A MIDDLE CLASS CUT INTO TWO: HISTORIOGRAPHY AND VICTORIAN NATIONAL CHARACTER

BY LAUREN M. E. GOODLAD

In a recently published essay, Ruth Perry carves out a distinctive place for literary criticism in the field of cultural history. Unlike the historian, who reads texts without recognizing the cultural work that literature performs, the critics purpose is to de-familiarize assumptions that are otherwise taken for granted.1 In a general sense, the following essay comments upon Perrys thesis by assessing current directions in Victorian studies. While critics do indeed strive to defamiliarize a familiar that many (but by no means all) historians continue to reify, it is also the case that the project of critical de-familiarization in either field is often burdened by methodological inconsistencyin particular, by failures satisfactorily to address incompatibilities between Foucauldian and more generally materialist approaches to cultural analysis.2 To be sure, recent critics of Victorian culture have dramatically illuminated the study of identity formation. Feminist scholars, in particular, have demonstrated the profundity with which constructions of gender and sexuality are implicated within histories of the political, resulting in a far-reaching transformation of what the political and its history are understood to include. Since the advent of post-colonial theory and criticism, studies of racial, national, and ethnic ideologies have also been increasingly integrated within and alongside models of subjectivity based on class, gender, and sexuality. I want to suggest, nevertheless, that an insufficiently expansive model of Victorian middleclass identity continues to impair critical elaborations of national characterwhat is sometimes alternatively conceptualized as Englishness or Britishness. For reasons relating at least partly to the totalizing tendencies of Foucaults model of the rise of disciplinary subjectivity, Victorianist scholars influenced by Foucault, I believe, have only superficially addressed the idiosyncrasies of British/Englishas opposed to Western or even Continentalsubject formation. By way of beginning to redress this problem, in the first part of this essay I identify two as yet under-recognized sites of contest within Lauren ELH 67 (2000) M. E. 143178 Goodlad 2000 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 143

mainstream ideologies of middle-class Englishness. The first concerns oppositions between Britain and its Continental rivals, an Anglo-centric rhetoric in which, as I will demonstrate, profound contradictions between the foundations of character, and the expansion of the nineteenth-century British state come to the fore. If, as I argue, Victorian national character was predicated on the (comparative) absence of intrusive centralized government in Britain, what were the effects of the controversial expansions of the British state? A second and related focus of this essay is the competition between entrepreneurial and professional modes of middle-class identity formation. With these debates in mind, I will argue that Victorian Britain was not only (as Disraeli asserted in 1845) a nation divided between classes, but also (as Matthew Arnold declared twenty years later) a nation whose crucial middle class was cut into two.3 The second half of this essay explains some of the ramifications of this divided middle-class culture. By closely reconsidering important feminist historiographies (particularly Mary Pooveys work in Uneven Developments [1988]), I argue that the Foucauldian disciplinary subject that these studies tend to affirm inadequately describes the discursive construction of British/English national and middle-class character. On this basis I offer suggestions for additional scholarly inquiry and methodological critique.
I. ENGLISH LIBERTY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER

One of the least developed areas within studies of the discursive construction of national character concerns the frequency of oppositions between Britain and its Continental rivalsparticularly France.4 As Linda Colley argues, the invention of the British nation (between 1707 and 1837) was facilitated by a succession of dangerous wars with France, encouraging Britons throughout the kingdom to define themselves collectively against an obviously hostile Other; to imagine themselves as free Protestants struggling against a superstitious, militarist, decadent and unfree Catholic foe.5 In early-Victorian discourse, for example, differences between Britain (or England) and France (or the Continent) were often articulated in the form of a distinctive character that could be explained as racial and evolutionary effects, and/or the historico-cultural products of vastly dissimilar social economies.6 Throughout the Victorian period, I will demonstrate, this contrastive mode of imagining English national identity deeply intersected with the class and gender ideologies so crucial to the consolidation and stabilization of early- and mid-Victorian middle-class industrial 144 Historiography and Victorian National Character

and professional society. It is well known that Victorian luminaries of many stripes represented their own class imperatives as aspects of universal Englishness. As Mary Poovey argues, they obscured differences constituted by class with appeals to sameness evoked by national identity.7 What I want to emphasize is the degree to which constructions of universal Englishness remained thoroughly contingent upon contrasts to the Continentand especially to the ruinous interference of Continental governmentsat a time when the material foundations of those contrasts were in jeopardy. Perhaps the most pervasive and reiterated theme within discourses of Englishness is the notion of Englands singular claims to freedom. The idea crystallizes with especial rhetorical force in the longstanding cult of Anglo-Saxon liberty. This history of free, equal, and self-governing Saxons undermined by the twelfth-century yoke of Norman (French) conquest was a potent symbol for English radicalism during the Civil War and, three centuries later, a vital basis of opposition to the Continental-style government interference proposed by many earlyand mid-Victorian reformers.8 But the mythic Anglo-Saxon past is only one important emblem of Englands more generally constituted claims to singular religious, intellectual, political, and economic liberty. Other much vaunted testaments to the nations robust individualism include Parliament, the English Constitution, Protestantism and Dissent, radicalism and Scottish moralism, Manchester-school political economy, and eventually, (the putative superiority of) Brittanic imperial rule.9 To this national panoply we must add Britains history of an absurdly small and inactive central government, its entrenched self-governing (predominantly local as opposed to centralized) institutional arrangements.10 This distinctive heritagewhether understood as an evolved or still evolving racial inheritance, a cultural legacy born of longstanding popular self-government, or Gods bequest to a chosen Protestant peoplewas relentlessly invoked and obsessively contrasted to the tyrannies of Continental nations such as France, demonstrating the selfevident superiority of Englands uniquely free national character. We find the presumption of Englands singular claims to freedom profoundly imbricated even within polemics that profess to minimize its importance. In the opinion of Thomas Carlyle, for example, the notion of English liberty is, like all political shams, mere bombast. It is all the more telling, therefore, that in Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850) Carlyle describes bureaucracy as a continental nuisance, assuring his readers that there is no risk or possibility of its development in England.11 John Stuart Mill, who promoted the 1834 New Poor Laws (carefully Lauren M. E. Goodlad 145

modified) variation upon centralizing reform, was, understandably, less sanguine. In his mid-century autobiography, Mill credits Tocqueville for alerting him to the dangers of centralization.12 Throughout his works, Mill urged Britons to eschew what he described in 1837 as that vast net-work of administrative tyranny . . . that system of bureaucracy, which leaves no free agent in all France.13 In his definitive 1838 critique of Bentham, Mill faulted the latter for his indifference to and ignorance of national character. The same laws will not suit the English and the French, Mill insisted, indicting Benthamism on the grounds that A philosophy of laws and institutions, not founded on a philosophy of national character, is an absurdity.14 This aspect of Mills critique, moreover, is all but anticipated by Harriet Martineau. Martineaus proto-sociological study of Society in America (1837) repudiates reformers who, like Bentham, offer to codify for countries where they have not set their foot. Articulating a definition of national character that is nearly indistinguishable from Mills, Martineau declares, It is absurd to suppose that communities, where wide differences of customs, prejudices, and manners still exist, can be, or ought to be, brought into a state of exact conformity of institutions.15 In these texts the (ambiguous) notion that character both determines and is determined by a nations institutions is implicit. This formulation becomes explicit in polemics that self-consciously critique the manifest un-Englishness of centralizing legislative reforms (most notably the New Poor Law and the Public Health Act of 1848). For Herbert Spencer, whose ardently individualist and evolutionary theories of character remained influential throughout the nineteenth century, society is founded upon a beautiful self-adjusting principle that naturally rectifies evils and keep[s] all . . . elements in equilibrium. Thus, in his 1842 series of letters on The Proper Sphere of Government Spencer argues that any attempt to extend government beyond the protection of mans natural rights to person and property (whether to regulate commerce, provide education, administer poor relief, or build roads and railways) constitutes dangerous interference in the natural progress of the (English) race.16 A comparable case is made by Joshua Toulmin Smith, constitutional lawyer, amateur Anglo-Saxonist, and founder of the Anti-Centralization Union in 1854. Smiths virulent campaign against the 1848 Public Health Act was founded on the belief that local self-government and centralization are diametrically opposed and inversely related, with the state of any nation becoming more free, happy, progressive, prosperous, and safe according to the degree to which the former supersedes 146 Historiography and Victorian National Character

the latter. To Smiths mind, such common classifications as aristocratic and democratic are irrelevant to the inner and actual condition of any nation. With any one of these, he argues, the nation may be a nation of freemen, or a nation of slaves. Hence, The real and only test of liberty must always beis Local Self-Government, or is Centralization, the fundamental practical idea of the constitution of the country?17 A similar means of assessing the national conditionand one that underscores Smiths implicit association between Centralization and the Continentis articulated by Samuel Laing, the early-Victorian author of Notes of a Traveller (1842), and self-styled social economist.18 Thus, while Laing commends the political democracy installed by the French Revolution, he (like Smith) distinguishes it from the practical civil liberty (N, 77) so crucial to moral, intellectual and national character (N, 77). The Revolution, in other words, failed to transform French character because it disregarded Frances longstanding history of administrative functionarism (N, 77)that unseen power called the state (N, 77) which owns all the deeds and thoughts of each individual (N, 77). By contrast, the distinguished national characteristic (N, 80) of the English is produced by the non-interference of government in [their] social economy . . . and the intense repugnance and opposition to every attempt at such interference (N, 80).19 Nevertheless, we must not overestimate the complacency of Laing and his contemporaries as they rehearse assurances of Britains free character by means of such felicitous comparisons. Rather, Laings conviction that the great social problem of this age is the opposition between government interference and the free agency of individuals (N, 6465) points to a signal contradiction, crucial to the understanding of early- and mid-Victorian national identity. According to one historian of nineteenth-century government expansion,
Most intelligent and influential . . . [Victorians] believed . . . in self-help, the avoidance of state control, government economy and the anxious preservation of human freedom. Yet they started to build one of the most effective systems of state government in Europe, and they had to do so.20

