Table Of ContentPalgrave Studies in N ineteenth- Century Writing and Culture
General Editor:Joseph Bristow, Professor of English, UCLA
Editorial Advisory Board: Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck College, University of London;
Josephine McDonagh, Kings College, London; Yopie Prins, University of Michigan;
Lindsay Smith, University of Sussex; Margaret D. Stetz, University of Delaware;
Jenny Bourne Taylor, University of Sussex
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph series
that aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that were pro-
duced in the E nglish-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to thefin
de siècle. Attentive to the historical continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’,
the series will feature studies that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these
terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements.
The main aim of the series is to look at the increasing influence of types of historicism
on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects the shift from critical
theory to cultural history that has affected not only the period 1800–1900 but also
every field within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to
offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and n on-
canonical writings of this era.
Titles include:
Eitan Bar- Yosef and Nadia Valman (editors)
‘THE JEW’ IN L ATE- VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN CULTURE
Between the East End and East Africa
Heike Bauer
ENGLISH LITERARY SEXOLOGY
Translations of Inversions, 1860–1930
Katharina Boehm
BODIES AND THINGS IN N INETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Luisa Calè and Patrizia Di Bello (editors)
ILLUSTRATIONS, OPTICS AND OBJECTS IN NINETEENTH- CENTURY LITERARY AND
VISUAL CULTURES
Deirdre Coleman and Hilary Fester (editors)
MINDS, BODIES, MACHINES, 1770–1930
Colette Colligan
THE TRAFFIC IN OBSCENITY FROM BYRON TO BEARDSLEY
Sexuality and Exoticism in Nineteenth- Century Print Culture
Eleanor Courtemanche
THE ‘INVISIBLE HAND’ AND BRITISH FICTION, 1818–1860
Adam Smith, Political Economy, and the Genre of Realism
Stefano Evangelista
BRITISH AESTHETICISM AND ANCIENT GREECE
Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile
Margot Finn, Michael Lobban and Jenny Bourne Taylor (editors)
LEGITIMACY AND ILLEGITIMACY IN N INETEENTH-CENTURY LAW, LITERATURE
AND HISTORY
Trish Ferguson (editorr)
VICTORIAN TIME
Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes
John Gardner
POETRY AND POPULAR PROTEST
Peterloo, Cato Street and the Queen Caroline Controversy
F. Gray (editorr)
WOMEN IN JOURNALISM AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE
‘Making a Name for Herself’
Yvonne Ivory
THE HOMOSEXUAL REVIVAL OF RENAISSANCE STYLE, 1850–1930
Colin Jones, Josephine McDonagh and Jon Mee (editors)
CHARLES DICKENS, A TALE OF TWO CITIES AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Kirsten MacLeod
FICTIONS OF BRITISH DECADENCE
High Art, Popular Writing and the Fin de Siècle
Jock Macleod
LITERATURE, JOURNALISM, AND THE VOCABULARIES OF LIBERALISM
Politics and Letters, 1886–1916
Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (editors)
VERNON LEE
Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics
Muireann O’Cinneide
ARISTOCRATIC WOMEN AND THE LITERARY NATION, 1832–1867
David Payne
THE REENCHANTMENT OF N INETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Serialization
Julia Reid
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, SCIENCE, AND THEFIN DE SIÈCLE
Virginia Richter
LITERATURE AFTER DARWIN
Human Beasts in Western Fiction 1859–1939
Deborah. Shapple Spillman
BRITISH COLONIAL REALISM IN AFRICA
Inalienable Objects, Contested Domains
Anne Stiles (editorr)
NEUROLOGY AND LITERATURE, 1860–1920
Caroline Sumpter
THE VICTORIAN PRESS AND THE FAIRY TALE
Sara Thornton
ADVERTISING, SUBJECTIVITY AND THE NINETEENTH- CENTURY NOVEL
Dickens, Balzac and the Language of the Walls
Phyllis Weliver
THE MUSICAL CROWD IN ENGLISH FICTION, 1840–1910
Class, Culture and Nation
Paul Young
GLOBALIZATION AND THE GREAT EXHIBITION
The Victorian New World Order
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth- Century Writing and Culture
Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–333–97700–2 (hardback)
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You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing
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Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke,
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Literature, Journalism,
and the Vocabularies
of Liberalism
Politics and Letters, 1886–1916
Jock Macleod
Associate Professor of English Literature, Griffith University, Australia
© Jock Macleod 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-0-230-39146-8
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For Norm and Andy
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Contents
Preface viii
Acknowledgements xxii
Introduction: Advanced Liberalism, Journalism and
Literary Culture 1
1 Between Literature and Politics: The Massingham
Network and the Institutions of Advanced Liberalism 29
2 The ‘Self-Conscious Evolution of Humanity’:
Advanced Liberalism and the Politics and Culture of ‘Life’ 61
3 Advanced Liberalism and the Cultural Value of ‘Life’:
Ethics, Aesthetics and Political Economy 87
4 Writing the East End: Advanced Liberalism,
Realism and Social Reform 117
5 Contesting the New: Advanced Liberalism and the
Emergence of Modernism 149
Conclusion 177
Notes 185
Bibliography 215
