NOTES

INTRODUCTION: “MORALISED FABLES”

1.Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1964), 515–16.

2.Nietzsche, Portable Nietzsche, 515–16.

3.For an application of Nietzsche’s ideas to a specific case of Victorian religion, see Donald D. Stone, “Arnold, Nietzsche, and the ‘Revaluation of Values,’” Nineteenth-Century Literature 43, no. 3 (1988): 289–318. As for women writers, Eliot gets off easy compared with the “fertile writing-cow” George Sand (Nietzsche, Portable Nietzsche, 516).

4.Insults aside, there is good evidence to suggest that Nietzsche thought of Eliot first and foremost as a novelist. This came about, it seems, mainly through the reading habits of his mother and infamous sister: “In 1879 a letter from his sister describes an acquaintance by likening her to Maggie Tulliver, or ‘Gretelchen’ as she becomes in German and she clearly knows that he will understand the comparison. In the following year a letter from his mother mentions Adam Bede as one of the books she and his sister have been reading, and in 1887 he reminisces in a letter to his sister about an occasion when she had with her a volume of Middlemarch by ‘the Good Eliot’ [‘der braven Eliot’].” John Rignall, George Eliot: European Novelist (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), 158.

5.William Makepeace Thackeray, Catherine: A Story by Ikey Solomons, Esq. Junior, ed. Sheldon F. Goldfarb (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 132.

6.Caroline Levine, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003); Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

7.“Wenn thatsächlich die Engländer glauben, sie wüssten von sich aus, ‘intuitiv’, was gut und böse its.” It is not a term he uses freely in moral discussions. Though it appears a small number of times in Beyond Good and Evil, written two years before Twilight of the Idols, he does not use it at all in the Genealogy, written only one year before.

8.Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 93–94. It should be noted here that there are two later versions of intuition, sometimes discussed in relation to literature—especially in modernism—in the philosophies of Henri Bergson and G. E. Moore. Both of these have received more attention in both the history of literature and the history of ideas than the scholars I am discussing here. For discussions of these two thinkers in relation to British fiction, see e.g. Mary Ann Gillies, Henri Bergson and British Modernism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996); Tom Regan, Bloomsbury’s Prophet: G. E. Moore and the Development of His Moral Philosophy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).

9.Henry Longueville Mansel, Letters, Lectures, and Reviews, Including the Phrontisterion; or, Oxford in the 19th Century, ed. Henry W. Chandler (London: John Murry, 1873), 135.

10.John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. Roger Crisp (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 50.

11.J. B. Schneewind, “Moral Problems and Moral Philosophy in the Victorian Period,” Victorian Studies 9 (1965): 30. For some time, Schneewind’s work has been unparalleled in its exposition of the importance of intuitionism in nineteenth-century English moral thought, and his discussion of the subject is essential background. See also J. B. Schneewind, “Whewell’s Ethics,” in Studies in Moral Philosophy, ed. Nicholas Rescher, American Philosophical Quarterly Monograph Series (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), 108–41. Another excellent recent resource is Laura J. Snyder, Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Though Snyder’s book deals more with the scientific and logical side of the debate between Mill and Whewell, it does touch on the moral implications of this debate. See especially chapter 5. Information on the place of religion in the debate between intuitionists and utilitarians, especially as it relates to novels, can be found in Robert Newsom, “Dickens and the Goods,” in Contemporary Dickens, ed. Deirdre David and Eileen Gillooly (Ohio State University Press, 2009), 35–52. For the prehistory of these debates, from Shaftesbury through Smith and Hume, see D. D. Raphael, The Moral Sense (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947); James Bonar, Moral Sense (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930).

12.Discussing “ethical criticism,” Jameson makes sure to distinguish his topic from “a moralizing, or moralistic, didactic gesture of the type presumably extinct with the Scrutiny group if not with the Victorian age.” Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 60.

13.Henry James, “The Life of George Eliot,” in Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1002.

14.F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (New York: New York University Press, 1963).

15.Virginia Woolf, The Second Common Reader, ed. Andrew MacNeillie (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1986), 233.

16.See Dominick LaCapra, Madame Bovary on Trial (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), ch. 2.

17.Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki, and Others, trans. Edith Bone (London: Merlin Press, 1989), 56; Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 135; Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 37

18.Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds., The Turn to Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2000).

19.Jameson, Political, 59.

20.When Martha Nussbaum, to take an extreme example, describes the morally salutary effects of reading, it sounds more like a prescription for proper reading practices than a description of novels themselves. Novels, she writes, “convey the sense that there are links of possibility, at least on a very general level, between the characters and the reader. The reader’s emotions and imagination are highly active as a result.” What evidence is there for these claims? How do we diagnose those who do not read in this way? Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 5.

21.Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Levine, Suspense; Andrew Miller, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008)

22.In highlighting these critics, I am pointing specifically to the influence of their work on reading ethics in the Victorian novel. They are certainly not alone in drawing lessons from their texts. Far from it: Jameson has suggested that ethical criticism, reading in order to draw some sort of lesson, is “still the predominant form of literary and cultural criticism today [1981], in spite of its repudiation by every successive generation of literary theorists (each for a different reason).” Jameson, Political, 59

CHAPTER ONE: WHAT FEELS RIGHT

1.Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki, and Others, trans. Edith Bone (London: Merlin Press, 1989), 55.

2.Lukács is the exception in popular narrative theory, with his Marxist-Hegelian belief in the great novel’s ability to capture the “total picture” of society at a given time. For him, the science that explained the experience of narrative was historical materialism itself. The reader was moved by the experience of history itself. Still, it is worth remembering that Fredric Jameson not only felt compelled to defend Lukács against charges of vulgarity and datedness (especially in his introduction to The Historical Novel) but also, in The Political Unconscious, to supplement Lukács’s project with the techniques of formalism and semiotics: in order to extend Lukács’s discussion of Balzac, he turns in the next paragraph to Todorov and Greimas (Jameson, Political, 164).

3.Noam Chomsky, Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1986), 36. This citation, and the one that follows, were both brought to my attention in Michael Devitt, “Intuitions in Linguistics,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57, no. 3 (2006): 481–513.

4.Quoted in Devitt, “Intuitions,” 481–82.

5.See Julia S. Falk, “Saussure and American Linguistics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Saussure, ed. Carol Sanders (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 119–20. The translation between the two sets of terms is not exact. One particular distinction is that the Saussurean axiom of language as a “social fact” gets replaced by what David McNeill calls “a kind of individual psychology.” David McNeill, Gesture and Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 76–77, also 78–79. This move has certainly not been without its critics. See, e.g., John Hewson, “Langue and Parole Since Saussure,” Historiographia Linguistica 3, no. 3 (1976): 329.

6.Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 9.

7.Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 22.

8.Barthes, S/Z, 135.

9.Brooks, Reading, 37.

10.Thackeray, Catherine, 132.

11.Dames, Physiology, 39.

12.Alexander Bain, Mental and Moral Science: A Compendium of Psychology and Ethics, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, Green, 1884), 268. For a much more extended discussion of this use of the term “interest” as it relates to narrative, see the following chapter.

13.Dorothy J. Hale, Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 9.

14.Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 8.

15.Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 16.

16.See Hale, Social Formalism, chs. 1, 3.

17.Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 10.

18.See, for example, the synthesis of Bakhtinian dialogism and Levinasian ethics in Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

19.Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching,” Diacritics 32, nos. 3–4 (2002): 22. Coetzee is a frequent topic of this sort of analysis, and with good reason. His novels—Disgrace perhaps most of all—deny both characters and the reader the comfort and reassurance that comes from intersubjective identification with another. In one knowing passage, Lucy tells David that she intends to carry her pregnancy from the rape to term. When he asks why she had not told him, she responds:

I can’t run my life according to whether or not you like what I do. Not any more. You behave as if everything I do is part of the story of your life. You are the main character, I am a minor character that doesn’t make an appearance until halfway through. Well, contrary to what you think, people are not divided into major and minor. I am not minor. I have a life of my own, just as important to me as yours is to you, and in my life I am the one who makes the decisions. (J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace [New York: Penguin, 2000], 198)

Coetzee thus points out how the novel tradition uses its ethic of intersubjectivity to solidify its division of major and minor characters: those whose eyes we see the world through, and those whose pain we feel. A book on Coetzee that takes a largely Levinasian approach is Derek Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

20.Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media, and Politics, trans. Graham D. Burchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 38.

21.Audrey Jaffe, Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 8.

22.Rae Greiner, Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 8–9.

23.This example, like many others discussed in this section, was first brought to my attention in J. B. Schneewind, Sidgwick’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 89.

24.Adam Sedgwick, A Discourse on the Studies of the University, 5th ed. (London: John W. Parker, 1850), 57.

25.Times, January 10, 1834.

26.John Stuart Mill, “Sedgwick’s Discourse,” in Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society, ed. John M. Robson, vol. 10, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 52.

27.“[The Discourse] excited great indignation in my fathers and others, which I thought it fully deserved.” John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, ed. Jack Stillinger (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 120.

28.Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal “Ought”: 1640–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 13. The reference is to a rather diverse collection of thinkers: “Hobbes, Cudworth, Cumberland, Locke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Butler, and Hume.”

29.Mill, for example, uses the two terms interchangeably in Utilitarianism, moving from freely from a reference to moral sense theory and utilitarianism to a reference to “the intuitive [and] what may be termed the inductive school of ethics” (50).

30.William Whewell, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy in England (London: J. W. Parker, 1854), ix.

31.Mansel, Letters, 132–33.

32.William Edward Hartpole Lecky, History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (New York: D. Appleton, 1921), 1.

33.“The opposition between ‘inductive morality’ and ‘intuitive morality,’ which the contemporary English school so often insists upon.” Jean-Marie Guyau, La morale anglaise contemporaine: Morale de l’utilité et de l’évolution (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1885), 200.

34.Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), 9–10.

35.D. D. Raphael writes that Hutcheson’s usage “appears to have been the first” (Raphael, Moral Sense, 15).

36.John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 351.

37.Whewell, Lectures xx.

38.Mansel, Letters, 136–37.

39.Schneewind, “Moral Problems,” 34–35.

40.Foucault’s claim, in The Order of Things, that the end of the eighteenth century, and Kant in particular, marked an epistemic shift to an emphasis on an inaccessible internality—as epitomized by the transcendental subject—describes this change in focus well, though it does not offer much in the way of explanation. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 247–48.