Evidence of this profound ambivalence is inscribed in the irrationalities and inconsistencies of early- and mid-Victorian reforms.21 As late as 1869, Matthew Arnold (one of the few notable Victorians who enthusiastically admired French and Prussian institutions) proclaimed that Englishmen of every class have no idea of the State.22 Yet there is no question thatgradually and, in the last quarter of the century, at an Lauren M. E. Goodlad 147

accelerated pacean effective and intrusive state was ratified by the same intelligent and influential middle classes that had forged their collective identity under the banner of Britains allegedly free national character. How, then, did mid- and late-Victorian middle-class Britons redefine themselves and the national character they had cast in their own ideal image, once the material differences between a nation of self-governing individuals and localities and the slavish submission of its Continental neighbors began to evaporate?
II. A MIDDLE CLASS CUT INTO TWO

The complexity of this question becomes even more apparent when one considers the degree to which both Englishness and Victorian middle-class identity were immersed in an identifiably entrepreneurial ethos, what Harold Perkin defines as the ideal of capital and competition.23 In Samuel Laings work, where the ideal Englishman is the sturdy-minded . . . industrialist who toils and slaves at his trade, to become some day an independent man (N, 75), the close filiations between English national character and entrepreneurial zeal are unmistakable. They surface in a different way in Spencers evolutionary model of characterin the obvious connections between the beautiful selfadjusting principle that underlies it and the ideology of free-market capitalism.24 But Perkins study does more than identify the degree to which earlyVictorian society was dominated by entrepreneurial ideologies of capital and competition. He further demonstrates the increasing importance of an allied, but ultimately oppositional, basis of middle-class identity: the professional ideal. According to Perkin, as the nineteenth century progressed, professionals increasingly ceased to serve the interests of other classes, articulating instead a social ideal that was uniquely their own. Their critique of industrial society, moreover, was but the brink of professionalisms massive expansion in size and influence in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and its eventual triumph in the twentieth century.25 In opposition to the entrepreneurial idealization of competitive capitalism, professionals emphasized trained expertise and meritorious service. While either could claim to be self-made men,
the entrepreneur proved himself by competition in the market, the professional by persuading the rest of society and ultimately the state that his service was vitally important and therefore worthy of guaranteed reward. The first called for as little state interference as possible; the second looked to the state as the ultimate guarantor of professional status.26

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Of course, Perkins elucidation of signal incompatibilities between a middle-class identity authorized by free-market competition and one authorized by specialized expertise itself demands a de-familiarizing scrutiny. Although Perkin points out that the practice of self-styled entrepreneurs increasingly militated towards specialized professionalism, he is less attentive to the degree to which professional practice relied upon competitive ideologies. The acquisition of expertise, like any other form of cultural capital, might easily form the basis of a discursive practice of professionalized competition in which merit was determined within a free market for individual expertise. Indeed, in the absence of specific evidence, there is no necessary reason to assume that selfemployed professionals (as opposed to civil servants and other employees of the state) might not sometimes identify with individualist opposition to government interference.27 This critique notwithstanding, Perkins model of divided middle-class ideologies offers an important rejoinder to constructions of a monolithic middle-class subjectivityparticularly to constructions founded primarily upon a Foucauldian genealogy of disciplinary society in which specific ideological components of English class and national identity play no substantial part. For what the Foucauldian critic may inadvertently miss are the inevitable conflicts and confusions between an individualist middle-class identity predicated on the minimization of state interference and a quasi-collectivist middle-class identity directly invested in the expansion and authorization of the state. By way of example, I turn to Victorian Englands principal mythologist of the entrepreneur, Samuel Smiles. Smiless enormously popular Self-Help (1859) is a paean to the indomitable spirit of industry, that spirit of self-help . . . [that] has in all times been a marked feature of the English character.28 Originating in a series of lectures dating back to the 1840s, the bulk of Smiless work is roughly contemporaneous with the texts I have cited by Laing, Toulmin Smith, and Spencer. Nevertheless, it was not until after the administrative blunders of the Crimea and the consequent threat to national character that Self-Help, with its rigorous early-Victorian individualism, found a publisher.29 Smiless assessment of such recent official (professional) crises as the Indian Mutiny of 1857 is therefore of particular interest. To many contemporaries, the failure to provide adequate military protection for Britons in India was, like the Crimean disaster two years before, evidence of the stupendous incompetence of English officialism. Nevertheless, the majority of middle-class Victoriansincluding Charles Dickens, whose exasperation with mid-century government prompted the CircumlocuLauren M. E. Goodlad 149

tion Office of Little Dorrit (185557)associated these blunders with the self-interest and ineptitude of pre-modern patronage and Old Corruption.30 Their demands for efficient government, in other words, were not fully-fledged professional calls for Benthamite bureaucratic expansion; nor for an Arnoldian state to institute reason and disseminate culture. They were, instead, identifiably anti-aristocratic and entrepreneurial calls for competency, energy, and perhaps above all, retrenchment (less government rather than more). Of course, the modernization of the civil service offered obvious opportunities to a professional middle class eager to promote its expertise. Nevertheless, retrenchment rather than government expansion was the original spark to administrative reform.31 William Gladstone, the Prime Minister under whose direction mid-Victorian civil service reform took place, was well-known for his dislike of government intervention, an advocate of local rather than centralized responsibility, and, on the whole, the self-styled embodiment of such conspicuously entrepreneurial middle-class values as efficiency, application, [and] economy.32 To be sure, both professional and entrepreneurial interests were served by Liberal reforms intended to curb upper-class privileges. But it is important to recognize the antagonisms always implicit in what amounted to a transient collaboration between two ultimately irreconcilable and competing bases of middle-class identification. These antagonisms, moreover, were evident to the chief mythologist of entrepreneurial England. Interestingly, for Smiles the debacle of the Indian Mutiny serves to emphasize
the determined energy and self-reliance of the national character. Although English officialism may often drift stupidly into gigantic blunders, the men of the nation generally contrive to work their way out of them with a heroism almost approaching the sublime. (S, 214)

What is striking about this passage is the covert erasure of middle-class professionalism (at least insofar as professionalism is understood to include the Victorian state). The depersonalizing and pejorative term officialism effectively isolates gigantic blunders from the energy and self-reliance of the men of the nation. Not only does it deprive the English middle-class professional of individual subjectivity, it further excludes him by identifying him with the un-Englishness of officialism on the Continent, and the un-Englishness (un-middleclassness) of upper-class Old Corruption at home. 150 Historiography and Victorian National Character

By thoroughly undermining the claims of an alternative basis of middle-class heroism, a middle-class identity determined to authorize itself from within English officialism rather than by disdainful contrast to it, Smiles engages in a tacit polemic against the increasing influence of professionalism. This strategy becomes even more explicit in Smiless passing remarks on reforms recommended by the 1854 Northcote and Trevelyan Report on the Organization of the Permanent Civil Service. It is, he opines, a most pitiable sight to see educated young men eager for the poorly paid and routine, though genteel occupation of a government office (S, 33536). The system of cramming for examinations, Smiles explainsemploying a rhetoric made familiar by contemporaneous objections to state educationis thoroughly demoralizing (S, 33536). With so little room left for free mental action, a functionarism as complete as Chinas might develop, at the expense of that constitutional energy and vigor . . . so indispensable to a robust manhood (S, 33536). Smiless meaning cannot be more clear. The recently proposed (but not yet thoroughly implemented) practice of competitive examination is notas it might appeara salutary application of entrepreneurial principles to governance. It is, instead, a pernicious and un-English (here Oriental rather than Continental) brand of functionarisma term that, like officialism, denotes the kind of intrusive government and unproductive (parasitic, sycophantic, effeminate) character to which English liberty and the energy, vigor, and robust masculinity of English spirit stand in bold contrast. A prime example of Perkins entrepreneurial ideal, Smiless critique of the perceived gentility of government occupation is, at bottom, an anti-professional polemic. By draw[ing] the educated youth of the country away from ordinary industry, while propagating a degenerative and servile passion for government salaries (S, 33536), the trend Smiles identifies privileges the professional middle classes at the expense of their entrepreneurial counterparts. This mode of intra-class conflict, exalting the gentlemanly status of the middle-class civil servant while snubbing the vulgar commercialism of the tradesman or manufacturerhas a complicated (and decidedly British) history of its own.33 But one need only recall the works of Matthew Arnold, mid-Victorian Englands premier professional polemicist, to see how middle-class professionals were able to capitalize upon their genteel credentials, legitimizing their interests while denigrating those of their philistine counterparts in trade and industry. Indeed, in Culture and Anarchy (1869) Arnold omits educated middle-class professionals from his blueprint of a Britain composed of Lauren M. E. Goodlad 151

(upper-class) Barbarians, (middle-class) Philistines, and (working-class) Populace. But their strategic roles as bastions of culture and defenders of anarchyto be authorized by and established within a vanguard Statewas already evident to Samuel Smiles. Addressing the Taunton Commission on middle-class schools in 1869, Arnold is more explicit. [I]n a way unexampled anywhere else, he explains, Victorian Britain offers the spectacle of a middle class cut into two: a professional class brought up on the first plane and, on the second plane, an immense business class . . . on which the future so much depends, cut off from aristocratic and professional influences and, consequently, without governing qualities.34 Smiless decade-old preemptive strike against precisely this kind of argument is thus brought into bolder relief. For, as he strips civil service reform of its entrepreneurial veneer, Smiles attempts to disclose the un-English spirit lurking within middle-class professionalism. Deriding the professionals putative gentility, Smiles marks the official body with the recognizable stigmata of the feminine, the aristocratic, the Continental, and the Oriental. In the ideological clash between Smiles and Arnold, one discerns the outline of a fraught mid-Victorian contest for English middle-class identity. At the heart of this battle are fundamental contradictions: English liberty versus an indisputably alien but inexorably expanding state; foundational mythologies of capital and competition versus a genteel and professionalized expertise that seeks to undermine their claims to legitimacy. Indivisible from this spectacle of competing class and national identitiesand in ways that I have only begun to suggest are contingent ideologies of gender, racial, sexual, and ethnic identities. These overlapping discursive formations were bound to negotiate, as well as able to manipulate and capitalize upon, such profound middleclass and national antagonisms. In the remainder of this essay I explore a few of the ways in which the mid-Victorian conflicts I have identified complicate some important critical histories of identity formation.
III. ENTREPRENEURIAL PURITANISM AND DOMESTICITY

