Catherine Gallagher’s The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse in Narrative Form 1832-1867

Traces the history of non-fictional and fictional discourses swirling around debates concerning Industrial Revolution, which want desperately to make good changes by playing with various models of connecting the social and the textual to stimulate social and political reform, but contradictions arise (you can’t have helpful effects if they aren’t connected, but you can’t have privileged realm for critique and brainstorming if they are connected), and by end of 1860s have retreated into an insistence on the separation of texts from social facts.

Basic Tenets

• Condition of England Debate was a discourse that affected the shape of the English novel
  • The tensions implicit in earlier fiction (free will versus determinism, private versus public, facts versus values) now become explicit
  • Thus, they had to investigate the novel itself, but it led to mimetic claims
  • “Even as they probe the contested assumptions of their medium they try to insist that their fictions are unmediated presentations of social reality.”
• What are these changes?
  • “Disruption of narrative continuity” resulting in “formal self-consciousness,” which comes out of meditations on free will versus determinism
  • Representation itself is redefined in order to show that we needed new answers to the question of how the social and familial relate, how we can make the private and public cohere
  • “New theory of culture and a new practice of realism” result from the impinging upon literary representation by political representation, which shows the rift between facts and values
  • 1860s: Arnoldian criticism reverses these earlier trends (tended towards de-canonizing the industrial novels
• Industrial Novels
  • Gaskell’s Mary Barton and _North and South-
  • Dickens’ Hard Times
  • Eliot’s Felix Holt
  • Disraeli’s Sybil
  • Kingsley’s Alton Locke
• Assumptions
  • She’s not a Marxist: she doesn’t make material facts the basis of her argument or say that they are “the ultimate sources of the discourse” around Condition of England,but instead focuses on the debate itself, which she says “played a crucial role in shaping the outcome of the Industrial Revolution”
    • Marx would say she’s standing on her head
  • The discourse isn’t just bourgeois (she says that there’s no discourse then that escapes the bourgeois antimonies that she’s talking about, so you can’t identify a working class or aristocratic discourse)
    • She admits my obvious counterarg: it’s not there b/c bourgeois were in power and made it “disappear,” and she explains it away becasue it doesn’t apply to her book!
    • My main problem with this is the instability of ALL class identity at this time in English history. Try to define to me the middle class at this time. I dare you. I would say that one of the most interesting features of British society at this time is that no one is what s/he seems, class-wise. (Sigh, except for the actual working class.) It seems to me that the revolving swirl of folks difficult to identity both belies the real structure of difference between the haves and the have-nots and shows how the stark structure of one against the other doesn’t fit the entire population.
    • What’s good is that Gallagher does recognize the variety behind the label “bourgeois”

Part one: Free will versus determinism

• Many industrial novels believe in free will and social determinism
  • Both public rhetoric about industry and these books revolve around questions of human freedom
  • Question, “What is freedom?” bleeds from public discourse into books, esp. about the worker being free
• Social Determinism of These Novels
  • Earlier British novels “tacitly assume” the freedom of the individuals
    • Thus, industrial novels go against this tendency, agree in the social determinist arguments of people like Owen
  • Also goes against Romantic tradition of free will
  • Of course, it isn’t solid: sometimes, free will assumptions break through, creating dissonance
    • There’s a tension between showing how bad factories are (showing their effects) yet claiming Romantic free will (esp for the growth of protagonist)
• Religious crisis: how to believe in Providence when the conditions are so bad?
• Freedom versus capitalism
  • During debates over the Corn Laws: “commerce has hitherto been the greatest destroyer of liberty ever known to man…. Heaven and hell are not more diametrically opposed to each other than is commerce to heaven-born liberty.” (33)
  • Question: is laissez-faire freedom? The answer isn’t clear.
    • Yes: Some extend the notions of freedom to the freedom of the invisible hand without government intervention
    • No: Some say that capitalism interferes with freedom.
• This debate about freedom affects the “formal characteristics” of the industrial novel
  • How? Their inconsistencies (are they free? or are they determined?) and obsession over freedom theme (sometimes jarringly so)
    • Should the narrator explain events away or say that they’re due to the character’s will: a tension between plot and character
    • Gallagher says these inconsistencies are not the “fault” of the timid novelist, but instead reflections of these debates about freedom
      • They are inconsistent because the rhetoric critiquing industry is inconsistent
    • Plus, novelists’ wish to have a nice social lesson tugs a bit on the plot as well: you can’t have anything random; all needs to work together perfectly: ANTI CONTINGENCY
• Hence, these novels make a big deal out of what was always underneath the novel, esp the realist novel: extent of human freedom

