Thackeray's Skeptical Narrative and the "Perilous Trade" of Authorship (review)

Judith Fisher's monograph swims, in ways both engaging and frustrating, against the current of most recent work on Thackeray, and provides its reader with many occasions to ponder the mutations of Thackeray's image in recent decades. Starting with John Sutherland's Thackeray at Work (1974) and continuing with Peter Shillingsburg's Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and W. M. Thackeray (1992), Thackeray has been used as the best possible—because most representative—site in which to investigate the social, material, and financial aspects of mid-Victorian authorship, a trend that has been recently furthered by the work of Richard Salmon and Clare Pettitt, among others. The contextualist and materialist methodologies in play among contemporary Victorianists find in Thackeray a compelling case study through which to demonstrate that "the novel" should no longer be treated as a transparent category, but one contingent upon a series of technological, legal, and social developments. The title of Fisher's book, with its misleading allusion to authorship as a trade, would seem to promise a similar emphasis. It offers instead a surprisingly rarified, and curiously dehistoricized, image of Thackeray as a novelist concerned above all with epistemology and moral agency—with, that is, creating a narrative voice that deprivileges any absolute ground for knowledge without thereby abandoning moral judgment. Insofar as there is any "context" in Fisher's depiction of Thackeray, it is the tradition of Humean skepticism and its afterlife in the work of Victor Cousin, which receives some treatment in Fisher's introductory chapter.

This is not the kind of context usually applied to Thackeray, and it invites us to wonder what contemporary work on the novel would look like if moral philosophy was given the privilege currently accorded to material textuality or reception history. Fisher's argument treats Thackeray's notoriously allusive and slippery narrative voice as the agent of a particularly didactic frustration of the reader, one intended to "create multiple perspectives that are irreconcilable with each other, purposefully throwing the reader outside the text onto her own interpretive resources" (4). Thackeray's characters are treated here as Bakhtinian monads, trapped in distinct but blinkered sociolects that are simultaneously possible, but limited, viewpoints on the ethically thorny transactions of Thackeray's plots. The result is a reading experience where "we (and his characters) make moral decisions and choose actions without having absolute grounds upon which to base those choices" (37). As an account of the particular brand of moral skepticism—but not relativism—to which Thackeray gives such an engaging voice, Fisher's argument is both clear and amply supported with detailed readings of Thackeray's major novels, from Vanity Fair (1847–48) to The Adventures of Philip (1861–62). The book's later chapters develop her argument lucidly and convincingly; her sensitive account of Pendennis (1848– 50) demonstrates how much more intricate Thackeray's skeptical voice gets when it turns into a retrospective one, and her reading of Henry Esmond (1852) argues for a late-career shift in which Thackeray's skeptical hermeneutic becomes a model for subjectivity, even for consciousness. The virtues of her overall argument are twofold: its insistence upon the philosophical importance of a narrative technique traditionally derided for its sloppiness, and its implicit contention for a study of Victorian fiction more attentive to concurrent developments in European moral and epistemological theory.

Her account suffers, however, from its isolation from contextual material, even material drawn from the skeptical philosophers Fisher initially mentions. Hume and Cousin are treated in summary fashion; excellent use is made in her reading of Vanity Fair of Henry Siddons's Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action (1822), but this contextual turn is brief and does not recur. Other Victorian novelists are neglected, with the exception of an early comparison of Thackeray's shifting narrative voice to Dickensian omniscient narration, which not only flattens the complexities of Dickens's omniscient voices but recycles a binary which obscures our...