Since the publication of Foucaults seminal works on modern discipline, studies of Victorian culture have gravitated towards a generalizable model in which genealogies of the modern subject are traced through the operations of what critics describe as discursive strategies. Perhaps the most influential of these studies has been Nancy Armstrongs Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987). Like another important critical work, D. A. Millers The Novel and the Police (1988), Armstrongs book makes the galvanizing connection between Foucaults genealogical work 152 Historiography and Victorian National Character

and Victorian literature. While Millers book redresses Foucaults conspicuous reticence towards literature, establishing the novel as a central episode in the genealogy of our present, Armstrong demonstrates the importance of feminine writing (including conduct books and domestic novels), arguing that strategies of gender differentiation are crucial to a genealogy of modern subjectivity.35 In so doing, Armstrong elaborates on the Puritan radicalism that pitted the domestic authority of the self-governing family against the inherited authority of the aristocratic state. This seventeenth-century strategy failed, she explains, because the Puritan domestic womanat once complementary and subordinate to the Puritan mandid not propose a new form of political organization. But in succeeding centuries this increasingly differentiated female ideal was inscribed with a new and essentially female mode of powerdomestic surveillance. It was thus that the Victorian middle classes gain[ed] authority over domestic relations and personal life, simultaneously establish[ing] the need for the kind of surveillance upon which modern institutions are based.36 From the standpoint of a history of English national identity (rather than Western subjectivity), there is an unremarked irony implicit in this narrative. Since the Puritan tradition sought to constitute the family as a self-enclosed social unit in whose affairs the state could not intervene, Armstrongs Victorian middle classes betray their forbears even as they achieve the goal of supplanting aristocracy.37 For, as Armstrong constructs it, Victorian domestic authority is predicated on the power of surveillance; and the female ideal who exercises that power authorizes the state in the very act of authorizing the household. If this history of domesticity is complete, then the old tradition of radical Protestant dissent was moribund, bequeathing to English national identity only the shell of the domestic woman without her imperative inviolability.38 Victorian domesticity was content, in other words, to make its bed willingly with the state. Yet, as I have suggested, a variety of theorists of national charactereven those who, like Harriet Martineau, were sympathetic to certain forms of state expansionwere deeply identified with their Puritan antecedents. And, to the (substantial) degree to which they were also enthusiasts of Victorian domesticity, such writers were as eager to construct the autonomous English home in contradistinction to its subjugated Continental counterparts as they were to contrast English free agency with Continental superintendence, and the free industrial energy of Britons with the servility, sycophancy, and lassitude of the Continent. Lauren M. E. Goodlad 153

I am aware, of course, that in a rigorously Foucauldian critique such as Millers, oppositions between public police and private sanctuary serve only to reinforce the disciplinary power which they seek to evade.39 It is also possible to question the totalization of power upon which such a reading is grounded.40 My purpose, however, is more specifically to contest the presumed equivalency between the Foucauldian disciplinary subject affirmed by Miller and Armstrong and the subject produced as English national (and middle-class) character, as I understand it. The production of Englishnessas both the effect and constituent of rhetorics concerning class, nation, and genderis both a great deal more complicated than the Foucauldian disciplinary model, and, in important respects, quite alien to it. I am suggesting, therefore, that these national oppositions between Continent (or Orient) and England amount to more than simple attempts to draw imaginary boundaries between public and private domains; and while the Victorian domestic woman certainly provided a common ideal through which middle-class power was consolidated, I question Armstrongs leap to the (Foucauldian) conclusion that the need for modern institutional surveillance was thus established. To make my point clearer I return to Laings Notes of a Traveller. Laings entrepreneurial project of resisting the growth of state intervention in order to preserve English national character bears the still vibrant impress of Puritan demands for domestic autonomy. And, like Armstrongs domestic woman, the notion of a unique (un-Continental) English character, produced by Englands social economy, provides a common idealevoking a coherent middle-class identity and a seamlessly English nation, even while sustaining the entrepreneurial ideologies that naturalized competition between individuals and classes. Laings entrepreneurial strategy also intersects with a history of domestic ideology. Because Armstrong focuses on the theory that domestic authority was politically effective precisely because of its presumed feminine apoliticism, she overlooks contemporaneous masculine (that is, avowedly political) discourses over the domestic sphere. Although Laings rendering of English social economy is not innocent of the ideology of separate (gendered) spheres, the boundaries he assumes are far more permeable and dramatically more contingent than those in the feminine writing emphasized by Armstrong.41 For example, in a discussion of Switzerland, where agricultural property is widely diffused, Laing commends the higher and more rational social position (N, 357) assumed by Swiss women relative to their counterparts in a rural England still impeded by concentrated 154 Historiography and Victorian National Character

upper-class land holdings. On the Swiss farm, he explains, the wife undertakes the thinking and managing department in the family affairs, while the husband is but the executive officer (N, 357). Seeking a social economic cause for the fact that many Swiss men are mere louts, vastly inferior to their wives, Laing points to the custom of military service among men and concludes that throughout Switzerland, The hen is the better bird (N, 357). Because the alleged national freedom on which Laings entrepreneurial character is founded is, like the Puritans commonwealth, constituted by non-interference, there is no compelling motive to distinguish between (equally independent) domestic and politico-economic spheres; nor, in contrast to Armstrongs paradigmatic texts, to deploy gender (or class) specifically to maintain those differences. On the Swiss farm, business as well as domestic duties are seamlessly comprehended as family affairs and no special feminine qualities predetermine the capacity of Swiss women to conduct them. Instead of inner qualifications inhering in gender, outer social economic (national) conditions account for the hen being the better bird. The distinctive entrepreneurial character of Swiss women is produced by their unimpeded ownership of property. Swiss men, by contrast, are disciplined by military drill rather than practical experience and free enterprise. Hence, the binary Laing foregrounds is not male/female, but entrepreneur/functionarya distinction that, in Switzerland, entails a healthy entrepreneurialization of the feminine (Swiss farm proprietresses enjoy a higher and more rational social position than their disadvantaged English counterparts), and a deleterious functionarization of the masculine (transforming would-be entrepreneurs into passive louts). Yet despite Laings apparent indifference to such strategic binaries as male/female and home/marketplace, domesticity is, nonetheless, a critical marker of national well-being. In this respect, Laings entrepreneurial writing of domesticity closely approximates that of Harriet Martineau. Both writers represent domesticity as a vital constituent of national and class identity, while either subduingor, in Martineaus case, vigorously contestingthe gender implications that usually accompany it. Indeed, Martineaus works, including Society in America and Household Education (1848), her chief contribution to the conduct book genre, attempt to overturn the unproductive, irrational, and un-Christian notion of incommensurable sexual difference.42 Rather than relegate women to a separate sphere of feminine influence, Martineau demands that women enjoy the same individual free-agency that authorizes Laings English character irrespective of gender. So far from authorizing a Lauren M. E. Goodlad 155

proto-modern female surveillance, Martineau ties the intensive domestic superintendence of wives in the American South to the demoralizing influence of slavery, and admires other Americans for limiting authority over servants to performance, without pernicious interference in personal matters.43 Thus, in both Laing and Martineau, domesticity is harnessed to a comparatively non-gendered politics with discernible origins in Puritan ideologies of the home. The entrepreneurial domesticity thus constituted aims to obviate rather than establish the need for the surveillant power of modern institutions. I emphasize aims because the ultimate effects of this entrepreneurial writing of domesticity are inevitably more complicated than its express intentions. For example, like Laing and Smiles, Martineau privileges household education over formal tutelage. As late as 1864, addressing education for middle-class girls, she supposes that there is nobody in England who for a moment dreams of asking the State to undertake . . . the education of the daughters of the most active, intelligent, practical, and domestic class of English citizens.44 In the case of Laing and Smiles, Puritan domestic politics work exclusively in the service of entrepreneurial individualism. That is, whether the subject in question is military drill or civil service cramming, the underlying object of attack is the arbitrariness of extra-domestic authority and the threats it poses to free agency and self-help. In Martineau, however, such politics are subtly undermined by the imperatives of womens emancipation and working-class self-improvementproducing inevitable conflict between a radically individualist (Puritan and entrepreneurial) conception of the subject, and the (extra-domestic) professional means required to mobilize it fully. Hence, in the 1864 essay, Martineau repeatedly assures readers that she shares their English repugnance to state education. Yet the urgent need to provide middle-class women with access to rational employment prompts her reluctant resort to state-funded teacher training schools.45 Doubtless her willingness to support state education for those not yet belonging to the most active, intelligent, practical, and domestic class of English citizens is further explained by the imperative to teach working-class people how best to help themselves. Seen from this perspective, Martineaus refusal to accept gendered differences magnifies the prototypical position of the mid-Victorian middle-class subject. That is to say, her imperviousness to mystifications of gender accentuates what was to become an increasingly prevalent antagonism between an enabling (entrepreneurial) identification with Puritan autonomy and an imperative resort to the modern (professional) 156 Historiography and Victorian National Character

state. Like Martineau, J. S. Mill believed that state intervention was both morally and socially inferior to the self-exertion of individuals, private enterprises, and voluntary associations. Yet he, too, was able to justify a wide range of state activitiesfor example, the building of roads and docks, and the establishment of hospitals and schoolsin the absence of appropriate market and/or voluntary provisions.46 As I shall attempt to demonstrate, mid- and late- Victorian culture is riddled by rifts between incompatible entrepreneurial and professional modes of conceptualizing middle-class and national identityboth acknowledged and unacknowledged.
IV. DAVID COPPERFIELD AND THE REPRESENTATION OF THE GENTLEMAN

