For the Fortnightly throughout its first decades, especially once Morley became its editor, sincerity was not a vulgarization of romanticism, the packaging for common consumption of what used to be an exclusively artistic state of mind. Sincerity operated, instead, as an affective and effective rhetoric of individuation but—and this is its liberal paradox—in constitutive relation to disinterestedness. To revise Lewes’s maxim, “speak for yourself and from yourself but not only for your own interest.” To realize what seems a virtually impossible marriage between sincerity and disinterest, the Fortnightly and liberalism more generally stipulated rather narrowly what sorts of thoughts could be modified by sincerity, steering clear of personalized or domesticated sentiment. Although a man might sincerely cherish his children or sincerely denounce his neighbor’s church, although an Englishman might sincerely abhor an Indian wife’s blind adherence to suttee or sincerely adore a Scottish philosopher, a liberal individual must divest himself of these particulars and link his sincerity to more abstract passions: a love of principle, a love of truth, a love of nation, the love for an idea, the love of disinterestedness itself. In what I take to be a “signature” essay in the Fortnightly, “What Is Progress, and Are We Progressing?” one of the few 69. Lewes, “Principle of Sincerity,” 705b. 70. Ibid., 700.

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women writers for the journal, Francis Power Cobbe, accepts as evidence for progress “instances of sympathy with noble causes in distant lands.”71 This sort of disinterestedness, capable of detaching its sympathy from the self and its familiars, bravely traveling to “distant lands” and there attaching anew to the abstract virtue of a “noble cause,” is exemplary of the journal’s own “highmindedness” and is also a component of Gladstone’s celebrity in the next decades.72 Even in those essays written by Walter Pater, such as “Notes on Leonardo da Vinci,” that were published in the Fortnightly, and which are otherwise so thoroughly marked by their stylistic distinctiveness, there is implicit throughout what might be called an analogue to the journal’s sincere disinterestedness. Writing “Winckelmann” for the Fortnightly Review, Pater celebrated what he called a “passionate coldness,” a deeply felt intensification of Arnoldian detachment, which perhaps only a liberal could love and that only a thoroughgoing liberal, such as Morley, could understand as something other than mere personal eccentricity and carnal pedagogy. Lewes had hired Robert Buchanan as a critic for the journal, he of the “fleshly school of poetry,” but Morley found something to appreciate in Pater’s philosophy. For midcentury liberalism, as for Wordsworth, sincerity emerges from the deep recesses of the abstract individual’s mind and becomes imprinted on the body’s own expressive components: posture, gesture, voice, glance. Despite their scenic and generic suggestiveness, these caverns are not supposed to summon gothic spirits in the liberal imaginary: there is always a seamless fit between knowledge and the knowing subject that seals over crevasses and cracks in the mental landscape. Sincerity, decisiveness, earnestness, knowing what one knows, all figure this state of mind, whose deepest corners boast the bright light of self-awareness. By contrast, the anonymous provokes a veritable theater of the gothic. Anonymous writers, according to Morley, are not in possession of their thoughts but are, rather, possessed, for “the paper generates a spirit of its own, which enters into you when you take up your pen to write for it” (“AJ,” 291). Meanwhile, readers of the anonymous writer are also tormented; to use Hughes’s words, they conjure “some great unknown which haunts” them.73

71. Cobbe, “What Is Progress,” 425. 72. One might also say that this sort of sincere sympathy, which shifts the object of one’s affection from the proximate to the distant, also shifts sympathy from subjects to abstractions—”noble causes.” In the phrase noble causes we can get some sense of the insensibility of mid-Victorian liberalism. For more on the commitment to the “cause” in mid-Victorian liberalism, see chapter 6. 73. Hughes, “Anonymous Journalism,” 160a.

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For liberals in favor of signature, the printed name exorcizes these demons, but in so asserting its salutary effect, neither Hughes nor Morley concedes the distinction between mental self-possession and possession in the marketplace. The unmediated contact between the subject and the idea is fostered by practices of reflexive cognition, but once the idea becomes published opinion, sincerity, decisiveness, and knowing what one knows can only be registered in print, alienated from its source, mere rhetoric. From this perspective, the medium of print, which must have contact with these depths, takes on a ghostly connotation. Professions of sincerity and the impression of a signature become alienated, alien, and can themselves seem spectral, not unlike the personalities afloat in other periodicals. Indeed, by definition, the passionate disinterestedness of liberalism, what Arnold calls a “critical spirit,” functions as a specter of liberalism that necessarily detaches affect from its subject and its object, levitating, like Morley’s observer, above the rich and poor, the beautiful and the damned. The metaphorics and (im)materiality of mediumship in the discourses in and around the Fortnightly are constitutively related to liberalism’s charged commitment to formalism. On the one hand, for an example, a commitment to the psychological, social, and political benefits of the form of an opinion rather than its content can seem—as it did to many liberals, too—a sort of mechanical instrumentalism. Many liberals could not, as it were, sign on to the signature cause because of this hesitancy concerning “mere formal machinery.” And Morley himself, soon to be wavering on the efficacy of signature, was, like Arnold, always ambivalent about the form in reformism, scoffing at the hopes implicit in the second Reform Bill—“as if a change in political form should be of itself an adequate antecedent and security of instant organic reconstruction.”74 Given this ambivalence about mechanisms, and a print signature is surely machine-made if not itself a machine, there is always a “spirit” haunting liberal discourse—“the critical spirit,” a “public spirit,” the “human spirit”—as if the abstraction that permeates the body of the individuated liberal wanders, zombielike, in search of its animating fluids or its organic origins.75 The print signature as handwriting trace seeks its weightiness from the hand’s imprinting. It also searches for the seem-

74. Morley, “Old Parties and New Policy,” 323. 75. Writing about Pater, Morley cannily responds to his spirit of “passionate coldness.” Pater is part, Morley argues, of a pagan movement not utterly unrelated to the more reactionary Oxford movement of a generation ago, for it “is equally a protest against the mechanical and graceless formalism of the modern era, equally an attempt to find a substitute for a narrow popular creed in a return upon the older manifestations of the human spirit” (“Mr. Pater’s Essays,” 469).

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ingly organic individuality that any handwriting represents: despite its adherence to rules of penmanship, writing by hand is always distinctive. On the other hand, the always predictable return to form, be it the signature or the ballot box or the liberal mind, bespeaks liberalism’s magical belief in the mediumship of form itself, the mystical ways in which the signature, for instance, confers to the public the depths of sincerity, the weightiness of responsibility, the practices of liberal cognition. One writer for the Saturday Review invests the signature with the very stuff of self-conscience—“the consciousness of personal identity and individual responsibility”—which then somehow functions as “the first security for public and private morality.”76

“Addressing Itself Indifferently” Signature is, in effect, the quasi-physical guarantee of sincerity in print culture, and both are necessary if also precarious values for a liberalism so committed to strict divisions (if also constructive relations) between private thought and public opinion. The spatiotemporal progress from private to public is a persistent problem for midcentury liberalism, evinced in the fortnightly to monthly shift in its publication schedule. There is the never-quite-resolved anxiety about the effects of publicity in and of themselves. There is the concern about an irrevocable loss of weighty thought in the trimming of idea into opinion. There is a lingering skepticism concerning the efficacy, even the possibility, of pedagogical transference from one private mind to another through the medium of the public. And there is, in the end, a strong preference for the inexpressible sweetness of retirement, as Trollope’s Septimus Harding has so movingly shown. It is this desire for retirement that at any moment can enervate liberalism’s reformist zeal, a relaxation of purpose seemingly so intrinsic to disinterest and detachment that contemporaries well recognized it. Morley, always prodding his more retiring compatriots, would not allow midcentury liberals to forget one sort of logical conclusion drawn from an intellectual stance of disinterest in a world of eclectic free opinion. In this world, the very world imagined in the pages of the Fortnightly, there is another way of understanding the mission of “addressing itself indifferently to every educated man of whatever party”: “We constantly hear the age lauded for its tolerance, for its candour, for its openness of mind, for the readiness with which a hearing is given to ideas that forty years ago, or even less than 76. [Harcourt], “Identity of Journalism,” 225b.

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that, would have excluded persons suspected of holding them from decent society, and in fact so exclude them. Before, however, we congratulate ourselves too warmly on this, let us be quite sure that we are not mistaking for tolerance what is really nothing more creditable than indifference.”77 Writing his typically cranky, maddening, yet bracing prose in Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, James Fitzjames Stephen, uncle of Virginia Woolf and eccentric cousin of English conservatism, seconds his liberal rival: “Complete moral tolerance is possible only when men have become completely indifferent to each other—that is to say, when society is at an end.”78 This insight presses hard on liberalism’s desire for the privatization of opinion formation, in which “debate” becomes increasingly a mental activity rather than a social one—when fencing, tips on, seems merely a theatrical “stab” at engagement.79 Moreover, the continuous emphasis in the Fortnightly on “decided opinion” can come to sound suspiciously defensive, since “knowing what one knows” must always rub roughly against an attitude of disinterest that requires, as Mill reminds us, a fastidious detachment even from one’s own views. Although it may seem that self-reflexivity ensures a tight fit between knowledge and the knowing subject, the division implicit in self-consciousness, heightened by the liberal mind’s thoroughgoing disinterestedness, can deplete the form of a liberalized opinion into a mere formality, an empty promise, and an ineffectual inattention. As Fitzjames Stephen sniffs, “the great mass of men is not capable of this kind of disinterested passion for anything whatsoever.”80 Perusing the pages of the Fortnightly, the reader, then, may not find a model for progressive thought but instead an example of routinized learning, the reciting of something one does not or cannot believe or simply will not bother to believe. This is the bad dream of J. S. Mill and liberal pedagogy more generally, a sort of reversion to mechanical Benthamite utilitarianism.

77. Morley, On Compromise, 105. 78. J. Stephen, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, 148. 79. Paul Seabright reflects similarly on liberalism’s mottled desire for retirement. On the one hand, the retirement is to be dedicated to mental work, such as reading and writing, the sort of work undertaken by Sir Underwood in his “private lodgings.” On the other, such activity, Seabright more generally observes, “may deteriorate into depression and ennui once the struggle to carve out and protect a comfortable private space has been substantially achieved.” Seabright, “Aloofness of Liberal Politics,” 156. 80. J. Stephen, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, 133. Or again, “I cannot understand how a man who is not a Roman Catholic can regard a real Roman Catholic with absolute neutrality. . . . How the question whether he is right or wrong can be regarded as one indifferent to his general character” (105).

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In a strongly worded defense of Mill’s thinking, launched in response to Fitzjames Stephen’s criticisms of On Liberty, Morley perhaps inadvertently points to other possible difficulties attending the social motivations of liberal cognition. Morley defines Mill’s libertarian position by differentiating between what he calls “self-regarding opinions and actions” and opinions and actions that are not self-regarding. Self-regarding opinions and actions affect the individual who opines or acts them but have no problematic impact on anyone else. As opinions and actions, they are the social analogues to an individual’s ideas, but they are fundamentally asocial insofar as they remain substantially meaningful, useful, and productive only within the context of the individual. They define the limit for the truly free play of the liberal individual’s mind and behavior beyond which his opinions and actions might rightfully be curtailed for the social good. As Fitzjames Stephen notes, published political opinion would, according to Mill, fall within the category of the self-regarding. Although the pervasive self-reflexivity essential to liberal cognition (the attentiveness to terms, definitions, logic, fairness in advocation) is by no means identical to the self-regarding category of Mill’s libertarian worldview, cognitive self-reflexivity and the domain of the self-regarding sustain a relation to each other. Cognitive reflexivity is the milieu in which ideas are generated; ideas are the source of opinions and actions. If cognitive reflexivity insures an intelligent regard for other views, produces a disinterested mental atmosphere in which evidence is weighed and terms are clearly defined, then it also curtails the self-indulgence toward which self-regarding opinions might tend; it creates a quasi-socialized setting in which disinterested thinking takes place. It also seems possible, however, to speculate that the procedures of principled self-reflection, the form through which ideas take shape, can have another tendency altogether. Rather, the assiduous mindfulness of others’ thoughts that attends the thinking process, the refined skill of weighing one kind of evidence against another even in the generation of one’s own position—in sum, the staging of the social—is in fact an intensely solipsistic experience, which itself might promote, rather than contain, the production of self-regarding opinions and actions. In this context, the term self-regarding comes to seem a bad choice of words; the more negative connotations of casuistry also seem warranted. Reflexive cognition could then seem at odds with those opinions and actions that are political in intent, wherein an individual’s thinking and doing have a consequence beyond the person. Once more we see a dynamic that at least whispers about the ineffectuality of this liberalism’s construal of liberty. In this way, the writ-

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ers for the Fortnightly might seem to be so many Sir Underwoods; like the protagonist of Trollope’s Ralph the Heir, they sit in their private chambers writing measured accounts of other thinkers’ ideas, indeed writing about their own ideas as if they were others’ ideas. The Fortnightly, especially through the voice of its long-acting editor Morley, seems anxiously intent to counteract the darker inversions of liberal reserve and detachment. During his tenure, he penned a series of essays in the journal, later compiled as On Compromise, which seeks to motivate liberal reserve into “decided opinion” in the public sphere. There Morley lauds the work of “propagating, elaborating, enforcing the new idea, and strenuously doing all that one can to bring as many people as possible to a state of theory, which will at last permit the requisite change in practice to be made with safety and success. . . . The time has always come, and the season is never unripe, for the announcement of the fruitful idea” (OC, 143). In this passage, even as liberal pedagogical goals are expressed in the remarkable and forebodingly abstract cognitive term “a state of theory,” Morley also shows, once more, how necessary are modifiers of bodily discipline (“strenuously doing”) to the process of liberal individuation. Midcentury liberalism consistently manifests this distinctive clocking of time where ideas are always already on time, but practical change is and must be late. As the public sphere in mid-Victorian England became relatively more open, less censored, and increasingly heterogeneous, the Fortnightly’s emphasis on emphatic “individual opinion” not only responded, therefore, to the free-market circulation of opinion and the bad faith of the “anonymous we.” The “decisiveness” of individual opinion was also intended as a rejection of passivity, the sort of passivity borne of luxury that Fitzjames Stephen detected in an era of free speech: “Unlimited freedom of opinion may be a very good thing, but it does not tend to zeal, or even to a distinct appreciation of the bearings of the opinions which are entertained.” “If you want zealous belief,” Stephen pronounces, “set people to fight.”81 The Fortnightly wanted neither zealous opinion nor the battle it promised; it wanted a “state of theory” or a “frame of mind”—evoking stasis and formal harmony. It preferred the sport of fencing to the realpolitik of battle. It seems likely that both the dread of zealotry of all kinds and the resistance to liberal apathy led Morley entirely away from actual editorial eclecticism soon after his taking over the editorship from Lewes. Following 81. Ibid., 79.

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Stephen’s logic, the good form of the Fortnightly’s initial eclecticism could only breed a mild forbearance whereby every topic was a “mere difference of opinion.” Despite this editorial change, a “philosophy of eclecticism” still adhered to the journal’s reputation, but it was now folded almost entirely into a broad-mindedness manifested by its contributors’ rhetorical approach, itself a dramatization of their frame of mind.82 Instead of a formal eclecticism that might look like a consumer’s bazaar—an open-air market of fungible opinion—or like a consumer’s bizarre, a collection of eccentric opinion to gawk at, the Fortnightly settled for a mental eclecticism in its practitioners, who ought to display wide-ranging interests in the arts, politics, and philosophy while also maintaining a dutiful respect for differing opinions. The liberal mind remains open, but the Fortnightly pages close. As Morley recalled years later, many critics of the journal, those he labels “prejudiced observers,” detected “an almost sinister unity in spirit and complexion.” Countering this misperception, Morley defends: “This unity was, in fact, the spirit of liberalism in its many-sided sense.”83 The journal’s historian, Edwin Everett, seems to describe the Fortnightly’s eclecticism in a similar manner—“that eclecticism is basically liberal in spirit—they had even called it liberalism in their prospectus.”84 Morley’s “many-sided” liberalism, however, not only blandly underscores the variety of persuasions midcentury liberalism embraced— conservative liberals, radical liberals, Evangelical liberals, atheistic liberals—but also reveals the extent to which eclecticism becomes liberal eclecticism, the way in which eclecticism no longer reflects the diversity of society but instead the diversity displayed through the liberal form of thought and opinion. No wonder, then, that “Conservatives considered the

82. Even Lewes apparently had given ground on the principle of eclecticism, or at least this is Everett’s account of Lewes’s editorial drift: “During the twenty months of his administration the review grew more and more liberal. The policy of independence was from time to time proclaimed to its readers; and the review was willing to print replies to its articles and to give the other man his say. But if willingness to be impartial was present, the other man was too often absent; and it became obvious before very long that, for one reason and another, the Fortnightly Review, if it was to attain any success at all, must do so as an organ of liberal opinion.” Everett, Party of Humanity, 36. Everett describes here what amounts to an “external” pressure to give up on eclecticism, as if the journal’s need for readers exerted the determining pressure. Although it is true that the journal saw more success when the journal went “more liberal,” there is no way to prove the causality in these contiguous events. Moreover, this stints the effects of liberalism’s ideological tensions. 83. Morley quoted in Everett, Party of Humanity, 103. 84. Ibid., 67.

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review sectarian.”85 It is these Conservatives, no doubt, whom Morley calls “prejudiced observers.” Under the regime of the Fortnightly, thinking for yourself has become thinking as a liberal. Within three years of its inauguration, the Fortnightly’s liberal form had also become its content, revealing how truly difficult it is to keep the two distinct.

85. Ibid.

CHAPTER FOUR

Thinking Inside the Box THE BALLOT AND THE POLITICS OF LIBERAL CITIZENSHIP

And the suffrage is but a lame and primitive contrivance for giving to Opinion a measure and form. —Frederic Harrison, “Our Venetian Constitution,” Fortnightly Review

Throughout the middle years of the nineteenth century, a member of the British parliament could expect, in the waning days of each session and usually in the wee hours of the evening when the aisles were nearly empty of colleagues, to see Francis Henry Berkeley, Liberal member for Bristol, present a ballot bill to the evacuated chamber. Citing the evils of coercion, personation, and bribery that England’s customary practice of public voting abetted, Berkeley called for voting papers, booths, boxes, whatever measures would ensure free elections. His speeches in favor of the ballot were renowned for their regularity, infamous for their fanciful rhetorical effects, and utterly predictable in their outcome. So consistently unsuccessful were they that contemporaries and historians have questioned Berkeley’s commitment to his own cause, wondering whether he simply wanted his annual advocacy advertised to his constituents, many of whom still passionately championed the radical agenda. During these years, the oldest radicals might well have shaken their heads in despair, seeing, it seemed to them, this democratic tenet of philosophical radicalism and once the foundational plank in the Chartist platform bathetically reduced to a matter of personal gain. Charting Berkeley’s annual emergence from the back benches, a reader of the parliamentary debates on this issue begins to see a rather different narrative, however, an ironic rather than a comic one. After years of failure, Berke-

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ley’s ballot rather suddenly in the late 1860s makes its way into the Liberal Party’s platform—but by then Berkeley is reported sick, and his annual celebration of the ballot is transferred to another, decidedly less colorful member of Parliament, E. A. Leatham of Huddersfield.1 By 1870, when Gladstone himself, long an opponent of what by this time had come to be called “the secret ballot,” voices his support, Berkeley is now referred to as “the late Mr. Berkeley.” No longer alive when the ballot was finally voted into law in 1872, the measure’s Moses was denied the promised land of electoral purity. I tell this more ironic or, perhaps, seriocomic narrative because it offers me some interpretive space for a rather different assessment of the later history of the secret ballot, in the two decades or so prior to its passage. In the comic narrative, Berkeley’s lackluster guidance, his limited parliamentary skills, and the rather sudden adoption of the ballot after years of fairly widespread resistance in the halls of government have encouraged the few interested political historians to rather cynically interpret the later history of the ballot in the nineteenth century as a type of high political maneuvering: Berkeley was an opportunist; Gladstone likewise, taking up the ballot only to unite the Liberal Party in a period of fracture.2 Setting aside this interpretation, I do not intend to rejuvenate Berkeley’s reputation, nor even to reexamine his motives. Instead, I want to consider why the ballot at midcentury and later was such a political puzzle for just about everyone, except, it seems, Mr. Berkeley. At that time, it was detached from other sorts of radical electoral reforms, epitomized in the formation of a Ballot Society in 1853, and the ballot thereby became associated with mainstream liberalism and moderate reform. And yet, despite its moderation, in the later years, when it was included along with other reforms in the Parliamentary and Municipal Elections Bill of 1872, it was consistently addressed as the most crucial change demanded by that legislation: a change nearly as profound, some conservatives averred, as the more obviously radical threat of universal suffrage. Most people then and now call that successful bill the Ballot Act, confirming the ballot’s relative importance in that multiform legislation.3 1. Less colorful, perhaps, but a man of complicated reputation; both he and his brother were accused of electoral bribery—the same behavior the ballot was supposed to counteract. His brother, William, member for Wakefield, was ejected from his seat on these charges. These two brothers epitomize the tension between practice and theory, pragmatism and ideals, a tension that bedevils liberal electoral reformers throughout the century and is a source of fiction for Anthony Trollope in his Palliser series. 2. This is the account provided by Kinzer in The Ballot Question, the only book-length account of the ballot’s British history. 3. This bill was the third of three attempts by the Liberal administration to draft a bill sufficiently amenable to the two houses. The three were the Parliamentary Elections Bill of 1870,

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Through an examination of the parliamentary and periodical debates that characterized the last twenty years of its British political history, I will treat the ballot as an instructive instance of midcentury liberalism’s legislative ambitions to populate the political domain with a liberalized citizenry, characterized by its capacity to think the abstractions vital to liberal politics. The citizen in the balloting booth is thus another case study of one of the definitive forms of abstract embodiment through which midcentury liberalism operates. The ballot measure itself, coming as it did soon after the Reform Bill of 1867, can thus be seen, to some extent, as an elaboration of or response to that bill, a much more extensively discussed and extensively studied legislative event than was the ballot. The contemporary debate on the franchise largely concerned whether the British workingman was respectable enough for the vote, and it often focused on questions of self-restraint, self-discipline, and a capacity for long-term planning. Catherine Hall and Keith McClelland, in particular, have enabled us to see how vital were the assumptions concerning race, class, and gender that informed these discussions regarding the population to whom the franchise was extended.4 Clearly, respectability and its bodily requirements are resonant with my concerns in this chapter. As I indicated in the introduction to this book, however, I am not seeking to rehearse these convincing arguments concerning the marginalized bodies of liberalism but rather to retrain scholarly attention on the abstract embodiment that midcentury liberalism simultaneously evokes and disavows and, through these abstracted bodies, its striking commitment to cognitive form. In making a case for the ballot’s liberal exemplarity, I am running risks because the debate itself does not fall neatly into recognizable political party divisions. On the one hand, there was the coalition of professed radicals and establishment liberals who constituted the Gladstonian cabinet that uncertainly navigated the bill into law; on the other, the even stranger admixture of conservatives and advanced liberals, who effectuated significant resistances and revisions during that long passage. Throughout the ballot’s legislative journey, then, card-carrying Liberals and radicals both supported and opposed the ballot legislation, making it difficult now and then to affiliate its principles with one particular party (especially

the Elections (Parliamentary and Municipal) Bill of 1871, and the Parliamentary and Municipal Elections Bill of 1872, which became law. 4. Two important texts outlining these indispensable arguments are C. Hall, McClelland, and Rendell, Defining the Victorian Nation, and C. Hall, White, Male, and Middle-Class. See also Gilbert, Citizen’s Body.

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parties so increasingly hybrid) or even a vanguard wing of the Liberal Party.5 Party policies and party affiliation inform but do not constitute the liberal formalism I am attempting to describe in this book and in this chapter. Because I wish to outline the formalist embodiments of midcentury liberalism, which are often disavowed as constitutive form, I must sidestep to some extent the political platform of any party, or the motives of any participant in the debate, for these causative categories are the means by which midcentury liberalism normalized its practices. In concentrating on individuals or on cohorts within the Liberal Party, I would be mobilizing a central presumption of liberal sovereignty—individual intentionality— as an explanatory tool rather than as an object of study. Relatedly, by explaining the ballot debate in terms of party ideology, I would be treating the ballot as a reflection of particular liberal “ideas” instead of as a materialization of what “idea” and “opinion” could mean. I hope to avoid the dangers of high political history, whose careful and intimate consideration of personal agency can at times reduce all ideology into ideas, all historical change into mere changes of mind. I am to some extent studying how cognitive autonomy and the political opinion which originates from it come to function as political agency in midcentury liberalism, a topic to which I will continually return, especially in chapter 6. In examining the ballot debate rather than the results of the legislation’s implementation, I am primarily trying to locate and then to analyze a midcentury liberal commitment to the production of a crucial type of liberal individual—the liberal citizen—reproduced through a concrete mechanism: the ballot. I am therefore most concerned in this chapter with ex-

5. The political affiliations of those in both camps (pro- and antiballot) were diverse. At midcentury, ballot reform was taken up by the Ballot Society, whose members came mostly from the commercial and radical classes, as well as by newspapers and representatives from the growing constituencies, such as Birmingham, Bristol, Bath, Glasgow, and the West Riding of Yorkshire. The Whig opposition, which during the Chartist period steadfastly resisted the ballot, began at midcentury to acknowledge the presence of corruption but continued to desire the “publicity” of the ballot. In the governmental setting, Leatham, a wealthy Quaker banker and Berkeley’s successor in championing the ballot, was an “advanced” member of the Liberal Party, as was W. E. Forster, the cabinet member specifically assigned to carry the legislation through Parliament. But other radicals, such as Henry Fawcett, dissented from the Liberal Party’s single-minded interest in the ballot, which, he believed, came at the expense of other radical demands for electoral reform. Meanwhile, there were Liberals, Trollope among them, who continued to oppose any sort of private polling, even as by the early 1870s some Tories (for instance, a Conservative candidate in a by-election at Stockport) were expressing public support for some form of secret balloting. For a general and detailed history of the ballot, see Kinzer, Ballot Question. For a summary, see Park, “England’s Controversy.”

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pressions of the ballot’s possibilities, perils, and potential results and much less concerned with the actual effects of the passage of the bill and, later, its operation in elections, when Conservative Party revisions and other political compromises muddied its clarity. Indeed, most historians believe the ballot bill had little appreciable impact until further legislation in the early 1880s assisted its attempt to reduce bribery in elections.6 Although these questions of impact are of great importance in evaluating electoral reform and the extent to which liberal ideals “actually” worked in the world—a crucial issue—they shift attention away from what I might call the formalist utopianism that I am tracing in the next pages, which envisions how living liberalism can happen in a chaotic, heterogeneous, unevenly civilized society, still largely in the grips of an aristocratic hegemony. Midcentury liberalism—as theory and envisioned practice—was deeply committed to effecting change, especially by changing people’s minds. It formulated distinctive approaches to political participation, and the ballot was one of these distinctive approaches. As it took shape over the years of parliamentary debate, and as it distanced itself from earlier radical associations, the ballot as mechanism was not just imagined to be a guarantee of electoral purity but was increasingly expected to actualize—efficiently and in large numbers—the specifically liberal citizen. And yet this brand of political subject is by no means a simple translation, if such exists, of classical liberal ideology. If earlier radical arguments for the ballot at times echoed the enthusiasms of the Enlightenment—its faith in reason’s direct access to truth and its fervent calls for the elaboration of political life beyond the sovereign body—midcentury arguments for the ballot were usually more pragmatic and yet thereby indicate the peculiar potential of this measure. The ballot was not expected to politicize society according to radical premises but to redefine the political “proper” within society. Through its polling stations and booths and boxes, the ballot would integrate political thinking into the everyday lives of the English (and importantly, the 6. The ballot bill’s ineffectuality is a commonplace in scholarship. See, for instance, Hoppen, “Franchise and Electoral Politics.” However, Hanham suggests that the ballot was perhaps most efficacious in Ireland (Elections and Party Management, 180). He writes, “The ballot destroyed the political power of the landowners who were the principal supporters of the two English parties” (183), thus ushering in the era of home rule politics. Hanham quotes the election commissioners who investigated corruption in a by-election at Sandwich in 1880: “It did not appear that the mode of taking votes by ballot had the slightest effect in checking bribery. On the contrary, while it enabled many voters to take bribes on both sides, it did not, as far as we could ascertain, render a single person unwilling to bribe for fear of bribery in vain” (267). Bribery in particular was not seen to decline until late in the 1880s, perhaps aided by the Corrupt Practices Act of 1883 but also due to the redistribution of seats in the 1885 legislation.

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Scottish, Welsh, and Irish), but insofar as it was a formal or proper politics, it was yet distinct from other sorts of everyday modalities. With varying degrees of self-awareness, most supporters of the ballot were in fact promoting through the practices and promises of the ballot a much more circumscribed political arena than the periodic extensions of the franchise during this period might suggest.7 Through the ballot, popular politics as formerly understood would not only be sealed off in a little box—the balloting booth—but would also be spatially and cognitively delimited within the individual voter, thereby profoundly revising what could then be understood as the public sphere and its powerful resident, public opinion.8 Deprived of its open-air nominations and elections, the traditional public sphere would no longer be a space of decisive political exchange; deprived of its sociable origins, public opinion as a collective formation (and as distinct from individual opinion) would now be an insistently secondary product, not producer, of politics. For necessary reasons I will discuss, the ballot, once it was nationally implemented, would be presumed to realize a free political subject through considerable spatiotemporal reconfiguration and, to some extent, confinement. Temporally limited to the actual event of the vote and spatially sequestered within the balloting booth, the citizen of mid-Victorian liberalism was thereby expected to determine his vote through correspondingly bounded mental practices, especially what might be called the cognitive process of abstraction.9 The Ballot Act hoped to mass-produce a new abstract space of privacy or, rather, mass-produce two abstract spaces of 7. To this extent only, I support D. C. Moore’s controversial argument in “Political Morality” regarding the ballot. I consider the ballot one of many electoral reforms that sought to limit the powers of democratization; however, unlike Moore, I want to argue that later nineteenth-century arguments for the ballot were not attempts to protect “due influence” and customary forms of social influence. 8. In so arguing, I am both following and revising Habermas’s exceedingly influential interpretation of the public sphere in nineteenth-century Europe that takes up a considerable portion of his The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Nossiter has observed that the ballot expected electors to vote according to purely political priorities. Although this seems entirely accurate, it still remains to be examined what was then thought to constitute purely political priorities. See Nossiter, Influence, Opinion. 9. The operative words in these phrases are practices and process. One could argue that earlier conceptions of representation, such as “interest,” were also abstractions, though the linkage between land and interest moderates this tendency. In the accounts of balloting provided by supporters, the ballot seems to produce a sense within the elector that he is, in some definitive way, both an abstraction from his everyday self and engaging in a mental process of abstraction—the ability to think abstractly. In these regards, I mean something rather different from what Hanna Pitkin, for one, considers the abstractness of interest. See Pitkin, Concept of Representation.

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privacy—the booth itself and the evanescent liberal citizen, constituted by his cognitive abstraction, who was momentarily capable of embodying his citizenship through an abstracted interest in the national or imperial good. The internalizing impulse that seems so evident elsewhere in Victorian society is no less evident, then, in the ballot. Yet both the principles and the anticipated practice of the ballot show a much more diversified and ambivalent progress toward privatization than is often assumed, even within the history of liberalism. For instance, private booth and locked boxes notwithstanding, the elector still had to journey to a centrally located polling station to vote. This way of making privacy spectacular is liberalism’s peculiar and crucial brand of publicity, creating citizens who are neither traditionally public nor recognizably private, at least not in any predictably domestic or personal ways.

Electoral Influence as Electoral Corruption Throughout its long history as a topic of debate, the ballot, when praised, was always lauded as a progressive reform, an effective tonic to various inadequacies and illegalities in the electoral process. The extent to which the ballot could and would be a genuine improvement in the electoral process was the most overt theme of parliamentary debate. Several historians have shown that prior to the electoral reforms of the latter half of the nineteenth century, which among them included the ballot, British electioneering and elections (with Scotland often a notable exception) operated according to what seem to modern observers codified principles of corruption or at least customary rituals of corruption.10 Some historians, then, view the ballot as an instrumental solution to these contaminated political practices. However, this triumphal story of electoral debasement purified by legislative reform is by no means the only or best framework through which to interpret the ballot’s significance. By the mid-nineteenth century, the ballot was not simply a commonsensical quick fix nor, more profoundly, another signpost on a teleological progression toward democracy but a peculiarly liberal institutional form, manifesting its own characteristic intervention in history

10. See, for instance, J. Phillips, Electoral Behavior. Also, for the later history of electoral corruption and reform, whose title speaks volumes about the author’s interpretation, see O’Leary, Elimination of Corrupt Practices. Frank O’Gorman is an exception. He opines, “The financial dimension to electoral behavior in the century before reform has presumably received such widespread criticism because it has been so poorly understood. It was not only that electoral politics in the eighteenth century were in many respects unlike those of our own day, but also the normative values which accompanied them.” O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons, and Parties, 141.

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and producing a distinctive version of politics. To elaborate these claims, I need to dislocate the ballot from these other sorts of interpretations. Eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century elections proceeded according to their own logic. Because nationally the percentage of adult males eligible to vote was small—and in many of the unreformed districts, a minuscule number indeed—“managing” the election seemed almost a privilege of the aristocratic elite of the constituency, and electors were accustomed to this management. The range of managerial practice was wide. There were subtle and not-so-subtle exertions of influence within a deferential hierarchy, and there also existed what was often called “treating”—what we call bribery—the direct payment of money or alcohol or food in return for an elector’s vote. Also evident in the more populated electoral districts was personation, wherein an ineligible man identifies himself as an eligible voter so that he might vote, perhaps for the second or third time that day. More and more observers of British elections in the nineteenth century, especially after the Second Reform Bill significantly enfranchised the industrial working classes, remarked on the apparent prevalence of coercion among factory owners, who might threaten the loss of livelihood to any employee who voted against their candidates; among union officials, who might ostracize and punish a maverick operative; and among politically active townspeople, who might withhold custom from wayward shopkeepers.11 Coercion of these latter kinds was possible principally because a polling day was, like the nominating day, a public event. Each elector arrived at a polling station, usually located in the open air, to declare his name and his candidate in front of elections officers, party officials, and anyone else who chose to congregate.12 One could always witness the vote of any elector and, if otherwise waylaid, read about it later in publicly available polling books.

11. Of the classic instance of landlord-to-tenant coercion, see [Rogers], “Bribery and Its Remedies,” 741; for priestly coercion, see, for instance, [Ward], “Priesthood in Irish Politics,” [257]; and for factory owner/operative coercion, see [Abram], “Social Condition and Political Prospects,” 426. Hanham asserts, “So widely recognized was the right of an employer to influence his workmen’s vote, that before the Ballot Act the employees of local authorities were often regarded as if they were employed by a Liberal or Conservative master” (Elections and Party Management, 83). 12. O’Gorman writes of the existence prior to 1832—and indeed, 1872—of some “specially constructed polling booths,” such that voting “could therefore be a tolerably private affair.” He then concedes, “Nevertheless, privacy was not greatly prized; suspicion of secrecy as betokening collusion and corruption remained extraordinarily powerful.” O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons, and Parties, 132.

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Despite a general consensus among historians, there is much work in progress and yet to be done to measure the distance between the perception of contemporary observers and the measurable existence in the historical record of corruption in these electoral practices—a distinction that still counts in this instance. There are kinds of textual evidence (polling books, for instance), woefully inadequate perhaps, that can at least set up a measure against which impressions by witnesses might be compared.13 Some of this ongoing empirical scholarship provides substantial evidence to suggest that electoral “irregularities” were common in the eighteenth century and continued unabated well into the nineteenth century; even supporting the widely held belief that certain irregularities were more common by the middle of the nineteenth century than they had been in the past. With the incremental increase in the electorate occasioned by periodic suffrage extensions and the relative rationalization of constituencies, a growing number of inexperienced voters entered the lists throughout the nineteenth century, making positive identification of an elector increasingly difficult and personation easier. Moreover, the modest circumstances of many of these voters and the dependent economic relation many of them had to their social and trade union superiors made them theoretically more susceptible to treating and coercion. Many of the new electors created by the Reform Bill of 1867, mostly laboring folk and small shopkeepers, experienced a sudden and, for many, attractive transformation of their role within this other sort of “political economy,” what the historian Gary Cox has called “the transference of . . . socio-economic creditorship into electoral currency.”14 Lord Hartington’s Select Committee of 1870, called in part to investigate allegations of electoral corruption in the 1868 general election, seems to have confirmed these suppositions, focusing in particular on a handful of recent elections, one of which was the contested election in Beverley, a borough in the East Riding of Yorkshire. It was here that the novelist Anthony Trollope tried and failed to attain a seat in Parliament, what he calls in his autobiography, despite the widespread knavery infusing the process, “the highest object of ambition to every educated Englishman.”15 Even with this evidence of a measurable increase in electoral corruption, however, there is need for a further assessment of a related issue: the

13. On the use and limitations of pollbooks, see Vincent, Pollbooks. 14. Cox, Efficient Secret, 7. 15. Trollope, Autobiography, 290. For a concise synopsis of Trollope’s election bid, see Briggs, Victorian People, 101–2.

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level of contemporary acceptance of these practices. Neither an empirical nor a perceptual history of electoral corruption is within the purview of this chapter, but the work of historians who have addressed these issues suggests to me the possibility that significant historical shifts in perception as well as in fact altered electoral processes and the demand and kind of electoral reform. Without, for instance, a clear understanding of what counted—at any given historical moment—as illegal or immoral electoral irregularities, such terms as corruption and coercion remain potentially more interpretive than descriptive. It is highly possible that perceptual changes were taking effect, too, so that what were once considered justifiable customs of electioneering had by the mid-nineteenth century become problematic and, in many circles, chargeable criminal offenses. From this perspective, the net total of irregularities may not have significantly increased by the mid-nineteenth century; rather, the increase lay in which activities ought to be counted as irregular. Just such an attitudinal change can be measured, for instance, in the denotative distance between “treating” and “bribery” and, in turn, between “influence” and “undue influence.” Whether fueled by increased incidents, changing perceptions, or more likely a bit of both, there are many contemporary accounts of high spirits and just plain spirits infecting the miscellaneous crowds that attended the nomination and election of parliamentary candidates prior to the 1871–72 bill.16 George Eliot draws from these accounts when writing Middlemarch 16. I could provide an endless supply of newspaper reports on a wide array of electoral disturbances but will focus on the few years prior to the ballot bill and provide only a tiny portion of those accounts that made it into the “national” newspaper, the Times of London. In an article titled rather inaptly, “Election Intelligence,” the following was reported of an election in Truro: “The poll was taken to-day and conducted with good order. At 9 o’clock Mr. Jenkins, the Liberal candidate, headed the poll, but in half-an-hour later he was left behind, and continued so to the end of the struggle. A man named Wyatt, a confectioner, in the habit of attending fairs, stabbed a woman named Eleanor Cock [Cook?], near Colonel Hogg’s committee-room, inflicting two severe wounds. The man was soon apprehended. There are upwards of 40 county police in the town, and the local authorities have taken steps to preserve peace.” Times (London), September 14, 1871. Also another “Election Intelligence,” this time from Dover: “The official declaration of the poll was made at half-past 5 in the evening. The Market-place, where the hustings were erected, was filled by an excited mob, and the feeling of disappointment on the part of Mr. Barnett’s friends vented itself in hisses and howls and the hurling of missiles at their opponents on the hustings. There was a strong disposition among the rougher part of Mr. Barnet’s supporters, who had been parading the town all day with boards and banners, to come to blows; but the strong double barrier which separated them from their opponents and the cordon of policemen which hemmed them in offered obstacles which could not be overcome, and there was nothing more serious than yells and gesticulations, though these were of the most violent kind, and strongly indicated the probability of a riot had the conditions been

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during these same years. On nomination day, each party’s officials, electors, and supporters gathered at the hustings to hear and probably most often not hear the nomination and the acceptance speeches of the constituency’s candidates. Frequently fights erupted among party loyalists. Undoubtedly others also attended, political and apolitical, who treated these customary days in the election process as public holidays, occasions to see and be seen and to watch if not engage in physical activity, and not always of the healthiest sort. On polling days, a polling update was declared at periodic intervals throughout the day, encouraging electoral agents and their candidates to increase or decrease (as the case may be) their “solicitations” of electors. Such running counts had the further impact of, as one member of Parliament complained in characteristic English understatement, exciting the electors “inordinately.”17 Additionally, the disappointment some observers had with an elector’s vote could set the scene for name-calling, stone throwing, and fisticuffs, sometimes with tragic results. As Lord Rosebery infers, when he celebrates the potential advantages of the ballot and its related reforms, voting in public was at times an act of courage: “I trust that . . . our present sports of voter-baiting, and voter fighting, and voter-worrying may join the category of these abolished amusements; for, at present, it is not so much a rateable as a physical qualification which a voter needs for the exercise of the franchise.”18 The parallel between voting and bearbaiting is a revealing one, for it not only demonstrates the implicitly low opinion many politicians, even liberal-leaning politicians, had for the unfranchised, here seen as disruptive yet dependent inferiors who were wholly responsible for these conflicts. It also reveals how electoral reform itself was considered a type of direct social control that was closely analogized by some to other roughly contemporaneous reforms that rationalized populist entertainments, such as bearbaiting and cockfighting. Nomination day and polling days were not necessarily more rowdy on average than in the previous century or two, but they were certainly less acceptable, categorized as a social problem in need of a social-management solution. Like other events that drew large

a little more favourable.” Times (London), November 27, 1871. See also Times (London), February 28, 1871; Times (London), March 1, 1871; Times (London), April 14, 1871. 17. Mr. Bruce, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd. ser., vol. 194 (March 4, 1869), p. 654. In a study of several local elections in the first quarter of the century, Mark Harrison argues that mass gatherings at elections had a “discernible structure.” M. Harrison, Crowds and History, 219. 18. Earl of Rosebery, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., vol. 211 (June 10, 1872), p. 1467. See also Richter, “Role of Mob Riot,” 19–28.

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crowds primarily from the lower strata of society, as Lord Rosebery avers, the election process in a British precinct ought to be closely monitored and the crowds dispersed. As one can see in part from an engraving (figure 1), distributed by Berkeley’s Ballot Society, the introduction of nominating petitions (which wholly eradicated public nominations) and the institutionalization of the ballot were intended, in part, to enforce social order. Nominating days involved the public nomination and declaration of candidates, who then delivered acceptance speeches before bipartisan crowds. Nominating petitions, by contrast, required a requisite number of signatures that were then submitted to electoral officials by a published deadline. As is emphatically evident in the before-and-after images provided by the Ballot Society, voting days, like nomination days, would also become less public. The spatial flexibility of the open air, the theatrical impact of the hustings platform, and the rowdy, undifferentiated mob would become rationalized under these reforms, their unpredictable energies redirected into the partitioned interior space of the polling station, with its railings, upholstered chairs, voting booths, and, tucked benignly in the corner, a small ballot box.19 The box quietly harbors the meaningfully silent, abstracted mark, not the vocal physical body, of an elector’s choice. In this propaganda, a scene of public bacchanalia appears to be rather predictably civilized through the calming contours of a bourgeois interiority. The crowd is thinned out, and the electors are channeled into individual booths—all in all a homey space, both “discrete” and “discreet.” However, as I shall argue later, the linear design of this polling place is much more expressive of rational order and detachment than bourgeois comfort and domestic attachments. A typical Victorian bourgeois interior, after all, eschews sharp lines and clean architectural planes for a profusion of color and commodities, the latter often a maker of memory and sentiment—just those sorts of influence that the balloting booth seeks to diffuse. The desire for a ballot was not about the imperial extension of middle-class domesticity, despite the roaring hearth and comfortable chairs that inhabit this fantasy of a polling station. Nor was it, more broadly, a call for public order at any cost. The Ballot Society’s flyer notwithstanding, a deployed police force during the headline days of the election might serve the purposes of order more easily and directly. Rather, the desire for the ballot eventually came to express in the midcentury a distinctively liberal theory 19. M. Harrison notes that compartmentalized booths had been introduced locally by the time of the 1832 election in Liverpool (Crowds and History, 229).

Figure 1. “Facts About the Ballot,” a before-and-after pamphlet distributed by the pro-ballot Ballot Society in the 1860s.

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of the polity, encompassing a particular kind of social order that reconfigured the public sphere, but also a distinctive view of citizenship and a new standard for public opinion formation.

Privatizing Public Opinion Even in an earlier incarnation, during the radicalized years of the 1820s and 1830s, the ballot had already initiated a discourse among its supporters that seriously questioned the efficacy of the customary publicity and sociability of electoral politics on grounds more complex than its disturbances of the peace. For most historians, this era of the ballot, when it was championed by the philosophical radicals—namely, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, George Grote, and the young John Stuart Mill—and was later incorporated as one of the six points in the Chartist platform, was the era of its keenest importance. Although this period is not the focus of my discussion, the earlier years of the ballot debate in the nineteenth century will help me specify the peculiarly “liberal” character of its later resurgence. It is useful to start with the distinctive terms of this earlier debate—interests, influence, publicity—and to contrast them with what would become some of the signal terms of the later debate: self-interest, reasoning, privacy. In this study, the terms of opposition between contemporary opponents and proponents of the ballot is crucial, but so are the shared assumptions that limit the conditions of their historically located debate, shared assumptions that most readily become apparent when compared to an earlier moment in the ballot debate’s long history. Divided over the ballot and surely at odds over the definition of interest, early-nineteenth-century Tories, utilitarians, and even many radicals nonetheless shared a belief in the tangible existence and visible efficacy of influence, which, in turn, rendered most of them sympathetic to publicity, to varying degrees. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, neither opponents nor supporters of the ballot could embrace older conceptions of influence, as evidenced in the increasingly fraught distinction between due and undue influence. Accordingly, publicity became suspect, becoming not just the site but perhaps the cause of corruption, such that even supporters of open nominations and open polling reimagined its powers. In place of subtle disputations over influence and public politics, later contestants in the debate found themselves sharing a lexicon organized by more privatized conceptions of politics, not only resulting in a heightened emphasis on the enclosed space of the balloting booth but also positing

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thereby a mental space of privacy. In addition, the later debate is much more concerned about what might be called the gender politics implicit in electoral reform. In the earlier part of the century, influence, for instance, did not possess the predominantly gendered connotations it would later develop in notions such as “womanly influence,” in which the operation of influence was considered intrinsic to the definition of female subjectivity itself. Although aristocratic influence evoked an ethos of gentlemanly privilege, the masculine presumptions of its performance were so given as to be largely unremarkable. Indeed, during that earlier period, if influence operated locally and physically, it was nonetheless never exclusively pinned on the particularities of sexual identity per se, on explicit distinctions of gender, but primarily on the entitlements of status and respectability, with male privilege certainly an implicit but deeply embedded postulate. In the 1860s and 1870s, however, proponents and opponents alike shared a dependence on the seemingly unchanging differences between the sexes, effeminizing “undue” influence even as they masculinized—in significantly different registers—the vote. Despite the nearly universal conviction of the unchanging difference of sex, the rhetorical centrality of gender categories in the ballot discourse indicates, as I will elaborate in later pages, that the debate over liberal citizenship was engaged in a contentious political redistribution of masculine and feminine attributes according to newly valued practices of cognition and states of mind. In its earlier nineteenth-century context, the ballot could be included among a list of radical reforms, such as annual parliaments, that sought to moderate the power of a traditional aristocratic elite as well as the emergent power of new moneyed interests. Along with the enlargement of the electorate, these menus of reform were meant to ensure the new electorate’s independence. Aristocrats, for example, were increasingly seen as tyrants of their own districts and other pocket and rotten boroughs, which rendered parliamentary elections a narrow expression of their interest. Even this shorthand account, however, shows how older conceptions of Britain or especially England as a perfectly balanced collection of corporate interests (e.g., the “landed” interest or the “city” interest) had started to give way to other conceptions of this geographic domain and to more sinister conceptions of interest that the ballot debates of the 1860s and 1870s more fully articulated.20 By the later period, just as “influence” was

20. There is, of course, a much more complicated history of interest that is rudely elided in my account. Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, myriad definitions of interest were extant. As Hanna Pitkin has argued, Edmund Burke fashioned a unique

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more often construed as “undue influence” or even “corruption,” so a vote that expressed “interest” was more frequently seen as a too-narrow pursuit of self-interest—a somewhat generalized revulsion not just against aristocratic privilege but also against the hedonistic calculus of utilitarianism. This shift in connotations was a slow process so that the affiliations attached to older forms of political action were hard to abandon, even for the stridently progressive philosophical radicals.21 In the early-nineteenthcentury consideration of the ballot, its use seems far less antagonistic to the principle of influence; indeed, it can be advertised as a preservative of influence. George Grote, who as a utilitarian was otherwise committed to the social utility of self-interest, evidently took great pains to retain something like the status-privilege of influence, even as that influence loosened itself from the feudal bonds of abject obligation. Insofar as Grote and others occasionally privileged influence over discussion, they reveal the uneven dispersion in England’s civil society of what scholars now think of as the Habermasian definition of the eighteenth-century public sphere: a site of critical publicity characterized by “reasonable forms of public discussion.”22 In the 1830s, influence was still a dominant political medium but also far more ramified and integrated in the broader social domain than an ideal of rational debate might wish for. Seen from this historical perspective, the ballot act that was finally legalized in 1872 might be seen as a liberal effort to salvage a few of the ideals of critical publicity—deliberation,

but influential notion of interest, which assumed that interest was not intrinsic to individual people but was to some extent objective. In this regard, interests were fixed; particular people might move from the country to the city, but the political significance of the country interest remained largely unchanged (Concept of Representation, 174–76). The utilitarians, in contrast, increasingly personalized interest, hence Bentham’s emphasis on self-interest. Pitkin suggests that Bentham did not import this primarily economic and functionalist understanding of “interest” into the political sphere but assumed the presence of a distinct, almost altruistic, “public” interest in each individual (199). Even here, however, notice the individuated parameters of this “public” interest. Despite Pitkin’s compelling claim, Bentham does align the right to “virtual suffrage” with what has become known as his characteristic definition of self-interest. See chapter 7 of Bentham, Plan of Parliamentary Reform, esp. 32. 21. Moore argues that James Mill differed considerably in his views regarding the ballot from other such radicals as Grote (“Political Morality,” 8–15). Moore suggests that Mill favors the ballot insofar as suffrage extended only to the middle class, which would remain subject to the appropriate, due influences of the social hierarchy. 22. Habermas’s historical narrative will describe the breakdown of just this critical publicity in the nineteenth century, which occurred—following Marx—when the “non-bourgeois strata penetrated the public sphere in the political realm and took possession of its institutions, participated in press, parties, and parliament.” Habermas, Structural Transformation of Public Sphere, 189.

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detachment—but in so doing to massively relocate and limit many features of this beloved and by then far-too-belated idea. In one of his speeches for the ballot, Grote assuages anxious men of status in a remarkable passage that, in fact, privileges influence, not critical publicity: How much influence over voters ought a rich man to have? As much as he can purchase? No, certainly—for even the present law forbids all idea of his purchasing any influence. Not as much as he can purchase, but as much as he deserves, and as much as unconstrained freemen are willing to pay him. Among unconstrained freemen, the man of recognised superiority will be sure to acquire spontaneous esteem and deference; these are his just deserts, and they come to him unbidden and unbespoken. But they will come to him tenfold, if along with such intrinsic excellencies, he possesses the extrinsic recommendations of birth and fortune—if he be recommended to the attention of his neighbours by the conspicuous blazon of established opulence and station—and if he be thus furnished with the means of giving ample range and effect to an enlightened beneficence.23

In this formulation, a truly free voter, freed by the protections of the ballot, is thus more susceptible to due influence, which is here described as a powerful potion of intrinsic merit and extrinsic privilege. Such a series of apparent paradoxes (freedom through protection, freedom of thought through the reception of influence, influence both earned and inborn) were in fact not so paradoxical at this time. In an era when legislative paternalism could yet seem a liberatory release from the exigencies of subsistence and aristocratic pillage, and social power could not yet be widely imagined distinct from social status, Grote’s utopian rhetoric is more practical than it at first appears. Influence had traditionally operated according to what might be called an “uncritical publicity” insofar as it was an instinctive, or at least habitual, experience in public. It is worth noting in Grote’s commentary how the practice of due influence is figured by him as visual (“conspicuous blazon”), not mental, while its effects are timed as “spontaneous,” not, explicitly at least, the product of a freeman’s deliberation or judgment, or even the result of discussion between the freeman and the man of recognized superiority, for the benefits of influence will come to the latter “unbespoken.” 23. Grote, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., vol. 17 (April 25, 1833), p. 622.

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More important, perhaps, its unbespoken operations carried with them the promise of easy sociability or, better yet, the more feeling gift of silent sympathy.24 In politics, the proper operation of “due” influence suggests an exchange that can occur only in a public sphere among sociable folk because different ranks of people would meet only in a public setting and would receive influential opinion regarding how to vote only if sympathetically open to it. Sympathy denotes the means by which such opinion would be ideally exchanged, and sympathy was possible in part because of the voters’ habituated, even organic, shared relation to locality. The socially inferior would, through sympathetic recognition built on common ground, share the general interest, not self-interest, of their social superiors, and the politically equivalent would confirm their common interests with their respected peers. In this way, two voters would vote in tandem. (As I will soon suggest, this assumption of common interests among socially distinct people is in part what changes by the midcentury.) Here is Sydney Smith’s narration of this process, in which he emphasizes the alchemical combining of “affections” with the understanding that responds to the diffusion of “due influence”: There is a town (No. 1) in which live two very clever and respectable men, Johnson and Pelham, small tradesmen, men always willing to run some risk for the public good, and to be less rich, and more honest than their neighbours. It is of considerable consequence to the formation of opinion in this town, as an example, to know how Johnson and Pelham vote. It guides the affections, and directs the understandings, of the whole population, and materially affects public opinion in this town; and in another borough, No. 2., it would be of the highest importance to public opinion if it were certain how Mr. Smith, the ironmonger, and Mr. Rogers, the London carrier, voted; because they are both thoroughly honest men, and of excellent understanding for their condition of life.25

Vertically or horizontally exerted, due influence is portrayed as a social rather than specifically cognitive practice. Johnson and Pelham are “clever” rather than thoughtful, “respectable” in the general social estimation rather than unconventional thinkers. Their politics is practical rather than philo-

24. Although I wish to emphasize “sympathy” as the lubricant of sociability and social cohesion, James Chandler has usefully emphasized the importance of “imitation” in Burke’s thinking on these matters. See Chandler, “Political Liberties,” 54–55. 25. S. Smith, Ballot, 8–9.

