A Novelist and a Gentleman

(This is half-baked, but we'll run with it)

George Eliot, on Fielding:

A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those intital chpaters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. We belated historians must not linger after his example; and if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a camp-stool in a parrot house. I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe (Middlemarch 132).

Ford, with usual aplomb, cuts right to the chase:

The besetting sin of almost all other English novelists from Fielding to George Meredith is that they seem to cut their characters out with hatchets and to colour them with brushes of house-painters and never, even at that, being able to leave them alone, they are perpetually pushing their own faces and winking at you over the shoulders of Young Blifil, Uncle Toby, the Widow Wadman, Dick Swiveller...and the rest (11). (Eliot's not mentioned here -- but it's still a jab)

Elsewhere, Ford hews to the notion of a kind of objectivity -- a distancing from the moralizing voice, which Eliot seems to embrace too (her goal is to reveal, not explain - which Fielding, she implies, does too much of already). OK, check. But for Ford, the emphasis moves entirely from narrator to character, with Eliot's sympathetic narrator entirely off the radar. With Eliot, too, the emphasis is on discernment (on seeing)-- for Ford, it's style and craft (on making characters, rather than finding the right lens).

What's interesting here, in part, is that while Ford lingers on Fielding, he pretty much glosses over Eliot entirely -- the English novel, by his account, stops with Richardson, then picks up and moves to France during the entire progression of Whig politics until Henry James comes along. Fielding and Thackeray he dismisses as "nuvvelists," who care relatively little about their characters, but who "would have knocked you down if they could, supposing you had suggested that he was not a 'gentleman.'" But what's his beef with Eliot? "Gentlemen" (or ladies) don't craft, according to Ford. I wonder if he would also say they don't observe?

That's all I've got.

On Thomas Babington Macaulay

From the Dictionary of Literary Biography on Macaulay's writing for the Edinburgh Review:

The Edinburgh Review was the quasi-official organ of the Whig party, and the period from 1825 to 1834--during which Macaulay wrote most of his reviews--was a politically acrimonious time preceding and following the passage of the Great Reform Bill of 1832. Arrogance and invective were characteristic of the Edinburgh's reviewers as a group. In these years, Macaulay wrote twenty-seven articles--ostensibly book reviews but in fact wide-ranging essays on topics suggested, sometimes rather loosely, by the book under scrutiny. They are not today his most impressive writings, but they were the ones that established him both as a political and a literary figure.

Specifically, on the relationship between Macaulay (writing for the Whigs) and J.S. Mill (writing for the Radical party) circa 1830.

It was because of an article in the Edinburgh Review that Macaulay came to the attention of Lord Lansdowne, who in 1830 helped secure him a seat in Parliament through his pocket borough of Calne in Wiltshire. The first essay (January 1825) was an abolitionist argument on the West Indies. This piece was followed by other purely political works, including a series of three attacks on James Mill and the Utilitarians in general. The general line of argument was that Mill was too theoretical and insufficiently pragmatic, that he reasoned from a priori notions rather than from observation of fact. These three essays are important in that they constituted one side of a debate between the Whig Edinburgh Review and the Westminster Review, the organ of the Benthamite Philosophical Radicals or Utilitarians. In his Autobiography (1873) John Stuart Mill recalls his own role in answering Macaulay's objections to his father's writings but also admits that the Edinburgh articles helped modify his faith in his father's views.

Brainstorming session

Thinking about mid-Victorian reform movements -- how to categorize them, how to relate them to literature:

• Owenites -- important as a variation of socialism that predates Marx
• Bentham / Mill - Utilitarianism -- focusing on institutional reform
• Socialism to Fabianism - post-Marx, precurser to the welfare state
• Moral reform -- including low church movements, temperance, education (in my head, all aligned with Unitarian activism)

Things I need to define more clearly in order to answer this question

• New Poor Law -- first major piece of Benthamite legislation
• Christian Socialism - Maurice, Ludlow, Kingsley
• Ten Hours Movement (1847)
• Anti-Corn Law League (1846)
• Chartism -- as a comparable bit of working-class activism?
  

Clearly there is more reading to be done here. What I need is a good solid history to get my facts straight. But right off the bat, the literary question being something about literature's relationship to institutions? As opposed to a more personalized "moral" approach?

These are my thoughts so far.