“The Providential Plot”

• Two Kinds of God
  • Inverventionist (Hannah More)
    • Hannah More’s 1785-9 Cheap Repository Tracts set stage for Evangelical look on industry: society might look all wrong, but it’s just cuz we’re too human to understand God’s good work
      • God’s making you virtuous by making you suffer! To give you wonderful afterlife!
    • There is no chance: God intervenes daily, even in the most trivial of events
    • Tries to say that her characters are moral agents (they are free to do good or evil)
      • Upshot? They must show submission
    • Historical fate: At first, More reflects Evangelical ideas, but as Revolution marches on (and abolition movements take off), Evangelicals begin to intervene and protest, not just submit
      • Cf Charlotte Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood, which shows people actively changing system (1839-40) because world is not providential. Though it introduces characters who apparently have free will, it ultimately proves determination. Religious base for the argument for reform.
  • Mechanical/Watchmaker God (Harriet Martineau)
    • Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-4), short novels that show economic law
    • Assumes benevolent Providence: world is good and deterministic
      • Accepts class conflict and suffering as the unfortunate way of life that’s part of “greatest good” of whole society, but did believe in alleviating it by education and good decisions
      • Tragic plot but cheerful tone: conflict is necessary, folks (55), and you unfortunate laborers are tragic heroes
    • Necessarian: eternal laws work in universe irrespective of any divine or human will
      • You can have free action and behavior (she agrees with Locke, Hume, and the political economists)
      • No free will, and you wouldn’t want it anyway: it’s an old superstition
      • “Human behavior turns the wheels of the plot” (53), but only according to the laws God set up
      • Sets up laws of Providence and of political economy as the same
  • Legacy: ambiguous b/c glorifies workers but also accepts necessary conflict and suffering (what her brother James called her “Religion of Causality”)

Mary Barton, “Causality versus Conscience”

• Gaskell’s novel (1845-7) tries to allow for some free will, so has multiple “explanatory modes”
  • It comes at a time of conflict in Unitarian Church about free will, where Necessarians like Harriet said “all determined” and Transcendentalists like her brother James says we do have free will. (Gaskell is a Unitarian, remember.)
  • Gaskell at that time under influence of Francis Newman, who thinks that man’s intelligence comes from God, not from environment: against “psychological materialism” of Harriet Martineau, pro the moral responsibility of folks
  • Yet even Newman thinks that spiritual and material are intertwined, and that you need “certain material conditions” to support morality (65): ambivalence
• Style
  • Vivid scenes
  • Use of realistic dialect, common language
  • Eclectic forms: use of tract, melodrama, domestic fiction, and finally a detective story
    • It’s divided into two parts: the unfairness story and the murder story
• Can’t decide
  • Narrator refuses to account for the story
  • Very self-conscious: narrator admits it to readers directly
• Gallagher argues that the contradictions about determination versus free will (character versus the events that happen to a person) require Gaskell to vacillate among various narrative styles to avoid looking the contradiction in the face.
  • Gaskell thus pawns off public problems by turning to narrate the private sphere.

Family and Society

• Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies
  • Gives an account of home being closed from the “rough work in the open world,” so that the world has “no danger, no temptation, no cause of error or offense,” the “shelter” from everything bad.
  • Once the outside world permeates, it’s not home anymore.
• Gallagher critiques Raymond Williams,
  • Williams’ The Long Revolution
    • Characters don’t illustrate larger background, and society is not a background for relationships: instead, “every aspect of personal life is radically affected by the quality of the general life, yet the general life is seen at its most important in completely personal terms.”
    • So, realism is where the two interpenetrate so much as to be indivisible
  • Gallagher’s critique: But the private is where you can actually affect your life, that is, where you can successfully exercise your will, where you resolve the public by taking it into the private and solving it there. So we need to let them be separate.
• Governing contradiction of this chapter: Novelists want to set up the family as a model for reform, yet in order to do so, they must separate the two spheres as much as possible.
  • So how can one realm affect another unless they’re connected?
  • And how could it be a reform unless it’s separated?
• Metonymy: the assumption that the family and society are alike, run into each other, and should be run by the same rules
  • The Question for authors is: what should be the proper relationship between family and society?
    • Hard Times and North and South “ultimately advocate the continued isolation of the family from society” (148)
    • Though these novels ostensibly need and want to connect the two spheres, they never can quite manage to
    • Ultimately, they’d rather choose to maintain the healing hearth than actually introduce domestic into the public
  • Hard Times
    • Style keeps stories of the family and the working class parallel, not intermingling
      • Any time the stories intermingle, there is disaster, so the connections between private and public are seen as destructive
    • Advocates family cohesion, not social cohesion: private self-sacrifice, not public sacrifice
    • Thus subverts family-society metaphor rampant in public discourse
      • Family is isolated, can’t help Coketown get better
      • Metaphor itself is seen as harmful, literal mindedness as better: duty comes to be more important than imagination/metaphoric flights
  • North and South
    • Gaskell rejects paternalist metaphor: her characters call the comparison silly: workers can’t be like children
      • True engine of change: influence by the action of other people, not by words (same lesson taught by Sarah Stickney Ellis, Mothers of England)
      • We have metonymy: the influence of women on men will do the trick, connecting private and public life
    • Mothers and sons (Mrs. Thornton and Mrs. Hale), and husbands and wives (Margaret and Thornton)
      • Margaret sees her influence specifically as “woman’s work”
    • Ultimately, this message does not cohere: “provides a running ironic commentary on its official ideas” (171)
      • Ie. when everyone misinterprets her actions, and the other many misunderstandings
      • She makes personal relations “pass” her ethical inspection, yet Thornton doesn’t care: he just loves and wants to be loved, not have some moral paragon
      • Margaret only helps b/c of her separation from that society (Helstone)
      • Powerful associations are the preconscious, emotional, chancy, subjective ones, not the moral/righteous ones
  • I’m not sure if I agree with this interpretation of North and South