41.Certainly, Hard Times is the best known of these, but we can find it in novels throughout the century. Sometimes, an almost hyperbolic expression can appear in rather muted language, as in Disraeli’s description in Sybil of four-year-old girls being sent to work in the mines. Disraeli writes that the children’s labor is a “punishment which philosophical philanthropy has invented for the direst criminals, and which those criminals deem more terrible than the death for which it is substituted.” Thus Disraeli not only compares the worst extents of English class oppression to Benthamite prison reform but actually makes the two equivalent. Perhaps striking a more familiar tone is Eliot’s mock apology in “Janet’s Repentance” for her inability to think in utilitarian terms: “emotion, I fear, is absolutely irrational; it insists on caring for individuals; it absolutely refuses to adopt the quantitative view of human anguish, and to admit that thirteen happy lives are a set-off against twelve miserable lives, which leaves a clear balance on the side of satisfaction. This is the inherent imbecility of feeling, and one must be a great philosopher to have got quite clear of all that.” Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil; or, The Two Nations, ed. Sheila Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 140; George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, ed. Jennifer Gribble (New York: Penguin, 1998), 314.

42.Ruth Bernard Yeazell, “Why Political Novels Have Heroines: Sybil, Mary Barton, and Felix Holt,” Novel 18, no. 2 (Winter 1985): 126.

43.Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, ed. MacDonald Daly (New York: Penguin, 1996), 385. A clearer statement of the same point comes in North and South, when she writes that Margaret Hale “saw less of power in its public effect, and, as it happened, she was thrown with one or two of those who, in all measures affecting masses of people, must be acute sufferers for the good of many.” Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, ed. Patricia Ingham (New York: Penguin, 1995), 70.

44.Charles Dickens, Hard Times, ed. Kate Flint (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 60.

45.Quoted in Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 88.

46.Williams, Culture, 89.

47.Williams, Culture, 96.

48.Gaskell, Mary Barton, 62.

49.Robyn Warhol, Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 64-65. Warhol gives a thorough account of the various forms that Gaskell’s references to “you” and “we” take in Mary Barton.

50.Carolyn Lesjak, Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 37.

51.See Jonathan H. Grossman, The Art of Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 118–25.

52.Tzvetan Todorov, “Narrative Transformations,” in The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 232.

53.Hutcheson, Inquiry, 145.

54.“In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with … of a sudden I am supriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of prepositions, is and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not . …’Tis necessary … that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.” David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (New York: Penguin, 1985), 520.

55.Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Getting It Right: Language, Literature, and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 183.

56.See, e.g., Harry J. Gensler, Formal Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1996), ch. 8.

57.André Gide, The Counterfeiters, trans. Dorothy Bussy and Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1947), 171.

58.John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 225.

59.Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and All, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1978), 139.

60.Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 273.

61.G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 32. For insight into the possible similarities between Hegel’s project and Rawls’s project in a A Theory of Justice, see the discussion of Versöhnung in John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. Barbara Herman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 331.

62.Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, vol. 1, Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 (New York: New Press, 1997), 284. For more on Foucault’s rhetorical style, in his later works, of disowning theories associated with him, see Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) ch. 6.

63.Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 37.

64.Chatman, Story, 108–13.

65.Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4:455–56. Page number given in this and future references to Kant are for the German Academy of Sciences edition of Kant’s collected works, given in the margins of most English editions.

66.See, e.g., Groundwork 4:452–53: “As a rational being, and thus as a being belonging to the intelligible world, the human being can never think of the causality of his own will otherwise than under the idea of freedom; for, independence from the determining causes of the world of sense (which reason must always ascribe to itself) is freedom.”

67.E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Brace & World, 1954), 130.

68.Jonathan Loesberg, Fictions of Consciousness: Mill, Newman, and the Reading of Victorian Prose (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 1.

69.John Henry Cardinal Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. David J. DeLaura (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), 12.

70.Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 5:98.

71.Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 275.

72.J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 28.

73.Harpham, Shadows, 35.

74.J.J.C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism, For and Against (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 104.

75.Some distinction has to be drawn between “act-utilitarianism,” which would judge by the consequences of the act in itself, and “rule-utilitarianism,” which would judge from the consequences of the act universalized as a general rule. So, to use one oft-cited example, an act-utilitarian ethic might support deploying ten United Nations peacekeepers on a dangerous mission that will definitely save fifty lives; a rule-utilitarian might point out that such a deployment could make people much less inclined to sign up for reserve duty, thereby leading to an inability to deploy peacekeepers in even more dangerous catastrophes.

76.Perhaps the most significant way in which ethical examples match our understanding of realism is through their suggestion of an arbitrary main character; it could, in the abstract, be any one of us. This seems to match well with Lukács’s view of the Bildungsroman, in which the choice of protagonist is “merely accidental”: “the hero is picked out of an unlimited number of men who share his aspirations” (Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 134). A fuller examination of the development of the ethical example as literary genre would be, I believe, profitable for understanding the relation of the literary and the philosophical, especially in the Anglo-American tradition, but it lies outside the scope of this current approach.

77.Williams’s necessity, it should be said, is not the same as an intuitionist’s, and certainly not the same as Kant’s—he is much more concerned here with the question of “moral integrity.” My point, though, is less about what he is arguing for, and more about how he is arguing against utilitarianism.

78.Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 26–27. This follows his more famous example of the biography of Paul Gauguin. Of course, since the vast majority of people will have no firsthand account of Gauguin’s biography, the trimmed-down version of his life that most of us encounter will also take the form of a literary example of sorts—though one missing an author.

79.Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 12.

CHAPTER TWO: THE SUBJECT OF THE NEWGATE NOVEL

1.Louis James, The Victorian Novel (London: Blackwell, 2006), 156.

2.Quoted in Philip Collins, ed., Charles Dickens: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1996), 45. The diary entry is from December 30, 1938. An entry from exactly one week earlier mentions finishing Bulwer-Lytton’s Eugene Aram—one of the crime novels discussed in this chapter. Suffice it to say that Newgate novels were early Victorian novels in more ways than one.

3.John Forster, “The Literary Examiner,” Examiner, November 3 1839, 691. For the most complete discussion of the Jack Sheppard phenomenon, see Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 265–79. For a compelling discussion of the relations between this phenomenon and increasing social alienation, see Matthew Buckley, “Sensations of Celebrity: Jack Sheppard and the Mass Audience,” Victorian Studies 44, no. 3 (Spring 2002): 423–63.

4.Sir Theodore Martin, quoted in Horace Bleackley, Trial of Jack Sheppard (Edinburgh: William Hodge, 1933), 99. The chorus of the song means roughly, “Never mind, pals, keep on stealing.” It does not appear in the novel Jack Sheppard but rather in Ainsworth’s 1831 Rookwood.

5.William Makepeace Thackeray, The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Gordon N. Ray (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945), 1:395.

6.Keith Hollingsworth, The Newgate Novel, 1830–1847: Bulwer, Ainsworth, Dickens, and Thackeray (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963), 132. Hollingsworth’s book offers the only comprehensive study of the Newgate subgenre that this chapter will address. Though I offer some different interpretations than Hollingsworth, his work is so complete as to offer a fuller discussion of most of the contemporary pieces that I reference.

7.Review, Athenaeum, October 26, 1839, 803.

8.Bulwer-Lytton had been Edward Lytton Bulwer until he was created a baronet in 1838. Since he had written the works under consideration prior to lordship and hyphenation, I follow Keith Hollingsworth in using the shorter name to refer to him simply as “Bulwer” henceforth.

9.Some critics include Dickens’s 1841 Barnaby Rudge and Bulwer’s 1846 Lucretia on this list as well, largely as postscripts.

10.D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 2.

11.Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel: 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998), 84.

12.John Forster, “The Literary Examiner,” The Examiner, September 10, 1837, 581.

13.“Recent Novels,” Monthly Chronicle 5 (February 1840): 221–22.

14.Boris Tomashevsky, “Thematics,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 67.

15.See LaCapra, Bovary, ch. 2.

16.“Recent Novels,” 220, 221.

17.Thackeray, Catherine, 132.

18.William Makepeace Thackeray, “Horae Catnachianae: A Dissertation on Ballads, with a Few Unnecessary Remarks on Jonathan Wild, John Sheppard, Paul Clifford, and — Fagin, Esqrs.” Fraser’s Magazine 19 (April 1839): 409.

19.Steven Marcus, Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (New York: Basic Books, 1965), 67–68.

20.Burton M. Wheeler, “The Text and Plan of Oliver Twist,” Dickens Studies Annual 12 (1984): 41.

21.A particularly notable moment comes at the conclusion of chapter 7, as Oliver runs away to London. When he visits the orphanage to see his dying friend, the original version reads: “The blessing was from a young child’s lips but it was the first that Oliver had ever heard invoked upon his head; and through all the struggles and sufferings of his after life, through the trouble and changes of many weary years he never once forgot it.” When Dickens revised this passage for the 1838 version, he removed the italicized passage.

22.Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 12.

23.Hollingsworth, Newgate, 65.

24.Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (Boston: Little, Brown, 1897), 1:xv.

25.Perhaps not wanting to have Oliver aligned too closely with a novel about a highwayman, he goes on to say, in impressively evasive and ambiguous prose, that Bulwer’s novel “cannot be fairly considered as having, or being intended to have, any bearing on this part of the subject, one way or other.”

26.Through a number of Bulwerian convolutions of plot, nearly impossible to summarize, the lawyer in question will turn out both to be Paul’s real father and the judge who sentences him to death. The lawyer’s niece, beside him at the time of the theft, will become Paul’s wife after he escapes hanging (Wheeler, “Text and Plan,” 50).

27.“Literary Recipes,” Punch, August 7, 1841, 39. The charity boy likely refers to Paul Clifford. The factory boy is a reference to the main character of Frances Trollope’s 1840 Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, Factory Boy. The carpenter’s apprentice is, of course, Jack Sheppard.

28.Miller, Police, 6.

29.We might take this as the moment where Oliver Twist parts company permanently with Paul Clifford. William Brandon, the man who is robbed by Paul’s companion, is a lawyer, who insists that Paul be arrested. He also turns out to be not only Paul’s father but also the judge in Paul’s final trial. Paul, unlike Oliver, is unable to escape the world of delinquency, through either the novel’s criminal story, its love story (she is Brandon’s niece), or its genealogical story.

30.Miller, Police, 9.

