Living Liberalism

Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain

Elaine Hadley

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780226311883
• eBook ISBN: 9780226311906
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Literature

In the mid-Victorian era, liberalism was a practical politics: it had a party, it informed legislation, and it had adherents who identified with and expressed it as opinion. It was also the first British political movement to depend more on people than property, and on opinion rather than interest. But how would these subjects of liberal politics actually live liberalism?

To answer this question, Elaine Hadley focuses on the key concept of individuation—how it is embodied in politics and daily life and how it is expressed through opinion, discussion and sincerity.  These are concerns that have been absent from commentary on the liberal subject. Living Liberalism argues that the properties of liberalism—citizenship, the vote, the candidate, and reform, among others—were developed in response to a chaotic and antagonistic world. In exploring how political liberalism imagined its impact on Victorian society, Hadley reveals an entirely new and unexpected prehistory of our modern liberal politics. A major revisionist account that alters our sense of the trajectory of liberalism, Living Liberalism revises our understanding of the presumption of the liberal subject.

CHAPTER ONE

Liberal Formalism in an Informal World

In 1862, a few short years after the official founding of the Liberal Party, James Fitzjames Stephen, brother of Leslie and soon to be an influential member of the viceroy’s council in India, sought to define liberalism at midcentury. The essay could be considered a sort of founding document for this period’s liberalism and will operate as a principal piece of evidence in this chapter as it attempts to provide a more global account of midcentury liberalism’s peculiar formalisms.

Noting that many commentators conflated liberalism with democracy and the liberal with the libertine, Stephen assertively reestablishes distinctions in his essay “Liberalism,” published in the Cornhill Magazine. Blaming Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens for mass-producing “stern and somewhat terrible looking working men who are always embodying profound observations in studiously bad grammar,” Stephen urges his readers “to watch the way in which real mechanics and labourers talk, speak, and argue, and to observe the tone of the books and newspapers which they really like to read.”¹ By comparing the false embodiments of a literary ideal with the literal real, readers would see that a political liberalism that blurs into democracy is in danger of “deifying almost casual public opinions and slight and ineffectual public sentiments” (“Liberalism,” 80). Despite the rich imaginations of the novelists, which Stephen concedes, the workingman of democracy and the thinking man of liberalism are not in any way alike. As Stephen insists, “there is more difference and a more durable difference, between minds which have and have not been formed by a liberal education than between the bodies of a sedentary invalid and a trained athlete” (“Liberalism,” 78).

Although Stephen is perhaps best known now for his stringent attack on On Liberty and his veneration for force rather than discussion and truth rather than opinion, his essay in the Cornhill Magazine uncannily describes the way in which midcentury liberalism in virtually all its varieties worries about the “embodying” of “casual public opinion.” Stephen seems equally troubled by the actual bodies of opinion—“labourers, mechanics, and small shopkeepers”—and by the way those bodies comport their opinion, how they “talk, speak and argue” (“Liberalism,” 77). In response to these casual bodies of opinion, whose casualness declines into physical and mental invalidism, Stephen supplies another body of opinion—the “trained athlete” who is “formed by a liberal education” and more than able “to classify, to distinguish, or to infer.” And, indeed, as Stephen himself commences to distinguish between laborers and liberals, he exemplifies the cognitive capacities that a liberal education forms, which in turn formalize the body of opinion, no longer the libertine of the Byronic era, or the laborer who lacks grammar, but the liberal “guided by a highly instructed, large-minded, and impartial intellect” (“Liberalism,” 72). “Those only are entitled to the description as well as to the name of liberals, who recognize the claims of thought and learning, and of those enlarged views of men and institutions which are derived from them, to a permanent preponderating influence in all the great affairs of life” (“Liberalism,” 80).

Arguably more enamored of the law and order that makes liberty possible than the creative expression of liberty itself, Stephen even so echoes more radical liberals of the era as he emphasizes the role of thought and ideation in opinion formation. For more reform-minded liberals of this era, like the authors of the famous 1867 Essays on Reform, a widely noted volume arguing for suffrage extension, the working classes deserve political representation precisely because they are, to use R. H. Hutton’s words, “so open to the influence of a few great ideas.” Stephen and Hutton, at this time on distant ends of the liberal spectrum, agree that political opinion should have something to do with ideas. And despite their different estimation of the laboring population, they both seem to agree that the workers are more likely to be “influenced” by ideas than to think them. Indeed, though he determines them ready to vote, Hutton also shows some concern about what Stephen calls the “embodying” of “casual public opinion.” Invoking a permeable surface and obliquely positing a sort of spongelike body, Hutton notes that working-class enthusiasm for an idea can go too far; workingmen can be “too porous, too open to such influences, to discriminate sufficiently between the great ideas and the small.”² Whether too casual or too zealous, these workingmen may be willing to sacrifice for a cause at the same time as they lack the cognitive capacity to make distinctions that a liberalized perspective also demands.