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sophical. “Willing to run some risk,” these modest gentleman nonetheless calculate risk and are therefore subjects interpellated by the market and its probabilities rather than the fully altruistic citizens we will see celebrated by midcentury liberalism. Although the reality of the traditional electoral process was perhaps far removed from such a patently nostalgic account of its legitimacy, public nominations, extensive days of door-to-door canvassing, and, especially, the public spectacle of open polling were still considered by many observers in the early nineteenth century to be the appropriate expressions of a public function.26 Public duties should be performed in public settings. Moreover, when the franchise was severely restricted, open nominations and polling were means by which, the historian James Vernon has suggested, nonelectors could be included in the political process, joining in the ayes and nays for nominated candidates and at least witnessing the decision of electors. These electors were, some observers argued, representatives of the disfranchised nonelectors just as surely as members of Parliament were representatives of their enfranchised electors.27 In this justification of public polling, the vote was considered a “trust”: one voter was thereby entrusted to vote in cognizance of his nonvoting neighbors—to vote, in effect, their common interests. By no means considered a version of direct representation, this paternalist conception of suffrage authorized the voter to exert a great deal of independence from those he “represented,” a conception, by the way, that was on occasion, as in notions of “virtual representation,” extended to the role of the members of Parliament, too. However, as long as there remained a presumption of common interests along a vertical plane, the limited suffrage in a public setting could seem to a wide variety of observers an expression of adequate representation. For many people, then, the act of voting for parliamentary elections had promoted and sustained a public world of sociability and sympathy that extended across the voting and nonvoting population, women included.28 The romance of this cohesive world did not dissipate rapidly, even when

26. Canvassing generally involved a retinue consisting of the candidate and one or more election agents paid by the candidate, who then went door-to-door to solicit the votes of electors. The journey was usually dictated by the voting histories that were publicly available in pollbooks from previous elections. Trollope, in his 1871 work Ralph the Heir, provides a full fictional account of such a canvass. 27. Vernon, Politics and the People, 78–80. 28. James Mill did not support female suffrage, on the grounds that a woman’s interest is “covered” by her husband. In Bentham’s Plan of Parliamentary Reform, 35–36, he is suggestively evasive on the matter of female suffrage.

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fists and boots had seemed to become the medium of sociability and sympathy. As late as 1868, even J. R. Sawyer, a grudging supporter of the ballot, could write with rich nostalgia to the radical George Holyoake, “I admire the spectacle of a calm determined man going to the polls and declaring openly & fearlessly his decision—and I confess the man who hides his political (or other) convictions in his own bosom striving neither to proselytize nor to be worked upon, and depositing his decision in secret in the Ballot Box has not my sympathy.”29 In this richly coded passage that I will eventually show to be profoundly uneven in its representation, we glimpse a world, perhaps only ever utopian, whose publicity is imagined as absolute. With its setting so public that it must instantly be imagined as a spectacle, polling day produces a public man of courage whose deepest convictions are themselves both public and highly social—always already working on and being worked upon in the public sphere. On this sociable stage, a man can be calm, not furtively fearful, while his opinions can be socially active but not at war with another’s. And perhaps most important of all, this public man implicitly elicits the observer’s sympathy, quite unlike the voter in the booth whose predilection for secrecy resonates throughout the passage as the hidden details of his convictions are parenthetically partitioned—“(or other)”—like the material partitions of the voting booth and then “deposit[ed]” in secret, as if the ballot box were an ever-moredeviant synecdoche for what now seemed his illicit opinions. Sawyer describes a setting where, in apparent agreement with Habermas’s narrative, civil society imposes the temperate standards of a communicative public opinion, but in Sawyer’s public sphere, public opinion communicates both critically and uncritically—through the potentially (but not certifiably) critical deliberations of what he calls “proselytism” and the potentially uncritical operations of influence—“to be worked upon.” In this latter phrase’s ambiguous connotation, in which the work might be physical or mental or both, there is perhaps a half-explicit concession that due influence is always already undue influence. The Earl of Rosebery’s contemporary counternarrative of electoral politics as a scene of “voter-baiting,” a world of riot that demands from an elector a martial spirit if not a martial state, shows how thoroughly Sawyer’s story was under duress by the 1860s and thereby reveals some of the terms of the later debate. Sociability is here nowhere apparent, but perhaps most important, publicity has become something else entirely. Instead of 29. Letter to George Holyoake, November 19, 1863; cited in Kinzer, Ballot Question, 110. Sawyer was an innovator of developing processes for photography in the 1860s and 1870s.

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a single calm man dominating the spectator’s view, where publicity fosters purity, elections are now viewed as sites of violent mob dissension and their publicity merely an incitement to riot. The descriptions of public polling offered by Sawyer and Rosebery are, therefore, additional if differing instances of a more general social interrogation of the function of publicity that throughout the nineteenth century helps delineate the contours of a new liberal privacy. More specifically, Rosebery’s rendition of polling, which in condemning publicity nonetheless grudgingly admires the physical rigor required to vote, also teaches us to see in Sawyer’s nostalgic rendering of his “fearless” elector the lineaments of what we will come to recognize as a midcentury thematic of manliness that earlier arguments for and against the ballot did not produce so regularly—or anxiously. The eulogistic tone of Sawyer’s defense of political public spectacle in the 1860s can be accounted for in part by noting in more detail Grote’s assessment of the electoral system in the 1830s, for even then, political publicity was a troubled domain: The elective system is, to a great extent, a failure and a nullity; for the basis on which the whole elective system rests—the source from which all its virtues are derived—the only characteristic distinguishing it from a vain mummery is the genuine suffrage of each qualified voter. So much for the public mischiefs of this compulsory voting. Add, besides, the fearful private mischief and immorality accompanying it—the solemn falsehood at the poll . . . the sense of self-abasement in the mind of every one, who thus feels himself degraded into the lifeless instrument of another’s will—the apathy and recklessness created . . . and the thousand angry feelings which accompany every where the workings of this private terrorism.30

The theatrical trope dominating Sawyer’s happy picture of election day is critically invoked when Grote describes the votes of economically dependent voters as “mere mummery,” the staged expression of the offstage political predilections of aristocratic puppeteers. Here the purity imparted by public spectacle is farce, and the horror of personal coercion is gothic—“private terrorism”—in a metaphoric pattern highly predictable in the early nineteenth century. From this formulation, one can quite clearly see how sociability can become a euphemism for undue influence, for bribery, and even for what seems the most corrupt enactment of public intimacy: personation, the imposture of one man as another. 30. Grote, Hansard, p. 613.

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It should be noted immediately, however, that publicity at this moment is not so much contrasted to some more-privileged liberal privacy, for it does not even seem operative in this passage. Instead, Grote espies in the present duplicity of publicity a sort of phantom privacy, a monstrous shadow that a degenerative publicity must always cast. Positing a debased privacy as the inevitable result of adulterated publicity, Grote’s criticism prefigures the liberal critique of Archdeacon Grantly that Trollope uses in The Warden. However, in the latter instance, the solution is a sanctioned and elaborated domain of cognitive privacy whereas with Grote the ballot is described as a means of salvaging a larger public sphere of influence. Precisely because of the farcical publicity of the vote, society is burdened with “private mischiefs” and “private terrorism,” the exercise of influence gone underground. Although suspicious of contemporary manifestations of political publicity, Grote reserves his most forceful rhetoric for the privacy it conceals; for most radicals in this period, it should be remembered, a “private” politics almost always functions as the secret locale for undue influence and treating. Ambivalent as these early-century critiques of publicity often were and, as we will see, would sometimes remain throughout the history of the ballot debate, they initiated a discussion about political publicity and privacy that would by the 1860s and 1870s culminate in the passing of the ballot into law. For many supporters in midcentury, however, the deeper structural reforms of the public and private spheres, implicit in the ballot legislation, were either unseen or unimportant in comparison to the supposed practical benefits of the ballot. Parliamentary proponents of the ballot, who were until the 1860s largely radicals and members of the advanced branch of the Liberal Party (Bright, Fawcett, Berkeley), believed that secret voting would significantly reduce instances of “undue influence,” bribery, and treating because those exerting pressure could never be certain that their intimidation and/or investment paid off. Instead of running a gauntlet that potentially consisted of landlords, customers, union officials, strong-arm party enforcers, and drunken mobs, and then announcing amid this unsympathetic crowd their votes, electors could enter a balloting station, pick up a voting paper, enter a booth, and, upon having made their mark in private, drop their secret ballot in a sealed box. Opponents of the ballot—and there were many right up to the moment of its passage—frequently argued on a similarly pragmatic level, charging that the ballot would not fulfill these reformist promises. They were to some degree banking on the older assumptions of human sociability and natural irrationality. Noting that folks often gambled on horses without

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certain return on their money and thus would continue to bribe and that electors, as sociable beings, would not be able to conceal for long their votes from their neighbors and friends and thus expose themselves to retribution, most Tories, Whigs, and even many radicals long resisted the ballot. Even when the extension of the franchise in 1867 incrementally altered the disposition of political power, many of the men who had acceded to this reform were not ready to welcome the secret ballot as its logical conclusion. Up to the moment of its passage in the House of Commons, there was little enthusiasm for the ballot’s implementation, even among some advanced Liberal Party members. If the enlarged franchise pointed to what were often called “democratical principles,” the ballot act seemed to suggest to these men an equally profound—and yet distinctive—alteration of the political landscape. Moreover, this alteration seemed to promise more intimate, even bodily, changes as well. The sheer scale of alteration was so unappealing that many opponents and some grudging proponents were driven, decade after decade, to label the secret ballot not only “un-English” but “unmanly,” as Anthony Trollope repeats in his Beverley campaign and again in An Autobiography.31 Clearly, the ballot legislation spoke to more profound alterations in the political landscape than are overtly implied by the sporadic installation across the country of polling booths and boxes. Thomas Carlyle, it seems, could see this. In one of his “Latter-Day Pamphlets,” Carlyle bitterly remarks with his characteristic bluntness, “‘If of ten men nine are recognisable as fools, which is a common calculation . . . how, in the name of wonder, will you ever get a ballot-box to grind you out a wisdom from the votes of these ten men?’”32 Implicitly, Carlyle notes that the ballot constitutes the elector as a discrete entity, specifically quantifiable (nine, ten). With this sort of insight, opponents would often argue in this vein: if men were no longer expected to vote according to collective interests, interests shared between them and their landlords, they would instead vote according to their own “discretion,” that is, according to their self-interest. Following this logic, the vote produced by balloting in private isolation would necessarily

31. Trollope, Autobiography, 302. On the ballot, Trollope was quoted as saying, on the hustings, “I am too great a Radical to love the ballot. I will not like to see any working man coerced as to the manner in which he gives his vote, but will much rather see him discharging his noblest duty openly and independently.” Beverley Recorder, November 14, 1868, cited in Tingay, “Trollope and Beverley Election,” 31. Trollope’s self-description of his “radicalism” seems, at best, a strong inversion of the politics of the ballot in the 1860s. Trollope’s dislike of the ballot demonstrates how deeply its presumptions hit at the core of liberal ambivalence. 32. Carlyle, “Parliaments,” 202.

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express only an elector’s private interest, and therefore, some opponents were quick to suggest, it was inevitably a piece of private property, regrettably subject to laws of alienation and thus bribery. Berkeley’s choice of tropes on the floor of Parliament perhaps fed this fear; in one of his annual speeches he compares the vote to the purchase of a horse and carriage: one may vote in any direction just as one may freely steer one’s own carriage.33 Because of this horse-and-market-driven conception of the vote, significant amounts of oppositional rhetoric accused ballot supporters of promoting rather than diminishing bribery and treating because one could presumably alienate one’s vote whenever and howsoever one wished. But there were larger issues at stake in this line of reasoning. Insofar as England’s status as a nation had hinged, for many such men, on a concept of shared interests, an electoral process that was presumed to privilege self-interest would surely at one and the same time construct a radically incoherent legislature, impossibly representing in one elected official myriad interests, and deconstruct the foundations of the English nation. This must partially explain the persistent belief in the secret ballot’s un-Englishness. Carlyle, however, seems equally if not more troubled by supporters’ claims that the ballot was a productive “machinery,” designed to produce something rather distinct in fact from a mere aggregation of those nine electors’ interests. In part, he resists what seem to be the magical claims made for the ballot and box as material entities. He reserves his most forceful disdain for the claims that the balloting booth itself would make wise men out of fools. Carlyle is perhaps expressing a Luddite revulsion to such assertions, evincing a disdain for Victorian society’s more general reverence for machines, a disdain echoed by Matthew Arnold, if for different reasons. But, more pointedly, Carlyle rejects the particular intellectual benefits that its supporters were apparently investing in the operation of the balloting booth and the ballot box: not just their supposed production of wise men out of fools but the production of wisdom itself. George Grote, a more philosophical champion of the ballot than Berkeley, had begun to articulate, as early as the 1820s, the special sort of alchemy that Carlyle detects more fully in the liberal fantasies attached to the ballot. For Grote, there are three sorts of interest: “the interest of an individual by himself apart—the interest of the same man jointly with any given fraction of his fellow-citizens—and his interest jointly with the whole body of his

33. From the liberal perspective amplified in this chapter, one could also read Berkeley’s metaphor as a fanciful and typically reductive (for Berkeley) articulation of “free thought.” Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., vol. 118 (July 8, 1851), p. 357.

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fellow-citizens—all these are distinct objects, abhorrent and irreconcilable in general, coinciding occasionally by mere accident.”34 For Grote, the ballot is not a conduit for the expression and representation of self-interest among rights-bearing electors, nor is it, like public polling, the inevitable expression of earlier collective forms of city and country interests; rather, it is the expression of what he variously calls the “interest of man jointly with the whole body of his fellow-citizens,” “the public good,” or the “national interest.” Even in the 1820s, then, we see supporters of the ballot trying to imagine a specifically political conception of the public that was no longer contingent on familiar types of publicity but also not dependent on cohorts of private interest. One must also note the shift from a conception of a “fraction of fellow-citizens” to the “whole body,” which is not simply a shift from part to whole but a shift from a numerical accounting of the public that concedes a mathematical autonomy to the part, to an organic one, which implies an integrated totality that Grote seems to privilege most. In speaking of the “public good,” Grote is therefore groping for a more universal but also what seems to us a more abstracted category of political value than the “sensible” utilitarian ground of pleasure and pain or the habituated and conventional attachments of sociable influence. This is an abstraction that nevertheless requires a “whole body.” Otherwise dedicated to the utilitarian notion of the self-interested man, Grote is nonetheless diverging from it when confronted with political rather than strictly economic values. By the 1850s, as Carlyle cannily realizes, the abstracted category of political value that Grote was only hazily articulating as a “national good” was increasingly understood to be an “idea” whose origin was the wise man of the balloting booth, otherwise known as a citizen with ideas. By the 1860s, those who elaborate on this earlier conception of “national” interest are by no means simply echoing Grote. Berkeley, Leatham, and others do not appear to think a nation is rendered coherent through channels of influence—as in Grote’s notion of “the recognition of superiority.” Likewise, their sense of the “public good” has almost nothing to do with the actual public circulating their sympathies on polling day. Along with other large-scale political reforms—the extension of the franchise, the redistribution of parliamentary districts, and the constriction of the length of elections themselves—the ballot as it was posited in the 1850s and more fully in the 1860s addressed new questions about the epistemology of electors, about the source of their political agency, and about the relation 34. Grote, “Essentials of Parliamentary Reform,” 30.

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between an individual elector and the rest of the voting population, all questions whose answers reconfigured the content and contours of the political public and private. The Ballot Society’s flyer (figure 1) provides some visual indication of these newly molded contours of the public and private spheres. As was common in print descriptions of open voting (Grote’s included), this depiction presents polling day as farce. The theatrical metaphor aptly evokes both the stagelike structure of the hustings, upon which candidates delivered their political soliloquies, and the behavior of the crowds, who are here shown to be like so many mixed occupants of the pit during the presentation of a farce: more engaged in their own collective performance than in the production on stage. In stark, instructive contrast to this public farce, ballot election is portrayed as a private event of immense solemnity. Privacy is repeated on multiple planes. Railings divide the room, which is further divided by a bank of booths, which themselves are divided into individual cubicles. The discrete interior spaces of the voting station thereby compulsively represent the narrowed field occupied by the elector, while the state officials, the only other residents in the polling station, represent the expanded national purview of the elector’s political thinking. The balloting booth especially figures what might be called the narrowed epistemological field in which the elector’s vote was to take shape. The men in the voting booths stand before clerks’ desks, pen in hand, seemingly oblivious to election officials and to each other. Utterly out of sight and thus presumably out of mind, landlords, employers, customers, and nonelectors exert no influence. Emphatically individuated, an emblem of solitary concentration in a private study that is situated within the exclusively national domain of the parliamentary polling place, the elector is now only able to produce a vote expressive of his own national opinion. Distraction is replaced by abstraction, the process by which a shopkeeper in Derby ignores his customers and his bottom line as he makes his own distinctive mark for the good of the nation. One might argue, as proponents of the ballot did, that the ballot’s enforcement of the vote as an expression of opinion, rather than the expression of more traditional interest, was merely upholding the principles implicit in the 1867 franchise extension. And, of course, this was surely true. Even Conservatives were by this time compelled to concede that electors, rich or poor, were entitled to vote as their conscience guided them, not as their social superiors demanded. As these debates demonstrate, however, it is quite wrong to assume that terms such as opinion and conscience were

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uniformly defined at this time, nor indeed were they throughout the century. If, as the architecture of secret voting exemplifies, a voter is absolutely cut off from both outside interests and influences and his own personal and domestic attachments when he votes, then what, precisely, counts as one’s own political opinion? What did opinion now mean? In these debates regarding the ballot, the sheer strangeness of liberal citizenship—its mysterious presence in the absence of the sociable, the influential, and the imitable—is registered in part by the kinds of social ramifications it seemed to indicate. To many observers, the ballot and its related legislation created mere empty containers, forms without content—the balloting booth, the ballot box, the detached elector. Hyperbolizing, some opponents wondered aloud if the legislature should also eradicate canvassing, casual political conversations among friends, even confidences among family in order to secure the purity of the elector’s opinion. In the ballot debate of the 1850s, the chancellor of the exchequer (Sir G. C. Lewis) registers what seems the stultifying isolation of the vote: “If no person is to be permitted to declare his vote and if an election is to be as secret and silent as a funeral, it seems to me that it would be a gross inconsistency to promote any intercourse whatever between a candidate and the electors[,] to permit a candidate to address the electors, or, indeed, to allow of electoral meetings at all.”35 And as Agar Ellis, MP, asked rhetorically in the 1872 parliamentary debate, “A voter might have a wife—he was not bound to hold his tongue to her?”36 The hyperbole speaks to what appears to be a genuine confusion. For many Georgians and even for many midVictorian Britons, it was impossible to imagine the formation of a political position, then largely understood as form of allegiance, outside the ken of the public sphere (however that sphere might be defined), the place where politics was presumed to happen. Without public exchange and circulation, whether it be through due or domestic influence or through irrational impulse or rational discussion, a citizen may as well be buried because his politics were effectively dead. Although some defenders of the ballot, for instance Leatham, reassuringly maintained that a communicative public sphere was central to the

35. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., vol. 146 (June 30, 1857), p. 666. G. C. Lewis was a free trader by philosophy, the chancellor of the exchequer during the Crimean War, and at one time an editor of the Edinburgh Review. 36. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., vol. 211 (May 30, 1872), p. 870. Ellis was the fifth viscount of Clifden.

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conscientious vote, their demands for rigorous isolation of the elector at the moment of the vote raised the suspicions of conservative opponents of the ballot. Conversations with friends (if not always with wives) and collaborations with party operatives, regular attendance at political party meetings, and daily newspaper consumption were all considered by many liberal reformers legal, appropriate (if newspapers reported responsibly), and quite necessary as an educative prelude to the voter’s final decision.37 Nonetheless, a historian must give some credit to the reactions of contemporary commentators, who predicted radical disjunction, even psychic dissonance, in the exfoliative transition from these exchanges to the voting booth. For all intents and purposes, these detractors sensed that the public prelude prior to secret voting mattered little. In open voting, the public that generated formal and informal kinds of canvassing remained in sight and in business even as the vote was recorded. Once these sorts of canvassing were to be prohibited on polling day, they had somehow seemed to become something else entirely, as did the vote itself. Although most critics of the ballot, engaged in the preservation of tradition rather than in the critique of a liberalism not yet complete, could not express the full nature of this liberalization of politics, it is clear that the micromanagement of the vote, manifest both in the balloting station’s interior space and in the machinery of the balloting booth, so deracinated the practice of registering one’s political position that opinion had for many voters little if no meaning as opinion. This apparent decontextualization of the vote therefore generated a complex debate about the ontology of political opinion in a liberalizing society and thus, in turn, about the epistemology of the voting subject.

Embodying Citizenship Both contemporaries and modern historians, including the ballot historian Bruce Kinzer, have found it hard to establish the degree to which “opinion out of doors” cared about the passage of the ballot bill. This modern interpretive difficulty arises in part because it was largely the location, the formation, and the value of public opinion that were fundamentally in dispute in the deliberations concerning the ballot. For many opponents,

37. Of course, Mill and other liberals had their worries about the newspapers, especially given their “dailiness” and hence their inability to reflect on the events of the day, but midcentury newspapers were a source for transcripts of political speeches in and out of Parliament and were thus a resource for the informed citizen.

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“public opinion” was against the ballot because it was silent on the issue. For them, the broader public’s negative opinion was gauged according to traditional principles of political publicity—in this instance, the relative paucity of petitions to Parliament and the lack of boisterous public gatherings on the subject. For supporters of the measure, however, it was just these gauging techniques that would be revised through balloting. Instead of public gatherings and formal petitions, the liberal supporters of the ballot provided in their stead what was believed to be a more accurate calibration of what was now a significantly altered conception of public opinion. This “public opinion” was to be found, paradoxically, in a new sphere of political privacy—where reserve, reflection, and reasoning practices were self- generated rather than socially ascertained.38 For traditionalists of one color or another, public opinion either preceded or encompassed individual political opinion; it was the guiding context in which a man made his electoral decision. In an 1853 parliamentary debate, Lord Palmerston voices a version of this ontology as he supports open voting: “This responsibility [to vote] has a great and governing influence on the mind of every honourable man, and I will not be one to deprive him of that publicity which keeps him in the right course.”39 Note how Palmerston implicitly replaces the universally reviled “undue influence” with a version of due influence, what he is quoted as calling “a governing influence on the mind” that can be exerted only in public and is figured as distinct from the mind of the elector. Palmerston seemingly adopts the terms of the older ballot debate, sharing a presumption of influence and publicity that even radical supporters of the ballot in that earlier era were articulating. Bentham, for instance, held the view that public opinion is most rightly imagined as a collective expression of the people and that it is distinct from and useful to individual political opinion: “Public opinion may be considered as a system of law emanating from the body of the people. . . . To the pernicious exercise of the power of government it is 38. Kinzer dwells at length on this conundrum: “No formidable extra-parliamentary agitation was mounted on its behalf at any time in the 1860s” (Ballot Question, 4). See also Kinzer, “Failure of ‘Pressure from Without,’” 399–422. By contrast, James Vernon argues that “from the early 1870s it again became the battlecry of all sections of plebeian liberalism” (Politics and the People, 295). Although the latter is not necessarily a direct refutation of Kinzer’s opinion, it suggests that tracing public opinion on this matter has not been easy, in part because of the varied criteria used to measure and identify it. In Ballot Question, Kinzer provides an excellent bibliography of the pamphlets and newspaper articles that addressed the ballot. Some of particular note: Dixon, Free Voting; Whitehurst, Ballot; [Thompson], Catechism on the Ballot. 39. Palmerston, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., vol. 134 (June 13, 1854), p. 70.

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the only check; to the beneficial an indispensable supplement.”40 For Bentham, public opinion functions as a “sensible” restraint of the state. Despite its conservative content, and its evocation of influence, Palmerston’s argument against the ballot registers the passage of time and points to the shifts in midcentury attitudes toward politics and political identity. Although Palmerston privileges influence, he describes a specifically mental influence, an interior process that affects the mind, not the social and socializing person, and thus his discursive terminology locates him firmly within the 1860s. By the midcentury even supporters of open balloting formulate publicity in terms of its relation to an individuated privacy characterized by processes of cognition. In this regard, Sawyer’s provocative support of open voting, which I have already quoted at length, needs to be reassessed in terms of the cognitive values of the 1860s, for it now seems possible that “the spectacle of a calm determined man going to the polls and declaring openly & fearlessly his decision” articulates a quasi-liberal (not just nostalgically conservative) conception of opinion formation, for the man enters the public sphere with his “decision” already in hand. In this rereading of the passage, the political opinion is formulated elsewhere, in private, and only then brought into public circulation. From this revised perspective, Sawyer may indeed yearn for public polling but has already, almost unconsciously, revised his understanding of the public sphere in light of midcentury liberalism’s criticism of its new participants and its alternative privileging of private, political deliberation that generates a “determined man going to the polls.” His grudging support for the ballot thus concedes the need for a private space where opinion can be made. Some resistant Tories, motivated by sheer political expediency, were protecting in their defense of open polling the traditional influence exerted by the landed interest—an influence by this time widely considered “undue influence.” However, it is also fair to say, as is evident in Palmerston’s “the mind of every honourable man,” that many opponents of the ballot were by midcentury willing to concede the significant role of a voter’s own “mind” and therefore accept the correspondingly substantial reduction in the role of “unbespoken” influence. Nevertheless, they felt compelled to introduce some form of external governance of that mind, an influence that in the last instance must be public and, it seems, still sensible—in both denotations of that word. In this regard, many were still casting back in time for models of visible and palpable sociability. In his brief historical summary of the term public opinion, J. A. W. Gunn suggests 40. Bentham, Correspondence, 168.

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that during the eighteenth century its most dominant connotation was “the sense of the people.”41 In Bentham’s formulation, cited earlier, for instance, the political thinker sees public opinion “emanating from the body of the people”(emphasis added). This is notably unlike Lord Northumberland’s fragmented accounting of the people, post-1867, that opened the second chapter of this book. He spoke of “an immense class of voters peculiarly exposed to intimidation and personal violence on the part of members of their own body.” In Bentham’s phrase, the body of the people is intact, still sensing itself whole and making sensible decisions. It now seems apparent that under this older system the vote itself is by no means a mere mark on a paper, neutrally registering a rational choice thought out elsewhere, but instead a vocal and bodily sensation—the felt enactment of one’s political role. In a related way, due influence had been considered to be a visible, sensate effect, still embedded in the economy of display that undergirds deferential networks, still associated with the observable marks of social privilege and reputation and the physical dynamics of social intimacy. By the 1860s, however, sensation becomes a problem. The physical privacy that is sought through the construction of actual walls and barriers in the polling place, divisions necessitated by the implementation of the ballot, would aggressively separate the elector from the “body of the people.” “Untouched” by that body, the elector would now be individuated, capable of independent thought, not corporate sensation. From this vantage point, the liberal citizen might be presumed to be disembodied by the booth—inhaling the ether of pure reason. The booth’s removal of the human body from the public setting certainly confirms the extent to which public opinion and “influence” in particular were presumed by its opponents and supporters alike to be physical, almost tactile operations, reliant on principles of sight, sense, and, indeed, sensibility. No longer comfortable with this politics of sensibility, for instance, Sawyer replaces a feeling person with a courageous man, in order to differentiate the elector from a sensibility now largely associated with feminine emotionalism stationed in the home. And yet, in so asserting an ethic of manliness, where even the vote protected by the booth and box expresses a manly courage, the ballot discourse reintroduces an apparently bodily component to the liberal citizen. This deep connection, sometimes figurative but often quite literal, between making a vote and manly courage is everywhere apparent in the later ballot debate, revealing, by the way, one of the many reasons why female 41. Gunn, “Public Spirit to Public Opinion,” 275. For more on public opinion, see Speier, “Historical Development of Public Opinion”; Palmer, “Concept of Public Opinion.”

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suffrage had so few champions before the end of the nineteenth century. The relation between manliness and the vote is asserted by opponents and supporters alike, but each defines the relation in a different way, on opposite sides of the public and private divide. The midcentury opponents of the ballot posit the man in the midst of the social body, but, unlike their early nineteenth-century predecessors, they do not describe a sensible and sociable exchange; rather, the elector’s body and the social body are analogously but oppositionally physical, in effect insensitive to each other. If the social body had been dismembered by midcentury and each of its now amputated limbs had become reflexively combative, then the elector must defend himself. In this construction, public voting is strength training for the citizen, a physical enactment of conviction. One opponent of the ballot effeminizes the voting booth even as he coaches the elector, echoing Kant: “Surely if ever there was a muscle that required exercise for its development it is liberty. The security of secrecy may be very pleasant and luxurious, but it will assuredly be enervating and fatal to the possibility of making moral and political muscle.”42 The eradication of this test of manliness through the institution of a ballot therefore elicits among its detractors predictable concerns about the “unmanliness” of secret voting. Kinzer suggests that these worries concerning “manliness” are probably related to customary chains of association in England that link secrecy to effeminacy and both to the Roman Catholic Church. Secrecy, furtiveness, and hypocrisy were stereotypical characteristics of an imperialistic religion long thought of as “she.”43 However, the decline of deferential influence and the rise of the ballot had more direct links with the feminine. The extension of the 1832 franchise had introduced a sort of household suffrage, the granting of the vote to mostly wealthy owners of homes. Insofar as it privileged the domain of the household, it had appeared to many observers to enhance if not utterly to enfranchise another form of influence: feminine influence. Especially by the 1830s, when the division of labor and bourgeois social values had become more pronounced, the wife and mother was increasingly seen as the heart not the head of the household. The privatization of the vote could be seen as an additional protection of this privilege. Represented as a “closet,” located amid a roaring hearth and upholstered chairs, the voting booth could somewhat circuitously connote intimate,

42. [Maitland], “Ballot Not Secret Voting,” 566. Maitland was an author and spiritualist who in the 1860s and 1870s wrote for many of the leading intellectual and political journals, including the Fortnightly Review. 43. Kinzer, “Un-Englishness of Secret Ballot,” 243–44.

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domestic space ruled by that space’s now customary authority: the wife. J. S. Mill, at the time when he famously withdrew his support for the ballot (1859), imagined with dismay the process through which insinuating feminine influence worked on a male elector: “But the general effect on him of her character, so long as her interests are concentrated in the family, tends but to substitute for individual selfishness a family selfishness, wearing an amiable guise, and putting on the mask of duty.”44 Mill’s worries seem less paranoid when set alongside George Jacob Holyoake’s disappointed response to this revered philosophical radical’s change of heart. Certain that “manliness” was at issue in the secrecy afforded by the ballot, Holyoake counters with a model of assertive masculinity that is located in just the space of domestic intimacy that Mill considers dangerously inappropriate as a site of political deliberation. “But there is a second description of secrecy which is manly, as when I lock my doors against intrusive or impertinent people—as when I exclude others from meddling with my affairs without my consent—or when I provide for the protection of my own interests in my business or my family.”45 In this broadly patriarchal description, the balloting booth is an extension of the locked doors of one’s business, which is, in turn, equivalent to the governance exerted by a man within his family: the civic, the private, and the domestic are all one. Holyoake thus considers the vote a type of property right, and this renders him susceptible to the charges of self-interest launched against Berkeley. This exchange between J. S. Mill and Holyoake reveals the discursive limits of the ballot debate: if not interest, then self-interest; if not aristocratic influence, then feminine influence. It also reveals the tenaciousness of influence as a physical operation of sociability and intimacy, for feminine influence, like its aristocratic relative, insinuates itself through emotional and bodily proximity. Given these limited conceptions of privacy at the time and the resiliency of influence, it is hardly surprising that some opponents wondered aloud why the Liberal government did not simply promote voting at home, a practice that had in fact been debated at one point in the deliberations but was roundly defeated when put to a vote. Home voting would, in this argument, officially ratify the private (read: domestic) formation of opinion that the balloting booth seemed to enforce.

44. Mill, “Enfranchisement of Women,” 442. See also [Becker], “Political Disabilities of Women,” 50–70. Mill, in Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, switched sides in the debate; he feared that voters’ self-interest would be, as Kinzer reports, “positively injurious to the wellbeing of the community.” Kinzer, Ballot Question, 73. 45. Holyoake, New Defence of Ballot, 3.

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For instance, one member of Parliament worried about the moment when the election agent arrived to pick up the home vote: “Was it right that the agent should be able to find the voter at home with his voting paper and be able to appeal to the wants of his children and perhaps the fears of his wife?”46 The landslide rejection among ballot supporters of voting at home implies that they were searching for another sort of privacy. This space could shed the electoral process’s reputation for the secret conspiracies that come with numbers (treating, impersonation) and instead become the site of an altruistic but also manly choice. Another look at the Ballot Society’s flyer confirms this: the ballot was not the apotheosis of Victorian domestication, for in contrast to home voting, balloting was still a comparatively public event. To be sure, the highly theatricalized spectacle of the hustings had been taken indoors and the indiscriminate public crowds dispersed, but polling stations remained in central locations in both borough and county, such that electors could still be seen by the general population marking their political opinion, if not openly declaring it.47 And doing so, despite naysayers, in an interior space insistently free of the distractions of home and community. The effects of the ballot, then, were multiple. The balloting stations would not merely privatize a certain kind of once-public behavior but also publicize this form of privacy, a specifically political and cognitive privacy of the public sphere. Separated from the social body, the classed body, even the influential body of his wife, the elector, however, was not precisely disembodied himself, even if his senses and sensed attachments were no longer the primary engine of his now rationally disinterested trains of thought. Although the valuation of cognition that is central to midcentury liberalism grows out of the associationist tradition of Locke and James Mill, its mournful skepticism toward the senses is most manifest in the status of the body in the balloting booth. Enclosed in a narrow and empty space of isolation, the body in the booth could be plausibly interpreted as pure bodiliness, its skin and bones and muscles no longer tingling with the touch of the social and the conventional and habitual but with the sense of themselves. Without referents beyond itself, the body could well become the single object

46. Torrens, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., vol. 188 (June 20, 1867), p. 189. Torrens was an independent liberal who won his seat at Finsbury on a platform of extended suffrage and the ballot. 47. Most supporters of the ballot lobbied long and hard for a significant increase in the number of polling stations, especially in the less densely populated countryside.

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of the elector’s attention. One might then think of that body as autoerotic, which is possibly yet another subtext at this time for the perpetual accusations of the ballot’s “unmanliness.” The body housed in the balloting booth is decidedly not this sort of sensualized being; it remains a manly body but an abstracted (not sexualized) embodiment of manliness, suffused with cognitive practices of abstract and disinterested political thought that are coded as masculine. In this way, the elector not only thinks altruistically in terms of the national good but thinks it independently, courageously, boldly; the strong male body that houses liberal cognition thus metonymically emboldens the elector’s idea of the nation, rendering it a felt conviction but a feeling that is not about the body or bodies. The feeling experienced by an elector in the booth is an abstracted sensation that is also a feeling for abstractions—the public good, the national good, the good of the British Empire. The potentially agonizing journey from the private sphere to the public sphere—with its dangers of physical attack, mental terrorism, and domestic torture—has become no journey at all. Cognitive privacy has become portable in the ballot and therefore overcomes what might otherwise be sensed as the alienation of its opinions in the political arena. The ballot, quite literally, concentrates one’s thoughts, condenses one’s interests into the disinterested casting of the vote. This aims indeed to be a politics without pain, precisely what some conservatives found so objectionable.

The Philosopher-Citizen In spite of their zeal for electoral autonomy, the staunchest supporters of the ballot did not agree that they had utterly privatized and therefore perverted political opinion. Indeed, from the perspective of many supporters, this peculiar form of publicized privacy specifically responded to some of the opponents’ worries concerning the ballot. By retaining a public site for private polling, the Ballot Act could be seen as a hedge against just those forms of privacy that seemed contradictory to the national spirit of parliamentary elections. The balloting booth in particular acted as both protection and security. Isolated in his booth, the male elector was surely protected from the last-minute importunities of domestic influence. At the same time, this public isolation also secured the national good from the moral susceptibilities of the mere human, largely eradicating the treacherous privacies, among them self-interest, that Grote considered so rampant in traditional polling. One member of Parliament declared, “The Ballot

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might be right or it might be wrong, but at all events, it professed to be a neutralization of influences of a private and personal kind.”48 The comparatively public spectacle of the ballot thus offset private considerations, those narrow business and domestic interests that make for a self-interested vote. But it also blocked out personal concerns, the intimate beliefs and prejudices that make a thoughtless vote. Most important, the balloting booth supplied its own, alternative conditions of possibility. Unlike the observations of a landlord or the whining remonstrances of the wife, the horizontal bank of expressionless officials monitoring the voting in the Ballot Society’s sketch are representatives of the disinterested state, the appropriate ratiocinative horizon for the elector’s deliberations concerning a national election. Anyone familiar with liberal ideologies will recognize this crucial construct—the state as disinterested reason—which then functions here as the mental prompt in which the nation is thought. As spectacle, the ballot furthered the object of governance by displaying to the general populace the necessarily sequestered and enclosed scene of abstraction, the vital procedure of disinterest that guarantees the production of the public good from an aggregation of usually private individuals. Insofar as the “public good” is a state-authorized articulation of how to govern the people who vote, the ballot seems to fetishize in miniature, and ritualistically (at least every seven years), that long-term Western narrative of modernity, described by Foucault, the process by which a territory subject to the sovereign’s interest is realized instead as a population in need of governance. In this regard, the Ballot Act may seem like a Foucauldian technology for the mass production of the modern subject, the sovereign subjectivity who is in fact a subjected subjectivity constituted by the disciplining methods of “governmentality.”49 Confined to the balloting booth, 48. Torrens, Hansard. 49. See Foucault on the “governmental state,” which is “essentially defined no longer in terms of its territoriality, of its surface area, but in terms of the mass of its population with its volume and density, and indeed also with the territory over which it is distributed, although this figures here only as one among its component elements.” Foucault, “Governmentality,” 104 (also discussed in Foucault, “Birth of Biopolitics”). Given my description of utilitarianism in the introduction, it might seem, in fact, that midcentury liberalism is much more about “disciplinary internalization” than this earlier period of nineteenth-century reform because it emphasizes thinking and thought processes. However, unlike utilitarian consequentialism, which was most interested in changing behaviors through routine and thereby producing routinized subjects who fully complied with their slots in society, this postutilitarian reform sought to define political space as that which was, above all, not routine. Moreover, utilitarianism focuses its commitments toward effects, while midcentury liberalism is deeply invested in causes, which manifest themselves quite explicitly in the legislative orientation of liberal governance. In aiming to guarantee a space of cognitive privacy where “individual” thought might prosper,

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the elector internalizes the order of its policing monitor. The booths and boxes, along with voter registration lists and election officials, nominating petitions and regulated polling days, strictly define both what constitutes electoral politics and what constitutes the politics of the elector; from this perspective, the booth seems more like a panopticon than a space of free thought. As many liberals themselves feared, following Carlyle, the balloting booth was simply a machine, a machine for the making of more machines—automatons, not wise voters. Certainly when midcentury liberalism seeks to codify into law the “proper” form of politics in the balloting booth, it also seeks to reproduce liberal citizens. To this extent, Foucault’s narrative works. But insofar as liberalism codifies the form of politics and not the content, creates a booth for the vote but does not dictate the final selection of candidates, it posits a space of free thought whose operations, as I will show later, are not always so formal, so proper, as one might predict given Foucault’s grim account of discipline. Once abstracted from predictable political conventions, the liberal citizen could engage in “free thought,” certainly bound by rules and regulations but potentially unpredictable, indeed eccentric, in the political conclusions his thinking might reach. Not too long after the institution of the secret ballot, one should recall, the Liberal Party, which sponsored the secret ballot, lost its majority to the Conservatives. The endless concerns expressed in the ballot debate regarding the provenance of the vote—for instance, the persistent desire to trace the voting paper to the physical hand that marked it and thus to the ordinary man who made the mark—reminds us that the ballot and the balloting booth, despite their claustrophobic design, posited a “freedom” from the ordinary that typifies and also terrifies mid-Victorian liberalism. The balloting booth is a heuristic but not a consistently disciplinary device. An abstracting mechanism, it was meant to instill practices of disinterested deliberation in the quotidian human otherwise distracted by habitual calculations of material interest and the unconscious beckonings of influence. For its most idealistic supporters, the ballot induces liberal thinking in bodies that otherwise live according to habit and custom. These supporters of the ballot were to some extent aware of the ballot’s more subtle technological advantages. E. A. Leatham, the gentleman who took over parliamentary advocacy of the ballot when Berkeley’s ill health prevented him,

midcentury liberalism largely differs from utilitarian reformism but also—as eccentricity (see chapter 1)—complicates the extent to which disciplinary internalization can fully define practical subjectivity.

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provides a remarkably penetrating and complete analysis of the ballot’s effects in one of his longest speeches on the subject. Taking issue with the necessity of public polling, Leatham argues that the ballot quite rightly and rather miraculously reconstitutes both the elector and the public. The public is divided in its own mind, and at the very moment when it would pretend to criticize my choice, it is dependent upon my choice, among many, for the way in which it is finally to make its own. . . . The fact is, that our opponents mistake the knot of persons by whom each voter is surrounded for the public. I demand the exclusion of this knot of persons, in order that he may see the real public which stands beyond. The public which stares the philosopher in the face in his closet with such intensity of expression that he can see nothing else, is absolutely shut out by the voter’s entourage. Put the voter into a closet, and he may see what the philosopher sees. At present he sees his landlord with startling distinctness; he studies every line in the frown of his displeased customer; the sawgrinders’ deputy peers round the corner at him. . . . But the public which is on such easy terms with the philosopher is to him a distant and retreating shadow, armed neither with horse-pistols nor notices to quit.50

At the most practical level, then, ballot supporters believed that the ballot brilliantly managed the predicted results of continued suffrage expansion and mounting democratic pressures, especially in a nation where large numbers of people still lived in the countryside, and thus where local loyalties remained strong. The electors would first and foremost be perceived—pragmatically—as undifferentiated people mired in their material and social element, not long extracted from the voter-baiting mob, “that knot of persons.” As human beings, they possess desires, interests, and senses, which are highly susceptible to the stares, frowns, and peerings of influence, the process through which public opinion had traditionally taken shape. If, then, they were to vote as human beings, mere mortals under the influence of traditional public opinion, they might well stagnate the nation or—if according to their own needs—usher in catastrophic social change, as Arnold prognosticates in Culture and Anarchy. For ballot supporters, then, any technology that would prevent the political expression of one’s elemental will is welcome, but one that might displace desire, interest, and influence and momentarily transubstantiate that same mortal 50. E. A. Leatham, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., vol. 194 (March 16, 1869), pp. 1489–90.

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into a disinterested and rational citizen—a “philosopher”—is a thing of genius.51 The perceptual emptiness of the balloting booth would divest the British commoner of his common self, creating in his place an originary abstraction, the philosopher-citizen. As abstraction, the citizen would be freed from all material limitations, including personal limitations. Through the process of balloting, the elector would become a “philosopher” who not only thinks of himself as an abstraction but thinks according to abstractions, what the Newcastle Chronicle called “‘the abstract truths of political science.’”52 These scientific truths, in turn, generate other effective abstractions, such as, to use Leatham’s terms, the “real public,” the “philosopher’s public,” or in Grote’s phrase, “the nation,” and all are pointedly unlike former conceptions of “public opinion.” Generated through philosophy or reason, these opinions are themselves rational, not subject to the whims of rumor or to emotional excesses of sympathetic entreaties. Additionally, as effects of a cause (the philosopher-citizen), they are the result of a process of independent deliberation, not the mystically instantaneous insinuations of “unbespoken” influence. The thinking citizen of the balloting booth is presumed to be immune from coercion and the alienation of market practice, and therefore he is assumed to be no longer prone to bribery: his thought is free. As abstractions, these citizens no longer, at least theoretically, need to relate directly either to the bodies of influence—aristocrats, women, other nonelectors—or to their bodily and material good. Opinion about the “nation’s good” can conceivably take shape without consideration of particular and tangible populations or constituencies. One anonymous commentator, in a Westminster Review article entitled “Liberty and Light,” 51. Leatham considers these political philosophers to be those who precede and who define public opinion. Neither they nor, indeed, the public opinion they define by their abstract reasoning should be confused with the “general will” described by Rousseau in The Social Contract. Leatham dreams of philosophers in this passage who are not natural philosophers. They do not submit themselves to a general will out of a “natural” observation that their individual will cannot preserve them. Rather than being born metaphysicians, they become so. Second, they are metaphysicians insofar as they are abstract thinkers, who are, by definition, disinterested and, therefore, dispassionate. Note how the will is pointedly replaced by reason in Leatham’s vision. In this regard, Leatham’s philosophers constitute a later stage in the history outlined in Hirschman’s book The Passions and the Interests, which concludes in the early nineteenth century when he writes of Bentham’s subsumption of passion into interest (109). For Rousseau’s “general will, “ see Social Contract, esp. 15: “Each of us places in common his person and all his power under the supreme direction of the general will; and as one body we all receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.” 52. Editorial, Newcastle Chronicle, April 7, 1859.

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appropriately evoking Arnold, helpfully articulates this new sort of thinking, which carefully distinguishes between the customary “body” of public opinion and the public good thought by the voter: “The voter is bound to follow his own best judgment as to what is for the public good, rather than to consider what it may be that the public believes to be for its own good.”53 Here, traditional public opinion is absolutely exiled from its a priori position—no longer the point of origin nor the motivating cause of the voter’s own political opinion. However, most amazingly perhaps, the liberal citizen nonetheless retains his sensations but now in a cognitive, abstracting register, for “the public which stares the philosopher in the face in his closet with such intensity of expression that he can see nothing else” is now a sensed idea of the public. In this startling passage, the visible sociability of influence in the public sphere is transposed with no diminution of visibility to a mental domain, where conversation, circulation, and deliberation become a cognitive communion of such intimacy that the citizen “can see nothing else.” Opinion formation is imagined by Leatham as limited within the parameters of an individual’s cognition, a space of formal order that seemed to many ballot supporters to be much less prone to confusion and contestation than public opinion.54 Drawing a distinction but not a wall between the public and the private, the booth preserves opinion from the public domain’s constant interruptions and upheavals—its “horse-pistols” and “notices to quit”—by emphasizing the formal order of private cognition that yet operates amid the everyday. Indeed, in the aforementioned passage, the author suggests that a more customary form of public opinion is difficult to gauge (“what it may be”), particularly if, as Leatham argues, its visibility only serves to confuse the mind’s eye, rendering the philosopher’s public “a distant and retreating shadow.” If the older, less-valued version of public opinion is incomprehensibly chaotic, as evoked in Leatham’s long row of heterogeneous constituents, and “divided in mind,” then it

53. “Liberty and Light,” 392. 54. Note how Leatham responds to J. S. Mill’s worry that the ballot would encourage voters to treat their vote as a personal commodity: “Or this argument is based on the hypothesis that a man’s conscience is a thing outside him, something which he borrows from the public and leaves in the ante-room of the polling-booth with his umbrella” (Leatham, Hansard). Such a figuration shows how thoroughly the debaters accepted the implicit relation between spatial architecture and the mental and moral architecture of the voter, but more important, it reveals the extent to which Leatham wishes to detach the voter’s moral and intellectual thought from the public and its space.

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cannot be effectively incorporated into a voter’s deliberations. Note also how this description of the vote privileges the cognitive abstractions that were presumed implicit in the elector’s vote (his “judgment of the public good”) and otherwise ignores the fact that the vote is always attached to a particular candidate, much less abstract than the principles that were now presumed to determine the outcome of his election. That an elector was now to represent this abstraction—odd as it is—is the subject of chapter 6. In this liberal discourse, the emphasis placed on this process of cognition must necessarily if awkwardly revise the status of the candidate in the electoral process, a revision discussed in more detail shortly. Although opponents regularly complained about the dangers of “quarantine,” supporters of the ballot believed that it merely institutionalized rather than prescribed a preexisting mediation or—in its worst construction—disjunction between the public and the private. By the 1860s and 1870s, the critique of public opinion had arrived at a rather different point in history than when William Hazlitt likened public opinion to reputation and both to scurrilous rumor.55 And yet, Hazlitt’s skepticism hints at the coming devaluation by midcentury of circulation in the social realm. The eradication of the Stamp Act, the increased efficiency of cheap paper production, the rise in literacy and leisure time, and the concomitant advance in the pleasure industries suggests that the diminished chatter of coffeehouses or salons in Hazlitt’s day had for liberals of a later generation degenerated even further, as Trollope’s characterization in The Warden of Mr. Harding’s sojourn in a London cigar divan confirms. Inscrutable public opinion, whether traditional or modern, therefore necessarily awaits the formal and formalizing judgment of the citizen, whose own opinion more directly produces what’s called public opinion but which is now an idea of public opinion, an orderly formulation of popular preferences, not the direct and chaotic expression of them. The extent to which public opinion had become a thought and the public outside the mind had become incomprehensible is implicitly registered in Leatham’s formulation, where the public itself possesses a mind, but a sadly divided one. The writer of “Liberty and Light” seems to echo this cognitive uncertainty of the public when he speaks of what the public “believes to be for its own good.” In both evocations, the public’s relation to its opinion seems problematically belated but also mediated and therefore experienced as a site of difference and dissension that cannot possibly express a 55. Hazlitt, “On Public Opinion,” 311–15.

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unified conception of the nation. One again recalls the dismembered public of Lord Northumberland’s phrasing: “members of their own body.”56 Presumed unmediated by comparison, the abstract citizen is portrayed as more easily thinking the abstract nation. Following the logic of Leatham’s extended conceit, liberal, politically useful public opinion is a shadow cast by the citizen, a reflection in both senses of the word. Product of the reflection that the balloting booth enables, public opinion is by no means a “mere” reproduction of its source, just as the reflections cast by light do not perfectly mirror the lit image. Instead, as Grote had implied, public opinion is something more than the aggregation of regional and individual interests, and yet at the same time something less, too—for as a shadow, public opinion is dependent and belated, quite specifically an afterthought of the independent thoughts that constitute the electoral returns. A complex of paradoxes, this real public opinion, which is most real and importunate when most shadowy and retreating, and which is shadowy even as it is blinding, is not much unlike the voting closets that create its condition of existence, for it prevents the voter and perhaps even the candidates from seeing or thinking anything else. One can see, given the value accorded mental deliberation and reflection in the balloting booth, why the communicative public sphere was still pedagogically valuable for some supporters of the ballot, but it was no longer the location of political opinion formation. It was, therefore, a considerably less vital sort of public sphere than the theatrical, sociable, and physically intimate one associated with eighteenth-century politics and critically immortalized in some of the engravings of Hogarth.57 In place of these scenes of physical intimacy and raucous activity, midcentury liberalism offered the Fortnightly Review as a more appropriately formal venue for the exchange of opinion, and it lobbied for the booth as the more creditable site for opinion’s registration. As the ballot debate and related legislation suggest, there was indeed less emphasis placed on certain kinds of domestic and/or civic political conversations, especially those at home, in the public houses, and during the official canvassing period that occurred between nomination and election of candidates. However, there was also to be less of the insidious, often nonverbal exchanges of influence on pub-

56. Northumberland quoted in Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., vol. 212 (July 8, 1872), p. 764. 57. Vernon also makes the argument that electoral reforms privatized political activity, thus altering the public sphere (Politics and the People, 106–7). On the demarcation of a new political domain, see also Joyce, Rule of Freedom, 113–14.

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lic polling days.58 The 1871–72 legislation, for instance, considered shortening the canvassing period, even as it aimed to close all public houses and disperse holiday crowds on the date(s) of the vote. Instead of these relatively intimate and most often public modes of political exchange, greater attention and value were accorded to, on the one hand, commentary in national periodicals and newspapers and, on the other, authorized gatherings of legal political parties and their associated membership drives. The rise of political parties and the building of party organization in the nineteenth century is its own field of historical specialization, which I will not attempt to summarize.59 However, the rise of party dominance created enormous challenges to and contradictions in midcentury liberalism. I simply want to show here how the wished-for effects of the ballot were importantly related to these large historical trends. Although many historians have argued that the rise of party enhanced rather than abridged the social component of politics in the nineteenth century (political clubs, debating societies, etc.), the ballot’s intentions, at the very least, force us to reconceptualize some of the effects of party building and party proselytism in public. Party meetings are not at first glance greatly different from other sorts of public gatherings staged prior to the ballot bill. Insofar, though, as such meetings sought to circulate ideologies (Liberal, Whig, Conservative) rather than exchange and consolidate the powers lodged in influence, and thus to produce what were then deemed political opinions rather than customary habits of loyalty to traditional interests and localities, they served the 58. Note Godwin’s comment to Shelley regarding the appropriate venue for political discussion: “Each man talks to his neighbor in the freedom of congenial intercourse, as he happens to meet with him in the customary haunts of men, or in the quiet and beneficent intercourse of each other’s fireside.” Quoted in Shelley, Letters of Shelley, 261. In this context, Godwin is providing an alternative to public gatherings and corresponding societies that were considered by many observers to be inciters of social unrest. By midcentury, one can quite clearly see how a liberal conception of publicity addresses—through abstraction and limited anonymity rather than through custom and domesticity—the potentially violent forms of congregation that had marked the earlier years of the century. Thanks to Julie Dugger, whose work drew my attention to this letter. 59. There is a tremendous amount of work on the “rise” of party politics in the nineteenth century; the following represent, therefore, a selected bibliography of sources. For a still-influential discussion, see Hanham, Elections and Party Management. For a study of party informed by more recent thinking on “language” in social and political history, initiated by G. Jones, see his work Languages of Class. See also Lawrence, Speaking for the People. For a classic interpretation of the impact of party, see Michels, Political Parties. For a long view of party politics, see B. Harrison, Transformation of British Politics; Pugh, Modern British Politics. For accessible, “synthetic” surveys, see Adelman, Gladstone, Disraeli; A. Hawkins, British Party Politics; and the most penetrating of these surveys, Belchem, Class, Party and Political System.

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cause of liberal abstraction, which considered the possession of political opinion—or, more specifically, political opinion as reasoned and reasonable idea—a precondition of citizenship. To be sure, there was considerable friction between such party ideology, generated collectively and often adopted thoughtlessly, and the purity of the elector’s vote; party thinking could also be seen as a kind of “undue influence” and become in its extremity the opposite of reasonable politics. The ascetic isolation of secret balloting was therefore considered insurance against this form of influence as well, calming the passions that public meetings stoked and condensing ideologies into the one idea that was the vote.

Circumscribing the Political Sphere As an abstract citizen whose personal and social interests have been neutralized in the balloting booth, one elector is equivalent if not identical to every other elector and plausibly thinks much like another, or, to be precise, his procedure of thinking is much like another’s, evincing one of the formalist features of liberal theory. What Chantal Mouffe has recognized in Rawls’s liberalism is also true of that expressed through the ballot: “Citizens in a liberal democracy need share only beliefs about procedural matters, about rules concerning getting along together.”60 Indeed, one can argue that the spectacle of the balloting booth dramatizes this formal feature of liberalism more generally. Because the elector’s choice is no longer visible on the political stage, the administrative apparatuses through which the choice is accomplished become, in effect, the performance itself. Moreover, as John Rawls would perhaps refuse to concede, a shared belief in procedure, in this case the ballot, can come very close to shared beliefs in general, for, as Foucault has warned us, the procedure is in some real sense the idea itself. The technologies that the elector is subjected to are also those that render him a thinking subject, as the most optimistic supporters of the ballot, such as Leatham, seemed to imply. Argued hyperbolically, it not only matters little whether John Smith or Robert Brown is sent to Parliament, but there is no significant difference between a Conservative or Liberal candidate. The Liberal victory has already occurred when political difference is in some sense reduced to mere changes of mind—the voter’s choice—that are themselves radically detached as disinterested thought from the rest of the voter’s life, his social setting, and, to some extent, the politics that arguably emerge from and in the social. Occasionally in the 60. Mouffe, “Democratic Politics Today,” 7.

