The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in 19th-Century Britain and Ireland by Sara L. Maurer (review)
- The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in 19th-Century Britain and Ireland by Sara L. Maurer
The most important target assailed in The Dispossessed State is our continuing tendency to see Victorian things and Irish things in separate categories. Irish studies has grown substantially as a field in the past two decades, both in the U.S. and in Europe, with significant results in history, anthropology, language, and literature. At the same time, interdisciplinary and transnational methods in nineteenth-century British studies have prompted research that renovates our understanding of geographical and intellectual boundaries. But it is still unusual for books in Victorian literature to work systematically with Irish materials. The work Sara L. Maurer offers here operates in a broader critical frame and opens a view onto a different critical practice. [End Page 526]
The Dispossessed State deals with shifting conceptions of property in the nineteenth century, looking primarily at fiction but spending considerable time on political, legal, and economic discourse. It reminds us that debates over the possession of land in Ireland were always implicated in conversations across Britain about ownership, citizenship, and the state. Its most interesting contention is that the Irish nationalist claim to an autochthonous and inalienable right of possession held a fascination for many English and Anglo-Irish readers, even those who might be dispossessed if this native right were ever recognized.
The book opens with a chapter on Maria Edgeworth, who in Maurer’s view skirts the nativist argument on inalienable possession through a double logic. On the one hand, Edgeworth suggests that it is impossible to tell who is the rightful owner of anything in Ireland after so many centuries of conquest and settlement, while on the other hand she slides the Anglo-Irish settler class itself into the category of native possessors. The following chapter traces John Stuart Mill’s evolving ideas on Irish property ownership, emphasizing the formative role this problem played in his thought. Unlike Edgeworth, who seems tempted toward a priori claims of the right to land, Mill frankly posits that the right to own depends always and only on the existence of a state, which enshrines and administers this right. This running debate between autochthonous and institutionalist conceptions of ownership is explored further in chapter 3, which contextualizes the cultural nationalist movement of the 1840s known as Young Ireland within a long tradition of British legal thought.
The next chapter makes a departure, or rather it suggests that Anthony Trol-lope does. In Maurer’s reading, the Palliser novels provide a “vivid redirection” of the whole land debate, imagining landlord-tenant relations in Ireland through a model of “vicarious ownership” (132, 136). This develops through the novels’ attention to characters who enjoy the pleasures of landed property without the economic and political responsibilities entailed in owning it: hunters, houseguests, and especially wives. Trollope’s political wives—Laura Standish, Glencora Palliser—are significant for Maurer in that they exercise influence and authority with neither the franchise nor representative standing. The insouciant joys and burdensome chores of ownership coalesce in her reading around the figure of Phineas Finn, the Irish Member who has no property and no settled constituency. As the emblem of enjoying without owning, Finn stands for a special Trollopian kind of Unionism, holding Ireland in allegorical marriage to the British state. And since Finn embodies the kind of “vicarious government” that Trollope recommends tout court, he is the Irish outsider who nonetheless “proves to be the very heart of England” (165).
The book concludes with George Moore’s Drama in Muslin (1886) and George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways (1885), both published in the wake of W. E. Gladstone’s second Land Act and the widespread land reform movement that came to be known as the Land War. Again in these works Maurer finds a paradoxical logic that intertwines ideas of possession and dispossession, here converging in the notion of a “public domain”: a formulation that links the question of land...
