Making Social Knowledge in the Victorian City: The Visiting Mode in Manchester, 1832-1914, by Marin Hewitt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Making Social Knowledge in the Victorian City: The Visiting Mode in Manchester, 1832–1914 by Martin Hewitt Mark Crinson (bio) Making Social Knowledge in the Victorian City: The Visiting Mode in Manchester, 1832–1914, by Martin Hewitt; pp. viii + 114. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2020, $59.95, $22.95 paper, $19.50 ebook. Quite a lot of people visited quite a lot of other people in Victorian Manchester. The visitors were philanthropists, clergymen, missionaries, doctors, the odd architect, distributors of tracts and readers of scripture, temperance agents, sanitary and nuisance inspectors, and officials from school boards and Boards of Guardians. Some were paid, many were voluntary. Those they visited were the laboring classes, the poor and indigent—some 35,000 of them in 1842 alone. Apart from relief and reformation, the visits gathered information and impressions about housing conditions, schooling, income and rent, and diseases like cholera. The visitor was thus granted "the authority to speak on social matters" (17). It is this visiting mode that is the subject of Martin Hewitt's new book, Making Social Knowledge in the Victorian City: The Visiting Mode in Manchester, 1832–1914. For historians in the 1990s and early 2000s, industrial Manchester stood for something very different from what Asa Briggs had named the "shock city" with its associated debates about the emergence of new classes and the economic causes and social impact of the Industrial Revolution (Victorian Cities [Pelican, 1963], 96). In the work of Patrick Joyce, Mary Poovey, and others, the emphasis shifted to social surveillance, particularly as found in the work of experts, medical reports, maps, the Manchester Statistical Society and, overall, in a society of bodies and populations framed by Foucauldian ideas of governmentality and biopower. Hewitt's deep research and careful arguments challenge the Foucauldians on their own ground, using the statisticians and their opponents in the [End Page 310] nineteenth century as a mirror to the Foucauldians and their critics today, and arguing instead that "social knowledge was material, morphological and multidimensional" (94). The visiting mode, both an ecology of knowledge and a hermeneutics, is usefully divided into four stages or forms: exploration or penetration, encounter, the tableau, and the specimen or case. Visitors and their committees, far from being made up of the new experts, were mostly members of groups traditionally interested in the poor. This is less a class difference than a difference of attitude between those wielding competences, in Michel Foucault's terms, and those closer to settled forms of power; both could be found in the same individual. The work of the statisticians, Hewitt demonstrates, was usually crude and partial, a limited and flawed version of social knowledge. By contrast, the knowledge gathered by the visitors sometimes overlapped with statistics, but it was also highly localized and highly narrativized, populated with stock characters (often racialized, though this is not brought out by Hewitt), and concerned with specificities of place and time that marked their difference from the flattened social space of statistical abstraction. A chapter on maps explores the "cartographic imaginary" as a way of managing "ignorance and impotence," rather than (in the somewhat circular arguments of Joyce) as the production of a standardized and homogenized urban space (37). As functionally and visually differentiated objects whose efficacy is difficult to establish, maps represented a "chequerboard of distinctive districts" and "a complexly configured material topography" (33–34). Here, art historians might have emphasized not the "failure of precision" in a bird's eye view, but rather the significance of its suggestiveness (38). Another chapter looks at "knowledge transactions" in Elizabeth Gaskell's fiction, revealing just how steeped this author and her work were in the culture of visiting. Again, the overtness of the anti-statistical stance is clear. In Gaskell's fiction the chaos and opacity of the city are always present, but also, and complementarily, we find the idea that social knowledge could best come from direct observation, particularly in the homes of the poor (Gaskell's work was compared to that of naturalists, photographers, and genre painters). Confrontation, recognition of shared interests, revelation, vindication, and active remediation: all are enacted by Gaskell's visitors and expected of her readers...