Early Victorian Industry

ELT 48 : 4 2005 eral mythologies about disinterested governance, a development epitomised (in Goodlad's view) by the contradictions which underlay the contrasting approaches to pastorship developed by the Charity Organization Society and Fabians, and which find their fictional counterpart in the narrative tensions in the fiction of Gissing, Wells and Forster. In these chapters Goodlad does not attempt complete readings of each literary work; her technique is rather to focus on particular narrative problems—for example, the tension in Oliver Twist between the innate goodness of Oliver and the moralizing functions attributed to family life via the Maylies—which she then recasts in terms of her preceding analysis of Victorian politics. For some readers this necessarily fragmented treatment of what are, after all, densely plotted and multifaceted novels may be frustrating (sanitary reform, for example, is only one—and arguably minor—theme among many explored by Dickens in Bleak House). On the other hand, such a narrowing of focus does allow Goodlad to examine particular instances of the interplay between the literary and the political with some depth and subtlety. And in so doing, she succeeds admirably in persuading the student of literature of the relevance of attending to nonliterary sources. In this respect it is also perhaps worth noting that Goodlad does not overplay the novelty of her framing account of nineteenth-century liberal thought, acknowledging that much of her nonliterary source materials (and interpretations of them) are familiar fare to social and political historians. Likewise, she resists the temptation to draw too forceful conclusions either about the demise of liberalism or—more importantly—about the role played by literature in it. This latter decision is particularly wise, given that a different choice of authors and literary works might have produced a very different sense of how nineteenth-century fiction deals with character and subjectivity (the works of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy spring most immediately to mind). In the final analysis, then, it is precisely this restraint, combined with a breadth and depth of political analysis unusual in literary histories, which makes Goodlad's volume such a rewarding read, and one to be recommended to all students interested in the politics of nineteenth-century fiction. JOSEPHINE M. GUY University of Nottingham Early Victorian Industry Joseph Bizup. Manufacturing Culture: Vindications of Early Victorian Industry. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. xii + 229 pp. $39.95 472 Book reviews MANUFACTURING CULTURE challenges one of the dominant theses of Victorian studies: Raymond Williams's claim that the modern idea of culture emerged in opposition to the effects of industrial progress . Joseph Bizup disputes this claim head-on, demonstrating that the advocates of British industry defended manufacture precisely in "cultural " terms. The book reveals a chorus of voices that "recognized and actively resisted" the attempts of industry's opponents to oppose industry with culture. "During the second quarter of the nineteenth century," Bizup explains, "an identifiable proindustrial rhetoric, predicated upon the subversion of the antithesis between industry and culture, coalesced within two mutually reinforcing bodies of discourse: the contentious debates over the factory system and its social and aesthetic effects, and the extensive discussions of the aesthetic, social, and commercial importance of'design' for British manufactures." For the many writers whom Bizup considers, the idea of an industrial culture was not only tenable but central to the justification of the factory system, its practices, and its products. Most of the book's chapters cover ground which is conceptually familiar , but populate this terrain with a cast of intriguing characters and diverse polemics. For instance, Bizup's analysis of the "rhetoric of the factory system" situates the factory debates within the discourses of organic growth, historical progress, and English nationalism. Bizup looks specifically to Scarry's "body in pain" and Rabinbach's "body without fatigue " as figures which competing ideologies (anti- and proindustrial) employed to turn these various discourses to their own purposes. Having established the key debate of his argument in terms which are not especially surprising, Bizup introduces three interestingly distinctive boosters of industry: Edward Baines, Andrew Ure, and William Cooke Taylor. All three men connect culture to industry by representing the factory system as a healthy social body that...