Wulgarity and Witality: On Making a Spectacle of Oneself in Pickwick

In Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1861), a massive, four-volume survey of urban workers living on the economic margins of Victorian society, city streets offer up plenty of appalling working-class vulgarity – strident voices, coarse language, gaudy clothing, and brazen behavior undisciplined by bourgeois standards of decency and reticence.1 But even as these crimes against propriety sharpen the contrast between the privileged observer and “the poor,” they also disturb the power relations between Mayhew and the subjects of his investigations. While vulgarity is generally understood as a lack of good taste and propriety, it can also result from an unwillingness to make an appropriate show of deference to one’s superiors. As James C. Scott argues, subordinate classes can subtly withhold deference in everyday practices such as speech, clothing, gestures, tone of voice, and word choice. These “hidden transcripts,” as he calls them, represent local, relatively safe assertions of power in a stratified society. Seen in this way, vulgarity – bad manners, slang, obscenity, sexual indecency – arises not from a lack of sophistication but from a deliberate intention to offend, resting on an awareness of the power dynamics of class relations. Scott quotes Pierre Bourdieu’s observation, “[t]he concession of politeness always contains political concessions ... the symbolic taxes due from the individual” (Bourdieu, Outline 4; qtd. in Scott 47-8). For some of Mayhew’s subjects, vulgarity is a form of tax evasion, amounting to an oblique protest against the would-be hegemony of bourgeois standards and a defense of their own territories, customs, and traditions. In London Labour and the London Poor, currents of power, speech, and judgment do not run in only one direction, and vulgarity often supplies the energy that turns these currents back on the observer

Expansion, Interruption, Autoethnography: Toward Disorienting Fiction, Part 2

The thesis of my 2005 book Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels is gestured at by the three words of this essay's main title: nineteenth-century Britain's imperial expansion is the ultimate context in which to make sense of the nineteenth-century novel's apparent commitment to an autoethnographic enterprise aimed at writing into existence a delimited and distinctive culture for the English or even the British people at a time when there was every encouragement for them to regard their way of life as exhausted in identification with a globally exportable “Civilization” or capital-C “Culture” itself. That delimiting impulse found expression in what I call the “self-interrupting” features prominent in Romantic-era and Victorian narrative. This essay considers the challenges facing a planned sequel to Disorienting Fiction that would extend that thesis from the later nineteenth century into the heyday of modernism

"The Country of the Plague": Anticulture and Autoethnography in Dickens's 1850s

This short paper proposes to consider the transition from Bleak House (1852–53) to Little Dorrit (1856–57) as a phase of particular significance in Dickens's debate with himself over the claims, benefits, and pitfalls of national and wider forms of belonging. I elide Hard Times (1854) because it seems to me that with the composition of Bleak House Dickens had definitively arrived at the conviction that the twenty-number monthly novel was that one of his novelistic forms best suited to sustained exploration and testing of capacious social networks making claims upon individuals' identification and loyalty. In Bleak House – as I have argued in Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (2005) – Dickens responds to the false universalism of the Great Exhibition of 1851 by producing his most restrictively “national” of novels, programmatically and demonstratively shutting out a wider world in order to produce an image of Britain that negatively foreshadows the kind of autarkic, autotelic fantasies of single cultures associated with the classic functionalist ethnography of the early twentieth century, as practiced by such luminaries as Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas. “Negatively” is key here, since anticipations of ethnography in nineteenth-century British (autoethnographic) fiction typically involve representation of the nation as “a form of anticulture whose features define by opposition the ideals [later] attributed to genuine cultures” (Buzard, Disorienting 21). Whereas the fast-disappearing genuine culture of ethnographic literature was credited with the integrated totality of “a sturdy plant growth, each remotest leaf and twig of which is organically fed by the sap at the core” (Sapir 90–93), Britain's culture vouchsafed in Bleak House and exemplified in the tentacular Court of Chancery presents “a state of disastrous and inescapable interconnection,” “a culture-like vision of social totality that is simply marked with a minus sign” (Buzard, Disorienting 21)

Enumeration and Exhaustion: Taking Inventory in "The Old Curiosity Shop"

The Old Curiosity Shop marks a crisis in Dickens’s early career. Overcommitted to projects, a victim of his own success, Dickens soon found his episodic model of fiction, first practiced in Pickwick and devoted to furnishing ‘‘a constant succession of characters and incidents,’’ pushed to its limit. Of his new periodical Master Humphrey’s Clock he complained, ‘‘wind, wind, wind, always winding I am.’’ His fourth novel became a metafictional reflection on the conditions of his own creativity, a work seemingly intent on thwarting the very delineating power—the power of invention, and of inventory—that multiplies fresh characters and incidents in the Dickensian episodic narrative

Item of Mortality: Lives Led and Unled in Oliver Twist

This essay engages with recent scholarly debates in Victorian studies focused, first, on narrative’s relationship to the optative mood, and, second, on the status of minor characters in fiction. Its reading of Oliver Twist both extends and challenges prior work by Andrew Miller and Alex Woloch, among others. With particular emphasis on the protagonist’s minor alter-ego, Dick, the essay considers what difference fictional mode makes to the possibility of anything else’s happening to a character than what we read about him or her

How George Eliot Works

The great problem of the shifting relation between passion and duty is clear to no man who is capable of apprehending it: the question, whether the moment has come in which a man has fallen below the possibility of a renunciation that will carry any efficacy, and must accept the sway of a passion against which he had struggled as a trespass, is one for which we have no master key that will fit all cases. The casuists have become a by-word of reproach; but their perverted spirit of discrimination was the shadow of a truth to which eyes and hearts are too often fatally sealed: the truth, that moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot