Hatred & Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England

Duncan is the hero of A Philanthropic Misanthrope, an oddly named novel by “Joseph Somebody.” Hackneyed and predictable, the work is a moral fable for the 1850s, long before the corporate scandals rocking us today. The moment Somebody tests his protagonist, Duncan’s family dies with alarming rapidity, his sister Ada collapsing first, followed swiftly by both parents. This is but the start of Duncan’s decline and embitterment, yet three hundred pages later justice prevails: the villain, John Stubbs, dies in gratifying pain (someone else’s horse and carriage run him over repeatedly), and the well-heeled doctor marries Louise, his sweetheart, whose “gentle, humanising influence” restores his goodwill. “In time Louise convinced her beloved husband that his misanthropy was only theoretical, that it was merely the hatred of all that was bad, and mean, and dishonourable in mankind, but not a hatred of mankind itself” (346–47).

Now languishing in the rare books section of the British Library, A Philanthropic Misanthrope seems an unlikely representative for Victorian culture. In truth, it’s closer to a caricature of the period’s piety, and thus a point of departure for this book. Still, the novel sums up ideas that many Victorians inherited and transformed: Love cancels misanthropy, and extreme hatred is a pathology marking a character for death. Later examples will confound this picture, compromising writers and challenging intellectuals by putting their characters in more complex light. But the sentiment flourishing at the end of Somebody’s novel recurs in popular nineteenth-century fiction, and it clouds many assessments of the Victorians today.

Take Lord Macaulay, the nineteenth-century liberal historian, who proudly declared, “The public mind of England has softened while it has ripened, and … we have, in the course of ages, become, not only a wiser, but also a kinder people.” “The more we study the annals of the past,” he added, in a Whiggish claim for progress favoring Victorian society over its 1685 counterpart, “the more shall we rejoice that we live in a merciful age, in an age in which cruelty is abhorred, and in which pain, even when deserved, is inflicted reluctantly and from a sense of duty.”²

True to Macaulay’s hope, we rarely label the Victorians people-haters. We know them better for creating charities and philanthropic organizations, for writing some of our best novels about society, and for upholding what Samuel Smiles, in his midcentury best-seller Self-Help, enshrined as Victorian values—duty, thrift, and self-sacrifice. These values allegedly kindled devotion to family, neighborly regard, and love of nation, building on Burke’s now-famous statement that loving “the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.”³ In sermons and conduct manuals, in journalism and fiction, the Victorians praised these sentiments so highly that our first instinct might be to dismiss the term Victorian hatred as contradictory.

Hatred and Civility shows that doing so would be inaccurate and unwise. Examining rare and well-known works that cast the nineteenth century in a darker light, this study asks whether the Victorians actually were ardently sociable, much less consistently moral and philanthropic, and what happened to individuals who defied or even mocked their ideals. As we’ll see, Macaulay’s fructifying metaphors (“the public mind … has softened while it has ripened”) could anticipate a fine national harvest only if the fruit did not go bad or include too many rotten apples.

Numerous Victorians believed “public affections” and “love [of] mankind” could trounce moral evil. But like those whose obsession with cleanliness compels them to unearth more and more dirt, they were preoccupied by hatred and anxious to eliminate it. Some bewailed “the great mystery” of turpitude, fretting, “We cannot be in the enjoyment of good without the knowledge of evil.”⁴ Others realized that “hatred of the old murderous kind” is not, as “so many of our instructors would have us believe[,] … entirely obsolete—killed by education, and intelligence, and what is known as ‘deeper sympathy.”’⁵ Sly and unsettling, this last idea jeopardizes many contrary expectations. Indeed, the author of this 1890 article added, “There is nothing in intelligence of itself to extinguish hate …, and to understand [it] accurately may only make you understand more clearly the hatefulness of the person hated.”⁶ Boding poorly for society, these remarks let gifted writers rethink existing values and assumptions. Novelists like George Moore gauged the benefit—and the price—of belonging to a community, and Moore concluded the price was too high. “Oh, vile, filthy, and hypocritical century,” he announced in Confessions of a Young Man, “I at least scorn you.”⁷

These examples not only point to recurring social concerns in the nineteenth century but also indicate how difficult it is to generalize about this era; a subtler, even piecemeal approach is necessary. Making matters more complex, the adjective Victorian has different connotations for conservatives and liberals today, who use their associations to buttress arguments they favor and to dismiss those they don’t. Whereas a conservative historian like Gertrude Himmelfarb praises the Victorians for their dignity and self-control, wishing Britons and North Americans today would emulate them,⁸ liberal scholars cite Michel Foucault’s influential claim that nineteenth-century society was adept at punishing miscreants, enforcing norms, and regulating desire.⁹ How, then, could misanthropes and others voice their dissent and vent their spleen? Taking issue with both sets of critics, this book shows that hatred escapes regulation in many literary and cultural texts, forging visions of individual freedom more imaginative than Foucauldians and conservatives generally admit.

Examining the Victorians’ varied, often contradictory responses to hatred and misanthropy, this introduction explains how many of them challenged orthodox medical, psychiatric, theological, and philosophical judgments, especially about vexed but fascinating links between satisfaction and sociability. Those links in fact recur throughout this book. My introduction also revisits key debates from previous centuries, when secular alternatives to theological discussion of evil took hold and philosophers wrangled over the difference between abstract and practical hatred of humanity.

The Victorians interpreted these arguments in ways as dynamic as the culture they inhabited and produced. Casting society as the best judge of moral evil and communities as a fine way of fulfilling individual needs, many of them nevertheless pathologized misanthropy so dramatically that a journalist could argue in 1901, with some justification, that the time when one could “be a ‘good hater’ ha[d] ceased.”¹⁰ “Hatred of certain causes and principles we have everywhere treated,” the author conceded, “but individual, personified enmity, intense enough to last a lifetime, and bending all the events of existence to its malignant will, is employed very charily nowadays in literary or dramatic work[s].”¹¹ Apparently, misanthropy died with Queen Victoria, leaving the Edwardians queasy about hatred, an emotion whose appearance in literature could “shock [them] as bad art.”¹² Though one need only glance at my epilogue to find holes in this argument, the status of misanthropy changed dramatically in the Victorian era, and the following pages explain why.

Misanthropes in all ages deserve our respect, but heroism is not their goal. As persons “who distrust … men and avoid … their society,”¹³ they share several traits. For starters, they are more often antisocial than asocial, so differing from hermits, prophets, and those practicing autarky—complete self-sufficiency. But although misanthropes aspire to be independent, their ornery behavior and pride in judging humanity often defeat this end, bringing them into volatile contact with the failings they abhor. Moore and others didn’t hide their contempt when calling humanity “despicable vermin” (186); they published it.