• Style: POV makes it so that we have “Social criticism as a natural byproduct of the working out of Margaret’s personal destiny” (171)

Facts/Values

• Facts are seen to be part of marketplace, while values to be private domain
  • Felix Holt and Sybil advise against conflating “public” with “marketplace,” however, adding a new dimension to the argument
• Debate over political representation and literary representation
• Sybil
  • One of the few industrial novels to focus on political representation
  • Advocates Carlyle and Coleridge’s Romantic Idealism (217)
  • Literary representation will not help political representation, even if you want it to
• Should literature represent society as it is (facts) or as it should be (values)?
  • Uses debate between Eliot and Martineau to illustrate this debate during mid-Victorian era
  • Eliot: scrupulously realistic depictions will lead to moral progress
    • “art is the next thing to life” (qtd 223, from a study of Riehl)
    • You should show what people do and are, not what they ought to be doing according to some moralist
      • cf Dickens’ “false psychology,” noting the unreality of Oliver Twist and and Nancy, for example
      • don’t pretend that virtue can come out of terrible relations of production (“harsh social relations, ignorance, and want” in Eliot’s words)
    • By accepting people as they actually are, readers will become more charitable, sympathetic
    • More facts = more sympathy (cf Adam Bede), resembling James Mill’s ideas about Parliament (more types of people represented more accurately, the better it is, so it’s all about representing competing interests fairly)
    • But by 1860s, she’s starting to doubt that idea
  • Martineau: use moral principles to generate facts (for stories)
    • Her Illustrations used general principles to deduce specific facts and situations because of her belief that society is a well-oiled “Providential machine”
    • Facts and values are pretty much the same thing
    • Don’t use facts themselves as the basis for a work because they’re probably partial, don’t show whole picture, tend to allow you to pick and choose unfairly
  • Later Eliot
    • Mirrors growing doubt among thinkers about the desirability of “descriptive” political representation (the Utilitarian opinion)
      • Market rhetoric often put into play to support broader representation, esp by radical MPs in 1850s-60s (ie, no restrictions, free hand)
      • Other people want elite representation (Burke)
      • Others want symbolic representation (Disraeli)
    • Skeptical
      • Of political representation for the lower classes, who aren’t ready to exercise that power, she says
      • Of her earlier belief that you can stimulate the ideal by describing the actual
    • Felix Holt shows the “evils of descriptive representation,” which heretofore had been Eliot’s aesthetic goal
  • Felix Holt
    • Influenced by Culture and Anarchy and J. S. Mill (see notes on “On Liberty” to see Mill’s antidescriptive politics)
      • She believes in Mill’s plan of government, so she can’t see her own job as descriptive anymore
  • Eliot’s essay “Debasing the Moral Currency”
    • On burlesque theatre
    • Overuse of literary signs and tropes will “debase” moral currency, making art useless
      • “We are still, most of us, at the stage of believing that mental powers and habits have somehow….a kind of spiritual glaze against conditions”
      • Actually, we are affected by the other cultural associations around works of art or philosophy, incl. burlesque
      • “Lowering the value of every inspiring fact and tradition so that it will command less and less of the spiritual products….by which man saves his soul alive.”
    • Economic, my observation: what a crazy metaphor!
      • In Gallagher’s words, culture is not “independently valuable medium of exchange” (254), unlike cash, which are “mere representations of value”
      • Cultural values are not grounded in anything else but themselves, unlike money, which has stable economic and material grounding
    • Unlike money currency, to which even inflation can’t completely destroy
    • Art is separate from world of “bread and ambition”
      • Although it underpins the socioeconomic world
      • This separation shows how art is “fragile,” artificial
    • Separation = vulnerability
      • Thus, we need “spiritual police” (256) to protect moral values