At midcentury, as Stephen’s and Hutton’s articles evince, cognitive criteria for opinion formation were pervasively offered and debated. It was at this time that liberalism was trying to formalize opinion by revising the relations between thought and political practice, between interest and disinterestedness, and between embodiment and abstraction in a world filled with bodies of “casual” and “porous” opinion. Victorian liberals across the spectrum were deeply disconcerted by this contemporary world full of new readers, new books, and new newspapers—a period of transition, as J. S. Mill, and Comte before him, asserted, when what counted as the public was no longer recognizable. Although the years following the end of the Crimean War (March 1854–February 1856) were considered by contemporaries to be years of peace and prosperity, a period of “equipoise,” they were also years of cultural ferment when the social and political domains seemed to be undergoing profound transformations.³

The Public Sphere at Midcentury

By the mid-nineteenth century, the “reading public,” which Habermas postulates as the occupant of the early eighteenth-century bourgeois public sphere, was expanding quickly. The newspaper tax was abolished in 1855 and the paper duty by 1861, such that during the 1860s, affordable reading material exponentially increased and “daily papers became for the first time a mass-market staple.”⁴ The rapid increase in reading materials and readers led to the formation of demographic market niches. The complex, creative flux, which Jon Klancher argues characterized earlier generations of radical, romantic, and reactionary readers, gave way to a public perceived to be rigidly partisan, with each “serious” periodical, for instance, merely reflecting a clearly defined interest group, be it the Conservative Party, the temperance community, or little girls at home.⁵ At the same time, most of the new newspapers, although they, too, were sectarian, nonetheless promoted in their rhetoric a “public opinion” that many contemporary readers could not fathom. As new readers and new electors flooded traditional domains of public discourse (print circulation and political debate), the boundaries that defined the public sphere and thus its public were blurred. “Public opinion” seemed almost indistinguishable from mass opinion. Fronting an increasingly literate but unknown society, Matthew Arnold, for instance, found in the “culture” concept a way to make meaningful degrees of distinction within a neutral notion of literacy that too generously, he thought, included those who could just barely sign their names, read only the simplest journalistic prose, and submit to the most blatant expressions of rhetorical persuasion, themselves untrained to consider “the forms of various arguments,” as Rawls in Political Liberalism describes the truly liberalized citizen. Note how Arnold in Culture and Anarchy shares James Fitzjames Stephen’s impulse, as he responds to “public opinion” by making his famous distinctions—“Barbarians,” “Philistines,” “the Populace.”

Mass culture’s lack of any detectably concrete origin or recognizable constituency and its proliferation of “mass subjects,” to borrow Michael Warner’s term, seemed to operate without orderly and responsible principles of cognition and volition, without ideas.⁶ Fueled by a policy of anonymity, the newer journalism seemed to occupy an abstract subject position (“public opinion”) while serving another abstract subject position (“mass society”), thereby producing a world devoid of thinking individuals. For mid-Victorians, the mass public’s variety of abstraction was worryingly invisible because this politicized population no longer made itself known to the police by congregating in a square but read newspapers during private time. They no longer seemed recognizable as the tenants, merchants, and laborers populating one’s county but were the unfamiliar masses, undifferentiated by and indifferent to status in a society where hierarchy was still supposed to render the external world legible.⁷ Such paranoia-inducing abstraction was only compounded by the practice of anonymity employed by all the newspapers because the entire exchange between readers and writers was without human referent. As one writer for Saint Paul’s Magazine writes of the anonymous author in the popular press, “It claims a right to speak in the name of that strange abstraction, public opinion.”⁸

Unlike the republican public sphere described by Michael Warner in The Letters of the Republic, unlike the Augustan public sphere described by Habermas, the mid-Victorian public sphere is by no means the object or organ of valued public discourse but rather a phantasmagoric threat to the given realities of liberal status.⁹ Such utterly mediated mass publicity and its mass audience signified a new era of politics, liberals averred, where the rational publicity grounded in the virtues of sociability that was celebrated by so many notable political thinkers of the past could no longer be realized.¹⁰