To elaborate, I turn to yet another seminal work of Victorianist and feminist scholarship: Mary Pooveys Uneven Developments (1988). Producing a comparatively complicated model of middle-class identity, Poovey locates within the domestic ideal the persistence of an apparently antithetical image: woman-as-Evesexualized, susceptible, and fallen.47 This constitutive contradiction has been variously deployed by bourgeois culture to mask its own ideological contradictionsin particular, the paradox of a mythically free, egalitarian market and the hardened class differences this mythology conceals.48 In her fascinating reading of David Copperfield, Poovey demonstrates how the natural selflessness and self-regulation of the English middle-class woman neutralizes bourgeois contradictions, thereby stabilizing individual and national identity.49 Crucial to this representational strategy, however, is both the erasure of aberrant female sexuality and the naturalization of class difference. In David Copperfield, Poovey argues, bourgeois contradictions threaten to return in the anti-heroic figure of Uriah Heep.50 The novel attempts to psychologize critical oppositions between Heep and Copperfield; that is, to mask class differences as variations in (moral) character.51 What remains potentially evident, nevertheless, is the hypocrisy of a society that rewards the self-made David Copperfield [but] punishes the self-made Uriah Heep.52 In the end, according to Poovey, bourgeois society is affirmedits constitutive class differences naturalizedby the exemplarity of Agnes Wakefield. Idealized feminine domesticity achieves this goal by enabling the opposition between Davids goodness and Heeps deceit to be projected outward as the difference (of sexuality) among or within women.53 Hence, what are fundamentally differences of class between men are (symbolically) treated and cured through the stabilization of differences of sexuality between women. Through Agnes, Lauren M. E. Goodlad 157

Poovey argues, a sphere . . . outside and different from the sphere of market relations is created, providing the site in which the (male) individuals desire can be produced as an acquisitive drive and then domesticated as its economic aggression is rewritten as love.54 This crucial site, however, is also realized through the construction of Copperfield/Dickens. Like the ideal housewife, the literary man represents an ideal of selfless labor, creating an illusion of equalitya crucial realm outside [of] the inexorable logic of market relations.55 Despite the importance of this argument, its conspicuous circularity invites closer scrutiny. As Poovey tells it, what is essentially a crisis in male class representation (the instability of difference between Heep and Copperfield) is negotiated indirectly by female representation (Agness ideal domesticity), only to be referred ultimately to analogous male representation (the literary man). I suggest that a more complicated model of middle-class identity obviates the need for this peculiar trajectory even as it suggests a distinctive relation between the discourse of Victorian domesticity and its relation to middle-class men. Consider the assumption (also made by Armstrong) that bourgeois individualism depends upon the domestic womans provision of a natural limit to competition.56 The writing of entrepreneurial character, as we have seen, begins with the premise that competition is inherently selfregulatory: ordered as in Spencers divine scheme of Nature, by a beautiful self-adjusting principle. The antithetical idea that competition must be artificially limited from without derives from professional discoursein, for example, Benthams famous tutelary principle.57 This is but one indication of the degree to which the crisis Poovey locates is managed at least partly by the novels participation in yet another ideological contest. For the notion of a society that rewards the selfmade David Copperfield [but] punishes the self-made Uriah Heep is neither so paradoxical nor so potentially disruptive when one considers that contemporaries were increasingly being called upon to choose between two competing versions of the self-made man. Indeed, the contest between entrepreneurialism and professionalism casts the opposition between Copperfield and Heep in a rather different light. As I have suggested, the very raison dtre of Perkins mature professional ideal is to reveal the deficiencies (moral and otherwise) of self-made capitalists in order to establish the superiority of self-made experts. Moreover, the rhetoric in which this critique was launched entailed differentiations of class within the middle ranksparticularly, as in Arnold, the difference between philistine men of business and genteel, cultivated professionals. These contemporaneous contests com158 Historiography and Victorian National Character

plicate Pooveys simple opposition between the fundamental acquisitiveness of middle-class man and the strategic masking function performed by his female domestic counterpart. In the case of the educated youth deprecated by Smiles, for example (see above), the gentility of salaried, routine government office has already supplanted an acquisitive logic that privileges competitive practices and money rewards. I am not suggesting that David Copperfield represents a full-scale professional critique of entrepreneurial character. Little Dorrits Circumlocution Office amply demonstrates Dickenss Smilesean distaste for officialism, and zeal for industrious self-reliance. Rather, in David Copperfield (and indeed throughout his oeuvre) Dickens engages the same class problematic identified by Pooveyonly, I want to stress, his attempts to naturalize class difference relate to a discourse over the gentleman that was crystallizing at mid-century in the contest between entrepreneurial and professional definitions of Englishness. To make this point more clearly I turn to a decidedly professional polemic of Arnolds. In an 1861 essay proclaiming the imminence of Democracy, Arnold seeks a substitute for aristocratic influence to prevent the Americanisation of England.58 Since what Arnold has in mind is the centralized state, he launches a brilliant offensive against the presumed un-Englishness of this Continental or Oriental mode of government. The familiar specter of Americanisation harks back to Tocquevilles admonitions about a leveling democracy, Martineaus sociological analysis of a country with no established national character, Mills dread of tyrannous, ignorant public opinion, and Dickenss own renderings of a crass, unscrupulous, and uncivilized nation.59 Arnold, in other words, implies a choice between un-English Americanization (anarchy and mediocrity) and un-English Continentalization (state cultivation of sweetness and light). He argues, in effect, that the latter is the more English of the two. In so doing, however, he contributes to a vulgarization of Americanness (for example, liberty and equality) that, by analogy and extension, undermines entrepreneurial claims to the genteel first plane of Englishness. Indeed, his subsequent opposition, in Culture and Anarchy, of the idealized Hellenism of a first-plane middleclass to the Hebraism of its inferiors, subtly deploys anti-semitism to further impugn the gentility of entrepreneurial character. Dickens, of course, is not Arnolddesirous neither of a vanguard state, nor an elitist ideal of perfection located in culture. Nevertheless, while admiring the industry, enterprise, and self-reliance of entrepreneurial Englishness, Dickens consistently refuses to recognize material status as the basis of identity or character. Indeed, Dickens is conspicuLauren M. E. Goodlad 159

ously incapable of producing positive representations of acquisitive men; so much so that in mid-Victorian works such as Great Expectations the archetypal and genteel essence of a figure such as Herbert Pocket is inextricable from the characteristic inability to amass Capital.60 Dickenss ambivalence points both to the appeal and the difficulty of the gentlemana kind of middle-class male individual whose exemplary character obviates the domesticating process delineated by Poovey (wherein male desire is first produced as acquisitive drive and then domesticated as its economic aggression is rewritten as love). For, in the gentleman, acquisitive driveshould the gentleman in question be so impecunious as to require it at allis constitutionally separate from and incommensurable with individual desire. Indeed, the mark of gentility is a desire that is inherently synonymous with love. The professional critique of entrepreneurial character, moreover, clearly enhances the difficulties of imagining middle-class men who are both gentle in the way I have described and competitiveself-evidently endowed with skills that are increasingly identified with un-gentlemanlike behavior. Although David Copperfield was written prior to the fully fledged mobilization of genteel professionalism, the dilemma that was to plague Dickens in such late novels as Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend is already discernible. This is the dilemma of stabilizing a definition of the gentleman that is at once sufficiently democratic to include any man, but sufficiently restrictive to exclude materialistic pretenders.61 One obvious strategy is to draw emphatic contrasts between the wrong and right sort of qualifications. In David Copperfield this end is achieved largely by stressing Heeps deceit and hypocrisy undesirable attributes increasingly associated with unregulated (entrepreneurial) activity and unfavorably contrasted to the disinterested service of professionals. In this way, Davids professional status, his selfless literary labor, isindependently of the imprimatur of Agness ideal domesticitysufficient to distinguish his self-aggrandizing efforts from Heeps. For not only Pooveys literary men, but a wide range of contemporaneous professionals imagined themselves as operating in a sphere outside of market relationsauthorized instead by the judgment of their fellow experts, by meritorious service to the nation, and, increasingly (by means of representations among which Dickenss own novels loom large), by their reputation as gentlemen. Interestingly, twenty years after David Copperfield, George Eliot avoids Dickenss mid-Victorian dilemma by shifting emphasis away from definining the gentleman per se, and towards reinventing the business160 Historiography and Victorian National Character

man. In so doing, she also complicates the simple opposition between entrepreneur and professional. In Middlemarch (1870), Eliot juxtaposes Nicholas Bulstrodes self-interested hypocrisy with Caleb Garths nonacquisitive, quasi-Dickensian, and, thus, domesticated variation on the entrepreneurial ideal. Like Herbert Pocket, Garth is impecunious and values friendship over material interests. Yet Eliot nevertheless repeatedly insistsas Dickens does notthat business is Garths (more so than Bulstrodes) mtier. When Garth observes that Dorothea, the exemplary heroine, has a head for business most uncommon in a woman, the narrator hastens to remind us that by business Caleb never meant money transactions, but the skilful application of labour.62 Thus, through her representation of Caleb Garth, Eliot attempts directly to subvert capitalist logicrepresenting value in labor, rather than in exchangeand, in so doing, stripping business of its aggressive, acquisitive meanings.63 (This task is simplified by what is arguably a traditionalist move wherein, through Garth, business shifts away from banking and manufacturing and towards the management of land.) By the very same process, Eliot undermines gendered boundaries between male business and female domestic realms. This distinctive critique of capitalism is, despite evident similarities, not so much Marxist as it is professional (and arguably Ruskinian). Garths way of doing business, privileging love over acquisition, and labor value over exchange value, not only domesticates entrepreneurial practice (in the manner of Dickenss literary professional), but also repositions the man of business as a professional agent (Garth manages the property of others rather than, like a capitalist, or even Herbert Pocket, his own). In this way Garth represents Eliots symbolic attempt to professionalize all business among the middle classes, supplanting an ethos of capitalist competition with one based on meritorious service.64 In Eliot as in Dickens, a professional mode of conceptualizing male middle-class identity thus operates largely by implicit analogy rather than opposition to a domestic ideal that is more typically attributed to women and the home. Both novels thereby indicate the need to supplement Armstrongs critical account of domesticity, by paying sustained attention to the discursive formation of Victorian professionalism as it makes its own distinctive (and distinctively masculine) contribution to the modern British subject. To further consider the ramifications of this discourse I turn to yet another of Pooveys important analyses of English national character.