Conclusion

• By end of this period, people aren’t trying to defend society on the grounds of its being right or inevitable, but instead on the grounds of its very arbitrariness (263)
• Notes common claims about industrial fiction and anti-industrial rhetoric
  • “politics of culture was all along an accommodation to industrial society” (264)
  • these works merely “preserve the economic and social dynamics of industrialism”
  • they just “deflect” attention away from social problems and into culture
• Debunks this claim: the lit is too complex to say that
  • Just because the ending idea is to support the separate realm of art, doesn’t mean you can forget the rest of the ideas
  • Plus, the separation of critique from the social allows it the distance required for critique
• What’s the result?
  • Condition of England debate now turns into “politics of culture,” where culture is separate from politics
  • Social is devalued by culture/novels to justify their existence
    • Finally, independence of representative realm is seen as a good thing
    • ie, separation of facts and values leads to separation of social and cultural
  • Mere representation realism not good enough
    • New realism develops: the masterpieces of realism of latter half of 19th century
    • Facts are separated from values: facticity of narrative no longer determines the value of that narrative
  • 1860s: changing value of “representation” for the realist novel
    • What’s happening in social world is the victory of the gentry’s ideology, the devaluation of industrial values and force
    • Also, the acceptance of laissez-faire economics quiets the debate somewhat