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ballot debates, the ballot is imagined as the chief political content, not just the form in which a political content is produced. The powers of serenity and integrity bestowed on the polling station and its booths become a synecdoche for the vote itself, indeed for the voter himself. In a tellingly dense phrase from an advertisement for one of the foolproof balloting machines then being devised, the inventors describe their invention as if it were a perfect instantiation of the liberal citizen as private cause of a public effect: “It should give to the public outward manifestation of its internal integrity without disclosing the poll.”61 This wondrous balloting machine enables the elector to formulate his opinion and cast his vote in private, yet, even so, he forecasts abroad an ethical and cooperative spirit that suffuses the public, reassuring the public of its own liberal spirit. One might argue that such a guarantee also underwrites the politics at work in a liberal society more generally, where the public is assured of a national integrity by asserting its citizens’ internal integrity as generic individuals, thereby not emphasizing the truly diverse and certainly incommensurate affiliations of the individuals who constitute the social realm and who might otherwise operate as fractious political constituencies. In this regard, the ballot was becoming for British liberalism, as it was already in the United States, a symbol of allegiance to the idea of the nation: a confirmation of national coherence that is also a guarantee of national virtue. The aforementioned advertisement articulates once more a definitive feature of the ballot that is equally an imperative in the dynamic of midcentury liberal subjectivity—the performative display of privacy. The centrally located balloting stations formalize what seem to me this underemphasized characteristic of liberal citizenship and—more generally—liberal subjects. The sacrosanct “right to privacy” considered intrinsic to liberal integrity is nonetheless contingent on its own public performance, the paradoxical display of its coherent interiority that confirms its existence, as evidenced in Gladstone’s “display of sincerity” in his hustings speeches. In the liberal politics of ideas, where everyone presumably agreed on the rules and procedures, the stakes of politics had become differences in opinion, as Habermas has famously theorized.62 In the mid-nineteenth century, liberal political culture was often portrayed in just this way—as a polite, indeed “formal,” mental contest between differing opinions, opinions that were held by like-thinking men in a realm of private deliberation that was, even so, fully instrumentalized and optimistically consequential 61. Quoted in O’Leary, Elimination of Corrupt Practices, 71. 62. Habermas, Social Transformation of Public Sphere, 64.

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in the political world. The liberal genius of the ballot was its instantiation of this principle. Spatiotemporally disjoined from quotidian time and customary location and yet centrally and conveniently located in town and country, the balloting station emphasized its difference from everyday practices even as it intervened in them. The balloting station conveyed the impression that the vote, although cognitively disinterested, expressed a profound interest in ordinary life, but life now understood through the formalizing and harmonizing thought of liberalism. Although the transition from town square to balloting booth was meant to be felt, it was not meant to be painful, as politics had palpably become for the injured Sir Underwood in Trollope’s Ralph the Heir. Midcentury liberalism’s commitment to a politics that inhabited the realm of the everyday was not, however, a politics of intervention, where the political dimension colonized the private, personal, and business domains of ordinary life. Just as Mr. Harding’s practices of liberal cognition were retired with him at the end of his political crisis, so the elector, before and after the vote, is a mere man, even, perhaps, still subject of and to social hierarchies when conducting his work, still influenced at home by his wife’s compulsive partisanship. It is perhaps obvious that many liberals were cynically or at least pragmatically drawn to this feature of the secret booth and ballot, which only momentarily demanded liberal thinking from the newly enfranchised. During the vote, and perhaps for some only during the vote, the elector is a citizen, thinking politically. After the vote, he returns home, peaceably traversing the distinct realms of cognitive privacy, liberal publicity, and personal life. This is how liberalism ought to be lived. Liberalism’s spatiotemporal delineation of citizenship and, in turn, its formalizing of politics itself distinguish it from the radical conceptions of these terms, which imagine a life permeated by citizenship and politics. Keith Michael Baker has identified “politicization” as one of the primary technologies of power characteristic of the French Revolution and, implicitly, of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century radical democratic ideology; he defines politicization as “the production of political subjectivity, or the subjectivization of politics. Each individual was now to be seen as a political actor; all actions were to be understood as political actions, every phenomenon was to be revealed as the expression of a political will.”63 Such a technology seems equally operative among many of the English radical groups active in the early nineteenth century, whose com63. Baker, “Foucauldian French Revolution?” 191.

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mitment to radical social change through politics evinces an encompassing faith in the political and an accompanying lack of faith in the present social order.64 Additionally, their desire for extended or universal suffrage— and, for most notable radicals, the yoking of the ballot to the universality of the vote—expresses their conception of all individual men as political agents. Rather than narrowing the realm of the political, these attitudes not only placed people and issues not usually addressed in formal politics at the center of political debate but also encouraged at least some radicals to construe traditionally social and personal concerns in political terms, such as the institution of marriage or the equitable distribution of cultural goods. Since politics was everywhere, people were everywhere and always politicized citizens. In careful contrast to this politicization of society and subjects, the ballot and its related legislation carefully delimit the political citizen per se but most especially what counts as politics.65 Himself a radical, George Holyoake backhandedly gives expression to this feature of the ballot, recognizing its revision of a radicalized society. In a pamphlet otherwise affiliating the autonomy of the balloting booth with personal and domestic privacy, Holyoake ironically concedes, “I shall taste of power for one supreme moment, when I shall stand by the Ballot Box. . . . under the representative system the state accords to me but one minute of independence in seven years, namely, the moment when I give my vote.”66 For many midcentury radicals like Holyoake, the freedom from undue social influence that the ballot promised rendered it a necessary evil in a democratizing society, a mechanism that would ideally wither away as democratic principles infused politics.67 Nonetheless, Holyoake here confirms the brief duration

64. This is a historical truism by now. Stephen Lee, for instance, describes the radical epistemology this way: “Transformation was seen as political first and foremost, with the cause of universal suffrage the best means of dealing with the ‘bread and butter’ question.” Lee, Aspects of British Political History, 26. 65. In his study of Victorian politics, Nossiter assesses the historical trajectory of what he calls the “politics of individual opinion and interest”: “‘agitation’ at the beginning, ‘conscience’ in the middle, the ballot at the end of the period—was a conception of the political order which sought to exclude any other considerations than the political” (Influence, Opinion, 65). 66. Holyoake, New Defence of Ballot, 5–7. 67. Holyoake reflects other radicals of his day in his willingness to support the ballot divorced from a guarantee of universal suffrage. Many radicals earlier in the century, confronted with a much smaller, much more exclusive suffrage, considered the ballot a potential enforcer of that exclusivity, preventing nonelectors from participating in the public forum that had been their only political leverage. For them, including the Chartists, the ballot made sense only when in league with universal suffrage. Even so, Feargus O’Connor opposed the ballot. For a later generation of radicals and republicans, the increased and more justly distributed elec-

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of political thinking under the British balloting system. Politics was decidedly not a way to live but instead something to think about, and for most people to think about in earnest only in the voting booth. If character—the moral and pedagogical subject of liberalism—is deeply and, indeed, complicatedly associated with narrative and the empirical sublime, and in turn the gradualist tendencies of them, then liberal citizenship is accomplished and completed in an instant of spatiotemporal abstraction. Mr. Harding’s retreat to a cigar divan and his absentmindedness in a nap are,, as I have already suggested, the deflation of this liberal ideal, the point when abstraction and deliberation succumb to the attractions of their extremities— distraction and doggedness. The forms of unrest that potentially preceded and punctuated the electoral process were through this legislation no longer intended to possess legally accorded political content or significance. If, for instance, nonelectors had at one time constituted a “voice” on nominating day or represented a body of influence or regional interest on polling days, the 1871–72 legislation—and, in particular, balloting—aimed to render them silent and invisible. Political opinion was now, incredibly, a private matter. And even as periodic Reform Bills extended the franchise, the ballot—in its ideal form—would presumably perform its abstracting alchemy, distilling from the compound of classes, ranks, and gender the gold standard that was the individual elector and his abstract contribution to the good of the nation. In addition, and perhaps more to the point, members of Parliament would not need to worry themselves about “opinion out of doors,” a phrase with indecorous connotations, especially in the latter half of the century when such opinion was increasingly considered “mass-mediated” opinion. Instead, Parliament need take seriously only the “opinion indoors,” a phrase which was now literally and figuratively apt. The more cerebral opinion—“public opinion”—expressed through the secret vote culminates in the members’ return to Westminster and could be plausibly construed in this strict constructionist manner. According to this logic, the disposition toral rolls perhaps eased concerns of this kind. Plebeian liberalism is thus seen to be rather uniformly if perhaps lukewarmly supportive of the ballot, even though the Liberal Party was not promising a further extension of the franchise. For instance, Kinzer notes that most radical news organs, specifically the Bee-Hive (a workingmen’s paper), Lloyd’s Weekly, and Reynold’s Newspaper, along with other regional radical-leaning newspapers (Leeds Mercury, Manchester Examiner Times, Newcastle Daily Chronicle, to name a few) largely supported the liberal legislation of the late 1860s and early 1870s, including the ballot (Ballot Question, 140–41). Needless to say, radicalism throughout the nineteenth century is no monolithic ideology or demographic group, so these comments are merely generalizations. For many radicals, the ballot was a necessary shield of protection, not a magic wand.

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of Parliament is therefore deemed a true representation of a truer public opinion. If bread riots or strikes or other sorts of collective action littered the country, they could be considered unrelated to politics—what Bonnie Honig in her critical assessment of Rawlsian liberalism has identified as the problematic “remainders” of liberal ideology. More specifically, such moments of dissent could now be deemed unrelated to the governance of the land, revealing one means by which midcentury liberalism maintained in fits and starts its laissez-faire noninterventionism. Even electoral division, such as the minority view articulated prior to the voting results, could now plausibly be discounted. The ballot is just one manifestation of nineteenth-century liberalism’s narrow construction of political citizenship, a delimitation of politics that is still evident throughout Western liberal democracies and twentieth-century political theory and which has become a special target of revision for political thinkers, such as Bonnie Honig, Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière, and Alain Badiou.68

The Divided Mind of Liberalism Midcentury liberalism’s efforts to formalize the practices and parameters of the political sphere and its interpellated subject, the liberal citizen, certainly disciplined “free thought,” as I have noted throughout this chapter. Positing a political public sphere where electors thought in boxes, liberalism sought to moderate the excesses of radical politics, guaranteeing, for instance, the demise of 1830s radicalism that David Lloyd and Paul Thomas have mourned.69 At the same time, the formal premises of liberalism that nurtured not just individuals but individuality resisted filling up the boxes with particular ideas, creating a form of liberal cognition that could never be wholly predictable in its results—as the history of the ballot debate and its implementation suggest. The deformations that attend the ballot debate and, in some instances, became detectable traits after its institution were truly unpredictable, for they could in any given situation advance or hinder liberalism’s aims. Striving “to be a neutralization of influences,” the secret ballot was a logical extension of midcentury liberalism, but in its vigilant extermination

68. Honig’s terminology has been particularly helpful to me as I try to document in this chapter a historical instance of the liberal “displacement of politics” that she finds rhetorically in some of the leading “liberal” theorists, such as Kant, Arendt, and Rawls. See Honig, Political Theory, 3–5. 69. Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State, 59–90.

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of influence—be it aristocratic, alcoholic, or feminine—it could express an almost fanatical anxiety about influence. Indeed, a small contingent promoted what seemed to many observers then and now paranoid plans for elaborately foolproof ballot boxes and voting papers with costly invisible ink, resisting any attempt, even attempts made long after elections, to determine the provenance of cast votes.70 In neutralizing all forms of influence, these supporters promote neutral citizens; here, the disinterested voter has become the uninterested voter, complicating, I might add, Habermas’s arguments that locate powerful nationalist identification primarily in constitutional mechanisms, like the secret ballot.71 This neutral elector’s emptiness seemed so profound as to convince many detractors, including many members of the Liberal Party, that the ballot legislation sought to neuter the elector, showing again how mental determination was still ensured through manly embodiment. Anthony Trollope aptly describes one of the myriad losses entailed in the ballot’s process of abstraction when he labels it “unmanly.”72 Although the final legislation insisted on a means of tracing the cast vote to its elector (operating as an electoral analogue to the signature appended to articles in the Fortnightly Review), the ballot’s apparent tendency toward inducing neutrality and indifference was never satisfactorily resolved in the debates. Emptied of influences, these neutral electors are, moreover, especially susceptible to personation because, so this thinking goes, one such elector seems much like another and to some extent, given the restrictions enforced by these electoral reforms, must “think” much like another. If what distinguishes the individual elector from another is his distinctive ideas, and yet his distinctive ideas emerge from a generic and abstracted category of subjectivity, then difference itself seems generic. There was unceasing worry in the debate and after the ballot’s installation at national elections that it did not and could not address the evils of personation. The prolif70. “An Act to Amend the Law relating to Procedure at Parliamentary and Municipal Elections [July 18, 1872]” describes the “ballot paper”: “Each ballot paper shall be marked on both sides with an official mark, and delivered to the voter within the polling station, and the number of such voter on the register of voters shall be marked on the counterfoil, and the voter having secretly marked his vote on the paper, and folded it up so as to conceal his vote, shall place it in a closed box in the presence of the officer presiding at the polling station (in this Act called the ‘presiding officer’) after having shown to him the official mark at the back.” Cited in Hanham, Nineteenth-Century Constitution, 277–78. 71. Habermas, “Citizenship and National Identity.” 72. Trollope portrays an election after the Ballot Act had passed in The Way We Live Now, written in 1874–75.

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eration of personation, or at least the proliferation of anxiety about personation, betrays the existential mystery at the heart of liberalism’s central premise: “Be true to yourself.” Lacking the geographic, demographic, or occupational characteristics that specify the conventional person, the individual of liberal citizenship ought to emerge instead through his opinions, but opinions that can only emerge from that citizen—a circular reasoning that the vacuum-packed voting booth encouraged. In the cognitive paradigm of midcentury liberalism, personation alternatively can stand for the mental division that the balloting booth otherwise claims to avoid. One elector voting in the place of another is particularly problematic if he votes differently from the elector he pretends to be. In open polling, this is the standard understanding of personation. However, in closed polling, personation can be translated into the terms of mental impersonation, so that the elector can be imagined to vote against himself. In this revision, the elector who is now “divided in its own mind” is possibly indecisive, ambivalent, or indifferent. He is the elector who cannot grasp the clear difference the choice imprinted on the voting ticket supposedly represents. Disinterested practices of cognition can produce a result so profoundly detached as to no longer count as a consequential political opinion at all but simply an ineffectual expression of ambivalence or, worse, a complete indifference toward one candidate or another, an ambivalence of creeping indifference apparent in Mr. Harding’s opinions. All these variations on mental division—indecision, ambivalence, and indifference—could be attributed to the vagaries of personality, but their consistency and persistence in the written record suggest they are more likely the result of the formal dynamics of liberal electoral choice itself. The ease with which a vote might express something other than the voter’s “calm, determined” opinion, even in the vacuum-packed booth, reveals the drama that is intrinsic to any sort of formal representation. The etymological revision of personation into impersonation that occurred over time registers a compensatory attempt to sustain the difference between being yourself and being someone else, as if that difference in the setting of liberal electoral politics at midcentury were easily put into words. Invisible ink and impenetrable voting boxes could have, however, just the opposite effect, for they could fuel suspicions regarding the plenitude rather than emptiness or diffusiveness of the liberal citizen. Staged as public spectacle, the ballot could tap into customary theatrical meaning, producing what appeared to many observers a drama of secrecy, constituting through the balloting procedure the liberal citizen as a subject with secrets,

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indeed secrets specifically hostile to the public, in need of exposure. Even many supporters of the ballot worried about this unseen excess. There may seem a cursory similarity between the voting booth and panoptic architecture, but Bentham’s panopticon seeks only behavioral, not cognitive, reformation. In the balloting booth, the elector who enters the booth cannot be seen in the act of exercising his citizenship, and so neither the state nor the public can fully monitor his thoughts, a domain that little interested earlier utilitarians. It seems possible that the freedom of choice constituted through the ballot may possibly exceed its administrative grasp. For instance, rather than expressing one’s undivided mind through the choice of candidate rendered possible by the mechanism of booth and ballot, a voter might vote impulsively. Instead of expressing his own mind by making his mark, he might express no mind at all. The Ballot Act may have eradicated customary exertions of influence and gross occurrences of bribery, but it did not regulate thoughtlessness, despite the high hopes expressed by some proponents. Indeed, the very dangers anticipated by the increased suffrage secured through the Reform Bill of 1867 were in this case seemingly enhanced rather than inhibited by the booth’s privacy. The citizen produced through this version of abstraction was therefore not the transparent subject produced, according to Baker, in the radical social upheaval of revolutionary France and dreamed of by many English radicals in the early part of the century. Nor is he the empty, neutralized subject feared by some contemporary liberals but is instead the opaque subject. The act’s circumscription of political integrity to the private zones of individual introspection and simple choice did not, however, merely relocate political chicanery to the private realm. Even though the ballot was intended as an alternative to the political farce that publicity performed, it fostered its own theatrical genre of critique: melodrama. Earlier in the century, Sydney Smith had already implicitly scripted the ballot’s peculiarly melodramatic narrative, casting the liberal citizen, quite predictably, as a secretive, deceitful villain. Conspicuously hyperbolic in its rhetoric, Sydney’s vignette is representative of a widely held view in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century that being true to oneself is, in effect, being false to everyone else. The single lie on the hustings would not suffice; the concealed democrat who voted against his landlord must talk with the wrong people, subscribe to the wrong club, huzza at the wrong dinner, break the wrong head, lead (if he wished to escape from the watchful jealousy of his landlord) a long life of lies between every election; he must do this, not only eundo, in his

Ballot and Politics of Liberal Citizenship / 227 calm and prudential state, but redeundo from the market, warmed with beer and expanded by alcohol; and he must not only carry on his seven years of dissimulation before the world, but in the very bosom of his family, or he must expose himself to the dangerous garrulity of wife, children, and servants, from whose indiscretion every kind of evil report would be carried to the ears of the watchful steward.73

As is typical of melodrama, especially in the early nineteenth century, Sydney Smith situates the scene of the ballot and its devious protagonist firmly within a crowded and highly ramified social narrative (crowds, clubs, family, servants) and, in particular, extends its temporality beyond the casting of the vote, just the opposite of that which the Ballot Act prescribes. But in so doing, Smith underscores the extent to which the Ballot Act struggles to divorce politics from the public sphere and detach the liberal citizen from his personal attachments, the same setting and affiliations that, to Smith, make “sense” of electoral choice. In this telling, the balloting booth fails to limit the domain of politics and thereby prevent personation; rather, it saturates the everyday with politics and personation—“a long life of lies.” Smith was prescient. Even as the ballot’s supporters claimed that it would above all purify the vote by eradicating all forces that might render the elector, like the general public, “divided in mind,” it proved to be, in the years following its passage, singularly and significantly ineffective as a deterrent of personation—and this in spite of that public display of privacy which was presumed to ensure integrity. Posing as an elector, a personator could easily enter the voting booth and vote counter to the elector’s wishes, in effect vote a lie, but a lie that the ballot’s logic could not detect. In general, the persistence of personation as a topic of debate, and therefore its persistence as a “problem” for liberalism, suggests that the ballot unsuccessfully addresses a social alterity that once was and could be again the perilous or promising place of politics: as if the liberal citizen must always register in the possibility of personation his own representational

73. S. Smith, Works of Smith, 264. Smith also evokes the theatricality of the secret spectacle he describes in this passage, emphasizing the element of disguise: “Why are the acts of concealment to be confined to putting in a ball [one proposed form of secret balloting]? Why not vote in a domino, taking off the vizor to the returning officer only? or as tenant Jenkins or tenant Hodge might be detected by their stature, why not poll in sedan chairs with the curtains closely drawn, choosing the chairmen by ballot” (265). Smith rather neatly expresses how secret balloting seemed to many observers a direct intervention in customary forms of sociability, creating rather than responding to the increased estrangement among people.

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inadequacy. The lying person who continually threatens to invade the voting booth, like the emptied elector who inhabits it, can thus be seen as a constitutive marker of anxious excess in liberal ideology or, in Honig’s terms, a “remainder” that gestures toward an alternative site for politics, a site where, quite possibly, the lie becomes untangled, turning into two distinct sides of a consequential political dispute in the larger society.

CHAPTER FIVE

Occupational Hazards THE IRISHNESS OF LIBERAL OPINION

In Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series, the author’s sizable six-novel narrative on political culture at midcentury, he decides to examine the contemporary story of Whiggism’s evolution into a coalitional Liberalism. He tells the tale primarily through the figure of Plantagenet Palliser, the stoic Whig aristocrat who, over the course of several volumes, helps legislate his ancient privileges into oblivion. Mainstream midcentury liberals—the parliamentary population of professionals and industrialists presumed to enter government on the coattails of suffrage reform—are dramatized through the life adventures of the handsome young Irishman Phineas Finn. That liberalism, seen so jealously by history as an organic outgrowth of English Protestant liberty and the ancient constitution, should be put into action by a Catholic doctor’s son from the western reaches of Ireland has been oddly minimized by most literary critics who otherwise are thinking about the political novel of this period.1 Perhaps this diminution of Ireland’s significance to Phineas Finn, protagonist and novel, simply demonstrates how 1. The six novels of the Palliser series and their years of publication are Can You Forgive Her? (1864), Phineas Finn (1869), The Eustace Diamonds (1873), Phineas Redux (1876), The Prime Minister (1876), and The Duke’s Children (1880). Taking Trollope’s diminishing tone in Phineas Finn to heart, Neil McCaw accepts Ireland’s marginal role in the novel, emphasizing the gendered thematic that is explicit in the Anglo-Irish Union: “In this novel the political resonance of Finn’s resignation over the Irish Land Acts is undermined by the fact that this resignation ultimately brings about the telos of the romance-narrative, seeing him return to Ireland and marry his Irish sweetheart. As such the principle that brings about the romantic resolution is inevitably made more incidental. If not made marginal, Ireland could be neutered as a site for political contestation, being ignored completely or else represented so as not to undermine the dominant political and cultural values of the British/English reading public.” McCaw, “Some Mid-Victorian Irishness(es),” 130. There are significant exceptions, however; see McCourt, “Domesticating the Other”; Lindner, “Sexual Commerce”; Dougherty, “Angel in the House”; Lonergan, “Representation of Phineas Finn.”

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very tacit and tacitly bland have become the inclusive presumptions of liberalism and, relatedly, our reception of Trollope’s study of British liberal culture at midcentury, a study characterized by what Henry James famously labeled Trollope’s “complete appreciation of the usual.”2 Indeed, Trollope’s narrator counsels us in Phineas Finn, and Trollope echoes him later in An Autobiography, to dilute whatever might constitute Finn’s Irishness into the decidedly nonalcoholic pleasures of the young man’s personal charm; after all, Phineas is no Fenian, no Young Irelander, no clannish Celt of melodramatic stereotype, but the sweet-natured and sweet-looking concoction of an undoctrinaire Protestant mother and Catholic father.3 Why Ireland is so dismissively humored in a novel about an Irishman in politics is worth a little consideration. During the years that Trollope wrote Phineas Finn, which was published in 1869 as the second novel of the Palliser series, Ireland was hardly a footnote in the liberal narrative. Its quasi-colonial relation to England, its pervasive agrarian unrest— manifestly heating up in the early 1860s—and its absolutely central role in the unmanageable divisions in the Liberal Party that would ultimately result in its breakup and decline later in the century were some of the key political topics of the day despite the narrator’s expression of casual indifference. The novel refers to Irish tenant right, perhaps the central issue of contention in the coming years, as “a terribly unintelligible subject” about which “no English reader will desire to know much.”4 Accordingly, the narrator declines to give us Irish details that any student of Trollope knows were easily at his bidding. He declines to do so, even though these very details, the details of Irish tenant right, compel Finn to give up his career as politician and to abandon all his highly promising social prospects at the end of this novel. One aim of this chapter, then, is to describe just how Ireland matters in Phineas Finn and what that might tell us about the theoretical presump-

2. Henry James, Partial Portraits, 100. 3. Trollope writes: “It certainly was a blunder to take him from Ireland,—into which I was led by the circumstance that I created the scheme of the book during a visit to Ireland” (Autobiography, 318). This statement no doubt reflects his growing disillusionment with Ireland—its widespread resistance to the Act of Union that in 1801 made Ireland part of the United Kingdom, its republican ambitions, and the home rulers in Parliament exercising stalling tactics. 4. Trollope, Phineas Finn, 2:341. (This work is hereafter cited in text and notes as Finn. Although the 1982 Oxford edition of Phineas Finn from which all quotations are taken was published as a single book, it is divided into two parts, labeled “volumes,” as it was presented to the public in Trollope’s time [1869], each “volume” with its own pagination. Citations thus include the “volume” number followed by a colon and then the page number.) Trollope himself later insisted that Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux were one novel.

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tions of mid-Victorian political liberalism and liberalism’s relation to its imperial holdings. Irish tenant right in particular was integral to any account of the conjoined histories of Ireland and Britain in this period and a central preoccupation of the Liberal Party from its emergence in the 1840s until its practical demise. Despite Trollope’s disclaimers, it is therefore also integral to any account of Phineas Finn that seeks to understand the novel’s contributions to midcentury liberal practices. The holding of Irish land— what this means and how it matters to people—largely determines the parameters of liberalism’s relation to Ireland during the Victorian period. Not surprisingly, then, emigration and absenteeism and their opposite, occupation, not only become dominant terms in the contemporary political debate but also inform a profound and often transpolitical philosophy of locational attachment that taps into liberalism’s deep reservoir of ambivalence towards its political authority. I will suggest that the novel’s elliptical inclusion of Irish tenant right serves to supplement the catalog of midcentury liberalism’s abstract embodiments with a new concept—“occupation.” By putting this novel in relation to concurrent legislative activity concerning Irish land, in particular the Irish Land Act of 1870, the centrality of “occupation” will come into view. In its multiform complexity, “occupation” illuminates the way in which this midcentury politics responds to altered political realities—how it accommodates the transmigrations of the new imperial world—from country to country, from class to class, from west Ireland to Westminster. I will therefore frame Finn’s rise and fall in the Liberal Party in terms of a conception of occupation, refining along the way ongoing rearticulations of midcentury cosmopolitanism that are trying to understand how a robust nationalism coexists with universalist impulses.

“Occupational Liberalism” “Occupation” takes diverse, seemingly contradictory shapes in the 1850s and 1860s in Great Britain. The types of liberal “occupation” that Finn accepts as member of Parliament and subsequently as member of the undercabinet, for instance, seem to differ substantially from the sort of occupational liberalism that we will see was codified by the 1870 Irish land bill, a bill that prizes sustained residency on the land. Indeed, liberalism as an occupation defined by politicking and governing seems to reveal only the most tenuous relation to any sort of land. No candidates for Parliament were required to be the owners or the inhabitants of the bounded territory they represented, even less so after Liberal reforms, but were presumed to

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be representatives of peoples and opinions. And cabinet appointees like Finn could be held responsible for Canadian policy without ever having visited, let alone having claimed some live attachment to, the region under discussion. Landed property in particular no longer appeared to be a richly constitutive component of political representation in a mid-Victorian England transformed by the flow of people with opinions. The suffrage reforms of the 1850s and 1860s, however, offer an emendation to this account of the liquefaction of the property criterion for political citizenship, for there was in fact a significant mediate category on the way from land to cash: occupation. The now-obscure Irish Reform Act of 1850 wrenched the vote from the exclusive possession of mostly AngloIrish proprietors, requiring instead, to quote Theodore Hoppen, the “occupation of property to a poor-law valuation of 12 pounds in counties and eight pounds in boroughs together with some simple tax and residence requirements.”5 In 1867, the English reform bill echoed if did not exactly replicate this bill’s spirit, promoting ten-pound household renters to a comparable if not identical voting status to landowners. Many renting occupants now had a vote. In aligning occupation with political rights, these electoral reforms prefigured to some extent the Irish Land Act of 1870. This legislation validated an occupational relation to place and space that had not before merited legal inclusion. Household occupants and tenant farmers were by no means identical populations, but both came into political visibility in these years by virtue of their inhabitation of a place they did not own and whose occupation they could not presume to guarantee into the long-term future. Renters were to comply with a residency requirement of one year before they could register to vote, and tenant farmers, now protected from summary eviction, were more securely codified through renewable contracts that emphasized occupancy terms rather than customary perpetuity. “Occupation” in both instances thus importantly mediates between the mobility of the imperial world and the immobility of a hereditary society: by reducing proprietary claims, it loosens political value from the absolute ownership of land, but it also momentarily tethers that newly floating political subject by occupying him in a particular place and time. I want to preserve the doubleness of occupation in this instance. These subjects are occupying particular places but also occupying time in particular ways. Just as surely as the 1870 Irish

5. Emphasis added. Hoppen, “Franchise and Electoral Politics,” 208. Hoppen notes of the legislation, “The confusions of earlier tests of value disappeared as did the notion that possession (however theoretical) of property should be the chief indicator of fitness to vote in counties.”

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land legislation materialized the political existence of the tenant farmer as farmer, for it granted him rights attendant on his present labor rather than an absent ownership, so the household suffrage’s careful stipulation of rent thresholds and residency requirements roughly coded, as every contemporary knew, occupational categories, thus bringing certain sorts of work into representative legibility. Whether a fully class-conscious society emerges by midcentury remains debatable, but it is surely true to say that occupational categories (grocers, weavers, miners, etc.), occupational status (renter or owner), and political eligibility all come to prominence in the public debates of the 1860s. Uprooted, and often unoccupied by the sorts of bodily labor usually accorded the name of work, political occupation seems to share just as little in common with the occupational criteria of these new political developments as it did with the category of proprietorship. The respectable working people of Britain who were enfranchised by this occupational rule and especially the Irish tenant farmers occupying their farms now maintain a politically representative relation to their location that seems counter to the trends of the reformed Parliament. Phineas Finn’s serial constituencies (it hardly mattered who or where he represented) and his rapid ascent and decline in politics speak to the infinite mobility of political occupationalism, whether one is a member of Parliament subject to elections or a member of the cabinet, who comes and goes with the changes in government. And yet, Phineas Finn is a novel that tells the story of a man in terms of an occupational crisis that resolves itself when Finn sacrifices his career for a piece of legislation that addresses these very occupants of Irish farms. Despite the obvious disparities among these occupational domains (farmer, renter, politician), then, I will argue that the occupational liberalism articulated in the Irish land bill haunts midcentury liberalism as this political philosophy becomes institutionalized as party in British politics. Furthermore, in this novel, the Irish version of occupation problematically designates as an oxymoron the occupation of Liberal politician even as it aligns liberal citizenship with Irishness. Gladstone as prime minister expressed a strong desire for segregated policy, such that Irish property law should remain distinct from English property law, but even Gladstone’s considerable political powers could not prevent the implications of liberal land policy from crossing the Irish Sea to flood the presumptions of English liberalism.6 The values that inform these diverse occupancy require6. The founding of the Land and Labour League in England in 1869 emphasizes the extent to which questions of land ownership and alienation were widely politicized in England, and

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ments will be shown to shape how midcentury liberal politicians construed “freedom of opinion,” defined political ideation, and, relatedly, managed geographic and cultural diversity. As liberalism entered the occupational domain of party politics at midcentury, the vaunted virtues of liberal cognition were oddly dependent on the Irish tenants of liberalism. By placing these myriad forms of occupation in relation to one another, it will become even more obvious that mid-Victorian political liberalism produces subjects who have minimal relation to “the liberal subject” of recent theoretical discussion. Mid-Victorian liberal politicians do not, in fact, posit their authority in terms of the abstract and universal subject. Nor does this era of liberalism fully promote a deracinated relation to land, as Uday Mehta has argued more generally of liberal theory.7 Rather, the foundational subject of midcentury liberal politics is not an individuated cosmopolitan but an abstracted occupant. By making this claim for an occupational liberalism, however, I do not mean to offer the familiar academic critique of liberal universalism that quite appropriately points out what it subsumes and erases in its abstract impulses (e.g., in this novel, the forlorn story of Laura Standish’s untapped political energies, the condescension displayed to the low-class Mr. Bunce’s political principles, the invisibility in the novel of Irish political dissent during these years). Instead, I seek to demonstrate Victorian liberalism’s convoluted accommodation of an occupationalism that situates abstracted liberal individuals and thus orders the otherwise chaotic world of opinion politics. Phineas Finn’s narrative and much subsequent literary criticism assertively brackets off “the Irish problem” in the novel so that Irish tenant right seems only a sidebar to the story of Phineas and to the novel’s Liberal Party more generally. I will, therefore, take some time to show how the liberal formulation of Irish tenant occupancy both informs and deforms a novel

it produced a context of comparison whenever the Liberal government attempted to resolve agrarian conflict in Ireland. 7. In his revelatory chapter “Liberalism, Empire, and Territory,” Mehta repeats a central paradox apparent in liberal theory: “One of the remarkable ironies of the link between liberal thought and the British Empire is that the latter’s monumental size, the sheer space it occupied on the ground—in brief, its far-flung and immense territory—is seldom raised to the level of theoretical attention by the tradition of the former” (Liberalism and Empire, 115). Despite “the sheer space [the Empire] occupied on the ground,” liberal thought, Mehta argues, gives territory little thought at all. Since there is a striking absence of this sort of attentiveness in Victorian liberal theory, I can agree, but I also disagree with Mehta, the remainder of whose chapter gives the impression that Victorian liberalism is merely an extension of Locke’s own thinking on land and proprietorship.

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and, in turn, a political ideology that finds itself at this very moment figuring out if a philosophy so dedicated to ideas can work as a politics in the everyday world. By the end of its narrative, Phineas Finn dramatizes the impossible fit between the priorities of a liberal citizen and the requirements of the politician, emphasizing once more the difficulties of living a life of liberalized cognition in the practical world, difficulties which always dog this variety of liberalism. That Trollope’s novel extensively narrates liberal political practice even as it registers its deep limitations is of course not fully representative of this period’s activism concerning reform, but it is representative of the ambivalence that equally saturates this optimism. If the 1870 Irish land bill’s account of dual occupation never really worked in practice, it is also true to suggest that midcentury liberal politics’ dual occupation—the liberal citizen in a parliamentary government—also seems in Phineas Finn nearly unworkable. In this period, the everyday world of political society still largely coincided with high “Society,” the world of landed aristocrats and their minions, whose own fraught relation to occupiers enriches Trollope’s story. For many intellectuals observing the changes in politics at this time, the electoral reforms associated with Liberal ideology dislodged the priority of these magnates to make way—not for the virtuous, disinterested thinkers that J. S. Mill’s stint as member for Westminster might imply but just their opposite, as one observer noted: “men whose sole object is to establish for themselves a place in society, and to that they are ready to sacrifice their own most cherished beliefs.”8 The novel could be described as the narration of this tension: are Liberal politicians simply social climbers hungry for inclusion or men of durable principle able to withstand social marginalization? In its mostly failed effort to answer this question, the novel circulates in and around the variant notions of occupation extant at that political moment. Much of what follows in this chapter concedes the narrator’s avoidance of Irish details but resists the assumption that an absence of detail and the author’s own disavowal of his Irish protagonist in his autobiography imply the irrelevance of all things Irish. In fact, the novel seems to commence with the premise that a West-Irish gentleman can perhaps most impressively demonstrate the promise of principled liberalism as he climbs the social and political ladder of success because he is—among British subjects—one not temperamentally attuned to the particular virtues that would otherwise excuse his ambition. Impulsive, romantic, sentimental, 8. [Gleig], “Late Elections,” 259.

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not prone to self-examination of either a self-critical or self-aggrandizing bent, Finn is a far more challenging subject for liberalization than even the timid, traditionalist curate, Mr. Harding, from Barsetshire, who initiated Trollope’s lifelong exploration of lived liberalism. Finn’s journey from a post-famine Ireland to a Liberal seat in Parliament could therefore attest to a thorough liberalization of politics, not just in allowing a modest Catholic doctor’s son to represent a Liberal constituency of County Clare historically controlled by the Tories but also in its presentation of politics more generally as an open occupation for the morally worthy and thus not solely an aristocratic birthright. The story of Phineas Finn is thus a story about the full institutionalization, routinization, and thus occupationalism of liberal politics, a moment in nineteenth-century British liberalism when, as Foucault describes it, a “critique” of government becomes the governor or when a theory of individualism becomes a political party.9

The Tenant of Liberalism A man’s relation to his work forms a central category in classical and Victorian liberal understandings of property, the characterological virtue of self-possession, and the posture of self-interest. From Locke’s earliest formulation of private property, when those first gatherers plucked berries from trees and the first farmers tilled the soil, there has been implicit in many varieties of liberal Protestant thought an assumption that human motivation—here figured as a specifically bodily labor—coincides with an interest in something (in this case bodily sustenance) and that this active brew of interested motivation is the very stuff of individuation. Recall, for instance, that when primitive hungry men nourish themselves under an oak, as imagined in Locke’s Second Treatise, “that labour put a distinction between them and common.”10 For generations of liberal and conservative thought, an interest in land—private ownership of land, to be exact— constituted the most powerful base of motivated individuality, which, in turn, became the locus of consent for the formation of civil society and its citizenry, as Locke first told it. Lack of interest is, in fact, often a synonym

9. Foucault, “Birth of Biopolitics,” 74. 10. See Locke’s Second Treatise, chap. 5, sec. 28, in which Locke nearly equates selfhood with ownership: “Every man has a property in his own person. . . . The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.” Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 111. Martel reminds us that Locke actually imagined that men of property would go out and work on their land for a few hours each day, maintaining that bodily relation to it that is so vital to his conception. See Martel, Love Is a Sweet Chain, 33.

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for lack of motivation and the loss of self. In J. S. Mill’s Autobiography, the young Mill famously recognizes that his nervous breakdown, which immobilizes him and induces a crisis of identity, is a forceful expression of this lack of interest in the life his father had charted for him—a life of the mind notably lacking in bodily labor of any kind and without any claims to property other than of the mental sort. At the same time, however, the liberal tradition is deeply committed to disinterest, the capacity to detach from one’s own local and personal interests and think in various registers of abstraction beyond the self and that self’s body: nationally, altruistically, globally. Indeed, interest in land and disinterest were seen to be profoundly interrelated attitudes for quite some time. The capacity for disinterestedness was often perceived, and not just within the classical liberal tradition, to be a direct consequence of a freedom from this subsistence—from bodily need and labor—that land ownership was most easily able to provide.11 There is, then, built into the notion of “landed ownership” a relation of distance, of alienation, from the materiality of the soil and the persistent needs of the body that is centrally contested in the debates concerning land tenure in Ireland. The radical leader John Bright and Mill were eventually most susceptible to Irish solutions that involved land-purchasing schemes, so convinced were they of utilitarian and political economic principles that assumed Irish farmers and Ireland more generally could become more motivated, more civilized, and more independent (from bodily need, from the bondage of land and their superiors) if given a reliable interest in their labors by owning the land on which they labored. For Mill, the best solution for Ireland would be a population of individuals owning small farms. So many liberal solutions to the Irish land problem circled around notions of proprietary interest in the land and the return on one’s interest in the land that it is hardly surprising that observers see little else at work in Victorian liberalism’s response to Ireland. Increasingly, however, over the course of the nineteenth century, disinterestedness relied less on land ownership or capital or even personalty (material property other than land) and more—at least ideally—on principles of self-respect and hence qualities of bodily restraint, character, and mind that could be inculcated by practicing 11. Locke, of course, stays mostly within a subsistence economy as he tells his story of the advent of private property and individuality, but by the nineteenth century, trade and capital have altered both the population capable of possessing land and the ultimate source of a farmer’s sustenance. Traditions of Protestant Christianity and political expressions of civic humanism are not always the same as a liberal tradition, however, and both these strands of intellectual history articulate attitudes akin to disinterest.

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liberalism in the ballot box, in signed public debate, as a way of life.12 Although this trend toward personal virtue—what has been called “self-possession” without the benefit of other sorts of possessions—arguably had its earlier formulations in England’s commercial past, Victorian liberalism was the first to instantiate it politically. This devaluation of land, revaluation of personalty, and valuation of “character” is perhaps an old story by now, but what I want to highlight within the story is how citizenship generally becomes less reliant on a person’s relation to land ownership (as does one’s capacity for civic disinterestedness) at the same time as liberal policies toward land tenure in Ireland seem convinced that some kind of interest in the land is vital to the tenant farmer, to Ireland’s future, and to the future of the empire more generally. According to the Irish Land Act of 1870, this interest in the land was now termed “occupation.” The bill itself, entitled the “Bill to amend Law relating to Occupation and Ownership of Land in Ireland,” gives this concept of inhabitation equal billing with proprietorship. In this way, occupation encapsulates both the diminishing authority of the alienated possession of property and the amplified value of bodies inhabiting a place. The government’s revision of absolute property in the 1870 legislation struck like a bolt of lightening throughout Great Britain, stunning both Irish and English landlords, Peelites, and laissez-faire liberals, for it was indeed a major departure from what they deemed liberal principles.13 The legislation granted a substantially truncated version of what land reform agitators had for years called “the three Fs”: fair rent, fixity of tenure, and the freedom of the tenant to sell his interest in the land (“Ulster custom”).14 The 1870 law was actually limited in its ends, for it only legalized “Ulster custom” in regions in which it was already practiced, and although tenants 12. Gilbert, Citizen’s Body. 13. In complaining about the Land Act of 1860 and its stringent reassertion of absolute property and contract law, one writer characterizes its worrisome notion of occupation: “The occupation of land was to be put on the same footing as the letting and hiring of furniture. No notice was taken of tenant right or any other claims of the occupiers, whether in Ulster or elsewhere, and the landlords were practically invited to act upon the principle, that land belongs to the landlord, and the only test of fair rent is what the land will let for in open competition.” Lock, Three Fs, 14. 14. “Ulster custom,” a practice most common in northern Ireland, recognized what some commentators called the “dual ownership” of the Irish land. This practice required an incoming tenant to pay the outgoing tenant a lump sum of money that represented the departing tenant’s interest in the land, a sum paid in addition to the money a new tenant would need to hand over to the landlord in rent. The origins of “Ulster custom” are a subject of debate. For more, see Guinnane and Miller, “Limits to Land Reform.”

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were now to be compensated for improvements and reimbursed if unfairly evicted, there was still no effort to guarantee that Irish occupants could remain on the land indefinitely. And yet the codification into law of “Ulster custom” was seen to be a major revision of liberal theory precisely because of its emphasis on custom rather than contract and its privileging of a cultural norm of inhabitation rather than a political economic theory. From Gladstone’s perspective, a perspective shared by many Liberal politicians and based on his cramming on Irish tenant right in the late 1860s, “Ulster custom” was not a covert form of the hedonistic calculus as some critics argued but the contemporary remnant of ancient land practices among the Celtic clans in existence long before the Acts of Settlement. An understanding of these communities had been offered recently (in 1865) to Victorians through the translation and commentary of the Brehon law tracts, a reconstruction project largely the work of John O’Donovan and Eugene O’Curry. The quality of this scholarship is open to substantial question, but the impact of the editorial commentary on these translations, which combined with the scholarship on Indian land usage coming from the pen of Henry Maine, Village-Communities in the East and West (1871, delivered as lectures in 1870), helped effect a profound shift in emphasis in liberal ideology, according to Clive Dewey.15 He succinctly summarizes the impact of what he labels “historicist sociology” thus: “The immediate effect of this new historicist sociology was to rehabilitate the customary and the collective at the expense of the contractual and individual.”16 Dewey’s “col15. Maine’s work also supported those who understood Irish tenancy as a form of delayed civilizational progress. He starts his fourth lecture with this assertion: “It does not appear to me a hazardous proposition that the Indian and the ancient European systems of enjoyment and tillage by men grouped in village communities are in all essential particulars identical.” Maine, Village-Communities, 103. Maine famously distinguishes between the modern European contractual model and the older Indian customary and village model of land usage. His sense of custom and collectives are derived in part from his perusal of Campbell’s work in Systems of Land Tenure. 16. For the Brehon translation, see Cook, Imperial Affinities; Dewey, “Celtic Agrarian Legislation.” See Campbell, Irish Land, 171–72, for a contemporary understanding of the translation’s impact on land tenure debates. The accuracy of the claims made by John O’Donovan and Eugene O’Curry concerning the communal holding of land in ancient Celtic history are considered rather suspect, but their scholarship was held as fact for several decades. See O’Donovan and O’Curry, Ancient Laws of Ireland. A more passionate historian of this period considers the Brehon translations nothing more than a “Liberal romanticisation of ‘a backward people,’ a romanticisation fuelled by Irish Nationalist endorsement.” O’Callaghan, British High Politics. No doubt this is partly true; one can get a sense of this taste for romanticization by examining Matthew Arnold’s now almost unreadable On the Study of Celtic Literature. But in light of Mehta’s claim in Liberalism and Empire that liberalism lacks a notion of territory as a terrain

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lective” should not be construed as a substitution for liberal individuality as his binaries seem to suggest. Rather, the 1870 land act accommodates collectivity to the individualist ethos, as I will argue shortly. At the same time as Gladstone began his work toward the 1870 legislation, J. S. Mill, in conversation with the Irish economist J. E. Cairnes, was revising his understanding of classical utilitarian political economy. Recognizing that Ireland was no free market, that the free trade of land was impossible among a peasant population that had no other options, Cairnes and Mill not only concluded that Ireland was no England but in acceding this difference also concluded that land could not be understood to be like any other fungible commodity. Land, in other words, ought never to be absolutely appropriated; and there was precedent for this argument in recent history when the British government took control of various segments of privately owned property in order to build railways.17 Implicit in this instance, it seems to me, is one sort of version of the “dual ownership” of land, held both as a private tract of property and as national territory subject to government usage for the national good. The convergence of tenant rights with the “national good” may seem like an unworkable contradiction between local and universal perspectives, but it is just this conjoining of a revisionary notion of the local with some more abstract articulation of the public good that resonates with midcentury liberals. Land, at least in nineteenth-century Ireland, was something more than, as Uday Mehta characterizes Locke’s view of it, “vacant space” available for the taking18; at the very least, it was riven with paradoxical claims, which I will now try to specify.

of the sublime, as an organic locality rich with associations that exceed mere sustenance and individuation, this accusation of excessive romance counts as a kind of evidence for my extenuation of Mehta’s claim. 17. “In Great Britain the competitors are independent capitalists, bidding for land as one among the many modes of profitable investments which the complex industrial civilization of the country supplies: in Ireland they are men—we speak, it will be remembered, of the cottier class—for the most part on the verge of absolute pauperism, who see in a few acres of land their sole escape—we cannot now say from starvation, but at best from emigration and the workhouse.” Cairnes, “Fragments on Ireland,” 160. And also more J. S. Mill: “Those who think that the land of a country exists for the sake of a few thousand landowners, and that as long as rents are paid, society and government have fulfilled their function, may see in this consummation a happy end to Irish difficulties. But this is not a time, nor is the human mind now in a condition, in which such insolent pretensions can be maintained. The land of Ireland, the land of every country, belongs to the people of that country.” Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 1:411. 18. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 126.

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“Of the Soil” Despite varied approaches to the “Irish problem” and distinct policy solutions—from wholesale land redistribution to reassertions of contract—liberal reformers were united in their recognition that the Irish people manifested a “special” relation to the land that was neither simply a by-product of English law nor easily altered by that law. Indeed, Irish identity—according to these writers—was synonymous with Irish land. George Campbell, an expert on India whose little book, the modestly titled The Irish Land, is said to have influenced Gladstone’s thinking prior to the Land Act of 1870, observes: “An Irishman always gravitates towards the land.”19 Gladstone notes that “no people ever were more passionately attached to the soil on which they were born and on which they have grown than the Irish.”20 T. X. Huxley, in the 1880s, is able to articulate ironically this view of Irish attachment to the land as “earth-hunger,” evoking that characteristic conflation of the Irish, their staple food (the potato), and the soil. And many writers were prone to attributing this love of the earth to a deeply embedded ethnic impulse. Tracing the racial and ethnic origins of the modern-day Irishman was something of a minor industry in periodical literature of the time. The Irish race evolves from the Milesians, and before them the Firbolgs, who “undoubtedly . . . left to their descendants agricultural tastes and that love of land or territorial possessions, which is so opposite to the mere ‘land hunger’ of the Anglo-Saxon.”21 Note the key distinction in this ethnic stereotype: the Irish people’s attachment to their land was often distinguished from a more accumulative, imperial energy associated with the English or, at times, a more contractual and thus more coldly impersonal relation to the land that some observers attributed to the English farmer. These platitudes about a people’s love of their land may sound blandly generic, but it is at least worth noting that writers on the Irish question do not always describe the Englishman in equally one-dimensional or

19. Campbell, Irish Land, 98. 20. Gladstone, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., vol. 199 (1870), p. 345. 21. Cusack, History of Cork, 5. References to a “hereditary love of land,” to quote one familiar phrase, link their attachment to a noncognitive factor, such as instinct—see Burke, Ireland’s Case Stated, 197. See also Rossa, Irish Rebels, 224. Another instance of this can be found in the 1881 novel Hogan, M.P., where Hogan refers to “some queer lingering love of the conquered race for its own land,” which he contrasts to the English farmer who “thinks only of the ground as he thinks of a machine, which, properly manipulated, will bring him in money.” Laffan, Hogan, 86.

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naturalistic ways: note the earlier distinction between the Irishman’s “earthhunger” and the Englishman’s “land-hunger.” One commentator writing in the aftermath of the 1870 legislation lists land as merely one among a host of national affections that ties the Englishman to England: “the attachment of the Englishman to his native land, to her institutions, and . . . to her laws, [and] the innate and inextinguishable pride with which he cherishes the sentiment that, after all is said and done, his country is the first and freest in the world.”22 From the English perspective, the Irish were fundamentally unlike the English, who expressed affection for their land but also their laws and institutions. Whether at home or abroad, the Irish, however, were singularly, palpably, and literally attached to Irish ground. One cannot overemphasize the extent to which the Irish were almost universally portrayed as organic components of Irish soil. One writer in the Monthly Review epitomizes this analogical ease: “The heart of the Irish, we believe, is like the soil of their green island, blessed by nature with an exhaustless fertility.”23 Gladstone, as we can see, literalizes their origins by envisioning their birth on the soil and thus as natural products of that soil. Catherine Gallagher, Phillip Bull, and others have remarked well on this organicism that ultimately covers the Irish people with the dirt they work on and merges them with the environment and the crops they cultivate, as when Gladstone absentmindedly speaks of “the old Irish notion that some interest in the soil adheres to the tenant.” Like their staple crop, the potato, the Irish hardly need cultivation to grow exponentially, and, when both the potato crop and the Irish people succumb to disease, both tuberous outgrowths of the soil are buried in the field on which they were born and grown, like tainted compost. Despite the mass transplantation of the Irish population after the famine, English liberals at midcentury were profoundly committed, imaginatively and legislatively, to the intractable fact that the Irish were implanted in Ireland. Two linked images in the London Illustrated News illustrate how it was presumed that even the finality of eviction could not detach the Irish from their land, as this evicted tenant seems to be “of the soil” in the hovel that has become his home. (figures 2 and 3). These organic metaphors could contribute to a conception of Irish national identity that coincides with the

22. “Rabirius,” Observations on Ireland, 30. 23. Review of Thoughts and Suggestions, 219. Yet another instance: “The minds of the Irish peasantry are, like much of our soil, uncultivated; but the material is good: richest thoughts and noblest feeling would be produced in abundance, if worked with gospel truth.” Quoted in “Religious State of Ireland,” 163.

Figure 2. “Ejectment of Irish Tenantry,” Illustrated London News, December 16, 1848, p. 380. These engravings depict Irish tenants who are evicted from thatched cottages and move to earthen “homes.” Reproduced by permission from the University of Chicago Library.

Figure 3. “Scalp of Brian Connor, Near Kilrush Union House,” Illustrated London News, December 22, 1849, p. 405. This engraving shows an evicted Irish peasant seeking shelter in the ground, or “scalp,” a rock that protrudes from the vegetation. Reproduced by permission from the University of Chicago Library.

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more passive connotations of the term occupation. Like soil, they inhabit the surface of the land, naturally, ubiquitously. However, this sort of occupation can never be fully disarticulated in the Irish context from the more active sense of occupation, the primary work one does to live. Given that the vast majority of the Irish population did not, in fact, own the land, attention understandably focused on the nature of their occupation of it. In the context of land tenure, the Irish occupied the land as farmers and agricultural peasants, not as proprietors; one therefore sees this conflation of the Irish and Irish soil, for the Irish in effect lived on the soil but did not own “the land” underneath and around it—nor could they own the contractual property with abstract borders that implies some register of alienation and distance from that land. Contractual renderings of the tenant-landlord relation often distribute land rights according to geologic layers of soil, minerals, underground water resources—a relation of surface and depths that is invoked in predictable ways: the Irish tenant simply occupies the surface of the land and benefits from its fertility, but the proprietor is in deep possession of its wealth. For many commentators, there is only a small qualitative difference between the passive occupation of space and the active occupation of an Irish farmer: potatoes were famously (and unfairly, as the potato blight vividly corroborates) derided for their capacity to grow anywhere under any circumstances. Moreover, Ireland’s absence of industry and shipping interests only underscored the conflation of these two sorts of occupation of the land, for there were few other sorts of employment available to the workforce.24 There was consequently a pervasive and nearly tautological association between the people and their tilling: their occupation of the land was, in effect, their occupation. In this context, “occupation” becomes a habituated human activity as well as a state of nature and can easily render those so described unqualified for nonhabitual and civilized behavior: “The Irish have not legislative heads, and their soil, fruitful in men of talent and men of intrigue, has never produced a man with intellectual aptitude for sober government—for maturing comprehensive and enlightened projects of popular advantage.”25 The presumption that “soil” taints “head” and that Irish heads lack “intellectual aptitude for sober government” constituted a truism in an era increasingly entranced by environmental and racial

24. Gladstone speaks of “a country which is almost exclusively agricultural, and does not offer to the adult Irishman that choice of professions and occupations which he can easily find in a land where mining and manufacturing industry prevails.” Quoted in Annual Register, 23. 25. Wade, Extraordinary Black Book, 574.

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determinism; these are the nexus of assumptions that complicated the task of midcentury liberalism in Ireland. Nonetheless, there is substantial evidence in the archive to suggest that at least a portion of midcentury liberal commentary on Ireland was thinking in alternative ways about occupation. Not just a passive occupation of “vacant space” nor even a job description, occupation became for some liberals—often only by implication or oblique reference—the very ground of cognitive embodiment.

“Irish Ideas” For the utilitarian tradition, regular labor instilled regular habits. For Bentham and James Mill, routine—located on the land, the shop floor, or the workhouse—habituated a subject to a future orientation. Central to liberal understandings of land tenure in the 1860s was what looks like a utilitarian conviction that a return on one’s labor in the land (compensation for improvements, in particular) would encourage one to maintain steady work habits and to sustain longer-term plans; there is always in liberalism (early, late, or otherwise) an ambition to master futurity.26 Construed as “habits of mind,” this future orientation was perhaps reasonable but not precisely a sign of a reasoning subject, for it did not require reflection, deliberation, abstraction, or any of the other virtues of liberal cognition that have been the subject of this book. Upon closer examination, however, leading midcentury liberals who focused on the “Irish problem” theorized their approach to Irish land reform less in terms of substitutable workplaces and instrumental habits than in terms of the surprising admixture of bodily occupation and the weight of “ideas.” In his “England and Ireland,” J. S. Mill insists that any successful approach to Irish land tenure must consider the “modes of thinking” of the Irish; he elsewhere argues for “Irish ideas” as a more normative consideration of land usage: “No, Sir, Ireland is not an exceptional country;

26. More-conservative writers also had a theory of the long view via land use. Some commentators on Irish land were prone to casting this dynamic far more organically than Bentham would. William O’Connor Morris sees there the eradication of organic society, an organic society that comes from the soil and through the soil learns much. He admiringly quotes an uncited source: “Society which springs from the soil, and forms itself by the tillage of land, training its people to thrift and industry, ripening by centuries of time, and binding all orders and inequalities of rich and poor, master and servant, together in mutual dependence, mutual justice, and mutual charity, making even the idle to be thrifty and the powerful to be compassionate.” W. Morris, Letters, 155.