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V. FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE AND THE ENTREPRENEURIAL WRITING OF DOMESTICITY

In contrast to the competitive ideology stressed in the essay on David Copperfield, Pooveys complicated analysis of Florence Nightingale connects this mid-Victorian icon to an ideal of English domesticity that underwrote the expansion of state and empire.65 Demonstrating how Nightingales nursing endeavors symbolically justified Britains imperial ambitions, Poovey suggests the almost limitless potential of domestic ideology to authorize aggressive projects that far exceeded the boundaries of the home.66 The starting point of this crucial post-colonial framing of domesticity is Nightingales importance to a nation scandalized by the Crimea. This mid-century crisis of faith, I want to stress, jeopardized Englands supremacy with respect to two Continental rivals: both the enemy autocratic, functionarist Russiaand, in a different way, Catholic Francewhere nuns provided the competent nursing that England lacked. I therefore question Pooveys assurance that Nightingales restorative image of (female) competence represents a militaristic strain of feminine domesticity.67 It seems more likely that, like Smiless interpretation of the Indian Mutiny, the Nightingale myth depended upon the stark contrast between the blunders of Englands military (Smiless English officialism), and the still indomitable industry and enterprise of the English individual (Smiless men of the nation). Indeed, this Smilesean reading of Nightingales mythic status is supported by contemporary responses to Crimean military inefficiency. Whereas the war undermined the confidence in the military and administrative system, argues one historian, at the same time . . . it enhanced the prestige of the individual soldier. The heroic individualism of the English soldier was thus contrasted to collective maladministration, so that by the end of the war the Russians were a far less accessible enemy than the English generals and the aristocrats behind the scenes at Whitehall.68 In a comparable way, I suggest, Nightingales legendary ministrations might compensate for military ineptitude by restoring the (incommensurable) difference between the superlative thinking and managing skills of Laings Swiss farm proprietress and the incompetence of her military-trained husband (see above). Of course, a distinction must be made between this myth and Nightingales own writings. Despite strong emphasis on discipline, Poovey notes, Nightingales lifelong efforts to legitimize nursing, and secure its independence from (male) medical authority, never amount to full-fledged professionalization. Instead, her conceptualization of the 162 Historiography and Victorian National Character

nurse is a compromise. Neither the fully professionalized competitor of medical men, nor the unreliable nurse of old, Nightingales nurse combines womanly self-sacrifice with a notion of compensated female labor rooted in domesticitys aggressive underside. What interests Poovey most is how aptly the same formulation that serves Nightingales dynastic ambitions justifies British imperialism.69 I want to suggest that Nightingales ambitions were themselves shaped by the contest between entrepreneurial and professional versions of English middle-class identity. If capitalist ideology depended upon the myth of virtuous feminine self-sacrifice in order (symbolically) to curb capitalist excesses and mask contradictions, then male professionals may be seen to have waged their own struggle for status and power by aligning themselves with the domestic ideal. Throughout the nineteenth century, the meritorious service of a range of professional representationsthe domestic comfort sought by exemplary clergymen such as Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility (1811); the superlative domestic temperament of Dr. Hope in Martineaus Deerbrook (1839); the love bestowed upon pauper children by Kays ideal teacher (1839); the unflagging ministrations of Esthers physician husband in Bleak House (1855); the fatherly guidance of the headmaster in Hughess Tom Browns School Days (1857); and, of course, the sound center of enlightened authority embodied in Arnolds gentleman-civil servants (1869)is not only harmonious with, but also in many respects indistinguishable from, the exemplary domesticity of women.70 In Laqueurs useful terms, the professional critique of capitalism dramatized the incommensurability between domestic women and philistine men of business, while stressing the inherent homology between dedicated professionals and homemakers.71 From the point of view of feminist women such as Nightingale, however, the obvious effect of the professional mans claims to domesticity is to reinstate an homologous order of sexual difference in which womens place is self-evidently subordinate to men. Here is a compelling motive for Nightingales refusal to constitute nursing as a profession, for her insistence that nursing is a secular calling authorized by womans uniquely maternal nature, and for the essentialization of the nurse in every woman in order to establish the authority and remuneration of a specially trained few.72 Within this context Nightingales writings read somewhat differently. In her popular Notes on private nursing, Nightingale asks, Did Nature intend mothers to be always accompanied by doctors? Disease is defined as a reparative process that only natureand not professional Lauren M. E. Goodlad 163

medicinecan cure. Working in active concert with this process, the nurses role is to put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him.73 Such a rhetoric, reminiscent of Spencers evolutionary discourse, allies nursing with a progressive Nature and locates both in the individualist sanctum of the home. It distinctly recalls Harriet Martineaus approach to household education which assures that, in matters of childrearing, Nature may be trusted here, as everywhere. If we have patience to let her work without hindrance and without degradation, shell justify our confidence at last.74 As figurative English mothers, Nightingales trained nurses adopt a comparable approach, beneficently superintending rather than invading private domesticity. By facilitating nature, their ministrationsunlike doctorspromote patients self-help. Nightingale thus appropriates a radically individualist and entrepreneurial rhetoric in order to imbue nursing with a palpable Englishness in contrast to which the activities of medical professionals smack of unnatural and foreign interference, dependence, and functionarism. Indeed, this individualist assault on intrusive male medical authority may well have responded to what Sally Shuttleworth has documented as the increasing degree of medical intervention to which middle-class Victorian women were subject in the years prior to Nightingales Notes.75 To be sure, the Notes stress on discipline provides a basis on which to concur with Poovey that Nightingales ideal society is panoptical: a vision of a classless, hospital-less societya network of middle-class families dominated . . . by women and penetrated and linked by nurses who emanate from training institutions.76 Nevertheless, Poovey makes clear that Nightingale refused the degrading resort to covert surveillance mechanisms, even in the volatile (working-class) context of the military hospital. To the degree, therefore, that Nightingales vision is operatively panoptical, this form of disciplinary mechanism is limited to the training institution. By contrast, the modular relationship between (trained) nurse and patientanalogous to that between ideal mother and family memberis expressly maternalistic rather than panoptical or even official. Supervision in this hospital-less network of middle-class families is, to this extent, visible, naturalized, autonomous, and privateself-consciously modeled upon the Puritan home rather than the Benthamite institution. Moreover, Nightingales training institution even insofar as it employs surveillant disciplinary mechanisms to produce the self-regulatory nurse-as-agentis not (like Arnolds civil service, or Kay-Shuttleworths schools for pauper children) the appendage of a modern bureaucratic State. On the contrary, it is emphatically 164 Historiography and Victorian National Character

the Nightingale Training School, authorized by Nightingales definitive and personal embodiment of the nurses calling and constructed in direct opposition to such debasing alternatives as the professional and state-registered nurse.77 Although the differences I am stressing are partly rhetorical, it is, of course, in and through rhetoric that identity formations take shape and disciplinary relations and practices materialize. Hence, I suggest that the ways in which Nightingales discipline is not panopticalthe insistent contrasts between calling and profession, between home and hospital, between maternity and functionarism, and (after training) the implicit difference between the nurse as self-regulatory agent and panoptical subjectexplain why Nightingales vision was so useful in reconciling the expansion of state and empire with an Englishness that had been predicated on self-government and national as well as domestic insularity. The Nightingale that became a legend in her own time was, in other words, the contemporary of Samuel Smiles rather than the descendant of Bentham.
VI. CONCLUSION

I believe that two related issues are at stake in thus distancing critical study from Foucauldian presuppositions. First, so wide-ranging a contest as that between entrepreneurial and professional polemicsa contest erased by the panoptical focusis of obvious importance to any historiography that examines the constructedness of identity and the perpetual contestedness of underlying ideologies. Second, I believe that a more complicated approach to disciplinary formations is useful to any critical practice. Isolated from Foucauldian emphases, Nightingales hospital-less England epitomizes Puritan domestic autonomy, while her ideal of female-dominated middle-class families reproduces the entrepreneurial domesticity mythologized by Smiles. The calling of the Nightingale-trained nursewhose exemplary function is privately to facilitate natural self-reparationbears the evident impress of English radicalism, religious dissent, and individualist evolutionary theory.78 Nightingale thus suggests a distinctively English rhetoric through which to conceptualize a modern disciplinary society, the genealogy of which is decidedly unlike that theorized by Foucaultneither premised upon the modularity of a panoptical subject position, nor diffused by the establishment of panoptical institutions, the reproduction of panoptical architecture, or the deployment of panoptical mechanisms. I am suggesting the efficacy of a post-Foucauldian historiographic method that springs directly from detailed and expansive models of the Lauren M. E. Goodlad 165

discursive construction of Englishness, a model that responds to the idiosyncrasies of British disciplinary practices and the gradual, reluctant, and uneven emergence of the modern British state. Crucial to this method is the scrutiny of a range of disciplinary paradigms that are distinct from the archetypally modern, rational, and bureaucratic organs of state emphasized by Foucault (for example, prisons, schools, and hospitals). Even more important, this English-focused critical practice must eschew the post-Foucauldian tendency to assume that Victorian Britains privately administered, locally organized, partially reformed, and ad hoc institutions (for example, voluntary societies, charity schools, local improvement commissions, parish officialdom, Methodist churches, and the Salvation Army) are simply analogous to Foucaults modern institutional archetypes.79 Through historiographic work of this kind it might be possible to connect Nightingales entrepreneurial writing of a hospital-less England linked by disciplinary nurse-mothers to the midVictorian operations of the Charity Organization Society (in which middle-class volunteers visited the homes of the poor, pioneering the case study method of inquiry into the causes of poverty); to the Fabian professionalization of this individuating technique and Fabian efforts to revise and implement institutional discipline; to the mid-twentiethcentury establishment as well as the recent Thatcherite disestablishmentof the welfare state. 80 What is absent from this formulation is, of course, a detailed account of the modernizing transformationsor epistemological shiftsthat are implicit in such developments. This important object is undertaken by Pooveys Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 18301864 (1995), which elucidates the nineteenth-century conditions that laid the groundwork for mass culture while offering a critique of Foucaults influence.81 Looking beyond the identity categories and ideological analyses of previous studies (including her own), Poovey repudiates the implication that identity is always more decisive than are questions about how social authority is distributed . . . and what, at any given moment constitutes the true. The ultimate purpose of this deliberate critical revision is to generate an historical epistemology that explodes New Historicisms totalization of power.82 The problem with this estimable effort, however, is the difficulty of moving beyond a study of ideological construction that is as yet incomplete. While the merits of stressing questions about . . . what, at any given moment constitutes the true are evident, the task, nevertheless, depends upon the prior identification of a dominant core of truthmaking discourses. Thus, Pooveys highly abstract model of nineteenth166 Historiography and Victorian National Character