The ensuing strain touches on psychology and philosophy. As truculent idealists, misanthropes are society’s conscience and scold. Like revolutionaries, they question what we expect from other people; unlike revolutionaries, they can’t stand other people.¹⁴ Dismissing the idea of harmonious coexistence, misanthropes scorn fellow feeling, to say nothing of loyalty, conformity, and altruism. Ignoring Enlightenment philosophers who claimed that humans rationally would pursue pleasurable activities, many nineteenth-century misanthropes realized they would experience more happiness spoiling other people’s. “Who believes in philanthropy nowadays?” asks Moore. “We are weary of being good. … Humanity be hanged!” (136, 126, 185).

“The misanthrope is not merely different from other men,” writes David Konstan. “He perceives himself as the representative of a social ideal which others have betrayed, and condemns his fellows for their perversity and hypocrisy. And yet society abides, and it is the misanthrope who cannot fit. He is rigid and surly, a natural target for comic deflation.”¹⁵ Unlike Konstan’s essay, this book doesn’t treat misanthropes as “a reflex of the history of social forms themselves”; nor does it presume that all such persons are male (98).¹⁶ Instead, it shows that individuals have a complex, unpredictable relationship to society and themselves, and that the Victorians often stigmatized the ensuing diffidence and self-strangeness because both jeopardize fellowship and citizenship (civitas), probing the foundations on which they rest. This is just one reason I modify the claim, in “The Decline of Hatred,” that misanthropy died with Queen Victoria.

Potent in Renaissance drama and refined by such eighteenth-century satirists as Swift, Gay, and Dr. Johnson, hatred of humanity acquired fresh significance in the age of Bentham, Mill, and Darwin. Rocked by a series of religious crises in the 1830s, the Victorians tried to develop increasingly secular and societal remedies for what were once considered theological and metaphysical concerns. As Auguste Comte explained, theology’s “treatment of … moral problems [is] exceedingly imperfect,” given its “inability … to deal with practical life.”¹⁷ As such claims took hold, they allowed citizens to spurn those who disagreed with society’s determining role. Indeed, a host of philosophical, scientific, and psychiatric assumptions began circulating at midcentury, arguing that misanthropes default on human relations and abdicate group responsibility—beliefs that left the culprits vulnerable to charges of moral and social delinquency. Hostility toward misanthropes gathered momentum as Romanticism waned, and, as we’ll see, disdain for misanthropy properly dates to the final decades of the eighteenth century. But unique in the 1850s and 1860s was a set of psychological and psychiatric judgments casting misanthropy as not merely eccentric or irritating, but also a condition bordering on insanity.

William Alger argued accordingly in The Solitudes of Nature and of Man that “the man who separates himself from mankind to nourish dislike or contempt for them, has in him a morbid element which must make woe.”¹⁸ We could ignore that making woe for others differs greatly from baring unhappiness, but Alger put his claim in the imperative. “However natural it may be to do so,” he added, “there is no justification for those who, when wronged, turn against mankind with retaliating animosity” (107). Perspectives like his oriented many hotly debated topics at the time, including capital punishment, irrational conduct, and rapacious imperialism. Indeed, Alger partly summed these up when asserting, “Misanthropy, as a dominant characteristic, if thoroughly tracked and analyzed, will be found almost always to be the revenge we take on mankind for fancied wrongs it has inflicted on us” (123). By the time the Hungarian writer and physician Max Nordau revisited this subject in the 1890s, his assessment was unambiguously negative: “Anti-social instincts … [make] life in common with the race difficult or impossible, worsening consequently its vital conditions, and preparing its ruin indirectly.”¹⁹

In accepting these judgments, many Victorians overturned earlier accounts of people-hating, in which “retaliating animosity” did not epitomize misanthropy, and redress—when it existed—could appear justified, even natural. Britain’s golden age of misanthropy in fact occurred almost three centuries before Victoria’s reign. The OED’s first entry for misanthrope is Barnabe Googe’s Eglogs, Epytaphes, and Sonettes (1563), and the noun misanthropy appeared almost one hundred years later, in 1656, just a few decades after the first published use of philanthropy in 1606.²⁰ One of the period’s best accounts of misanthropy—Timon of Athens, published in 1623 and attributed to Shakespeare—adapts Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans as well as Lucian’s dialogue Timon the Misanthrope (second century A.D.).²¹

In Plato’s Phædo, another vital antecedent, Socrates calls misanthropy “discreditable,” because it stems from “ignorance of the world.” Allegedly, misanthropes hate rashly, unearthing falsehood when they expect to find integrity.²² Socrates reproaches such individuals for prejudging the whole from faults in the part: “Misanthropy arises out of the too great confidence of inexperience.” After trusting men who “turn … out to be false and knavish,” the irascible “at last hates all men, and believes that no one has any good in him at all” (1:474).

People-hating was also well known to many other Greek, Roman, and Indo-Greek writers, including Euripides, the cynic Diogenes, Horace, and Menander, who authored Dyskolos, often translated as The Bad-Tempered Man; or, The Misanthrope.²³ Menander was a pupil of Theophrastus, whose philosophy informs George Eliot’s last book, Impressions of Theophrastus Such. Moreover, it was Horace’s speaker who declared, “I hate the profane mob and keep them at a distance,” insisting, “Our generation is prolific in evil.”²⁴

For much of the eighteenth century, by contrast, writers and philosophers drew sharper distinctions between cerebral and heartfelt hatred, as well as between hatred of specific individuals and loathing of the entire species. Those who hated a few generally fared better than those who indulged in heartfelt contempt for all, but the latter could still defend themselves without being called mad, iniquitous, or perverse. Eighteenth-century intellectuals also upheld this distinction, because it helped them separate love of individuals from disgust for human weaknesses, so redeeming the benevolent misanthrope as one waging a personal crusade against vice. As Percival Stockdale declared, quite confusingly, in his 1783 Essay on Misanthropy, “There is a Misanthrope, who is as acute, and severe in his observations, as he is gentle, and placid in his conduct.”²⁵ In this miraculous interpretive shift, “speculative” misanthropy becomes morally edifying, defending individuals against worldly corruption by establishing the foundations necessary for fellow and religious feeling:

Of course, Stockdale’s vague thesis wrests “speculative” misanthropy from any suggestion of hatred, thereby rendering the term misanthropy almost meaningless. His concession about “the selfishness, malignity, and barbarity of mankind” also sits uneasily beside his claims for “universal … benevolence,” making any thought of turning the other cheek rather unwise. But that’s why his argument is interesting. In advancing such shaky distinctions, he and other eighteenth-century writers sought to defend “speculative” misanthropy from its invidious counterpart. Disappointment at other people’s weaknesses could seem honorable, but generalized vengeance against humanity was beyond the pale.

In light of such arguments, one can appreciate why William Hazlitt’s 1823 essay “On the Pleasure of Hating” was so scandalous. Hatred, claims Hazlitt, is inspiring and unexceptional. By tarnishing everyone’s thoughts, it creates “a moral basis … radically opposed to the standard of utility.”²⁶ “The spirit of malevolence survives the practical exertion of it,” he insists. “We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we can subdue our sentiments and imaginations to the same mild tone. We give up the external demonstration, the brute violence, but cannot part with the essence or principle of hostility.”²⁷

Why not? Focusing on intractable forms of malice, Hazlitt established a rationale for hatred that wreaked havoc on rationalist arguments about behavior, including Robert Owen’s early belief that individuals are determined entirely by their environment and Jeremy Bentham’s desire to promote “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” by vanquishing our “malevolent or dissocial affections.”²⁸ Poking fun at such noble utilitarian aims, Hazlitt destroyed the myth that the pathological alone plumb the depths of enduring hatred. “There is a secret affinity, a hankering after evil in the human mind,” he says, and “it takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction” (12:128; second emphasis mine). Though such satisfaction turns out to be a mixed blessing, first to go in this account is any idea of fellow feeling. “The greatest possible good of each individual,” he insists, in obvious mockery of Bentham’s maxim, “consists in doing all the mischief he can to his neighbour: that is charming, and finds a sure and sympathetic chord in every breast!” (12:129). Many Regency and Victorian sketches portray this glee, including Cruikshank’s amusing studies “Sheer Tyranny” and “Sheer Tenderness” (FIGURES 01.1 and 01.2).

Although they were fascinated by these antecedents, the Victorians generally drained their satirical and antisocial associations. They did so, as William Alger shows, by refining another, predominantly eighteenth-century assumption—that people-hating is a psychological affliction caused largely by unrequited love.²⁹ Still, other judgments circulated in the nineteenth century, especially among those who asserted that a little misanthropy would help keep society honest and self-critical.

In “The Modern Misanthrope,” published in April 1863, Edward Lytton Bulwer hewed this line, accusing his fellow Victorians of “masked misanthropy” when they tried thwarting aggression.³⁰ Gone was the previous century’s “ruder age,” he lamented, when contempt was heartfelt and individuals fled society in admirable disgust (477). Indeed, Bulwer inherited from German Romanticism the idea of weltschmerz (literally, “world-pain”), one of whose meanings is still “mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state.”³¹ Claiming his peers were engaged merely in fashionable sniping, Bulwer implied that a sounder morality would generate stronger attacks on the “actual state of the world.” Doubtless, he was partly recalling the vicious denunciation of his own work in Fraser’s Magazine and The Age, as well as the enmity he experienced in the early 1830s from rivals like Thackeray—material that I explore in chapter 1 alongside Bulwer’s complex thoughts on sympathy and social progress.

The myths that we inherit about Victorian fellowship and repression aren’t the whole story, then, but they contain a grain of truth. “The movement from Romantic to Victorian years,” writes John Reed, was “a movement also from aggressive heroism, or what might be called the imperial will, to controlled heroism, or the reflective will.” The “need to renounce selfishness in favor of a larger purpose was,” he adds, “characteristic of much Victorian writing.”³² As Joseph Somebody’s novel helps indicate, many Victorian novels encourage self-renunciation so fervently they punish hatred while teaching individuals to balance self-regard with judicious attention to other people. So it isn’t surprising that we feel confident, turning the last page of such works, that love and goodwill prevail over a range of social evils, including treachery and adultery. As the author of “The Natural History of Hatred” declared in 1871, with some justification, “Our modern novel-writers never attempt to offer us a study of revenge, or, if they do attempt it, break down hideously. … Hatred, real downright hatred, is far less common than is supposed, and is far more potent. We may admit without difficulty that it is unchristian.”³³ Such attempts at dissolving “unchristian” hatred were for centuries inseparable from assumptions about Providence. Like their cultural antecedents, in other words, nineteenth-century novels harm villains and confer happiness on those practicing benevolence.

But as Bulwer’s essay and a host of other works show, it would be wrong to view this as a complete account of the period or to suggest that novels taught the Victorians only to repress their hatred. The Spectator was right to caution that “what we see around us, in fact, is not the extinction of hate, but an increase of self-restraint in its manifestation. … It is intelligence as to consequences which we fear the modern method is diffusing, and not a better heart at all.”³⁴ Arguably, the Victorians gave hatred new life when trying to curb antipathy, for, besides their literature on moral evil, they also produced a vast number of works on mobs, demonstrations, and class hatred at home. And a brief glance at the international stage shows that, for many of them, these issues were a global concern. In 1863 and 1866, respectively, Littell’s Living Age reprinted short pieces titled “Japanese Hatred of Christianity” and “Irish Hatred of England.” By the mid-1880s and throughout the 1890s, this and other journals were running articles or editorials on every conceivable form of hostility, including “Race-Hatred in India,” “The Hatred of England,” “The Growth of National Hatred,” “The Hatred of Authority,” “American Hatred of England,” “The Hatred of the Poor for the Rich,” “Hatred of Jews,” ‘Hatred of Foreigners,” “Holy Hatred,” “International Hatred,” and “Racial Hatred.”³⁵

Informing—sometimes guiding—such disparate hostilities was a set of amorphous claims about racial enmity, voiced by adherents to such relatively new “sciences” as phrenology and eugenics. Allegedly, biological predispositions could account for factors as varied as wealth, intelligence, sympathy, and benevolence.³⁶ In 1824–25, for example, the Phrenological Journal included an essay “On the Coincidence between the Natural Talents and Dispositions of Nations, and the Development of Their Brains,” which argued that a “common type” defines the “brains of different EUROPEAN NATIONS”: “They are decidedly larger than the Hindoo, American Indian, and Negro heads; and this indicates superior force of mental character.”³⁷ These assertions implicitly endorsed British imperialism by justifying its support for racial hierarchies: They made the scramble for Africa and other continents not only proof of the fittest nation but also, for many, an act of massive philanthropy.³⁸ While guiltlessly appropriating land, the jingoistic could believe that biological patterns had rendered non-Europeans somehow less godly or human than they. As the Scottish anatomist and surgeon Robert Knox put it, “Can the black races become civilized? I should say not; their future history, then, must resemble the past. The Saxon race will never tolerate them—never amalgamate—never be at peace.”³⁹ An otherwise freethinking socialist and profeminist Karl Pearson, professor of applied mathematics at University College, London, could still advance similar claims half a century later, in 1900, attributing internecine strife in “large districts in Africa” not to European rapacity but rather to “bad stock” marring the cultures of “the Kaffir and the Negro.” “If you want to know whether the lower races of man can evolve a higher type,” he declared, “I fear the only course is to leave them to fight it out among themselves.”⁴⁰ Not content with advocating such detachment, Pearson, in the midst of the Boer War, became a proponent of apartheid and, when necessary, of racial extermination in the name of national welfare: “The only healthy alternative” to the “evil” of racial coexistence was, he said, that the white man “should … completely drive out the inferior race” (21).

