Back in Time: The Bildungsroman and the Source of Moral Agency

This chapter focuses on the Bildungsroman, studying the philosophical and literary significance of the novel of development. Through readings of Margaret Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks (1866), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, and John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, it suggests that the ethical foundations of the concept of Bildung—and in particular the idea of sensus communis (common sense)—made form in the Bildungsroman, lay the groundwork for one's own understanding of what makes a novel count as an object of study. The operating principle in the narrative structure of the Bildungsroman is the discovery that one is already a member of a community, and that one's decisions can be understood as stemming from that community. Proper cultivation means the development of a character that can understand and respond to the pre-existing, yet unconscious, shared consensus: the sensus communis. This sort of reciprocity between individual and community is actually a better description of how moral intuition worked, at its more refined levels, than references to physical sensation.

The Subject of the Newgate Novel: Crime, Interest, What Novels Are About

This chapter examines a central moment in the development of moral narrative practices—one that is, at the same time, a moment in the coming into being of “the Victorian novel.” Looking at Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist and the “Newgate novel” controversy of the 1830s, it offers an example of one way in which the experience of diachronic reading could be interpreted in an explicitly moral fashion. Oliver Twist was to be distinguished from other similar novels, and particularly from William Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard, because of the ways in which it appealed to the moral sensibilities of its reader: “natural sentiment,” “moral sense.” The general implications seem clear enough: Oliver Twist is more appealing to its readers' moral feelings because it has other, “healthier,” focuses than crime alone. According to the novel's reviewers, Oliver Twist might feature crime, but unlike Jack Sheppard, crime is not the novel's subject. Ultimately, what a survey of the discourse surrounding Newgate novels makes clear is how debated this question of subject matter actually was.

“Moralised Fables”

This introductory chapter discusses how, over the course of the nineteenth century, an “intuitive” faith in an internalized sense of right and wrong came to take an increasingly prominent, if fraught, place in English moral life. It was “moralistic” figures like George Eliot—that is, novelists—who would provide the most lasting expression of this prominence. The compulsion of narrative, a reader's feeling of being drawn through a text, was a key term in the developing novel art of the nineteenth century. The metaphor of physical motion, which Victorians applied to the reading experience, came to offer a means of describing the movement from what is to what ought to be—or at least the yearning for that movement. At the same time, the moral valence that readers placed on the stories they read came to shape, in terms of both market forces and creative tradition, the principles that now define the well-plotted realist novel. By offering a fuller context for the ethical discourse of the British nineteenth century, this book argues that Victorian formalism was inextricably tied to moral thought. This not only impacts one's reading of Victorian literary and philosophical history but also offers a new perspective on one's own approaches to literature.

The Large Novel and the Law of Large Numbers: Daniel Deronda and the Counterintuitive

This chapter assesses the counterintuitive: the ending that “feels wrong,” or that does not work out as it seems it should. Certainly, this could mean many things, from a poorly constructed novel to the pedagogy implied by naturalist accident. The form of the counterintuitive that structures much of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876), however, and which enacts the novel's stern moral lesson, develops from Eliot's more social concerns. Eliot, throughout her writing career, worked with an idea of narrative intuition, and formal morality, connected with the model consisting of a working out of the identity between an individual and the larger group. In Deronda, though, with its consistent concentration on ideas of probability and statistical significance, one sees a conceptual shift in Eliot's thinking about the relation of the one and the many. In short: though the larger workings of human interaction indicate that a certain state of affairs shall certainly come about at the largest levels, this offers no indication of how or when this might resolve in the individual case.

Afterword

This afterword explores how the arguments in this book relate to the question of literary periodization. This is, without question, a book on Victorian literature, written in the context of Victorian moral thought. From that point of view, it is very much rooted to a specific time and place. On the other hand, many of the arguments and theoretical ideas in this book rely on a certain concept of realism that would seem to extend beyond Britain and beyond the nineteenth century. The closing thoughts of this chapter consider just how much of the book's argument is portable to a larger discussion of literary realism. In so doing, the afterword hopes to elaborate the ways in which the Victorian novel, and the moral thought that attached to it, has continued to influence people's larger sense of how works from the past can seem to be, in some odd way, about them.

What Feels Right: Ethics, Intuition, and the Experience of Narrative

This chapter demonstrates how literary theory bears the mark of the ethical debates of the nineteenth century. Through a reading of Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854), as well as a discussion of a number of classic narrative theorists, it shows how narrative theory, underwritten by a principle of forward compulsion through the text, reiterates the position of the intuitionist thinkers of the Victorian period. Both novels are examples of what people have come to call the “industrial novel,” or the “social problem novel”: a set of novels that focus on the condition of the working class. There is a strongly felt, if sometimes vague, ethical message in these novels' focus on the human misery inherent in capitalism: a general sense that it is necessary to treat other humans by some other standard than the bottom line. The chapter then considers the philosophical arguments of Bernard Williams—famous for his use of small narratives as philosophical argument—and suggests how narrative form, having subsumed the tenets of intuitionism, itself became an effective argumentative practice.

Getting David Copperfield: Humor, Sensus Communis, and Moral Agreement

This chapter looks at another narrative mechanism that an author could use to imply that there was a “law” governing the text: humor. This is not, as the chapter shows through a discussion of Romantic and Victorian writings on the subject, a humor that was defined by its ability to make a reader laugh. Rather, humor was a strategy used to produce, in the reader, the experience of unspoken agreement and shared community with others. Unlike Oliver Twist, David Copperfield does not rely on an inaccessible back-story. Instead, it relies on a shared understanding, but one so implicit that it seems to be more of an intuitive sense than any sort of rational knowledge. It relies, in other words, on the idea of sensus communis (common sense). The narrative of David's progression is always measured against this backdrop of an anonymously judging public of which he is part, and the novel's narrative method seeks to move him into agreement with that public. The novel thus uses humor to underscore the idea that one's individual intuitions are shared, though in ways that are difficult to conceptualize. Charles Dickens's narrative technique makes use of an externalization, into the social sphere, of a reader's individual feeling.