Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Jonathan Farina

Abstract

Reviewed by: Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Jonathan Farina Daniel Tyler (bio) Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Jonathan Farina; pp. xxii + 286. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, £75.00, £19.99 paper, $99.99, $23.99 paper. In George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72), Dorothea’s uncle Mr. Brooke is an unruly, bumbling, bungling speaker and thinker. But what specifically are the implications of his habit of allowing his sentences to trail off with the tag “that sort of thing” ([Norton, 2000], 84)? In Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Jonathan Farina considers Mr Brooke’s phraseology and neatly develops its surprising connections with the novel’s interest in taxonomies of different kinds. This account is exemplary of this book’s fascination with innocuous words and phrases and their connection with nineteenth-century epistemology and ways of thinking about knowledge itself. The book views literature as participating in economies of knowledge production; for, as Farina sees it, novels are “exemplary repositories of an epistemology of character that extended well beyond fiction into other domains and genres” (xv). Brooke’s other tic, [End Page 129] “you know,” might therefore be taken to register a concern with epistemology that other voices address with more competence. The book argues that characterization in Victorian novels takes place by way of unassuming, inconspicuous, “everyday words,” like “thing,” or like “turn,” “general,” “particular,” “attention,” “as if,” “something,” and “but.” The model of characterization that is proposed is one where character is performed or expressed, rather than being innate. Character involves “a grammar of relations” (xiii); it is “generated by the articulation of certain locutions rather than by any fixed set of qualities belonging to a specific object” (213). In other words, the idea of character is displaced from inner virtues to outward performances, or, as Farina expresses it, “characterization diverts moral value from content to form” (27). That puts it sharply, and occasionally the book risks making Victorian novelists seem to have more in common with more recent theorists than with the stereotypical but nevertheless prominent Victorian defenders of character as the sum of the qualities and virtues that comprise an individual’s inward life. But of course there is much to be said for the prevalence of the performance of manners and character in the period, and the book puts that counteremphasis well. The first three chapters read the period’s fiction alongside writing from other fields of intellectual enquiry. The first chapter develops parallels between Charles Dickens’s use of the word “turn” (for example, “a gentleman of a literary turn”) and Charles Darwin’s, for Darwin regularly observes a propensity to turn in the behavior of animals, while his own prose turns readers from one subject to the next (3). Farina claims that the word turn, whether noun or verb, indicates modern character, because it describes an outward act or performance rather than something intrinsic or essential. The chapter discusses the way that characters move between individuality and typicality, between the instance and the species, showing that in Victorian characterization idiosyncrasy does not necessarily trump commonality (Dickens’s Sketches of Young Gentlemen [1838] and Sketches of Young Couples [1840] would have provided exemplary corroboration here). The second chapter outlines the way that inductive method in natural philosophy offered a context for characterization in Jane Austen, as signalled in her prose through the balance of the words general and particular. The chapter reveals how frequently nineteenth-century reviewers and critics assessed a novel’s performance and its characterization in terms of its movement back and forth between general truths and observed particulars, a quality that was exemplified in Shakespearean characterization. The third chapter considers the use of the phrase “as if” in creating “conditional analogies” in science writing by Charles Lyell and John Tyndall (95). The locution establishes a form of knowledge that is not factually or empirically or evidentially grounded, but nevertheless true (even revelatory), and it is then taken into the fiction of the period, preeminently the novels of Dickens. In the hands of Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and others, the phrase...