Despite their being published to bolster Victorian theories about the “family of man,” these arguments rendered Victorian notions of fellowship so specious that Euro-American sociability could appear inseparable from bigotry. As Knox enthused, “What an innate hatred the Saxon has for [the Negro]. … There is, there can be, nothing more wonderful in human history than this dislike of race to race: always known and admitted to exist, it has only of late assumed a threatening shape” (161, 223). Unlike Pearson, who wanted above all to bolster “the case of the civilized white man” (National Life 34), Knox conceded that Britain’s and Europe’s political strength derived from their capacity for, and willingness to commit, genocide: “Empires, monarchies, nations, are human contrivances often held together by fraud and violence.” “Man’s gift is to destroy,” he added, “not to create” (Races 11–12; 312). In short, as I’ve argued elsewhere,⁴¹ the empire became for such thinkers a vehicle for the expression of group hatred, of misanthropy on a grand scale.

In his excellent study of European hatred, Peter Gay sums up this deplorable chapter of Victorian society:

“But,” he cautions, “conscious and contentious attitudes toward aggression coexisted with aggressive ideas and acts that were not recognized as such.”⁴³ As we’ve seen, the Spectator anticipated this point in 1890. Yet because writers and politicians were sometimes poor evaluators (or good rationalizers) of their motives, we can’t take their statements simply on trust. Consequently, this book examines a range of Victorian fantasies, including the specious idea that love and fellowship annul hatred; it focuses on irreconcilable tensions between individuals and society, particularly when the former failed or refused to conform to the demands of the latter.

To simplify their moral and social concerns, many Victorians tried putting misanthropes in separate camps, depending on whether the bitterness was temporary, and thus basically harmless, or lasting, and thus morally reprehensible. That villains are innately venal and misanthropes merely appear so is an idea that flourished in simpler fiction of the time, settling the outcome of, say, Somebody’s Philanthropic Misanthrope, M. J. M’intosh’s equally facile story, “The Young Misanthrope,” and Romantic antecedents such as Hatred, or the Vindictive Father and Catharina Smith’s The Misanthrope Father; or, The Guarded Secret.⁴⁴ But as the best writers realized, these schemas are neither credible nor aesthetically interesting. The subject of chapters in this book, these gifted authors either couldn’t sustain this distinction or chose not to for artistic and philosophical reasons. In probing how individuals’ impulses and satisfactions clash violently with the sanctioned expression of such feelings in society, these authors encourage a book-length analysis of related philosophical claims about pleasure and sociability, including the pleasure of shunning—or retaliating against—other people.

Consider Dickens’s last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend. In it, the aptly named Mr. Venus exemplifies the belief that misanthropes hate for want of love. When Pleasant Riderhood returns Venus’s passion at the novel’s end, his mild antipathy softens and he returns to society a married, productive citizen. But as I show in chapter 2, part of Dickens’s achievement in this novel is to tarnish with misanthropy almost every character except this “harmless misanthrope.”⁴⁵ Revoking pat solutions, such shifts in perspective turn society into a source of hatred, inviting us to ask, with protagonist Eugene Wrayburn, What if society were so corrupt, prejudicial, and even despicable that our sole happiness consists in obstructing it?

Granted, this modifies the sentimentalism flourishing in some of Dickens’s earlier works, including Sketches by Boz, in which misanthropes—also shorn of hatred—are eccentric and endearing. But Dickens was almost unique in oscillating deftly between radical and maudlin haters, and he appealed to popular tastes in milking misanthropes for all their comic potential. In “The Bloomsbury Christening,” Nicodemus Dumps (“long Dumps”) is a hilarious curmudgeon whose idea of toasting his godson’s life is telling the baby it will soon experience “trials, considerable suffering, severe affliction, and heavy losses!”⁴⁶

A few other writers also used misanthropy as rich material for laughter. In the mid-1870s, Vanity Fair ran a series of witty articles, later reprinted as Our Own Misanthrope, poking fun at subjects like salesmen, the Swiss, Philistines, fake aristocrats, children, and the badly dressed. The articles drew on such popular antecedents as James Beresford’s Miseries of Human Life—already in its eleventh edition by 1826, and reissued in 1856—in which the character Mr. Testy insists, “Timon or Diogenes, if you will—these are the Recluses for me.”⁴⁷ But “Ishmael,” the author of these Vanity Fair articles, is more bitter than either Mr. Sensitive or Mr. and Mrs. Testy, and has little time for those practicing “charity”:

As Bulwer found most lighthearted views of people-hating disingenuous, his perspective in the 1863 essay resembles that in Our Mutual Friend, which Dickens began serializing the following year. According to Bulwer, the rage fueling Elizabethan and Jacobean malcontents sadly had begun to wane. Bulwer’s lament is worth heeding, his argument difficult to refute. For reasons we must examine, readers of Victorian literature encountered less often the bile flourishing in plays by, say, Chapman, Jonson, Marston, Shakespeare, Tourneur, and Webster. Gone too was much of the idealism motivating “benevolent misanthropy” in the eighteenth century, a term describing people who were disillusioned with humanity but not hostile toward all of it. If they abhorred their neighbors’ greed, apparently it was less from spite than out of serious concern for their souls.⁴⁹ Such changes don’t mean, however, that the Victorians always kept their word or fulfilled their lofty ideals. Nor, as Gay reminds us, did such concern make their culture and society intrinsically less hostile than before. Even the liberal journalist and essayist Walter Bagehot, one of the most influential journalists midcentury, was prepared to write: “You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor.”⁵⁰ Bagehot was being sardonic, but readers surely got his point.

When Victorian rhetoric and reality failed to correspond, misanthropes—struggling to justify their hatred in the first place—became easy scapegoats for zealots. In a society bent on proclaiming fellowship, they stood out as symptoms of failed civility. More important, they drew attention to aspects of behavior that society couldn’t contain, including impulses, passions, and forms of enjoyment arising at the expense of those needing charity and neighborly concern. As the author of “Confession of a Misanthrope” opined in April 1893, “That horrible word ‘altruism’ cuts a large figure in the discussions of the day. … I sometimes wonder if, in this modern world of general benevolence, there are any misanthropes extant beside myself. Certainly, if any such exist, they keep themselves extremely dark.”⁵¹ Betraying many reigning concerns, this material helps us see where Victorian ideals showed signs of collapse, spotlighting surplus enmity the culture couldn’t integrate.

