Contested Liberalisms: Martineau, Dickens and the Victorian Press, by Iain Crawford

Abstract

Reviewed by: Contested Liberalisms: Martineau, Dickens and the Victorian Press by Iain Crawford Jessie Reeder (bio) Contested Liberalisms: Martineau, Dickens and the Victorian Press, by Iain Crawford; pp. xii + 332. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, $110.00, $29.95 paper, $110.00 ebook. Comparing two Victorian authors’ experiences in the United States might not seem a particularly expansive prospect. And yet, in Iain Crawford’s Contested Liberalisms: Martineau, Dickens and the Victorian Press, we see just how wide the view can get. Crawford identifies Harriet Martineau’s and Charles Dickens’s early visits to the United States as formative to their views of the periodical press, their own careers, and, ultimately, their incompatible philosophies of liberalism that led to their infamous and public falling-out. While the two authors share much in their parallel trajectories as self-fashioning authors and liberals, they turn out to diverge on subjects as wide-ranging and consequential as the role of women in the public sphere (something Martineau advocated and Dickens disliked) and the nature of progressive history (Martineau adhering to a stadial arc while Dickens saw more indeterminacy than pattern). Crawford follows these fissures through an impressive array of subjects, including abolition, working-class and Irish unrest, urban versus rural prospects, and the role of the celebrity author. Working adroitly in three fields—transatlantic studies, periodical studies, and liberalism—Crawford’s two-author study offers a vision of the early Victorian press as “shaped by a transatlantic community of letters broadly united in [End Page 691] support for the advance of progressive values but crucially divided over core elements of the ideology of liberalism itself” (2). Chapters 1 and 2 track Martineau’s political philosophy as it developed in the early 1830s in England and then during her lengthy stay in the United States. Influenced by Friedrich Schiller and Adam Smith, Martineau believed the key to social progress was the creation of sympathy through robust public discourse, which in turn required a free press and universal access to education, particularly for women. In her American writings, then, Crawford argues, Martineau depicts the United States—and especially the western frontier—as “a potential if still partially realised exemplar of liberal progress” in which slavery, constrained womanhood, and a restricted press all threaten the otherwise promising advance of liberal subjectivity (50). By turning to Dickens in chapters 3 and 4, Crawford offers a striking comparison of the two authors’ American experiences. Reading American Notes (1842), Crawford shows that where Martineau privileged the frontier, Dickens favored New York City; where Martineau saw the promise of progress in America, Dickens saw degeneration from a British ideal; and where Martineau despised the restrictions of American republican motherhood, Dickens condoned domesticity and limited subjectivity for women. Both writers, however, “examined the American press as a predictor of what the future might hold in store for British journalism” (119). And so, on his return to Britain, Dickens penned Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), which Crawford reads as a response to widespread criticism of American Notes—and as a doubling-down on its critiques of American society. Martin Chuzzlewit depicts an atopic America, drowning in a tide of unregulated mass media, disconnected from both history and future, and corrupted by women’s independence. These first four chapters contain some of Crawford’s most compelling close reading, particularly as he tracks Martineau’s and Dickens’s divergent senses of the temporality of American landscapes. And he makes a persuasive case that the transatlantic voyage was formative for both authors’ political views and professional futures. Crawford is somewhat more critical of Dickens’s version of liberalism than of Martineau’s in these early chapters. And although he concedes that both authors “endors[ed] the underlying theory [of progress] that pushed Native Americans beyond the pale of civilised society,” one wishes for a more critical orientation toward Martineau’s erasure of violence against Indigenous and enslaved people (118). Martineau is apparently concerned with miscegenation only as it affects white families and not Black victims of sexual violence, and she locates Andrew Jackson’s threat to liberalism in his censorship of the press rather than in his genocidal policies of Indigenous displacement. These are features of her...