Palgrave Studies in N ineteenth- Century Writing and Culture General Editor:Joseph Bristow, Professor of English, UCLA Editorial Advisory Board: Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck College, University of London; Josephine McDonagh, Kings College, London; Yopie Prins, University of Michigan; Lindsay Smith, University of Sussex; Margaret D. Stetz, University of Delaware; Jenny Bourne Taylor, University of Sussex Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph series that aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that were pro- duced in the E nglish-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to thefin de siècle. Attentive to the historical continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series will feature studies that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The main aim of the series is to look at the increasing influence of types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the period 1800–1900 but also every field within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and n on- canonical writings of this era. Titles include: Eitan Bar- Yosef and Nadia Valman (editors) ‘THE JEW’ IN L ATE- VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN CULTURE Between the East End and East Africa Heike Bauer ENGLISH LITERARY SEXOLOGY Translations of Inversions, 1860–1930 Katharina Boehm BODIES AND THINGS IN N INETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE Luisa Calè and Patrizia Di Bello (editors) ILLUSTRATIONS, OPTICS AND OBJECTS IN NINETEENTH- CENTURY LITERARY AND VISUAL CULTURES Deirdre Coleman and Hilary Fester (editors) MINDS, BODIES, MACHINES, 1770–1930 Colette Colligan THE TRAFFIC IN OBSCENITY FROM BYRON TO BEARDSLEY Sexuality and Exoticism in Nineteenth- Century Print Culture Eleanor Courtemanche THE ‘INVISIBLE HAND’ AND BRITISH FICTION, 1818–1860 Adam Smith, Political Economy, and the Genre of Realism Stefano Evangelista BRITISH AESTHETICISM AND ANCIENT GREECE Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile Margot Finn, Michael Lobban and Jenny Bourne Taylor (editors) LEGITIMACY AND ILLEGITIMACY IN N INETEENTH-CENTURY LAW, LITERATURE AND HISTORY Trish Ferguson (editorr) VICTORIAN TIME Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes John Gardner POETRY AND POPULAR PROTEST Peterloo, Cato Street and the Queen Caroline Controversy F. Gray (editorr) WOMEN IN JOURNALISM AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE ‘Making a Name for Herself’ Yvonne Ivory THE HOMOSEXUAL REVIVAL OF RENAISSANCE STYLE, 1850–1930 Colin Jones, Josephine McDonagh and Jon Mee (editors) CHARLES DICKENS, A TALE OF TWO CITIES AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Kirsten MacLeod FICTIONS OF BRITISH DECADENCE High Art, Popular Writing and the Fin de Siècle Jock Macleod LITERATURE, JOURNALISM, AND THE VOCABULARIES OF LIBERALISM Politics and Letters, 1886–1916 Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (editors) VERNON LEE Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics Muireann O’Cinneide ARISTOCRATIC WOMEN AND THE LITERARY NATION, 1832–1867 David Payne THE REENCHANTMENT OF N INETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Serialization Julia Reid ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, SCIENCE, AND THEFIN DE SIÈCLE Virginia Richter LITERATURE AFTER DARWIN Human Beasts in Western Fiction 1859–1939 Deborah. Shapple Spillman BRITISH COLONIAL REALISM IN AFRICA Inalienable Objects, Contested Domains Anne Stiles (editorr) NEUROLOGY AND LITERATURE, 1860–1920 Caroline Sumpter THE VICTORIAN PRESS AND THE FAIRY TALE Sara Thornton ADVERTISING, SUBJECTIVITY AND THE NINETEENTH- CENTURY NOVEL Dickens, Balzac and the Language of the Walls Phyllis Weliver THE MUSICAL CROWD IN ENGLISH FICTION, 1840–1910 Class, Culture and Nation Paul Young GLOBALIZATION AND THE GREAT EXHIBITION The Victorian New World Order Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth- Century Writing and Culture Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–333–97700–2 (hardback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Literature, Journalism, and the Vocabularies of Liberalism Politics and Letters, 1886–1916 Jock Macleod Associate Professor of English Literature, Griffith University, Australia © Jock Macleod 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-0-230-39146-8 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-35160-2 ISBN 978-0-230-39147-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230391475 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 For Norm and Andy This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface viii Acknowledgements xxii Introduction: Advanced Liberalism, Journalism and Literary Culture 1 1 Between Literature and Politics: The Massingham Network and the Institutions of Advanced Liberalism 29 2 The ‘Self-Conscious Evolution of Humanity’: Advanced Liberalism and the Politics and Culture of ‘Life’ 61 3 Advanced Liberalism and the Cultural Value of ‘Life’: Ethics, Aesthetics and Political Economy 87 4 Writing the East End: Advanced Liberalism, Realism and Social Reform 117 5 Contesting the New: Advanced Liberalism and the Emergence of Modernism 149 Conclusion 177 Notes 185 Bibliography 215 Index 227 vii Preface This is a book about the liberalism of English literary culture in the late Victorian and Edwardian years.1 It has two main