Adept at promoting “alibis for aggression,” the Victorians imbued with violence such disparate topics as commerce, mass demonstrations, and colonialism, to say nothing of public executions and war.⁵² So even statements hailing Victorian progress should be read with a pinch of salt, as Cruikshank’s parody The Grand “March of Intellect” makes clear (FIGURE 01.3; see also FIGURE 01.4). When Macaulay proudly insisted he lived in “an age in which cruelty is abhorred, and in which pain, even when deserved, is inflicted reluctantly and from a sense of duty,” he was invoking earlier penal reforms and echoing Kant’s and Claude-Joseph Tissot’s concern that punishment for crimes be compassionate, not vengeful.⁵³ As Gay puts it, Macaulay wanted society to show a “mounting willingness to forgo the emotional dividends of revenge.”⁵⁴ Pandering to humanity’s baser instincts—especially when punishing criminals—struck such commentators as unseemly, replacing justice with retaliation. Macaulay insisted relatedly, in his 1828 essay on Henry Hallam, that “misanthropy is not the temper which qualifies a man to act in great affairs, or to judge of them.”⁵⁵

But some churlish Victorians on both sides of the Atlantic (Moore and Bulwer among them) were candid about these “emotional dividends,” thereby revealing that the gap between social ideals and political strategies could be very wide indeed, and that misanthropy—seemingly provoked by ever-greater numbers of social causes—cast an increasingly wide net. In 1869, four years after the Civil War, the Baltimore-based New Eclectic Magazine ran a short piece called “Laus Iracundiæ” (Praise the Irascible). “The times demand ‘good haters,”’ the article concludes with bitter irony, the author complaining that liberalism makes it

Ridiculing “the pious horror of some male or female ‘Miss Nancy,”’ the author insists that “if the pole of repulsion be but feebly shunned, we shall expect the pole of attraction to be languidly sought. Hatred tranquilly worded, is no more to be confided in than love coldly uttered” (524, 525). A person who hates poorly lacks other passions, apparently, and can’t be trusted. Impatient with Victorian piety, the author wanted to return, with Bulwer, to a “ruder age” when misanthropes were misanthropes, without apology.⁵⁷

Christianity for centuries had tried to instill contempt for worldly goods and ties, and the Book of Romans states (as do other parts of the Bible), “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (13:10). But Victorian preachers found it increasingly difficult to reconcile worldly disdain and fellow feeling. In “National Apostasy,” the Reverend John Keble warned congregations about “the malevolent feeling of disgust, almost amounting to misanthropy, which is apt to lay hold of sensitive minds, when they see oppression and wrong triumphant on a large scale.”⁵⁸ In Hatred of the World, by contrast, the Reverend Francis Brothers took a more radical line, suggesting that hatred itself displays Christian integrity:

While Brothers’s adjectives (“strong,” “universal,” “ever-deepening”) highlight the growing complexity of nineteenth-century hatred, his final noun in the first sentence quoted here could as easily be “misanthrope” as “disciple.” Brothers assumed his congregations would hate in Christian ways—with God’s guidance—but the difference in his sermon between misanthropes and disciples is negligible. Certainly, both sets of figures could argue that, figuratively speaking, they were “not of the world.”

When put in secular terms, devoid of conventional moral bearings, this issue became more urgent, raising doubts about whether persons were fully in command of their behavior, and what should happen to them when they lost self-control. Enlightenment tenets represented the individual as the seat of consciousness aspiring rationally to knowledge, freedom, and happiness. But these tenets never resolved whether persons were oriented toward their own maximum pleasure or the greater happiness of all, and, partly for that reason, eighteenth-century writers and philosophers wrote extensively about misanthropy. Classifying people-haters as either bitter or disillusioned—as torn, that is, between rejecting and reforming society—such writers viewed misanthropy as a fulcrum between selfishness and altruism. They returned obsessively to this topic, trying to align characters and citizens on one or the other side of the divide.

But as nineteenth-century theories of satisfaction and sociability gained subtlety, these distinctions became harder to sustain. Was individualism a sign of man’s hunger for improvement or an impulse signaling only greed? If nature were in fact indifferent—even hostile—to the plight of humanity, should society mirror its ruthless bid for survival or protect citizens from greater harm? When individuals were incapable of governing their actions, moreover, rational bases for behavior seemed wrongheaded, and many Victorians—indebted to their Enlightenment forebears—concluded that the irascible needed medical and even psychiatric attention. In his 1835 Treatise on Insanity, for example, James Prichard warned about the dangers of “moral insanity,” which he defined loosely as “a moral perversion, or a disorder of the feelings, affections, and habits of the individual.”⁶⁰ As Christopher Herbert observes, “This condition amounts very precisely to a collapse of what we may call the cultural structure of the individual, and is definable, though Prichard does not highlight this point, only by reference to the moral, affective, and behavioral norms of a surrounding community.”⁶¹ So while writers like Dickens tried to combine misanthropy and social critique, Prichard’s and others’ desire to sever these links points to a growing quandary for those representing misanthropy in its “benevolent” forms.

In his study of Victorian anomie, a sociological term referring largely to the myth of boundless human desire, Herbert shows that Prichard wasn’t alone in associating rage and insanity with moral delinquency. Other, ingenious arguments spread rapidly at the time, making comparable claims about the cause and moral depravity of misanthropy. When C. P. Bronson published in 1855 his study of Stammering: Its Effects, Causes, and Remedies, he tied speech disorders to a host of “analogous nervous diseases,” including “Spasmodic Asthma and Croup, Hysteria, Insanity from despondency, peculiar weaknesses of both males and females”—and “Misanthropy.”⁶² Although this last connection seems baffling to us today, Bronson yoked stammering to people-hating by viewing both as involuntary disorders stemming from an “impaired … authority of the will” (131). Since in his eyes misanthropes can’t stop hating humanity, and hatred as such is illogical, then misanthropy is best termed a “nervous disease.” Bronson’s recommendations for the afflicted included slow eating, avoidance of salt and fatty substances, and regularity in habits. “Cultivate an agreeable state of mind,” he urged, “and cherish none but agreeable feelings towards all” (151).