century epistemologywhich centers on the disaggregation of a social domain from its political and economic alternativesis, on the one hand, fascinating and important and, on the other, fundamentally constrained by the incompletion of the critical project that preceded it.83 Consider, for example, Pooveys deliberate epistemological focus on dominant rather than oppositional discourses: an example she offers is the privileging of Chadwicks dominant Sanitary Report over the oppositional working-class responses it evoked.84 By assuming that certain textssuch as those by Benthamite-influenced reformersare the self-evidently dominant artifacts of epistemological study, Poovey reproduces the defects of an insufficiently inclusive model of middleclass and national identity. For example, although Chadwicks 1842 Sanitary Report was well-read and even notorious, it was not until 1848, after a series of additional reports, that a Public Health Act was passed. The central Board of Health thereby constituted was insufficiently empowered to implement any of Chadwicks chief designs. His efforts to provide constant water supply, drain public sewage, regulate burial practices, and contain cholera failed utterly. Chadwick became personally embroiled in battles with local tradesmen and politicians, Radical M. P.s (including John Bright), London notables such as Sir Benjamin Hall, influential figures in journalism such as John Walter of The Times, and medical and engineering professionals including the celebrated George Stephenson. By the time he was dismissed in 1854, he was, according to Raymond Williams, the most hated man in England.85 The Board of Health was completely dismantled just four years later, after which Chadwick retired from public service. Although Chadwicks influence in the long run is unquestionable, it was not until the last decade of the nineteenth century and, in several instances, not until much later that the large part of Chadwicks sanitary idea was implemented.86 It is also important to consider that, in contrast to the New Poor Law, the Public Health Act was not likely to generate predictable divisions between middle-class support and working-class opposition. On the contrary, sanitary legislation (unlike Poor Law reform) was perceived as benefiting the poor and disenfranchised, while taxing the governing classes and interfering with their local and individual autonomy. Hence, working-class opposition to sanitary legislation seems to have been vastly overshadowed by the debate within the rate-paying classes. Why, then, does a far-reaching and scrupulous scholar such as Poovey hasten to identify Chadwicks Sanitary Report with dominant epistemological Lauren M. E. Goodlad 167

changes, while dismissing the vehement middle-class campaign that opposed, crippled, and partially abrogated the Public Health Act of 1848? The answer to this and other comparable questions indicates the degree to which Pooveys assumptions are based on the same totalizing theoretical paradigm from which she claims emphatically to break.
VII. AFTERWORD: THE CONTEMPORANEITY OF VICTORIAN NATIONAL CHARACTER

If more complicated models of national identity can make us better historiographers, they can also demonstrate the urgent contemporaneity of critical de-familiarization. While I was drafting my analysis of Smiless contribution to mid-Victorian ideological contests, the right-wing Institute of Economic Affairs in Britain issued the latest reprint of Self-Help, describing it as a universal lodestar for the next millennium.87 More surprising, perhaps, than the Cornhills 1862 opposition between the Thamess useful virility and the Seines whimsical femininity, is the BBCs 1996 opposition between the interior calm of the new British Library and the lavish exterior display of its French counterpart.88 Rhetorical appeals to Victorian individualism and the class and national identities it underwrote have been and, of course, remain crucial to dismantling public education and welfare, privatizing industry, resisting the Europeanization of Britain, and mobilizing an anti-PC backlash that has seriously eroded the position of women and minorities. The 1997 devolution to Scotland and Wales prompted the Times Literary Supplement to ponder The End of Britain?, noting that an encircling European girdlethat is, increasing hostility towards the E. C.has made the U. K. safe for nationalist separatism within the British Isles.89 Such developments suggest that at least until such time as the discursive constituents of Englishness have been more fully documented, the project of de-familiarizing the past, and tracing its duration in mythologies of the present, must continue. This project demands rigorous historicization and methodological critique. With these ends in mind, I look forward to a critical practice that neither capitulates to the teleological and essentializing tendencies identified by recent criticism, nor eludes those dangers by recourse to abstraction. University of Washington

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NOTES I want to thank Srinivas Aravamudan, George Behlmer, Kathleen Blake, Pauline Brooks, Marshall Brown, Tim Dean, Cindy Eisenberg, Pam Morris, Bruce Robbins, Mark Sammons, and Henry Staten for their valuable comments and encouragement. Research for this paper was supported by the Mellon Foundation and the University of Washingtons Royalty Research Fund. A condensed version of this paper was delivered at Liverpool John Moores University, whose students and faculty generously offered many helpful suggestions. 1 Perrys exclusive focus on literary texts, with its corresponding implication that nonliterary texts do not respond comparably to critical pressure, is not elaborated. My own sense of criticism can be understood more broadly as cultural analysis. See Ruth Perry, De-Familiarizing the Family; or, Writing Family History from Literary Sources, MLQ 55 (1994): 42025. 2 By Foucauldian I refer primarily to the genealogical work on disciplinarity as it is developed in Discipline and Punish (1977) and contemporaneous essays. Foucaults later works on governmentality differ substantially but, thus far, have exerted far less influence over Victorian studies. For the Victorianist scholar, Foucaults genealogical disciplinary model poses at least two problems. First, his account of modern (Western) institutional subjectivity is, by and large, indifferent to and even suspicious of the differences typically invoked to mark off Victorian Britain as a field of study in contradistinction to post-Enlightenment Western Europe. Secondly, culture, the use of which, in this context, derives from such Marxist theorists as Gramsci and Raymond Williams, has neither an integral place nor an adequate correlative in Foucaults method of analysis. Rather than acknowledge culture, either as the site of ideological contest, or as the medium of everyday life, Foucault asks us to consider modern power as, initially, crystallized within architectural structures (that constitute certain power relations); gradually disseminated through intangible networks (infra-laws, micro-powers, and others); and, ultimately, inscribed in human subjectivities. Throughout this essay I identify just a few of the problems that occur when studies of Victorian culture tacitly conform to the Foucauldian paradigm. 3 My reference is to the well-known two nations passage as well as to the subtitle of Disraelis novel Sybil. 4 Following Linda Colley, I speak, for the moment, of British rather than English national identity; but the difference between the two is itself a subject meriting sustained critical attention. Colley focuses on Britishness because her study addresses the ways in which hostility towards a foreign, dissimilar, and Catholic enemy proved to be the essential cement between Britons in the years between the 1707 Act of Union (joining Scotland to England and Wales) and the beginning of Victorias reign. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 17011837 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992), 19. Philip Dodd, by contrast, examines an Englishness that was consolidated in the wake of the reformed Oxbridge culture of the 1860s. Predicated upon essentialized differences between an English core and its Celtic peripheries, this version of Englishness offered subordinated groups within the United Kingdom a unique place within the national culture in exchange for quiescence. See Philip Dodd, Englishness and the National Culture, in Englishness: Politics and Culture, 18801920, ed. Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 322. In contrast to such nuanced distinctions, I use either Englishness or Britishness interchangeably in this essay, depending upon the preference of the writer under consideration.

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Colley, 5. The term social economy is found in the writings of Samuel Laing, whose earlyVictorian travel writing is discussed below. Conceived as a distinct science, and productive of national character, Laings social economy would include construction of the social body, institutions for the administration of law, police, civil, military and ecclesiastical affairs, and the principles on which all this social machinery should be constructed (Laing, Notes of a Traveller, on the Social and Political State of France, Prussia, Switzerland, Italy and Other Parts of Europe, During the Present Century [London: Longman, 1842], 10). Hereafter cited parenethetically in the text and abbreviated N. Elsewhere, Laing explicitly states that [i]t is not in the human animal, but in the circumstances in which he is placed that national character derives (N, 60; my emphasis). 7 Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in MidVictorian England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), 109110. 8 On the theory of the Norman Yoke see Christopher Hill, The Norman Yoke, in Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution in the 17th Century (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958), 57. In an essay on Ivanhoe, a novel deeply engaged in producing Englishness as a synthesis between incompatible Norman and Saxon cultures, Michael Ragussis identifies the Norman Conquest as the key event through which ideology regularly enters and shapes the writing of English history, from the seventeenth century through the end of the Victorian period and beyond (Writing Nationalist History: England, The Conversion of the Jews, and Ivanhoe, ELH 60 [1993]: 196). For an example of the deployment of the Yoke reading of history in arguments for the un-Englishness and un-Constitutionality of centralizing reforms see Joshua Toulmin Smiths Local Self-Government and Centralization (London: Longman, 1851). 9 The perceived singularity of British imperialism is neatly epitomized by the opening line of Keiths 1937 history of colonial India: It was the aim of the greatest among the early British administrators in India to train the people of India to govern and protect themselves . . . rather than to establish the rule of a British bureaucracy (quoted in Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993], 14; my emphasis). 10 See David Roberts, who argues that the British central government of 1833 did little besides administer justice, collect taxes, and defend the realm, rarely touching the lives of ordinary individuals and showing little concern for their well-being. See Roberts, Victorian Origins of the British Welfare State (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960). John Brewer, however, has argued for the formidability of the fiscal-military state that financed and administered British war efforts during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State (New York: Knopf, 1988). Pat Thane argues persuasively that the eighteenth-century British state had the will and the capacity to influence the lives of its citizens in a variety of ways, but adds that it did so by methods markedly less visible than those of its European counterparts. Thane goes on to attribute the distinctive liberality of English government partly to Englands strong indigenous tradition of attachment to liberty (Government and Society in England and Wales, 17501914 in The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 3 vols. [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990], 3:5). Derek Frasers catalogue of the activities adopted by the British state prior to 1870 suggests a pattern of substantial government growth during the early and midnineteenth century (The Evolution of the British Welfare State, 2nd ed. [Houndmills:
6