31.Other names that critics have used for the complex of motivations surrounding Monks, the locket, and Mrs. Corney include the “inheritance story,” the “rescue story,” and the “mystery story.” I have chosen to refer to it as “genealogical” largely because that fits with the network of connections I see it producing between the disparate elements of the novel.

32.Caroline Levine, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 2.

33.See, e.g., Jameson, Political Unconscious, 152–54.

34.Hitchcock’s description of the MacGuffin: “It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is most always the necklace and in spy stories it is most always the papers” (1939 speech at Columbia University, cited in the definition of the term). The majority of the revelation in chapter 49 centers on the locket and a destroyed will.

35.Charles Dickens, The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, and Nina Burgis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 1:388.

36.Harpham, Shadows, 37.

37.Times, June 25, 1840, 14.

38.Times, July 7, 1840, 7.

39.J. R. Stephens, “Jack Sheppard and the Licensers: The Case against Newgate Plays,” Nineteenth-Century Theatre Research 1 (1973): 1–13.

40.William Makepeace Thackeray, “Going to See a Man Hanged,” Fraser’s Magazine 22 (July 1840): 154.

41.J. H. Reynolds’s reaction is particularly memorable: “‘Whom are you depicting, Mr. William Harrison Ainsworth?’ asked we; and his novel answered for him, ‘Jonathan Wild.’ … ‘What! Jonathan Wild the Great? After Fielding, that’s much—ay, very much, indeed.’” The contrast with Gay, according to Reynolds, is “still more woful.” John Hamilton Reynolds, “William Ainsworth and Jack Sheppard,” Fraser’s Magazine 21 (February 1840): 232, 236.

42.Fielding’s work is titled, in full, The Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great. Fielding’s use of Wild was intended to satirize the Whig party in power at the time, and especially the “Great Man” Walpole, on the grounds that “Greatness consists in bringing all Manner of Mischief on Mankind, and Goodness in removing it from them.” Henry Fielding, The Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great, ed. Hugh Armory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 9.

43.Tomashevsky, “Thematics,” 65.

44.Tomashevsky, “Thematics,” 66.

45.Jaffe, Scenes, 9.

46.Of course, in some cases, a sort of sympathetic identification was a key element of the novels. In his discussion of Bulwer’s Eugene Aram, Jonathan Grossman offers a compelling reading of the narrative mechanics that an author could use to produce such sympathy for criminals, particularly through an emphasis on the internal in his characters. Grossman, Alibi, 143ff.

47.Thackeray, Catherine, 133.

48.Bulwer’s Eugene Aram offers perhaps the best-known example of a novel about the crimes of a “virtuous philosopher.” Though Thackeray does not refer to it explicitly here, he, and the rest of the Fraser’s staff, made the novel the object of frequent ridicule. See also the discussion later in this chapter of the epistle opening to Elizabeth Brownrigge.

49.William Makepeace Thackeray, “Thieves’ Literature of France,” Foreign Quarterly Review 31 (April 1843): 233.

50.William Harrison Ainsworth, Rookwood (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1931), 3.

51.Examiner (London), November 3, 1839, 691.

52.The most famous collection, and the source of the generic name, was Andrew Knapp and William Baldwin’s Newgate Calendar; or, Malefactor’s Bloody Register, published in 1773. Of nearly equal popularity was the 1780 Annals of Newgate, by the Rev. John Villette, chaplain of Newgate Prison. Other collections include Select Trials of Murder, Robbery, Rape … (1734–35); The Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals (1735); The Tyburn Chronicle (1768); and The Old Bailey Chronicle (1788). When I refer to Newgate Calendars, I am referring generically to this collection of texts.

53.Dickens, Letters, 1:114.

54.Church of England Quarterly Review 27 (1850), 25.

55.Brooks, Reading, 37.

56.See Nicholas Dames, “Wave-Theories and Affective Physiologies: The Cognitive Strain in Victorian Novel Theories,” Victorian Studies 46, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 206–16.

57.Bain, Mental, 268.

58.Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph, 20th anniv. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 20ff.

59.Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy (Glasgow: R. and A. Foulis, 1755), 1:9–10. Hutcheson’s use of this term is discussed in Hirschman, Passions, 65–66.

60.Thackeray’s disposition to ironic detachment, of course, should prevent us from taking his commitment to calmness as typical. He felt, for example, that Charlotte Brontë’s unhappiness made her unjust toward her characters.: “Novel writers should not be in a passion with their characters as I imagine, but describe them, good or bad, with a like calm.” My aim, however, is not to argue that Thackeray’s outlook is typical of all novel readers. Rather it is to suggest that in the particular discussion of novelistic depictions of crime, Thackeray’s language and opinions seem to have held the day. Thackeray, Letters, 3:67.

61.From the “Advertisement” to Catherine. Goldfarb notes that this is not in the copy text and may have been a posthumous addition. If so, it nonetheless stands as an accurate statement of Thackeray’s views. Thackeray, Catherine, 190.

62.Thackeray, “Hanged,” 155.

63.Thackeray, “Horae,” 408.

64.Quoted in Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, 1811–1846 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), 231.

65.William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis, ed. John Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), lvi.

66.The inability to affect what we are reading is a feature of all realist novels: those texts that Barthes labeled as “classic” or “readerly” and leave the reader “with no more than the poor freedom to accept or reject the text.” Barthes, S/Z, 4. Andrew Miller has pointed to Austen’s novels, in particular, as deriving “their peculiarly powerful aesthetic effect for our helplessness before the events about which we read.” Miller, Burdens, 128.

67.Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 39, 33.

68.Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013), 262.

69.William Harrison Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard: A Romance (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1900[?]), 313.

70.J. B. Buckstone, “Jack Sheppard,” in Trilby and Other Plays, ed. George Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 79–80. This scene is also discussed in Buckley, “Sensations.”

71.Review, Athenaeum, October 26, 1839, 803.

72.Reynolds, “Sheppard,” 232.

73.For a thorough discussion of Wild’s criminal operation, see Gerald Howson, Thief-Taker General: The Rise and Fall of Jonathan Wild (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1971).

74.Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Eugene Aram (Boston: Little, Brown, 1897), 32, 43.

75.[Anon.], The Malefactor’s Register; or, New Newgate and Tyburn Calendar (London: Alex Hogg, 1779), 4:310.

76.“Elizabeth Brownrigge: A Tale,” Fraser’s Magazine 32 (1832): 68. The authorship of this parody remains a matter of some dispute. Critics have come increasingly to agree, however, that the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century attribution of the piece to Thackeray was mistaken. Miriam Thrall suggests that the piece was most likely written by Maginn, with the assistance of J. G. Lockhart. Whoever the author may be, however, the influence of the piece on Catherine seems clear. See Miriam Thrall, Rebellious Fraser’s: Nol Yorke’s Magazine in the Days of Maginn, Thackeray, and Carlyle (New York: AMS Press, 1966), 62–64. For a discussion of articles wrongly attributed to Thackeray, including but not limited to “Elizabeth Brownrigge,” see Edward M. White, “Thackeray’s Contributions to Fraser’s Magazine,” Studies in Bibliography 19 (1966): 68–65.

77.Ainsworth, Rookwood, 6.

78.Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe Their Myths?: An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination, trans. Paula Wissig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 22–23. The term “myth” is precarious, since it can have so many meanings, often opposed to each other. Rather than risk confusing my usage with that of Frye, Durkheim, or Lévi-Strauss, I will try to avoid the term. For a Lévi-Straussian reading of eighteenth-century criminal narratives such as those of Sheppard and Turpin—which embraces the term “myth”—see Lincoln B. Faller, Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

79.Quoted in John Hamilton Reynolds, “Hints for a History of Highwaymen,” Fraser’s Magazine 9 (March 1834): 284.

80.Anthony Burton makes this point: “Most of the Jack Sheppard plates … are heavily loaded with accessories; the reader is intended to miss none of them, and Ainsworth conscientiously details them in the text.” Anthony Burton, “Cruikshank as an Illustrator of Fiction,” in George Cruikshank: A Reevaluation, ed. Robert L. Patten (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 110.

81.Daily Journal, November 15, 1724.

82.Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Time,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1, Autumn (1980): 179.

83.Barthes, S/Z, 4.

CHAPTER THREE: GETTING DAVID COPPERFIELD

1.Miller, Police, 205.

2.Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Nina Burgis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 630.

3.In “Dickens and the Mystery Novel,” Shklovsky refers to Dickensian parallel plots as the “device of several simultaneous planes of action, the relationship among which is not immediately given by the author”; such a device is “a peculiar continuation of the technique of the mystery.” Though Shklovsky is focusing on Little Dorrit, he implies that his analysis carries through to the “Dickensian device” as it pertains to the corpus as whole. Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998), 137, 146.

4.For the sake of brevity, I have suppressed part of this complicated passage. Though the phrasing in this sentence is absolute, David also says that there is “one reservation,” the “most secret current of his mind” which he held back. He is referring here to his love for Agnes, which itself can hardly be a surprise to most readers. The way the novel deals with the presentation of this one withheld piece of knowledge, though, is complicated, and will be the subject of extended discussion later in the chapter. For the moment, suffice it to say that this is the “one reservation,” in contrast to his larger narratorial intention, and therefore can be taken as the exception that proves the rule.

5.Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 5:293.

6.Quoted in James R. Kincaid, Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 3.

7.Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 61–190.

8.William Whewell, Lectures on Systematic Morality (London: John W. Parker, 1846), 81.

9.David Lewis, in his seminal analytic approach to the subject, emphasizes that any definition of convention must include “tacit convention not created by agreement.” David K. Lewis, Convention: A Philosophical Study, New York (Blackwell, 2002), 3.

10.See, e.g., Thomas Vargish, The Providential Aesthetic in Victorian Fiction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1985).

11.Barbara Hardy, The Moral Art of Dickens (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 131.

12.George Eliot, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” Westminster Review 66 (1856): 244.

13.Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 51.

14.Jameson, Political, 152. This position, it should be pointed out, was first and foremost a formalist one. See Tomashevsky, “Thematics,” 80–84; Roman Jakobson, “On Realism in Art,” in Language and Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), 19–27.

15.Wayne Booth describes the experience of reading Tess: “desiring Tess’s happiness, fearing and increasingly expecting her tragic doom.” Since for Booth, to desire Tess’s happiness is to desire something that she does not receive—“a man who unlike Angel Clare or Alec … would appreciate her true quality”—the implication is that the novel somehow leads the reader down a counterfactual path, the possibility of which it then denies. Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 205–6.