Index 227
vii
Preface
This is a book about the liberalism of English literary culture in the late
Victorian and Edwardian years.1 It has two main aims. The first is to
provide the first extended account of the literary cultural language of
progressive or ‘advanced’ liberalism from the 1880s through to World
War I. The second is to make a case for the importance of this end of
the liberal spectrum in English literary culture up to 1914. Literature,
Journalism, and the Vocabularies of Liberalism approaches this topic in a
particular way. If, following John Burrow, we might say that political
theories are vocabularies we inhabit rather than doctrines to which we
subscribe,2 then this book is concerned, not with the analysis of a number
of putatively liberal literary writings, but with the ways in which the
specific vocabularies of progressive liberalism permeated the discourses
of English literary culture during those years. I argue that key liberal
organs of the daily and weekly press provided the enabling conditions
for these vocabularies. Because it is clear that Victorian political dis-
courses themselves were replete with the languages of religion, ethics,
science and literature, I am not suggesting a simple one-way migration
from the political to the cultural. Rather, my claim is that the literary
cultural and socio-political discourses of progressive liberals shared
vocabularies that gave the former its distinctively liberal tenor. The
mutations in these types of rhetoric across the two fields will become
obvious in the course of the book, but so too will the continuities, and
it is the continuities which are my main focus here.
In pursuing these aims, the present study joins an emerging body of
scholarship that, to use Kate Flint’s words, ‘has sought to bring the term
“liberalism” back into contention as a term of critical importance in
literary studies’.3Perhaps the most significant of these works have been
Amanda Anderson’s The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the
Cultivation of Detachmentt (2001), Lauren Goodlad’s Victorian Literature
and the Victorian State (2003), David Wayne Thomas’s Cultivating
Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aestheticc (2004), Daniel Malachuk’s
Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism (2005), and Elaine Hadley’s
Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in M id-Victorian Britain (2010),
though articles both by these scholars and others, and special issues
of journals devoted to liberalism have also played a part in this
resurgence of interest.4 At its heart is an effort to reconsider the ideal
viii
Preface ix
of e mancipation at the centre of liberalism while at the same time
recognizing what Goodlad, following Foucault, calls its ‘perverse
effects’.5 This is not an exercise in neoliberalism. As Hadley says in an
earlier article: ‘I have a confirmed belief in the Victorian and present-
day ineffectiveness of liberalism’, a view reaffirmed in Living Liberalism,
where she claims that ‘liberalism’s liberatory mission was and remains
unsuccessful’.6 Hadley is more sceptical of liberalism’s aspirations than
Anderson, Thomas and Malachuk, but her view that they are in their
different ways engaged in a ‘rescue mission’ of liberalism seems, to me,
an overstatement.7 Anderson, for example, makes it clear she wants
to ‘defend the progressive potentiality’ inhering in liberal practices of
detachment, particularly its capacity to enable critique from within.8
However, her exploration of detachment has at its centre recognition
of the ‘opposition between desirable and undesirable forms of detach-
ment’,9 and much of The Powers of Distance focuses on the different
ways in which key Victorian writers tried to negotiate these different
forms. Even more apposite is Goodlad’s comment in an article on John
Stuart Mill, where she notes that her aim ‘is not to vindicate left- wing
liberalism so much as to consider what a more robust engagement with
certain liberal ideas … might contribute to the radical enterprise’.10 The
extent to which Anderson and other modern scholars are still attached
to the possibilities of liberalism is not the point, though. Rather, each
is trying to draw out a clearer and more complex picture of what was
involved in those emancipatory aspirations and in the process enable us
to apprehend a much richer and more complicated liberalism in the cul-
tural sphere. As Goodlad puts it: ‘I believe that diminished conceptions
of Victorian culture impair historicist critique and, in so doing, reduce
critics’ power to illuminate p resent-day concerns’.11 This of course is the
task that Hadley herself is engaged in. It is a task also at the centre of my
book, though with some differences, as I will explain later.
There are two related reasons why such a task is necessary. The first
stems from limitations in literary criticism and cultural history over
the past two to three decades. Depending on the particular revisionary
scholar, these limitations take different forms. In the case of Anderson,
for example, the focus is on what she calls a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’,
which ‘considers investments in critical distance as self- damning,
interpreting them as masked forms of power rather than as emergent
practices that might themselves be the subject of ongoing critique’.12 For
Goodlad, the point of purchase is less a hermeneutics of suspicion than
a too-narrow grasp of Victorian liberalism and the Victorian State upon
which such a hermeneutics might be based. Goodlad is particularly