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but England is. Irish circumstances and Irish ideas as to social and agricultural economy are the general idea and circumstances of the human race; it is English circumstances and English ideas that are peculiar.”27 Gladstone, too, in his meditations prior to writing up the 1870 legislation gave credence to what he called “the mind and notions of the people.”28 It would be easy to assume, as many historians have, that these references to thinking and ideas are simply condescending tactical gestures— euphemisms for superstitions, customs, and habits that earlier legislation could not expunge and newer legislation must accommodate. Moreover, the recourse to “Irish ideas” suggests at least a substantive diminishment in liberalism’s championship of cognitive individualism, insofar as the phrase “Irish ideas” emphasizes group mentality or customary norm: Englishmen may till land to individuate (“a distinction between them and common”), but Irishmen till en masse. In short, so the argument might go, this moment in Victorian liberalism has really nothing to do with ideas or individuals or liberal ideals more generally but with political expediency. To many students of the period, “Irish ideas” is one more sign amid a host of early signs that liberalism will ultimately succumb later in the century to plebeian liberalism or populism, a story Jonathan Parry has told in his history of nineteenth-century political Liberalism.29 This populist trajectory may be unquestionable. Even so, I want to move a bit more slowly to this conclusion, to register the struggle between certain Liberal ideals and the intransigent facts of Ireland. The Lockean-influenced liberal ideal of improvement never goes away, but it does change over time. As manifest in eighteenth-century painting, a commitment to idealized land shaping in the aesthetic of landscape can be seen as a material representation of improvement that links agricultural and aesthetic standards of cultivation in that era, a kind of protoliberal perspective that I believe informs midcentury Victorian liberals’ conceptualization of Irish occupation: in cultivating the land, they are cultivating themselves. This syllogism, however, simplifies the logic of Irish land in the mid-nineteenth century, for Irish land was not so much ripe for cultivation

27. Mill, Chapters and Speeches, 98. 28. Gladstone quoted in Cook, Imperial Affinities, 59. Gladstone wrote to Queen Victoria, suggesting that the Land Act of 1870 “is to give, to the occupiers of the soil in Ireland, that sense of security which they require in order to pursue their calling with full advantage to the community and to themselves . . . and to preserve, it might almost be said, to restore, the essential rights of property.” The pauses and corrections are typical of Gladstone but also speak to the delicacy of the “property right” for the Irish. Gladstone, “Letter to Queen Victoria.” 29. Parry, Rise and Fall, 274–311.

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as it was “decultivated.” As David Lloyd and others have noted, the English over the centuries had in effect “deterritorialized” Ireland for the Irish. Especially after the famine and mass emigration, the topography of peasant cottiers’ plots and even some whole villages were leveled.30 And the entire history of dispossession and enforced enculturation over the previous centuries had in effect taken away the associations to and even names of familiar landmarks. If American pioneers were at this moment able to go to the high plains and blindly (and pragmatically) see only a Lockean romance of property, which was ripe for the taking, English observers could not look at postfamine Ireland without seeing the tragic past of that land. In a remarkable passage, written during the months that Gladstone penned his 1870 Irish land bill, William O’Connor Morris, writing for the conservative Times, visits Skibbereen, twenty-five years after the famine had devastated it: The traces of human industry, however, are but seldom apparent upon the landscape; the habitations of the occupiers of the soil are few in number and almost always mean, whole breadths of country remain unenclosed and untouched by the hand of man; over thousands of acres brushwood and gorse encroach on what ought to be fine grass land; and, above all, the lines of the numerous streams that, on a considerable margin along either bank, could easily be changed into meadows and pastures, are usually spongy and lonely marshes. The general character of the scene is that of dreary and not pleasing solitude; and what adds to its melancholy features is that occasionally you meet desert spaces, on which, amidst blotches or rank vegetation, you still see the marks of ruined dwellings, and on which you hear that a dense population had once been crowded in spreading villages.31

Where to begin? Morris, in viewing this scene of desolation, sees at least three levels of temporal representation overlaid on the earth: a present, a future, and the past. Although the present scene confirms that the “occupiers” have not fully recovered from the famine, there is everywhere the potential for improvement, of “unenclosed and untouched” land that could be “fine grass land,” and of “spongy and lonely marshes” which could become “meadows and pastures, if” only “the hand of man” would intervene. Almost entirely framed by a Lockean-inflected trajectory of cultivation, then appropriation, the journalist is quick to assert that this wild landscape refuses an alpine epiphany of the unlonesome wanderer but is a “dreary 30. Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature. 31. W. Morris, Letters, 184.

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and not pleasing solitude” that cries out for human intervention and socialization. Indeed, what inhibits the improving mood is the “occasional” reminder of devastation in the form of another romantic cliché: “you still see the marks of ruined dwellings, and on which you hear that a dense population had once been crowded in spreading villages.” This is “Ozymandias” after Malthus. The recourse but also resistance to romantic formulations of the relation between man and nature in this passage suggests that the famine had introduced into a classical liberal tradition of progressive Lockean cultivation an unwelcome tragic vision of reversal, depopulation, decivilization—perhaps operating to some degree as a nightmarish inversion of the positivist developmentalism and imperial expansion of the period but also as a registration of a painful human loss embedded in the soil, palpably, sensibly expressing its own destruction (“you still see,” “you hear”). The widespread publication of gruesome images of the famine, in which dogs are described pulling bodies from shallow graves—in the Skibbereen vicinity—perhaps underwrites Morris’s Gothicism.32 This Skibbereen is not vacant land but a land overpopulated by ghosts moaning about past failures. The postfamine landscape of Skibbereen provides through sharp contrast an insight into the structure of abstraction at work in mid-Victorian liberalism, for its haunted ground reminds one that a liberal individual always abstracts from a locational attachment, marked by its social, not natural, plenitude: the elector in the ballot box steps out of his domestic bonds to wife and children and to personal economic interests; the periodical signature precipitates from the complex personal, social, and civic overlap that constitutes an individual life. H. S. Jones has, for my purposes, felicitously described this social context as a “ground”: “most Victorian liberals were ‘organic’ rather than ‘inorganic’ individualists: they grounded their individualism on some kind of conception of the social whole.”33 It needs to

32. “A man of the name of Leahey died in the parish of Dromdaleague about a fortnight ago; his wife and two children remained in the house until the putrescent exhalations from the body drove them from their companionship with the dead; in a day or two after, some persons in passing the man’s cabin, had their attention attracted by a loud snarling, and on entering, found the gnawed and mangled skeleton of Leahey contended for by hungry dogs.” From “Dr. Donovan’s Diary.” Also: “I saw the bodies of Kate Barry and her two children very lightly covered with earth . . . the flesh completely eaten by dogs . . . two most wretched looking old houses with two dead bodies in each.” Quoted in Leland, Lie of the Land, 125. 33. H. S. Jones’s full quotation from Victorian Political Thought, 49, goes as follows: “To borrow a felicitous distinction, most Victorian liberals were ‘organic’ rather than ‘inorganic’ individualists: they grounded their individualism on some kind of conception of the social whole, rather than supposing ‘society’ to be a fiction and individuals alone to be real.” Needless to

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be stressed emphatically that I am not thereby arguing that mid-Victorian liberalism defines a liberal subject as socially constituted, such that one can use this as evidence, as some have, for its inherent sociability, even its nascent socialism.34 As I suggested in chapter 1, midcentury cognitive formalism seeks abstraction from the social through mental procedures that always exceed and precede that social domain. The mere man of the midVictorian era, jostled by the masses, embedded in the flux of modernity, is always located in the social domain, but the liberal individual is able to detach from that “embeddedness” precisely because of abstracting mental practices that conceptualize the social as “idea.” The dilemma of Ireland after the English, then, is precisely its lack of a recognizably liberal location from which cognitive procedures can abstract liberal citizens. There is no truly vacant, virgin land for appropriation—the Lockean origin—and, at this moment in Victorian liberalism, no proprietary ground from which a liberal citizen, abstracted and abstracting, might be disinterestedly embodied. And although Skibbereen’s ruins speak of a human past marked in the soil, its memory of “spreading villages” gestures only minimally to events that might aspire to history, unlike, for instance, the town of Barset in The Warden, whose manifold histories, figured as burdensome obligations, require that a liberated individual detach from them. By contrast, this blighted land seems unripe for individuation. As I have mentioned already in the introduction to this book, liberal embodiments of abstraction are often shadowed by ghostly bodies—the stuff of disembodiment that abstraction both requires and sublimates. In Ireland, however, disembodiment has preceded this process of abstraction, in effect dislocating liberalism. There is no liberal “there” there. There is only occupation, a haunting occupation, and this ghostly occupation must now acquire the liberalizing capacities that property once held.

say, I differ on this score if by this Jones is arguing that Victorian liberals imagine subjects to be constitutively social. Rather, I take my cue from Locke and Mill, to suggest that this era by and large posits the subject as initially presocial. Even Jones quotes Mill on this matter: “Human beings in society have no properties but those which are derived from, and may be resolved into, the laws of the nature of the individual man” (39). 34. There is a long tradition of liberal political theory that emphasizes communitarian impulses in liberalism. In this period, such arguments often turn to Thomas Hill Green’s work as an important link into liberal socialisms later in the century. I can’t argue that the “New Liberalism” did not have a socialist orientation, or that society did not factor in a more elaborated fashion in Green’s work. But I can argue that the pervasive presence of a social domain that requires management and ordering in so many texts and practices at midcentury suggests that an even stronger impulse of “antisocialism” is present, which any progressive admirer of this era of liberalism needs to address. See Goodlad, Victorian Literature; Malachuk, Perfection.

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That liberal abstraction in the Victorian period must operate as a detachment from a spatiotemporal and/or bodily location shows why “occupation” becomes a central category during this period for liberals who are searching in this deracinated land for some ground for the processes of liberalization. Put bluntly, occupation on the land (both the passive occupation of space and the active occupation of farming) is perceived to be the only affective contact point left between the Irish people and the Ireland of the 1860s, and even this feeling is precarious. When Morris looks across the barrens of Skibbereen, he sees future potential and past loss, but the only presence is the habitations of the occupiers of the soil, not the occupants themselves, an absent presence that metonymically evokes the vacancy of the peasant state, which is “almost always mean.” Occupation of the soil functions as the only possible source of individuation and the only expression of attachment between the Irish and their country, stripped as so many were from their history, culture, and language, evicted as they were from their towns and from their inherited farms, cast away on boats to North America. At a time of crisis, when Ireland resists attachment to England and English law, occupation indeed becomes a preoccupation of mid-Victorian liberals, who seek both to liberalize the Irish and to thereby attach them to England by means of newly abstracted attachments to their own homeland. Here is a revealing meditation on the Irish by Thomas Hare, the famous author of proportional representation: If the agricultural spirit is not felt in America as a counterpoise to the commercial, it is because American agriculturists have no local attachments; they range from place to place, and are to all intents and purposes a commercial class. But in an old country, where the same family has long occupied the same land, the case will naturally be different. From the attachment to places follows the attachment to persons who are associated with those places. . . . Again, with attachment to the place comes generally attachment to the occupation; a farmer seldom becomes anything but a farmer.35

One can see in Hare’s reasoning the centrality of occupation for the Irish. Their occupation of this land generates attachments to place, to people, and to work, and—anomalous as it may be in classical liberal theory prone to universals—it must somehow generate attachment to England as well. Occupation is quite possibly the only form of attachment that might yet bind them to the union, but no one can now look at the occupants of 35. Hare, “Representation of Every Locality,” 527.

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Ireland without at the same time evoking absence. Absent occupiers (in distinction to absentee landlords) not only auger an inversion of nature but also seem a mocking inversion of the abstract embodiment that characterizes midcentury liberalism, for these tenant farmers are concretely disembodied: Morris sees and hears but does not meet them. Many an Englishman, moreover, when encountering the homes of occupiers, found nobody at home. Irish people had indeed died or emigrated, and this surely complicated an attempt to define the Irish (de?)attachment to land, but even those now present in Ireland seemed to many an Englishman absentminded—not forgetful but, in fact, overly mindful of a past and insufficiently mindful of a future. The virtual consubstantiality of the Irish and their soil affirmed the occupiers’ inability to abstract from what Robert Lowe, a devout free trader, refers to as a “daily life . . . necessarily occupied in daily struggle for existence.”36 Given the pervasiveness of Lowe’s view, Morris’s implicit attribution of a national memory of loss in the soil seems the most generous construction of absentmindedness that is evident in this discussion.37 This notion of Irish land memory is easily discovered in writing of this period. A writer for the Dublin Review characterizes the sentiment of the Irish “wherever they are” as “passionate unforgetting love of the land of their fathers.”38 Many English commentators did not see “occupation of the soil” as anything more than racial instinct or, at best, customary habit, the mental sedimentation of peasant routine—absent of mind in any sense. When Mill, Campbell, Gladstone, and parliamentary committees refer to “the ideas of the Irish,” such that it became a catchphrase in the 36. Lowe is quoted in Roach, “Liberalism and the Victorian Intelligentsia,” 59. This notion that dailiness and occupational subsistence are resistant to thought is characteristic of a midVictorian liberalism committed to cognition, but it exceeds those boundaries. Even in Harold Laski’s excellent interpretation of liberalism, in the midst of an exceedingly empathic account of how liberalism misserved agrarian workers when breaking up great landed estates, he writes, “It was calling into existence a class of peasant proprietors without the means of effective economic independence, and without the coherence or the leisure to take an elevated view of public questions.” Laski, Rise of European Liberalism, 260. 37. Too often, the absence of mind attributed to the Irish was understood thus: “And here I must protest against governing Ireland, as the saying is, according to Irish ideas, whether from Westminster or from Dublin. What are these Irish ideas? They are the ideas of a peasantry whose minds have been dwarfed, while their feelings have been hardened, by the effect of the penal laws.” Brodrick, “Past and Future Relation,” 44. Another satirized version of “Irish ideas” or Irish absence of thought accuses the Irish of submitting to the rule of their Catholic priests: “But what are Irish ideas? Are they the ideas of the Catholic clergy . . . of the best educated Catholic laity?” Leslie, Land Systems, 47. 38. “Mr. Froude on the English in Ireland,” 427. Likewise: “For unluckily, there are no Irish ideas in politics. There are Ultramontane ideas—Roman Ultramontane ideas—but no Irish ideas.” Quoted in “Empire, and Ireland’s Place in It,” 466.

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contemporary debates, one can find just as many instances of conservatives mocking such phrases, as when J. A. Froude wrote that “murder, violence and destruction” were “Irish ideas.”39 Froude, a vocal opponent of the legislation, epitomizes those who could not imagine a liberalized Ireland or an Irish man with ideas. Nevertheless, if one takes the rhetoric in favor of the new law at face value for a few moments, these proponents were insisting that Irish people did not just occupy space, did not just occupy time as farmers, but also had “ideas” about that occupation; they were, in effect, able to wash the soil from their clothes, to extract from the spatiotemporal location of their laboring bodies and have thoughts about their occupation of ground: as Gladstone insists, “some interest in the soil adheres to the tenant.”40 This concept of “interest in the soil” simultaneously amalgamates the tenant with his occupied environment and, as a type of “interest,” posits as well a thinker who, while he may not alienate himself from the soil like a property owner, nonetheless can abstract his attachment sufficiently to see it as an “interest.” The Irish people’s absence from their habitations in Morris’s vignette must become, somehow, the expression of this mindful distance and not an expression of their absence of mind. George Campbell’s The Irish Land influenced the 1870 Irish land bill in ways that few other documents did. It looks like many other studies of this period, full of observations, cross-cultural comparisons, and an attention to detail. On a visit back to Britain from India, he traveled to Ireland, like many before him, to make sense of the patchwork of land practices there. His experience with land usage in India compelled him to see that Irish practices regarding land tenure had, in fact, a history and were not just expressions of primitive chaos. Guided by Henry Maine’s work on status and contract cultures, Campbell draws parallels between the ryot who lived and tilled in India and the Irish tenant farmer, emphasizing, as did J. S. Mill, that England’s pervasive contractual practices were unique, not universal. Such a claim in both instances supports the liberal theory of uneven civilizational development, but what also emerges from this text, and what is most uniformly adopted and elaborated by others from its rhetoric, is the phrase “Irish ideas.” The economist J. E. Cairnes zeroes in on Campbell’s crucial contribution to the problem of Irish land tenure: “Sir

39. Froude adds: “Ireland he told us was to be governed henceforth by ‘Irish Ideas.’ Irish ideas, in the only form in which they could force themselves upon the legislature, were the ideas of those who most hated England and everything English, who defied the law as it stood, and enforced their own rival laws with knife and bullet.” Froude, English in Eighteenth Century, 526. 40. Gladstone, Hansard.

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George Campbell tells us . . . to take Irish ideas and practices as the basis of our land legislation. He, in short, proposes to apply to Ireland the same principles which he had seen bearing good fruit in the portion of the empire with which he was familiar . . . to take account of the customs and ideas of the people.”41 Customary usage and practice are central to Campbell’s account, as Cairnes notes, but it seems to matter that these usages rise above the level of habit into a cognitive register, or rather, that customary practices—what one does day in, day out—provide the groundwork for a reflexive ideation that makes that dailiness less habitual. This commitment to practical ideation, as opposed to foundational principles, marks most of the commentary offered by supporters of reform. In their revisionary efforts, midcentury liberals shift from universal foundations to local practices, suggesting to me that these reformers seek to emphasize occupation as labor instead of occupation as inhabitation of a ground. Mill notes that the occupants have an “idea of property” that concerns “the right of the cultivator.” This statement has its own Lockean inflection but is posed in an ideational yet pointedly occupational register that downplays occupation’s connotations of habit and habitation. The Irish, at this precise moment in Mill’s defense of their practices, are not occupying the land but occupying their thoughts. Additionally, Gladstone, in his speech to Parliament when introducing the 1870 Irish land bill, locates these “ideas of property” in the “heart of the Irish people,” an admittedly banal evocation of sentiment, probably emanating from the most cliché stereotype of the sensitive Irish, but yet shifting the liberal understanding of how one relates to land away from the economic calculus of “interest.”42 By sustaining the term property, Mill and Gladstone, like others cited in this debate, hardly announce their conversion to a new world economic order, but they do seem to be attempting to combine Irish “ideas” with familiar and inviolate commercial categories. At the same time, the very phrase “ideas of property” implies a diversity of denotation, as if the concept of “property” was now open to thought and negotiation.

41. Cairnes, “Froude’s English in Ireland,” 171. 42. The fuller quotation is this: “Whereas in England and in Scotland the idea of holding land by contract is perfectly traditional and familiar to the mind of every man, in Ireland, on the contrary, where the old Irish ideas and customs were never supplanted except by the rude hand of violence and by laws written in the Statute Book, but never entering into the heart of the Irish people, the people have not generally embraced the idea of the occupation of land by contract.” Gladstone, Correct Report. English, Scottish, and Irish people are all accorded ideas. The ideas may be old, so old as to be rooted in the people, and therefore resistant to nonorganic violence and statutes, but they count as thought—grounded thought.

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Many commentators during this period noted the ambiguity of the phrase “Irish ideas”—one anonymous one noting that “Irish ideas enjoys a very laxity of meaning”43—but I wish to suggest the laxity indexed the hybridization taking place. For thinkers like Cairnes, Mill, and Gladstone, “Irish ideas” marked a space where the customary practices of occupation could be understood, not as an emanation of a nativistic habituation but as the ground of individuated, liberalized mental labor. With “Irish ideas,” the absent tenantry in Morris’s vignette becomes visible as individuals, but admittedly as occupational individuals—farmers improving the land on which they could remain, laborers sustaining themselves on the harvest of their gardens: “And Irish ideas of government were not so strange—they were the ideas of every people on the face of the earth. That an industrious Irish farmer should be allowed to live and thrive unmolested in his Irish home—that the Irish labourer should first receive the fruits of the earth— these were Irish ideas, and, according to these ideas, and such as these, Irishmen should govern Ireland.”44 The Land Act of 1870 does not by any means entirely abandon Locke’s idyll of the fertile ground. One need only look at Gladstone’s astonishing account of the impact he intends for his legislation to hear echoes. Morris’s future vision of an improved Ireland is delayed in his vignette by a land preoccupied by its past, but Gladstonian liberal reform seems to have no such hesitations: There is, no doubt, much to be undone—there is, no doubt, much to be improved—but what we desire is that the work of this Bill should be like the work of Nature herself, when on the face of a desolated land she restores what has been laid waste by the wild and savage hand of man. Its operations, we believe, will be quiet and gradual. We wish to alarm none; we wish to injure no one. What we wish is that where there has been despondency there shall be hope; where there has been mistrust there shall be confidence; where there has been alienation and hate, there shall, however gradually, be woven the ties of a strong attachment between man and man.45

What is the role of liberal government? It is nothing less than “Nature herself.” It is nothing less than the eraser of history, restoring the land to its fertile past. It is nothing less than the source of a people’s optimism, the

43. “Irish Politics and Irish Priests,” 491. 44. “Ireland,” 182. 45. Gladstone, Correct Report, 57–58.

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origin of one’s motivation, the weaver of human bonds. Clad as “Nature herself,” liberal legislation seems at first reading to return the land and its people to a Lockean state of nature where acorns can be gathered, property can be appropriated, and there is enough for everyone. Man attaches to “nature,” then man attaches to man, just as Locke narrates. Among the liberals seeking these kinds of reform in Ireland, liberal legislation was not “machinery,” grinding out its automatons, but was “quiet and gradual,” spreading hope and confidence to the people; this is, in fact, to pirate Matthew Arnold’s words for a counterargument, the “spirit we are of” that “attaches people to us.”46 Gladstone’s pastoral vision of a happy Emerald Isle seems to suggest that liberal reform can restore a state of nature to what has been laid “waste by the wild and savage hand of man.” To some extent this is true: through the rhetoric of this passage, Lockean liberalism seems itself restored after the ravages of Malthus. One can well imagine the anxiety this vision induced in landowners who wondered aloud how a return to nature could actually function on an island of finite territory and currently existing property owners. It would be inexact, however, to climax my discussion of the Irish Land Act of 1870 with this incomplete reading of Gladstone’s fantasy of gradualism—a pace especially attractive to him and to liberalism more generally. As illogical, contradictory, and unworkable as this land plan appears (and as it largely proved to be), the act was no phantasmic return to Locke’s land-grab scheme. Gladstone’s promises, marked by a series of “wheres” that are replaced by “theres,” are about the reoccupation of vacated land and its indissoluble affective attachments. For liberals like Gladstone—serious students of history—the return to a fertile past that this legislation imagines is “Ulster custom”: not vacant land but occupied land, not nature but culture. This is land saturated with human feeling, memory, and ties. Over time, liberal reform can turn back time, not to some presocial moment of individuation but, rather, in the thick of the social and cultural territory that was Ireland before the famine.47 By reoccupying Ireland 46. Arnold, “Celtic Literature,” xiv. The full statement is: “When shall we learn, that what attaches people to us is the Spirit we are of, and not the machinery we employ?” 47. Markell also notes the ways in which temporal goals are often displaced by spatial distributions in this politics (e.g., the marginalized and the nonmarginalized), thereby expending limited resources finding “the right place” for a group rather than facilitating aspirations in time, a point I’ve also remarked on, in slightly different registers, in “The Past Is a Foreign Country.” The recognition of the Irish for Gladstone involves restoring the people to a particular time—not a time when they were most fully and completely and always already themselves (or, at least, not precisely) but a time when their potential is seen to be greatest. See Markell, Bound by Recognition, esp. 9–32.

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with the Irish, liberalization can begin. And this is just the premise that structures Phineas Finn.

Finnean Liberalism When Finn gives up his political career, he does so because he supports a bill legislating a version of tenant right, a bill that the larger Liberal Party is not prepared to adopt. The novel was written during the period when Gladstone was writing up his controversial 1870 Irish land bill, and it is tempting to see these two legislative efforts as identical. However, Gladstone did not reveal the bill to the public until after the publication of the novel; moreover, the text’s vague references to the bill under discussion in the novel suggest legislation somewhat different from Gladstone’s final draft. At first glance, Finn’s allegiance to this bill tracks a normative WhigLiberal ideological line. The bill seems mostly in accord with the positions of the Russell government in the 1840s, far more than with Gladstone’s startling endorsement of occupation in the 1870 act.48 The author of the bill, Finn’s most revered friend, Mr. Monk, has the look of a philosophical radical imbued with orthodox principles of political economy. Indeed, the novel’s main account of the political ideology that inspires the Irish bill sounds close to the premises on which such laissez-faire Liberals approached the difficulties of Irish land tenure—Monk’s bill responds to this question: “Could anything be done to make it profitable for men with capital to put their capital into Irish land?” (Finn, 2:262). In this formulation, there is no need to think about the Irish peasantry, especially the small Irish cottier. There is no need to consider whether tenant farmers in Ireland should even be tenants rather than owners on land once freely cultivated by their ancestors. The novel’s legislation thus wholly effaces the entire quasi-colonialist relation between England and Ireland.49 48. Dougherty suggests that Trollope’s portrayal of what amounts to a fairly mainstream contemporary liberal approach to tenant right—the capitalization of land—indicates that Trollope writes about a slightly earlier era of liberalism, that which culminated in the 1860 Irish land act. Dougherty, “Angel in the House,” 135–36. It also suggests—from a slightly different angle—that in his fiction Trollope inhabits at times a retroliberalism: in this imaginary space, he can experience himself as a progressive at a moment when his actual politics were becoming slowly but unmistakably old-fashioned, his location on the political map tilting toward the unionist ideology that took clear shape in the 1880s. 49. Manu Goswami notes that this notion of “territorial colonialism” indeed “found strong echoes” in J. S. Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848), which Goswami considered “mandatory reading for subsequent generations of colonial administrations and officials in

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Nowhere is there explicit evidence of an “idea of the soil” grounded in the occupation by the tenants of that very soil; rather, there is evidence of the mediation of capital. The solution to the “Irish problem,” the admirable politician Mr. Monk suggests, rests on the capitalization of land, the production of surplus profits, the trickling down of wealth, and an ultimate reliance on free-market principles if not exactly a free market. Monk’s views veer somewhat toward a mild revision of classical liberalism, as shown when he grudgingly concedes to Finn that the tenants’ expenses should be understood as capital whose profits ought to return in some portion to them even though they did not own the land.50 For now, I simply wish to indicate that Monk’s legislation, in this era, develops out of what looks to be a modest revision of the classical liberal understanding of land as absolute property. To this extent, the tenant right of Phineas Finn seems somewhat behind the innovatory curve of liberalism in the latter half of the decade, but it does appear to accord at least minimal rights to tenant farmers as occupants of land, unlike the Irish Land Act of 1860 that had consolidated the absolute rights of property. That Finn agrees with Monk suggests that Finn, at first glance, is following a slightly revised classical liberal principle as well, that he understands Ireland by and large in these conventional, universal premises of a laissezfaire liberalism. And, to some extent, I agree. To some extent, I will agree to the end of this chapter: Finn is a mainstream Liberal, no radical, and the whole thrust of the narrative could be described as a demonstration of how even an Irishman can become a Liberal, if only he becomes less Irish. The novel suggests this dilution is eminently possible, an ameliorative optimism rather at odds with Trollope’s own developing convictions regarding racial determinism. Amid a host of fellow liberals who were at midcolonial India.” Goswami writes that within this logic, “Colonies were increasingly conceived not as extraterritorial zones for mercantilist trade and the provision of raw materials but rather as substantively and functionally internal supplements of a globe-spanning and hierarchically configured imperial space economy.” Goswami, Producing India, 38. 50. Monk says: “But in regard to tenant right, to some arrangement by which a tenant in Ireland might be at least encouraged to lay out what little capital he might have in labour or money without being at once called upon to pay rent for that outlay which was his own, as well as for the land which was not his own,—Mr. Monk thought that it was possible that if a man would look hard enough he might perhaps be able to see his way to that” (Finn, 2:181). Monk also sounds like earlier, Russellian Whig-liberals when he can only imagine a providential solution to the problem of the Church establishment in Ireland: “Mr. Monk well knew, the subject of the Protestant Endowments in Ireland was so difficult that it would require almost more than human wisdom to adjust it. It was one of those matters which almost seemed to require the interposition of some higher power,—the coming of some apparently chance event,—to clear away the evil” (Finn, 2:181).

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century articulating a liberalism with racist dimensions—Goldwin Smith is a notable example—Trollope is perhaps the leader. Catherine Hall writes ably about Trollope’s complacent faith in the inferiority of colored peoples across the British Empire and his willingness to write at length in other venues about their characterological deficiencies.51 Later in his career, Trollope shows himself ready and willing to lump the Celts with these other degraded races, yet in this novel Trollope’s Irishman is not a figure of disgust but exactly the opposite—the object of almost everyone’s desire.52 No one wants to be him—an Irishman without means—but everyone wants to be with him, and almost everyone wants to help him become unencumbered by his Irishness, to liberalize him. His genial liberality thus reflects their own, producing an unimpeded exchange of flattery in search of promotion. The classical liberalism that informs the modestly progressive politics of Mr. Monk and thus of Mr. Finn is implied to be importantly formative of their political characters, demonstrating again how in this political era one’s public opinion must sustain a continuity with private character. Like Mr. Monk, Mr. Finn must, in keeping with Morley’s injunction in the Fortnightly, “say what he really thinks and really feels.” In the novel’s telling of Monk’s liberal ideology, there is a logical relation between the courageous independence of view evinced by Monk and the principles of proprietorship evinced in the bill. In having some quasi-proprietorial right to the land, the tenant is expected to become less dependent on it and at the same time become more worthy of a capital investment through his capacity for longer-term planning. There is, then, a Lockean undercurrent to Monk’s liberal independence. Monk’s decision to step down from the Liberal cabinet over this issue is portrayed in the novel as of a piece with the philosophy inspiring the legislation, for it is his private ownership of property in England that underwrites the independence that enables someone like Monk to enter the political world as a citizen capable of running counter to his party’s current aims, a citizen having an idea of his own. Put 51. Hall focuses on Trollope’s well-publicized (at the time) text on the West Indies, The West Indies and the Spanish Main. See C. Hall, Civilising Subjects, 209–29. See also C. Hall, “‘Going-a-Trolloping,’” 180–99. Hall notes that native West Indians coined the term Trolloping to describe ill-informed English travelers’ expeditions. 52. See, for example, G. Smith, Irish History; Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts. At this moment of the 1860s, the Irish to Trollope were simply not “like” the aborigines in Australia, for whom extermination seemed the only rational end. But Trollope’s views on the Irish, especially the Irish Catholic tenantry population, hardened toward the end of his life, when there were few Irish Catholics given much credit in his characterization of the Land League years. On Arnold’s racialist-infused thought, see the classic chapter by R. Young, “Complicity of Culture.”

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another way, his political isolation does not result in social desolation. The absolute ownership of private property enables, so Locke claims, the ensuing vital consent to political society and the formation of an individual political identity. Uday Mehta, in Liberalism and Empire, argues that this implicitly causal relation—first private property ownership, then consent to a political identity delimited by this isolate ownership of land—authorizes injustice in the imperial era.53 Liberalism, Mehta avers, cannot grant political status to societies not equally governed by this myth of appropriation or unequally placed in the myth of appropriation—like, I might add, the Irish. Toil as he may, the Irish farmer, for instance, cannot convert his labor into truly private ownership, cannot convert a dependence into citizenship. From Mehta’s critical vantage point within liberal ideology, it could be said that Finn can never be Monk, despite their seemingly identical political opinions on Irish tenant right. Finn is neither the salt of the earth, toiling on the soil like the Irish farmer celebrated by Gladstone, nor a proprietor, who owns his independence. Finn, unlike Monk, is thus dependent on an income of one kind or another. In aspiring to an income through the occupation of politics, Finn does not necessarily complicate a Lockean logic within a hierarchical society, however. As a Mr. Ratler or a Mr. Bonteen (other characters within this novel), both of whom are party operatives, he can function simply as “the hired help” that supports the Whig propertied class in their titled independence, a role that Barrington Erle celebrates. And yet, throughout the novel, Finn aspires to and, at least nominally, achieves a liberal individuality portrayed as pointedly distinct from their jobbery, described by him in these proprietary terms: “I have views of my own” (Finn, 1:6). By novel’s end, he gives up his position and takes a stand. At this functional level of narrative and characterization, the novel suggests that Finn’s political career can foster an independence akin if not identical to that of Monk’s. He may not own English property, and he surely does not work on Irish soil, but his political occupation apparently suffices as a space from which to abstract his liberal autonomy. My syntax of qualification already anticipates, however, the inadequacy of this account of Finn’s liberal practice, for, among other reasons, my rendition of Finn as a normative, liberal political economist hardly offers a rationale for just why Ireland and Irish tenant right might matter in what could be understood as a standard liberal bildungsroman, in which a gen53. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 120–35.

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tleman shows that property in the self more than suffices for a lack of real property. In the logic of the narrative, however, Irish tenant right is precisely the opinion that ultimately establishes Finn’s self-possession. His stance on tenant right finally renders his political occupation truly liberal. In this formulation of liberal practice, party politics as some kind of daily occupation is at best a necessary contradiction in a political ideology otherwise predicated on individualism and independence of mind; the occupation of Liberal cabinet member in particular is simply not ethically commensurate with being a liberal individual, a liberal citizen living liberalism. Monk therefore prefers—and can afford to prefer—a position of opposition outside the cabinet. Finn cannot retire to his estate, but he pursues a variant version of retirement. Until the moment when Finn sacrifices his party appointment, when he transforms a sinecure obtained by influence and old corruption into an occupation from which principled detachment can occur, Finn is no genuine liberal. Moreover, Irish tenant right is portrayed in the novel not merely as an arbitrary source of liberal individuation—an opinion among many—but a necessary one. Phineas senses that he has no choice. He must vote for tenant right, lose his income, and return to Ireland to wed an Irish girl. Indeed, he is at his most liberalized, one might say, when he is most unoccupied by politics. He is his most liberal when he is his most Irish. It is worth emphasizing that the novel never manages to blend the moral compromises and groupthink of party politics with liberal individualism, even as it struggles mightily to do so for most of its pages. Rather, the narrative ultimately confirms their irreconcilable differences when Finn retires from Parliament to an Irish life. Party is an omnipresent problem for midcentury liberalism more generally—when it first emerges as a coalitional muddle, when it finally produces under Gladstone’s guidance a workable majority, and when it ultimately splits apart on the matter of the Irish union. That political parties during this period increasingly recur to “machinery” as their prized organizational metaphor suggests some sources for this resistance, for parties are producers of mass opinion, not cultivators of individualism. Phineas Redux, the sequel to Phineas Finn, apparently attempts to rectify or revise this rupture between person and party and does so by jettisoning entirely questions of Irish right. In that novel, Phineas’s revived Liberal career and the enunciations that emerge from it show no signs of voicing a crisis of conscience—or an Irish brogue. Although Finn sacrifices all in Phineas Finn for a form of tenant right distinct from the occupational right that Gladstone offers in his 1870 Irish

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land act, it is my contention that these emergent concessions to landed occupation as a form of tenant right, vigorously debated in the years when Finn was written, nonetheless inform Finn’s story. Aligned in this novel and in the popular debate of the time with the diminishing property qualification for suffrage, the growing preoccupation with bodily occupation of place as well as the occupational labor affiliated with place are both a boon and a burden to Finn’s liberalism. The unpropertied Finn can indeed emulate Mr. Monk’s conviction, for Finn’s lack of property no longer precludes the principled liberal independence once presumed indispensable in an unreformed Parliament, but that independence cannot rest on—by definition it contradicts—his dependence on his daily work as political appointee in the Liberal Party, subject as it is to the whims of politicians and to tactical maneuver. It is only when Finn reoccupies Ireland that his liberal mettle is truly revealed. Put into a larger framework, the novel suggests that liberal individualism is local and practical. Its policies may reform the property requirement, but its practice often offers as substitute a murky notion of occupation whose oblique appropriation of bodily mass and situated habitation imposes limits on the mobility of liberal citizenship and midcentury cosmopolitanisms. Recall, for a moment, that poignant passage from William O’Connor Morris in which he depicts the empty homes of absent tenants in an Irish village hit hard by famine a generation earlier. Russellian policy during the famine, a theory fully embraced by Trollope at the time, welcomed the reduction of population that the famine providentially initiated through starvation, disease, and emigration. The overwhelming and overwhelmed masses of backward Irish peasants had been reduced, so that argument proceeds, into a population that could thus become susceptible to political economy, liberal governmentality, and liberal individuation. And yet it proved quickly apparent not only that the empty cottages and wasted lands were, in fact, occupied by tenants but that liberalism needed to accommodate that occupation. Morris had simply failed to see. As Finn disappears from English political culture at the end of the novel, we realize that Finn is not just another Mr. Monk, that his support of the bill costs him in ways that will never touch Monk. And though their differential fortunes might be explained away by a classical liberal logic, Finn is in fact never shown to be potentially just like Mr. Monk if only he married into property or accumulated property through his own labor, for part of what makes Finn committed to this bill has nothing to do with him as homo economicus but with what are called in the novel his “birth and connection”: “his Irish birth and Irish connection had brought this misfortune

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of his country so closely home to him that he had found the task of extricating himself from it to be impossible” (Finn, 1:340). This “Irish connection” gives me license to think a bit longer about how a Victorian liberal’s source of identity is necessarily grounded—sometimes literally, most often abstractly—in response to social mobility, and how this requirement impacts liberalism lived both as a governmental occupation and as a political identity. That liberal citizens must in some way occupy (as opposed to “own”) land to be fully liberal certainly complicates efforts to align this era of liberalism with a cosmopolitan ethos. For this book’s purposes, however, the occupational ideal I’m outlining becomes most revealing and complex when it infuses the ethics of opinion formation that constitutes the liberal individual. Finn may say to Monk, “I have views of my own,” but the novel ultimately rephrases that claim: he occupies views of his own.

A Transitional Object Phineas Finn, like Trollope’s The Warden, is a novel deeply interested in the possibility of and terms for “connection” (Trollope’s terms) or attachment, to use a term elsewhere of such importance to liberal cogitations on Ireland and the union: Finn’s ability to integrate (but not fully) into the upper reaches of English culture attests to the potential of new attachments in a liberal society but also the elusiveness of them. It is not just that these connections are present but tantalizingly out of reach to Phineas (if only Laura Standish had become his wife, if only the Liberal Party had adopted Monk’s land tenure bill, if only British unionism truly encompassed Ireland) but that the connections themselves seem less substantial, more elusive at their core, than one might wish. In a liberal and liberalizing society, the terms of human affiliation are changing—humans are much less constituted by their possession of land—a reality that presses itself full force on Victorian liberalism during this period; they are also presumed to be less determined by their habituated, customary occupation of land and less beholden to and defined by their blood relations. Property’s absoluteness was particularly under scrutiny in Ireland, where landlords’ privileges were actively ignored by Fenians and speculatively eradicated by republicans, and whence large numbers of Irish tenants were emigrating. Recall that the Irish Reform Act of 1850 evacuated the electoral claims of property to a degree unimaginable in England until the 1880s, undergirding the land legislation of this era with only an “occupational” requirement for the Irish vote. Finn’s landlessness,

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although pertinent to his subaltern status as an Irishman, is also expressive of an imperial nation more largely, one that is reforming the criterion for political citizenship, as each successive reform reduces or revises the property requirement for suffrage. An Irishman, an unpropertied son of a modest professional, a Roman Catholic, one who moves away and becomes something else entirely, is thus a striking instance of what is happening to many British subjects, albeit in profoundly uneven ways. Phineas Finn thus worries over just what grounds of connection, pun intended, to civil society and society more generally a liberal individual can establish even as the territory of the empire itself continues to expand exponentially: In the absence of private property in land, what authorizes consent? If disinterested conviction does not demand an interest in the land— which had traditionally enabled civic detachment—of what precisely does principled disinterestedness consist?54 It seems (to me, at least) that one cannot overemphasize the poignancy of these questions at this time, that it is almost impossible to convey how deeply identical landed proprietorship and citizenship had been for gentlemen just a generation behind Trollope’s own and indeed for most gentlemen still. By midcentury most estates earned their income from other sources than agriculture, but the ideal of an agrarian, deferential society and the allure of real property ownership persisted—and had real effects. Trollope’s Mr. Kennedy, a man of singular unsingularity “who did not seem possessed of an idea” (Finn, 1:56), can rise to the virtual top of his Liberal Party simply by owning an enormous estate in Scotland—both a signal of land’s evacuated meaning when even Kennedy can have it and its lingering authority when having it makes him a cabinet minister. Unlike Kennedy, Monk would satisfy James Fitzjames Stephen’s notion of a liberal, for he is “possessed of an idea,” but that idea’s political capacity is underwritten by the other sort of possession. Only Finn struggles with the utter political insufficiency of a property in ideas. This novel is strikingly sensitive to the same complex at work in the 1870 bill: the relations among land usage, the various permutations of land possession, and the constitution of political consensual communities. The narrative tends to examine these relations by showing how the various bodies inhabiting these spaces use up their time. As Finn struggles to attain a foothold in politics, the text provides a detailed account of the country home culture that had been for generations the real location of British pol-

54. Langbaurer notes this feature of Trollope’s fiction but leaves it largely unexplored. She notes that “Trollope finds the notion of ground uncertain.” Langbauer, Novels of Everyday Life, 104.

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itics. In contrast to the cabinet meeting’s sense of belatedness, as this novel portrays it, where men convene to acknowledge what has already happened elsewhere, the gatherings at the Plantagenet estate of Matching are the elsewhere. The rituals of sleeping, eating, playing, and politicking—in the interstices of a leisured life on the estate—are so deeply entangled with their location and the ownership of that location that Phineas knows he must go into debt to get the furnishings he needs to join “the hunt.” And although critics tend to think of Trollope’s extended narrations of fox hunting only in terms of a hobbyist’s indulgence, there is also present in these chapters a commentary on the nature of aristocratic land usage.55 The reformed Chiltern, having foresworn the profligate and anachronistic version of aristocracy associated with the duel, is the perfect antidote to absentee landlords; his refusal to budge from his land, allied with his devotion to the hounds, represents the equivalence of inhabitation, ownership, and stewardship—a conservative and largely nostalgic ground—that was slowly and (most commentators felt) surely disappearing in nineteenth-century Britain.56 The symbolic and practical expression of a “privileged access” enacted by the hunt as its hounds and mounted horses race across large, contiguous tracts of land was becoming acutely explicit in radical circles. Speeding across estates and farms, not rooted in the soil but yet making deep marks on its surface, digging furrows but not tilling, drawing pleasure but not sustenance, the hunt expressed a nonoccupatonal use of the land. Plantagenet Palliser’s failure to attend to the coverts on his estate and his more general ignorance concerning the hunt serve as shorthand indicators of his disconnection from aristocratic obligations to land and thus his longer-term political efforts to diminish the power of the propertied. In Trollope’s last, unfinished novel, The Landleaguers, utter disillusionment with Irish land reformers is registered in part by a disgusted portrayal of what were their actual efforts at the time to blockade the running of the hounds—the symbolism of which was lost on no one. Phineas Finn illustrates, by way of contrast to the serious leisure of the hunting season, the utter silliness of cabinet occupancy—what seems the

55. When public opinion turned against foxhunting, Trollope responded, and did so by promoting it as a democratic sport that brings high and low together via their love of the hunt, a decidedly different account than that implied in this novel. See Trollope, “Mr. Freeman on the Morality of Hunting,” 616–25. 56. The implied anachronism of the duel in Phineas Finn—written up in a classic Trollopean irony—is, even so, an uneasy scene, for the secure symbolic relation between an aristocrat’s honor and his bodily being is contrasted with Finn’s own conflicted response to the duel: he must fight but not really, shooting his gun so as not to inflict a real wound.

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sheer hopelessness of delaminating now largely empty Whig ideals of disinterestedness from the land and moving them to the offices of liberal governance. These offices are, after all, the very home of sinecures and old corruption that long precede this Liberal coalition, tainting, it seems, any possibility of combining liberal conviction with cabinet appointment. Trollope’s novel harbors no strong Whiggish loyalties; it does not hesitate to reveal the empty performativity of Whig civic obligation: Laurence Fitzgibbon had perfected over the years a form of bureaucratic absenteeism to match that of his landed, Irish Protestant compatriots. By contrast, Phineas is regularly in his office, shown to be a hardworking employee quite unlike that Irish scapegrace, but his Foreign Office study of the Canadian provinces, as much as his probing investigation of the army’s potted peas, is supposed to convey, much to the chagrin of Canadians everywhere, just how unimportant, how supremely marginal to substantive politics, is the occupation of liberal governance.57 Oratorical prowess on the floor of Parliament, in contrast to bureaucratic labor, had long been an essential requirement for political success, as the high stakes implied by Finn’s “maiden speech” show, and remained of great public interest when Gladstone and Disraeli tangled over legislation in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In the years leading up to the 1869 publication of Phineas Finn, during the years that coalitions slowly cohered into new parties, the speeches in Parliament routinely toppled governments, leading to new elections, but this era seemed to be coming to an abrupt end. The parliamentary floor that witnessed these increasingly ornamental speeches was becoming less and less a site of governance in proportion to the growing importance of, on the one hand, opinion out of doors and, on the other hand, the cabinet, which, as the text admits, operated behind closed doors. It is easy to provide an instrumental reading of the chapter, aptly titled “A Cabinet Meeting,” in which the narrator pretends to narrate a cabinet meeting, the nature of which he can have no idea.58 Having no idea, so this argument might go, the novel portrays a cabinet meeting that has no ideas. However, it seems far more likely, given

57. See Bloomfield, “Trollope’s Use of Canadian History,” 67–74. 58. Bagehot observes of the cabinet: “The most curious point about the cabinet is that so very little is known about it. The meetings are not only secret in theory, but also secret in reality. By the present practice, no official minute is kept of them. Even a private note is discouraged and disliked. The House of Commons, even in its most inquisitive and turbulent moments, would not permit a note of a cabinet meeting to be read. No minister who respected the fundamental usages of political practice would attempt to read such a note.” Bagehot, English Constitution, 61.

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Finn’s views on the unmanly secret ballot, that the novel is representing a position, one notably against the powerful argument of this time offered by Walter Bagehot in The English Constitution, that urges the cabinet is no place for politics.59 Occupied for longer periods of time in Phineas Finn by its caretaker than by its ministerial officials, the cabinet encloses no ground for governance; it is evacuated and redundant.60 Indeed, the claustrophobia incurred by the cabinet’s secretiveness and its general aura of being mostly unoccupied for days on end only seems to enhance by contrast the “extension” of space and time, the sport in open air, provided in the privilege of landed proprietorship. It is as if the cabinet is an empty presence, there only to affirm that the liberal coalitional government lacks content, that real politics happens elsewhere. Indeed, all these officials, it seems, have already decided the future of their government and the political tactics to deploy against the opposition while shooting pheasant at Gresham’s or Palliser’s estates, far away from the people and Westminster. A conservative frustration with the ballot coincides with this deep presumption portrayed in the novel that a person draws his gendered, civic authority from his open possession of the ground on which he stands and takes a stand. The need to locate one’s vote in a closed chamber, be it voting booth or cabinet, to elaborate one’s liberal consent in a vistaless vacuum elicits Trollope’s famous estimation of the secret ballot as “unmanly.” Only at a place like Loughlinter, for instance, can Finn propose atop a waterfall whose view encompasses the vast acreage of Mr. Kennedy’s estate, but his proposal fails precisely because he does not own the land on

59. “Cabinet governments educate the nation. . . . The great scene of debate, the great engine of popular instruction and political controversy, is the legislative assembly. A speech there by an eminent statesman, a party movement by a great political combination, are the best means yet for arousing, enlivening, and teaching a people. The cabinet system ensures such debates, for it makes them the means by which statesmen advertise themselves for future and confirm themselves in present governments. It brings forward men eager to speak, and gives them occasions to speak. The deciding catastrophes of cabinet governments are critical diversions preceded with fine discussions. Everything which is worth saying, everything which ought to be said, most certainly will be said.” Ibid., 14. 60. In his chapter “Trollope, Bagehot and the English Constitution” in Victorian People, Asa Briggs shows the similarities between these two liberals, suggesting that both men celebrated the “Palmerstonian” era of limited legislation and fewer big ideas and would therefore both celebrate a cabinet invisible to the people. On the one hand, I am not attempting to square these novels with Trollope’s actually existing politics. On the other hand, the novel’s extended observations about “taking stands” seems to suggest that Trollope’s conservative liberalism might have been appalled at the democratizing of politics but was nonetheless working through what could count as a worthy opinion politics, and in so doing found the privacy of the cabinet as problematic as the privacy of the balloting booth.

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which he kneels, and therefore he cannot offer Laura Standish the financial and political foundation she requires. In this vista, Finn does not belong. He may be handsome in his person, but he is not an owner of the handsome prospect that could ensure his marital prospects. This particular ideal of proprietary conviction, evoked by Trollope through hunting weekends and picturesque views, both of which are variant evidence for an aristocratic mastery of extended space, lingers powerfully in the novel, but not without striking signs of strain. Grouse hunting and foxhunting are merely leisure pastimes, but they signified investments of time and nurture. Aristocrats inhabited their estates while engaging in these pursuits; they were present landlords. Not surprisingly, then, many liberal advocates of Irish accommodation were intensely disdainful of absentee landlordism in Ireland, but they realized that aristocrats both at home and across the Irish Sea were never truly rooted on the land and were even less so as the nineteenth century reached its midpoint. By the 1860s, most aristocrats could no longer cite their agricultural properties as their primary economic resource, having resorted to industrial and financial investments. Moreover, if an estate proved economically profitable, it was almost always because the landlord had modernized his agricultural practice in just the way that free-market liberals wished to do in Ireland. Large-scale, capitalintensive farming requires the consolidation of lands, the reclamation of wastes and commons, and the reduction in the number of small farmers and cottiers, in effect, the transformation of traditional, deferential communities. That politics remained dominated by landed proprietors at this time indicates in part how profoundly residual and dated and yet symbolic and powerful was the assumption that ownership of land invested the man with the independence required to become a citizen. The novel registers the strain in this ideal of landlord politician when the disinterested (in both senses of the word) Palliser legislates against the land he owns—but does not much care for—while the interested aristocrat, Chiltern, refuses to legislate at all. Nostalgia for this sort of grounded authority hovers in the novel’s narrative and its syntax, and in the writing of midcentury liberals, even as they seek to reform that property qualification. The novel’s evacuated cabinet can signal, then, both the elsewhere of aristocratic governance and the nothing of liberal policy formation, where civil servants and lower secretaries put in their hours to no effect.61 The questions of where Finn should stand, and what he should stand for, of what 61. On the uselessness of liberal legislative activity, but in service of a very different claim than mine, see Letwin, Gentleman in Trollope, 198.

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place he occupies and how he occupies himself are asked in a social domain characterized by absenteeism, exclusivity, and leisurely distraction. Finn’s story, occurring roughly at the moment when the Reform Bill of 1867–68 is diminishing electoral property requirements, when English proprietorship in Ireland is open to debate, when “liberal ideas” are now operating within the routines of parliamentary bureaucracy (the committee, the committee report), and the liberal individual himself is counted as a cog in the party machinery, Finn’s story seems to considerably up the ante of the process of liberal individuation and the grounds of consent from that told in earlier Trollope novels, in particular The Warden. When Septimus Harding takes an independent stance and steps down from his wardenship, the principled, deliberate, and disinterested path he takes is patiently delineated by the novel—long passages of internal monologue, flush with deliberative thought, are portrayed for the reading audience as an instantiation of a kind of liberal cognition that substitutes for more traditional grounds of authority. Harding takes an independent stance, becomes a liberal individual, but does so through rigorous, if only momentary, cognitive principles, or at least so it seems. And Harding, even when in London, is firmly situated in the specificities of Barsetshire, so that his courageous act of principle is supported by a richly saturated social and natural “embeddedness.” We cannot imagine Mr. Harding without Barset. He may not be a proprietor, but a proprietary culture orders his field of practice, for he functions as the “ward” of local pensioners and the warden of Hiram’s property; he has, in effect, a ground of attachment from which his liberal detachment can take effect. In addition, his loss of the wardenship is not the utter loss of his religious occupation. In this instance, religious and musical devotion is seen to substitute adequately for a lack of substantial property. Self-cultivation in retirement sustains Harding’s lived liberalism. In effect, he does occupy some profound if alienated embodied relation to his land that the text registers and that readers at the time are presumed to recognize, even if the novel does not fully develop it or renders consistent all of its deformations. Harding is, one might say, always Mr. Harding, whatever job he holds; he is the warden of himself—a natural part of the Barsetshire landscape. Finn, however, “felt that he had two identities,—that he was, as it were, two separate persons” (Finn, 1:330). “His Irish life, he would tell himself, was a thing quite apart and separate from his life in England” (Finn, 2:271). At the start of the novel and well into the narrative, Finn is not detached but unattached to home and to British society; his forlorn love life and modest lodgings only accentuate his solitariness.

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Phineas Finn is just as much embroiled in questions of affiliation and disaffiliation as that earlier novel, but initially this novel seems hardly interested in or perhaps aware of the mental features of liberal individuation that might make Phineas a Liberal member of Parliament and in turn could presumably motivate Finn’s commitment to the Irish tenant right bill. Finn sometimes is shown sitting at a table with books of statistics or listening over claret to conversations between Monk and Turnball, the radical leader, but the growth and development of his political opinions are more often than not avoided or comically rendered—as in the repeated references to the serious business of potted peas. It is perhaps at these moments when Finn’s Irishness, expressed in his flighty intellect and sentimental temperament, most seems to be getting in the way of liberal individuation, for he lacks the “gravitas” thought to be so characteristic of the sober Englishman, as one sees in tonnage in the personality of Planty Pall.62 To render Finn’s path even more treacherous, Ireland is, of course, no Barsetshire. We have Mary Flood Jones and Finn’s loving nuclear family of unmarriageable sisters, along with a bit of fishing in the river, but the social and natural saturation of Barsetshire is not matched in an Ireland presumably depopulated and denuded by famine only one generation earlier. Lord Tulla, the local landed proprietor, is hardly up for the hunt, hobbled by gout, wholly dependent on the ministrations of Phineas’s father and, by extension, lacking political conviction, using the parliamentary seat he commands as an instrument of familial revenge. One could cynically say that Finn’s independent political convictions cannot easily ground themselves in a model of deliberative cognition that requires time and a selfreflexiveness he lacks, or in a Liberal cabinet whose rituals are seen to be without consequential content, or in a famished Ireland whose land has no value, that does not attract investment or even support the labor that occupies its soil. If this mid-Victorian liberalism requires an attachment from which principled disinterest must necessarily build, what can be drama62. Arnold is a contemporary who famously gives voice to this standard stereotype of “the Celt,” in which a certain emotional adventurousness is implicitly contrasted to “balance.” He writes: “Sentimental,—always ready to react against the despotism of fact; that is the description a great friend of the Celt gives of him; and it is not a bad description of the sentimental temperament; it lets us into the secret of its dangers and of its habitual want of success. Balance, measure, and patience, these are the eternal conditions, even supposing the happiest temperament to start with, of high success; and balance, measure and patience are just what the Celt has never had. Even in the world of spiritual creation, he has never, in spite of his admirable gifts of quick perception and warm emotion, succeeded perfectly, because he never has had steadiness, patience, sanity enough to comply with the conditions under which alone can expression be perfectly given to the finest perceptions and emotions.” Arnold, Celtic Literature, 102–3.

