The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons by Carolyn Lesjak

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons by Carolyn Lesjak Joseph Albernaz LESJAK, CAROLYN. The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021. 256 pp. $90.00 hardcover; $30.00 softcover. The significance of the enclosure of common lands for English literary culture of the long nineteenth century—indeed, for the literatures of the British Isles (not to mention the imperial periphery) as a whole since at least the sixteenth century—has been enormously underappreciated. Carolyn Lesjak’s refreshing and bold recent book The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons is a vital step forward, not only in affording this context its proper importance for studying Victorian fiction, but in providing conceptual and methodological tools that will be of interest to scholars working on other periods, genres, and problems. Lesjak turns to major works of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy to reframe some of the basic contexts of the Victorian novel and the fundamental machinery of realism [End Page 452] with attention to the long, slow violence of enclosure, which, following Rob Nixon’s work, she calls an “attritional catastrophe.” Focusing on the traces of the lands once held, managed, and cultivated collectively (the commons), and the ordinary, low, vulgar, and everyday (the common), Lesjak’s readings uncover a “worldly ethics” and “radical politics” at the heart of a bevy of major Victorian novels which, however familiar they are, feel revitalized in Lesjak’s hands (4, 3). By the early Victorian period, the process of land enclosure in England was essentially complete (save for the occasional late privatization grab or breaking the will of a particularly stubborn village). But this fact is precisely why the nineteenth-century realist novel, Owl of Minerva-style, appears as such an intriguing and apposite form for taking stock of what has been lost (or rather, defeated), registering what might linger from the cultures of the commons, and imagining how these lingering communal textures might be re-energized in new contexts and configurations. In addition to Lesjak’s substantial (and for this reader, welcome) framing move of enjoining scholars to pay more attention to enclosure, the commons, and their “persistence” as essential to the formation of industrial capitalist modernity, the book makes three broad significant contributions, to my mind. First, it works to disentangle the realist novel and liberalism, putting convincing pressure on more received accounts of the cozy marriage between these two formations. Second, it deftly thinks through the problem of enclosure as a problem of “figurability,” looking to the novel for technologies of oblique representation that can encompass slow, indiscrete, temporally and spatially dispersed events like enclosure. And third, it presents an original intervention into how we might understand the working of characterization in the Victorian novel as flecked everywhere with the residue of the commons. Recasting Alex Woloch’s influential account of character in his book The One vs. the Many (2003), Lesjak finds “the relationship between individuals and their social world” to resemble a dialectical dance, “the one as the many” (5). Rather than focusing on individual novels for sustained readings, Lesjak treats each of her three main figures’ prolific work as a complex unity, cutting across a wide swath of their fiction, while leaving room for perfectly timed close readings of specific passages to illustrate her conceptual claims. This approach of seeing each writer’s work as an “ongoing thought experiment” rather than a series of individually enclosed narratives comports methodologically with her claims about the importance of the commons, and also keeps the book nicely paced (9). Each close reading—say, of one of Jo’s devastating speeches (“They dies more than they lives”) in the second chapter of Bleak House, for example—takes on a new significance when placed primarily in the context of an author’s entire oeuvre rather than in the novel in which the passage is housed. After an introduction and opening chapter construct the connections between realist fiction and the process of enclosure, the first chapter turns to Dickens, reading his novels’ famously exaggerated characters alongside popular contemporaneous character books (collections of “types”), arguing for the latter’s...