Because to many Victorians a “disagreeable” state of mind implied mental illness, this diagnosis was in fact unsurprising. As John Conolly had remarked two decades earlier, “When the passion [of anger] so impairs one or more faculties of the mind as to prevent the exercise of comparison, … the reason is overturned; and then the man is mad.”⁶³ “We see many madmen,” he continued gravely and rather ominously,

Conolly was lecturing at University College, London, when he published this claim, and his book became a classic textbook in nineteenth-century psychiatry. Anger is for him not only “peculiar” but also a sign of insanity. As the individual, he reasoned, is directed only toward its own good, departures from this state of mind necessarily imply madness. Conolly apparently had not read Hazlitt’s account of “the pleasure of hating,” in which rancor isn’t opposed to reason but is instead a sign of its reach. But while in the 1820s and 1830s the picture was certainly more complicated than Conolly implied, his and similar judgments eventually won the day.

Well aware of these changing judgments, physiological psychologists such as Herbert Spencer, George Henry Lewes, and William Benjamin Carpenter debated between the mid-1850s and late 1870s whether consciousness regulated will or stood at the mercy of it. Their contributions are important secular alternatives to determinism, as well as related providentialist arguments that Victorian fiction regularly touted.⁶⁴ What these intellectuals did not doubt was the need—following Comte—to advance a “religion of humanity” defining individuals relative to society. As Eliot, Lewes’s partner, declared in Felix Holt, the Radical, “There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.”⁶⁵ Yet while this grand assertion is apparently commonsensical, Eliot’s novel repeatedly shows where its characters’ inner lives depart from—and even violate—their social roles. Her narrator amplifies the “irrational vindictiveness” surfacing in not only Harold Transome and Matthew Jermyn’s bitter fight over the ownership of Transome Court but also a political demonstration that goes violently awry, because of those “who loved the irrationality of riots for something else than its own sake” (339, 319). This “something else” is a complex desire for revenge that Eliot can neither sanction nor completely discredit, and it points—as we’ll see—to a fascinating tension in her claims about fellowship and sociability.

Finding determinism too limited a theory of behavior, then, many Victorian thinkers (including Eliot herself, in much of her fiction and nonfiction) sought a more nuanced model—a “community of interest” is her metaphor in “Birth of Tolerance”—that could mitigate the diffusive effects of individualism and rapid industrialization.⁶⁶ Endorsing her project, Lewes argued in the first volume of his Problems of Life and Mind, first series, as elsewhere:

Superficially, Lewes argues that humanity’s “real development” lies in cultivating civilization, but he also asserts intriguingly that human desires and fantasies are not entirely reducible to society, and must therefore be studied as “a double root, a double history.”

The Victorians were of course fond of cataloging social distinctions, using nature to dignify social hierarchies and to naturalize labor relations. To take a well-known example, George Cruikshank’s British Bee Hive (1840; revised 1867; FIGURE 01.5) puts the Queen and Royal Family, Parliament, the Law, and the Church at the top of the “hive,” the professions in the middle, and trade and labor near the bottom. The foundations of the whole rest on the Bank of England plus the Army and Navy. Because Cruikshank represents the hive as self-contained, he doesn’t portray life or persons outside it (see also FIGURE 01.6, Cruikshank’s Regency satire of “The Load Borne by the British Public” during wartime). Lewes was thus voicing received wisdom when arguing, somewhat optimistically in the third series of Problems of Life and Mind, that “men living always in groups co-operate like the organs in an organism. Their actions have a common impulse and a common end. Their desires and opinions bear the common stamp of an impersonal direction. Much of their life is common to all.”⁶⁸ Still, his metaphor of humanity’s “double root”—part “animal,” part “social”—didn’t resolve this dichotomy in Victorian literature and philosophy. Both discourses instead revealed where social identity fails to eclipse our “animal” counterpart, as is clear in works as different as Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Browning’s Ring and the Book (Guido is called “part-man part-monster”).⁶⁹ These works probe a faultline in identity that science and psychology—relying heavily on rational explanations for human behavior—were ill equipped to resolve. Indeed, as we’ll see throughout this book, the best Victorian minds unearthed impulses that put individuals in conflict, not harmony, with society. Moreover, as the next section shows, the culture sparked strong reactions against full-blown misanthropy and “antisocial” hatred, damning many characters to suffering, penury, and even premature death.

Auguste Widal’s midcentury study Des divers caractères du misanthrope, chez les écrivains anciens et modernes helps explain why the Victorians drew these conclusions. Reviving antecedents to understand misanthropes, it psychologized them with a vengeance. In attempting to recover a history of “true, moral, philosophical, and forgivable” people-haters since antiquity, Widal invoked Socrates’ argument about misanthropy’s links with immaturity, but treated these links as indicating types, not passing moods.⁷⁰

Widal can’t get going, however, without noting vexing psychological exceptions to his thesis. “Misanthropy, resulting from pride and an exaggerated sense of self-love, is,” he says, “immoral, and therefore reprehensible [condamnable]” (5). Like Widal, many Victorians couldn’t help superimposing their beliefs on historical examples, judging them increasingly by their own psychological standards. Consequently, Widal pronounces as regrettable egoism what in earlier centuries were portrayals of justified hatred. Spencer described a similar reevaluative process when noting how his contemporaries gave social and political meaning to formerly theological terms. “In the old divines,” the sociologist asserted, “miscreant is used in its etymological sense of unbeliever; but in modern speech [c. 1862] it has entirely lost this sense. Similarly with evil-doer and malefactor: exactly synonymous as these are by derivation, they are no longer synonymous by usage: by a malefactor we now understand a convicted criminal, which is far from being the acceptation of evil-doer.”⁷¹

On what philosophical foundations did these secular judgments rest? One of several important guides for the Victorians was Comte’s System of Positive Polity, … Instituting the Religion of Humanity, first translated in 1851, which argued that “in human nature, and therefore in the Positive system, Affection is the preponderating element” (1:10). While conceding that turning self-love into social love is “the great ethical problem,” since the first trait is “deeply implanted” in us, Comte insisted that “social sympathy is a distinctive attribute of our nature” (73, 18, 11). He could thus argue—in ways influencing Victorian intellectuals like Lewes and Spencer—that “recognising our subjection to an external power,” now viewed in political, not metaphysical, terms, helps make “our self-regarding instincts … susceptible of discipline,” and thus of social value (18). Comte wanted his “System of Positive Polity” to promote altruism, a noun he coined from the Italian altrui (“to or of others”) and a phrase in French law, le bien, le droit d’autrui (“the wellbeing and right of the other”).⁷² It was Lewes who introduced Comte’s term into English when publishing Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences in 1853, and partly because of Comtean philosophy, the word community is almost incapable today of supporting negative connotations.⁷³

Still, renegade thinkers upset these communitarian theories by spurning their underlying claims about reciprocity and the individual’s willingness or capacity to harmonize with society.⁷⁴ “On Human Nature,” by Arthur Schopenhauer, says that “to the boundless egoism of our nature there is joined more or less in every human breast a fund of hatred, anger, envy, rancour, and malice, accumulated like the venom in a serpent’s tooth, and waiting only for an opportunity of venting itself.”⁷⁵ In 1853, on Eliot’s clock as assistant editor, the Westminster Review presented Schopenhauer to the British intelligentsia, the same year in which Comte’s neologism “altruism” was introduced into the English language.⁷⁶ And though Schopenhauer viewed as inevitable humanity’s “fund of hatred, anger, envy, rancour, and malice,” several intellectuals surpassed him in positing a gratuitous hatred, stemming from pleasure in others’ suffering, rather than from a more justifiable bid for survival.