16.George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ed. Terence Cave (New York: Penguin, 1995), 803.

17.Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (New York: Verso, 2000), 23.

18.As Poovey puts it, Copperfield is “a psychological narrative of individual development, which both provided individual readers with an imaginative image of what identity was and created a subject position that reproduced this kind of identity in the individual reader.” Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 89. Miller, memorably, reflects on how the David (Miller) reading Dickens became for him the David reading in Dickens. Miller, Police, 192.

19.Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 176.

20.In this I follow David Kurnick’s recent reading of the theatrical undercurrent of the Victorian novel: “the novel’s interior spaces are lined with longing references to the public worlds they would seem to have left behind.” David Kurnick, Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 3.

21.Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 236.

22.Janice Radway notes that the romance readers she interviewed had been for the most part isolated from each other. Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 96. Interestingly, when she returned to the topic in a later article, she moved away from the term “popular” altogether, preferring instead the term “mass-produced literature.” See Janice A. Radway, “Reading Is Not Eating: Mass-Produced Literature and the Theoretical, Methodological, and Political Consequences of a Metaphor,” Book Research Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1986): 7–29.

23.For a discussion of the popular reception, bordering on manias, that these works received, see, e.g., Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Ghislaine McDayter, “Conjuring Byron: Byromania, Literary Commodification and the Birth of Celebrity,” in Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 43–62; L. Edward Purcell, “Trilby and Trilby-Mania: The Beginning of the Best-Seller System,” Journal of Popular Culture 11, no. 1 (2004): 62–76.

24.The comparison is frequently used, but no less true for it. Terry Eagleton makes the point while discussing Richardson: “To measure the astonishing social impact of these novels, we would have to compare them to the most popular films or TV soap operas of our time. The modern equivalent of Pamela or Clarissa would not be Mrs. Dalloway but Harry Potter.” Terry Eagleton, The English Novel: An Introduction (New York: Blackwell, 2005), 76.

25.Examples can be embarrassing, since they so quickly become dated. With that in mind, Americans, depending on their generation, might consider including the “Who Shot J. R.?” episode of Dallas, or the final episode of The Sopranos.

26.Richard D. Altick, “Varieties of Readers’ Response: The Case of Dombey and Son,” Yearbook of English Studies 10 (1980): 70.

27.Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952), 2:613. This quote is mentioned in Altick, “Varieties,” 72. Altick is equivocal about the veracity of the anecdote, but seems ultimately to think that it seems likely, if not particularly meaningful: “Anecdotes are not necessarily reliable history, and while there may have been a number of such clubs, for Dombey and Son as well as the other early novels, their existence does not by itself prove very much.” It does not prove much, that is, about the class distribution of Dickens’s readership. But the existence of such clubs, or even the claim that such clubs existed, strongly suggests that reading a Dickens novel was associated with doing what others around oneself were doing, on a monthly basis.

28.By which Anderson means “all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact.” Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Species of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1995), 6.

29.Roddey Reid, discussing France, brings the popular novel together with the newspaper as a way of imagining a “national community,” claiming the importance of the performance of “identical rituals” among different classes in “the reading of best sellers and the daily consumption of newspapers.” Jonathan Culler, discussing Reid and Anderson, brings us one step closer to Dickens, noting that Reid’s insight is “especially true of serial novels, such as Eugène Sue’s Le mystères de Paris of 1842–43 and Le juif errant of 1844, which were initially consumed in newspapers.” Roddey Reid, Families in Jeopardy: Regulating the Social Body in France, 1750–1910 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 139; Jonathan Culler, “Anderson and the Novel,” Diacritics 29, no. 4 (1999): 26.

30.The principal example would likely be Todorov’s The Fantastic, in which he defines “popular” literature—“detective stories, serialized novels, science fiction, etc.”—as those works which do not change our notions of the rules of literature. Only such “popular” literature, for Todorov, qualifies as a genre. But this definition, important though it may be, is more a statement of literary history than actual market or cultural popularity. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 6. See also “Popular Fiction as a Genre” in Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 183–93. Rabinowitz here focuses on the formal generic qualities of a work’s popularity. In both cases, a single critic, with a suitably large body of literary reference, can pinpoint the “popularity” of a work without particular concern for whether anyone actually read it.

31.Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 10.

32.John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (C. Scribner’s Sons, 1907), 1:3.

33.Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, trans. Joyce Crick (New York: Penguin, 2002).

34.George Meredith, “An Essay on Comedy,” in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 4.

35.One notable exception to this trend: Žižek has taken a consistent stance against a “belief in the liberating anti-totalitarian force of laughter,” believing instead that the pleasure of cynical laughter is “part of the game” in both democratic and totalitarian societies. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 28

36.Gilles Deleuze, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Precursor of Kafka, Celine, and Ponge,” in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 74; Gilles Deleuze, “Nomad Thought,” in New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 147.

37.Kincaid, Laughter, 2.

38.The difficulty in any discussion of affective reactions is that they risk building too much on one’s own reaction. As Moretti says, in defending his use of novels that have made him cry as the basis for his discussion of the tearjerker, “There is no other way.” Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders (London: Verso, 1988), 158. While I am arguing against any universalizing of the experience of laughter, I have to admit that I am building on my own reaction—and the one I have witnessed in others—of not laughing at every recognizably humorous moment in a Dickens novel. Full disclosure: Sam rarely gets more than a smile out of me, and Micawber not even that. I do laugh, quite a bit, at Mrs. F’s aunt in Little Dorritt.

39.William Makepeace Thackeray, “The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century,” in The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray (New York: Pollard & Moss, 1881), 1:61.

40.Because the argument that follows is generally confined to Victorian ideas of humor, I have excluded all but the most germane findings in twentieth- and twenty-first-century humor research. Suffice it to say that no ultimately satisfactory conclusions seem to have yet been drawn on the relation between humor and laughter. Salvatore Attardo’s comprehensive survey of the literature, with a marked emphasis on linguistics, offers a useful account of recent attempts to explain the relation. See Salvatore Attardo, Linguistic Theories of Humor (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994), 10–13. For a more comprehensive attempt to apply results from humor research in psychology, linguistics, and sociology, see Paul Lewis, Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989).

41.Often we prefer that meaning to remain unsaid—one of the first rules of humor is that you never explain a joke.

42.Meredith, “Comedy,” 47.

43.Jonathan Rose, “How Historians Study Reader Response: Or, What Did Jo Think of Bleak House?” in Literature in the Marketplace, ed. John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 206. The quote is from Acorn’s One of the Multitude.

44.Fredric Jameson, “The Ideology of the Text,” in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986, vol. 1, Situations of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 68.

45.Miller, Police, x.

46.As was the case, for example, with the previous chapter’s discussion of Jack Sheppard.

47.Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford, ed. Elizabeth Porges Watson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 9.

48.See Elizabeth Gaskell, “Our Society at Cranford,” Household Words, Conducted by Charles Dickens 4, no. 90 (December 1851): 268, 270. The changes are limited to replacing “Boz” with “Hood” and “Pickwick” with “Hood’s Own.”

49.Letter to Gaskell, 4 December 1851, in Charles Dickens, The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, and Nina Burgis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 6:549.

50.See Alvin Whitley, “Hood and Dickens: Some New Letters,” Huntington Library Quarterly 14, no. 4 (August 1951): 385–413.

51.Leigh Hunt, Wit and Humor: Selected from the English Poets, with an Illustrative Essay, and Critical Comments (London: Wiley & Putnam, 1846), 6, 8.

52.Later, he discusses Chaucer, one of the classical examples of a “humorous” author, who, as he puts it, combines “the most indelicate with the utmost refinements of thought and feeling” (51). Nowhere in the work is “idea” used in conjunction with “feeling.”

53.Hunt writes that humor “derives its name from the prevailing quality of moisture in the bodily temperament” (8).

54.Quoted in Robert Bernard Martin, The Triumph of Wit: A Study of Victorian Comic Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 30.

55.The classic work on the transformation in terms from the Restoration to the Romantics is Stuart M. Tave, The Amiable Humourist: A Study in the Comic Theory of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). For the continuation of this trajectory into the nineteenth century, Robert Bernard Martin’s The Triumph of Wit is extremely helpful. Though I disagree with Martin’s conclusion about the superiority of wit, and thus with the teleology implicit in his title, his reading of the literature is complete enough that the majority of our citations are shared, and I came across many of them for the first time in his book. For readings of specific Victorian works, see Robert Polhemus, Comic Faith: The Great Tradition from Austen to Joyce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Roger B. Henkle, Comedy and Culture: England 1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

56.Quoted in Tave, Amiable, 220.

57.Thomas Carlyle, “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter,” in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, ed. Ralph Waldo Emerson (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1852), 12.

58.In Sartor Resartus, it is true, Carlyle does say that “no man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad” (26). Perhaps not altogether bad, but, if this and other quotes are to be believed, there might still be room for improvement. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, ed. Kerry McSweeney (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

59.The most notable being Herbert Spencer, “The Physiology of Laughter,” in Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative (London: Williams & Norgate, n.d.), 2:452–66.

60.Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 55.

61.Tave, Amiable, 46. For more on the lesser known Drake, see Edwin E. Williams, “Dr. James Drake and Restoration Theory of Comedy,” Review of English Studies, 1939, 180–91.

62.Kant, Judgment, 5:332.

63.Bergson is “coupling the superiority theory with the incongruity theory.” Bernard G. Prusak, “Le Rire à Nouveau: Rereading Bergson,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62, no. 4 (Autumn 2004): 380.

64.Bergson, “Laughter,” 97.

65.Martin writes: “The eighteenth century had been quite as perplexed as their descendants about the scorn, degradation, and condescension implicit in the superiority theory of comedy. Briefly, their solution to the problem had been to concentrate on personal aspects of humour, then to exaggerate the sympathy that one must feel in order to have total perception of individuality or eccentricity, so that the object of humour provoked laughter with it, not at it, finally to make sympathy and love the really distinguishing aspects of humour, as laughter dropped away from it. (Indeed, it almost seemed as if the provocation of laughter was proof that writing was not humourous.) The standard examples advanced were those of Sterne’s Uncle Toby and (improbable as it may seem to the twentieth century) his story of Le Fever; Don Quixote; and Falstaff in his more amiable aspects.” Martin, Triumph, 26. Also see Tave, Amiable, ch. 7: “Humor and Sweet Philanthropy: Parson Adams, my uncle Toby, Don Quixote.”