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tized as a courageous act of detachment? What sort of interest does Phineas have—in Ireland or anything else? Monk’s bill is needed to rectify just this sort of problem in Ireland, perhaps, for it enables other men to invest and garner interest, but early in the novel Finn is shown trying an occupational leap of faith into the political world without financial support, without his own ideas, and without a dense cultural location from which his abstracted embodiment might take shape. Indeed, rather than owning a property and improving it, rather than occupying land and tilling it, without any sort of embodied relation to Irish land, even if only to purposely emigrate from it, Finn—in mind and body—is adrift. Mr. Low, Finn’s barrister mentor who warns against an early career in politics, continually reminds the reader that the young man is like most other men who have “strong bodies with weak legs to carry them. Then, because their legs are weak, they drift into idleness and ruin. During all the drifting they are wretched, and when they have thoroughly drifted they are still wretched” (Finn, 1:45).

Phantom Limbs Throughout Phineas Finn, as shown in the passage just cited, the narrator expresses the fluctuating drama of Finn’s career in liberal politics according to a bodily, and also specifically masculine, physics of balance, gravity, posture, and a vocation that itself is anthropomorphically in search of “its legs.” All these expressive patterns in the prose metaphorically hypothesize a vital relation between a male human body occupying ground and political authority and, in turn, the grounded body’s unique capacity to articulate consent. The Conservative Mr. Low “was himself an ambitious man, looking to entering Parliament at some future time . . . but he was prudent . . . resolved to make the ground sure beneath his feet in every step that he took forward” (Finn, 1:42).63 Low, a devout Conservative, thus stands firm, but his liberal apprentice “drifts,” this latter characterization a familiar conservative reproach of liberal opinion at the time. The Liberal Party was famously referred to as a “heap of sand.”64 In the 1860s and beyond, the press echoes this syntax of “drift” when complaining of Gladstone’s often

63. In the second “volume,” chapter 63, entitled, “Showing How the Duke Stood His Ground,” Trollope evokes this lexicon of the ground to establish how easily the old, immobilized duke could stage a garden party simply, it seems, to ensnare Madame Max Goesler. Again, we have both the irony of this empty deployment of the aristocrat’s grounded body and the allure of its easy mobilization on the grounds of an estate. 64. “In the first place, the Liberals, looked at as a party, are but a heap of sand.” [Gleig], “Late Elections,” 257.

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sudden changes of mind, exemplified in his unexpected endorsement of an “occupational right” in Ireland and his subsequent controversial support of Irish home rule—positions that varied from other Liberals, many of whom could not come to agreement on Ireland as on other matters.65 The novel negatively stages this convergence of a grounded body, the articulation of consent, and the instantiation of political authority in its depiction of Finn’s first aborted speech on the floor of Parliament, awkwardly and tellingly described as “the occasion of his rising to his maiden legs” (Finn, 1:180). The subject of the debate should come as no surprise to readers of chapter 4: the secret ballot. As I have shown, this legislation is also encoded by the gender politics of opinion formation. In his speech, Finn parrots Anthony Trollope’s own opposition to the booth. Trollope, like many of his peers, liberals and conservatives alike, resisted the ballot because they believed an open, oral declaration of one’s political choice in a public setting was “manly” and therefore authoritative, measuring in that embodied assertion, that courageous “stand,” the firmness of one’s consent. One can almost see in this negative construction of the ballot question the genealogy of a political practice once exclusively engaged in by landed citizens, where the body’s self-possession is exactly conterminous with its ownership of land, where a body rightly lodged on the ground it owns can make a “stand.” Without that property qualification, the body of opinion is, in fact, just a body. That Finn is a “maiden,” that Finn in fact fails to rise up and speak and is instead tempted to prostrate himself, “flinging himself at Mr. Monk’s feet” (Finn, 1:186), the selfsame Mr. Monk who believed “that every man possessed of the franchise should dare to have and to express a political opinion of his own” (Finn, 1:182), suggests that Finn is “without legs” and, implicitly, lacking other appendages that make the man. Having memorized his comments, diligently copying them to note cards beforehand, Finn nonetheless becomes distracted in thought and unmanned at the critical moment of enunciation, revealing his susceptibility to an emotionalism coded as feminine. The novel notes as much 65. See note 34 to chapter 6 for substantiation of Gladstone’s changeability. On the Liberal Party as a changing organism, Hamer writes, “Liberalism as a political creed was no longer systematic enough; there was no general agreement among reformers calling themselves Liberals as to what the principles that should govern the political action of Liberals really were.” Hamer, “Irish Question and Liberal Politics,” 514. Pugh writes of the more general and foundational shifts occurring in the Liberal Party in the early 1880s, which were detectable even in the 1870s: “The fact is that although in retrospect Victorian Liberalism may seem basically the party of free trade, individualism and self-help, by the 1880s contemporaries were more aware of the growing emphasis on state intervention and compulsion at the expense of individual rights.” Pugh, Modern British Politics, 32.

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soon afterward, when the narrator admits that Finn was against the ballot not because he stood firm upon his legs but because of Mr. Monk’s attentiveness; “Had Mr. Turnbull become his friend instead, it may well be that he would have liked the ballot” (Finn, 1:243). Perhaps now we have a fuller explanation for the inordinate space devoted in Phineas Finn to the young Irishman’s efforts to speak effectively on the floor of Parliament. Trollope’s elongated passages on Finn’s physical and mental anxieties while “finding his legs” are the central representational drama of liberal political individuation. At the risk of sounding utterly nonsensical, why is it so hard for a liberal politician to locate his own body parts? We don’t really get much sense of just what Phineas says on the ballot or in defense of tenant right, virtually nothing at all, but we hear all about how his body feels when stating those opinions, as if the novel transposes the self-reflexiveness associated with liberal cognition (thinking long and in earnest) into a self-consciousness of the body (becoming intensely aware of how one looks and sounds).66 To reinvoke Morley’s words quoted in chapter 3: in order “to say what he really thinks,” Phineas must “really feel” what he thinks; his body must consciously sense the self-possession implied by conviction. It matters little to the novel what Phineas has to say about the ballot, much less about that “terribly unintelligible subject” of tenant right, but it is absolutely necessary that Phineas is capable of “finding his legs” and “hearing his own voice.” This bodily self-possession thus “stands for” the formalism of midcentury liberalism, where an embodied form of cognition supposedly counts more than its content, where taking a stand is more important than the stand itself. The novel elaborates this self-conscious physics of body, ground, and consenting voice conspicuously, even suggesting a conscious dimension in the protagonist, despite our temptation to read most of Trollope’s prose effects as arbitrary products of haste. When referring to his failed proposal to Laura Standish at Loughlinter, Finn shows his deep awareness of the

66. This awareness of one’s body could be interpreted as Finn’s understanding of aristocratic performativity; in other words, he becomes painfully aware that he cannot inhabit his body as a true blue blood does—externally, unselfconsciously. Liberalism often translates this aristocratic value of social performance into a register of communal respectability, and that variant could work well in this context because Finn seeks acceptance from his parliamentary peers and thus worries overmuch about how he looks to them. I am emphasizing, however, Finn’s own awareness of how he seems and less his awareness of how others perceive him. On a reading of Trollope that quite differently understands self-reflexivity, see Anderson, “Trollope’s Modernity.”

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authority of property in a context of “consent”: “And this I have done on soil that is to be all your own” (Finn, 1:138). And when Finn is struggling to gain confidence in parliamentary debate, the narrator ruefully comments in a voice that is contiguous if not identical to Finn’s: “He should be as a cock in his own farmyard, master of all the circumstances around him” (Finn, 1:184). A metaphoric logic such as this marks the transition from presumptions of proprietorial privilege in the land to the authority invested in the subject on the land. In this image, a figural ground, “the farmyard,” linked to a figural masculinity, “the cock,” comes to substitute for actual property. In this farcical translation of the country house to the farm, a real possession declines into the fact of occupation, while the erect body inhabiting that space becomes the locus rather than one component in a ramified landscape of authority. A cock in a farmyard is, I admit, a rather curious way of describing liberal individuation, though it echoes similar analogies in The Warden. In this shift in focus from landed aristocrat to liberal individual, whose own bodily features must now assert the mastery required, one can glimpse the new representational pressures of a reformed political nation. This could be the difference between the cultural authority expressed in a landscape of a country home in which an aristocratic stewardship is implied but no aristocrat need be present and the individualized features in a human portrait that, as we will see, figure liberal parliamentarianism in this novel. The metaphoric compensation implied in occupying a farmyard is also of course deeply deflationary. It articulates just how haunted by the land liberal political occupationalism is, how truly ungrounded—at the visceral and representational register—its daily cognitive and political practice feels, how unmanly is its personal instability, and how very silly it can seem in its quotidian practice.67 Moreover, this shift from an “actual” ground on which to stand to a metaphoric ground is no mere invention of Trollope’s personal anxiety but specifically encoded in the praxis of politics at this moment in the nineteenth century. The introduction of professional, retail, and industrialist members of Parliament and the liquefaction of the property requirement to vote detached the aristocratic politician from his authoritative land. At

67. Trollope is insistent on the distinction between politics as an occupation and the meritocratic professions; see Mr. Low, who articulates the differences between a real profession where one works through the ranks and the nature of the sort of political labor that Finn seeks, dependent on patronage. Trollope isn’t always this insistent on the difference between profession and politics, however; see Trollope, Three Clerks.

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around the same time, the balloting booth aims to remove the elector from his public place of opinion formation. The vagaries of opinion formation are at the heart of the next chapter, but in the context of my discussion of Phineas Finn, let me just suggest that during this period there was a new emphasis on distinctive argument in hustings oratory (as opposed to formulaic assertion) and an invigorated attention to the candidate as individual rather than as a placeholder for interest. One might speculate, as a result, that the persuasiveness of political oratory did not now draw all its ballast—or at least did not seem to draw its ballast—from the fact of landlord influence, from the impressive cultural entanglement of land, landlord, and interest, nor could the political orator automatically summon his authority from his proprietary relation to that landed dynamic, either as owner of it or as proxy for the landlord interest. The debater in Parliament, as with the orator out of doors, was no longer a proprietor or a placeholder for property but a man of opinion, which is not to suggest that holding a place no longer mattered. Part of the secondary drama of Finn’s political fortunes concerns his periodic need to find a constituency for his Liberal candidacy, at each successive election standing at an ever farther remove from what might be considered his constituency of origin. Quintius Slide espies a conspiracy of Whig influence in Finn’s standing for Loughton (Lord Brentford’s domain), and indeed it is that, but it is also portrayed equally in this novel as occupationalism (as opposed to vocationalism), the exact thing demanded of an ordinary man who pursues politics as his livelihood, unlike, for example, Mr. Monk, who “had not taken up politics as a trade” (Finn, 2:182). Finn reminds himself that he “had taken up politics with the express desire of getting his foot upon a rung of the ladder of promotion” (Finn, 2:44). This passage echoes rather dangerously the standard complaint of the reformed Parliament cited earlier, where the floor was inhabited by men whose “sole object is to establish for themselves a place in society, and to that they are ready to sacrifice their own most cherished beliefs.” With this social context in mind, Finn could be seen as more interested in rising up to find a place than in standing his ground, and the novel struggles with this conflict between social mobility and disinterested conviction. Many observers assumed that social climbers appeared in Parliament precisely because of the electoral reforms that gave common people the vote. Implicit in this assertion is a familiar presumption of this era: new voters cannot be the source of deliberative political opinion, in themselves or their representatives. As Finn slowly relinquishes the sinecures of Whig favor,

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as he increasingly excuses himself from the hunting parties, he encounters this new constituency that equally complicates his search for political authority.

A Portrait of the People Where can Finn find his liberal representational ground? Where can he take a stand, if not on the floor of Parliament, not in the ministerial cabinet, not on the aristocratic estate, or in County Clare, or at Loughton? As the novel indicates in reference to Finn, his liberal conviction is most manifest when he is most distant from Liberal politics, unlike Mr. Monk. While Monk derives his power and independence from his social and proprietorial place—more a Whiggish radicalism than a progressive liberalism— Phineas, in syntax of uncertain result, “had given up his place in order that he might be able to speak his mind” (Finn, 2:340). Note here how “speaking one’s mind” and “place” are put in unhappy opposition in this odd but supremely liberal phrase, as if speaking one’s mind were a fully commensurate substitution for his political and spatial occupation. This phrase asserts that the Liberal politician is most liberal when unoccupied by his position; it suggests that this liberal opinion is most grounded when it is most without ground. Given the pervasive limitations (on career, on character, on love, on conviction) imposed on Finn by his lack of land, given the novel’s portrayal of the “nowhere” of cabinet and ballot, this sanguine landlessness is simply not plausible. In an era when property is at least supposed to lessen its grip on power, when suffrage enlarges with each passing generation or two, and when politics has become an occupation or is seen soon to become so, the question of just how a particular candidate can represent a district thus takes on new resonances and becomes a crucial part of the candidate’s solicitation of the electors. In this revised oratorical scene, then, what is said and who says it—both the ideas and the singularity of the candidate—commingle meaningfully with his actual speech. In conversation with Finn, Mr. Monk opines pretentiously about theories of political representation, likening the legislature to a portrait of the people but insisting that in Britain (as opposed to thoughtless America) the likeness must have something of the “mind” as well as the “body” (Finn, 1:336). That “mind” matters to British liberalism is of course not news in this book, but that mind is then described as adequately figured in—to use the revered Mr. Monk’s own words—“a turn of the eye here and a curl of the lip there” and in ones’ speech (and specifically not embedded in a landscape) reveals how the embodiment of

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human singularity is integral to liberal representation—both the human as individual in thought and opinion and the human body as distinctive in its gestural and oral lexicon.68 Britain can no longer be represented by a map of country and city interests, not even sufficiently by the distinction between counties and boroughs, nor by those interests’ indistinguishable proxies, for Britain increasingly represents “a people,” not territory. How are these people to be represented? Once more, it is worth conjuring up that iconic image of an uninhabited tenant’s cottage in postfamine Ireland, a poignant figure of their times for gentlemen of traditional attachments. William O’Connor Morris reveals, it seems to me, how truly difficult it was for this generation to accept the full ramifications of a changing political landscape, where land mattered less and people, at least theoretically, mattered more.69 As he looks at these famine-ravaged cottages, Morris cannot see their tenants. His preference for landscape and improvement and his sense of the tenantry as either utterly absent or menacingly “crowded in spreading villages” reveals how truly absent to vision are “the people” and how utterly engrossing—still—is the land in midcentury Great Britain. Rather than envisioning a collection of small farmers toiling in their little fields and at any moment returning to their homes, Morris sees a haunting vision of dispossessed land and empty houses that evoke simultaneously, it seems to me, the attenuation of place into capitalized space, the withdrawal of the landlords from their paternal obligations to their tenants (and thereby the loss of their rationale for political eminence) and the “vacancy” of those tenants, a subgroup in Ireland and in England about to be given political representation. In this haunted landscape, improvements must be made, but both kinds of cultivation—an aesthetics of landscape that idealizes the shape of the land and an agricultural investment in its fertility—do not yet alter what Morris sees. Absent from view and absent of mind, the Irish tenants in this vignette have no ground to stand on, let alone an “idea of that ground,” and yet must be represented in the brave 68. To be true to the text, Monk’s allusion to eyes and lips refers to a portrait in need of adjustment, in need of suffrage reform; however, the language of portrait and facial gesture remains relevant to his understanding of representational adequacy, in both unreformed and reformed legislatures. My point is to show that Monk finds the fleeting gestures of the singular body to be an adequate or, at least, inevitable expressive vehicle for descriptions of that which represents “the people.” 69. For a less-gentle accounting of this blindness induced by aristocratic hegemony, see Mill,, “Spirit of the Age,” 39: “They love their country as Bonaparte loved his army—for whose glory he felt the most ardent zeal, at a time when all the men who composed it, one with another, were killed off every two or three years. They do not love England as one loves human beings, but as a man loves his house or his acres.”

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new world of liberal politics as having “stands.” Without “a place”—absent from the landscape Morris sketches—these dispossessed people take shape in political discourse as transient bodies, bodies in motion, captured as gestural traces over time (the turning eye, the curving lip) rather than the still ornamental figures in an eighteenth-century landscape.70 They are not Irish occupants of the soil nor are they picturesque decoration but the itinerant Irish, the emigrating Irish, the revolutionary Irish. It hardly needs commenting on the allusiveness of these representational figures of eye and lip, which nearly replicate the disarticulated body parts of Finn’s early oratorical failures, in which weak legs, unsteady feet, and jittery hands express his loss of self-possession. Finn’s opinions—his late support of tenant right and unrotten boroughs and his own dispossession from the land—make him a fitting representative of these tenants, even if he resists considering them his natural constituency. The turning eye and curved lip of the people, as Monk describes it, take on a certain volatile flirtatiousness, perhaps even effeminacy, and seems in keeping with the novel’s portrayal of Finn. As Mr. Low reminds us when speaking of those new demagogues who seek political position without profession, these people’s representatives have “weak legs,” are unable to find sure ground, and inevitably “drift.” They fling themselves at men’s feet or “embrace” a cause due to fleeting attractions. That Finn appears feminine in his physical and social graces has been noted widely by readers and critics, who often suggest quite rightly the ages-old association of the Celts with feminine susceptibilities.71 That political liberalism is thus also associated—as an accessory—to sentiment, indecisiveness, and emotional and intellectual levity requires further exploration, however.

“The Bride Thus Bound in Compulsory Wedlock” Phineas Finn’s portrayal of the young man’s journey toward his final and independent act of political consent oddly resonates with the pretty “Irish lad’s” habit of proposing marriage. As a reader of the novel can easily recall, Finn is falling in and out of love throughout the novel, often, ad70. Thinking about the idealized landscape of eighteenth-century painting, I am thinking of Barrell’s work Idea of Landscape, which emphasizes the formalism of a Claudean composition. Bermingham shows how workers in landscape painting function as decoration in Landscape and Ideology. See also Helsinger, Rural Scenes. 71. McCourt, “Domesticating the Other”; Lindner, “Sexual Commerce;” Dougherty, “Angel in the House.”

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mittedly, spurred on to the next passionate gesture by a previous gesture spurned, but his capacity to overcome heartache and redirect his affection is more than impressive. To put a blunt question: why is Finn’s liberalism, and in particular his stand on Irish land reform, structured in the narrative as “like” his too-frequent romances, such that, for instance, his political positions are as fickle as his romances or, relatedly, his position on Irish land reform requires a similar sort of social sacrifice as his commitment to Mary Flood Jones? Are these two forms of consent—political and marital— comparable to one another? In an era when marriage was less about sustaining proprietary lineages and consolidating aristocratic privilege than, say, love, matrimonial union shares with opinion a crisis in authority. In both instances, the ground that supports the consent has become reliant on the individual qua individual and not, like the warden or the lord, on the title and all it represents. Like the opinion articulated in the Fortnightly Review, a propertyless, penniless man like Phineas, when dealing with a woman, must especially “say what he really thinks and really feels,” for the assertion of sincerity appears to be the only firmness on which to establish the right to consent. Just as Mr. Monk insists that every man now needs an opinion to make a politics, every man now needs a true love to make a marriage. For aristocrats like Laura Standish or Violent Effingham, Finn’s sincerity hardly matters, for it comes without land, but eventually, for Madame Max, herself an unpropertied social climber, it does. The Union of Settlement between Ireland and Britain was often understood—not just among liberals—as a problem of consent, framed in the affective language of attachment, even allegorized as a marital union. The narrator in Phineas Finn contextualizes Irish tenant right by indicating that mainstream and radical liberals were all unionists at this time, who felt “it was at any rate necessary to England’s character that the bride thus bound in a compulsory wedlock should be endowed with all the best privileges that a wife can enjoy. Let her at least not be a kept mistress” (Finn, 2:189). Others have delved into the stunning evocativeness of this passage in which Ireland, and thus Phineas Finn, is compared to a mistress who becomes a lucky wife due to the good character of the groom. A balder statement of imperial self-congratulation and colonial prostitution would be difficult to find. Note in this passage how the value of the relationship hinges not only on contract but also on good character, what I have earlier indicated is the premium of good and honest intention placed by midVictorian liberals on a contractual relationship formerly concerned only with the realization of promised action.

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That Finn can be seen as a kept mistress as well is of course plausible given his reliance on his governmental appointments or on a good marriage to keep him going in politics. Moreover, that the pro-tenant-right Finn is somewhat more like the people than the aristocracy or the political elite aligns him with the curved lip and turned eye, the coquette rather than the cock in his farmyard. Also, that Finn is an Irishman only enhances this association with flightiness, intellectual and emotional superficiality, and charm. Remember, Finn supports the ballot not because he stands firm but because Mr. Monk and not the radical Mr. Turnbull made overtures first. In this context, one could argue that Finn seeks tenant right so that he might become a wife rather than a mistress to English liberalism, obtaining the “best privileges” if not the “independence” that England could “not afford . . . so close against her own ribs” (Finn, 2:180).72 Mr. Monk can establish his “character” by supporting tenant right, and so can Finn, it seems, but good character in this latter instance (from mistress to wife) is the merest gendered minimum when compared to the national character confirmed in Mr. Monk’s support. Ireland’s subjection to England in the Union of Settlement is undeniable, but it is just possible that Finn’s liberalism is also a subject’s version of liberalism, one that might be called “plebeian liberalism”—subordinate, volatile (“a turn of the eye here and a curl of the lip there”), without an idea in its pretty little head, and highly susceptible to charismatic statesmen.73 During the reform years, the intellectual limitations assumed to be pervasive among the newly enfranchised were often described in this way; those in need of the ballot’s protection, one ought to recall, were “unmanly,” lacking the courage to take a public stand. If we pay attention to the narration, Finn’s political commitments do in fact seem more like his own serial monogamies than like liberal cognition, which the narrator admits is not easy to practice—“men must think long, and be sure that they have thought in earnest, before they are justified in saying that their opinions are the results of their own thoughts” 72. Dougherty, “Angel in the House.” Sample quote: “All those contradictory observations are true because of the self-contradictory status of Ireland after the Union, a union which is explicitly defined in Phineas Finn as a marriage contract” (133–34). England and Ireland are both figured as she in this marital union. I admit to having nothing special to say about this queer union; it seems to me that the customary association of nations as she simply gets in the way of this marriage metaphor. One might speculate that this inconsistency registers the failure of fit between an understanding of a “mother country” and a masculinist conception of an imperial nation, which can be seen elsewhere in Victorian fiction, perhaps to most purple effect in Rider Haggard’s work. 73. This version of “romantic” liberalism is a debasement of that form of friendship that constitutes the basis of Martel’s Love Is a Sweet Chain.

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(Finn, 1:243). Finn’s liberalism, then, seems much more about impulse, about magnetic attraction, about arbitrary proximity, about being, as the narrator in fact phrases his collaboration with Monk, “shoulder to shoulder with the man he loved” (Finn, 2:333). We can see in miniature in this passage the emerging concern that a more-democratic liberalism will become beholden to personal charisma. There is, however, a presumed intimacy (if not exactly equality) to this masculine connection (“shoulder to shoulder”) that evokes companionate union more than demagogic worship from a distance. Finn’s situation may threaten a decline in liberal ideas, and the novel registers this worry about the loss of vigor in a routinized party politics, but Phineas Finn is not telling that story. More important to this parallel construction between political and marital consent is the ethical content of these choices. Just as Finn must consider whether to vote for the party and career advancement or for his own opinion, so must he consider whether to marry for income or to honor his proposal to a dowryless lass—a choice in both instances between professional success in Liberal politics and personal conviction as a liberal individual, the difference between liberal politics as a morally compromised occupation and liberal citizenship as a practice of virtuous independence. Finn’s serial monogamies, occupied like a series of rented rooms, count the rising number of sincere acts of consent routinely required in an opinion culture, enumerating the worrisome possibility that one conviction is like the next, that one lady is like any other. But Finn’s final commitment to Mary suggests that even in the thick of romance, disinterest must rule, for by this time his sexual and professional interest has shifted to Madame Goesler. This is a lesson unlearned by the taciturn Lord Chilton, whose illiberal desire for Violet confirms his anachronism as surely as does his youthful duel. Near the end of the novel, the narrator offers an epigram, already cited, which seems a definitive summation of Finn’s liberal career, phrased as if the gains achieved through his sacrificial exchange of status for consent were transparently straightforward: “He had given up his place in order that he might be able to speak his mind” (Finn, 2:340). Finn seems to have overcome the need for a place, to have instead found an opinion, expressed in the abstract embodiment so characteristic of midcentury liberal cognition—speaking his mind. This phrase, “speak his mind,” so commonplace then and now, is—even so—a peculiar formulation. It accentuates, if we need any more persuading, the abstract physicality demanded of liberal individuation. The particular body—cast in a metaphoric register, compacted into a mere trace of itself (a voice)—substitutes for the

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extension of land in space and time in the formation of a political authority. The voice—so unique in its timbre, style, volume—also emphasizes the distinctiveness of liberal individuality, as did the “signature” deployed in the Fortnightly Review; it is the aural imprint as the signature was the visual registration of liberal autonomy. Moreover, that the voice speaks mind reaffirms yet again liberalism’s commitment to thought rather than whim. At the end of the novel, then, Finn is apparently no impulsive plebeian, not even an illiberal Celt, but a liberal individual.

The Lack of the Irish Back at home, wedded to a bland girl, Finn is decidedly ambivalent about his individuality, but ambivalence is fully in keeping with the affective inventory of a Victorian liberalism that promotes passionate disinterest. In reluctantly choosing Mary, Finn has transformed his attachment to the young woman into a conviction. In ultimately committing to Irish tenant right, he likewise transforms his “connection” to his home into a conviction. His consent to liberal individuality requires that he become coherent in all sorts of ways. He must become the man of union rather than a mistress, and he must ensure that his “two identities”—the liberal politician in England and the Irishman at home—become whole. Finn’s struggles to wed the right wife and to commit to the right cause constitute the drama of sincerity that is vital to liberal conviction, the affect which is completely entangled with liberal conceptions of taking a stand. Imputations of gold digging and opportunism, of duplicity (bigamy?) and indecisiveness, vanish in this sincere, embodied expression of principled consent. And yet, in order to summon himself into this virtuous register of conviction, Finn must leave Westminster, leave Madame Max, and settle in Ireland. Finn can achieve his independence only by a gesture of reoccupation: returning to Mary Flood Jones and to Ireland. In emphasizing Finn’s occupation of Ireland and Mary (who dies soon thereafter, as noted in Phineas Redux), I am not suggesting that Finn’s return constitutes a nationalist affirmation. Needless to say, Ireland is not an autonomous nation at this time, nor is Finn ever recorded as wishing it to be so. Rather, I am suggesting that Finn’s occupation of Ireland evokes the sort of bodily inhabitation in time and space that comes to prominence in the Irish land and electoral legislation of this period. Finn’s liberal opinion counts as a stand only when he occupies Ireland, but as a liberal individual, he also needs to establish that opinion’s abstraction from accusations of mere interest in the land. Unpropertied, unem-

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ployed Finn seems securely on his feet not primarily because he stands in Ireland but because an “idea of Ireland” grounds him, an idea of farmers inhabiting their cottages and occupying their fields. Finn lives liberalism because all his impulses and habits as an Irishman have risen if only briefly to the cognitive level of reflexive conviction about tenant right and disinterested romantic consent. Finn’s liberalized interest in Ireland is not, moreover, an origin for an ethnic identity, as a multiculturalist might imagine, for Finn returns home not to join the Fenians or to initiate a Celtic revival or even to claim some land of his own. Finn’s commitment to Ireland seeks to resolve his doubled identity but does not in itself constitute him. That Finn was born in that land, that Finn continues to have family there, that Finn is thus attached is a necessary but not sufficient ground for liberalization. Having married Miss Flood Jones, Finn takes a position in the British bureaucracy as a poor-law inspector, a political occupation that properly distances him from the soil. On Ireland but not precisely in Ireland, Finn oversees the English laws of the land. At this point, I think it is useful to compare Finn to his Liberal colleague Plantagenet Palliser, for both men sanction political views that take one sort of ground from beneath them. In the two weeks remaining in the parliamentary session after the tenant right debacle, Gresham passes into law an electoral reform bill: “Our hero who still sat for Loughshane, but who was never to sit for Loughshane again, gave what assistance he could to the Government, and voted for the measure which deprived Loughshane for ever of its parliamentary honours” (Finn, 2:342). In abolishing such districts, Finn and Palliser abolish an aristocratic influence expressed through land ownership. I could now argue, I suppose, that in this divestment— Finn from his sinecure, Palliser from his privilege—we see a Whig hierarchy devolving into a liberal democracy. These reformers are construing land as liquid property, as a fungible commodity meaningful only insofar as an individual invests in the self and then converts it to capital, the sort of political economy that dominates the content of Monk’s tenant right bill and elsewhere celebrated by Trollope. But I want to suggest that what Finn portrays here is a dual process of divestment and investment in the land, not one after the other, in a sequence of cause and effect, but both at the same time. As the narrator leads his readers into the defining moment of Finn’s political career, he withholds all the complicated legislative details of the Irish tenant bill, absolutely insisting that a “Canadian grievance” or an “Indian budget”—any imperial project at all—“would wake to eloquence the

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propounder” (Finn, 3:341), but this sudden flight to synonymic anonymity (“the propounder”) cannot erase what Phineas has already conceded a few sentences earlier: his awakened eloquence requires “this misfortune of his country” (note the particularities this and his) about which “he had found the task of extricating himself” “to be impossible.” His “Irish birth,” his “Irish connection,” and “his country”: these enunciations of territorial affiliation do not constitute Lockean proprietorship, nor do they plant him in a physical relation to the soil. Rather, they abstractly figure a physical relation of attachment (“extrication”) and enable him to stand for an Irish idea. Finn thus finds his legs, speaks his mind, and becomes a liberal individual: this is the effective variety of liberal occupationalism in the novel, a version that works far better for liberal ideals than the occupation of politician in the Halls of Westminster. An “idea of occupation” rather perfectly expresses the abstracted “embededness” on the land that stabilizes this restive Irishman. Although Monk’s legislation seemingly differs in its details from that proffered by Gladstone in 1870, the narrative nevertheless confirms how absolutely central a highly attenuated notion of occupation remains in the formulation of a liberal cognitive autonomy that must somehow remain attached. In the mid-nineteenth century, the center of gravity in a liberal understanding of consent had not shifted, despite Mr. Monk’s claim, from landscape to portrait. Free markets had not made free men, and the weak legs of liberal politics struggled to stand. Trollope, as much as he might misunderstand or even disrespect the indigenous culture of the Celts, could not avoid representing just how wedded Finn was to Ireland. As poor-law inspector, Finn travels from district to district in a circuit comparable to the sojourn of William O’Connor Morris, but one can speculate that when he looks at the famished countryside, slowly recovering, he will see the tenants in their homes; he will imagine a portrait in a landscape. As Phineas Finn comes to a close, the luck of the Irish that so infused the young man becomes for Finn the lack of the Irish, but in the tortured ideals of this version of Victorian liberalism, luck and lack are just about the same thing. Is it possible that Ireland, that land of emigration and emotional attachment, formative of an identity now politically constituted by occupation, is the very image of the liberal citizen?74

74. Gladstone argues for this dispassionate, embodied Irishman throughout the 1870s and with more pronounced regularity in the 1880s: “If Ireland is still divided between Orangemen & law-haters, then our task is hopeless: but our belief & contention always is that a more intelligent & less impassioned body has gradually come to exist in Ireland. It is on this body, its

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Local Liberalism Mr. Monk envisions a world of free markets, where real property transacts like liquid property, where landed influence gives way to personal autonomy, and where men take full possession of themselves and exercise free thought. Ireland’s dependent peasantry ought to have complicated his story of an open market in Ireland because the peasants neither owned land to sell nor had other occupational options if they were ejected from that land. In a related way, Finn’s story troubles any narrative that trumpets liberalism’s emancipation of the political subject from land. The liberal subject in this period, even amid its embodied abstractions, is not universal but local. The narrator, like Monk, seeks imperial fungibility and universality in its liberal opinion: when Phineas speaks his mind, he could speak of Canada or India, he could argue for potted peas or some other “very unintelligible subject,” what matters is—in telling formalist phrases—“the importance of the moment” and “the character of the debate” (Finn, 2:341). But the novel’s protagonist shows how the abstract ideas that are so central to liberal politics in this era—opinion, nation, empire—still must occupy a ground. Finn’s voice at the end of Phineas Finn must absolutely speak of— and in—Ireland. In Phineas Redux, by way of contrast, the literal and figurative localisms that settle liberal individualism give way to a world of uncertain identities. Returning to Parliament after the conveniently sudden death of his young wife, the Finn of Phineas Redux divests himself of all sorts of attachments, including those to Ireland, for the Ireland of Redux stands for no particular place; it is successfully portrayed as interchangeable with other colonies, commonwealths, and satellites of empire. In this later novel, which awaits from others a completer understanding, Finn is no longer torn into two identities but has no especial identity at all. This story is not about the “Irish member,” as the first volume was subtitled, but about mistaken idenprecepts & examples, that our hopes depends, for if we are at war with a nation we cannot win” (“Letter to Forster”). And again: “Amongst the scenes that are now, unhappily, being enacted there by certain persons, we may lose sight of the great and unquestionable progress that has been achieved by that country. It has achieved material progress in a degree most remarkable for a country with little variety of pursuit. I do not believe that there is a labouring population in all Europe—although the condition of the Irish labourer still leaves much to desire—which, in the course of the last twenty years, has made a progress equal to that of the labouring population of Ireland. Let me look at the farming class, which, as you know, may be said almost to constitute the body of the nation, understood as the term is understood in Ireland. . . . Gentlemen, these are indications of real progress about which there can be no mistake” (Gladstone, “State of Ireland,” 49).

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tity. Unfairly fingered for the murder of unlikable Bonteen and nearly hung for it, Finn looks like the murderer and finds himself nearby the scene of the crime. Distanced from the influential elite that had provided him a place, Finn is subject to an occupational drift that far exceeds the weakness of his own legs, a sort of cosmic arbitrariness that renders him completely dependent on the secretive capacities of an Austrian Jewish woman. Ultimately absolved of the crime, Finn is—to use the novel’s words—“unmoored” and “unmanned” by this unjust arrest.75 Resisting the accommodation of the Irish, and indeed most ideas that require a recognition of the people who occupy the different territories that empire accumulates, this latter novel— like many a liberal imperialist—represents the world as increasingly alien and alienating, England included. Phineas Finn, however, opens a tiny aperture onto an alternative perspective of liberalism, perhaps a more generous one than Trollope’s later novels can condone. It is a liberalism that accommodates plebes, if only the “idea of plebes.” This liberalism takes its stand not through appropriation or imperial occupation but from an ambivalent relation to one’s own place, a dual occupation, as if an Irishman and liberal all at once, in the same space. It is a liberalism where consent occurs through attachment and connection, not coercion or alienation. Its ultimate return to Ireland—the actual land, not its idea or its metaphorized form—as a means of seeing the Irish citizenry introduces its own set of complications, however.76 In this scenario, Finn cannot be the same sort of liberal as Monk, nor Monk like Finn, because their ground is not the same. Phineas and Ireland are thus

75. Trollope, Phineas Redux, 3:164. (Although Phineas Redux is considered a single work, older editions such as the one I cite from 1893 were published in three separate volumes, each with its own pagination, thus the inclusion of both volume and page number here.) 76. Gladstone may seem related to this alternative liberalism. As his career progressed, he became increasingly committed, at least oratorically, to “the people.” He was as committed to supporting European movements for national self-determination as he was opposed to most imperial incursions. But Gladstone, like Trollope, and indeed most liberals of this era, in replacing the abstract notion of territory for the abstract notion of the nation not only elaborated categories of attachment to the land that Locke avoided but also introduced categories of race, ethnicity, culture, and history that would become impossible to embody as abstractions. Gladstone was perhaps the least committed of the notable liberals to the determinations of race, though he was by no means unprejudiced. D. W. Bebbington, one of Gladstone’s most recent biographers, notes of Gladstone’s definition of nation: “Race was not the sole, or even an absolutely essential, component of national loyalties, but, together with an ambition to be free from oppression, it was, he held, the normal basis for the ‘collective or corporate identity’ that qualified a group to be a nation. Gladstone was fully aware of the complexity of the phenomenon of national allegiance in the modern world.” Bebbington, Mind of Gladstone, 277.

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always in danger of diverging from the path of union with England even as they remain fully within the rationales of liberalism. Phineas may not be a nationalist, and the occupationalism of liberal reform may endeavor to provincialize the restive Irish, but one can see that in acknowledging the rights of man in the terms of Irish tenant right, midcentury liberalism’s commitment to the nation-form in an English context could easily migrate to the west, as Gladstone’s 1886 home rule bill attests. A nationalism that emanates from an occupational localism problematizes the universalism of the liberal subject and its capacity to relocate its “connection” beyond national boundaries, a noticeable constraint in Liberal politics in the nineteenth century, where the abstracted nation-form as a territorial place delimited emancipatory projects. Gladstone’s grandest vision, a “comity of nations,” perhaps speaks baldly to this fact. Equally constrained is the British Liberal government’s own understanding of its relation to its colonies. Given the ubiquity and resonance of these occupational registers at midcentury, one might well wonder if liberals imagined their presence in India, in various territories in Africa, and elsewhere as a form of occupation that ought to be dictated by the attachments, connections, and residency requirements of these other types of occupation. By and large, they did not. The bodily inhabitation of space and time that defined occupation was to some extent an abstraction, for Phineas does not need to plow the field or occupy the village, but insofar as the body could not be just any body nor occupy just any space or time, it was also particular. Ryots ought to occupy acreage, cottiers ought to occupy cottages, they are “of the soil,” but the imperial powers possess the land as if by contract—they are in deep possession of its wealth. That occupancy was constitutively linked to a form of attachment or belonging precluded its application to colonists. The landed localism of liberalism also constrains Victorian articulations of cosmopolitanism. In Daniel Malachuk’s essay “Nationalist Cosmopolitics in the Nineteenth Century,” he accurately observes that a disinterested cosmopolitanism and an essentialist nationalism are routinely conjoined in mid-Victorian thought, despite their apparent practical contradiction, and he uses George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda as evidence. In her own reading of Deronda, Amanda Anderson also judiciously registers how the longing for immersion in a racialized national consciousness sits uncomfortably alongside Eliot’s disinterested humanism. Conceding how ethnicity and culture creep in and around the attachments of land and history that Eliot deems necessary for human thriving, both Malachuk and Anderson still wish to preserve this variety of cosmopolitanism. Malachuk suggests that

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mid-Victorian cosmopolites like Mazzini, Whitman, and Eliot think along developmental lines, such that the nation-form is but a way station on the path to a more complete disinterestedness. He considers this “universalist essentialism” an “objective telos for all the world’s peoples to realise.”77 In both these essays, the various varieties of nationalism in this period function as the prime obstacle to a fully realized cosmopolitanism. The pairing of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in this context is, however, one that underestimates the complexities of the nation-form’s provenance in the mid-Victorian period. Despite their concessions to the historically specific limitations of a mid-Victorian understanding of the nation-form, both writers, by remaining at this level of abstraction—the “nation”— minimize the embodied localisms that now seem integral to the very authority of liberal opinion in this period. On their way to manifesting their liberal opinions and thus their liberal individuality, both Phineas and Daniel are shown to mentally detach from their landed origins, performing the cognitive disinterestedness that liberalism demands. Deronda enacts what Anderson refers to as a “notion of reflective return,” quite similar to the Irish ideas that characterize Finn’s divested relation to Ireland at the end of the novel.78 Located in thought, what Eliot labels “an idea of a republic,” Daniel’s Jewish convictions, like Phineas’s Irish variant, nonetheless presume something more than a cognitive reflexivity. They require, to use Mordecai’s more romantic syntax, a “sacred land” to occupy, the sort of quasi-literal “return” with which Phineas’s story concludes.79 If, as Phineas Finn seems to suggest, a liberalized perspective is always already infused by an occupational criterion for its disinterestedness—an inhabited ground

77. Malachuk, “Nationalist Cosmopolitics,” 142. H. S. Jones also makes this argument: “Most nineteenth-century liberals, at least until the last decade or two of the century, were nationalists because they saw the nation as a step away from the particular and towards the universal and not because they wished to emphasize their own nation’s particularity in relation to other nations” (Victorian Political Thought, 49). J. S. Mill’s paean to discussion in On Liberty has become a kind of ur-text for configurations of cosmopolitanism, see Appiah, Cosmopolitanism. The exchange of ideas in a conversational format in which each can learn from another—what Amanda Anderson refers to as “intersubjective recognition and engagement”—undergoes substantial revision as it transitions into a global setting, whether its strained revisions are noted or not. See Anderson, “Cosmopolitanism,” 283. 78. Anderson, Powers of Distance, 141. 79. The exact sentence is: “The degraded and scorned of our race will learn to think of their sacred land, not as a place for saintly beggary to await death in loathsome idleness, but as a republic where the Jewish spirit manifests in a new order founded on the old, purified, enriched by the experience our greatest sons have gathered from the life of ages.” Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 2:207.

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whose dimensions are specified by a body in its place—then cosmopolitan humanism (Malachuk’s “all the world’s people”) becomes extremely hard to imagine. Perhaps much more literally than in Daniel Deronda, Finn explicitly articulates this “occupation qualification” for citizenship, but its peculiar lineaments are evident in that Eliot novel, the Irish Reform Act of 1850, and the Irish Land Act of 1870. If one can find common ground among different peoples only on uncommon ground, then nationalism seems less a way station on the path to a more perfect cosmopolitanism than midcentury liberalism’s destination.

CHAPTER SIX

A Body of Opinion GLADSTONIAN LIBERALISM

The simple truth is that Mr. Gladstone is regarded as the embodiment of the Liberal cause, wherever he goes. —“News of the Day,” Spectator (1879)

By some accounts, William Ewart Gladstone was a late bloomer. Although entering Parliament at the young age of twenty-three, gaining prestige and respect as chancellor of the exchequer in his mid-forties, and becoming prime minister of arguably the most legislatively significant Parliament in the nineteenth century during the years 1868 to 1874, Gladstone waited until his old age to enjoy the status of a cultural icon. It was then, in his sixties and seventies, that Gladstone determined to reverse his retirement; postpone the pleasures of intellectual solitude, Greek translation, and religious debate; and run again for Parliament in the Midlothian district of Scotland. The lead-up to this campaign, above all else, made him a legend: “The most marvelous episode in Gladstone’s life was undoubtedly the Midlothian Campaign. It was a stupendous undertaking, embarked upon at an age when most men have abandoned themselves to leisure and rest.”1 Gladstone had resigned from Liberal Party leadership in 1875 to devote his time to scholarship and family. Just a year later, however, Gladstone reemerged on the national political scene to contribute to the debate on what was then known as the “Bulgarian Atrocities,” a massacre of well over 10,000 Bulgarians by the Turkish Porte and their associates in response to an uprising in some Bulgarian towns under Turkish rule. Just a few years 1. Lucy, “Gladstone as a Campaigner,” 195.

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later, having recorded additional sins of aggression and aggrandizement committed by the Disraeli government, Gladstone decided to stand as Liberal member for Midlothian on a platform with local but mostly national resonance. In this campaign he indicted both the foreign policy of Disraeli, which, for example, had silently continued to support Turkey even as evidence of its violent suppression of Bulgarian independence emerged, and his domestic policy that, among other faults, accumulated a large national debt to fund his forays into other lands. Gladstone reviled these policies as “Beaconsfieldism,” in dishonor of the title Victoria had recently bestowed on her favorite. Gladstone not only won the election but, as current Liberal leaders succumbed to inevitability, he regained the ministerial top job. Gladstone won the election in part through a series of dramatic public speeches in Scotland from November 30 to December 9, 1879, attended by thousands and widely reported in the newspapers. Many observers today argue that with these public appearances, ordinarily referred to as the “Midlothian Campaign,” Gladstone regained popular support for the Liberal Party and for his leadership of the Liberal Party, and he encouraged what many commentators consider a kind of populist worship of his person, first as “the People’s William” and soon after as “the Grand Old Man,” or “G-O-M.” It was during this period that Gladstone’s portrait appeared on many cottage walls in northern England, when delegations of workers trekked to his estate to watch him shed his waistcoat and fell trees with an axe, and when plates, trays, mugs, and other consumer goods sported his visage. For some historians, and contemporaries, this notoriety marks a real decline in liberalism’s core principles, as deliberation and debate on the parliamentary floor gave way to sentiment and demagoguery. For others it marks the welcome or unwelcome or ambivalent success of democratization—what some call “plebeian liberalism”—against what had been until then an aristocratic club otherwise known as the Liberal Party.2 Epstein and Belchem in their important essay on “gentlemen leaders” of the nineteenth century complicate this latter view of democratization by remarking on the continued exclusiveness of these seemingly mass-public gatherings, where Liberal operatives stipulated guest lists and even open-air 2. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment, and Reform; Parry, Rise and Fall. The Midlothian campaign as an extension of consumer culture is also assumed by P. Morris, Imagining Inclusive Society, 41–45. Andrew Robertson argues that the Midlothian speeches were a feature of the increased personalizing of politics after the Second Reform Bill; see Robertson, Language of Democracy, 129–45. The political “hero” also understood as a type of personal politics is suggested by Joyce, Visions of the People, 44–47.

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venues consisted largely of well-wishers.3 With this stipulation in mind, however, few scholars have sensibly disputed that the Midlothian campaign epitomized an important revision of the political relation between the elected and their electors. In this chapter, I will revisit this Midlothian campaign to show how these series of oratorical events crystallize claims made throughout this book about the lived dimensions imagined by mid-Victorian liberalism. Resisting the tendency to interpret this event as the apotheosis of celebrity culture, or a coup d’état by the charismatic demagogue, or, more benignly, the politics of personality, I want to argue that the Midlothian campaign is by no means the diminishment of liberal principles in the polis but, rather, the improvisatory performance of them. In this performance, indeed, nothing is certain, much is in peril, performance itself often seems ethically suspect if pragmatically necessary. In this perilous liberal practice, disinterest, opinion, individuality, and reform remain paramount values, even as the political terrain seems increasingly populist, populous, and impolitic. Two substantial Reform Bills having been put into law by the mid1860s, Liberal politicians had to figure out ways to accommodate a mass voting public seemingly disinclined toward the abstract virtues of national legislation and foreign policy and yet obligated by the ascent of Liberal political culture to formulate opinion and mobilize that opinion in the person of a candidate. As J. R. Vincent cannily phrases the dilemma of Liberal electoral politics, Liberal candidates needed “to embody disinterestedness in flesh and blood, and to find an appropriate tone and temper and line of policy.”4 This chapter explores how the candidate Gladstone “embodies liberalism” in his tone and temper and policy. In focusing on Gladstone’s Herculean endeavors during the Midlothian campaign, I am not seeking to revise political biography or delve into psychology; in fact, a vast literature on Gladstone the person and a somewhat less vast literature on Gladstone the psyche already do just that.5 My 3. Referring to both Bright and Gladstone, they argue that these men brought “aspiring new citizens away from the crowd into an enclosed culture of progressive improvement, party politics and constituency organization.” Belchem and Epstein, “Gentleman Leader Revisited,” 177. 4. Vincent, Formation of the British Liberal, 215. 5. Recent biographies on Gladstone include Aldous, Lion and Unicorn; G. Goodlad, Gladstone; Partridge, Gladstone; Biagini, Gladstone; Richard Shannon, Gladstone; Jagger, Gladstone; R. Jenkins, Gladstone; Matthew, Gladstone; Bebbington, William Ewart Gladstone; Brand, William Gladstone. A psychobiography is Crosby, Two Mr. Gladstones. For an entertaining and thoughtful survey of these biographies, one that places them in their historical context in relation to earlier eras of “Gladstone interpretation,” see Gardiner, Victorians, 181–200.

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approach is not interested in ascertaining Gladstone’s own intention or in measuring how well his intention was realized in its practice. The chapter, rather, seeks to describe a form of liberal intentionality—the “embodiment of a cause”—understood not only as an expression of charismatic personality, as Max Weber famously interpreted Gladstone’s appeal, nor as an expression of the person in any conventional way, but as another instance of the abstract embodiment of a midcentury liberal reformism. As an “embodiment of a cause,” Gladstone formalizes the incommensurate and often incomprehensible pressures of a chaotic social domain into a “virtual” purposive action through the operations of an opinion politics. The fact that oratory importantly marks this period of Victorian liberalism makes it part of a long-standing political tradition of public oratory. However, the work of opinion at this oratorical moment is newly peculiar and produces a different sort of oratory, a different variety of Gladstone, and a different interpretation of Gladstonian Liberalism than has been described. In focusing on these public events, then, this chapter maintains that midVictorian liberalism continued to rely on a rhetorical and performative politics that many scholars have suggested declined in the wake of a liberal culture more evidently committed to individual ethos and thereby offers revisions to the conventional account of the liberal polity as a space of communicative rationality and reflexiveness and to the emergent democratic polity as a mere generator of celebrity.6

“Let Us Be True to One Another” Political historians continue to debate, via contemporary accounts and empirical studies of maddeningly incomplete electoral data, the degree to which political reform transformed politics in the Victorian period. I will concentrate first on what was a liberal account at this time of the political changes that may or may not have been substantively reflective of the facts on the ground in an effort to enumerate the principal forces at work in the

6. As Biagini asserts, “the contemporary liberal conviction was that rhetoric was the midwife of truth and the counterpart of logic, an Aristotelian view perfectly consistent with Mill’s understanding of active citizenship.” Biagini, “Liberalism and Direct Democracy,” 41. I will part company with Biagini on several fronts as the chapter proceeds, but I certainly agree that liberals imagined rhetoric to carry with it these serious ambitions. I wish to raise the question: how does one make sense of the relation between rhetoric and discussion and what sort of political domain does it describe? Bevis, in Art of Eloquence, 22–23, argues as well for a renewed attention to oratory and rhetoric, and he does so with a better knowledge of rhetorical practice.

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period leading up to Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign.7 I will then turn to a scene in Middlemarch that encapsulates many of the social and ethical pressures of this period of political reform, expressing in its complexities the central liberal aspirations that seem to me at work in Gladstone’s northern election. I refer in the first instance to the by-now unremarkable story of how the old political system of Whig and Tory, city and country interests, was breaking down at midcentury into a coalitional muddle from which Liberalism emerged. Recall from the introduction that these shifts deeply altered the nature of the political process from a period when status, property, interest, influence, and locale organized the electoral map to an emergent politics of person, opinion, persuasion, and issues. Needless to say, aristocratic influence continued to dominate political practice late into the nineteenth century, including the Liberal Party itself. The extent to which that party was defined by shared opinion and the power of persuasion rather than status and influence is certainly arguable. For most contemporaries and historians, however, the Second Reform Bill marks the beginning of the end of parliamentary governance of the status quo and the bumpy emergence of, among other trends, the governance by public opinion via mass political gatherings, newspapers, and party bureaucracy, which seemed to many observers to apotheosize in Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign of 1880. It is just possible, as some historians have argued in relation to these shifts, that the candidate form in an election slowly and unevenly altered during this century. Consider this difference—broadly sketched: on the one hand, there is the traditional candidate known to be the hand-selected proxy for a local aristocrat’s county seat, sustaining those interests of locality and status in an unreformed parliamentary culture not prone to legislation. If not the aristocrat himself, this candidate was often a brother, a son, or a nephew whose blood ties accentuated the depth of affiliation. On the other hand, there is the slow emergence of a candidate often by necessity unknown to an enlarged electorate, conceivably independent of the gentry, who nonetheless asks to represent them all—an individual claiming to represent other individuals through the holding of comparable political opinion.8 One mustn’t mistake this liberal individual, it can’t be said too

7. Vernon, Politics and the People. 8. Hanham describes the aristocratic landed representation in these concise terms: “The landlord did more than collect the rents and make reductions in bad times; he was the head of a community towards which he had recognised duties and obligations, and with which he

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often, for a particular person per se with a unique personality and determinate temperament but as a form of political subject, designated by his autonomous possession of opinion. And one must modulate this assertion even further by recognizing that individuals within a parliamentary system most often operate as principles of individuality within a party mechanism that seeks and frequently achieves a broad unanimity of opinion.9 Midcentury political liberalism thus privileges in its daily practice the having of opinion as a criterion for individuality but does not demand the having of a distinctive opinion. To be sure, Victorian liberals celebrated idiosyncrasy, championed minority opinion, developed schemes for proportional representation of those minorities, such that distinctive opinions could develop and thrive. However, individuality was not contingent on the distinction of one’s opinion but on the more generic threshold of holding opinion individually. In other words, possessing an opinion as an individual was far more instrumental for midcentury liberal politics than possessing any particular opinion.10 Individual opinion, moreover, as the Fortnightly Review demonstrates, and as will be elaborated subsequently, depends far more on how one holds an opinion. That opinion is lodged in the individual political subject fundamentally and that party consensus is an aggregation of individual opinions are critical principles that underwrite liberalism’s capacity to politically manage the impolitic. As suffrage shared a community of interest.” Hanham, Elections and Party Management, 8. One anonymous Daily Telegraph commentator of this period notes how the stock “classical” signatures that commonly larded letters to the newspapers had become ordinary names of ordinary men. This commentator measures the shift from a categorical representation of elite interests to a more individuated variety of political representation: “What on earth have the remarkable men who have started up to assure us, in oratory or in print, that they are the only possible ‘popular,’ ‘Constitutional,’ ‘working man’s,’ ‘resident,’ ‘independent,’ or ‘tried’ candidates been doing with themselves all these years . . . Why have they hidden their light for so long under a bushel? We have heard of MENENIUS AGRIPPA we know all about DEMOS . . . but we confess that, when TOMPKINS tells us that he has been the friend of the people all along, we are staggered; that when SIMPKINS recites his long list of claims to our political confidence and gratitude, we are amazed.” Daily Telegraph, November 17, 1868. 9. B. Harrison, Transformation of British Politics, 26. The Conservative Central Office was founded in 1870 and the National Liberal Federation in 1877. Lawrence emphasizes, however, that “party remained less fully developed than one might imagine given the rise of caucus politics from the 1870s” ( “Tradition and Modernity”). Indeed, the singular focus on Gladstone as “liberal embodiment” suggests as much. Rubenstein suggests that a truly consolidated party could not really take shape until the 1883 Corrupt and Illegal Practices Act; see Rubinstein, Britain’s Century, 197. 10. Daniel Deronda shows himself to be above the politics of opinion, but in claiming his distaste for it, he defines this feature of politics in the 1870s: “I cannot persuade myself to look at politics as a profession . . . I don’t want to make a living out of opinions . . . especially borrowed opinions.” From Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 2:145.