Max Stirner had alluded to this “surplus” rage in the mid-1840s. Like his compatriot, he condemned the frequent stupidity and tyranny of group thought, viewing communitarianism as more coercive than individualism. In his neglected study The Ego and Its Own, Stirner usefully explained why “we no longer say ‘God is love,’ but ‘Love is divine.”’⁷⁷ “Love is to be the good in man, his divineness, that which does him honour, his true humanity,” he claimed sardonically, characterizing such benevolists as Ludwig Feuerbach, whom he was fond of attacking (47; original emphases). Stirner hoped to undermine what this argument about love surreptitiously presumed: “Love is what is human in man, and what is inhuman is the loveless egoist” (47; original emphasis).

Stirner believed that our well-being consists not in conforming with society, since “we two, the state and I, are enemies,” but, more broadly, in “repelling the world” (161, 25; original emphasis). To be free, humans must “dissolve” their identities and spurn existing ties, “becom[ing] so completely unconcerned and reckless … so altogether indifferent to the world that even its falling in ruins would not move” them (26, 25, 22; original emphasis). As no compromise or reform was possible in his eyes, Stirner turned rejection and betrayal into imperatives. “The world must be deceived,” he declared bluntly, “for it is my enemy. … I annihilate it as I annihilate myself” (26, 262; original emphasis).

Not every nineteenth-century writer viewed these claims as mad. Among midcentury texts, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground represents this philosophy in extremis, with similar disdain for consensus and conformity. The novella begins with an extraordinary declaration: “I am a sick man. … I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man.”⁷⁸ The friendless “antihero” boasting this claim then lies to the reader, claiming he loves exhibiting “supreme nastiness” in public, whereas disaffection really governs his outlook (16). After asking rhetorically, “Can man’s interests be correctly calculated?” the narrator says that philosophers weighing human actions invariably neglect another type of satisfaction, a “prompting of something inside [ourselves] that is stronger than all [our] self-interest” (30; my emphasis). “The point is not in a play on words,” he adds, “but in the fact that this [‘irrational’] good is distinguished precisely by upsetting all our classifications and always destroying the systems established by lovers of humanity for the happiness of mankind” (31). Once we doubt that self-interest is society’s rational foundation, related assumptions crumble. If individuals are drawn to forms of enjoyment causing them harm, then society clearly can’t be geared toward only its collective fulfillment.

By the time Freud wrote Civilization and Its Discontents, shortly after he’d published an essay on Dostoyevsky, the damage stemming from this “interference” seemed irreparable.⁷⁹ Freud argued that society, in trying to protect us from what we want (ultimately, an end to internal tension), instills in subjectivity a profound malaise, while providing “an occasion for enmity” rather than, as Comte and Lewes dearly hoped, a viable defense against it.⁸⁰ Attempts to bolster society or to protect individuals from harm are at bottom futile, Freud implied, for nothing can protect humanity from itself. To the biblical injunction “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” Freud asked: “Why should we …?”⁸¹

Few Britons apparently could take the argument this far. Nor could they match Dostoyevsky’s and Stirner’s disdain for cant and communities. Though Carlyle is certainly our best judge of the former, according to the Spectator even his “misanthropy seems to us to fall short of anything that can properly be called prophetic.”⁸² Instead, having shorn misanthropes of eighteenth-century idealism, many Victorians sided with the likes of psychiatrist John Conolly and physician Nordau, arguing that if man’s “double root” were social and animal, then hatred signaled a reversion to presocial barbarism. They extended, that is, the psychological reach of misanthropy, driving a wedge between the normal and the pathological to imply that misanthropes got what they deserved.

Reflecting self-critically on his youthful melancholy, Thackeray’s narrator in The History of Henry Esmond consequently insists that the problem stemmed from his vanity and assumptions about hostility in others. “The world deals good-naturedly with good-natured people,” he claims naïvely, “and I never knew a sulky misanthropist who quarrelled with it, but it was he, and not it, that was in the wrong.”⁸³ Such perspectives didn’t stop Thackeray from mocking other writers and much of his own society, but like several other Victorian novelists, including Anthony Trollope, he felt able to attack hypocrisy without spurning humanity.⁸⁴ Indeed, when Thackeray threw misanthropy into the mix, as Henry Esmond shows, he did so as something to condemn (given its ties to malice), rather than to cultivate. A year before publishing this novel, he lambasted Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels for its “gnashing imprecations against mankind,” urging readers to skip Gulliver’s fourth voyage, because it is “filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene.”⁸⁵

Thackeray helped intensify the splitting effect I mentioned earlier, whereby love or reason reforms misanthropes, but antiheroes prove beyond redemption. Some Victorians even augmented this last idea by representing figures that seem to hate gratuitously. For instance, in the memorable opening quatrain of Browning’s “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” first published in Dramatic Lyrics, the speaker growls with spite:

The speaker’s exuberant hatred prevents us from dismissing his fantasies and siding with either Brother Lawrence or, for that matter, the other monks. For the poem to work, it’s necessary that Brother Lawrence be pathetically (even annoyingly) unaware of the hatred he inspires. We know too little about the speaker to call him misanthropic, but that’s one of Browning’s points. Although circumscribing the speaker’s hatred might comfort readers, it would weaken the corrosive glee that Browning’s poem excites. That we enjoy being party to such hatred, without needing to affirm it ourselves, yields a fascinating ethico-religious compromise, given the work’s Catholic context. How, we are left wondering at the poem’s end, could we despise so readily a monk whose sole “faults” include making small talk, tending his plants fastidiously, and swallowing his orange juice in one gulp, not three? What disposes us to trust the feverish hatred of a man we couldn’t distinguish from Adam?