In the mid-eighteenth century, Hume had genially described the overlapping layers of intercourse that helped constitute the admirable public of his great nation. Economic commerce amplified and sustained social commerce, which in turn enhanced and sustained artistic and intellectual commerce, an account of commercial society he shared with his good friend Adam Smith. Print discourse, as Habermas has famously asserted, combined with conversational discourse in coffeehouses to produce the temperate and civilized souls that Hume celebrated in his essays.¹¹ Paine had later in the century exerted pressure on the exclusivity of this civilized public and championed a sphere of absolute publicity, where the significance of face-to-face commerce was translated into open-air politics, a conception of political publicity that survived among certain socialists and radicals, such as George Holyoake, well into the nineteenth century.

For much liberal opinion of the mid-Victorian period, however, a Humean sociability or Painean politics was simply impossible to imagine; many observers hesitantly accepted that “publicity” and “face-to-face politics” were not only no longer possible but were directly responsible for electoral corruption and “undue” influence. Arnold, for instance, writes of the public activities of those he labels the “Populace,” “that vast portion . . . of the working class, which, raw and half-developed, has long lain half-hidden amidst its poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman’s heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes”—a decidedly darker version of circulation than Smith’s.¹²

In July 1866, what are known as the “Hyde Park riots” were instrumental to the writing of this passage in Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. Organized by the Reform League, a group seeking franchise extension, the protest resulted in the trampling down of the iron railings of Hyde Park, a gesture of “leveling” whose symbolism was easily interpreted. Overwhelmed, some observers argued, by its own sheer size, the protest turned destructive. In the Ballot Act of 1872, on the one hand, the transposition of political choice from the open-air setting of political confrontation to a doubly interiorized setting of the balloting booth and the internalized deliberation of the elector was reaction against a public sphere seen to be entirely too fractious, too dependent on the use and abuse of faceless and mindless bodies; on the other hand, it was also a policing sequestration of political thinking to the bounded walls of a voting station where newspapers and other reading matter were banned.

Meeting the dangers of a “phantom public sphere,” mid-Victorian liberals did not, however, retreat to their homes, there to find the consolations of individuality and sociability that mass culture could not provide. Early in the second decade of the nineteenth century, as Kevin Gilmartin has observed, one can see in Leigh Hunt’s Examiner an effort to transfer political authority from the intemperate sphere of open-air politics to the “calm domestic circles” of the middle class, a population to whom Hunt accorded the powers of a “plain-thinking” disinterestedness.¹³ By midcentury, however, “domestic circles” could only mean one thing: homes presided over by wives and mothers, who had by then become synonymous with interest.

Rather than a disinterested domesticity, which registered then as an oxymoron, midcentury liberals carved out a distinct region of privacy, the private realm of liberal cognition, largely antagonistic to the private spaces of the domestic and its narrow interests. It was in the mind, conceived as an original but by no means personal or familial site for the “propagation” of ideas, that midcentury liberalism found one of its foundational places. Because Victorian liberalism continually distinguished this zone of “free play” from other intimate and presumably problematic sources of identity, it would be misleading to think of its relation to the public sphere as identical to the one Michael Warner glosses for the republican subject: “the republican notion of virtue, for example, was designed exactly to avoid any rupture of self-difference between ordinary life and publicity. The republican was to be the same as citizen and as man.”¹⁴ The liberal individual in Victorian Britain was perhaps no less committed to consistency and sincerity than his republican counterpart but was far more suspicious both of “ordinary life,” especially the ordinary lives of the expanding electorate, and “publicity,” especially that of the mass public sphere.¹⁵ To a great degree, as I will show, mid-Victorian liberalism sought to bridge the private and the public and thus to secure consistency, but it did so in a world riddled with self-difference, which necessitated important revisions of “man” and “citizen” in the political domain.

The usual private sphere of ordinary life and ordinary men was antipathetic to midcentury liberal political practice. At home, impulse, influence, and reflexive attachments to one’s personal self, to one’s spouse, to one’s chi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgment
• Introduction: Politics as Unusual
• 1. Liberal Formalism in an Informal World
• 2. A Body of Thought: The Form of Liberal Individualism
• 3. A Frame of Mind: Signature Liberalism at the Fortnightly Review
• 4. Thinking Inside the Box: The Ballot and the Politics of Liberal Citizenship
• 5. Occupational Hazards: The Irishness of Liberal Opinion
• 6. A Body of Opinion: Gladstonian Liberalism
• Bibliography
• Index