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extended voting rights to the individual, it also reduced the size of the population outside this rubric of individuality, thereby minimizing, theoretically at least, the size and strength of mass politicization.11 What seems to happen in some elections, and is supported in written accounts of elections as the century passes, is a decreased attention to locality and traditional circuits of influence and an increased attention to the policies and thus the party, which must be expected in an era of massive demographic and electoral shifts, in an era when, as Bagehot details in The English Constitution, parliaments are expected to write and pass legislation after winning an election and not just govern the status quo, distribute sinecures, and collect taxes.12 However, what also seems to happen is that candidates are no longer encountered by the electors as proxies or even, as the newer mode of governance might imply, mere vehicles for the realization of a series of legislative aims forged by a party executive.13 Rather, a special if as yet indeterminate relation was to obtain between the candidate, as a public individual, and those party policies, and, in turn, his electors. This relation is realized in the form of opinion, the public medium of liberal political thought. And it is in electoral oratory that we can see how liberal opinion operates. If a new politics was indeed emerging, it oscillated between the key conceptual nodes of the individual and the mass (the party, the public, the nation, the empire) through the medium of opinion, which would ultimately, though not yet, be rendered technologically visible through statistics. Making this opinion measurable, comprehensible, ontologically viable, and, most of all, consequential to campaigns and voters alike was an especially tall order in an era before polling, national media outlets, and widespread functional literacy. It is perhaps difficult to imagine a political setting in which opinion both matters so much and materializes, measures, and means so little. Observers at this time noted that opinion politics had taken precedence over parliamentary politics, and they worried about its significance. In The Platform: Its Rise and Progress, a monograph dedicated

11. Belchem, Class, Party and the Political System, 177, focuses on related effects of individuation within a mass electoral event. 12. “The English parliament, of which the prominent functions are now legislative, was not all so once. It was rather a preservative body.” Bagehot, English Constitution, 29. Brian Harrison notes that the localism of parties in the mid-Victorian period “both reflected and accentuated what we would now see as their unconcern with precise legislative commitment. The voter might be individually bribed locally, but he was not yet collectively bribed nationally.” B. Harrison, Transformation of British Politics, 33. 13. Barker and Vincent, Language, Print, and Electoral Politics.

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to proving and meditating on the impact of a political reality in which voters voted for candidates who represented “Platforms,” H. L. Jephson writes, “The Platform has, in some ways, usurped the place of or supplanted Parliament. The really great and vital discussions are now carried on outside Parliament, and as a rule, are threshed out there and moulded into some more or less definite decision or conclusion before they reach Parliament for legislative or executive purposes.”14 No easier perhaps to estimate, but less explored in political history, was just how the candidate and opinion function as a workable ensemble in the political arena. Because the candidate and his opinion were not legible in terms of familiar codes of locality, custom, and proxy, it was a genuinely open question. In the previous chapter, I spent some time showing how the elements of what liberals label “democratization” present in liberalizing Victorian Britain relocated the dynamics of representation from, to use Trollope’s terms in Phineas Finn, landscape to portrait. A Liberal Party, and its member of Parliament, so Mr. Monk avers in that novel, must seek to represent the people, not the estate, must capture the mobile expressiveness of that “body”—which in the idealism of Monk is focalized most often in the prosopoetic of the finely featured face—and in so doing relinquish a traditional reliance on the grounding authority of the proprietary stance of a magnate. One can see in Monk’s evocative description a liberal intervention into the enlarged electorate as the locality (landscape) transposes into an organism of multiform parts (the body of mass opinion) and ultimately into a personification of individuality (the face). This body of the people, this newly public opinion, is thus represented “like” an individual in Trollope’s text, showing how midcentury Liberals seek to civilize the beast. In this transformative process, then, the body of the people— the locus of the people’s inclinations and will—is condensed into a recognizable and individuated face, which itself is ultimately registered in the even less tangibly manifest form of opinion. Analogous to a human face, opinion is irreducibly unique, but its peculiar features, although constantly changing, matter less in their particularity than in their formal status as particular. Opinion does not function, then, as a simple synonym for policy, or as a narrow expression of specific parliamentary votes, or as a unitary “mass” of public opinion, but rather as a complicated, highly attenuated extension of a singular persona’s presence, thought, and political inclination into the political realm that ultimately, but not exclusively, expresses legislative in14. Jephson, Platform, 464.

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tention. In this regard, opinion is an abstract embodiment of the liberal individual in the political domain, either as elector or as candidate. As is evident in Monk’s individuation of the people’s body, opinion seems wholly dependent upon the singularity of the person as a conceptual category (not as a particular man) even as that opinion becomes increasingly virtualized in oratory and print. Opinion, then, carries with it, as it navigates the public sphere, traces of the singularity of an individual—his thought, his intention, even, at an important signifying level, his bodily gravity and facial specificity: the signature affixed to articles published by the Fortnightly Review demonstrates one variety of this tendency. As the circulatory medium of electoral politics in the Victorian period, opinion designates electors, designates candidates, and distinguishes one candidate from another. Moreover, through its public dissemination, it binds together voters and candidates. Just how it does so will be addressed in more detail later in the chapter. A Briton in this era might experience the change in the candidate form from customary locality to opinionated individual in myriad registers. The candidate himself might seem ungrounded as a legible social figure, literally and figuratively, as the previous chapter about Trollope’s Phineas Finn sought to indicate, for one might contend that the very ground is taken from beneath the candidate’s feet as locality loses its political force. The elector, too, might gesture nervously to compose his mass-mediated public persona, seeking for a bodily instantiation of his disinterested political will—one way of understanding the idiosyncratic tics of Septimus Harding outlined in chapter 2. Authority, not to mention the merest criteria for political identity, were elusive in any case, as the candidate became less associated with property, with locale, with the presumptions embedded in that situated place and more dependent on a singular but circulating “opinion” provisionally stabilized in the public sphere by its weightiness. This metaphoric substantialization of an otherwise fleeting, volatile opinion that one sees throughout the political literature of this period evinces the liberal political ethos, for a “weighty opinion” (a body of opinion) complexly incarnates, gives ballast to, the characterological spirit that we will see is required of an opinion holder. As I will elaborate soon, many midVictorians seem much more absorbed in the relation between the opinion and its holder than in the details of the opinion itself because that political relation was precariously new. In this era, the body of the people that had always haunted the perimeters of the political sphere necessarily morphs into a body of opinion as reforms enfranchise increasing numbers of those people. This newly incarnated body of opinion, prone to violence and impulse as a mass,

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requires refinement into a distinctive and thus knowable countenance. However, in a mass-mediated Victorian Britain, the representation of opinion is most often impersonated as a highly mediated and therefore mostly metaphorical “voice.” Newspapers routinely reference, but cannot yet measure, the “people’s voice”; liberal doctrine idealizes “having a voice”; and democratizing politics often conflates the “voice” and the “vote.” Midcentury liberals therefore struggled to improvise a complex calculus of thought, speech, and embodiment that could guarantee the realization of liberal reform even in an unfamiliar, impersonal, and cacophonous environment, where actual bodies may be absent or dispersed or otherwise distracted.

Improvisational Liberalism A mass-mediated oratorical arena, filled with newspaper leaders, summaries of parliamentary debates, reprints of hustings speeches, and— increasingly—engravings and photographs of campaigns presented enormous obstacles to the formation of individual opinion, even as it made individuality come into view as a crucial political value. In a central novelistic scene of this era—the hustings speech in Middlemarch (1871–72)—a reader can see a liberalizing politics encounter these internal and external conditions of operation. The novel as a whole can, in fact, be approached as a drama of liberalized opinion. The primary narrative in Middlemarch shows Dorothea developing advanced opinions concerning companionate matrimony, gender equity, and intellectual value quite distinct from her traditionalist husband’s, while the secondary narrative relates the story of Dr. Lydgate struggling vainly to maintain progressive medical and professional opinion that counters his main benefactor Bulstrode’s aims. There is also Mr. Farebrother, who achieves an ethically enlightened disinterestedness in relation to Mary Garth’s marital aspirations. And finally, there is the famous narrative voice that mediates all opinion formation and doles out its own generous share of commentary in the most disinterested of tones. One could accuse me of banality at this point, for surely any interesting character in a novel has opinions and opinion broadly conceived has little analytic bite—it is the very stuff of socialization, after all, as David Hume persuasively shows. But, even so, I want to think some more about this banality, this having and holding of opinion, so banal a fact to us but a highly charged subject in a society in which more people and different sorts of people were now allowed, even expected, to have politically consequential opinions, a “voice” instantiated for many people in the form of a vote for an independent candidate. Recall that the novel takes as its

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setting the years just before the 1832 Reform Bill, although its was written by George Eliot not long after the passage of the 1867 Reform Bill. I don’t plan to sort out in the novel which themes and references are historical in 1870 and which are contemporary, and there’s been solid literary criticism on just this subject.15 Many features of liberalization were ongoing and seen to be in the 1870s both a result of the most recent franchise extension and a long-term product of processes first put into motion in the 1820s and 1830s, and it is this long view, no doubt, that partly motivated the historical impulse in the novel. I do not wish to invoke through this elevation of opinion in the novel and in liberal politics a radical and certainly nonsensical historicism, in which I argue that humans before the wave of franchise extension and redistribution of seats in the nineteenth century did not have or express opinions. My working hypothesis is only this: that political liberalization raised the stakes of opinion, made it the very condition of individuality, of citizenship, of national character, and that returning to the historical uncommonness of this commonplace helps us better describe the politics of this variety of liberalism.16 That liberalism constitutes its citizens by the possession of opinions— not in their land holdings or their titles, not in their particularities of personality or flavor of domestic life—has been a central claim thus far. Just as crucially, if unevenly sustained by its contemporary claimants, individual opinion in a liberal society cannot be founded, so J. S. Mill argues in On Liberty, merely on habit or convention or impulse but on reason, on selfreflexive deliberation, on principles of disinterestedness—the capacity in part to treat differing ideas as if they were your own, if only for purposes of debate, the pursuit of truth, or, less idealistically, the attainment of consensus. In this version of midcentury liberalism, one must be oneself and also believe in something other than oneself. Quite necessary to this liberal ambition of disinterest is a liberalized perspective, a frame of mind that thinks beyond one’s horizons—an especially live subject in Eliot’s novel, subtitled “a study of provincial life,” whose pages seem to mock one sort of cosmopolitan mentality in the person of Mr. Brooke. His thoughts, the narrator notes, wander from “China to Peru.” 15. See, for example, Staten, “Is Middlemarch Ahistorical?”; Mason, “Middlemarch and History”; Beaty, “History by Indirection.” 16. It might be useful to note here that a liberal political culture could be contrasted to certain varieties of democracy in its insistence on opinion as a complicated elaboration of character: once virtually everyone has a vote, the content of opinion matters much more than its form and the requirements of its possession.

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Since my ultimate goal is to discuss the easily mischaracterized liberalism at work and under stress in Gladstone’s late-career popularity, I will only linger over that amusing scene in chapter 51 of Middlemarch, when Mr. Brooke, Dorothea’s guardian, delivers a speech for his reform candidacy, which quickly degrades into a Punch-and-Judy show—not by any means an unusual occurrence in either generation of nineteenth-century politics, despite the civilizing promise of each suffrage reform.17 This hustings scene cannily stages the disorienting conditions under which liberalism must operate in the public sphere. As Brooke struggles to summon his talking points, an effigy pops up out of the crowd, while at the same time a “parrotlike, Punch-voiced echo of his words” bounces off the buildings’ facades (M, 547). Since it is set during the elections prior to the 1832 reforms, one might be tempted to read the scene’s carnivalesque atmosphere as the traditional sort of disruption offered by nonelectors on nomination day, but, as the novel hastens to remind its readers, nonelectors are now clamoring to become electors, to enter into the articulable domain of politics, setting up a classic confrontation that Jacques Rancière has powerfully redescribed.18 And Eliot, writing the novel not long after the Second Reform Bill and its subsequent elections, seems to be inflecting this earlier political moment with the enhanced perils of a later era of publicity. The interplay between Brooke and the mock version of himself is in part a dramatization of the harrowing dangers of opinion politics dependent on mediated representations, in which the candidate can so effortlessly be like and yet equally unlike another body (effigy) or another voice (echo), in which the candidate’s distinction disintegrates as body and voice circulate in the square independently of each other, of the orator himself, and of any given ideational location (China or Peru?). This scene thus describes a chaotic political domain in part created by liberal ideals in which liberal causes must operate under enormous stress for uncertain results; indeed, in this novel’s account, the candidate is a big part of the problem. As Brooke’s candidacy crumbles at his feet, the novel argues by default for some variety of political authenticity situated in a univocal body of opinion—a convergence of thought, body, and voice that “stands for” integrity in the public sphere. This hustings scene is preceded, you’ll recall, by a discussion between the handsome protagonists, Ladislaw and Lydgate, in which the doctor chides Ladislaw for backing such an obviously incapable candidate. The

17. Eliot, Middlemarch, 540–52 (hereafter cited in text as M). 18. No one has written more passionately about the articulable border of the political than Rancière in Disagreement.

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men then launch into a debate concerning the ethics of political representation. Does one support a man for the progressive policy he publicly advocates, in this case, the Reform Bill (as Will does), or does one vote for the man—his character, his intelligence, his genuine adherence to the opinions he publicizes (as Lydgate argues but certainly fails to practice later in his questionable financial and medical entanglements with Bulstrode)? The ethical stakes in this debate between the men may seem clear enough: Does a candidate represent some version of his private self or the policy he espouses? Does a vote signal an affirmation of a person or a position? As Will defines the terms, when referring to Brooke: “He’s good enough for the occasion: when the people have made up their mind as they are making it up now, they don’t want a man—they only want a vote” (M, 505). Even if the stakes may seem clear to these men, and indeed these men are otherwise so unclear about so much else, the relation between person and policy is hardly so straightforward in its practice, as the novel takes pains to demonstrate. The private debate between Lydgate and Ladislaw frames the public event, as if this private question, a tête-à-tête deliberating the primacy of principle over person, is thus to be dramatically realized and then definitively settled in the town square. This is a decidedly liberal trajectory, in which a gentlemen’s deliberative exchange seeks its political realization in public. Brooke’s subsequent failed speech and, in turn, his aborted candidacy could be read as the conclusion to their debate. It operates then as a simple satire of the opportunism of reform, showing to Ladislaw and Eliot’s readers that it ought to and indeed does matter whether or not Mr. Brooke subscribes to his public pronouncements. In this conception of unobstructed correspondence, the hustings scene becomes a kind of allegory. The effigy and the “Punch-voiced echo” imply that Brooke is a dummy—intellectually inept, prone to distraction in just the ways that rational liberal cognition ought not to be. As the ventriloquized words bounce off the buildings in the market square, Brooke is exposed as the puppet, the party cipher, put up by the Whigs to mouth positions he cannot possibly believe—retrograde landlord that he is. Read at this level, Middlemarch applauds by contrast the politician who adheres to what he professes to the voters; an opinion realized in the vote, then made into law is not in itself sufficient—as Ladislaw implicitly concedes by his hasty exit from town after Brooke’s oratorical debacle. In this one instance, Lydgate appears the victor. Rather than read this scene as a limited and local critique of Whig reform, where Ladislaw’s youthful opportunism is shown to be both an

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ethical and political failure in the representational medium of the aristocratic Brooke, I wish to read it instead as the improvisational field in which an enactment of liberalism in the public square seems both possible and impossible. After all, Brooke is not exposed at this moment as the unimproved and unimproving landlord that he is; it is not, in fact, a scene that counsels, pace Lydgate, the substitution of a good man for a good policy but a scene that labors hard to figure out just what a candidate is in this era of reform. Questions of political integrity and personal authenticity are raised but are certainly not answered in any settled way. In another novel of this era, East Lynne (1861), by Ellen Wood, one can perhaps see the fantasy of formal coherence that circulates in some portions of Liberal and radical political discourse but which Middlemarch cannot or will not weave into its famous web. Plot and theme, form and content, policy and character are in wondrous alignment, when the stalwart middle-class hero, Archibald Carlyle, is unanimously affirmed by his Liberal electors in the very scene and at almost the very moment when his opponent, the aristocratic roué Francis Levison—having haunted the town under an alias in months past—is arrested for murder. As good and bad characters become synonymous with good and bad candidates, and character and candidate are conflated entirely, the sensationalism of the adultery plot and its domestic ambiguities is momentarily set aside. In this harmonic convergence of the personal, judicial, and civic stars, the Liberal candidate and the impersonator have nothing in common. What’s more, the mob element that Eliot’s novel merges with normal political praxis is in East Lynne sequestered to an earlier chapter in Wood’s narrative, where it gets its chance at charivari during what might be called a prepolitical moment in the plot, when Levison is unceremoniously dunked.19 In Middlemarch, however, the hustings scene disarticulates and dislocates what might seem liberal commonplaces—it distances the voice from the body, it duplicates the body in an effigy, and it highlights the crowd’s disaffection with the candidate. The event does not settle into a scene of recognition and persuasion, a process of exchange, but into doubling and echoing, dysfunctional displays of self-reflexivity. Smithian sympathetic exchange or Millian rational debate—what G. M. Young perhaps too easily 19. Chapter 53, “Miss Carlyle in Full Dress. Afy Also,” in Wood, East Lynne, 587–600. The ten years that separate these novels might account for this incommensurate scene blocking, despite the fact that East Lynne’s events occur during the second reform era and Middlemarch during the first. Middlemarch might well be focused more on what was deemed the middle-class conquest of aristocratic privilege, while Wood’s novel looks at the apparent democratic results of a legislation by then routine.

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defines in his “portrait” of this century as “government in accordance with opinion elicited by discussion”—bursts into pantomime, a genre of and for the masses, and into mockery, an inversion of rational debate.20 Eliot’s poetic couplets, otherwise equivocal, at the opening of chapter 51, can now register their skeptical tone as they perform the illogical logic of chiasmatic liberalism: “the Many in the One, the One in Many; . . . / This is not That, and He was never You, / though this and that are AYES, and you and he / Are like as one to one, or three to three” (M, 540). This is the Liberal political ideology that impossibly conflates a prized individual opinion with the public opinion (“the One in Many”), nonsensically differentiates among identical identity forms (votes) and implausibly renders them politically articulate—gives them a voice (“AYES“)—in arbitrary registers of numerical equality (varieties of proportional representation). Through this verse, Eliot has ready-to-hand her own critique of a democratizing liberal politics. Liberalism in many of its operational manifestations emphasizes exchange, circulation, even alienation. For instance, a necessary condition of a progressive politics requires that the opinion detach from its speaker to circulate, forming coalitions and movements, seeking recognition in the opinions of its electors. Relatedly, the speaker must detach from his opinion in order to demonstrate his disinterestedness, to render the opinion sufficiently impersonal to address more abstract registers of belonging (nation, empire) and motive (altruism, sacrifice). However, Victorian descriptions of liberal oratory also can be seen to gravitate to a metonymic embodiment of opinion’s abstraction, and it is this representational register of abstraction, as Eliot’s and Trollope’s scenes show, where the formal demands of opinion often seem so precarious, so frightening. “The problem for a public man . . . was to embody disinterestedness in flesh and blood, and to find an appropriate tone and temper and line of policy.” These abstracted embodiments are worrisomely resistant to a certain kind of representation in Eliot’s telling. Looking “neutral” in the face, the effigy of Mr. Brooke is in a positive sense a materialization of the detachment required of disinterested liberal opinion, a disinterestedness that brings composure to the face, as it makes its way toward electoral articulation. Opinion must not be attached to the particularities of personality, the tics of caricature, or the impulses of mood but travel in the public sphere

20. G. Young, “Liberal Mind,” 114. Pam Morris’s reading of Romola, in some respects, closely supports my reading of this scene in Middlemarch. She shows how “Eliot is questioning Mill’s optimistic belief in the triumph of a disinterested rationality through free debate.” P. Morris, Imagining Inclusive Society, 174.

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in an ether of neutrality. Noted as “the effigy of himself,” the rag figure nonetheless does not look like Mr. Brooke, thus lacking the individual representativeness required by a liberal politics. Nor does it look like anyone else, unfortunately. Neutrality, as we have seen when assessing the secret ballot, has more ominous associations, for as a neutral physiognomy, the candidate, like the elector perfected in the voting booth, is thus prone to impersonation—“and you and he / Are like as one to one.” Mimicry, as a variety of political burlesque, contrasts with satire as form contrasts with content. Political satire would expose Brooke as a hypocrite; it would measure his policies against his practice—a reformer without reforms. This is the preferred genre of eighteenth-century political critique, where the dominance of contract measures integrity in terms of follow-through— the criterion of whether or not one does what he promised he would do. Mimicry, by comparison, duplicates the formal properties of the oratorical scene in effigy and echo, accentuating how the newly isolate candidate can be anyone and thus no one at all.21 Put another way, mimicry raises questions of identity, not action. What perhaps is registered in other portions of the narrative as “characteristic tics” of Mr. Brooke’s distinctive verbal stylings, a sign of his idiosyncrasy, are, in their duplication throughout this scene, emptied of their temperamental specificity and reproduced as empty repetition. As the echo repeats the unmotivated stutter punctuating Brooke’s sorry account of his own cosmopolitan detachment, we detect a by-now familiar crisis for the politics of liberal opinion as it circulates in the public sphere—what is the grounding or stabilizing authority of an embodied opinion? When Brooke’s admirably disinterested “observation with extensive view” lurches toward a comical indifference toward the distinctions among Adam Smith, Dr. Johnson, and the Baltic, we discover that Mr. Brooke “stood his ground no longer” (M, 547). As Brooke stumbles, the rest of the scene does not comply with expectations, for it hardly replicates an age-old nightmare of mob retaliation. The mass’s actions are neither anarchic or potent; they are as diffuse and disjointed and distracted as are Mr. Brooke’s. “Sitting above the shoulders of the crowd,” rather than on them, the effigy is as disconnected from the multitude as it is from the candidate. Condensing the people into a metonymic 21. After significantly metaphoric emblems of the nation are depleted, such that Mr. Brooke cannot “stand in for” the transcendent whole, the remaining fragmented sources of authority— the body and the voice—thus search for a metonymic status, as individuals seek means to associate. This would be borrowing terms from Gallagher, Industrial Reformation of British Fiction, 219–67.

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shoulder (“the Many in the One”), Eliot’s prose pictures the effigy hovering above the crowd—proximate to but yet unrepresentative of them (not “the One in the Many”). At the same moment, the “Punch-voiced echo” refuses to give voice to Brooke, the effigy, or the crowd—“there had arisen, apparently in the air, like the note of the cuckoo, a parrot-like Punch-voiced echo of his words.” Cuckoos, parrots, Punches: in this carnival of metaphoric representation, allegorical equivalence splits and even metonymic political representation falters, for the effigy and echo seem increasingly unrelated to any thing at all. Even as the language of the narration proliferates images to represent adequately the public panoply, no vehicle sticks to a tenor— the effigy is not like Mr. Brooke; the effigy rises above the shoulders of the crowd; and the echo floats in the air. In this oratorical scene, the candidate’s words wander “from China to Peru” while the “Punch-voice” only partially parrots them, distorting their syntax. No deliberative exchange here, no communicative rationality, no settled representational ground for liberal opinion, the scene delineates in comprehensive detail the challenges to and the pressures within a liberal form of political intentionality.

“All Is Not Some, nor Some the Same as Any” The disarticulation of speech from body and the disaffection between candidate and electors in Eliot’s hustings scene suggests that a better candidate cannot simply be found in a better man, or, perhaps, a better man now must mean something else, for the candidate must manifest some sort of detectable unity or harmony among body, speech, and opinion so as to reassure, at the very least, his constituency. Gladstone’s place in this liberal representational drama is exemplary, for the public was notably fixated on his body, his voice, and, moreover, to what degree the body and voice signaled his political integrity. Commentators often remarked on Gladstone’s physical fortitude, especially as he aged, and his compulsion to hold the floor of Parliament for hours or, at Midlothian, to deliver half-day speeches. Many of these observers invariably linked his physical stamina to his oratorical and mental capacities, tracing the coherence backward from speech to body to mind and thereby implicitly devising evaluative criteria for a candidate form otherwise unmoored from locality, familiarity, and other types of evidentiary access. When writing, for instance, about his campaign against the “Bulgarian Horrors,” one observer referred to his “amazing feat of eloquence and bodily endurance” and its ability to provide a “revelation of what might otherwise have remained concealed from us, the grand,

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intense simplicity of Mr. Gladstone’s mind.”22 I simply can’t stress enough how political integrity is understood to be at this time a coherence of body, voice, opinion, and, thus, mind, so that a common type of Gladstonian compliment looks like the following, written by Edward Hamilton, Gladstone’s secretary: “There was not a movement of the body that did not give emphasis to the idea he was expressing.”23 That writers on liberal politics continually recur, when discussing opinion, to representations of the bodily, the body as metaphor, is not merely a traditional rhetorical topos associated with political oratory. It is equally indicative of this newly authoritative political value embedded in the individual form, a form that yet must speak in an abstracted voice in a more comprehensively discursive field of politics, through the attenuated medium of opinion. Gladstone’s hale and hearty constitution rendered him an especially qualified candidate for this candidate form, but language that expresses perseverance, strength, and muscularity peppers a good deal of liberal discourse during this era, suggesting that “body language” often compensates for the absence of the actual body in the articulation and circulation of opinion .24 There is a historical precedent of sorts for this embodied unity, for the elocutionary movement of the eighteenth century—most often credited to the works of Hugh Blair and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—was “characterized by the systematic ordering of certain observed phenomena of voice, body, and language.”25 And in this earlier period, such unity was often associated with musical rhythm and harmony. As one influential rhetorical manual of the early nineteenth century suggests, when praising the unity of body and voice, “This coincidence of the hand and the voice will greatly enforce the pronunciation; and if they keep time they will be in tune as it were to each other.”26 In tune with each other, the body and voice articulate a performative integrity that most often translates in the Victorian era into the affective value of sincerity, which in turn authenticates the political value of consistency, so that when one votes for a candidate, one can not only count on him acting in accord with his oratorical promises, but when new issues present themselves, one can predict the opinion one’s represen-

22. G. Young, Mr. Gladstone, 109. 23. Quoted in Biagini, Gladstone, 62. 24. Collini, Public Moralists, 170–98. 25. The elocutionary movement “was characterized by the systematic ordering of certain observed phenomena of voice, body, and language, and by the invention and use of systems of notation to represent these phenomena.” Quoted in Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic, 163. 26. Walker, Elements of Gesture.

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tative will hold because of its coherence in relation to what came before. In order to untangle, at least partially, just how embodied opinion, sincerity, and consistency increasingly define the candidate form in mid-Victorian liberalism, I need to carefully distinguish the liberal political sphere from a democratic or radical political sphere that may look identical to many observers. As Jay Fliegelman has argued with much originality in Declaring Independence, his study of the Declaration of Independence and early American political culture, sincerity is closely associated with democracy and its demands for transparency between private and public realms.27 Sincerity was expressed through an unadorned plain speech whose revaluation coincided with the elocutionary movement. The elocutionary era prized a version of rhetorical instruction that downplays logical argumentation in the service of proof, de-emphasizes verbal ornamentation, and privileges instead oral delivery and bodily gesture in the service of affective persuasion premised on what Adam Potkay, working in the British eighteenth-century context, links to the “Ciceronian-Demosthenic ideal of sympathetic identification between orator and audience.”28 As Fliegelman notes, plain speech and a formalized delivery intending emotional effect do not always work together as transparently as their advocates wished. He describes a dynamic of embodiment in which “naked” thought requires—paradoxically—a simple dress of words, and in which this ambiguous embodiment or dressing is supposed to move its audience through a virtually unmediated emotional transfer.29 Colonial and Revolutionary American politics was of course responding to the same aristocratic state that radicalism in England sought to revise. The British radical William Godwin shared this commitment to 27. “An individual’s actions are meaningful only insofar as they are revelatory of a specific personality or moral character; moral character is meaningful only insofar as it is vouchsafed by sincerity; sincerity is credible only insofar as it can be directly or indirectly experienced, and then preferably by an unseen witness to private behavior.” Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, 121. This passage describes the presumptions at work in Jefferson’s autobiography, which, like so much of the material written by Victorian liberals, especially Mill’s own autobiography, disavows the personal even as it celebrates the virtues of sincerity. 28. Potkay, Fate of Eloquence, 46. 29. Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, 35–37. In Eighteenth-Century British Logic, Howell stresses the way in which the new rhetoric argued that the substance of argument comes from “intellection, consciousness, common sense, experience, analogy, and testimony” (602) and not from artistic proofs and the topical system of Aristotle. Thomas Miller also points out that the new rhetoric and the new logic that Mill promoted focused on the “mental processes of the individual auditor.” T. Miller, Formation of College English, 26. Not just ideas, but ideas coming from that particular individual: a formulation that is central to liberalism.

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transparency, even if he did not share its diminishment of reason and logic in public speech. Heightening, one might even say to a hysterical level, the stakes of a political revaluation of sincerity in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), Godwin argues that the possibility for a just human community hinges on the most scrupulous realization of sincerity in every form of human interaction, between men and women, servants and masters, citizens and the state. “But the improvement of mankind rests upon nothing so essentially as upon the habitual practice of candour, frankness and sincerity.”30 In this brave new world, sincerity in exchanges between persons anchors all other matters of truth, justice, and equity, as if a little white lie could topple nations. Given their roughly equivalent targets, the practices of republican and radical discussion and oratory not surprisingly manifest similar values—a common revulsion toward luxury, elaborate ornamentation, casuistry, and an ongoing allegiance to sincerity, as I discussed in detail in chapter 3.31 In both historical settings, sincerity’s value emerges during the necessary procedures of embodiment—from a priori or “naked” ideation into opinion—that public circulation requires. In the transit from idea to opinion, sincerity authenticates a consistency between private reflection and public articulation, assuring the audience that a given opinion is not merely an exchange value in the political public sphere but also functions as an embodied voice that guarantees the conviction of its speaker. It seems likely that the growing activism of government in eighteenth-century America and nineteenth-century Britain contributes to sincerity’s authenticating prowess because policy-driven government posits a motive force that is most often traced back to the populace through the candidate form. The candidate is the holder, then, of a motivated opinion, and so “motive” as both motor and intention comes under closer scrutiny. Despite these real parallels between democratic and liberal investments in sincerity, however, Victorian liberalism routinely administers a skeptical critique of core democratic principles—of undiluted sentiment, of universal cognitive capacity, of the ideally unmediated transfer of opinion. All these values seem too unsettled a mechanism of substantive opinion formation. As a result, sincerity in mid-Victorian politics continues to underwrite opinion even as its detection and assessment appears fraught with danger and error. What one might wish to call a crisis of sincerity was frequently detected

30. Godwin, Enquiries Concerning Political Justice, 98. For a good summation of Godwin’s understanding of sincerity, see Davidson, “‘Professed Enemies of Politeness,’” 599–615. 31. For instance, Porter, Seeing and Being.

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in electoral oratory during the mid-nineteenth century. Here is Thomas Carlyle in his 1850 pamphlet on “The Stump-Orator”: “Probably, there is not in Nature a more distracted phantasm than your commonplace eloquent speaker, as he is found on platforms, in parliaments on Kentucky stumps, at tavern-dinners, in windy, empty insincere times like ours.”32 Both high and low journalism that inclined toward the Liberal cause during the 1860s and 1870s continually contrasted Gladstone’s earnest sincerity with Disraeli’s operatic opportunism when recounting their parliamentary debates.33 However, as often as Gladstone was applauded for his sincerity in liberal organs, he was condemned for his insincerity by less-partisan observers.34 It’s worth emphasizing again how this preoccupation with sincerity emerges in a context where electoral proxies for regional constituencies and interests are slowly replaced by individual candidates voicing opinions whose origins are increasingly presumed to be of a cognitive and ideological cast rather than coming from customary or habitual sources. As I sought to sketch in the first chapters of this book, the liberalizing moment of mid-Victorian Britain was not a democratic engine but sought through a primarily cognitive liberalization to rethink under different terms the relation between a political citizenry and the populace—“all is not Some, nor Some the same as Any.” Ideation, then opinion, then re-cognition (as the elector starts to think “like” the candidate) are the criteria for political success in an ideal liberal world. A candidate must now think what he says

32. Carlyle, “Stump-Orator,” 149. 33. Citing a review of Disraeli’s novel Endymion, an unnamed writer for the Times in an article titled “Latest Intelligence” paraphrases M. Scherer, who “contrasts Mr. Gladstone’s earnestness, breadth, and lack of humour and flexibility with Lord Beaconsfield’s shallowness, worship of success, tact, geniality, and resolution—resolution especially in adventurous affairs.” Disraeli famously noted, in reference to Gladstone, that “what is earnest is not always the truth.” Quoted in Maurois, Disraeli, 345. Another formulation of this ubiquitous and longlasting comparison between the two prime ministers was expressed by Ian Buruma: “Gladstone believed in reason passionately. Disraeli believed in unreason dispassionately.” Buruma, “God’s Choice.” 34. Justin McCarthy recalls, “I shall never forget the impression made on me by Mr. Gladstone’s eloquence, and made still more, I think, by the sincerity and the earnestness of the orator himself.” McCarthy, “Story of Gladstone’s Life,” 27. W. Stanley Jevons writes, “There is no charge against this great minister more common than that of impulsiveness and inconsistency.” Jevons, “Mr. Gladstone’s New Financial Policy,”131a. R. H. Hutton complains, “Now Mr. Gladstone has been remarkable for unlearning what he once took for convictions.” Hutton, “Mr. Gladstone,” 624. Gladstone, Hutton notes, “regards all his own changes of conviction as Providential, and cannot help attributing to a sort of self-will the inability of other statesmen to follow him in the facility with which he unlearns old principles and acquires new ones” (“Mr. Gladstone,” 625).

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rather than say what he represents. There is a striking pattern of emphasis in the Midlothian discourse upon Gladstone’s mind and the impact his mind had on others. Gladstone, years after his death, continues to be understood in these terms. Gladstone is “still unconsciously influencing the thinking habits of millions”; Gladstone’s actions “left their mark upon our institutions and upon the minds and outlook of the people.”35 Midcentury Liberalism originates in and through ideas, not traditions, not impulses. Ideas beget ideas and thus change minds, but this re-cognition is therefore susceptible to accusations of volatility, of opportunism, of insincerity, especially because ideas circulate in the public sphere as individual opinions now alienated from their possessor and now equally oriented to all kinds of change—the change of minds but also the changes promised in liberal reformism more broadly. To be clear, I am not implying that Whigs and Tories in previous generations had no ideas. Moreover, I am not claiming that the ideas they did have failed to become political opinions. Rather, I am focusing on perceptions regarding the generative context for political change. That ideas as they transmogrified into individual opinion were increasingly the motor of political change, either underwriting or forcing the legislative agenda—in effect, the very cause of politics—inevitably raised concerns about authenticity, effectivity, and legibility. It mattered more than ever that candidates meant what they said, but more than ever before the sensible evidentiary bases for sincerity had been compromised. Voters were much less likely to know the candidates personally or recognize the types of political affiliations that deputized them as candidates. Campaigns themselves were much less about where the candidates had come from: Gladstone ran for the seat in Midlothian having not lived in Scotland since childhood, though his Scottish origins might have, like the Irish origins of Trollope’s Phineas Finn, enhanced his abstracted relation to that land. In a context where motive is simultaneously essential and elusive, individually situated yet nationally mobilized, the synchronic self-consistency promised by sincerity (“I mean what I say”) was often conflated or combined with a demand for diachronic self-consistency (“I mean

35. Garrett, Two Mr. Gladstones, v, vii. Biagini is an instance of how a liberal perspective shared between the Victorians and their modern commentators has occluded the function and the oddity of “idea” in liberal theory and practice. In differentiating his work on liberalism from other historians who emphasize Foucauldian disciplinary accounts of subjection or quasi-Freudian paradigms concerning identification, Biagini insists “ideas matter and that they have a social and political influence, since people’s behaviour is deeply influenced by what they think.” Biagini, Gladstone, 2; see also 5.

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the same thing each time I speak”). These complex criteria were routinely applied to Gladstone’s oratorical events, where his capacity for sincerity is understood to be equally his capacity for consistency of opinion. In fact, about the same number of commentators accused Gladstone of insincerity as they did of sincerity, the former complaint linked to his continual shifting of positions regarding budget, electoral reform, Ireland, and many other issues. This accusation of insincerity is simply the negative answer to the same question that assumes sincerity evinces the consistency of the subject. Thus one writer complains of Gladstone’s “intense ardour of temperament, like an actor’s, which, while he is speaking, makes him seem immensely in earnest. That inflames the sympathies of his hearers, who do not know that he might have shown, and for the moment have felt, the same ardour if he had been speaking on the other side of the question.”36 Like Phineas Finn and Will Ladislaw—indeed, like liberal opinion more generally—Gladstone’s opinions can seem arbitrary. Lytton Strachey provides perhaps the most famous condensation of this ambivalent estimation of the People’s William: “It was easy to worship Mr. Gladstone; to see in him the perfect model of the upright man—the man of virtue and religion. . . . It was also easy to detest him as a hypocrite, to despise him as a demagogue, and to dread him as a crafty manipulator of men and things for the purposes of his own ambition.”37 Opponents of Gladstone thought his opinions intemperate. Like Phineas Finn, whose opinions often seemed the product of random crushes, they appeared to come out of nowhere and to go to who knows where—“He would have seemed quite as ardent against Home Rule as he was for it had he chanced to take that side.”38 So bedeviled by what seemed a fairly definitive condemnation, Gladstone felt it necessary to write a chapter of autobiography in midcareer to explain his infamous shift from High Church authoritarianism to a political if not equally personal commitment to religious toleration that had resulted in the controversial move to disestablish the Irish Anglican Church.39 That Gladstone’s sincerity was continually questioned throughout his career has much to do with the changed comprehension of sincerity itself. In the earlier telling by Godwin, truth and sincerity are the inner and outer expressions of the same thing. Although not explicitly written in full in Po-

36. Hamer, “Gladstone,” 41. 37. Strachey, Eminent Victorians, 307. 38. Hardy, People’s Life of Gladstone, 167. 39. Gladstone, Chapter of Autobiography.

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litical Justice, a powerful assumption circulates in his text. It supposes that being true to oneself is also objectively true, as if the operations within the subject that confirm his honest relation to his thoughts and actions have an inherent identity with the logic of truth itself. Mid-Victorian liberals certainly share Godwin’s emphasis on intent in ways that the consequentialists of the eighteenth century did not. It matters to them, as it does for Godwin, that a man means what he says, not simply that he does what he says. Even so, Carlyle, Mill, Eliot, and Arnold, to name just a few midVictorian liberals, cannot assert the confident correspondence between sincerity and truth that Godwin emphasizes again and again. As much as they seek virtue through the operation of sincerity and struggle to realize it in a public dimension, they are all too aware that sincerity is a register of individual integrity that may as easily be false as true. Presented with the newly enfranchised working people of unknown cognitive capacity, midVictorian liberals could quite easily imagine a citizen who both deeply believed in the truth of his conviction and was just as deeply wrong. The oscillation between accusations of impulse and celebrations of principle in these journalistic appraisals of Gladstone bespeaks the difficulty of the public ascertainment of character. Discernment in this instance was also difficult because sincere disinterestedness, the peculiar relation of ardent detachment from one’s own opinions—so prized in liberal thought—could also as easily seem like its opposite: insincere selfinterest, opportunism, Disraeli. Even as—perhaps because—political opinion seeks its impact in a highly mediated circulatory public, individual opinion formation becomes that much more codified in its practices and vexed in its performance. The descriptive motif of “harmony” that peppers mid-Victorian liberal descriptions of personal and social practice—the social harmony celebrated by Arnold, the personal harmony enacted by Mr. Harding in Trollope’s The Warden—indicates a rather different register of representation than the harmonies of voice and body, a theory of correspondence, evoked by advocates of the elocutionary movement of the late eighteenth century. In both Arnold and Trollope, harmonic convergences must overcome great distances, differences in capacity, and social and personal discordances. Likewise, a presumption of sympathetic identification that Potkay associates with the Ciceronian-Demosthenic rhetorical styles of the eighteenth century appears equally inoperable by the 1860s. Eliot’s hustings scene confirms this much. Some work in nineteenth-century literary studies aims to trace the tentacles of Adam Smith’s sympathy into the Victorian period, thereby asserting a continuity between models of sociability that were valued in those

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two periods.40 It certainly seems plausible that sympathy might define political forms of sociable exchange in the Victorian period: if the correspondence between sincerity and truth cannot work to establish the political integrity of the candidate and his relation to the electorate, perhaps sympathetic identification will. This work is compelling because it is strongly corrective of an overly theatricalized version of Adam Smith. My project argues, however, that the transition from a model of spectatorial sympathy to Millian discussion entailed substantive alterations, such that effective political exchange relies much less on sympathy than on estimations of sincerity—how surely an opinion is held by its possessor. If Smith’s social domain, for all its distancing, commits to a universal human nature and thus transparency in his moments of rhetorical idealism, Victorian liberal practice often aligns its values with a “nature” of hierarchical particulars in a complex structure of mediated and often opaque circulation. Eliot evokes this organic hierarchy in her epigraph to chapter 51: “Genus holds species, both are great or small; / One genus highest, one not high at all” (M, 540). Gladstone himself implicitly evokes a hierarchy of individuals, distinct yet citizens all, in his first speech of the Midlothian campaign: “It is upon the individual exertions of you, as true Britons and true patriots, each in his own separate place, every man in his own office and function, to contribute that which he can contribute.”41 Note here how “place” continues to haunt the liberal imaginary, a spectral vision of social hierarchy even as its real emplacement as “locality” on British land diminishes. Commitments to common natures and common sense that enable even the solipsism of sympathy—as Adam Smith describes it—to recognize another in itself are simply not the operative motors in a social domain that midcentury liberalism seeks to delimit through highly regulated, formalized, and discontinuous models of communication. These models privileged, in fact, self-reflection much more than interpersonal reflection, self-instantiation more than social circulation. Smithian sympathy, as Rob Mitchell and Rae Greiner diversely suggest, is a structure underlying social interaction, while sincerity—at least as it is envisaged by midcentury—is less transactional than sympathy. Godwin’s sincerity is always articulated as an exchange between master and servant, husband and wife, man and man, but mid-Victorian sincerity is an external affect of self-coherence, saturated

40. See two works by Robert Mitchell, “Adam Smith and Coleridge,” 54–60, and especially “Violence of Sympathy,” 321–41. Also, from an ongoing work, see Greiner, “Adam Smith’s Narrative Sympathy.” See also Lowe, Victorian Fiction and Insights of Sympathy. 41. Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches, 19 (hereafter cited in text as MS).

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by bodily signifiers, that cannot easily assume association beyond itself— either with others or with truth. The problems of its public legibility and currency in this period have much to do, then, with its role as an ethical measure for a widely circulating and extensively depersonalized opinion in the civic domain—even as it remains tethered to an internal moral value mostly invisible to the human eye. A candidate’s or elector’s sincerity thus operates as the affective reassurance that a distanced, disinterested opinion—a “liberal cause”—originates from and is realized through a locatable origin, in effect, a thinking body with good “motives,” what Lionel Trilling limns as “congruence between avowal and actual feeling.”42 A sincere candidate is an essential in liberal politics, as voters seek the authentic ground of opinion. It is certainly as essential as it was in Godwin’s radicalism, but being a good man just isn’t enough anymore, as Lydgate shows.43 A candidate must always be a sincere man who must always also be a consistent man who is perpetually performing his embodied conditions of possibility in the public domain of politics where truth no longer inheres.

The Embodiment of the Liberal Cause Midcentury liberalism privileges ethos, as evidenced by its concern for the ethical dimensions of action and for the characterological aspects of opinion formation and possession.44 Given these priorities, rhetorical and performative political subjectivities appear to be historical burdens that Liberals must reject. And certainly one can find liberal critiques of aristocratic performativity and denunciations of “mere rhetoric” throughout the nineteenth-century print record.45 However, as Middlemarch instantiates, 42. See Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 3. Trilling notes that sincerity in the era before his present day assumed that if one were true to oneself, then one would be true to others (9). 43. My sense of sincerity’s centrality in this era echoes Pam Morris’s engaging account of its Victorian operations (Imagining Inclusive Society, 24–30); she understands the difference between sympathy and sincerity in a related fashion, noting that sympathy is not individualistic as is sincerity (18). 44. Anderson, Way We Argue Now, 161–88. 45. One of the most interesting rhetorical trails I’ve encountered concerns the term political theatrical, which one sees rather routinely deployed in political debate throughout the nineteenth century. It appears to emerge in reference to Richard Brinsley Sheridan, noted Whig and well-known playwright, theatrical manager, actor. In the notice, “Prince George of Cumberland has been appointed by His Majesty the King, Colonel en Second of the Hanoverian Horse Guard.” The Times, for instance, on May 15, 1828, evokes “theatrical politics” in direct reference to Sheridan, but the phrase returns again and again, notably during debates in 1887 regarding Ireland and tenant evictions, when politicians accuse the Tenant Right League of stag-

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even an antiquated political event such as open-air oratory has its modern uses. In two much-needed studies of public oratory in the Victorian period, Joseph Meisel, studying public speech in schools, in churches, in Parliament, and then in the person of Gladstone, and Matthew Bevis, outlining the oratorical concerns of literary authors, show how pervasive a taste there was among much of the public for extended oratory. Perhaps because of his particular focus on Gladstone, Meisel makes a special case for the political: “Indeed it seems clear that there was a close affinity, if not exactly a direct connection, between Britain’s oratorical heyday and its great age of Liberalism.”46 Arguing for the mutual imbrication of oratory and liberalism, as Meisel does—and as I will do—would seem a bit counterintuitive for many scholars. Historians and critics who have noted liberalism’s characterological ethos have tended to see this ethos as fully replacing the more performative, univocal rhetoric of an earlier era, and in some sense I do not diverge from this reading. It would, however, be a mistake to suggest that rhetoric dies in the nineteenth century precisely because of liberalism and liberal commitments to discussion. This is the claim of David Wellbery and John Bender in their introductory chapter to The Ends of Rhetoric, where they list “Liberal political discourse,” understood as a “language of communal exchange,” as one of the “conditions of impossibility of rhetoric.”47 If discussion is seen in this context as a more transactional process than oration, and implicitly a more democratic form, then rhetoric as the art of oration is allied with authority and manipulation of the masses, the voice of despotism and autocracy rather than the conversation among equals. Rather than proffering the cliché that the historical record must be more mixed than this schematic implies, and of course it surely is, I want to explore this “close affinity” between liberalism and oratory to show how a rhetorical orientation works in a tense collaboration with a liberal notion of character. Liberal discourse and rhetorical delivery were not by any means distinct political values, even when it seems Liberals sometimes wished it so, but, rather, generated a hybrid representation vital to liberalism’s survival in the nineteenth century.

ing evictions for political effect, which morph into a theatrics of the parliamentary floor: “Did the House listen to those gifted men? No; their Bills were scouted and were contemptuously rejected, because at that time no political theatricalities were resorted to.” “House of Commons, Friday, July 29,” Times, July 30, 1887. 46. Meisel, Public Speech; Bevis, Art of Eloquence. On Victorian oratory, see also Meisel, “Words by Numbers.” Of use also is Oliver, Public Speaking. And for a nineteenth-century exploration, see Matthews, Oratory and Orators. 47. Bender and Wellbery, “Rhetoricality,” 22.

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In a mass representative politics where individualism is constituted by the having of opinions, public oratory does not simply give way to Habermasian critical discussion in the newspapers and on the floor of Parliament: at the very least, this narrative too closely plagiarizes the autocracy-to-democracy story that liberalism tells about itself. Rather, persuasive oratory becomes both a necessary and indeed a vital broadcast mechanism for the sort of opinion upon which liberal politics relies: sincere, disinterested, abstractly embodied. Public oratory remains critical but emphasizes less a formalism of language (how to construct an argument, how to ornament that argument) and much more a formalism of delivery (the emphasis on the gestural, vocal, and tonal embodiment of that opinion), precisely because—as we saw in The Warden, in Middlemarch, and in Phineas Finn—Victorians were deeply absorbed in the ethics of opinion formation and possession and its practical being in the world, and at times directly to the detriment of the opinion’s argument. As quoted in the epigraph opening this chapter, one unnamed journalist who witnessed the Midlothian phenomenon neatly attests to this fascination with the embodied relation between an individual and an ideology: “Mr. Gladstone is regarded as the embodiment of the Liberal cause wherever he goes.” I want to spend some time describing the complexities at play in this striking formulation of Gladstone as “the embodiment of the Liberal cause wherever he goes” because it will show how ethos and rhetoric produce a much more uncommon liberal political process than ordinarily described. The journalist conjoins a notion of bodiliness with an abstract “Liberal cause,” a claim that evidences once more how notions of corporeal individuation routinely imbue perceptions of liberal practice. “Liberal cause” also perfectly defines an ideology that simply cannot understand itself independent of its change imperative—liberalism seeks progress, while a liberal has a cause: both ideology and ideologist claim possession of futurity. The main purpose of these Midlothian appearances was to define a Liberalism that could respond not only to Conservative investments in the status quo but also to the imperial engagements characteristic of the Disraeli era. This was liberal causality in a complex field of foreign and often arbitrary forces. The “Liberal cause” therefore condenses myriad policy positions, numerous legislative technicalities, and the probability of internal dissent into an ethical force that is embodied in the person of Mr. Gladstone. The Times journalist also understands at some level that Mr. Gladstone’s Midlothian journey is about the embodiment of an ideology as a form of political representation: “that great principles and parties are embodied in

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representative men.”48 The quotation referring to Gladstone’s embodiment of the liberal cause also captures not only the temporal futurity but the constant movement (“wherever he goes”) that liberal progressivism promises, in this instance, in the body of a man who seemed incapable of slowing down or retiring from the political scene.49 This exemplification of abstracted embodiment—of Gladstone embodying a liberal cause—indicates that political representation in a liberal polity cannot simply mean direct representation of the people—“the Many in the One.” That Trollope had Mr. Monk change pictorial genres from landscape to portrait reorients the representational field of politics but does not necessarily imply a settled expression of the public’s will after the Second Reform Bill. Eliot’s “neutral physiognomy” and Trollope’s fleeting eye, mentioned by Monk in Phineas Finn, indicate that nothing about representation is or perhaps can be settled once the person and the living body (rather than ancient land, primordial habit) are its measure. At the same time, the relation between the candidate and his constituency was also not what Grenville had called “virtual representation” when mollifying the American colonies in the eighteenth century. Although Victorian parliamentary candidates were no longer to represent locality, they also did not claim to represent solely the whole well-being of British subjects in general, a form of stewardship or coverture: individuation and individual motive mattered.50 Even with this emphasis on individuality, no one in the

48. Editorial, Times, November 25, 1879. The recurrence in this passage to “representative men” possibly suggests that Gladstone could thus represent the “everyman” who is in some sense most representative of the median of the people. In this way, Gladstone is typical or generic. I think it makes better sense to place the emphasis on what he represents: “great principles and parties.” In this accentuation, Gladstone is not an everyman but a specially qualified man to represent these especially prized qualities. 49. Even commentators not politically or personally inclined to the Midlothian excitement, such as the writers for the conservative Times, concede how crucial to the politics of liberalism this performance of motivated energy on the hustings was: “Steam is a splendid force, but before men trust themselves to a steam-engine they want to know that there is a man with a good judgment and cool head in command of it” (editorial, Times, December 3, 1879). In describing Gladstone as machine, of course, the writers refuse to attribute not only humanity but also, in this particular image, judgment to the politician. This editorial evinces—once more—the extent to which Conservatives were obliged to debate almost entirely on Liberal terms. Gladstone’s startling physical stamina matches rather well Max Weber’s insistence on “specific gifts of the body and spirit” that typify charismatic leaders, but I also seek in this chapter to demonstrate how impersonally motivated these gifted bodies are. See Weber, “Sociology of Charismatic Authority,” 19. 50. There is an ongoing debate about the extent to which Gladstone, though explicitly anti-imperialist (in theory if not in practice), was himself a nationalist. For my own purposes,

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1860s advocated man-to-man representation, either, a utopian notion of direct democracy that liberalism rejected outright, in part for its association with self-interest and in part for its often veiled commitment to universal suffrage. Whatever emerged in the political domain could not be merely a matter of regionalism on the old aristocratic model, or the virtuality that the colonies understood to be no representation at all, or identicalness, with its presumption of transparency and—more negatively—selfishness. When Gladstone fronted the crowds in Perthshire, a portion of the Midlothian constituency, he grasped this much: he came to his audience not as one of them, nor as guardian of all people, nor patently as a proxy for the regional powers: “It is not an ordinary occasion, gentlemen, because, as we well know, the ordinary rule is that in county representation it is customary, though not invariably the rule—it is customary to choose someone who, by residence, by property, by constant intercourse, is identified with the county that he is asked to represent. In these respects I come among you as a stranger” (MS, 26). As a stranger to them and they to him, Gladstone cannot claim to represent the people on the simple grounds of resemblance or correspondence, inviting an element of estrangement in a political scheme that ordinarily assumes some sort of association or identification (face-to-face exchange). Gladstone, though born in Scotland, was by no means of these people at this stage in his life—eminent statesman, owner of an estate far distant from Midlothian, formal in his bearing, aristocratic in mien. He was an aristocrat without the influence exerted by proximity or familiarity, having neither land nor business in Perthshire or its environs. These considerations alone should give one pause in investing confidence in the full explanatory power of a certain sort of charisma to define Gladstone’s impact. Max Weber’s famous instantiation of Gladstone as a charismatic leader has dominated understanding of his later career. In a passing aside, Weber describes Gladstone in terms of “a Caesarist plebiscitarian element,” a pithy encapsulation that has licensed historians to characterize Gladstone

I simply wish to differentiate between the concept of nation that liberalism authorizes in the political domain and Gladstone’s stated sense of what constitutes a nation and the grounds for national affiliation, synopsized by his biographer Bebbington—“race, religion, language, history, sympathy or antipathy in character, geographical proximity, internal conformation of the country, material wants and interests, relief from internal difficulties, relations to the outer world, and what Gladstone calls a ‘sentiment of nationality.’” Bebbington, William Ewart Gladstone, 275. Although anti-imperialist, this view should not be confused with a tolerance toward racial difference. Gladstone bitterly complained about “negrophilists” who were willing to lose white lives for a black man. Noted in Hoppen, Mid-Victorian Generation, 230.

