In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain
  • Tim Dolin (bio)
Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain, by Linda Young; pp. xi + 245. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, £55.00, $95.00.

Linda Young's Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain covers many topics familiar to readers of Victorian Studies, including advice manuals and etiquette books, the use of furniture and household implements, forms of bodily discipline and domestic economy, the sexology of William Acton, the gender ideology of Sarah Stickney Ellis, and the meaning of constrictive fashions in clothing: in short, all the appurtenances, rituals, and discourses of the genteel Victorian middle classes—or should that be middle class in the singular? For Young's book departs from previous accounts of middle-class culture in arguing for the unitary character of that culture across diverse status and occupational groups, across virtually the whole early-nineteenth-century English-speaking world, and across the boundaries of what we conventionally think of as the Victorian period. In this last respect, indeed, it is difficult to pinpoint with any accuracy the precise historical parameters of this book. The title says "the nineteenth century," but in the text this is routinely interchanged with "Victorian," just as the "long nineteenth [End Page 743] century" gives way inexplicably to "turn-of-the-nineteenth-century." As a result we're never quite sure whether we're still in the regency period or whether we're up to Self-Help (1859): certainly, it's never much later than that. The effect of all this is to conjure up an indefinite timeframe: a vague Victoriana, a blurred social space where families that must work to earn a living, wherever they live, continue to behave much like Jane Austen's small gentry. Even granted that this is precisely Young's argument about the cultural habitus of the global nineteenth-century English-speaking middle class, there is a disarming absence of historical signposting here that mars what might otherwise have been a compelling argument.

Nor is it merely a matter of dates. This book makes a contribution to two different and important strands of recent cultural-historical research: research into middle-class daily life; and research into the phenomenon that has come to be called the "British world." One of Young's most interesting aims is to challenge the dominance of difference as an analytical and methodological assumption in the cultural history of modern Britain by arguing for the pervasive commonality of middle-class experience. From that point of view, it follows that we should see the Anglophone middle-class world whole, for American, Australian, and British bourgeoisies all share in what she calls the culture of gentility. This culture, Young argues, trickled down from the landed classes to the upper reaches of the middle class, where it was remade in the image of an evangelical commercial-professional ethos, before trickling further down through the ranks, reaching a point just above the respectable working classes (which Young nicely distinguishes from their genteel betters). British (or really English) middle-class gentility is characterised chiefly by forms of "psychic internalization" (93) and self-regulation in everyday life: in the regulation of the genteel body (cleanliness, carriage, sexual restraint, and so on); in the public performance of gentility as etiquette; and in "genteel knowledge" or good taste.

There are dangers in Young's approach, not least the danger that the ambitious scope of the argument will force it into overly broad generalisations, and that the challenge of covering so much material will lead to merely descriptive accounts of the shared habits of daily life of the "Anglos" (as Young calls them). Although the book claims its affinities with recent developments in global history by presenting gentility as a transnational cultural system, and the dominant cultural discourse of the massive middle-class British diaspora, Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century is not really a characteristic product of the transnational turn. Not only is Young relatively uninterested in the complex differentiations among various national or regional forms of gentility across the British world, but she actually locates most...

pdf

Share