66.Charles Lamb, Life, Letters, and Writing, ed. Percy Fitzgerald (London: John Slark, 1822), 4:312. Lamb is speaking here specifically about Hogarth.

67.Carlyle, “Richter,” 11. For more on this connection, and particularly the influence of Richter on Sartor, see J. W. Smeed, “Thomas Carlyle and Jean Paul Richter,” Comparative Literature 16, no. 3 (1964): 226–53.

68.Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Defense of Poetry,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 491. I must admit that, quite unfortunately for my argument, Shelley seems to reverse the association of laughter. In such times, Shelley also argues, “we hardly laugh but we smile.” For now, I can only say that on this point, Shelley seems to be out of keeping with many other Romantics and Victorians.

69.Though Hutcheson certainly refined his terms, to the extent that Shaftesbury’s own formulations are often difficult to place in the context of nineteenth-century thought.

70.Any full account of sensus communis would have to include, in addition to Shaftesbury, Vico. Because neither Kant nor nineteenth-century English thought shows the influence of Vico’s work, I have chosen to exclude it in the interest of space and focus. For a book-length explication of the subject, see John D. Schaeffer, Sensus Communis: Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990). In Hans-Georg Gadamer’s account, Vico’s thought seems to be of more interest than that of Shaftesbury, because it displays the Roman classical tradition in its purest form: “Vico lived in an unbroken tradition of rhetorical and humanist culture, and had only to reassert anew its ageless claim.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd ed. (London: Continuum Books, 2004), 21. Benedetto Croce has shown that there was some social interaction between Vico and Shaftesbury—Vico visited Shaftesbury in Naples—which, at least, suggests the possibility of some English moral-sense influence in Vico’s work. Benedetto Croce, Shaftesbury in Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 8.

71.Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Douglas den Uyl (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 1:69. For discussions of Shaftesbury’s essay that influenced my account, see Simon Critchley, On Humour (London: Routledge, 2002), 80–85; Bo Patterson, “Exploring the Common Ground: Sensus Communis, Humor, and the Interpretation of Comic Poetry,” Journal of Literary Semantics 33 (2004): 155–67; Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and the Cultural Politics of Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 9.

72.Kant, Judgment, 5:293.

73.Hannah Arendt, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 139.

74.Bergson, “Laughter,” 64.

75.The most useful recent attempt in literary criticism to sketch out the difficult interactions between the comic and the community is James F. English, Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor, and the Politics of Community in Twentieth-Century Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). English’s book focuses on modernist British literature, and its intention is “less to raise questions for humor theory than to raise questions for cultural politics” (18).

76.Arendt, “Questions,” 140. Laughter can take place alone, of course, but it often requires the imagined presence of others. As anecdotal evidence, consider concert films of stand-up comedy, in which the viewer is placed in the position of an audience member, with the laughter of other audience members clearly audible. It is difficult to imagine a concert film with the comedian simply performing for the camera, and thus for the viewer alone.

77.Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 113–14.

78.Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990), 23. The version of the “repressive hypothesis” at play here would likely be the frequent, and to me mystifying, bit of critical self-castigation surrounding the fact that critics writing on humor are so rarely funny.

79.Hippolyte Taine, History of English Literature, trans. H. Van Laun (Philadelphia: Henry Altemus, 1908), 4:4.

80.E.g., Lewes’s claim: “in no other perfectly sane mind … have I observed vividness of imagination approaching so closely to hallucination.” George Henry Lewes, “Dickens in Relation to Criticism,” Fortnightly Review 11 (1872): 144.

81.Most notably the famous scenes in Barchester Towers, in which Trollope admits that he does not like Mr. Slope, or reassures the reader that Eleanor would never marry him. Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 64, 146.

82.Alexander Welsh, From Copyright to Copperfield: The Identity of Dickens (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 140.

83.Philip M. Weinstein, The Semantics of Desire: Changing Models of Identity from Dickens to Joyce (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 41.

84.Janet H. Brown, “The Narrator’s Role in David Copperfield,” Dickens Studies Annual 2 (1972): 201.

85.This is a relatively commonsensical way to describe what most people mean by character: for a character to exist at the level of narrative, within the narrative, means that the character should be able to effect change in the world of the narrative. Note, though, that this intuitive definition is actually the flip side of a more rigorously argued actantial, or functional model, in semiotics. Associated mainly with Propp and Greimas, this model claims, essentially, that characters are largely the properly named hosts of a number of narrative functions: subject and object, helper and opponent, sender and receiver. What seems to underlie the model is an essential belief that a character is necessary to manifest an actant. But that also means that a character who does not or cannot act is somehow not worthy of the name.

86.Thomas Leitch labels these the “discursive principle” and the “teleological principle.” See Thomas Leitch, What Stories Are: Narrative Theory and Interpretation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), 42, 63. The teleological side has gotten the majority of the attention in formal discussions of the novel (though, as I discussed in the introduction, the discursive has gotten the majority of attention in ethical discussions). For the contrary argument, pointing to the importance of the descriptive, see Amanpal Garcha, From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Ultimately, it is an underlying claim of this book that ethical thought, as the logic connecting “is” and “ought,” can offer a useful way of describing the interrelation of these two principles. See the discussion of the theoretical argument in chapter 1.

87.Or, if we prefer, the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of a narrative “language.”

88.Welsh, Copyright, 125.

89.Weinstein, Semantics, 38–43.

90.From a biographical point of view, it’s worth noting that the one point where Dickens stresses David’s agency and control is one in which he, himself, was saved largely by a series of circumstances that were, as Fred Kaplan puts it, “unpredictable and bewildering.” Fred Kaplan, Dickens: A Biography (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1988), 43.

91.This narrative mechanism in Great Expectations will be discussed at greater length in chapter 4.

92.Barthes, S/Z, 135.

93.Which is to say, mainly, Lionel Trilling, Steven Marcus, and Edmund Wilson. See Deborah Epstein Nord, “The Making of Dickens Criticism,” in Contemporary Dickens, ed. Eileen Gillooly and Deirdre David (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009), 262–85

94.Lacan, Psychoanalysis, 131.

95.Jacques Lacan, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954 (the Seminar of Jacques Lacan), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 54.

96.Because the similarity in language might confuse, I should stress that this is not the same as a Jungian collective unconscious. It need not be the unconscious mapped to the group, so much as the assertion that the experience of the group—of the city street and the workday—is difficult to express in the language of character. The communal unconscious owes a great deal to Jameson’s idea of the political unconscious as a sort of inexpressible shared experience. The communal unconscious, though, is a good deal more modest; I’m not talking about the realities of shared experience so much as the way the novel depends on a shared experience, and furthermore bases its narrative upon that. See, e.g., Jameson, Political, 34–35.

97.George Orwell, “Charles Dickens,” in All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays, ed. George Packer (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), 37.

98.Orwell, “Dickens,” 39. There is one case in which Orwell’s claim falls glaringly short: lawyers. The list is extensive: Dodson and Fogg in The Pickwick Papers, Jaggers—whose in-court affect is memorably described—in Great Expectations, Tulkinghorn in Bleak House. As each of these three cases indicate, Dickens saw a danger in the legal profession of the public impinging on, and damaging, the private. Still, the precise reasons not only for Dickens’s willingness to show lawyers at work, but his insistence on it, and how that reflects on Orwell’s point, falls outside the scope of this current discussion.

99.As an aside, the structural similarities are more striking than I can offer an explanation for here. Both read to hide from cold-hearted guardians; following the scene of reading, both are beaten; both fight back for the first time; both are locked in an attic room; both are then sent off to school. The relation of reading to forced confinement seems worth following up on.

100.Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Q. D. Leavis (New York: Penguin, 1985), 349.

101.Brian Phillips offers Mr. Dolloby, and the way he turns his pipe upside down on his doorpost before entering his shop, as an example of “the easy largesse of detail” with which Dickens writes. Brian Phillips, “Reality and Virginia Woolf,” Hudson Review 56, no. 3 (2003): 415–30.

102.As an unnamed writer in Blackwood’s puts it, “Every reader will tell you that he has made acquaintance with Sam Weller and several other remarkable persons, and that he shall never forget them as long as he lives.” “Debt and Credit,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 83 (1858): 60.

103.Moretti, Way of the World, 183.

104.See Moretti, Way of the World; Welsh, Copyright; Harry Stone, Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Novel-Making (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979).

105.When it is used in the novel, it is almost always the conclusion of an exclamatory aside enclosed in dashes.

106.There are a number of parallels here to the most famous modern discussion of the figure of blindness: Paul de Man’s “Rhetoric of Blindness.” De Man argues that the insights of the major modern literary critics—Lukács, Poulet, Blanchot—could “only be gained because the critics were in the grip of this particular blindness: their language could grope toward a certain degree of insight only because their method remained oblivious to the perception of this insight.” Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida’s Reading of Rousseau,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, by Paul de Man, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 106.

107.Miller, Police, 205.

108.Rawls, Justice, 96.

109.René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 83.

110.Kelly Hager, “Estranging David Copperfield: Reading the Novel of Divorce,” ELH 63, no. 4 (1996): 991.

CHAPTER FOUR: BACK IN TIME

1.Margaret Oliphant, Miss Marjoribanks, ed. Elisabeth Jay (New York: Penguin, 1998), 420.

2.Recall the original title of Middlemarch, and the title of its first book: “Miss Brooke.”

3.Oliphant, Miss Marjoribanks, 21.

4.Barthes, S/Z, 216.

5.George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Rosemary Ashton (New York: Penguin, 1994), 836.

6.Andrew Miller, “Lives Unled in Realist Fiction,” Representations 98, no. 1 (2007): 123.

7.Miller, “Lives Unled,” 118.

8.Cf. Lorna Ellis, Appearing to Diminish: Female Development and the British Bildungsroman, 1750–1850 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1999), 30.

9.The comparison of classical narrative techniques and time-travel stories is similar to that offered in David Wittenberg, Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). Wittenberg, though, is primarily interested in the ways in which time-travel stories encourage “even the naive reader” to become a “practicing narrative theorist.” I wish to look at the verso side of the argument and point to the way that narratological structures already imply time-travel narrative.

