In this book, ‘Gissing, James, Hardy and
Wells’—who sound like a
law firm—are made to behave
like barristers in a courtroom drama: they stand up and ask ‘What is class?’, and then ‘they interrogate
history’ (p. 3). They
interrogate fiction too, because ‘they each see a reciprocal relationship between
history and fiction’
(p. 3). Wells, for instance, ‘questions the version of class depicted
and embodied in the Victorian novel, and implicates the novel itself as a tool
and supporter of the class system’ (p. 10). The victims, of course, were democracy and ‘the poor’. James, from Harvard
law school, stands out from the other three in terms of background and
education, but even he goes ‘against the middle-class world-view and authoritative
voice of the Times’ and provides ‘a
more democratic world-view’ (p. 54).
Christine DeVine is certainly
interested in the legal context of Victorian literature, and she emphasises the
four novelists’ awareness of the political and legal situation—Hardy was
actually ‘a practicing justice of the peace during the time of the composition
of Tess’ (p. 99). DeVine also clearly believes in the close relationship
between society and literature, but then, she argues that the four novelists
believed in it as well. So, naturally, realism is an important idea in this
book. DeVine argues that Gissing, James, Hardy and
Wells developed a new realism, moving away from the realism of earlier, more
middle-class, Victorian novels of such writers as Dickens and Gaskell.
Nonetheless, she is ‘not arguing for a clear division between all earlier
writers and Gissing, James, Hardy and Wells’ (p. 4) and ‘despite Gissing's
claim to a "school of strict veracity," his novels and those of
Hardy, James and Wells are no more a window onto life as it was experienced in
the nineteenth or early twentieth century than had been earlier depictions’ (p.
5).
Similarly, DeVine is very
interested in the reading public. She makes the observation that an increase in
literacy and book-buying ‘encouraged an expansion of the pool of writers,
allowing writers from the lower middle classes—such as Gissing, Hardy and
Wells—to join the profession’ (p. 7). And who will read DeVine's
book? Will the reader be an American? Although published in Aldershot, the book
uses American spellings and we are told that it is ‘hard for today's reader,
especially the American reader, to appreciate the strength of class ties and
class enmities, and the overwhelming power that class afforded in both
Victorian life and literature’ (p. 138). American or not the reader is intended
to be an academic. Just as an entire book could be written about the use of
‘we’ in Victorian literature, DeVine is happy to
refer to ‘what we do as literary and cultural scholars, and especially as Victorianists’ and then say that ‘if we are teachers we
often focus on the historical and social context of the works we teach’ (p.
137). Yet DeVine also makes a number of statements
that are rather basic, so that we must presume that the book cannot have been
entirely directed at an academic audience. A book for literary and cultural
scholars, and especially Victorianists, needn't tell
us that Thomas Chatterton ‘was a young poet who had been inspirational to some
of the young Romantics early in the nineteenth century’ (p. 72), nor end with a
paragraph that tells us that ‘D. H. Lawrence, the son of a miner, foregrounded the working classes by giving his novel, Sons
and Lovers (1913), a working-class hero’ (p. 140) and then a note that just
provides the names of some of Arnold Bennett's novels.
That note contains a typographical error, and so does
the last paragraph. There are far too many of these small errors in the book,
from ‘literary’ instead of ‘literacy’ (p. 11) to ‘Foster’ instead of ‘Forster’ (p.
146) and there are some rather more important ones too. On two occasions, DeVine briefly discusses Forster's Howards End, so she says
that ‘as I have said, despite Forster's sympathy for Leonard, his main concern
is with the Schlegel sisters’ (p. 121), but she had said ‘Edward’ rather than
‘Leonard’: ‘Setting aside the poor, and clearly sympathizing with the lower-middle-class
Edward Bast, who is yearning to be more than he is,
to take advantage of the supposedly more fluid class system, Forster's real
concern is with the changes taking place in the elite world of the Schlegel
sisters’ (p. 107). There is evidence in The Manuscripts of Howards End, edited
by Oliver Stallybrass, that Forster had considered
calling Leonard Bast ‘Edward Cunningham’, or possibly
‘Edward Bast’, but DeVine
has obviously made a mistake.
The discussion of Edward/Leonard Bast
also exemplifies how her attempts to connect society and literature, and her
way of describing the connections, do occasionally lead to some simplistic or
implausible assertions: does Leonard Bast yearn ‘to take advantage
of the supposedly more fluid class system’, or does he yearn for beauty,
culture, happiness, wealth? Equally, is George Eliot's Adam Bede set in 1799
because ‘the historicization of the class system is
one of several devices she uses to make class division seem natural’ (p. 90)?
There could be other, better, explanations, including some that are less
negative, and the term ‘device’ seems inappropriate. DeVine's
book needs to portray earlier Victorian novelists, such as Dickens, Eliot and
Gaskell, as defenders of the class system in order to argue that the younger
four were different: she says that ‘It may seem simplistic to pack up in one bundle the
work of such disparate writers as Dickens and Gaskell and claim their novels as
bastions of the bourgeoisie’ (p. 4), and it is. But maybe class is still to be
blamed since she says, ‘Social class is difficult to discuss with any precision
and without feeling as though one is using stereotypes and making sweeping
statements’ (p. 3).
Guy Cuthbertson
St Edmund Hall,
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