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Macmillan, 1984], 11011). Although Roberts clearly overstates his case, the basic thrust of his argument remains appropriate. It is undisputed, for example, that the French Ministry of the Interior was employing more than 200,000 officials in the 1830s just a few years after the British Home Office was making do with 29 (Roberts, 1214). In 1832, the entire British civil service numbered 21,300, while in 1846 its French counterpart numbered just under a million. Indeed, even as late as 1911, after the considerable government expansion of the late-nineteenth century, the total number of British civil servants was only 172,000; see Harold J. Schultz, History of England, 3rd ed. (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1980), 297; Roberts, 1213; and Thane, 57. 11 Thomas Carlyle, Latter Day Pamphlets (1850), in Carlyles Works: Centennial Memorial Edition, 26 vols. (Boston: Dana Estes, 1904), 20:173. 12 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (1873), ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 116. In the 1840s Mill published two lengthy reviews of Democracy in America in the Westminster Review, both of which further illuminate Tocquevilles profound influence on him. 13 [Mill], Armand Carrel, his Life and Character, Westminster Review 28:6 (Oct. 1837): 71. 14 Mill, Utilitarianism and Other Essays, ed. Jack Ryan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 157. 15 Harriet Martineau, Society in America, 2 vols. (London: Sanders & Otley, 1837), 1:32 (offer to), 33 (It is absurd). 16 Herbert Spencer, The Proper Sphere of Government. Reprint of a Series of Letters originally published in the Nonconformist (1842; rpt., London: W. Brittain, 1843), 5. 17 Smith, 1011. 18 See note 6. 19 Laing closes his travelers commentary with a request that readers consider the following conclusion in social economy (N, 496): If we fairly consider the social condition of the continental man of whatever class . . . we find him, body and soul, a slave. His . . . personal bodily and mental action in the use of property, in the exercise of his industry and talents, in his education, his religion, his laws, his doings, thinkings, readings, talkings in public or private affairs, are fitted on him by his master, the state, like clothing on a convict (N, 496). This dire representation of Continental slaves is offered in direct contrast to the individual free-agency enjoyed by even the lowliest of Britons (N, 6465). 20 G. Kitson-Clark, An Expanding Society: Britain, 18301900 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), 18182. 21 These include the Factory Acts, the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, and the Public Health Act of 1848, as well as initiatives in education and policing. Although the specific details vary, in each case opposition to government interference, centralization, and expense resulted in ineffective legislation, particularly as a result of inadequate inspection and enforcement provisions. For thorough analyses, see Fraser; Oliver MacDonagh, Early Victorian Government, 18301870 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1977); and William C. Lubenow, The Politics of Government Growth: Early Victorian Attitudes Toward State Intervention, 18331848 (Devon: David & Charles, 1971). 22 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 88. 23 Harold Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society (London: Ark, 1985), 22130. 24 Spencer, Proper Sphere, 5. Indeed, Spencers early-Victorian commitment to

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competition as the agent of human progress became increasingly evident as his evolutionary theories developed, reminding us that it was Spencer (and not Darwin) who coined the phrase survival of the fittest. See, for example, Social Statics (1851) in which Spencer posits the eventual evolution of a utopian state in which government functions will be superseded entirely by the social individual: an individual . . . hav[ing] such desires only, as may be fully satisfied without trenching upon the ability of other individuals to obtain like satisfaction (Social Statics [London: John Chapman, 1851], 6162). Nevertheless, as Tim Gray has demonstrated, in later works, as Spencer witnessed the gradual rise of state intervention, his evolutionary theories began to contradict and diverge from, rather than justify, his staunchly liberal principles. Whereas the early works I have described maintain that individual autonomy produces evolutionary progress, the later works tend to favor the evolutionary development of ideal self-governing capabilities, even at the expense of certain peoples individual liberties; see Tim Gray, Herbert Spencers Liberalism, in Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Professional Thought and Practice, ed. Richard Bellamy (London: Routledge, 1990), 11030. 25 Perkin, Professional Society: England Since 1880 (London: Routledge, 1989), xii. Although a fuller consideration of Perkins theory of professionalisma theory that continues to prevail todayis beyond the scope of this essay, his basic premises are worth recapitulating. According to Perkin, Professionalism differed from land and capital as an organizing principle of social structure in not being confined to the few . . . Based on human capital and specialized expertise, it could become as extensive as there were human beings capable of skilled and specialized service. . . . The ownership of human capital was thus capable, at least in theory, of reaching much further down the social structure . . . and was thus able to transform society not from the top down but from within. Instead of the horizontal layers we call classes in vertical conflict with one another, the new society would be constructed on a different principle, of professional career hierarchies rearing up alongside one another . . . each in competition to persuade society to yield as much power, prestige and income as it could win. (Perkin, Professional Society, xiixiii) W. D. Rubinstein offers a very different interpretation, arguing that Britains was never fundamentally an industrial and manufacturing economy; rather, it was always, even at the height of the industrial revolution, essentially a commercial, financial, and service-based economy whose comparative advantage always lay with commerce and finance (Capitalism, Culture and Decline in Britain 17501990 [London: Routledge, 1993], 24). Although the implications of this thesis are many and varied, Rubinstein nevertheless describes a transfer of resources and entrepreneurial energies into other forms of business life (Rubinstein, 24; my emphasis). Rubinstein thus offers an alternative basis of historical support for the middle-class ideological contest I describe in this essay. 26 Perkin, Professional Society, xii; my emphasis. 27 Joshua Toulmin Smith, the ardent individualist described above, was, for example, a constitutional lawyer. Engineers such as the celebrated George Stephenson were eulogized by entrepreneurial writers such as Samuel Smiles. Nevertheless, in this

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essay I follow Perkin in minimizing distinctions between private professionals and professional employees of the Victorian state. Although any complete analysis of middle-class identities must explore potential incompatibilities between various professional sectors, the general arguments I offer here do not require it. 28 Samuel Smiles, Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859; Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866), 4041 (indomitable); 18 (spirit of self-help). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text and abbreviated S. 29 See Michael Cotsell, Politics and Peeling Frescoes: Layard of Ninevah and Little Dorrit, Dickens Studies Annual 15 (1986): 19, n. 15. 30 W. D. Rubinstein defines the Old Corruption as the widespread use of pensions, sinecures, and gratuitous emoluments granted to persons whom the British government . . . wished to bribe, reward or buy (Rubinstein, The End of Old Corruption in Britain, 17801860, Past and Present 101 [1983]: 55). These excessive forms of patronage remained more or less intact until the mid-Victorian civil service overhaul that was precipitated partly by the blunders to which Smiles alludes. 31 Jennifer Hart demonstrates that reform agitation originated in the context of trade depression in the late 1840s with the express intention of decreasing taxation on industry and income; see Hart The Genesis of the Northcote-Trevelyan Report, in Studies in the Growth of Nineteenth-Century Government, ed. Gillian Sutherland, (Totowa: Rowman, 1972), 6869; 72. 32 Perkin, Professional Society, 47 (dislike); quoted in Thane, 29 (efficiency); see also Thane, 3637. 33 Smiless entrepreneurial critique of the Northcote-Trevelyan Report is anticipated in a treatise issued by a committee of independent London businessmen in 1854. The Reports emphasis on university education, they insist, is intended to strengthen the element of gentlemen in the public service (Hart, 71). Harts study of the Report concludes that while the origin of civil service reform was a desire for economy and efficiency (of the sort Smiles would be likely to approve), implementation of NorthcoteTrevelyan proposals was secured within a context of increasing interest in public service careers for prosperous middle-class sons (or precisely the sort of genteel occupation derided by Smiles) (Hart, 8081). It is important to remember that Northcote and Trevelyans 1854 recommendations on civil service reform were only gradually and unsystematically implemented. The English civil service at this timerecruited through upper-class patronage and organized by means of a narrow system of seniority within individual departmentswas so very unlike a rationalized modern bureaucracy that the most prestigious Home Office positions were those in departments with the most ancient (and routine) responsibilitiesfor example, correspondence between the queen and her subjects. Conversely, the lowest status (and pay) were in the recently added criminal affairs department, even though this modern office offered the greatest potential for demonstrating the specialized expertise of Perkins mature middle-class professional ideal. Because the most coveted positions consequently involved mechanical (clerical) labor, Sir James Stephen, himself a civil servant, anticipated Smiles when he opined that the qualities of selfreliance, self-possession, promptitude, address, resource, hopefulness and courage, shown by the most successful graduates of the two ancient universities, were gifts illsuited and even inconvenient to one who is entombed for life as a clerk in a Public Office on Downing Street (quoted in Jill Pellew, The Home Office, 18481914: from Clerks to Bureaucrats [London: Heinemann, 1982], 913). 34 Quoted in Perkin, Professional Society, 83.

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D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), x. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 1819. 37 Armstrong, 18. 38 Armstrong, 18. 39 See, for example, Millers reading of Bleak House, esp. 1034. 40 For example, Lee Patterson argues that the Foucauldian model of dominance and subordination . . . allow[s] for no external purchase that might make possible a reformation or even reversal of power relations (Literary History in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995). The result, he continues, is historical accounts that tend to drain the heterogeneity and conflict out of culture, and with them the possibility of change (Patterson, 261). See also the introduction to Michel Foucault: A Critical Reader, intro. and ed. David Couzens Hoy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 125. 41 On the ideology of separate spheres, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 17801850 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987). Elsewhere Hall clarifies that while the late eighteenthcentury individual was constructed as non-gendered, its meanings depended on a series of dualisms and gendered assumptions (The Economy of Intellectual Prestige: Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and the Case of Governor Eyre, Cultural Critique 12 [1989]: 170). Although Laings non-gendered individual also relies upon such assumptions, his construction of Englishness nevertheless militates towards a different and differently gendered binarism than that usually associated with separate spheres ideology. 42 Martineau, Society in America, 2:233; see also Martineau, Household Education (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1849), 15556. On the eighteenth-century shift from homologous to incommensurable modes of sexual difference and its relation to scientific theories of the reproductive body, see Thomas Laqueur, Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology, in The Making of the Modern Body, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), 141. The homologous sexual difference that characterizes the pre-Enlightenment period is a difference of degree apart from which men and women remain essentially comparable. By contrast, the incommensurable sexual difference that attends postEnlightenment societys intensive interest in womens unique reproductive functions posits male and female essences that are fundamentally unlike. 43 Martineau, Society in America, 2:104 (female and superintendence), 248 (performance and interference in personal matters). 44 Quoted in Harriet Martineau on Women, ed. Gayle Graham Yates (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1985), 117. 45 Martineaus urgent resort to the state is partly a response to W. R. Gregs infamous 1862 protest against the economic independence of middle-class women. Implicitly defining women as non-entrepreneurial individuals, Greg argues that their natural condition is a dependent state in which they complete, sweeten, and embellish the existence of (436) men in exchange for material support. Interestingly, in order to preclude the fatal effects of womens artificial employment, Greg, like Martineau, resorts to the state, urging that the government oversee emigration of redundant women to the colonies where wives are in short supply. See W. R. Greg, Why are Women Redundant?, National Review 14 (April 1862): 43460. 46 See John Gibbons, J. S. Mill, liberalism, and progress, in Victorian Liberalism, 1012.
36