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as a demagogue, a celebrity, a consumerist spectacle, the prophet of the decline in political discussion and the coming of a media-lobotomized public taste.51 I’m by no means ready to dispense with Weberian charisma; it fits far too well, as Eugenio Biagini has shown, with the Evangelical understanding of godly selection that Gladstone professed, with the old politician’s oft-stated conviction that the common people were fundamentally more disinterested than their social superiors, and with the biblical framework of revelation and enthusiasm that he brought to bear on current events, a view he shared in various ways with John Bright and the working-class liberals from the north who provided his electoral base in the 1880s. It hardly needs saying that a boring speaker, a bland persona, would fail to captivate the attention in an increasingly rationalized party and state apparatus. It is also probable that Gladstone’s Protestant enthusiasm formed a shared vocabulary between himself and his audience that fostered some mutual recognition, despite my suggestion that estrangement matters. Moreover, insofar as charisma seems affixed to the person, the term demonstrates how political mobilization increasingly needs to be theorized in terms of the individual—something intrinsic, elemental, and sensate that substitutes individual attractiveness for the suprapersonal ether of influence. Conceding this much, however, charisma as often mobilized in the post-Weberian moment seems analytically insufficient and in need of elaboration. The term charisma itself is scantily defined by Weber—as if patently self-evident, though I recognize that self-evidence is part of its definition (you know it when you see it). A charisma that consists entirely of je ne sais quoi also seems factually a bit off in relation to Gladstone because Gladstone’s public persona relied a good deal on argumentation and evidence. He larded his public speeches, as he did his parliamentary ones, with lots of facts and figures and subtle, often serpentine arguments, not just prophetic visions, biblical allegory, and melodramatic sentiment about mothers and sons.52 Colin Matthew, the editor of Gladstone’s diaries and a no-nonsense student of Gladstone’s life, has enriched this debate 51. Weber, “Sociology of Charismatic Authority,” 106. See also Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform; Parry, Rise and Fall; Matthew, Gladstone. 52. Subsequent readers of Gladstone’s speeches find it difficult to tap into the excitement that contemporaries report. A. J. P. Taylor remarks on “the speeches which retain a high reputation for oratory largely, I suspect, because they are never read and in which the twists of Gladstone’s utterance make it almost impossible to pin down his thought.” A. Taylor, Trouble Makers, 85. Taylor and others have even suggested, as a result, that one must focus only on the performance rather than the substance. I would suggest that reading the speeches only as efforts at oratory misses their newspaper print destinations. See Belchem and Epstein, “Gentleman Leader Revisited,” 188.

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considerably, in part by suggesting that Weber was folding Gladstonian liberalism into a conceptual framework gleaned from the statist ideology that ultimately resulted in fascistic governments and cultic personalities in the middle decades of the twentieth century in mainland Europe.53 Moreover, Weberian charisma doesn’t entirely capture the dynamics of abstracted embodiment that I detect at work in the Midlothian campaign, for Gladstone’s embodiment of a cause complicates Weber’s emphasis on charismatic personality. If charisma only implies a kind of magnetism, an electrical influence that comes not from status or title—the ethereal current of aristocratic deference—but from personal attractiveness or forcefulness, or the charge between a fiery orator and his receptive audience, then the facts on the ground, quite literally, inhibit its unimpeded circulation. Gladstone’s forceful personality or his bodily fortitude cannot explain, on their own, his embodiment as liberal cause because Weber’s understanding of political charisma rests solidly on the assumption of some sort of correspondence or identification or resemblance among personalities. All of these relational models depend on the leader’s personal qualities—to quote Weber, “above all, their [the masses’] belief in the ethical character of his personality.”54 In shifting away from the importance of personality, I am therefore insisting on a revision of Weberian charisma or, perhaps, a refinement of it that captures the impersonal and indeed purely formal qualities of a charismatic event, in which “belief in the ethical character” is elicited by a performative sincerity. In the Midlothian campaign, Gladstone insists that personality matters much less than a rhetoric of impersonality, resemblance much less than estrangement, correspondence much less than asymmetry, all of which shifts the representational register. If Gladstone was in fact a representative in any sense, then a certain distance obtained between those represented and the representative, and it was not just along class lines.55 Mediation and distance are absolutely crucial in the elaboration of liberal detachment during these years. In his speeches to the crowds, Gladstone signaled passing familiarity with the local when he referenced, for instance, the controversy concerning hypothec (a species of landholding

53. Matthew, “Rhetoric and Politics,” 53. 54. Weber, “Sociology of Charismatic Authority,” 106. 55. As Vincent’s study of pollbooks shows, political parties in Victorian England did not fall along class lines, as commonly defined. “Parties may have had their genesis in class, and their function may have been to meet class needs, but the correlation between class membership and party preference, though positive, was too slight to have been of any predictive value for any particular group, occupation, locality, or person.” Vincent, Pollbooks, 20.

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that had originally come from Roman law), but his central thematic was about national and especially foreign policy issues, “how the foreign affairs of this country, and its affairs beyond the sea, are to be administered” (MS, 62). The members of his audiences at Midlothian, unlike his colleagues in the cabinet, were all virtual strangers to these political contact zones. The substantial franchise extensions in the 1830s and 1860s at least theoretically welcomed for the first time a large population of unpredictable (because unknown) voters into the government’s deliberations concerning other nations and colonies, at a time when the government as imperial power was most overtaxed by these myriad demands, which in turn exerted, at the very least, fiscal pressure on domestic policy. Disraeli’s constant and seemingly unprecedented activity on several foreign fronts over the last several years, promoted in terms of national superiority and national prowess, only heightened the centrality of foreign-policy issues at this general election. In his second Midlothian speech, Gladstone warns, “These [Disraeli’s foreign-policy moves] are not the transactions with which you are familiar from youth upwards in the scene and upon the stage of domestic affairs, but transactions largely concerned with the most distant quarters of the globe, and likewise involving that complicated subject of the foreign relations of the country with almost every one of the States of the civilized world” (MS, 60). It is tempting to note in this passage how Gladstone redirects his audience’s attention not only from the “youthful” familiarities of domesticity—yet another instance of liberal rhetoric’s evoking and swerving from a nostalgic romanticism—but also from the possibility that these foreign “transactions” are any longer stageable, indeed representable, in a standard performative field of vision where agents exchange, circulate, and touch one another. These are not domestic or social relations in any familiar, recognizable sense, but “foreign relations.” Even domestic policies can no longer remain ordinarily visual or palpable but are disseminated in and through a national and imperial system that is apparent only in the mind’s eye. “Transaction” seems an important synonymic substitution for exchange in Gladstone’s speech, for it delaminates familiar and domestic connotations from a causality increasingly abstract in its meaning and implications, requiring a shift in the voters from a self-interest traditionally allied to sense perception, including the sense of standing on the land, to a cognitive variation on perception. The Times of December 3, 1879, quotes Gladstone on the Midlothian tour exhorting the people that “they should seriously think and should seriously realize to themselves that what they ought to set before their eyes and their minds is the public and national good.” In this passage of his speech, Gladstone

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describes a kind of radically individual, self-reflexive activity (“realize to themselves”) that first sees the public and national good in thought rather than, for instance, in the sense of communal belonging or sympathetic exchanges that these mass demonstrations might otherwise be imagined to inspire. Intervening in a face-to-face exchange, the instantaneous transmission of sentiment, Gladstone sets “before their eyes and their minds” new objects of interest. The Victorian domestic polis that was now expressed through a large, variegated, mostly unknown populace was its own representational conundrum to contemporary politicians, but the relational transactions with an even more variegated “civilized world” that constituted this new enfranchised populace’s political cause were difficult not only to represent but to comprehend within an intentional model of exchange that is otherwise the very rationale of liberal cognition. At the Corn Exchange in Waverly Market, Gladstone often points out that he is asking his audience to think beyond the personal and the local, and without the typical social and commercial “transactions” that heretofore had mobilized an elector’s intentions. Asserting what seems a comical mix of didacticism, absurdity, and a certain unfamiliarity with the thought processes of the ordinary man on an ordinary day, Gladstone warns, “Do not remain any longer under the delusion . . . of believing that you have nothing to do with Indian finance” (MS, 143). One component, then, of embodying the liberal cause thus has to do, perhaps counterintuitively, with deflecting familiar associative and identificatory exchange and somehow, instead, redirecting thought to distant lands, complex systems—“transactions” —and finally toward a liberal intervention.56 It would be false to suggest that identificatory gestures are absent from Gladstone’s speeches. Encouraging his auditors, for example, to associate British motherhood with Afghan motherhood, Gladstone on occasion turns to familiar melodramatic and sentimental universalisms. However, I want to emphasize the way in which predictable avenues of representation (sympathy, deference), built on commonalities of people and place, are not definitive or even especially pervasive, and are even at times pointedly bracketed off, in order to introduce a more indirect, dislo56. That the Midlothian campaign sought to enlarge the political horizon of the electorate has been forwarded before, as Matthew himself argues: “The Midlothian speeches were of international importance in encouraging a new and high standard of political awareness, discussion and citizenship. The concept of the active citizen, so central to the ethos of Liberalism, was given fresh life and larger definition by the new means of political discussion and communication.” Quoted in Biagini, Citizenship and Community, 42.

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cated medium of communication, a mode of political representation that actualizes the elector through opinion and policy and only then embodies it in Gladstone as agent. If voters now have something “to do” with Indian finance—a cause that might strike a newcomer to politics as a very odd and alien medium of political representation—they will do it through the acts of Gladstone. Indeed, these issues—Indian finance, Bulgarian national rights—are, in fact, only meaningful in and through the mediations of politicians, the press, the party; for these electors to have something “to do with Indian finance,” they must understand their opinions to be highly mediated and then lodged in an abstract “cause” (“to do”), rather perfectly expressed in the suprapersonal etymology of “trans-action.” Gladstone’s embodiment of liberal causality is thus both the phantom corporeality always elaborated in liberalism—giving the cause legs, giving it weight—and the representation of a liberal elector’s disinterested opinion. Gladstone as liberal cause is infused with the “trans-actional” that moves British public opinion to the antipodes. The inversions of identification and diversions of cognitive intention attendant on this practice are perhaps registered in this one quoted instance regarding Indian finance by its tendency toward negation—“do not remain” or “nothing to do”—a kind of cause distanced from the committed intentionality of its causal agent. Needless to say, this sort of distancing from a committed agent is never fully resolved in Gladstone’s embodiment, as it would have become quite difficult to establish how truly committed he—or for that matter, anyone else—could be to Indian finance. The nation is perhaps the most highly privileged site of abstraction throughout the Midlothian campaign, surely the most frequent transubstantiation of mere personality in these oratorical events, but it more often than not constitutes a set of concepts or principles, not personified feelings, originating with the disinterested individual who informs foreign policy. Gladstone routinely and explicitly rejects a sympathetic model of familiarity as a foundation for political judgment. Those Smithian models of sympathy with others that start with interested affective models—one’s own feelings of recognition, of identification—are undeniably human but not properly liberal: “You may sympathize with one nation more than another. Nay, you must sympathize in certain circumstances with one nation or another. But in point of fact, all are equal” (MS, 116). Gladstone’s third Midlothian speech articulates, instead, a heartfelt commitment to concepts, to ideas—“a love of freedom” and “a love of order” (MS, 116, 117) —that is not site specific. “Sympathies” must be situated in liberal politics, but they are not located on a domestic ground but in a ideational plane—“on the

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side of the free.” Here an abstract concept, “free,” is situated, for it occupies one side of a whole, but the whole remains inexplicit, refusing to name its local or national coordinates. When Gladstone outlines his principles of foreign policy that constitute, in effect, the liberal nation, he defines it in terms of its transactional practices, its principles of liberal action; freedom is above all else liberalism’s active impulse, and his speeches enjoin the populace to “give it scope” (MS, 117). A sense of “Britishness,” still a conflicted identificatory category in Scotland in the 1880s, was more often a rallying cry of Conservative interventionist rhetoric than that deployed by Gladstone in these speeches. The neutral physiognomy of “nation” that might apply to any nation is the more dominant term.

“Flesh and Bone” If a significant portion of each speech directed the public’s thought to the liberal cause in foreign policy or to the liberal cause as mobilized in the nation-form, inciting them to abstractness, an equally significant portion of the event was nonetheless the fact of Gladstone’s physical presence among them, which generated so much emotion and gratitude, according to press accounts and memoirs. He was, it seems, a “sensation,” and quasi-sensational explanatory models, based perhaps on Weber’s “charisma,” have become one of the means of explaining his impact during these days and subsequently during the polling that catapulted him back into office.57 Gladstone’s journey north to the Midlothian constituency was widely anticipated in the news. Crowds started forming along the train route in what Gladstone rather grandiosely described in his diaries as a “procession.”58 At the sight of these crowds, Gladstone felt obliged to deliver what he called “short speeches” before the train moved on to the next town. Once he arrived in Scotland, he delivered both indoor and outdoor addresses in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and other locations in Perthshire, drawing crowds, Gladstone estimated, from three thousand to twenty thousand and showing to many observers the Olympian stamina for which he was famous. Gladstone was seventy years old at the time. Perhaps most remarkable to a modern observer otherwise quite accustomed to such political stagings is the experiential dissimilarity between

57. A. Winter, Mesmerized, 331–43, takes this approach in her brief account of Gladstone’s mass popularity. She links the endeavors to “incorporate the masses” with earlier Victorian notions of sensory reflex. 58. Gladstone, Diaries, 461.

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this Victorian media event and modern versions. What I wish to emphasize at this moment centers less on the substance of those speeches and much less on his oratorical flair, which many praised generally, and more on the basic fact that many and in some cases most of his audience members simply could not see or hear Gladstone, even those present.59 As H. C. G. Matthew has quite rightly emphasized, the Midlothian campaign had two facets: the first was the public event, the second the transcription in the newspapers.60 The public events were both indoors and outdoors, and although many of the indoor events might provide better acoustics, I nevertheless must assume that a considerable number of participants could not hear him, as other scholars have suggested, in part because some of these venues were not designed for acoustic transmissions. In the outdoor venues, a platform could not sufficiently enhance the sight lines of many people standing on the level ground, though many others tried to climb stairways and trees to catch a glance (figure 4). While many people, then, could not quite see or hear the great man, members of the press were given a box just below the platform where they shorthanded the address and wired it to their newspapers for publication in full that evening or next day (figure 5). The fact that only 15 percent of the male population could vote in this Liberal aristocratic constituency only confirms the centrality 59. Gladstone had been a speaker of notoriety as early as his days in the debating society at college. His time as chancellor of the exchequer and prime minister only enhanced his reputation for oratory. His celebrated exchanges with Disraeli during parliamentary debates were already the stuff of legend. Praised for his impressive memory for detail, his stamina, his flashes of eloquence, the clarity with which he could explain the complexities of taxation and other dense policies, and his flair for classical and biblical allusion, Gladstone was also an oratorical performer, according to some observers. Gladstone also was known for his expressive face, which caricaturists seem so intent on magnifying in their drawings. He was known as well for long-windedness. Some commentators speak of his lengthy sentences, others talk of the overall length of his speeches. He was praised for the emotional impact of his voice on his audience. Matthews writes in 1879, “Mr. Gladstone has a voice as silvery as Belial’s. When he led the House of Commons, though he spoke for hours together, yet no hoarseness jarred the music of his tones, and the closing sentences were as clear and bell-like in their cadence as the first. A foreigner, who heard him speak one night, declared that, until then, he had never believed that English was a musical language; but now he was convinced that it was one of the most melodious of all living tongues.” Matthews, Oratory and Orators, 75. But the extent to which these characteristic gestures and talents were available in real time to most of his audience at Midlothian is likely very small, despite the claims of some journalistic observers, who would have been stationed in the press boxes just below his feet. 60. Matthew, “Rhetoric and Politics,” 40. An unsigned Times article, “Mr. Gladstone in Midlothian,” dated November 28, 1879, notes, “They stand literally for hours in the muddy streets and at gusty corners, in the dim light of gas lamps as cheerfully as in the broad light of the day, on the chance or in the hope of catching a passing glimpse of the sharp features and white looks of the popular favourite.”

Figure 4. “Mr. Gladstone in Scotland,” Illustrated London News, December 6, 1879, p. 1. This front page portrays the diverse crowds gathered along a Midlothian campaign route. Note how the policeman (bottom left), stares directly at the viewer of the scene. His solemn gaze and stark pose presumably guaranteed the event’s order. Reproduced by permission from the University of Chicago Library.

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Figure 5. “Open-Air Meeting at Blackheath to Hear Mr. Gladstone on the Turkish Atrocities,” Illustrated London News, September 16, 1876, p. 273. This public event, at which Gladstone emerged from retirement to speak about the “Bulgarian Atrocities,” illustrates how the press corps sits just below the Grand Old Man, while the admiring masses stand dimly in the distance. Reproduced by permission from the University of Chicago Library.

of the extra-Midlothian audience for these speeches. The London Illustrated News included engravings of various appearances so that readers might get some sense of the tour.61 Even those present, then, substantively relied on the media to represent the event and the politician, as did the millions more who did not attend but who indisputably counted as his audience. That political oratory was always already destined for mass-marketed print and that political appearances were instantly illustrated (not at this time

61. Illustrated London News, November–December 1879. See also “Grand Old Stumper.” Hoppen, Mid-Victorian Generation, 632, provides the electoral numbers. Hoppen also notes that the Telegraph Act of 1868 and news agencies such as the Press Association and the Exchange Telegraph expanded the press’s work by charging good rates, and these were the services through which Gladstone’s speeches were transmitted (633).

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photographed but sketched) specifies in part the historical uniqueness of this political moment, for certainly acoustics and sight lines had always been an issue in public oratorical settings prior to the age of audiovisual technology. Moreover, given the extension of the franchise, one can safely speculate that those in the predominantly liberal crowd had some expectation of a substantive transaction with the candidate even as they could not easily see or hear him, in contrast to the autocratic processionals or carnivalesque sideshows of an earlier political era, where nonelectors could only announce their presence rather than transact politics.62 Because crowds in the moment took in little by eye and even less by ear, and yet anticipated meaningful intercourse, it might seem surprising that the “sensational” element in his appearances was often emphasized. The absence of direct sensation, however, plausibly provokes “sensationalism,” a kind of virtual compensation for that which is palpably missing. Gladstone “takes a stand” on Indian finance that one cannot see; he speaks his mind without being heard. The hustings scene in Middlemarch can perhaps now be aligned with this dynamic. Infused with the centrifugal force of the mass-mediated politics (by print and by empire) of midcentury Liberalism, Eliot sees in the earlier era of reform the dislocational and disembodied forces of her own. Gladstone may not deter her from her pessimistic estimation of the political real, but for thousands of voting Britons, his embodiment worked reasonably well. When Gladstone spoke but was “heard” only in print, when Gladstone was present but “seen” only in engravings, Gladstone as liberal persona was best able to virtually, not physically, embody the Liberal cause. To put it another way, even for many of those present, the discursive ideation of political opinion did not directly emanate from the sensate person on the hustings but was deracinated into print, a two-dimensional and also temporally subsequent representation of opinion. Matthew again contributes most helpfully to this feature of my argument when he emphasizes the extent to which Gladstone’s opinions were primarily directed toward newspaper readers, specifically liberal readers of newspapers. I wish to push this idea further, to suggest that these opinions, insistently characterized by Gladstone himself as “liberal” opinion, were the very form of liberal political representation. Newspaper culture at this time was markedly sectarian, so that liberal individuals read liberal newspapers. These liberals therefore found full transpositions of

62. This expectation of a kind of liberalized transaction qualifies as one of the criteria for plausibly designating this electoral event, otherwise factionally generic, as a specifically liberal structure.

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Gladstone’s speeches in their daily papers. If, then, Gladstone gives body to the “liberal cause,” it is a body displaced, a body in print, a body in circulation, a body of opinion. Difficult to definitively prove, this liberal embodiment of opinion can be substantiated to some extent in the written record. Writing about his encounter with Gladstone’s oratory, Robert Spence Watson, himself a northern Liberal Party member, recalls the Grand Old Man’s famous “flesh and bone” speech, which articulated his late support for household enfranchisement: Returning from Grasmere with my wife, I got a copy of The Times at Oxenholme station, and on the platform, waiting for our train, I began to read her Mr. Gladstone’s “flesh and bone” speech. A few porters gathered around, and asked to be allowed to listen, and so I sat up on the back of the seat and read a little more loudly. Then one went and told some men who were working outside the station, and soon I had an audience of some thirty persons. And when we got to the passage ‘Time is on our side’ . . . and the assertion that the men sought to be enfranchised were flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, my audience cheered and cheered as if they had been listening to the speaker himself.63

Watson writes about a “flesh and bone speech” that he reads aloud from the papers to workers who cheered “as if” they had heard Gladstone. The circulation of speech to print to speech again produces the virtuality of political representation the form of opinion that typifies liberalism in this period. Indeed, this transubstantiation of speech into print concerns the transubstantiation of the “flesh and bone” into a more generalized embodied abstraction—“flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone”—that constitutes a rhetoric of another sort of virtual representation: “as if” they were us. If this highly complex circuit of embodiment results in a form of identification, it is so unlike previous notions of political identification as to require an entirely new term. The emphasis in this passage is not, in fact, on the elision of these mediations but on the mediations themselves—“as if.” By means of these “trans-actions,” the liberal cause is embodied. This process should be compared to the description of mass democracy offered just a few years later, in 1886, by W. T. Stead, the controversial populist journalist. In his account, the individuated agency of liberal cognition disappears as a mediator between the people as mass and public opinion; the press 63. Quoted in G. Goodlad, “Gladstone and His Rivals,” 180.

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simply is the body of the people: “The Press is at once the eye and the ear and the tongue of the people. It is the visible speech if not the voice of democracy.”64 At the very least, these campaign appearances were pointedly disjointed media and political events. Electors and nonelectors were by this time certainly comfortable with print proceedings of parliamentary debate, and many in this crowd had perhaps attended John Bright’s mass political appearances, where speeches were also published in the newspaper, but this was the first campaign tour of such size, and Gladstone’s appearances and comments were directed to Liberal electors and supporters, like Mr. Watson and his porters (the party sought to restrict audiences to this population as much as possible). It is these features which permit my exploration of the specifically liberal dynamics of the Midlothian campaign—the way in which Gladstone mobilizes the Liberal electorate through a highly mediated embodiment of liberal opinion as a form of virtual causality.65 Although it is certainly true that Eliot’s hustings scene in Middlemarch shares little in detail with the Midlothian progression, I note in both instances a pervasive sense of disjuncture, the nonalignment of voice and body, of candidate and constituency, through procedures of mediation— what I want to call a particular sort of “virtual representation” quite different from the version described by Granville—that can enable abstract causes to both animate and detach from voters and candidates, a frightening yet necessary elaboration of liberalism. In Eliot’s novel, the disjuncture is decidedly dystopian, a tragedy of misrepresentation. Needless to say, Middlemarch is itself far more committed to telling the story of political ineffectiveness—middling improvers like James Chettam, insincere politicians like Brooke, an oversupply of Theresas with no cause to embody or to effect. In the Midlothian campaign, by contrast, this virtual representation seems to operate more effectively as a structure of indirection that works against some processes of personal identification even as it works for the identification of the liberal cause that Gladstone embodies—the physical and, in this instance, oratorical expression of a certain human political effectivity in a large and complex world, which for hundreds of these attendees had not been imaginable before electoral reform and seemed increasingly unimaginable now in the world of empire. In the second of

64. Stead, “Government by Journalism,” 656. 65. The campaign could not restrict all public appearances to Liberals. A Times editorial dated November 28, 1879, notes that at his music hall speech in Edinburgh, “Conservatives” also “were admitted to the meeting.”

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his major Midlothian speeches, Gladstone aims “towards giving the right direction to the national wishes and convictions” (MS, 60). Not reliant on position and privilege, not even on presence or direct intention, this embodied liberal cause was the apotheosis of opinion as political power. The first Midlothian speech, cited earlier, continues, “On the contrary, it has been, I may say, not unfrequent for important counties, and especially for metropolitan counties, to select those who, in that sense, are strangers to their immediate locality to be their candidates or to be their representatives in Parliament, but always with a special purpose in view, and that purpose has been the rendering of some emphatic testimony to some important public principle.” In this passage, familiar proxies for counties become strangers who become voices who become principles, a parallel and sometimes overlapping set of transformations to those abstracting processes described by Trollope in Phineas Finn. As electors enter the public sphere as individual voices, so the principled opinions, possessed by strangers, also emerge as voices to be heard. Eliot emphasizes the failure of communication in Brooke’s hustings appearance as bodies and voices disperse, but during the Midlothian campaign liberal “discussion” shifts into a virtual form of discussion that appears to rely almost entirely on an embodied Gladstone as the emphatically centripetal force of sincerity and thus integrity. The historian J. L. Hammond’s description of Gladstone’s relation to his audience captures the way in which his embodied presence posits an opinion politics that at least seems like discussion, even if it does not actually enact discussion: Gladstone “was passionately in earnest, sincere not only in his opinions, but in his treatment of their [the people’s] right to be asked their opinion.”66 In this passage, one notes the blocked circulation between discussion and sincerity that a Victorian conception of political effectivity induces. Sincerity, as I have already remarked, was no longer posited as intrinsic to exchange; it was evidence for individual self-consistency. In politics, then, sincerity operated for newer purposes than the establishment of truth. If one can believe in a candidate’s sincerity vis-à-vis his opinions, then one can assume he will do what he says he will do. If you vote for him, therefore, he will in effect be true to you in the process of being true to himself. One must note how oddly self-referential this process is. Because sincerity

66. Hammond quoted in G. Goodlad, “Gladstone and His Rivals, 180. The unnamed writer of a Times editorial senses as much when reporting on November 25, 1879, “The mass of men crave for a man whom they can follow and trust, and in whose hands they can leave the interests they have at heart.” Gladstone’s candidacy seeks to expand the range of those interests.

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is so assertively about the relation between “avowal” and “feeling,” to use Trilling’s terms, it is an oddly private measure of public intentionality. The public domain is in this process only secondary and hence the intense difficulties sincerity now presents in its translation to politics. Gladstone may well be sincere in his opinions, but his opinions only articulate a right to discussion, not a performance of it. In the phenomena of Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign, there is always an abstracting impulse to consider, but it should not be solely classed with the abstractions of classical liberalism—abstract principles of justice or the central commitment to “nation” as an abstract category of attachment. Rather, these sorts of principled abstractions demand a body to realize their intentions. In their tenuous transition to circulatory aural and print synecdochism, the “voices” of liberalized opinion carry with them the rhetorical traces of the “gravity” or the “weightiness” or the steadiness of the body as a compensatory ethics for a fast-diminishing ground.67 Sincerity should be understood in a related way: as a performative articulation of an ethical soundness, the cohering of “voice” and mind in lieu of other evidentiary grounds of electoral worthiness. Gladstone functions as a personification of disinterest even as he depersonalizes the self-interested body. When ambivalently eulogizing Gladstone in the 1890s, the writer R. H. Hutton nonetheless inaugurates him as successor to J. S. Mill: “He has taught us all to think a great deal less exclusively of our own selfish interests than we ever thought before, and a great deal more sympathetically of the interests which we suppose to be inconsistent with our own.”68 As Gladstone offers in his Taymouth speech, substituting one’s mind engaged in “the general interests of Empire” for the more visible sorts of “personal and local attachments,” he asserts that “if ever, gentlemen, there was an occasion on which all those personal and local attachments ought to recede into the shade, on which the mind ought to address itself to the general interests of the Empire, this is the occasion” (MS, 182). After his series of Herculean speeches in the Midlothian campaign, Gladstone did not plunge into the crowds, pressing flesh and imprinting the crowd with his intimacies. One need only hear his response to the praise that introduced him to the Aberfeldy crowd to confirm the insistent deflection of self that marks what others have mistakenly understood to be entirely a cult of liberal personality or a psychological compulsion to pub-

67. One unnamed Spectator journalist writes of “the weight of [the speech’s] effect on the mind of the constituencies.” See “Mr. Gladstone’s Speech.” 68. R. Hutton, “Mr. Gladstone,” 634.

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licize himself.69 Thanking those who introduced him, Gladstone echoes so many other liberal encomia to impersonality: I am bound—I will not say in modesty,—but I am bound in truth to state that I regard many of the kind words that you are pleased to use with respect to myself . . . as proceeding from your indulgence rather than from my own desert, and, at any rate, as being used towards myself, not merely with reference to the past, not merely on personal grounds, but because you are aware that, as a member of the Liberal party, I have undertaken an arduous contest in the metropolitan county of Scotland; and you not unnaturally regard this contest as an occasion on which you may suitably express sentiments that you conscientiously entertain. (MS, 177)

Here, Gladstone gives expression to the representational register to which liberalism aspires: located but not local, a person but not personal.70 Mostly during this campaign, Gladstone was experienced as a passionately gesticulating but personally reserved orator and as several column inches of print. What instantiates the “didactic rationalism” that Matthew detects is

69. Hamer quotes Louis Jennings, who describes Gladstone in this way: “Publicity is to him as the breath of life. Even his pleasures and recreations appear to become tedious and insipid unless he can indulge in them before a multitude of gazers.” Hamer, “Gladstone,” 38. 70. Early in his career, Gladstone was working on the impersonality of oratory when he wrote of the orator that “he must endeavour to get rid of all reflex action of the mind upon itself while he speaks; all distinct contemplation of himself at the time.” Quoted in Reid, “Gladstone’s Essay on Public Speaking,” 272. By midcareer, when writing his chapter of autobiography, he models himself on the abstract embodiments of anonymity and apologizes for his own autobiography, as did J. S. Mill: “I must make the attempt; though the obtrusion of the first person, and all that it carries in its train, must be irksome alike to the reader and the writer.” Gladstone, Chapter of Autobiography, 8. Compare this to the opening of The Warden, in which Trollope introduces Harding and Barchester but then comments, “Were we to name Wells or Salisbury, Exeter, Hereford, or Gloucester, it might be presumed something personal was intended” (W, 1). Although Trollope is denying that his fiction is based on a real person and location, it also points to the way in which the text deflects the emphasis on persons as particular personalities. There is some evidence that the audience took in this impersonality as a kind of distancing from the merely personal, as when Morley quotes an observer who notes Gladstone’s “pale complexion, slightly tinged with olive, and dark hair, cut rather close to his head, with an eye of remarkable depth, [which] still more impress you with the abstracted character of his disposition.” Morley, Life of Gladstone, 1:194. There is, however, a decided instability in the rhetoric of belonging and identity that Gladstone utilizes during his Midlothian tour. In his address to the Corporation of Edinburgh, he emphasizes his ethnic wholeness—“none of my forefathers ever had, any relations but were of pure Scottish extraction. So that you have in me, so far as that is concerned, what may be called the genuine article” (MS, 219). I take this to be a kind of oscillation between belonging and estrangement that models the action he wishes the electors to undertake cognitively.

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precisely the abstraction of voice into print, but what certifies its cognitive authenticity and causative possibility is the man and his oratory, the giving of unheard voice and distant body to opinion. No easy campaign plan, and I am not arguing that Gladstone or his associates conceived his efforts in this way. For a little time, the popularity of public oratory and liberal deliberative politics collided, changed each other in the collision, and thereby produced an odd, complex political celebrity called Gladstone. Liberal individualism as a politics necessitated the public performance of a highly complex structure of affective embodiment: a sincere disinterestedness of opinion. Let me underline the oddity of this structure that requires one to embody a certain passionate detachment from one’s own opinion even as one demonstrates its political effectivity as a mobile and intentional “cause.” This affect was not perceived as mere affectation for most Victorians, and it registered pervasively in liberalism. I’m fully aware of how difficult an argument it is to make. Sensible reservations about how Weberian charisma has been mobilized in this Victorian context may momentarily prevent us all from categorizing Gladstone’s celebrity as an early or even first instance of the demagoguery that many observers believe becomes so common a feature of mass politics and culture in the twentieth century. Moreover, registration of Gladstone’s political effectivity as an impersonal embodiment of a reforming cause may forestall Habermasian laments about the decline of the public sphere. It may moderate conflations of the Midlothian campaign with apolitical sentimentalization of national identity, a tendency that Lauren Berlant so ably detects in our present-day political events.71 Having carefully distinguished this moment of political Liberalism, however, I do think the Midlothian campaign describes a complex and conflicted liberalization that is always about to tip into more “modern” varieties of celebrity, spectacle, and political benumbing. The attenuation of body and speech furthers the work of abstraction and distancing in the elaboration of politically effective liberal opinion, but it is a delicate calibration, a convergence of controlled (ticketed events, liberal-controlled newspapers) and uncontrolled (a complex newspaper culture, the masses that milled outside the halls) mediations whose impacts Liberal Party operatives and Gladstone himself were surely not always alert to, let alone actively manipulating. I want an abstracted embodiment, but at times in the public record of

71. Parry’s history of Gladstonian liberalism, Rise and Fall, argues for the sentimentalization of liberalism in the person of Gladstone. For the contemporary uses of sentimentality in the service of citizenship, see Berlant, “Poor Eliza.”

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Gladstone’s later career one can seemingly find only its two extremes— either the attenuation of the body as image becoming a brand name for a consumption politics or the concretizing of the body into a person for a cult of manly personality. One need only lift one’s eyes from the hustings platform and the front pages of the newspapers and see throughout Victorian England the mass-produced, two-dimensional Gladstone as consumer logo for the slowly centralizing and bureaucratizing Liberal Party machine: Gladstone on mugs, on plates, on the wall above one’s bed. Or, contrarily, there is the Gladstone that is the vigorous, manly body, the one whom Ronald Reagan later channels, felling trees for supporters and media alike.72 In this configuration of Gladstone at home, formality relaxed, we are very close if not already at the politics of personality, the faux intimacy implied by “the People’s William.”73 The easy proliferation of another sort of print Gladstone, this one seen to be hewing the trunk that is the empire, or the trunk that is Turkish rule, or the trunk of the Protestant church in Ireland, perhaps indicates that the character of Liberalism would quickly become mere caricature, “a parrot-like Punch voiced echo of his words” (figure 6). A modern observer surely knows a political celebrity when he sees one, but in the many images of Gladstone cutting down metaphoric trees, I would suggest an alternative reading but not a prohibitively exclusive one. In the virtualized world of liberal politics at the close of this midcentury, this image rather perfectly materializes in print the singular body not only in movement but as the movement. Gladstone is the agent of political opinion; he is, in fact, “the embodiment of the liberal cause.” The cognitive estrangements of liberal citizenship in the British impe-

72. Randolph Churchill offers a scathing account of this portrayal of the demagogic Gladstone: “Every act of his, whether it be for the purposes of health, or of recreation, or of religious devotion, is spread before the eyes of every man, woman, and child in the United Kingdom on large and glaring placards. . . . For the purposes of recreation he has selected the felling of trees; and we may usefully remark that his amusements, like his politics, are essentially destructive. Every afternoon the whole world is invited to assist at the crashing fall of some beech or elm or oak. The forest laments, in order that Mr. Gladstone may perspire.” Quoted in Hamer, Gladstone, 39. Note here how the highly mediated, abstractly embodied Gladstone of my description is just a mere sweaty body. 73. The personalization of politics seemed palpable to many contemporary observers: “In these days of relentless journalism, a Minister cannot be judged merely by his public acts, retaining a kind of personal privacy, while his political self is attacked or defended. A literary carte de visite has to be presented to a certain class of readers, and they expect to be told not only what [he] said, but how he looked when he said it, how he took the answer of the other side, and how he looked when he replied to it. . . . This kind of gossip is unfortunate, and we never remember so much personality in conversations as within the last three or four years.” Edinburgh Courant, February 15, 1874, quoted in Robertson, Language of Democracy, 141.

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Figure 6. “An Unexpected Cut,” Punch, November 21, 1874, p. 215. This illustration echoes many caricatures of Gladstone. It allegorizes Gladstone’s favored pastime, the felling of trees, to represent his reformist zeal for toppling tradition. In this case, with the “Irish Established Church” already chopped down behind him, Gladstone—armed with an ax labeled “Pamphlet”—takes a whack at “Papal Infallibility,” much to the surprise of the observer Punch. Reproduced by permission from the University of Chicago Library.

rial context and amid the necessity of mediated political representation seem vastly complex and highly risky in comparison to the quaint hustings scene in Middlemarch, set just before the First Reform Bill, when a provincial town could still seem right in the middle of the country’s march toward progress. Eliot’s decision to situate her novel of reform in a bygone era has often seemed to readers an act of bad faith, unfairly translating the promise of change into the predictable disappointments of hindsight. It is just this conflation of the political frame, this studied anachronism, however, that highlights how impersonalization, disinterest, and the “transactional” are improvised into existence. Eliot’s anachronism reveals that central liberal values, though comparatively naturalized by the 1860s, are no less odd for being almost familiar. Eliot, moreover, records how powerfully residual certain features of mid-Victorian liberalism are, measuring its deep and abiding investments in oratory, in individuality, and in location, albeit highly virtualized evocations of them. In the second reform era, the

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individual still matters; in an era of mass-mediated print culture, oratory still matters. The enactment of their materiality, however, is complicated by their transactional requirements in the service of a torturous opinion politics that must not believe it has “nothing to do” with Indian finance, or China, or Peru, but that it has, in fact, “to do.” This hustings scene at modest Middlemarch, then, is not simply another instance of the elitist revulsion to working-class democratization. Nor is this passage a literary reenactment of the trampled railings in Hyde Park, for instance, that inspires Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. Rather, it seems to me to be looking directly at the intentional requirements of liberalism itself. The disrespectability of the working classes—their cognitive incapacity for citizenship (“‘Blast your ideas! We want the Bill,’” M, 548), their self-interested literalism, and their brutish volatility—is not the only drama of this scene. It is also the drama of a Liberal candidate in their midst, the drama of any liberal individual, whose voice, body, and direct intention in the public sphere of opinion must detach from the person and yet even so seem embodied, intentional, and politically effective in a world beyond one’s imaginable control. Situated amid the undifferentiated masses, Mr. Brooke undergoes the cognitive self-effacement (“neutral physiognomy”) and weakening self-reflexivity of a liberal oratory that has not found its audience; he “was not in a position to be quickly conscious of anything but a general slipping away of ideas within himself” (M, 548). This is a failure of Mr. Brooke’s liberalism, but it is also a risk inherent to mid-Victorian liberalism more generally, as the “quickly conscious” ideas of the liberal individual—of Phineas Finn, of Will Ladislaw, of William Gladstone, and many others—“slip” into the political opinion of a disjointed, mediated, and tempestuous public sphere. Midlothian was perhaps a perfect liberal storm, but political winds are notoriously hard to track.

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INDE X

aboriginal peoples of Australia, 15n28, 259n52 abstract embodiment: ambivalence and, 47n15; anonymity and, 335n70; ballot and, 177; determinism and, 17–19nn33–34, 18–19; devil’s advocacy and, 104; Gladstone and, 319, 322, 336–37; habitus and, 17–18n33; in Hadley’s larger argument, 14–20; Irish famine and, 250, 252; of liberal reformism, 294; liberal subject and, 12–14; occupation and, 231; opinion and, 43, 299, 305–6; in Phineas Finn (Trollope), 271; signature and, 55; speaking one’s mind and, 281–82; splintering of, 117–18. See also abstraction; bodies; embodiment abstraction: altruism and, 101; balloting booth and, 180–81, 200, 209, 211, 215, 226; cognitive formalism and, 250; determinism and, 17–19nn33–34, 18–19; devil’s advocacy and, 104; disinterestedness and, 47n15; distraction and, 20–25, 113; dreams and, 110; empire and, 287; the everyday and, 20n36; experience of, 30–31n63; Fortnightly Review and, 128, 154–57, 161–62; habitus and, 17–18n33; individuality and, 102; of interest, 180n9; Irish famine and, 249; liberal cognition and, 11–16, 20–23, 22n41; liberal individual and, 19–24, 91; metaphor and, 60;

Midlothian campaign and, 334; nation as site of, 325; panopticon and, 22n41; philosopher-citizen as, 213–14; political mobilization and, 16–17, 20, 336; politics of Matthew Arnold and, 21n37; of print, 161; privatization and, 64; public good and, 199; receding horizon of, 23n42; representation and, 333; sexuality and, 17n32; signature and, 167; sympathy and, 166n72. See also abstract embodiment aesthetics, 94n46, 165 alterity, 81, 82, 84 altruism: abstracted individual and, 101; affect of rationality and, 14; disinterestedness and, 79; in literature of liberalism, 7; names and signatures and, 120; public interest and, 189–90n20; Trollope’s dark representation of, 116; voting and elections and, 193 Amberley (Viscount), 147, 148–49, 163 ambivalence: formalism and, 55–61, 86, 105, 167; political, 122–23 An Autobiography (Trollope), 73–74, 119, 122 Anderson, Amanda: on George Eliot’s nationalism, 287–88; liberal ambivalence and, 59n39; on rationality, 28n56; on rejection and engagement, 288n77; on work of Matthew Arnold, 21n37 Anglican Church, 76n20, 145, 147, 148–49 Annan, Noel, 146

370 / Index anonymity: critiques of, 134–35, 139; debate over, 133n15; names and signatures and, 120–21, 155–56; narrative voice and, 131–33, 151, 155; religion and, 144–45; theater of the gothic and, 166; weighty opinion and, 160 architecture, formalism in, 14–15n27 Arendt, Hannah, 30–31n63, 223n68 Arnold, Matthew: aesthetics and, 31, 44n5; on anarchy, 46, 213; as authoritarian, 21n37; on Celtic literature, 239–40n16; cognitive idea and, 82n30; on “critical spirit,” 129; on culture, 44; on detachment, 51, 166; as educator, 58; on “free play,” 10, 53, 141n30; on freedom, 139; harmonic convergences and, 314; idea of the state and, 29; liberal individualism and, 65, 91, 94; on literature and enculturation, 58n37; machines and, 198; on newspapers, 75–76; as old liberal, 49–50n17; pedagogy of selfdevelopment and, 67–68; perfection and, 68; on periodicals, 130n10; pessimism of, 49; public good and, 214; racism of, 259n52; on reform, 51, 55, 56–57; on self-governance, 11, 100–1; sincerity and, 164, 314; on social class, 46, 82; on social harmony, 314; on spirit of a people, 256; on stereotypical Celt, 270n62; Trollope and, 32. See also specific works associationism, 10n19, 51, 144n34, 151–53 Austen, Jane, 69n10, 86–87n40 Australia, aboriginal peoples of, 15n28, 259n52 authenticity, 304, 310, 315 Autobiography (J. S. Mill): altruism in, 79; character development in, 99; chronology in, 102n55; as conversion narrative, 110; devil’s advocacy and, 101–2; disorder in, 36–37, 98; Mill’s apology for, 335n70; Mill’s nervous breakdown and, 26, 100, 237; Mill’s youth in, 102–3; narrative voice in, 103; opinion formation in, 80–81; psychological interpretation of, 105; sincerity in, 309n27; subject liberalization and, 65 Autobiography (Trollope), 230

Badiou, Alain, 30, 223 Bagehot, Walter: on English cabinet, 266n58; Fortnightly Review and, 135; on orderly public, 51; quirky views of, 39; Trollope versus, 267n60; on work of parliaments, 297 Bain, Alexander, 10n19 Baker, Keith Michael, 220, 226 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 54, 83n35 Ball, Patricia, 164, 165 ballot, secret: agitation and, 221n65; benefits of, 185, 196, 211–13; bibliography on, 203n38; cognitive values of 1860s and, 204; conscience and, 202; critical publicity and, 190–91; debate over, 188–202, 203, 207–8; effects of, 212, 217; embodiment of citizenship and, 202–9; illustration of, 224n72; integration of political thinking and, 179–80; interest and, 197–99; in Ireland, 179n6; liberalized citizenry and, 177; melodramatic narrative of, 226–27; nonelectors’ voices and, 222; opinion and, 200–1; Parliament and, 175–77, 181, 223; party politics and, 177–79, 217–18; in Phineas Finn (Trollope), 272; political morality and, 180n7; political priorities and, 180n8; privacy and, 219; public good and, 199–200, 210–11; public versus private politics and, 196, 200, 203; “quarantine” and, 215; secrecy and, 194, 225–26; as shield of protection, 221–22n67; social order and, 186–88; suffrage and, 63–64, 180, 197, 200, 212, 220–22, 226; as un-English, 197, 198; as unmanly, 197, 206–7, 224, 267, 272–73, 280; vote as personal commodity and, 214n54; wisdom and, 198. See also balloting booth Ballot Act of 1872: balloting booth and, 180–81; canvassing and, 217; critical publicity and, 190–91; Hyde Park riots and, 46; ineffectuality of, 179n6; modernity and, 210; nonelectors’ voices and, 222; passage of, 176; prescriptions of, 226, 227; privacy and, 209 Ballot Question in Nineteenth-Century English Politics (Kinzer), 203n38

Index / 371 Ballot Society, 176, 178n5, 186–87, 200, 210 balloting booth: abstraction and, 180–81, 209, 211, 215, 224, 226; disciplinary internalization and, 210–11; foolproof construction of, 219, 224; illustration of, 186–87, 200, 210; introduction of, 186n19; liberalism and, 218–19; as machine, 211, 219; opinion formation and, 275; as panopticon, 211, 226; placement of, 208n47; private cognition and, 214; suspicion and, 182n12; voters’ bodies and, 205–6; voting process and, 224n70, 225–26. See also ballot, secret Barchester Towers (Trollope), 89–90, 91, 124, 136n22 Barrell, John, 278n70 Bebbington, D. W., 286n76, 319–20n50 Bee-Hive (workingmen’s paper), 221–22n67 Belchem, John, 292–93, 297n11 Bender, John, 317 Benhabib, Seyla, 59n39 Benjamin, Walter, 113n73 Bentham, Jeremy: associationist utilitarianism and, 10n19; ballot and, 188; consequentialism and, 8; female suffrage and, 193n28; hedonist calculus of, 7; imperialism and, 15n28; on interest, 189–90n20; on level playing field, 139; opinion and, 8–9n15, 203– 4, 205; panopticon and, 8n13, 226; on passion and interest, 213n51; on routine, 246 Bentley, Colene, 4n7 Bentley’s Miscellany, 125–26n2 Berkeley, Francis Henry, 175–76, 186, 198, 199, 211 Berlant, Lauren, 24, 336 Bevis, Matthew, 107n61, 317 Biagini, Eugenio, 5–6, 27–28, 294n6, 312n35, 321 Bible, Fortnightly Review and, 145n37 biography, forms of, 127–28 Blackstone Magazine, 131, 132, 134–35 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 129n8, 155–56, 158, 161

Blair, Hugh, 308 bodies: abstraction and, 12–20; authority and, 306n21; of candidates, 307– 8; effigy and, 304, 305–7; individuality and, 160–61; laboring classes and, 12–13n25; in Phineas Finn (Trollope), 271–76; political mobilization and, 16, 336–37; political representation and, 298–300; poverty-stricken hearer and, 162; press as, 332; signature and, 167–68; sincerity and, 166; spirit and, 14; undecidability and, 105; voting and, 205–6, 208–9. See also embodiment Bodies that Matter (Butler), 16, 32n66 Bourdieu, Pierre, 17–18n33 Briggs, Asa, 2n3, 267n60 Bright, John, 293n3, 321 Britain. See England British Quarterly Review, 130n10 Bromwich, David, 63 Brown, Wendy, 22n40, 150 Buchanan, Robert, 166 Bulgarian Atrocities, 291–92, 307, 325 Bull, Phillip, 242 Burke, Edmund, 189–90n20, 192n24 Burney, Fanny, 86–87n40 Burrow, John, 95 Buruma, Ian, 311n33 Butler, Judith, 16, 32n66, 59n39 Cairnes, J. E., 240, 253–54, 255 Campbell, George, 241, 252–54 Can You Forgive Her? (Trollope), 229n1 Canada, 266 Carlisle, Janice, 74n17, 112n72 Carlyle, Thomas: on ballot box, 55; as Dr. Pessimist Anticant, 91; on oratory, 311; on secret ballot, 197, 198, 211; sincerity and, 164, 314 cases, selection of, 16n29 Catholicism, 75n18, 169n80, 206, 252n37, 338. See also Christianity, critique of; religion Chadwick, Edwin, 7–8 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 11n20 Chandler, James K., 16n29, 192n24 Chapman, Frederick, 135

372 / Index character: ambivalence and, 116; caricature versus, 114; conversion and, 110; devil’s advocacy and, 108; disinterestedness and, 56, 237–38; form and, 52, 107n61; individuality and individualism and, 6–7n11, 70–71, 73–89, 98, 309n27; liberty and rationality and, 98n50; moral valence and, 74n17; opinion and, 71–74, 129, 146, 301n16; opinion formation and, 316; political candidacy and, 304; property ownership and, 237–38; psychological interpretation of, 105; signature and, 160; tenant rights and, 280; undecidability and, 105–6 charisma, 281, 319n49, 320–22, 326, 336 Chartists, 175, 178n5, 221–22n67 Childers, Joseph W., 33n68 Christian Socialism, 60n42 Christianity, critique of, 143. See also specific branches Churchill, Randolph, 337n72 citizenship: as constituted under liberalism, 301; embodiment of, 202–9; liberal citizen and, 178–81, 201, 220–25, 233–35, 284; occupation and, 289; political awareness and, 324n56; public and private spheres and, 24 civic life, libertarianism and, 4n5 civilizing mission, 12–13n25 class: political parties and, 322n55; voting and elections and, 177, 182, 189–92, 200, 322n55 Cobbe, Francis Power, 166 cognition, liberal: abstraction and, 11–16, 20–23, 20n36, 22n41; academic liberalism and, 13, 27; appetite and imagination and, 53n25; associationist utilitarianism and, 10n19; authority and, 269; balloting booth and, 180–81, 220, 223; citizenry and populace and, 311; components of, 9; convention and, 10–12; disinterestedness and, 97–98n49; disorder and, 112–13; embodiment and, 64–65; fitness and, 8n14; formalism and, 10, 34, 50–55, 81, 250; in Fortnightly Review, 37, 128; “free thought” and, 19–20; habits of thought and, 11–12; in Hadley’s larger

argument, 9–10; historical epistemology and, 31–32; idea of the state and, 29; individuated agency of, 331–32; Ireland and, 234, 247, 263; labor and, 246; liberal individuality and, 77; occupational subsistence and, 252n36; opinion and, 8–9, 147; pedagogy and, 58–59, 152–53; personation and, 225; in Phineas Finn (Trollope), 276–77, 280–81; poverty and, 8; practical world and, 235; privacy and, 209, 210–11n49; propriety and, 141; psychological cosmologies and, 146; public and private spheres and, 47, 85; public schools and, 58n37; relational transaction and, 323–24; religion and, 145; secret ballot and, 214–15; self-government and, 7–8; self-reflexivity and, 170–71; speaking one’s mind and, 281–82; suffrage extension and, 43; time for deliberation and, 152; trends in literary scholarship and, 9–10n17; working class and, 339 Cohn, Dorrit, 78n24 Coleridge, Samuel, 12n23 Collini, Stefan, 28, 71 colonialism. See empire communitarianism, 4n5, 6n10 Comte, Auguste, 13, 43, 143, 144 Congreve, Richard, 144n35 conscience, opinion and, 200, 202 consequentialism, reform of the poor and, 8 Conservative Party. See Conservatives Conservatives: ballot and, 178n5, 179, 200; Conservative Central Office and, 296n9; interventionism of, 326; Liberals versus, 26n49, 211, 318 construction, social, 16 contemplation, 100 Contemporary Review, 129n8 Cornhill Magazine, 41–42 Corrupt Practices Act of 1883, 179n6, 296n9 corruption and influence: civic obligation and, 265; legal reforms and, 179n6, 296n9; personation and, 225, 227–28; publicity and, 46; secret ballot and, 181–92, 195–98, 201–4, 209–10, 213, 218, 221, 223–26

Index / 373 cosmopolitanism, 287–89 Courtney, Janet, 135 Courtney, William Leonard, 144n34 Cowling, Maurice, 70, 101 Cox, Gary, 183 criminal justice, 14–15n27 Culture and Anarchy (Arnold): “best self” in, 100–1; franchise extension and, 213; Hyde Park riots and, 46, 339; optimism and, 56–57; public opinion and, 44; social class and, 82 Culture and the State (Lloyd and Thomas), 28–29 Daily Telegraph, 295–96n8 d’Allones, Revault, 30–31n63 Dames, Nicholas, 9–10n17 Daniel Deronda (Eliot), 287–89, 296n10 Davidson, Jenny, 52n24 Dawson, Gowan, 125n1 Declaring Independence (Fliegelman), 309 deformation, liberal, 106–21 democracy and democratization: ballot as limit to, 180n7; direct, 320; Eliot, George, critique of, 305; liberalism’s blurring of, 41; literacy and, 88; opinion and, 10; “plebian liberalism” and, 292; representation and, 298; rhetorical versus actual, 132; self-development and, 67; skepticism about, 310; slowed progress toward, 4; working class and, 339 “Democratic Citizenship” (Bentley), 4n7 detachment: agency and, 138; Arnoldian, 166; Ballot Act of 1872 and, 190–91; balloting booth and, 186; cognitive, 55; cosmopolitan, 306; decided opinion and, 169; discernment and, 314; engaged disengagement and, 4n5; from home, 47n15; liberal reserve and, 171; liberal subject and, 20, 114; manliness and, 16; mediation and distance and, 322–23; from one’s own opinion, 336; of pleasure from body, 97; principled, 261, 271; professionalization of politics and, 38; property and, 264, 269; rationality and, 28n56; retirement and, 168; speculative distractions and, 11. See also disinterest and interest

determinism, 17–19nn33–34, 18–19, 29n57 developmentalism, cultural, 11n20 devil’s advocacy: abstraction and, 104; character and, 108; courage and, 116; disinterest and interest and, 80–81, 99–102; in Fortnightly Review, 147–51; friendship and, 112n69; as “ventriloquial method,” 147–51 Dewey, Clive, 239–40 Dickens, Charles, 33–34, 41, 90–91, 96 Dictionary of National Biography, 126 Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock, 25n46 Disagreement (Rancière), 30 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 8n13, 22n41 disinterest and interest: abstraction and, 47n15, 180n9; altruism and, 79; ambivalence and, 116–17; in Autobiography (J. S. Mill), 103; balloting booth and, 211, 220; character and, 56, 237–38; character development in fiction and, 91; class and, 190n21, 321; cognitive practices and, 54; contemplation and, 100; definition of interest and, 189–90n20; Derrida on, 31n64; devil’s advocacy and, 80–81, 99–102; direct democracy and, 320; discordant values of, 99–100; diversity and, 85; embodiment and, 55; form of inquiry and, 107n61; Fortnightly Review and, 127, 149, 162, 166, 168–69; free play of mind and, 141n30; happiness and, 114–15; ideology in novels and, 83–84; “indifferency” and, 50n18; in individualist theory, 77–78; individuality and, 103, 105; in intellectual history, 237n11; Irish land reform and, 254; in journalism, 133–34; Liberal candidates and, 293; liberal cause and, 316; liberal cognition and, 97–98n49; of middle class, 46; names and signatures and, 119–20; narrative voice and, 78–80; nationalism and, 288; occupation and, 288–89; opinion and, 73, 81, 82, 301, 305–6; political ambivalence and, 123–24; political philosophers and, 213n51; political quietism and, 107n61; poverty-stricken hearer and, 162; property and, 237–38, 264,

374 / Index disinterest and interest (continued) 265; romantic consent and, 283; secret ballot and, 188–90, 197–99, 207, 209–10, 224; versus self-interest, 48; sincerity and, 165–66, 314; voting and elections, 209–10; in Warden (Trollope), 77, 87, 96. See also detachment Disraeli, Benjamin: Gladstone and, 266, 292, 311n33, 323, 327n59; imperialism and, 318, 323; opportunism of, 311, 314 diversity, 85, 172–73 domesticity, cult of, 159 Dorothea Brooke effect, 89 Dougherty, Jane Elizabeth, 257n48 dreams, 106–12, 112n69 Dublin Magazine, 156 Dublin Review, 252 Dublin University Magazine, 125–26n2 Duke’s Children (Trollope), 229n1 East Lynne (Wood), 304 eccentricity, 89–106; character development and, 98–106; “demonic hero” and, 93n45; devil’s advocacy and, 150; in Dickens’s works, 112; disciplinary internalization and, 210–11n49; gestures and, 92–97; in On Liberty (J. S. Mill), 98; Mill, J. S., on, 10, 53; perversity and, 105; in Trollope’s works, 89–98, 104–6, 112, 115, 121 “Economimesis” (Derrida), 31n64 Economy of Character (Lynch), 86–87n40, 108 Edinburgh Magazine, 129n8 Edinburgh Review, 130n10, 134–35 education, 14–15n27, 58–59, 67, 100 Eighteenth-Century British Logic (Howell), 309n29 “Ejection of Irish Tenantry” (Illustrated London News), 243 Elfenbein, Andrew, 9–10n17 Eliot, George: character development and, 108; critique of democracy by, 305; gender and, 34n70; in Hadley’s larger argument, 33–34; “Key to All Mythologies” and, 143; liberal values and, 338; nationalism and, 287–88; neutral physiognomy and, 319; on organic hierarchy,

