The Professional Ideal in the Victorian Novel: The Works of Disraeli, Trollope, Gaskell, and Eliot (review)

The most remarkable aspect of Susan Colón's examination of professionalism as an ideal in mid-Victorian culture is its studied, and one suspects hard-won, equanimity. After a period roughly twenty years ago of ideologically suspicious readings of the formation of the professions in the nineteenth century, and after a more recent series of equally nuanced defenses of professionalism and disinterest, Colón's book enters a discussion that can hardly help, at this point, seeming like an argument. That The Professional Ideal in the Victorian Novel offers neither a ringing defense of its subject nor a sour critique of its subject's failures and blindnesses makes it often highly astute in its trackings of the ideals of disinterested service in a series of Victorian narratives. Colón's book rests, in fact, on a dialectical balance between what she terms the competing "rationalities" inherent in Victorian professionalism: the "materialist rationality" associated primarily with Jeremy Bentham and the "idealist rationality" deriving from Christian notions of vocation. Dialectical shuttling is the motor of the book: market efficiency often becomes the alibi for idealist attempts to remediate class conflict; Benthamite "efficiency" is frequently the context for what can otherwise seem like stubbornly idealist attempts to contravene professional norms; and no argument for professionalism, however rooted it might be in materialist or idealist logics, can avoid entanglement in the logics of its opposite. Cool heads, as Colón wittily puts it, always meet warm hearts. One result of all this dialectical back-and-forth is, Colón argues, a tendency to self-critique that is professionalism's most consistent legacy. Another result is the intriguingly neutral tone of the book's own argumentation. As Colón puts it, she "keeps open the dialectic in professionalism between materialist and idealist rationalities in order to prevent flattening the existential tension between them that the Victorians experienced" (13). More than anything else, Colón's study suggests that Victorianist scholars might finally be, in relation to professionalism, après la guerre, if nonetheless still existentially tense.

Which might leave some of Colón's readers, like Fabrizio del Dongo wandering around the aftermath of Waterloo, wondering what the fuss was all about. The most important statements on professionalism of recent years, such as Mary Poovey's Uneven Developments (1988), Bruce Robbins's Secular Vocations (1993), and Amanda Anderson's The Powers of Distance (2001), have been generally open about their self-reflexivity. Meditations on the genesis of professionalism, they cannot help but dwell on the ironies, luxuries, and blindnesses of the profession that enable such meditating. At a time when literary-critical professionalism (or even academia tout court) struggles to articulate its own idealism, these books worried at and around the ways in which our anxieties are related to Victorian examples. Excepting a brief epilogue, Colón is much more reticent about her own self-reflections. While this discretion helps keep the book's winning neutrality intact, it also leaches some of the potential urgency from her argument. More remarkably still, the subjects of Colón's chapters—the Benjamin Disraeli of the Young England trilogy, the Anthony Trollope of the early Barsetshire novels, the Elizabeth Gaskell of My Lady Ludlow (1858), and the George Eliot of Romola (1863) and Daniel Deronda (1876)—seem notably unaware of the self-reflexive quality of their own meditations upon professionalism. As good as Colón can be on these novelists' depictions of clerical, or philanthropic, or political professionalism, she is much more cursory on the subject of their enabling profession, novel-writing. Despite an early admission that they "all embed in their representations of professionalism an implied or explicit commentary on the structures of professionalism in which their characters—and they—simultaneously participate" (20), Colón's authors seem perhaps too outward-directed and not aware enough of their own...