A Victorian Woman's Place: Public Culture in the Nineteenth Century, by Simon Morgan

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Victorian Woman’s Place: Public Culture in the Nineteenth Century Penny Russell (bio) A Victorian Woman’s Place: Public Culture in the Nineteenth Century, by Simon Morgan; pp. x + 270. London and New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007, £47.50, $74.95. The main title of Simon Morgan’s book seems to imply a conventional study of Victorian middle-class femininity. The subtitle complicates this impression and promises something more—which, on the whole, the book delivers. Morgan contends that any attempt to understand Victorian women’s role as confined to the “private” sphere and excluded from the “public” is doomed by the artificiality of the distinction itself. Activities of public moment were conducted in private homes; the very constitution of ideal femininity itself was vital to the emergence of middle-class culture. His central argument is that, far from being excluded from the political world during the middle years of the nineteenth century, women participated in the development of middle-class identity and its expression in public culture. In so doing, they developed institutions and methods of organisation that in turn laid the foundation for the emergence of a specifically feminist movement later in the century. Morgan develops this argument via a close study of the industrial township of [End Page 526] Leeds, focusing on its emerging urban middle class. In assessing the nature and signifi-cance of women’s role in civic work, his book maps a well-planned trajectory. He begins by presenting the conventional masculine narrative of the development of a new “public sphere” on the Habermasian model and follows this with reflections on the prescriptive literature on feminine virtue and influence. Subsequent chapters complicate these conventionally gendered narratives by tracing the main areas of women’s involvement in the civic world: their interest in high culture, their active and sometimes controversial engagement in philanthropy, and their considerably more contested entry into the activities of the formal political sphere. The last substantial chapter explores the public representation of “ladies” in the civic landscape, with particular reference to their visible presence as spectators on grand civic occasions, or their supposedly calming influence at moments of public agitation. To observe the mere fact of middle-class British women’s engagement in such activities at this period is not in itself remarkable. The strength of Morgan’s achievement depends, rather, on his close analysis of the social circumstances of Leeds. He presents a local, particularised study, drawing upon diaries and private correspondence as well as a rich array of archival sources from churches, societies, and political action groups and a careful reading of local newspapers. At the same time, he pays close attention to broader discursive and political contexts. His extensive research, at once minute and broad-ranging, allows him to present intricate local stories within an argument about broader social change. Rich in the cut and thrust of local politics and in complex individual relationships, the subject matter of this book presents many opportunities for lively narrative treatment. Lively narrative, however, is disappointingly scarce. There are glimmers, certainly. The falling out between the ladies’ committee and the (all-male) General Committee of the Leeds Institute Bazaar in 1859, for example, is recounted with energy and understanding. But it begs for more creative treatment. Morgan seems almost deliberately to eschew the use of exemplary narratives to introduce his main arguments. Each chapter opens rather repetitively with a statement of the argument to come and a map of how the sections will unfold; anecdote and incident find their place in the body of the chapter only as evidence to support a point already made. This commitment to the dry tone of scholarship will no doubt limit the book’s appeal to the general reader or to students, but more than its value as entertainment is at stake here. The frame of argument tends on the whole to reduce, rather than to draw out, the complexity of the incidents recounted. Morgan does not encourage his readers to focus on individuals: only in his conclusion, for example, does he at last offer a connected account of Fanny Heaton, whose multifarious activities have been scattered throughout the preceding chapters. His...