10.Rawls, Justice, 225.

11.José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote, trans. Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marin (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 111.

12.I am referring to the assumptions and practices of the field as it stands now. When I presented a preliminary version of these ideas at Princeton University, Deborah Epstein Nord pointed out that the field of “Victorian studies” has gone through a number of changes over the decades, centering around a move away from poetry and prose and toward the novel as its signature form. The field, it seems, became easier to read. For a long view on the history of Victorian studies in United States academia, see Richard D. Altick, “Victorians on the Move, or, ’Tis Forty Years Hence,” in Writers, Readers, and Occasions: Selected Essays on Victorian Literature and Life (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), 309–28.

13.Jameson, “Ideology,” 68. Jameson is speaking of nineteenth-century European realism more generally, but confining our discussion to the English language brings us back to the Victorian novel. For this reason, in what follows, I will sometimes blur the lines between theoretical discussions of nineteenth-century realism and Victorian novels, unless the author insists on national specificity.

14.David Masson, British Novelists and Their Styles (London: Macmillan, 1859), 215–27.

15.Ruth Bernard Yeazell, “Why Political Novels Have Heroines: Sybil, Mary Barton, and Felix Holt,” Novel 18, no. 2 (Winter 1985): 127.

16.Pearl Brown echoes this reading in her discussion of Gaskell’s novels: “Structurally, both [Mary Barton and North and South] use not only the convention of the novel of social purpose or the industrial novel but also those of the female bildungsroman to present the maturation of young women in an urban setting.” Pearl L. Brown, “From Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton to Her North and South: Progress or Decline for Women?” Victorian Literature and Culture 28, no. 2 (2000): 346.

17.Maureen Moran, Victorian Literature and Culture (London: Continuum Books, 2006), 81.

18.M. M. Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel),” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 19.

19.Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 157.

20.Watt, Rise, 296.

21.Gadamer, Truth, 8–9.

22.This account of the Bildungsroman that has received a good deal of excellent analysis. The exemplary analysis is in Moretti, Way of the World. For discussions that go beyond the boundaries of the European nineteenth-century, see Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.; Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

23.Lukács, Theory, 132.

24.Moretti, Way of the World, 70.

25.From Carlyle’s translation. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels, trans. Thomas Carlyle, vol. 2 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1824), 182.

26.Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Margaret Cardwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 312.

27.Barthes, S/Z, 135.

28.See previous discussion in the introduction.

29.Kant, Groundwork, 4:455–56. Page numbers given in all citations to Kant are for the German Academy of Sciences edition of Kant’s collected works, provided in the margins of most English editions.

30.Rawls: “The [categorical imperative] procedure is a schema to characterize the framework of deliberation that [rational and sincere] agents use implicitly in their moral thought.” John Rawls, “Themes in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” in John Rawls: Selected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 498.

31.Kant, Practical Reason, 5:94.

32.See, e.g., Groundwork 4:452–53: “As a rational being, and thus as a being belonging to the intelligible world, the human being can never think of the causality of his own will otherwise than under the idea of freedom; for, independence from the determining causes of the world of sense (which reason must always ascribe to itself) is freedom.”

33.Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, ed. and trans. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 6:22.

34.The argument that follows is in large part drawn from Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 201ff.; and Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso, 2000), 21–42. It is most notably dependent on Allison’s conception of the “incorporation thesis,” in which Kant suggests that an incentive can determine the will only if an agent has incorporated it into his maxim. That argument, in the interests of focus, has been omitted.

35.Allison, Kant’s Theory, 208.

36.Zupančič, Ethics, 33.

37.Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, trans. Eric A. Blackall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 307.

38.Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 99.

39.William Whewell, Lectures on Systematic Morality (London: John W. Parker, 1846), 20.

40.As D. D. Raphael points out, “The expression ‘moral sense’ was first used by Shaftesbury, but in a loose and vague way.” Raphael, Moral, 2. Francis Hutcheson certainly refined his terms.

41.Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 1:205n.

42.Susan L. Cocalis, “The Transformation of ‘Bildung’ from an Image to an Ideal,” Monatshefte 70, no. 4 (1978): 401.

43.Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 2 (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1876), 33.

44.Ernest Boyer Jr., “‘What Is Religion?’: Shaftesbury, the German Enlightenment, and Schleiermacher” (PhD diss., Harvard Divinity School, 2002), 188.

45.Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (London: Smith, Elder, 1876), 1:61.

46.Certainly, that’s what critics of Shaftesbury’s intellectual descendants would argue. Mill, in particular, famously categorized the moral sense as a theory by which “every inveterate belief and every intense feeling, of which the origin is not remembered, is enabled to dispense with the obligation of justifying itself by reason, and is erected into its own all-sufficient voucher and justification.” Mill, Autobiography, 135.

47.Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Douglas den Uyl (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 2:28.

48.Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal “Ought”: 1640–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 179.

49.Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, 1:205n.

50.Arendt, “Questions,” 139.

51.Gadamer, Truth, 29.

52.It might not be properly a German genre, either. Jeffrey Sammons has made the point that, given the term’s prominence in discussions of the novel, there have been surprisingly few studies of the German Bildungsromane, and that discussions of the form—Lukács is a notable offender—often omit the most important specifics: “It is quite astonishing how often in discussions of the subject no actual novels are mentioned. Often such discussions appear to be primarily commentaries on Wilhelm Meister. One can scour the secondary literature and still not come up with a very long list of candidates.” Jeffrey L. Sammons, “The Mystery of the Missing Bildungsroman, or What Happened to Wilhelm Meister’s Legacy,” Genre 14, no. 2 (1981): 233. Sammons ultimately questions the specific importance granted the Bildungsroman in discussions of German culture and literature: “This is a genre, and a predominant one at that—a category into which we can, on inspection, admit only Wilhelm Meister and maybe two and a half other examples?” (237).

53.The term was first suggested by Friedrich von Blanckenburg in his 1774 “Essay on the Novel,” and coined in 1820 by Karl von Morgenstern, but is little used until Dilthey’s 1870 biography of Friedrich Schleiermacher. See Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 3.

54.The arguments of Howe’s book were further developed in Jerome H. Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).

55.Cf. Rosemary Ashton, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Cf. the discussion of Carlyle’s reading of Jean Paul in chapter 3.

56.Ashton, German Idea, 4–5. Carlyle, the great proponent of German thought in general and Goethe in particular, characterized English opinion: “[W]e disdain to be assisted by the Germans, whom by a species of second-sight, we have discovered, before knowing anything about them, to be a timid, dream, extravagant, insane race of mortals.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels, trans. Thomas Carlyle (London: Chapman & Hall, 1824), 1:5 (Translator’s Preface).

57.Marianne Hirsch makes the point that the generic classification, though it might take different forms in France, England, and Germany, also displays compelling similarities among those traditions: “The definition of a historical genre of the novel of formation not only provides a useful critical tool for the reading of individual works, but also accounts for the different orientations of German, as opposed to French and English realistic fiction” (Marianne Hirsch, “The Novel of Formation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Lost Illusions,” Genre 12, no. 3 [1979]: 294). Note that Hirsch groups French and English together in opposition to German, while Moretti famously groups French and German together, and excludes the English Bildungsroman as a “fairy-tale novel.” Moretti, Way of the World, 189

58.Gadamer, Truth, 293.

59.Georgia Warnke, “Hermeneutics, Ethics, and Politics,” in Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. Robert J. Dostal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 80–81.

60.Mill, Utilitarianism, 74.

61.In this, ethics was just one part of a much larger debate, encompassing science and math, between Mill and Whewell. As Laura J. Snyder explains, “Mill’s view … was … deliberately presented in opposition to Whewell’s work. … [Mill’s] overriding desire was to expel the intuitionist philosophy from its ‘stronghold’ in physical science and mathematics, because he saw this as being the crucial precondition for reforming moral and political philosophy. … If he could demonstrate that knowledge of physical science and mathematics did not require any a priori axioms, Mill hoped, then he would have proved the superfluity of a priori elements in morality and political philosophy.” Snyder, Reforming, 27.

62.Mill, Autobiography, 135.

63.See the discussion of Sidgwick’s Discourse in chapter 1.

64.Mill, “Sedgwick’s Discourse,” 60.

65.Cf. “A Method of Self Examination” in John Wesley, The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M., 4th ed. (London: John Mason, 1841), 11:499–500.

66.Williams, Culture, 66.

67.For a compelling discussion of the odd fact that Mill seems fairly uninterested in Wordsworth’s actual poetry, see Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 98–99. Siskin has suggested that, for Mill, the mere act of making literary discriminations—Wordsworth is better than Byron; some Wordsworth poems are better than others—gave Mill access to a different field of knowledge, the “literary,” with its attendant reward: “the self- and class-authorizing ideology of the aesthetic (the taste by which one knows great authors and thus one’s greatness).” A convincing argument for the importance of Wordsworth in terms of the Hartleyan associationist orthodoxy of the day can be found in Robert Scott Stewart, “Utilitarianism Meets Romanticism: J. S. Mill’s Theory of Imagination,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 10, no. 4 (1993): 369–88.

68.“My course of study had led me to believe, that all mental and moral feelings and qualities, whether of a good or of a bad kind, were the results of association; that we love one thing, and hate another, take pleasure in one sort of action or contemplation, and pain in another sort, through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those things, from the effect of education or of experience.” Mill, Autobiography, 82.

69.Kant, Groundwork, 4:455–56.

70.The actual composition of the Autobiography, published posthumously in 1873, has been the subject of some academic sleuthing and debate. Albert William Levi offers convincing evidence that a good deal of the composition took place in 1853 and 1854. Albert William Levi, “The Writing of Mill’s Autobiography,” Ethics 61, no. 1 (1951): 293.

71.John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Books IV–VI, Appendices, ed. John M. Robson (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006), 840.

CHAPTER FIVE: THE LARGE NOVEL AND THE LAW OF LARGE NUMBERS

1.This term will call to mind Alex Woloch’s The One vs. the Many. As I will argue in this chapter, a good deal of Eliot’s inventiveness comes from her attempt to offer a different solution from that found in most nineteenth-century realism to what Woloch phrases as the question of how “the discrete representation of any specific individual is intertwined with the narrative’s continual apportioning of attention to different characters who jostle for limited space within the same fictive universe.” Eliot, I will suggest, sees the “fictive universe” not as containing “limited space” but rather as existing at a level of magnitude greater than that which can be produced by simply summing up all the characters, major or minor. See Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 13.

