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Disraeli, Gaskell, and the Condition of England
IN the 1840s, English legislators and political philosophers found themselves grappling with an unwelcome outcome of the economic growth of the previous century. These problems, which Thomas Carlyle captured with the phrase 'the Condition of England,' materialized in part because both the theory and the instruments of government developed in the eighteenth century proved inadequate to manage the tensions produced by rapid economic changes. In the most concrete terms, these tensions resulted from the intolerable pressures brought on by an increasingly densely congregated urban population, inadequate housing and sanitation, irregular employment, and government policies designed to manage rather than alleviate poverty. Conceptualized at a more abstract level, these tensions reflect the imperfect success with which the political philosophy of «liberalism» had thus far realized its paradoxical aim: to develop a form of government that could simultaneously allow individuals «free» expression of what seemed like idiosyncratic desires and unite those individuals into a single aggregate that was both amenable to rational oversight and capable of augmenting national prosperity.
In order to appreciate the characteristic features of the two closely related innovations in the British novel of the 1840s-the political novel and the social-problem novel-it is important to realize two things about this decade: first, that the deplorable living and working conditions of the laboring poor were startling revelations to much of the middle-class reading public; and second, that middle-class reformers were as divided about how best to comprehend social problems as about -508- how to cure them. The question of which was more effective-a theoretical approach to the problems of poverty or imaginative engagement with one case at a time-had profound implications for the kind of writing granted social authority and for who was considered most knowledgeable about the poor. While all reformers wanted both to preserve individual liberty and to make the «population» productive, those who advocated theory thought that 'experts'-statesmen, philosophers, and political economists-should address the problem analytically in official reports. Those who supported the case-by-case approach welcomed descriptive accounts by clergymen, journalists, and novelists as well.
The question of how best to comprehend the new urban landscape also made the issue of gender central to the treatment of poverty. Largely because of the eighteenth-century breakup of moral philosophy into political economy and aesthetics, ways of knowing were gendered in the early nineteenth century: the abstract reasoning of political economy was considered a masculine epistemology, while the aesthetic appreciation of concrete particulars was considered feminine. This did not mean that all imaginative literature was written by women, of course, or even that political economy was exclusively a male domain. It did mean that men who wrote poetry and novels struggled to acquire the dignity generally attributed to masculine pursuits-whether by asserting, as Percy Shelley did, that poets were the 'unacknowledged legislators of the world' or by taking serious historical events as their subjects, as did Sir Walter Scott. It also meant that women who addressed political and economic subjects, like Mary Wollstonecraft and Harriet Martineau, had to contend with the charge that they were «masculine» or «unsexed» females.
When novelists entered the Condition-of- England debate in the 1840s, then, they were implicitly arguing that a feminized genre was more appropriate to the problems of the poor than were the abstractions of political economy. At the same time, however, when writers addressed social issues in fiction they were also claiming a more directly political role for the novel than feminized activities were generally granted. In this chapter I will examine some of the implications of gendered knowledge for the treatment of social problems and for the novel as a genre. Benjamin Disraeli's Coningsby (1844), which most identify as the first political novel, suggests how even novelistic knowledge could be represented as masculine if «politics» was sufficiently rede-509- fined. By contrast, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1847), which critics consider the first social-problem novel, argues for the feminization of knowing even in a world where the principles of political economy hold sway.
Before turning to these novels, I need to sketch in more detail some of the more theoretical approaches to the problems of the 1840s, for it was in relation to these formulations that novelists developed their ideas. Foremost among these masculine paradigms were the theories of political economists like Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo. Working from the basic economic «laws» that Adam Smith set out in 1776, political economists developed a «science» that, by the 1840s, was generally associated with two sets of conclusions. The first, which was invariably linked to Malthus's Principles of Population (1798), emphasized the incompatibility between some kinds of individual desire and the well-being of the nation. Because he thought that the population increased geometrically whereas food production could only grow in arithmetical increments, Malthus claimed that (the working class's) sexual self-control-what he called the 'moral check'-was necessary to prevent widespread starvation, plague, or civil war. By contrast, political economists' second conclusion emphasized the essential compatibility between another kind of desire and national prosperity. This principle, which received its most scientific formulation in Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy (1817), maintained that the nation would necessarily prosper if individuals' desire for gain was left alone because the economy was providentially governed by its own, self-regulating laws. In the first decades of the century, these and other principles of political economy were made widely available to the middle class through the copious writings of J. R. McCulloch and to literate workers through Harriet Martineau's Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–1833).
A second important theoretical approach to the problems associated with poverty was offered by two of the most influential literary philosophers of the early nineteenth century, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle. Both influenced by German idealism, both struggling to imagine a transcendental «idea» that could be realized in English society, Coleridge and Carlyle proposed slightly different versions of what Coleridge called 'representativeness.' For Coleridge, «representativeness» was best conveyed by what he called a 'symbol.' The symbol, he explained in The Statesman's Manual (1816) simulta-510- neously partakes of an abstract idea and renders that idea intelligible by representing it in a specific image. This concept, when applied to social relations, laid the groundwork for Coleridge's theory of politics. In the political realm, Coleridge considered the constitution the most potent symbol, because it incarnates the 'IDEA of the STATE.' As he explained in On the Constitution of Church and State (1829), the 'IDEA of the STATE' is also given concrete form in two institutions: the state, which represents people in the aggregate, and the church, which treats individuals as unique beings. The partnership of these two institutions therefore simultaneously gives every individual a (symbolic) role in the government by which he (and, even more indirectly, she) is represented and provides images by which social problems can be imaginatively transcended.
In 'Signs of the Times' (1829), Carlyle offers his own theory about how to cure social ills. Like Coleridge's Constitution, 'Signs of the Times' was written partly in response to debates about Catholic emancipation, which was enacted in 1829. Unlike Coleridge, however, Carlyle is primarily concerned with the challenge posed to individual spirituality by what he calls the «machinery» of parties and interest groups. In modern society, Carlyle complains, individual genius has been supplanted by institutionalized programs and spiritual values have been displaced by materialistic concerns. As a result, people increasingly act as if neither absolute truths nor moral imperatives exist. Carlyle proposes as a cure for such maladies a program of individual self-improvement that will both surpass and inspire national improvement, and whose institutional incarnations will embody the drive toward spiritual freedom now thwarted by the 'Mechanical age.' 'Of this higher, heavenly freedom… all [man's] novel institutions, his faithful endeavours and loftiest attainments, are but the body, and more and more approximated emblem.'
The diagnoses of Coleridge and Carlyle help explain how what I have called a «liberal» formulation could be adopted by theorists and statesmen across the political spectrum. These diagnoses also make explicit a tendency that all such theoretical approaches shared. Whether one thought that the solution to the problems associated with the Condition of England involved more government oversight, as the Whigs did, the conservation of traditional institutions like the church and the constitution, as Tories tended to do, or even complete parliamentary or economic reform, as did Chartists and Owenite -511- socialists, almost everyone in the 1840s wanted to free individuals in order to realize national potential. At the same time that individual liberty was their concern, however, these theorists also tended to conceptualize the individual as an abstraction and to assume that this abstraction could be analyzed by generalizations because every person was animated by a single, universal desire (however