One answer to these questions, which I amplify in chapter 5, is that Browning grasped the subtle links joining schadenfreude, narrative excitement, and readerly satisfaction. The fantasies on which his and others’ fiction draws don’t simply train minds for self-abnegation and sociability, as some Victorians alleged, but point to forms of excitement in others’ suffering that belie self-control. These effects certainly struck many Victorians as degrading and immoral, depending on their tastes and convictions. Writing on “moral evil” in 1879, one writer declared: “Adopt what theory of human depravity you will, modify your statements as you please, still you have on your hands the fact of what must be admitted to, through some peculiarity of nature, the deflection of the whole race from the right way, and the true aim of life.”⁸⁷ Yet the point here, which many Victorian writers grasped, is that this “deflection” wasn’t exceptional, but really a well-trod path.

I’ll conclude with one of many possible examples: James Fitzjames Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s uncle, advocating “gratifying the feeling of hatred—call it revenge, resentment, or what you will—which the contemplation of [criminal] conduct excites in healthily constituted minds.”⁸⁸ Granted, this hatred struck Stephen as appropriate because it seemed to dissipate with the outlawed behavior he condemned. He even asserted, against a growing body of opinion opposed to capital punishment, that “the feeling of hatred and the desire of vengeance above-mentioned are important elements of human nature which ought in such cases to be satisfied in a regular and legal manner”—as, for instance, in public executions, which England didn’t outlaw until 1868.⁸⁹ (Executions continued thereafter in prisons, long after most of Europe had abolished capital punishment, and they didn’t officially end until 1965, with the Murder [Abolition of Death Penalty] Act. Even then, the death penalty technically remained until 1998 for treason, piracy, and the murder of a member of the Royal Family.) But Stephen’s caveat “in such cases” wasn’t so easy to enforce, not least because—witnesses of public executions often affirmed—“excite[ment]” surpassed these sanctions, springing from elements of fantasy and imagination rather than from the law only. Invoking Dickens’s and Thackeray’s commentaries on executions (Dickens calling the assembled multitude “odious”), Gay writes vividly: “Mobs of spectators, often numbering into the thousands, drunk with alcohol no less than with the occasion, cheered or jeered the condemned felon, and got into fist fights. Hawkers peddled crudely printed poems, nearly all of them barefaced inventions, describing the crime about to be expiated or retailing the criminal’s last words. Pickpockets plied their trade under the eyes of the police.”⁹⁰

The crowds relishing these scenes often were so drunk that the word hangover eventually was coined to describe their excess and its aftereffects. Quite frequently, children also witnessed these executions, signaling yet another gap between their lived reality and the rhetoric of innocence that many cultural guardians promulgated on their behalf. Indeed, despite the opprobrium accompanying “feeling[s] of hatred” in the wider culture—and the embarrassment, disgust, and even shame that many experienced when encountering them in person and in print—the public’s excitement and delight in vengeance expose an unruly, contrary pattern in the culture that isn’t easily repressed or explained away. Given this behavior and the fantasies it unleashed, it’s unsurprising that a large number of writers and philosophers came to view such antisocial sentiment as widespread and even structurally inevitable. Pointing repeatedly to a near-insoluble antagonism between individuals and society, Bulwer, Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Browning, Eliot, and Conrad (among others) increasingly resisted the idea that self-abnegation could bring their works to adequate or even satisfying closure.

As will emerge, these writers help explain why imaginative fiction strays from communitarian precepts and magnifies how precariously altruism outshines less noble impulses. I call these impulses “depsychologizing,” somewhat awkwardly, because they betray conventional Victorian arguments about will and self-control, pointing to the perverse allure of destruction and eschatology—the disturbing satisfaction of imagining humanity’s extinction or one’s own annihilation by impersonal forces. That such fantasies recur in some of our most cherished Victorian novels and poems makes these works more volatile and less predetermined than many have assumed. It also requires that we read them differently, paying more attention to the social and ethical problems they unearth than to the sometimes pat notes on which they seem to conclude.

Exploring these lively tensions, the following chapters are broadly chronological, beginning with Bulwer’s first novel, Falkland (1827), and ending with the “evil, … contempt and hate” that bedevil Razumov in Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911).⁹¹ In arranging the book this way, I hope to show how misanthropy—and hatred, more generally—acquired new meanings in the works of single authors, and thus in several generations of Victorian writers. Extending the argument and focus of The Ruling Passion and The Burdens of Intimacy, my previous books, Hatred and Civility investigates why crises about pleasurable aggression recurred when the Victorians’ faith in religion and sociability often failed.

As I elaborate in the following readings, especially of Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (chapter 2) and Eliot’s Romola (chapter 4), this book dwells especially on the novel’s complex relation to hatred, as this literary form not only copied and recast many social problems in the nineteenth century, but also educated readers in the vagarious paths of characters’ and their own fantasies. For instance, at a well-known moment in Eliot’s Adam Bede, the narrator, observing that “Hetty [Sorrel] had never read a novel,” asks, How “could she find a shape for her expectations?”⁹² The question has far-reaching implications: Novels give voice and form to a host of expectations. They teach us what to want from life, ourselves, and other people—and they show us, both directly and indirectly, whom to hate, and what we can and can’t do with that emotion.

If I seem to overemphasize this point and to eclipse all contrary evidence, let me refine it, as I shall in the chapters to follow. Like many of Eliot’s works, Adam Bede tries to promote a Wordsworthian ethic, developing “fibre[s] of sympathy” to help our hearts “swell with loving admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in the faulty people who sit at the same hearth with [us]” (180–81). And to the degree that this ethic helps us overcome our fury at Hetty for murdering her infant, and at Arthur Donnithorne for recklessly seducing her, the ethic appears sound. But to grasp this novel’s full complexity, it’s necessary to invert this scenario, because the actions represented are what create a need for authorial intervention. Within the fictional conventions adopted by Eliot, that is, nothing less than this intervention would have let her convey “loving admiration at some trait of gentle goodness” and still conclude the novel with any plausibility. Reading Eliot’s fiction against the grain doesn’t of course eclipse her interest in compassion, but it shows why this ethic became so fragile in her later works, barely containing the rancor flourishing in The Lifted Veil, Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda.

Overall, then, it’s impossible to detach beneficence from Eliot’s widespread interest in narrative antagonism and self-confrontation, and it would be naïve to imagine otherwise. What inspires fiction—and what fiction inspires in us—is rarely so tidy or well behaved. The surplus content of such works, including the affect exceeding narrative control and closure, is my concern throughout. Like Hazlitt, Freud, and many others, I am arguing that nineteenth-century literature educates us in a range of fantasies, including imaginative scenarios that are frequently amoral. As such—and perhaps quite usefully—one of the first things to vanish, briefly or conclusively, from the best Victorian fiction is the thin veneer of altruism protecting us from other people and ourselves.