2.Eliot, Deronda, 810.

3.H. W. Fowler, The King’s English, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 142.

4.See Douglas Lane Patey, Probability and Literary Form: Philosophic Theory and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Neil Hertz, George Eliot’s Pulse (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Leland Monk, Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modern British Novel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).

5.The most famous being Leavis’s desire to cut out the Deronda sections and leave only a novel titled Gwendolen Harleth. Leavis, Great Tradition, 122.

6.Eliot, Letters, 6:290.

7.Lukács, Theory, 132.

8.This might just be to say that Eliot was the most Continental of the Victorian novelists. Franco Moretti: “Together with Jane Austen, she was the only novelist to dismiss the judicial-fairy-tale model and deal with the issues characteristic of the continental Bildungsroman.” Moretti, Way of the World, 214.

9.Eliot, Middlemarch, 37.

10.Catherine Gallagher, “George Eliot: Immanent Victorian,” Representations 90, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 70.

11.The strong form of this claim would be that, since every individual is particularized, the novel could be about any one of them. Lukács, in Theory of the Novel, makes this argument: the protagonist of the Bildungsroman is “merely accidental … picked out of an unlimited number of men who share his aspirations” (134). Many of Middlemarch’s self-conscious discourses on authorial attention—the pier-glass metaphor, “Why always Dorothea?”—can be seen as an attempt to phrase some version of this claim while, at the same time, avoiding the disingenuous assertion that the novel could be about Rosamond or, say, Sir James Chettam.

12.As Sharon Marcus has shown, Dorothea’s moments of intense sympathy with Rosamond and Will are both essential to the dynamics of the heterosexual marriage plot: “Dorothea and Rosamond come together only because of their shared entanglement with Will, and Dorothea and Will tie the knot only because of the electric decisive affinity Dorothea experiences with Rosamond. Weak as it is, the bond between the two women is the only force powerful enough to tie up the marriage plot’s loose ends.” Marcus, Between Women, 78–79.

13.For more on the problem of induction in the larger philosophical discussions of the period, see Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), ch. 7; and Snyder, Reforming.

14.Edward Said offers a strong version of this comparison: “Dorothea emerges at the end of Middlemarch as a chastened woman, forced to concede her grand visions of a ‘fulfilled’ life in return for a relatively modest domestic success as a wife and mother. It is this considerably diminished view that Daniel Deronda, and Zionism in particular, revise upward: toward a genuinely hopeful socioreligious project in which individual energies can be merged and identified with a collective national vision, the whole emanating out of Zionism.” This more successful heroism, though, relies on the imagining of a place quite different from the crowded cities where Middlemarch reaches its conclusion; it requires the myth of an empty Palestine. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 61.

15.George Levine, “Determinism and Responsibility in the Works of George Eliot,” PMLA 77, no. 3 (June 1962): 271.

16.More technically, a countably infinite set is said to be “denumerable.” Unfortunately for my argument, no responsible scholarly conclusions about Eliot’s Jews can be drawn from the fact that Cantor denoted the ordinality—that is to say, the “size”—of a denumerable set with a Hebrew letter and a number: ℵ₀ (read “aleph null”).

17.Of course, when it came to the census, they could be counted. There were, literally, a finite number of English. What is important here, though, is the way in which Eliot figures the English as a continuum, while identifying Jews with their numerical representation. See note 18.

18.George Eliot, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda Notebooks, ed. Jane Irwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 84, 209, 265, 431, 436. The source of the newspaper article is uncertain—Irwin suggests it may have come from the Jewish Chronicle. There are no references in her notebook to specifically English populations, and the only general, non-Jewish note avoids the actual numerical size of the population in question: “Population now augmented 14 per ct. in 10 years” (234).

19.George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, ed. Nancy Henry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994), 162.

20.Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 194.

21.Hacking, Chance, 180–99.

22.John M. Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 5.

23.Mitchell Bryan Hart, Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 8.

24.Oren Soffer, “Antisemitism, Statistics, and the Scientization of Hebrew Political Discourse: The Case Study of Ha-Tsefirah,” Jewish Social Studies 10, no. 2 (2004): 55–79.

25.Joseph Jacobs, Studies in Jewish Statistics, Social, Vital, and Anthropometric (London: D. Nutt, 1891), 54. The epigraph to this volume is a quote from Deronda: “In relation to society, numbers are qualities.” This quote will be discussed at greater length in the next section.

26.Joseph Jacobs, “The Comparative Distribution of Jewish Ability,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 15 (1886): 351–79. Jacobs’s desire is to build on Galton’s Hereditary Genius in order to show the statistical preponderance of “genius” and “lunacy” among Jews, and the relative low incidence of “mediocrity.” Though in no way consciously anti-Semitic—Jacobs was himself Jewish—the discussion of the human elements of the bell-shaped normal curve does produce some rather chilling moments, including a fanciful description that replaces the balls and pins of Galton’s quincunx—which showed that randomly dropped balls would fall into a normal curve—with people and “pens”: “I have said that our method consists in estimating the number of eminent men among a million Englishmen or Jews, as the case may be. Suppose that we had these million men collected together on Salisbury Plain, and suppose further that we were gifted with the insight of a recording angel and could arrange them in sixteen classes according to their ability, ranging from the greatest genius to the most degraded idiot. A long wall with fifteen projecting walls perpendicular to it would give us, as it were, sixteen pens, in which we could place our various classes” (352).

27.Times, January 7, 1850; New York Times, October 17, 1885, 3.

28.A problematic aside: it is difficult to watch these accumulating enumerations without feeling pulled backwards, like Benjamin’s angel of history, toward the twentieth century, and its totemic enumeration of Jewish millions. Is it possible that the historical focus on the six million, instead of the over ten million total, is in some part a continuation of this nineteenth-century discursive tradition?

29.Hart, Social Science, 28.

30.Quoted in Soffer, “Ha-Tsefirah,” 62.

31.Max Nordau, speaking in December 1901, at the Fifth Zionist Conference in Basil. Quoted in Hart, Social Science, 29–30. As we saw with Jacobs, though, such insistence on precision need not always be Zionist in nature.

32.The translation that follows this epigraph in the text is, as far as I can tell, the longest existing translation of Zunz into English. Hacking notes that “English readers’ most direct knowledge of Zunz will come from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.” Hacking, Chance, 194n.

33.Luitpold Wallach, Liberty and Letters: The Thoughts of Leopold Zunz (London: East & West Library, 1959), 21. For a list of the specific topics these “statistics” would cover, see Fritz Bamberger, “Zunz’s Conception of History: A Study of the Philosophic Elements in Early Science of Judaism,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 11 (1941): 15–16.

34.Eliot, Notebooks, 436.

35.For a comprehensive account of the important cross-disciplinary influences in Eliot’s organic thought, see Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), ch. 1.

36.George Eliot, “Address to the Working Men, by Felix Holt,” in Felix Holt, the Radical, ed. Lynda Mugglestone (New York: Penguin, 1995), 489. It should be noted that this quote proceeds rather ominously “… and with a terrible liability to get wrong because of that delicate dependence.” This self-conscious fragility is essential to Eliot’s organic metaphor, but it would take my discussion too far afield. For a good discussion of this problematic in Eliot’s work, see David Carroll, “‘Janet’s Repentance’ and the Myth of the Organic,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35, no. 3 (December 1980): 331–48.

37.Steven Marcus, “Literature and Social Theory: George Eliot,” in Representations: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 197.

38.The term was introduced by Adolphe Quetelet in his 1835 Treatise on Man. For the intellectual debates surrounding this “character” in Victorian literature and social theory, see Christopher Kent, “The Average Victorian: Constructing and Contesting Reality,” Browning Institute Studies 17 (1989): 41–52.

39.Gallagher discusses the anxiety that Eliot felt about becoming, in the writing of Deronda, “an insistent echo of [her]self.” This passage suggests the extent to which her knowledge of readerly expectations of Eliotic maneuvers surfaced in the novel’s text. See Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), ch. 5.

40.A good deal of the information here is drawn from the rich and accessible discussions in Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking: 1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Hacking, Chance; and Poovey, Modern Fact. See also Stephen M. Stigler, The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty Before 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986); Alain Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning, trans. Camille Naish (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). For the prehistory of these topics, see Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction, and Statistical Inference, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

41.Hume offered the most famous statement of the relation between quantity and quality: “it seems natural to expect that wherever there are most happiness and virtue, and the wisest institutions: there will also be most people.” David Hume, “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations,” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 382. An 1815 article in the London Medical Repository analyzed the reason for the comparatively higher suicide rates in Paris than in London after Napoleon’s defeat. Hacking points to this as the beginning of numerical sociology, because “(a) there were numbers, and (b) the numbers of suicide were seen as a moral indicator of the quality of life.” Hacking, Chance, 64.

42.Hacking suggests a “gross but convenient” binary between the development of “Eastern” statistics, focused in conservative Berlin, and “Western” statistics, focused in liberal London and Paris. Eastern statistics, according to Hacking, rejected the idea of “statistical laws,” which not only described society but also governed it; Western statistics embraced it. Hacking’s explanation:

Why, if you are a conservative, who regards law as a social product, are you disinclined to think that statistical laws can be read into the printed tables of numerical data, or obtained from summaries of facts about individuals? Because laws are not the sort of thing to be inferred from individuals, already there and counted. Laws of society, if such there be, are facts about the culture, not distillations of individual behaviour.

Why, if you are a liberal who regards law (in the political sphere) as a product of the will of individuals, are you content to find statistical laws in facts about crime and conviction published by the ministry of justice? Because social laws are constituted by individuals.

This would seem, at the very least, to fit with Sinclair’s understanding of his importation of German work. Hacking, Chance, 37.

43.Quoted in Hacking, Chance, 16.

44.Quoted in Hacking, Chance, 177.

45.Percy Fitzgerald, The Life of Charles Dickens as Revealed in His Writings (London: Chatto & Windus, 1905), 1:207. I was made aware of this reference by its citation in Kent, “Average,” 49. Kent, in turn, gives credit to Philip Collins.

46.Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England (London: John W. Parker & Son, 1857), 1:30–31.