aims. The first is to provide the first extended account of the literary cultural language of progressive or ‘advanced’ liberalism from the 1880s through to World War I. The second is to make a case for the importance of this end of the liberal spectrum in English literary culture up to 1914. Literature, Journalism, and the Vocabularies of Liberalism approaches this topic in a particular way. If, following John Burrow, we might say that political theories are vocabularies we inhabit rather than doctrines to which we subscribe,2 then this book is concerned, not with the analysis of a number of putatively liberal literary writings, but with the ways in which the specific vocabularies of progressive liberalism permeated the discourses of English literary culture during those years. I argue that key liberal organs of the daily and weekly press provided the enabling conditions for these vocabularies. Because it is clear that Victorian political dis- courses themselves were replete with the languages of religion, ethics, science and literature, I am not suggesting a simple one-way migration from the political to the cultural. Rather, my claim is that the literary cultural and socio-political discourses of progressive liberals shared vocabularies that gave the former its distinctively liberal tenor. The mutations in these types of rhetoric across the two fields will become obvious in the course of the book, but so too will the continuities, and it is the continuities which are my main focus here. In pursuing these aims, the present study joins an emerging body of scholarship that, to use Kate Flint’s words, ‘has sought to bring the term “liberalism” back into contention as a term of critical importance in literary studies’.3Perhaps the most significant of these works have been Amanda Anderson’s The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachmentt (2001), Lauren Goodlad’s Victorian Literature and the Victorian State (2003), David Wayne Thomas’s Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aestheticc (2004), Daniel Malachuk’s Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism (2005), and Elaine Hadley’s Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in M id-Victorian Britain (2010), though articles both by these scholars and others, and special issues of journals devoted to liberalism have also played a part in this resurgence of interest.4 At its heart is an effort to reconsider the ideal viii Preface ix of e mancipation at the centre of liberalism while at the same time recognizing what Goodlad, following Foucault, calls its ‘perverse effects’.5 This is not an exercise in neoliberalism. As Hadley says in an earlier article: ‘I have a confirmed belief in the Victorian and present- day ineffectiveness of liberalism’, a view reaffirmed in Living Liberalism, where she claims that ‘liberalism’s liberatory mission was and remains unsuccessful’.6 Hadley is more sceptical of liberalism’s aspirations than Anderson, Thomas and Malachuk, but her view that they are in their different ways engaged in a ‘rescue mission’ of liberalism seems, to me, an overstatement.7 Anderson, for example, makes it clear she wants to ‘defend the progressive potentiality’ inhering in liberal practices of detachment, particularly its capacity to enable critique from within.8 However, her exploration of detachment has at its centre recognition of the ‘opposition between desirable and undesirable forms of detach- ment’,9 and much of The Powers of Distance focuses on the different ways in which key Victorian writers tried to negotiate these different forms. Even more apposite is Goodlad’s comment in an article on John Stuart Mill, where she notes that her aim ‘is not to vindicate left- wing liberalism so much as to consider what a more robust engagement with certain liberal ideas … might contribute to the radical enterprise’.10 The extent to which Anderson and other modern scholars are still attached to the possibilities of liberalism is not the point, though. Rather, each is trying to draw out a clearer and more complex picture of what was involved in those emancipatory aspirations and in the process enable us to apprehend a much richer and more complicated liberalism in the cul- tural sphere. As Goodlad puts it: ‘I believe that diminished conceptions of Victorian culture impair historicist critique and, in so doing, reduce critics’ power to illuminate p resent-day concerns’.11 This of course is the task that Hadley herself is engaged in. It is a task also at the centre of my book, though with some differences, as I will explain later. There are two related reasons why such a task is necessary. The first stems from limitations in literary criticism and cultural history over the past two to three decades. Depending on the particular revisionary scholar, these limitations take different forms. In the case of Anderson, for example, the focus is on what she calls a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, which ‘considers investments in critical distance as self- damning, interpreting them as masked forms of power rather than as emergent practices that might themselves be the subject of ongoing critique’.12 For Goodlad, the point of purchase is less a hermeneutics of suspicion than a too-narrow grasp of Victorian liberalism and the Victorian State upon which such a hermeneutics might be based. Goodlad is particularly