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47 Poovey, Uneven Developments, 9 (the persistence and apparently . . .), 11 (sexualized, susceptible, and fallen). Pooveys work, implicitly Gramscian, operates on the theoretical premise that focal images such as the domestic woman indicate arena[s] of ideological construction rather than simple consolidation (Uneven Developments, 9). 48 See Poovey, Uneven Developments, 911. 49 Poovey, Uneven Developments, 115. 50 Poovey, Uneven Developments, 116. 51 Poovey, Uneven Developments, 122. 52 Poovey, Uneven Developments, 120. 53 Poovey, Uneven Developments, 122; my emphasis. 54 Poovey, Uneven Developments, 122; my emphasis. 55 Poovey, Uneven Developments, 122. 56 Poovey, Uneven Developments, 115. 57 Benthams philosophical premises are, of course, riddled with contradiction. On the one hand, he assumes a natural harmony of interests on which grounds he endorses laissez-faire economic practice. On the other, he calls for legislative or tutelary devices to reconcile artificially the competing interests of individuals in a way that benefits the greatest number. As Stephen Conway explains, Bentham was from first to last and above all else, a utilitarian, able to explain that coercion by government was an undesirable evil, while holding that so long as such evil was employed for the production . . . of more than equivalent good then it was acceptable (Bentham and the Nineteenth-Century Revolution, Victorian Liberalism, 75). For another elucidation of this paradox, see Fraser, 114. 58 Arnold, Democracy, in Culture and Anarchy, 1213. 59 My references are to Tocquevilles Democracy in America (1835), Martineaus Society in America, Mills On Liberty (1859), and Dickenss American Notes (1842) and Martin Chuzzlewit (184344). Arnolds offensive strategy directly counters the entrepreneurial idealizations of the United States as a cheap, well-governed country. Such representations proliferated in mid-century tracts favoring administrative retrenchment; see Hart, 7071. 60 Successful businessmen such as the Cheerybles of Nicholas Nickleby spend more time dispensing profits than earning them. The more typical Dickens benefactor (for example, Brownlow of Oliver Twist or Jarndyce of Bleak House) draws upon an independent income, the source of which is never clearly specified. 61 The quotation is from Twemlow, a character who at the close Our Mutual Friend offers a democratic definition of the gentleman that the novel (particularly in its representation of Bradley Headstone) fails to stabilize. 62 George Eliot, Middlemarch (1870) (Harmondworth: Penguin, 1994), 552; my emphasis. 63 The classic argument is, of course, by Karl Marx in Capital, Vol. I (1867), trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International, 1963), esp. 35142. 64 Eliots novel recalls Unto this Last (1860), Ruskins controversial critique of political economy. More radical than Eliots professional revision of middle-class entrepreneurial practice, Ruskin attempts to professionalize (and thus to de-proletarianize) all labor, arguing that The natural and right system respecting all labour is, that it should be paid at a fixed rate, but the good workman employed, and the bad workman unemployed (Unto this Last and Other Writings [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985], 174). Although the fundamental transformation Ruskin envisions applies to all forms of labor, most of the examples Ruskin uses to undermine competitive logic are drawn from the middle-

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class professions, where a longstanding tradition militates towards the set fee (fixed rate) rather than the competitive wage. For example, We do not sell our primeministership by Dutch auction; nor, on the decease of a bishop . . . do we (yet) offer his diocese to the clergyman who will take the episcopacy at the lowest contract. . . . [S]ick, we do not inquire for a physician who takes less than a guinea, litigious, we never think of reducing six-and-eightpence to four and sixpence (173). Ruskins privileging of a fee system is also interesting in relation to Middlemarch. Tertius Lydgates attempt to supplant the extant practice of selling drugs to patients rather than collecting a fee for a medical consultation is, of course, a move away from early linkages between medicine and trade, and towards modern medicines rigorous professionalization. 65 Poovey, Uneven Developments, 166. 66 Poovey, Uneven Developments, 18889. 67 Poovey, Uneven Developments, 16970. 68 See Asa Briggs, Victorian People (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972), 60. 69 Poovey, Uneven Developments, 17893. 70 Dr. James Phillips Kay, The Training of Pauper Children: A Report Published by the Poor Law Commissioners in their Fourth Report (London: William Claves and Sons, 1839), 30. 71 That homology is occasionally made explicit in mid-Victorian fiction. For example, describing the non-threatening role of male clergymen in the predominantly female and domestic society of Gaskells Cranford, Shirley Foster cites an unusual moment in an 1867 novel by Sewell. An unconventional female character shocks the respectable narrator by describing the clergy as a race which is neither male nor female. See Shirley Foster, Victorian Womens Fiction: Marriage, Freedom and the Individual (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 169 and n. 78, 184. 72 See Poovey, Uneven Developments, n. 40, 243; 19293. 73 Quoted in Poovey, Uneven Developments, 18788. 74 Martineau, Household Education, 177. 75 Shuttleworth documents physicians increasing tendency to describe female physiology as inherently unstable, justifying the need to prescribe invasive and painful treatments (Female Circulation: Medical Discourse and Popular Advertising in the Mid-Victorian Era, in Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, ed. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth [New York: Routledge, 1990], 47 68). In a more recent essay, Poovey elaborates on the efforts of early-Victorian medical professionals to legitimate their authority over sanitary reform at the expense of other possible contendersfor example, clergymen, men of letters, and mothers. Southwood Smiths 1835 attempt to rhetorically eliminate mothers, and thereby establish the expertise of doctors as the ultimate authority in childcare, anticipates the mid-Victorian contests over domestic authority I am now describing; see Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 18301864 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), 4142; n. 51, 192. 76 Poovey, Uneven Developments, 192. 77 Poovey, Uneven Developments, 183; 19293. Additional insights into Nightingales entrepreneurial writing of domesticity are found in Cassandra (1852), a proto-feminist and semi-autobiographical narrative in which Nightingale argues against parental interference, deprecates complacent surveillance, and encourages independence; see Florence Nightingale, Cassandra (New York: Feminist Press, 1979), especially 2729. 78 Even Nightingales colonial stance, in ways that anticipate Keiths mode of characterizing the distinctive qualities of Brittanic imperial rule (see above note 9),

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bears the impress of her ideological and rhetorical commitments to entrepreneurial individualism. Nightingale supported bills for Indian self-government and local education; see Constance B. Schuyler, Introduction, Notes on Nursing (London: Harrison, 1859; rpt., Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1992), 9. 79 In an essay on early-Victorian Unitarian philanthropy (influential for writers such as Martineau, Nightingale, Dickens, and Gaskell as well as reformers such as Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth and Dr. Southwood Smith), Howard M. Wach notes that With municipal structures as yet inadequate to the tasks, the cultural matrix of religious arguments and voluntarist organizations often provided the first sustained response to newly perceived social dilemmas (Unitarian Philanthropy and Cultural Hegemony in Comparative Perspective: Manchester and Boston, 18271848, Journal of Social History 23 [1993]: 1517). Charitable and voluntary organizations, Wach suggests, were among those institutions through which that thorniest question of . . . how best to conceive of and organize an incipient mass urban society (17) was approached in a highly contested civic culture. 80 Established in 1869 in order to rationalize philanthropic aid of the poor in London, the Charity Organization Society thrived until 1913. As Fraser notes, while COS casestudy methods were professionally pioneering, its ideology was reactionary and the organization became one of the staunchest defenders of the self-help individualist ethic long after [that ethic] had been [widely] challenged, see Fraser 13031. I discuss the COS and the Fabians in a forthcoming essay, Character and Pastorship in Two British Sociological Traditions. 81 Poovey, Making a Social Body, 4. Athough she does not directly name Foucault as the object of her critique, Poovey situates her thesis in contrast to New Historicist representations of modern power as a totalizing force in which the distinctively modern form of power/knowledge subsumes potential opposition by proliferating ever more differentiated versions of itself. Poovey acknowledges this influence in some of her earlier work, but proceeds to argue that no theoretical position that credits modernity with totalization is adequate to the historical record (14). 82 Poovey, Making a Social Body, 3 (that identity), 18 (historical and totalization). 83 At the end of Uneven Developments, Poovey encourages scholars to attend to the interrelations of the identity categories she has examined. For example, If we could chart . . . the changing prominence of symbolic and institutional representations of gender in relation to other determinants, we could produce a history of ideological formulations that might help us understand the impetus behind and resistances to change in ways our old histories have failed to do (200). 84 Poovey, Making a Social Body, 18. 85 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 17901950 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983), 94. 86 The events I refer to are well documented in S. E. Finer, The Life and Times of Edwin Chadwick (London: Methuen, 1952); R. A. Lewis, Edwin Chadwick and the Public Health Movement (London: Longmans, 1952); and MacDonaghs Early Victorian Government; among other works. 87 David Hill, Self-Help, The Observer, 25 August 1996. My thanks to Adrian Mellor for bringing this article to my attention. 88 The Frenchman in London, Cornhill 6 (JulyDecember 1862): 72. The Cornhill quotation reads, It is not difficult to discern the essential characters of the chief European capitals in the streams by which they are traversed . . . The Seine is graceful,

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whimsical, and so to speak, feminine. She seems as if she ran for her own amusement as if she were given to adorn and entertain the city than to be useful to it . . . The charm of the Thames lies in its usefulness; its pride is to forward business. . . . Strong and eager, . . . virile not feminine, the Thames is an image of the life of London itself (72). My thanks to Pam Morris for this reference. The descriptions of the British and French libraries were aired during a televised BBC newscast on the opening of the Mitterand Library (at which time the long-delayed but less costly addition to the British Library had not yet been completed). 89 Vernon Bogdanor, The End of Britain? Sceptred isleor isles?, Times Literary Supplement, 26 September 1997, 56. Bogdanor argues that globalization is strengthening traditional allegiances as well as longstanding antipathies to the Continent.

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