315; sincerity and, 314; social consensus and, 86. See also specific works Ellis, Agar, 201 embodiment: ambivalence and, 61; determinism and, 17–19n33–34, 18–19; disinterestedness and, 55; free thought and, 19–20; habitus and, 17–18n33; individuation and individualism and, 13–14, 15n28, 19, 91; Ireland and, 15n28; of liberal cause, 294, 316–26; occupation and, 246; of opinion, 331; productive labor and, 64–65n4; religion and, 74–75; sincerity and, 310; social body and, 64; spirit and, 59–60nn40– 41; voting and elections and, 59, 64. See also abstract embodiment; bodies empire: alienation and, 286; civil service system and, 58; construction of British nation and, 38; cultural developmentalism and, 11n20; Gladstone and, 319–20n50, 323–24; liberal theory and, 234n7; local liberalism and, 286n76; Midlothian campaign and, 318; occupation and, 287; social diversity and, 54; utilitarianism and, 15n28 Ends of Rhetoric (Bender and Wellbery), 317 Endymion (Disraeli), 311 England: colonialism and, 257, 257– 58n49; contractual practices of, 253; Ireland in contrast to, 240, 241–42, 246–47; Irish attachment to, 251–52, 280n2, 282; Irish property law and, 233; Union of Settlement and, 279 English Constitution (Bagehot), 267, 297 Englishman’s Magazine, 125–26n2 Enlightenment, 9, 146, 179, 248 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Godwin), 310, 313–14 epistemology, historical, 6–7n11, 31–32 Epstein, James, 292–93 equilibrium, reflective, 21, 29 Essays (Hume), 111n68 estrangement, 277n73, 320–22, 335n70, 337–38 ethics: good life and, 152n51; of opinion formation, 141; political practice and, 142–43; in Warden (Trollope), 76–77 ethnicity. See race and ethnicity

Index / 375 Eustace Diamonds (Trollope), 229n1 Evangelicalism, 60n42, 145–46, 321. See also religion Everett, Edwin, 135, 140, 172 Examiner, 46 “Facts About the Ballot” (pamphlet), 187, 200 Fawcett, Henry, 178n5 Felix Holt (Eliot), 34 femininity: “mother country” and, 280n2; stereotypical Celts and, 278; in Trollope’s works, 86–87n40; Victorian conceptions of, 17n32; voting and, 205–7. See also masculinity; women Ferguson, Frances, 139 fiction: disinterest and interest and, 91; formalism in, 81–82; serial, 124; Victorian governance and, 6–7n11. See also novels; specific works Fliegelman, Jay, 309 formalism, 41–61; ambivalence and, 55– 61, 86, 116; cognitive, 54–55, 57, 113, 250; education reform and, 14–15n27; in fiction, 81–82; form and, 48–53; Fortnightly Review and, 128; in Hadley’s larger argument, 36; idea of the state and, 29; institutional, 57; liberal cognition and, 10, 34; liberal individualism and, 71–72, 73; party affiliation and, 178; “redistribution of the sensible” and, 30n62; reproductive function of, 55; secret ballot and, 218; signature and, 167–68; social, 54; thought and, 144n34 Forster, W. E., 178n5 Fortnightly Review, 125–72; anonymity and, 171; commitment to abstraction and, 154–57, 161–62; as Comtean organ, 144n35; decided opinion in, 169, 171; demise of periodical and, 148n42; devil’s advocacy in, 147–51; disinterestedness and, 149, 162, 166; editorial eclecticism of, 125–26n2, 141–42, 152, 161–62, 171–73; exceptionality of, 142; as fencing ground, 135, 140, 171–72; founding of, 37; a frame for mind and, 140–54; goal of, 159, 161; “good form”

and, 52; in Hadley’s larger argument, 37; impersonality and, 159; indifference and, 168–69; influence of J. S. Mill and, 141–42, 148, 150–51, 163; intimacy of print and, 136; liberal individualism of, 147; liberal policies and, 163; on marriage proposals, 279; narrative voice in, 149, 151, 162; opinion and, 59, 126–30, 137, 140–41, 145–46, 171, 172n82, 296; periodical market and, 128–29; popularity of, 125n1; publication history of, 125, 126, 135; publication schedule of, 137–38; publicity and, 161; rationality and, 142; religion in, 144–47; responsibility and, 154–63; rules of engagement of, 139–40; secret ballot and, 216; self-regarding opinions and, 171; signature in, 125–26, 127n5, 132–33, 139n28, 141, 154–57, 159–60, 282, 299; sincerity and, 164–68; standards of, 140–41, 147–48, 151; Trollope on, 118n75 Foucault, Michel: on critique of government, 236; disciplinary subject of, 22; exhaustion with, 6–7n11; on governmentality, 28–29, 210–11; historians and, 312n35; on liberal individualism, 3n4; on panopticon, 8n13, 22n41; performance contradiction and, 28n56; on silent history, 107n61 frame of mind. See mind, frame of Fraser’s Magazine, 125–26n2, 129n8 Free Minds (Knickerbocker), 26, 127 free thought: abstract embodiment and, 19–20; formalism and, 51; in Fortnightly Review, 126; private sphere and, 47; secret ballot and, 198n33, 211. See also thought French Revolution, politicization and, 220 friendship, intimacy and exchange in, 112n69 Froude, J. A., 253 “Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (Arnold), 75–76 Gallagher, Catherine, 33n68, 64n2, 64–65n4, 64n2, 104–5n59, 242 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 41

376 / Index gender: election reform and, 189; use of male pronouns and, 16–17; women in private sphere and, 25n46; in works of George Eliot, 34n70. See also femininity; masculinity; women Gender of Freedom (Dillon), 25n46 generosity, social. See altruism Gilmartin, Kevin, 46 Gissing, George, 34 Gladstone, William E., 291–339; appearance of, 335n70; autobiography of, 335n70; ballot and, 176; biography of, 159, 293n5; celebrity of, 166, 321, 336; changeability of, 271–72, 313; charisma of, 320–22, 326; consumption politics and, 337; as debater, 327n59; as demagogue, 337n72; Disraeli versus, 311n33, 323, 327n59; as embodiment of liberal cause, 291, 293–94, 296n9, 318–19, 330–33, 337; Evangelicalism and, 321; as everyman, 319n48; foreign policy and, 319–20n50, 323–26; in Hadley’s larger argument, 35, 38–39; on hierarchy, 315; home rule and, 32–33n67, 271–72, 287; illustration of, 328, 329, 337, 338; influence of, 312; on Irish attachment to land, 242, 245n24, 253, 260; on “Irish ideas,” 252–53, 255; Irish Land Act of 1870 and, 240–41, 247n28, 254–57, 261–62; on Irish progress, 284–85n74; Irish versus English property law and, 233; legislative debates and, 266; liberal detachment and, 322– 23; liberal pedagogy and, 152–53; local liberalism and, 286n76; Mill, J. S., and, 334; nationalism and, 319–20n50; need for publicity and, 335n69; new voters and, 293n3; oratory and, 294, 313, 317, 327, 331–33, 335–36; political career of, 291–92; political effectivity of, 336; political style of, 307–8; the poor and, 4n5; popularity of, 302; populist worship of, 292; on race and nation, 286n76; racism of, 319–20n50; reformist zeal of, 338; religion and, 6n10, 313; Scotland and, 312, 335n70; sensationalism and, 330; sentimentalization of liberalism and, 336n71; sincerity and, 219, 311, 313–14, 334; speeches of, 321n52,

323–27, 331–32, 334–35; stamina of, 319n49; as stranger, 320; temporal goals of reform and, 256n47; on Ulster custom, 239; use of male pronouns and, 17. See also Midlothian campaign Gleig, G. R., 1 Godkin, J., 149–50 Godwin, William, 217n58, 309–10, 313–16 good life, 9, 15–16, 152n51 Goodlad, Lauren, 4n5, 6 Goswami, Manu, 257–58n49 governance: European versus British, 6–7n11; opinion and, 137, 203–4, 295; site of, 266–68; substantive politics and, 266. See also self-governance Green, T. H., 49–50n17, 250n34 Greg, W. R., 76n19 Greiner, Rae, 315 Grenville, George, 319 Grote, George: assessment of electoral system by, 195; imperialism and, 15n28; on nation, 213; on public opinion, 216; on publicity and privacy, 196; secret ballot and, 188, 190n21, 191, 198–99, 209; status privilege and, 190 Gunn, J. A. W., 204–5 Habermas, Jürgen: on communicative rationality, 30, 194; deliberative standards of, 140–41; on nationalist identification, 224; on nonbourgeois entrance to political realm, 190n21; on opinion, 128n6, 219; performance contradiction and, 28n56; in print discourse, 45; on public and private spheres, 24, 180n8, 190, 336; on reading public, 43; on representation as historical fact, 132n14 habitus, 17–18n33 Hale, Dorothy, 54, 81–82, 83 Hall, Catherine, 12, 38, 177, 259 Halperin, John, 33n68 Hamer, D. A., 272, 335n69 Hamilton, Edward, 308 Hammond, J. L., 333 Hanham, H. J., 179n6, 182n11, 295–96n8 happiness, 70–71, 79, 99–100, 114–15 Hare, Thomas, 251 harmony, personal and social, 314 Harrison, Brian, 297n12

Index / 377 Harrison, Frederic, 11, 144n35, 161, 163, 175 Harrison, Mark, 185n17, 186n19 Hartington (Lord), 183 Harvie, Christopher, 12–13n25, 13, 27, 138, 146 Hazlitt, William, 215 Hennedy, Hugh L., 76n21 Heyck, T. W., 146, 153 Hirschkop, Ken, 83n35 Hirschman, Albert O., 213n51 Historical Novel (Lukács), 93n45 historicism, 11n20 Hobbes, Thomas, 139n27 Hogan, M. P. (Laffan), 241n21 Hogarth, engravings of, 216 Holyoake, George, 45, 194, 207, 221 Honig, Bonnie, 30, 223, 228 Hoppen, Theodore, 232, 329n61 Howell, Wilbur Samuel, 309n29 Hughes, Thomas, 134, 140, 154–55, 167 humanism, civic, 237n11 Hume, David, 9, 45, 111n68, 162 Hunt, Leigh, 46 Hutton, R. H., 42–43, 311n34, 334 Huxley, T. S., 241 Hyde Park riots, 46, 339 Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness (Davidson), 52n24 idea: cognitive, 82n30; as foundational, 152; of Ireland, 283; Irish, 246–57; liberalism and, 312n35; of occupation, 284; opinion and, 312; of property, 254; of state, 29–30; Whigs and, 312 Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place (Barrell), 278n70 Illustrated London News, 242–44, 329 impartiality and partiality, 125–26n2 imperialism. See empire India, 15n28, 239, 253, 257–58n49, 324–25 individuation, individualism, and individuality: abstract embodiment and, 13–14, 15n28, 19, 64; abstraction and, 102; body and, 160–61; character and, 6–7n11, 70–71, 73–89, 98; conceptual eclecticism and, 127; disinterest and, 103, 117; disorder and, 98, 106, 112;

Dorothea Brooke effect and, 89; eccentricity and, 53, 89–106; formalism and, 50, 91; Fortnightly Review and, 128, 147; in Hadley’s larger argument, 36–37; happiness and, 115–16; individualist theory and, 77–78; Irish famine and, 250–51; liberal citizen and, 178–79; liberal cognition and, 331–32; liberal deformation and, 106–21; liberal representation and, 277; liberalism’s selfunderstanding and, 3; libertarianism and, 6–7n11; in On Liberty (J. S. Mill), 70; literacy and, 88–89; modifiers of bodily discipline and, 171; novels and, 34; opinion and, 296–97, 299, 318; in parliamentary system, 296; in Phineas Finn (Trollope), 269, 270, 274; political party and, 236; printed page and, 159; property ownership and, 236–37; public performance and, 336; reproducing liberalism and, 121–24; romance of, 65; secret ballot and, 223; signature and, 160–61, 282; state as individual and, 29; substantive, 151; suffrage and, 296–97; sympathy versus sincerity and, 316n43; thought and, 156; virtues of, 86–87; voting and elections and, 297n11; in Warden (Trollope), 69–70, 82, 87, 269 Industrial Reformation of English Fiction (Gallagher), 33n68 integrity, 304, 315, 333 interest. See disinterest and interest Ireland, 229–89 (see also Phineas Finn [Trollope]); absentee landlordism in, 268; abstract embodiment and, 15n28, 60; accommodation and, 286; Act of Union and, 230n3; ancient landholding patterns in, 239; attachment to England by, 251–52, 280n2, 282; ballot in, 179n6; Celtic culture and, 284; church in, 258n50; England in contrast to, 240, 241–42, 246–47; English colonialism and, 257; English deterritorialization of Ireland and, 248; eviction of tenants in, 243–44; famine in, 248–52, 253, 262; Gladstone and, 313; in Hadley’s larger argument, 38; home rule and, 32–33n67, 271–72, 287; idea of, 283;

378 / Index Ireland (continued) ideal of improvement and, 247–48; identity and land in, 241–46, 251–52; as image of liberal citizen, 284; “Irish ideas” and, 246–57; Irish inferiority and, 239–40n16, 245–46, 252–53; land legislation in, 55–56; local liberalism and, 285–89; long view via land use and, 246; luck and lack of the Irish and, 282–84; meaning of occupation and, 245–46; as mistress, 279; political economy of, 240; political ideology and, 258–59; postfamine political landscape in, 277–78; progress in, 284–85n74; proposals to solve land problem in, 237–39, 241; race and ethnicity and, 241, 259; reoccupation of, 256–57; stereotypical Celts and, 270n62, 278; suffrage in, 263–64; tenant rights in, 231–35, 238–40, 257–58, 260–62, 316–17n45; theatrical politics in, 316–17n45; Trollope’s Palliser series and, 229–30; Ulster custom and, 256; Ulster custom in, 238n14, 239; Union of Settlement and, 279 Irish Land Act of 1860, 238n13 Irish Land Act of 1870: complex at work in, 264–65; Gladstone’s thinking and, 241, 254, 255–56; in Hadley’s larger argument, 38; Irish Land (Campbell), and, 253; occupation and, 231–32, 235, 238, 261–62, 289; in Phineas Finn (Trollope), 257 Irish Land (Campbell), 241, 253 Irish Reform Act of 1850, 232, 263, 289 James, Henry, 230 Jefferson, Thomas, 309n27 Jennings, Louis, 335n69 Jephson, H. L., 298 Jevons, William Stanley, 73n15, 311n34 Jones, H. S., 60n42, 249, 288n77 Jones, Stephen, 125–26n2 journalism: periodicals: as both problem and solution, 161; as fencing ground, 135, 136n22, 138; Gladstone and, 311; libel suits and, 135; mass-mediated politics and, 300; Midlothian campaign and, 326–30, 332; narrative voice and,

134, 149–50; oratory and, 318; party journalism as form of, 128–31; personality in, 156–58; personalization of politics and, 377n73; press as body and, 332; public taste and, 321; social order and, 139; telegraph and, 329n61. See also newspapers Joyce, Patrick, 22n40, 27n54, 84n38 justice, alternative conceptions of, 79 Kant, Immanuel, 51, 103–4, 144n34, 223n68 Kay, James, 14–15n27 Kent, Christopher, 133n15 Kingsley, Charles, 41 Kingsley, George, 131, 134 Kinnear, J. Boyd, 160n65 Kinzer, Bruce L., 176n2, 202, 203n38, 206, 221–22n67 Klancher, Jon, 12n23, 44 Kluge, Alexander, 12, 103 Knickerbocker, Frances, 26–27, 127 Knowles, James, 125–26n2 La Capra, Dominick, 83 Laffan, May, 241n21 laissez-faire, 4n5, 6 Land and Labor League, 233–34n6, 259n52 Landleaguers (Trollope), 265 Langbauer, Laurie: on the everyday, 20, 82n30; on series fiction, 124; on Trollope’s novels, 82, 83n34, 86–87n40, 264n54 Lansbury, Coral, 111n65 Laski, Harold, 252n36 Last Chronicle of Barset (Trollope), 124 Lawrence, Jon, 4n7, 296n9 Leader (periodical), 125–26n2 Leatham, E. A.: on opinion, 214, 216; on political philosophers, 213n51; public good and, 199; on “real public,” 213; secret ballot and, 176, 178n5, 201–2, 211–12, 214n54, 218 Leatham, William, 176n1 Leavis, F. R., 58n37 Lee, Stephen, 221n64 Leeds Mercury, 221–22n67 Lefort, Claude, 22n41

Index / 379 Lepenies, Wolf, 102n54 Letters of the Republic (Warner), 45 Lewes, George Henry: on decided opinion, 163; editorial eclecticism of, 171, 172n82; Fortnightly Review and, 126, 144n35, 166; “good form” and, 52; on sincerity, 164–65 Lewis, G. C., 201, 201n35 Liberal Party: as challenge to status quo, 5; as changing organism, 272; composition of, 1; Conservatives versus, 26n49, 211; elections of 1868 and, 121–22; emergence of, 295; founding of, 2; Gladstone and, 291–92; as heap of sand, 271; Ireland and, 230; lack of intellectuals in, 32–33n67; National Liberal Federation and, 296n9; in Phineas Finn (Trollope), 231, 234, 257, 264; political mobilization and, 336; secret ballot and, 177–78, 196, 197, 224; suffrage and, 221–22n67 liberal subject: character and, 73–89; cognition and, 112–13; emergent intellectual and, 153–54; form of, 66–73, 77; local liberalism and, 285; material base of, 103–4; mid-Victorian political literalism and, 234; new kind of candidate and, 296; opinion and, 129; ubiquity of term, 3 liberalism: administration versus politics and, 84n38; agrarian workers and, 252n36; as aloof from the poor, 4n5; ambition and, 246; central premise of, 225; communitarian impulses in, 250n34; decline of, 292, 294; divided mind of, 223–28; ethos and, 316; Finnean, 257–63; freedom and, 326; gradualism and, 124; Hadley’s definition of, 25–36; ideas and, 312n35; improvisational, 300–7; “Liberal cause” and, 318–19; liberatory mission of, 13; local, 285–89; “mature,” 60–61; myth of appropriation and, 260; old versus new, 49–50n17; organic versus inorganic, 249–50; as philosopher, 209–18; plebeian, 292–93; politics of the everyday and, 220–21; as practical politics, 3; presuppositions of academics and, 28; sociability of, 250; social performance

and, 273n66; tenant of, 236–40; Victorian versus classical, 104–5 “Liberalism” (Stephen), 41 Liberalism and Empire (Mehta), 15n28, 239–40n16, 260 libertarianism, 4n5, 6–7n11 liberty: character development and, 98; of combination, 106–7; liberalism’s ineffectual construal of, 170–71; negative versus positive, 6; rationality and, 98n50; of thought and feeling versus tastes and pursuits, 98–99; three types of, 70 Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity (Stephen), 169 Liberty, Retrenchment, and Reform (Biagini), 27 Liddle, Dallas, 133n15, 139n28 Linda Tressel (Trollope, as Anonymous), 120n77 literacy, 44, 87–88, 91 Lloyd, David, 14–15n27, 28–29, 67, 223, 248 Lloyd’s Weekly, 221–22n67 Locke, John: associationism and, 9, 51, 208; on cognitive formalism, 54; ideal of improvement and, 247; on “indifferency,” 50n18; on land and proprietorship, 234n7; land as vacant space and, 240; on mechanization, 56; pedagogy of, 52–53; on private property, 236, 254; on property and political independence, 259–60; reliance on “English gentleman” by, 53n27; romantic view of property and, 248–49, 250, 255–56; on selfhood and ownership, 236–37nn10– 11; social convention and, 98n50; Victorian era and, 249–50n33 London Review, 125–26n2 London Times. See Times (London). Love Is a Sweet Chain (Martel), 280n3 Lowe, Brigid, 252 Lukács, Georg, 93n45 Lynch, Deidre, 86–87n40, 107–8 Mackinnon, William Alexander, 45n10 Macmillan’s, 125–26n2 “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” (Stead), 157–58

380 / Index Maine, Henry, 239, 253 Maitland, Edward, 206 Malachuk, Daniel S., 23n42, 287–89 Malthus, Thomas, 31, 249, 256 Manchester Examiner Times, 221–22n67 Mansfield Park (Austen), 69n10 Marat, John-Paul, 139, 139n26 Markell, Patchen, 256n47 Marshall, Alfred, 49–50n17 Martel, James R., 50n18, 236n10, 280n3 masculinity: imperialism and, 280n2; liberal redefinition of, 95; property and, 274; sexuality and, 17n32; Victorian conceptions of, 17n32; voting and, 189, 195, 197, 205–8 Masks of Conquest (Viswanathan), 15n28 “Mass Public and the Mass Subject” (Warner), 47n15 Matthew, H. C. G., 321–22, 327, 330, 335–36 Maurer, Oscar Jr., 133n15 Maurice, Frederick, 131, 134, 138 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 287–88 McCarthy, Justin, 311n34 McCaw, Neil, 229n1 McClelland, Keith, 177 Mehta, Uday: on appetite drives, 53n25; on “English gentleman,” 53n27; on liberal pedagogy, 111; on liberalism and empire, 15n28, 234n7, 239–40n16; on liberalism and land, 234; on Locke’s political theory, 52–53, 98n50; on Locke’s view of land, 240; on property and political identity, 260 Meisel, Joseph, 317 Middlemarch (Eliot): character development in, 108; disinterest in, 301; effigy in, 304, 305–7; elections in, 184–85; gender in, 34n70; in Hadley’s larger argument, 33–34, 39; hustings scene in, 302–5, 307–8, 314, 330, 332–33, 338–39; opinion in, 300–1, 318; organic hierarchy in, 315; political events in, 316–17; skepticism in, 305; social and ethical pressures and, 295; temporal setting of, 304n19 Midlothian campaign: abstracting impulse and, 334; cult of personality and, 334–35; Gladstone as stranger and,

320; Gladstone’s first speech in, 315; Gladstone’s political style and, 307, 312, 318–19, 322; illustration of, 328, 329–30; liberal dynamics of, 332; as media event, 326–30, 332; new kind of politics in, 295–96; new voters and, 323; as perfect liberal storm, 339; plebeian liberalism and, 292–94; political awareness and, 324n56; sentimentalization of national identity and, 336; sympathetic exchange in, 325–26 mid-Victorian era: as historical designation, 2, 3–4; as period of transition, 11 Mill, J. S: ambivalence and, 116; on aristocratic blindness, 277n69; associationism and, 10n19, 51, 144n34, 151–53; on brave new world, 140; on civic engagement, 84; classical tutelage and, 13, 143; colonialism and, 257–58n49; Comte, Auguste, and, 144; on conformity, 88–89; cosmopolitanism and, 288n77; deliberation and, 59n39; determinism of, 19n34; disinterestedness and, 77, 79, 169; disorder in works of, 98; on domain of unconsciousness, 108; on eccentricity, 10, 53, 93; on English contractual practices, 253; Fortnightly Review and, 141–42, 148, 150–51, 163; Gladstone, William E. and, 334; in Hadley’s larger argument, 35; on happiness, 79; imperialism and, 15n28; on individuation, 69, 70, 73, 91; influence of, 141–42, 148; on “Irish ideas,” 246, 252–53, 255; on Irish land reform, 237, 254; Irish political economy and, 240; on journalism, 75; Kantian theory of mind and, 144n34; as leading intellectual, 1; liberal individualism and, 65, 94, 104, 112n72; liberal subject of, 65, 71–72; liberty of combination and, 106; mature liberalism of, 7; on mechanization, 56; as member of Parliament, 235; mental rest and, 112n72; on meritocracy, 70n11; Mill, James and, 99–100; Millian discussion and, 315; as moralist, 71; Morley’s defense of, 170; nervous breakdown of, 79, 99–100, 237; newspapers and, 202n37; as old liberal, 49–50n17; opinion and, 71–74, 76n20, 80–82, 86–87n40, 94, 129, 134,

Index / 381 141, 301; pedagogy and, 67–68, 169; on period of transition, 43; poetry and, 100, 102; on political representation, 5; psychological interpretation of, 105; on rational debate, 304; secret ballot and, 188, 207, 214n54; sincerity and, 314; socialism and, 70; on stationary state, 49; Stephen, James Fitzjames, and, 32; on tastes and pursuits, 73; utilitarianism and, 100–1; Victorian era and, 11, 249–50n33; on well-being, 70–71; on women’s conversation, 112n70. See also specific works Mill, James: associationist utilitarianism and, 10n19, 208; ballot and, 188, 190n21; female suffrage and, 193n28; on happiness, 70–71; hedonist calculus of, 7; imperialism and, 15n28; Mill, J. S., and, 99–100; on routine, 246 Miller, Andrew, 152 Miller, D. A., 89–95, 108 mind, frame of: disinterest and, 301; formalized, 10; Fortnightly Review and, 140–54, 171–72; Kantian theory and, 144n34; meaning of, 9 Mitchell, Rob, 315 Mitchell, Timothy, 29 modernity, 22n41, 210 monarchy, 22n41 Monthly Review, 242 Moore, D. C., 27n54, 180n7, 190n21 Morison, James Cotter, 135, 145 Morley, John: on anonymity, 139, 144, 155, 166; Arnold, Matthew, and, 141n30; biographies of, 127; on body and spirit, 14, 59n40; on daily trouble, 152n51, 154; editorial standards of, 147–48, 171–72; education policy and, 163; on exchange between reader and writer, 152; Fortnightly Review and, 37, 59, 126, 135, 142, 144n35; Gladstone and, 159, 335n70; on indifference, 168–69; intellectual subject of, 20; on journals’ brawling judgments, 134; on leadership of the rich, 154; on liberal frame of mind, 11; on lover of truth, 146; on many-sided liberalism, 172; on Marat, Jean-Paul, 139, 139n26; Mill, J. S. and, 142n31; Mill, J. S., and, 170; narrative voice and,

162; as new liberal, 49–50n17; opinion and, 131, 146, 171; on parliamentary deliberations, 137; on passion for truth, 97–98n49; on Pater, Walter, 167n75; pedagogical engagement and, 151; on “reserve,” 137–38; on saying what one thinks, 259; signature and, 157, 161, 167; sincerity and, 165; on state church, 153; use of “man” by, 16 Morris, Pam, 292n2, 305n20, 316n43 Morris, William O’Connor: on Irish attachment to land, 262; on Irish famine, 248–49, 251–52, 253, 284; on Irish postfamine political landscape, 277–78; on organic society, 246n26; vision of improved Ireland and, 255 Mouffe, Chantal, 218, 223 Munchhausen effect, 32 names and signatures, 287–89, 319–20n50. See also signature nationalism “Nationalist Cosmopolitics in the Nineteenth Century” (Malachuk), 287–88 Negt, Oskar, 12, 103 nepotism, 19 New Liberalism, 2n3, 6–7n11 New Monthly Magazine, 125–26n2, 127n5 Newcastle Chronicle, 213 Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 221–22n67 newspapers: advocacy and sensationalism in, 82; as despotic, 76n19; Gladstone and, 330–31; letters to, 295–96n8; liberals’ worries about, 202n37; massmediated politics and, 300; as party organs, 75–76; versus periodicals, 128–29n7; political transcripts in, 202n37; public sphere and, 43–44; as sectarian, 330–31 Nina Balatka (Trollope, as Anonymous), 120n77 Nineteenth Century (periodical), 125–26n2 Nonconformists, versus Anglicans, 147 Norrie, Alan, 22 Northumberland (Lord): bodily selfgovernance and, 65; on personal violence, 118; public and private spheres and, 215–16; secret ballot and, 63–64; on Victorian social terrain, 85; on voter intimidation, 205

382 / Index Nossiter, T. J., 180n8, 221n65 Novel Possibilities (Childers), 33n68 novels: Dorothea Brooke effect and, 89; enculturation and, 58n37; ideology in, 83–84; narrative voice in, 78–80, 83, 84n36; as narratives about liberalism, 33n68, 35, 82; social formalism in, 81. See also fiction occupation: absence and, 252–53, 255, 268; absolute property and, 238n13; citizenship and, 289; connotations of, 245–46; disinterestedness and, 288–89; empire and, 287; Gladstone’s endorsement of, 257; “good form” and, 254; idea of, 284; “Irish ideas” and, 253–54, 255; as labor, 254; liberalism and, 234, 251; nationalism and, 287; opinion formation and, 263; party politics and, 261; political independence and, 282–83; politics as, 274n67; requirements for Parliament and, 231–32; speaking one’s mind and, 276; suffrage and, 232–33, 263; tenant rights and, 261–62 O’Connor, Feargus, 221–22n67 O’Curry, Eugene, 239 O’Donovan, John, 239 O’Gorman, Frank, 181n10, 182n12 On Compromise (Morley), 137, 171 “On Individuality” (J. S. Mill), 112n72 On Liberty (J. S. Mill): brave new world in, 140; character development in, 98–99; conformity in, 88–89; cosmopolitanism in, 288n77; criticisms of, 170; eccentricity in, 98; Fortnightly Review and, 141– 42; in Hadley’s larger argument, 36–37; liberal individualism in, 70–73, 77, 103; opinion and, 49, 71, 74–75, 80–81, 94, 141, 147–48, 301; political citizen in, 67–68; Stephen, James Fitzjames, attack on, 42; Warden (Trollope) and, 70 On the Rise, Progress, and Present State of Public Opinion (Mackinnon), 45n10 On the Study of Celtic Literature (Arnold), 239–40n16 opinion, 291–339 (see also opinion formation); abstracted individuality and, 104; abstraction and, 16–17, 305; ambiva-

lence and, 123–24; authentic ground of, 316; authority of, 306; versus belief, 147; candidate and, 298–99; casual and porous, 42–43; as catalyst of legislation, 128; chaos and, 214–51; character and, 71–74, 129, 146, 301n16; conscience and, 200, 202; content versus requirements of, 301n16; convention and, 10; courage and, 116; decided, 163, 169, 171; definition of, 45n10, 200–1, 204–5; development of, 5; devil’s advocacy and, 80–81; discussion of, 30; disinterest and, 301, 305–6; enforcement of, 93–94; exchange of, 152; versus expertise, 129–30; in Fortnightly Review, 59, 126–28; Gladstone and, 333; governance and, 137, 203–4, 295; groupthink and, 149; in Hadley’s larger argument, 38; ideas and, 312; independent, 140; individual versus public, 305; individualism and individuality and, 296–97, 299, 318; inscrutable, 215–16; landownership and, 61; liberal citizenship and, 225; liberal cognition and, 331–32; mass culture and, 44–45; in Middlemarch (Eliot), 300–4; mobilization of the idea and, 29; new voters and, 299–300; novels versus newspapers and, 82; occupancy requirements and, 233–34; oratory and, 294; out of doors versus indoors, 222–23; in parliamentary system, 296; political and cultural valence of, 129–30; political philosophers and, 213n51; poor people’s suffrage and, 8–9; privatization of, 188–202; progression of, 151; providence and, 43n3; public and private spheres and, 104, 109n64; public versus nation’s, 134; raising the stakes of, 301; received, 72, 76n20, 86–87n40; religion and, 72, 76n20; representation and, 72, 307, 330–31; secret ballot and, 200–3, x; self-regarding, 170–71; as shadow, 216; signature and, 159–60, 168; sincerity and, 310, 315; source of, 205; as stakes of politics, 219–20; stationary state and, 49; taste and, 73; virtues of, 86–87; “voice” as, 300; vote as expression of, 200; working class and, 42–43

Index / 383 opinion formation: in Autobiography (J. S. Mill), 80–81; balloting booth and, 275; character and, 316; codification of, 314; ethics and, 141; Fortnightly Review and, 136, 145–47; individual cognition and, 214; in On Liberty (J. S. Mill), 80–81, 147–48; marketplace of print and, 154–55; Morley, John, on, 131; new voters and, 275–76, 293; occupation and, 263; oratory and, 275, 318; privatization of, 169; religion and, 147; secret ballot and, 201, 204, 207, 216, 272; suffrage and, 42–43; values as mechanism of, 310 optimism, ambivalence and, 61 oratory: body as metaphor and, 308; Carlyle on, 311; continuing importance of, 338–39; crowds’ perception and, 329–30; Gladstone and, 294, 313, 317, 327, 333; heyday of, 317; opinion formation and, 275, 318; rhetoric and, 317–18; sincerity and, 309–10 Paine, Thomas, 45 Palliser series (Trollope), 176n1, 229–30 Palmerston (Lord), 2n3, 203–4, 267n60 panopticon, 8n13, 22n41, 211, 226 “Panopticon” (Bentham), 8n13 Parliamentary and Municipal Elections Bill of 1872. See Ballot Act of 1872 Parry, J. P., 4n5, 5–6, 247, 336n71 partiality, 125–26n2 party politics: dialectic of, 76; liberalism and, 234, 261; nineteenth-century trends and, 130; party journalism and, 128–31; politicking and, 297n11; purposes of, 217–18; rise of, 217n59. See also politics; specific parties Passavant, Paul, 22n40 Passions and the Interests (Hirschman), 213n51 Pater, Walter, 166, 167n75 Pecheux, Michel, 32 pedagogy: complex motivations of, 111; Fortnightly Review and, 151; Locke and, 111n66; political, 58–59; routinized learning and, 169; of self-development, 67–68; theory and, 171; women’s conversation and, 111n68

Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism (Malachuk), 23n42 perfectionism, Victorian preoccupation with, 152 periodicals: anonymous “we” in, 131–34; demise of, 148n42; first person plural in, 139; growth of, 125; intimacy of print and, 136; names and signatures in, 125–26, 127n5, 132–34, 138; versus newspapers, 128–29n7; party journalism and, 128–31; political and social geography and, 130. See also journalism; newspapers Phillips, Adam, 10, 36 philosophy, political, 21n38 Phineas Finn (Trollope): abstracting processes in, 333; bodies in, 271–76; Church establishment in Ireland and, 258n50; citizens and politicians in, 235, 298–99; civic obligation in, 266; connection in, 263–64, 269–71; dynamics of representation in, 298; electoral reform in, 283; English cabinet in, 266–67, 268–69; Finnean liberalism and, 257–63; gestures in, 277n68; in Hadley’s larger argument, 33, 35, 38; hunting parties in, 264–65, 268, 276; idea of Ireland in, 283; identity in, 285; Ireland’s marginal role in, 229–31, 234–35; Irish farms and, 233; Irish protagonist in, 235–36; liberal individual and, 339; local liberalism and, 285, 286–89; marriage in, 278–83; opinion formation in, 318; political context of, 266–67, 269, 275; political opinion in, 313; portrait of the people in, 276–78; presumptions of liberalism and, 229–30; representational field of politics and, 319; tenant rights in, 258, 260–62, 280, 282–84 Phineas Redux (Trollope), 229n1, 261, 283, 285–86 Pitkin, Hanna, 180n9, 189–90n20 Pitts, Jennifer, 7, 8–9n15 Plan of Parliamentary Reform (Bentham), 193n28 Platform: Its Rise and Progress (Jephson), 298 pleasure, 7–8

384 / Index political economy, 6–7n11 Political Liberalism (Rawls), 21, 44 politics: agency and, 27–28; candidates and, 298–99, 307–9, 311–13, 315–16; celebrity and, 293–94; class and, 322n55; consumer products and, 337; effects of reform and, 294–95; in Hadley’s larger argument, 38–39; integrity and authenticity in, 304, 315; intentionality and, 307; local versus national focus of, 297–98; marriage and, 278–82; mimicry and, 306; new kind of candidate and, 295–96; new voters and, 293, 295–96n8; as occupation, 274n67; oratory and, 294, 308–11, 313, 317; parliamentary versus opinion, 297–98; personal, 292n2; personalization of, 337n73; theatrical, 316–17n45; as vacation, 39 Politics of Aesthetics (Rancière), 30n62 Poovey, Mary: on abstraction, 12–13n25, 23n42; on common natural rights, 19; on historical epistemology, 6–7n11, 31–32n65; on homogeneous space, 22–23; on self-governance, 64; on women’s conversation, 111n68 populism, Ireland and, 247 Potkay, Adam, 309, 314 poverty, 4n5, 7–9, 162 Powers of Distance (Anderson), 21n37, 28n56 Prime Minister (Trollope), 229n1 “Principle of Sincerity” (Lewes), 164–65 Principles of Political Economy (J. S. Mill), 49, 257–58n49 private sphere. See spheres, public and private “Production of Abstract Space” (Poovey), 19 progress, sincerity and, 165–66 property: appropriation of, 240; Brehon law tracts and, 239; capitalization of land and, 257n48, 258; divestment and investment in, 283; dual ownership of, 240; ideas of, 254; identity and, 241– 46, 263; Indian land usage and, 239, 253; landlord’s role and, 295–96n8; landscape painting and, 278n70; local liberalism and, 285; love of land and, 241n21; marriage and, 279; masculinity

and, 274; organic society and, 246n26; political independence and, 259–60; political influence and, 267; romantic view of, 239–40n16, 248–49, 250, 255–56; social hierarchy and, 315; suffrage and, 232–33, 262–64, 269, 272, 274–75; temporal goals and, 256n47; theories of, 236–37; Ulster custom and, 238–39, 256 Protestantism, 6, 152n51, 237n11. See also Christianity, critique of; Evangelicalism; religion psychology, sentimentality and, 164–65 public good, secret ballot and, 199–200, 210–11, 213–14 Public Moralists (Collini), 28 “Public Opinion, Violence and the Limits of Constitutional Politics” (Wahrman), 43n3 public sphere. See spheres, public and private Pugh, Martin, 1n2, 27n53, 272 purposiveness, obligation to progress and, 51 Quarterly Review, 130n10 race and ethnicity: attachment to land and, 241, 252, 287–88; Gladstone and, 319–20n50; liberalism and, 258–59; nation and, 286n76; in Phineas Finn (Trollope), 283 radicalism: aesthetic and, 30n61; American Revolution and, 309; aristocracy and, 309–10; demise of periodical and, 223; French Revolution and, 226; liberal eclecticism and, 172; in Liberal Party, 43n2; in Middlemarch (Eliot), 304; Mill, J. S., and, 70, 207; opinion formation and, 42; in Phineas Finn (Trollope), 257–58, 265, 270, 276, 279–80; in political history, 12, 18, 29n57, 106, 130; political publicity and, 45; “political quackery” of, 61; secret ballot and, 175–79, 188–90, 196–98, 203, 220– 23; sincerity and, 316; Trollope and, 75n18, 197n31; Westminster Review and, 129n8 Ralph the Heir (Trollope), 123–24, 171, 220

Index / 385 Rancière, Jacques, 30, 150, 223 rationality: affectively intense, 97–98n49; communicative, 30; debate and, 304–5; didactic, 335–36; faith and, 144; in Fortnightly Review, 142; generative site of, 50; happiness and, 70–71; liberalism as origin of, 28n56; liberty and, 98n50, 99 Rawls, John: on alternative conceptions of justice, 79; assessment of, 223; displacement of politics and, 223n68; on liberal reflection, 51; on liberalized citizen, 44, 79, 218; on political philosophy, 21n38; on reflective equilibrium, 29; subject of investigation of, 21 Reade, Charles, 120 Reagan, Ronald, 337 reform: in cacophonous environment, 300; disillusionment with, 265; electoral, 181; as gradualist response, 49; liberalism’s investment in, 50; mechanization and, 55–56; practice versus theory in, 176n1; public good and, 199–200; skepticism about, 56–58; temporal goals and, 256n47. See also specific reforms Reform Bill of 1832, 301 Reform Bill of 1862, 338–39 Reform Bill of 1867: enfranchisement of working classes and, 182; as historical marker, 4, 295, 302; Middlemarch (Eliot) and, 301; new electors and, 183; personalization of politics and, 292n2; provisions of, 4n7; secret ballot and, 177, 226; suffrage and, 269 Regulating Aversion (Brown), 22n40 religion: anonymity and, 144–45; disestablishment and, 313; diversity of, 145n37; embodiment and, 74–75; in Fortnightly Review, 142n31, 144–47; influence of, 6, 60n42; journalism and, 75n18; liberal cognition and, 11n22, 54–55; machinery of reform and, 59–60; opinion and, 72, 76n20, 147; political effects of, 294–95; rationality and, 144; sincerity and, 164–65; state church and, 145, 148–49, 152, 153. See also Christianity, critique of “Religion of Humanity” (Comte), 144 representation: direct, 319–20; dynam-

ics of, 298–300; ground for opinion and, 307; as historical fact, 132n14; individuality and, 251; mandates and, 5n8; the Many in the One and, 319; mass, 318; Mill, J. S., on, 5; opinion and, 330–31; proportional, 251; register of, 335; “representative men” and, 319; resemblance versus estrangement and, 322; sympathy and, 324, 325–26; theory of, 72; transaction and, 324–25, 331–32; virtual, 320, 332–33 Representative Government (J. S. Mill), 84n38 responsibility, gravity of, 154–63 retirement, 168, 169n79, 261, 269, 319 Revue de deux mondes (Review of Two Worlds), 126, 130n10, 135 Reynold’s Newspaper, 221–22n67 rhetoric: of belonging and identity, 335n70; Ciceronian-Demosthenic, 314; denunciations of, 316; idealism in, 315; oratory and, 317–18; “political theatrical” and, 316–17n45; romanticism and, 323; truth and, 294n6 ritualism, religion and, 145 Robertson, Andrew, 292n2 Roman Catholic Church. See Catholicism romanticism: friendship and, 280n3; liberal individualism and, 65; property and, 239–40n16, 248–50, 255–56; rhetoric and, 323; sincerity and, 164–65 Romola (Eliot), 305n20 Rosebery (Lord), 185, 194–95 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 213n51 Rubinstein, W. D., 296n9 Rule of Freedom (Joyce), 22n40, 84n38 Ruskin, John, 44n5 Russell, John, 257, 262 Rylance, Mark, 144n34 Saint Paul’s Magazine, 45, 137 Saldivar, Ramon, 92n44 Salmon, Richard, 156n60 Santayana, George, 94n46 Saturday Review, 168 Sawyer, J. R., 194–95, 204–5 “Scalp of Brian Connor, Near Kilrush Union House” (Illustrated London News), 244 science, 142n31, 144, 151–52

386 / Index Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical (Dawson), 125n1 Scotland, 181 Scott, Water, 93n45 Seabright, Paul, 169n79 Second Reform Bill. See Reform Bill of 1867 Second Treatise (Locke), 236, 236n10 Sedgwick, Eve, 97 Select Committee of 1870, 183 self-development, pedagogy of, 67 self-governance, 7–8, 11, 64–65, 100–1 self-help societies, 4n5 self-interest. See disinterest and interest sexuality, 17n32, 97, 107 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 217n58 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 308, 316–17n45 Sherwood’s Monthly Miscellany, 125–26n2 signature: debate over, 139n28, 154–57, 160; formalism and, 167–68; Fortnightly Review and, 125–26, 127n5, 132–34, 138, 141; as handshake, 160; idealism and, 157; letters to newspapers and, 295–96n8; liberal individuality and, 282; lives of the mind and, 127n5; as a medium, 163; in newspapers versus periodicals, 128–29n7; professionalism and, 153n53; sincerity and, 167, 168; in Trollope’s works, 118–21; weight of, 160n65; weighty opinion and, 159–60 Simmel, Georg, 113n73 sincerity: character and, 309n27; force of, 164–68; Gladstone and, 333; political culture and, 309–16; signature and, 163, 167, 168; sympathy versus, 315–16; truth and, 316n42, 333–34 Skopcol, Theda, 29n58 Smith, Adam: on commercial society, 45; on laboring classes, 12–13n25, 46; moral philosophy of, 162; on moral sentiments, 84–86; on sympathy, 304, 314–15, 325; theatricalized version of, 315 Smith, Goldwin, 259 Smith, Sydney, 191, 226–27 Smollett, Tobias, 108 Social Contract (Rousseau), 213n51 Social Formalism (Hale), 54, 83 social order, 139

socialism, nascent, 250 sociology, historicist, 239–40 Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Locke), 52, 54n29 space, homogeneous, 22 Spectator, 136, 156, 163, 334n67 Spencer, Herbert, 65 spheres, public and private: balloting booth and, 214–15, 227; bourgeois subject and, 103–4; decline of public sphere and, 336; diversity of opinion and, 150; freedom and, 80–81; “good form” and, 52; Habermas’s rendition of, 24, 190; humanitarians as strangers and, 115; liberal cognition and, 47; liberal individualism and, 73; in On Liberty (J. S. Mill), 72; names and signatures and, 118–19, 158; newspapers and, 43–45; one-on-one exchange and, 83; opinion and, 76, 104, 109n64, 126–30, 147, 169; ordinary life and, 47–48; political practice and, 142; props for engagement in, 108–9; rationality and, 50; readers and, 155n56; secret ballot and, 180n8, 181, 194, 196, 200, 203, 209–10; setting of The Warden and, 110–12; signature and, 163, 168; social commerce and, 84–85; in various historical eras, 24–25; voting and, 46–47, 182, 206, 208, 216–17, 222, 224 spirit, embodiment and, 59–60 Spirit of the Public Journals, 125–26n2 Stamp Act, 215 Stanley, A. P., 49n16 state: church and, 145, 148–49, 152, 153; governmental, 210–11n49; idea of, 29–30; liberal, 28–29; mistrust of, 4n5; perfection and, 23n42; restraint of, 204; stationary, 49 Stead, W. T., 157–58, 331–32 Stephen, James Fitzjames: ambivalence of, 61; definition of liberalism and, 41–43, 51, 264; on diffusion of knowledge, 48, 49; on eclecticism, 172; in Hadley’s larger argument, 35; on indifference, 169; on On Liberty (J. S. Mill), 170; on “mature liberalism,” 60–61; metaphor and, 60; Mill, J. S., and, 32; as new liberal, 49–50n17; on passivity, 171;

Index / 387 on political reform, 56–57; on public opinion, 44, 47 Stephen, Leslie, 11, 56–59, 61 Sterne, Laurence, 86–87n40 stories, Hadley’s method and, 26 Stow, David, 14–15n27 Strachey, Lytton, 313 Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas), 180n8 “Stump-Orator” (Carlyle), 311 suffrage: Bentham on, 189–90n20; class and, 177, 182, 190n21; as contrivance, 175; Essays on Reform (1867) and, 42; exclusive, 221–22n67; household, 206; Hyde Park riots and, 46; individuality and, 296–97; in Ireland, 232–33; new entrants into government and, 229; new voters and, 280, 323; opinion formation and, 42–43; property and, 232–33, 262–64, 269, 272, 274–75; race and, 177; secret ballot and, 63–64, 197, 200, 212, 220–22, 226; skepticism about, 56–58; transaction of politics and, 330; universal, 8–9n15, 221; violence and, 299–300; women and, 177, 193n28, 205–6. See also ballot, secret; voting and elections sympathy: noble causes and, 166n72; representation and, 324, 325–26; sincerity and, 166, 315–16; social cohesion and, 192n24; sympathetic exchange and, 304, 314–16; voting and elections and, 192–94 System of Logic (J. S. Mill), 13, 141–44, 151–52 Taylor, A. J. P., 321n52 Taylor, Miles, 5n8 Telegraph Act of 1868, 329n61 Tenant Right League, 316–17n45 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 84–85 Thomas, Paul, 14–15n27, 28–29, 67, 223 thought: versus action, 143; cultivated, 7; formalism and, 144n34; idea as foundational and, 152; individuality and, 156; “Irish ideas” and, 254n42. See also free thought Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (J. S. Mill), 207

Times (London): Arnold, Matthew, on, 130n10; “despotism” of, 76n19; on disordered elections, 184–85n16; on Gladstone, 311, 318–19, 327n60, 331, 332n65, 333; Irish land bill and, 248; on theatrical politics, 316n45; in Warden (Trollope), 75 Tom Brown’s Schooldays (Hughes), 140 Tories, 178n5, 197, 204, 295, 312 Tractarians, 145 transcendentalism, liberal rejection of, 47n15 Trilling, Lionel, 50–51n19, 316, 334 Trollope, Anthony: anonymity and, 120n77; on Australian aboriginal peoples, 15n28; Bagehot, Walter, versus, 267n60; as candidate, 121–23, 183; character and opinion and, 73–74, 76n20; as conservative liberal, 70; Dickens compared to, 90–91, 96; eccentricity in works of, 89–98; editors and, 158; feminized sociability and, 86–87n40; Fortnightly Review and, 118n75, 135; in Hadley’s larger argument, 32–36, 37, 38; harmonic convergences and, 314; historical claims in work of, 69n9; ideology and, 83n34; individuation and individualism and, 284; Ireland and, 230; as journal editor, 157; on journalism, 75n18; liberal subject of, 65; mediocrity of, 36; on meritocracy, 70n11; names and pseudonyms and, 119–20; narrative voice and, 78, 85–86n39; on notion of ground, 264n54, 271n63; on opinion, 109n64; on Phineas books, 230nn3–4; political loyalties of, 265, 267n60; political novels of, 33n68; political position of, 81; on politics as occupation, 274n67; production of agreement and, 86; race and ethnicity and, 258–59, 284; as radical, 197n31; retroliberalism of, 257n48; secret ballot and, 178n5, 187, 197, 224, 267; series fiction of, 124; social formalism and, 82; territory versus nation and, 286n76; “Trolloping” and, 259n51; use of proverbs by, 86–87n40; the “usual” and, 230; women in novels of, 111n68. See also specific works

388 / Index Trollope and Politics (Halperin), 33n68 truth: rhetoric and, 294n6; to self, 225, 316n42; sincerity and, 164–65, 314–15, 316n42, 333–34 Turkey, 291–92 Turn to Empire (Pitts), 7, 8–9n15 Union of Settlement, 279 United States: early political culture of, 309–10; public and private spheres in, 24; secret ballot in, 219; territorial expansion of, 248; virtual representation and, 319 Universal Education Act of 1870, 58 University Liberals, 13 utilitarianism: cognition and, 8n13, 10n19; countercanon of, 13; cultivated thought and, 7; Fortnightly Review and, 169; Hadley’s light treatment of, 6–7n11; hedonism and, 71n13; imperialism and, 15n28; interest and, 189–90n20; labor and, 246; versus midcentury liberalism, 210–11n49; Mill, J. S. and, 100–1; reforms and, 4; voting and elections and, 190 ventriloquial method. See devil’s advocacy Vernon, James, 4, 193, 203n38, 216 Victoria (queen of England), 247n28 Victorian liberalism. See liberalism Victorian Literature and the Victorian State (Goodlad), 4n5, 6 Victorian People (Briggs), 267n60 Village-Communities in the East and West (Maine), 239 Vincent, J. R., 26n49, 32–33n67, 293 violence: elections and, 194–95, 196, 205; “Irish ideas” and, 253; new voters and, 299–300; publicity and, 217n58 virtue, property ownership and, 238 Viswanathan, Gauri, 15n28 voting and elections, 179–80 (see also ballot, secret; corruption and influence; suffrage); of 1868, 121–23; abstraction and, 14–15, 57; bribery in, 179, 179n6; canvassing and, 193, 193n26, 217; Carlyle on, 55; class and, 189–92, 200; coercion and, 182; corporeality and, 17; embodiment and, 59; financial dimen-

sion and, 181n10; in Hadley’s larger argument, 25–26, 37–39; historical perspectives on, 184; home voting and, 207–8; illiteracy and, 87n41; “independent electors” and, 5; individuation and, 297n11; Ireland and, 15n28; liberal cognition and, 11; manliness and, 189, 195, 197, 205–8; mass gatherings at, 185n17; mechanization and, 55–56; nominating petitions and, 186; nonelectors’ role in, 193; personation and, 225, 227–28; poor people’s suffrage and, 8–9; principle versus person in, 303; proportional representation and, 251; public and private spheres and, 46–47, 182, 206, 208, 216–17, 222; role of citizens and, 20; Second Reform Bill of 1867, 4; secret ballot and, 32, 63–64, 122; selection of candidates and, 4–5; site of governance and, 267–68; size of electorate and, 182, 327–28; sociability and, 194–95, 196–97, 204, 206, 227n73; social control and, 185–86; sympathy and, 192–94; violence and, 194–95, 196, 205; “voice” and, 300; vote as trust and, 193 Wahrman, Dror, 43n3 Warden (Trollope): ambivalence and, 109–10, 116–17, 225; anonymity and, 335n70; character development in, 104–5n59, 107–8; chronology in, 107, 110; cognitive formalism in, 81; connection in, 263–64; conscientious character in, 84; dreams in, 106–12; eccentricity in, 90–98; ethical distinctions and, 76–77; gestures in, 92–97, 104, 105, 107, 113–15, 121, 250, 299; good life and, 106; in Hadley’s larger argument, 33, 37, 66; Harding’s name in, 118–20; historical claims in, 69n9; individuation in, 69–70, 82, 86–87, 274; institutionalism and, 76n21; liberal ambivalence in, 106; On Liberty (J. S. Mill) and, 70, 74; masculinized sentimentality in, 86–87n40; mockepic metaphor in, 136n22; music in, 94–95, 110–11, 113–14; narrative voice in, 78–80, 82n30, 85–86, 103, 107n61,

Index / 389 108, 113, 119n76; opinion formation in, 318; opposition to patronage in, 69n10; personal harmony in, 314; privacy and, 196; proverbs in, 86–87n40; religion and embodiment in, 74–75; retirement in, 220; rhetorical emphasis of, 80–81; setting of, 106–13, 136, 158–59, 215; subject liberalization and, 65; success in, 114–15; successor novels to, 124; Trollope’s exploration of liberalism and, 236; as unrepresentative, 68; the “usual” in, 90–91; virtue of opinion in, 86–87 Warner, Michael, 44, 47, 154 Watson, Robert Spence, 331 Waugh, Arthur, 148n42 Way We Live Now (Trollope), 224n72 Wealth of Nations (Smith), 12–13n25 Weber, Max, 294, 319n49, 320–22, 326, 336 Wellbery, David, 317 Westminster Review, 129n8, 142n31, 214 “What Is Progress, and Are We Progressing?” (Cobbe), 165–66

Whigs: ballot and, 178n5, 197; Church establishment in Ireland and, 258n50; coalitional politics and, 295; disinterestness and, 265; ideas of, 312; reforms and, 4 Whitbrook, Maureen, 33–34n69 Whitman, Walt, 288 Willey, Basil, 141n30, 147–48, 149–50 Williams, Raymond, 160 Winter, Sarah, 54 women: as authors, 126; conversational powers of, 111n68, 112n70; as “interior decoration,” 86–87n40; political influence and, 189, 206–8, 213; suffrage and, 177, 193n28, 205–6. See also femininity Wood, Ellen, 304 Wordsworth, William, 100, 102 working class: commitments of electors from, 6n10; dark picture of, 46; democratization of, 339; language of, 41–42; suffrage extension and, 42–43 Young, G. M., 10, 304–5 Žižek, Slavoj, 30–31n63