Historical Info

• Early critique of industrialism, 1830s-40s
  • Ten Hours Movement, 1830s-1840s
  • Chartism, 1840s
    • Liberty: we need suffrage, say the workers
    • Reform Act of 1832 only gave middle class the vote, leaving working class unrepresented
    • Inefficacy of Parliamentary reform to help conditions make them see that they have to change government itself, not just persuade it to help
    • Attention going from factory conditions to franchise: the vote
    • Republicanism to fight unfair political economy
  • Rhetoric of industrial reform took its cue from anti- and pro-slavery rhetoric (from late 18th century to about the 1820s/1830s)
    • Tries to take the abolitionists and channel their power and energy into helping industrial conditions
    • Note: antislavery rhetoric often backs its claims for having a free unregulated labor force!
  • Appealed to “freedom”
  • Common rhetoric in 19th c: Workers: worse off than actual slaves
    • They are not actually free, but driven by necessity
    • Only “freedom” they have is to change employers (as Owen said, “liberty of starving” is what they have)
    • Charge of hypocrisy: people who worry about abolition yet don’t care about their own poor countrymen
      • Thus, early criticism of industry actually part of pro-slavery rhetoric (big figure: William Cobbett, one of the people talking about “white slavery”)
  • Phrase “white slaves” begins to refer to factory workers
• Combination Acts, 1799, 1800
  • Neither masters nor workers could “combine” to fix wages
  • Used to prevent unions and strikes
  • Liberals, radicals, and workers want it repealed
  • 1824 repealed
  • 1825, a new Combination Act: allowed unions but restricts them
• Second Factory Act: 1819
• Robert Owen: “one of the earliest analysts and reformers of industrial society”
  • Advocate of central social planning: your environment determines you, so it must be the best possible
    • Factory work takes away your capacity for moral judgment and growth, as well as growth of intellect
  • Affected early 19th century discussion about industry, esp. parliamentary
  • His concept of freedom, which Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Mill, Locke, and Hume pretty much all shared: your will is not free because it is determined by your predecessors and environment. However, you can act free when you may act in accordance with that will.
    • The formation of the will is determined.
      • There is no free will.
    • The exercise of that will can be free.
    • Freedom is freedom from “external constraint,” whereas they admit “internal constraint” of determinism
  • Owen adds something to this mix, however: free action must be rational
    • Society must control its people rationally, and industrialism gives society a great chance to do so. (for moral development)
    • In his factories, they can be centralized and ordered according to this scheme.
    • This freedom is the freedom and resources to do something (positive freedom). To be free, you must have been educated.
  • Trade as it exists ruins sincerity and honesty b/c you’re trying to make money off your neighbor, which is deception
  • Labor is not free now because you aren’t educated.
• 1815: Peel’s bill proposing to limit children’s working hours and provide education
  • Resistance: you are meddling with our freedom to deal w/laborers and their own free labor
  • Comeback: Owen: but your workers aren’t free like this
• S. T. Coleridge
  • Freedom is not the highest virtue (what about comfort)
  • Believed in a paternalistic community: traditional norms about rights and duties of the hierarchy
    • Traditionalist: we need to go back to traditional relationships
  • It is modern commercial society that makes you think you don’t have free will: it is the mechanistic, deterministic force
    • He is a Romantic against Enlightenment
  • Anti-utilitarian
    • Utilitarian: Bentham’s criterion for determining social action: greatest happiness for greatest number of people, measured by objective criteria; enlightened self-interest will help others too; utilitarian gov = James Mill 1820 Essay on Government, saying that gov should be “descriptive microcosm” of society, showing all the interests of the realm, for when you have more people who accurately represent more groups, you get a better government
      • Social fact leads to political value
    • Anti-utilitarian: Facts don’t equal values, people! Just cause it’s true don’t mean it’s right.
      • Mere description doesn’t show actual meaning (empirical facts don’t reflect truth), what Gallagher calls “an antidescriptive theory of representation” (190)
      • Utilitarians wrongly used exchange value as the model for value itself (if it’s valuable in the market, then it’s good)
      • What we need are transcendent values, beyond appearances (which are only a tiny part of actual God-given universe)
      • Appearances do not convey actual Truth
  • Anti-determinist, wants to save free will
  • Antidemocratic, yet isn’t a conservative or reactionary:
    • Noted that the “political marketplace” of allowing each group political representation would just allow the sector with the most votes to have power
    • Why should Parliament just give a “mirror image of the economic realm?” (188)
  • Instead, politics should be connex with literature: representation symbolizes the truth
    • That will connect politics with the transcendent
      • He’s an Idealist, like Carlyle, Disraeli, Arnold, Eliot
  • Under influence of German Idealists in the 1810s, he pits the “Spirit of Commerce” against “Spirit of State” (cf “The Statesman’s Manual” 1816; “A Lay Sermon” 1817)
    • “Spirit of Commerce” = value-neutral flow of energy; it has order, sure, but that order is only superficial; empirical meaning; raw energy, so it’s chaotic even when it looks orderly
    • “Spirit of State” = used to direct commerce, it is the correct political model; figurative sense of meaning that reflects God’s mysterious presence in nature; look to Bible as the “germ” of meaning and direction for the future
  • Top down model of meaning: everything is meaningful because it takes part of the larger social/political body, eventually up to the will of God (not empirical, in which case you move upward from facts)
    • The social isn’t by itself the determinant of meaning, but instead God
• Carlyle
  • Anti-determinist, wants to save free will
  • 1829 “Signs of the Times:” determinism associated with factory production, not anything else
  • “politics is primarily a realm where the ironic potentials of symbols actualize themselves” (195)
  • Sartor Resartus
    • Social is a collectively woven fabric, not one of competition
    • “Call ye that a Society where there is no longer any Social Ideal extant; not so much the Idea of a common Home, but only of a common over-crowded Lodging-house?”
    • Today, people just compete, and because they don’t use weapons and kill each other, you call it peace!
    • Symbols, which both conceal and reveal meaning
      • Arbitrary: where meaning is socially determined
      • Inherent: divinely constructed meaning
      • Symbols can devolve, fail to represent anything (the fat king’s coronation, barely able to get on the horse, is one of them)
  • Political result
    • Realm of politics is now an outdated symbol: they should reflect eternal value, but they only reflect right now (mere facts)
    • Politics always is “the exact symbol of its People” (Past and Present) but that “social determination” makes it impossible to become a party to transcendence
    • Politics won’t be able to organize the workers, which is the great social problem of the day; instead, the people on the ground will have to do so
• Mid-Victorian
  • 1854: Chartism dead, but unionism creates dramatic strikes
  • Political reform “often went hand-in-hand” with political conservatism (ie, changes through the current government
  • 1865-66: Representation of the People Bill
    • To extend franchise, based on numerical proportion, supported by Radicals like John Bright
      • Once the workers have power, they will become middle class (thank God, he thinks)
      • Believes in social mobility
    • Versus other Liberal Robert Lowe
      • Doesn’t want to see people in 1:1 ratios because people will be “too much like each other—that we may become merely the multiple of one number” (226)
      • Believes that accurate representation reflects the people who have social power, not just pure numbers; ie, people with property value
    • Yet they are both still under Utilitarian numerical principles
  • Matthew Arnold
  • J. S. Mill