47.Helen Small, “Chances Are: Henry Buckle, Thomas Hardy, and the Individual at Risk,” in Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830–1970: Essays in Honor of Gillian Beer, ed. Helen Small and Trudi Tate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 67–68. Small’s essay offers an excellent account of the relation between Buckle’s specific ideas and the use of the individual in late-Victorian literature.

48.Eliot, Letters, 2:485–86.

49.See George Henry Lewes, “Mr. Buckle’s Scientific Errors,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 90 (November 1861): 582–96.

50.Henry James, “Middlemarch,” in Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Library of America, 1984), 965.

51.For a discussion of this friendship see Selma B. Brody, “Physics in Middlemarch: Gas Molecules and Ethereal Atoms,” Modern Philology 85, no. 1 (August 1987): 42–53.

52.Eliot, Notebooks, 21.

53.George Henry Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind: First Series, the Foundations of a Creed (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1874), 1:295, 297–98.

54.And Maxwell would have had some knowledge of Eliot, as well. After seeing a discussion of solar myths at the Cambridge Philosophical Society, he wrote a letter to Lewis Campbell, analyzing all of Middlemarch’s major characters in “astronomical or meteorological” terms. Lewis Campbell and William Garnett, The Life of James Clerk Maxwell (London: Macmillan, 1882), 386.

55.Quoted in Porter, Statistical Thinking, 111.

56.Maxwell, of course, was not the first to notice that it was impossible to follow individual molecules. In this he was influenced by Rudolf Clausius’s work in the late 1850s. What was new was his application of methods acquired from Laplace, Quetelet, and Buckle. “Clausius had recognized that there would be considerable variation in the velocity of the molecules; but in his mathematical analysis of molecular encounters, he simply used the average molecular velocity. Maxwell, however, maintained that a statistical analysis, analagous in form to Laplace’s distribution of errors, was required: he suggested that the velocities were distributed among the molecules in accordance with a statistical distribution function.” P. M. Harman, The Natural Philosophy of James Clerk Maxwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 124. Interestingly, the Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann independently produced not only similar theories, in what would eventually be called the “Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution,” but also similar social analogies to explain those theories.

57.Quoted in Porter, Statistical Thinking, 113–14.

58.Porter, Statistical Thinking, 136. An interesting corollary to this is the fact that quantitative discussions of evolution were from the very beginning “social Darwinism.” For such work could only come about through the applications of statistical methods. And that required drawing analogies between Darwin’s theories and the proper social domain of statistical research. As anecdotal demonstration, we have the fact that first person to present a statistical refinement of Darwin’s theories was his cousin, Francis Galton—the father of modern eugenics.

59.James Clerk Maxwell, Theory of Heat, 7th ed. (New York: D. Appleton, 1883), 328.

60.For a more technically precise but still highly readable account, see Harman, Maxwell, 124–44.

61.Eliot, Middlemarch, 194.

62.Moretti, Way of the World, 45–46.

63.As, for example, when Lucien sees him at the opera in Lost Illusions.

64.Eliot, Letters, 5:312.

65.Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt; trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 177.

66.Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 232.

67.Richard Shiff, “Handling Shocks: On the Representation of Experience in Walter Benjamin’s Analogies,” Oxford Art Journal 15, no. 2 (1992): 90.

68.Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann; trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 906.

69.Benjamin, Illuminations, 179.

70.Benjamin, Arcades, 544.

71.Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 156.

72.Richard D. Altick, The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), 182.

73.F. B. Pinion, A George Eliot Companion: Literary Achievement and Modern Significance (London: Macmillan, 1991), 203.

74.See E. J. Carter, “The Green Table: Gambling Casinos, Capitalist Culture, and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2002).

75.Eliot, Letters, 5:312.

76.Carter shows how the proprietors of the casinos, and in particular of the casino at Bad Homburg, used this excitement as a means of boosting business in the casinos’ final days. E. J. Carter, “Breaking the Bank: Gambling Casinos, Finance Capitalism, and German Unification,” Central European History 39, no. 2 (2006): 201.

77.Not completely responsible, of course—we might also look at the presence of railway travel. Interestingly enough, though, Nicholas Daly has argued that the railways had a similar effect as that which I have been ascribing to gambling, and he makes similar connections with the sensation novel. See Nicholas Daly, “Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and Modernization of the Senses,” ELH 66, no. 2 (1999): 461–87.

78.Wilfred Stone, “The Play of Chance and Ego in Daniel Deronda,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 53, no. 1 (July 1998): 31.

79.As Stone points out, across the Atlantic we would also find Mark Twain’s 1873 The Gilded Age—subtitled A Tale of To-day.

80.See, for example, the discussion of the triangulated relationship between the terms “investment,” “speculation,” and “gambling” in David C. Itzkowitz, “Fair Enterprise or Extravagant Speculation: Investment, Speculation, and Gambling in Victorian England,” Victorian Studies 44, no. 1 (Autumn 2002): 121–47.

81.Henry Longueville Mansel, “Sensation Novels,” in Letters, Lectures, and Reviews, Including the Phrontisterion; or, Oxford in the 19th Century, ed. Henry W. Chandler (London: John Murry, 1873), 222.

82.Henry James, “Mary Elizabeth Braddon,” in Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Library of America, 1984), 742, 744.

83.See Dehn Gilmore, The Victorian Novel and the Space of Art: Fictional Form on Display (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 106–11.

84.Miller, Police, 146.

85.Nicholas Dames, Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810–1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 169. Dames discusses the actual medical understandings of amnesia not only lying behind the work of the sensation novel but also developing from it. Gilmore also usefully relates forgetfulness occasioned by repeated shocks to the culture surrounding large-scale exhibitions.

86.Barbara Hardy, “Introduction,” in Daniel Deronda (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 27.

87.Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 136.

88.Since the similarity of terms may mislead, I should point out that I’m not claiming this revelation as a shock experience—first, because it is not repeated, and second, because, contrary to Eliot’s claims, it is not particularly surprising.

89.George Eliot, Adam Bede, ed. Valentine Cunningham (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), ch. 34.

90.Eliot, Middlemarch, 192.

91.John Sutherland has done the math: “by the time she runs away from Hall Farm … Hetty must be six to seven months pregnant.” John Sutherland, Is Heathcliff a Murderer? Puzzles in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 114.

92.In other words, Barthes’s hermeneutic code.

93.Levine, Suspense, 101ff.

94.Narrative enigmas are often centered around questions of origin. Eliot usually shows little interest in them, but when she does engage them, as with Daniel, her interest is much more in asking the question than in finding out the answer. Cynthia Chase, in an influential deconstructive reading of the novel, makes the point that the novel tends to reverse the temporality of cause and effect. Looking specifically at the question of Daniel’s origin, Chase writes, “What the reader feels, on the basis of the narrative presentation, is that it is because Deronda has developed a strong affinity for Judaism that he turns out to be of Jewish parentage.” Cynthia Chase, “The Decomposition of the Elephants: Double-Reading Daniel Deronda,” PMLA 93, no. 2 (March 1978): 217.

95.Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, ed. Henry Popkin (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 12.

96.Stone, “Play of Chance,” 27.

97.Neil Hertz suggests that the “numerical” consciousness here is a form of “neutral” repetition that runs throughout Deronda, countering the novel’s commitment to moral involvement (as it does here with Mordecai’s lecture). Hertz, Pulse, ch. 8.

98.Richard Anthony Proctor, “Gambling Superstitions,” Cornhill Magazine 25 (1872): 708.

99.Eliot, Notebooks, 283. The fact that Eliot was drawn to the mathematical questions inherent in these issues is further evidenced by her jotting down the following mathematical oddity in her notebook: “If a rod be tossed over a grating of parallel bars, the number of times it will fall through will depend on the length & thickness of the rod, the distance between the bars, & the proportion in which the circumference of a circle exceeds the diameter” (283). This is a rather awkward phrasing of the elementary probability result known as “Buffon’s needle.” It can be shown that, given lines spaced a unit apart, the chance of a needle of unit length landing on one of those lines is ²/_π. Therefore, if we repeat this experiment, we should be able to get an ever more accurate estimation of π. As Proctor puts it, “we can estimate the proportion in which the circumference of a circle exceeds the diameter, by merely tossing a rod over a grating several thousand times, and counting how often it falls through” (710). That random tosses, repeated often enough, should give us π is often used as an impressive demonstration of the law of large numbers. It certainly seems to have made an impression on Eliot.

100.A hodgepodge of progressive betting schemes—the “Martingale,” in which bets are doubled after a loss, and the “Paroli,” in which they are doubled after a win—and prediction schemes based on the maturity of chances.

101.Norwood Young, “Gambling at Monte Carlo,” National Review 16 (1890): 487.

102.Carter, “Breaking,” 193ff.

103.Lascelles Wrexall, “Gambling-Houses in Germany,” Dublin University Magazine 77 (April 1871): 468. This article was originally published in St. James Magazine in 1865. It was presumably reprinted due to the imminent 1872 closure of the German casinos.

104.An American visitor helpfully offers this explanation: “A stranger to the spas wonders why most of the players pore so intently over the little printed cards they hold in their hands, sticking metallic pins here and there as the last result of the game is announced. They are keeping the run of the game, marking the numbers and cards which have won, and drawing deductions therefrom for future bets. In this way they are slowly but steadily evolving systems which will prove their bane.” Junius Henri Browne, “The German Gambling Spas,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 45, no. 265 (June 1872): 9.

105.The details: the sole house advantage in trente et quarante occurs when the two rows of cards—the first labeled noir, the second rouge—both add up to thirty-one. In Homburg, a further rule was added that the final card of the rouge row must be black, thus cutting the house advantage in half, to roughly one and one-third percent. See Carter, “Green Table,” 36–38.

106.Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 457.

107.Eliot, Letters, 5:314.

108.The haughty tone of the travel articles notwithstanding, such intuitive beliefs persist rather unabated. For a psychological discussion of the conflicts between intuition over small sample sizes and the larger laws of probability, see Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Belief in the Law of Small Numbers,” Psychological Bulletin 76, no. 2 (1971): 105–10.

109.Eliot, Letters.

AFTERWORD

1.Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 1.

2.Miller, Police, x.

3.Difficulty and ease of reading are centrally important notions in literary studies that are quite, yes, difficult to discuss with any precision. One admirable recent account of modernist difficulty that I found quite helpful was Leornar Diepeveen, The Difficulties of Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2003).

4.Jameson, “Ideology,” 57.

5.Jameson, “Ideology,” 57.