Bulwer-Lytton's Pelham : The Disciplinary Dandy and the Art of Government

Abstract

The shifting strata of society following Napoleonic Wars heralded emergence of a literary genre which would effectively market social emulation. For reading public, silver-fork novels of 1820s seemed to advance what Pierre Bourdieu identifies as an of and were thus read as instruction or initiation manuals for rising above. With its painstaking attention to day-to-day details of fashionable living, silver-fork novel was a public source of knowledge for an ideology of social differentiation and distinction; it was required reading for nouveaux riches as well as a guidebook to exclusive society for aspiring social climbers. For Bourdieu, objectively and subjectively aesthetic stances adopted in matters like cosmetics, clothing, or home decoration are opportunities to experience or assert one's position in social space, as a rank to be upheld or a distance to be kept;1 that is, aesthetic taste is not so much a matter of individual preference as it is a form of cultural capital. Indeed, according to Bourdieu, taste is a knowledge of high culture; it is a material and institutional practice with definite social and cultural effects.2 The tendency, however, of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Pelham; or Adventures of a Gentleman (1828) silver-fork novel that would come to be considered the hornbook of dandyism was fundamentally opposed to these popular expectations.3 Bulwer recognized and took advantage of power of taste, but he mobilized this ideology to construct a new form of cultural capital. In Pelham, Bulwer assiduously disrupts and reconfigures moral and social authority by bodying forth an aristocratic hero whose very privilege challenges political hierarchy and social decorums he supposedly enforces. Thus, Pelham works not only to interpellate its dandy hero into a grid of liberal values, but also acts as a relay of social mechanisms of regulation, conscripting and disciplining readers to a new (Victorian) moral order. Though he was an advocate of political reform,4 Bulwer saw that England's post-Regency society was most in need of a fundamental reform