Peter J Katz. Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction: Associationism, Empathy and Literary Authority

Abstract

In 2015, in an interview with the novelist Marilynne Robinson, Barack Obama claimed that the most important things he had learned about citizenship, ‘setting aside being president’, he had learned from novels. ‘It has to do with empathy’, he explained (18). Obama’s easy elision of empathy, moral improvement, and novel reading might well elicit a scornful curl of the lip from some contemporary literary critics, but as Peter J. Katz shows in this engaging monograph, it would have been entirely familiar to many mid-Victorian readers and writers, who held ‘a philosophy of fiction in which literary value depends on a text’s capacity to cultivate empathy through feeling’ (2). Katz argues that this philosophy was most vigorously propounded and interrogated in the fiction of the great mid-Victorian sensationalists, Dickens, Collins, and Braddon, all of whom positioned empathy as central to the experience of reading, an idea that was at the time strongly associated with popular fiction, and is now associated instead with popular responses to ‘serious’ literature. As Katz shows, the debate about whether and how reading fiction was (or was not) morally improving, and who got to decide, was as heatedly political then as now, with popular fiction and ‘common readers’ pitted against ‘classic’ literature and professional authority. In the mid-Victorian era, however, it was also a fraught philosophical and scientific argument, in which competing theories of language and ethics were invoked to judge both the significance of novels and the competence of their readers.