An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel, by Gregory Vargo

Abstract

Reviewed by: An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel by Gregory Vargo Chris R. Vanden Bossche (bio) An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel, by Gregory Vargo; pp. xiv + 278. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018, £75.00, $99.99. The rising of the middle class has loomed so largely in studies of Victorian literature that the study of class itself, especially the working classes, long received scant attention. What criticism we have has often focused on representations of class, primarily in what is deemed middle-class literature. Fortunately, scholars such as Louis James and Martha Vicinus have introduced Victorianists to working-class literature, and the modern editions of Ian Haywood and others have made it widely available. The result has been a growing body of critical literature to which Gregory Vargo's An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel is a valuable new addition. Vargo's book makes two interventions that build on and extend important developments in recent criticism on Chartist writing. First, rather than measuring Chartist writing in terms of assumptions about what it should envision—a fault of some early criticism of this work—it treats this work as a form of social action and asks what it attempts to achieve on its own terms. Second, it does not treat this work in isolation but instead examines the ways in which working-class and middle-class writing respond to, adapt, and revise each other. Among the first books to take this approach were Sally Ledger's Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (2007) and Sambudha Sen's London, Radical Culture, and the Making of the Dickensian Aesthetic (2012), both of which investigated the ways that Charles Dickens's novels engaged with and borrowed from radical literature and discourse. The project of these studies, as I take it, is to treat ideological formation not as the dissemination of a predetermined set of doctrines but as a process that novelists engage in as they seek to come to terms with their social condition. My own Reform Acts: Chartism, Social Agency, and the Victorian Novel, 1832–1867 (2014) applied a similar approach to other middle-class authors while also investigating movement in the other direction by examining [End Page 469] writing produced by radicals and members of the working classes. Vargo's Underground History shifts the focus even further toward radical literature. While there are discussions of Harriet Martineau, Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell, he digs deeper into the archive and devotes more space to radical literature with analyses of William Cobbett, Thomas Cooper, Thomas Martin Wheeler, Ernest Jones, and others as well as non-literary texts from the radical press such as The Book of Murder (1839) and commentary on empire and post-1848 refugees in the Chartist press. Vargo's concern is not only to examine middle-class novelists' engagement with radicalism, but also radical fiction's engagement with middle-class discourse and narrative conventions. In particular, he examines the ways in which Chartist fictions rewrite the narrative conventions of melodrama and the Bildungsroman. Whereas the middle-class forms of these genres locate agency in the individual—in particular the melodramatic villain as the source of evil and the self-making individual of the Bildungsroman—Chartist fiction focuses on the social order itself. The villains of Chartist melodrama are no longer aristocratic rakes but institutions such as the marketplace or the patriarchal family. Vargo's analysis of the ways in which working-class writers and radicals shifted the locus of social evil from individuals to the social system is insightful, but also fits a familiar paradigm. Indeed, while he suggests in passing that Dickens "typically traces crises to the wrongdoing of specific characters," citing the example of Merdle in Little Dorrit (1855–57), many would argue that by the time of his late novels Dickens had himself shifted toward a systemic, rather than individualistic, conception of social evil, villainy in Little Dorrit residing not in Merdle but in the institutions the banker represents and their corollary in the Circumlocution...