Imagining Inclusive Society in Nineteenth-Century Novels: The Code of Sincerity in the Public Sphere by Pam Morris

Abstract

832 Reviews Britain itself. When food was required forWest Indian slaves, breadfruit trees were brought directly from Polynesia; when themariners on board the ship mutinied, they were deposited on Pitcairn Island. All of this happened hundreds of miles away from London, and yetWilliam Bligh was operating on orders from home, largely Banks's, whose strings really did extend that far.The prophylactic method of inoculation was imported from Turkey, yet, encouraged by Banks, itwas the British who harnessed the technique, extended it by the use of Edward Jenner's discovery of vaccination (about which Banks was initially sceptical), and then sent it out again, to India, with questionable results. Though purportedly 'post-Saidian' (p. 26), the book therefore endorses Said's views pretty efficiently, nowhere more so than when it turns to the ideological aspects of Banks's patronage. In the early years of the nineteenth century, ifyou wished to get anywhere in science, you needed to bend Banks's ear, and that meant espousing his philosophy: conservative, respectful, gradualist. When in I8oi Davy sought to exploit Volta's discoveries, he dropped his radical friends in theWest Country-the renegade intellectual Thomas Beddoes, a still Unitarian Coleridge and took a job at the Royal Institution, safely under Banks's wing. For Coleridge and his kind, electricity had been ametaphor for insurrection, an association of which itwas duly purged. An important requirement for the establishment of knowledge is knowledge of the establishment. The authors of this well-researched and fascinating book have illustrated this truth more amply than they concede. THE OPEN UNIVERSITY ROBERTFRASER Imagining Inclusive Society inNineteenth-Century Novels: The Code of Sincerity in thePublic Sphere. By PAMMORRIS. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2004. xii +26I pp. $44.95. ISBN O-80I8-791II-6. In contrast to other nations, observed Mme de Stael, conversation inEngland centred on politics. For most of the rest of the nineteenth century, in awhirlwind of written and oral formats, the conversation continued: broadening as education and communi cations (and real incomes) improved, but themore intense because political influence was rationed, and because the nation (including the novel-reading nation) was both constructed and divided by overlapping clusters of affiliation. Dickens, for instance, clearly commanded his own 'inclusive society' of readers, drawn from various classes and engaged like him in a process as old as Piers Plowman. Pam Morris's exposition focuses on two Dickens novels. Bleak House is paired with Gaskell's North and South in a discussion of 'The Constitution of the Public'. Our Mutual Friend (which Morris sees as 'indicative of the disassociation [sic] of the utopian ideal', p. 229) isdiscussed with Romola as 'Embodying Mass Culture'. Earlier chapters review the eponymous heroes of Shirley and The History ofHenry Esmond as exemplifying'Inclusive Leadership'. There are introductorychapters, on 'Imagining' and on 'Producing' that shy snark, the 'Inclusive Society'; the conclusion decides it is the very 'absence of social connection' that, in the alienated but sentimentalized world of the Victorian novel, 'energises the imaginative quest for inclusiveness' (p. 229). Drawing on Benedict Anderson's 'imagined communities', Morris prefers the phrase 'imagining inclusive society', as incorporating notions of 'diversion and dis tinction' alongside 'centripetal pressures' (p. 7). Mme de Stael: 'EnAngleterre, on permet l'originalite [. . .] tant lamasse est bien reglee!' Morris borrows the term 'massification' to define this tendency, but does not explore the sort of paradox de Stael's mot suggests. Commendably anxious to avoid charges of 'nationalism' (p. 7), Morris strays from specific evidence, or scrutiny of specific passages of text. Indeed, MLR, IOI.3, 2oo6 833 her argument often strays. A danger is that, in the absence of any thorough economic discussion, it is difficult to imagine what 'inclusive society' might actually imply (a fairer society? amore inclusive culture?). Pronouncements like the following on mid-nineteenth-century Britain are neither good style nor sense: 'The problem that engaged the collective imagination, especially that of the "cultivated" classes ... .]was how tomaintain social distinctions within amass society' (p. i66). All three definite articles are dubious (the third actually provokes an apologetic set of quotation marks round 'cultivated'). As for 'especially', are we really saying working-class activists (for example) were anxious to justfy the...