Literature, Journalism, and the Vocabularies of Liberalism: Politics and Letters, 1886–1916 by Jock Macleod (review)

Jock Macleod’s Literature, Journalism, and the Vocabularies of Liberalism adds to the twenty-first-century reevaluation of Victorian liberalism. In contrast to scholars such as Amanda Anderson, Lauren M. E. Goodlad, David Wayne Thomas, and Elaine Hadley, Macleod concentrates on the period from the mid-1880s to the First World War—from the defeat of W. E. Gladstone’s government over Home Rule to the resignation of H. H. Asquith—and on a particular set of writers publishing their work in a group of linked periodicals. The “advanced liberals” whom Macleod examines (he prefers this phrase to the more familiar “new liberals”) wrote for the periodicals edited by or associated with Henry Massingham: The Star and then The Daily Chronicle in the 1890s, followed by The Daily News and The Speaker, the weekly that in 1907 became The Nation under Massingham’s editorship (3).

In the first chapters of the book, Macleod describes the journals and institutions that linked members of the group, analyzing the “second-level networks” of writers who were connected in multiple ways (18). A map or chart depicting the manifold connections among members of what Macleod calls the “Massingham network” might have been a useful addition here, laying out relationships and assisting readers who might need a little help distinguishing between, for instance, John Hobson and L. T. Hobhouse (19). In a larger sense as well, the book’s absence of images—for instance, of the journal sections so carefully described and analyzed by Macleod—seems unfortunate.

After delineating this journalistic network, Macleod moves on to the quite different project of analyzing its shared vocabulary, especially its terms of literary evaluation. As Macleod demonstrates, the language of advanced liberalism’s political vision could also offer ways to discuss and assess literary works. Unity in diversity, personality, continuity, open-ended growth, reciprocity (especially the reciprocal exchange of knowledge between members of different classes): such ideas helped supply a vocabulary that could take the values of advanced liberalism into the literary realm, a language that could readily circulate between literature and politics. Macleod gives a particularly rich, multi-chapter explication of the meaning of “life” as a keyword in the Massingham network’s body of writing (74). The term might sound numbingly broad when we read it after F. R. Leavis, or vaguely biopolitical after Michel Foucault, but Macleod shows that in the criticism of advanced liberals, it sums up all of the values listed above. Macleod’s book thus provides something like a primer to understanding—and taking seriously—a critical tradition that employs what we might no longer recognize as interpretive terms at all, much less as the terms of a politicized criticism grappling with the social movements and the problems of its era.

Even the era’s social challenges had their literary dimensions. In the book’s most sustained juxtaposition, the East End fiction by Massingham network regulars presents a significant contrast in tone and technique to writings by Arthur Morrison. In Macleod’s account, Clarence Rooks’s The Hooligan Nights (1899) and Henry Nevinson’s “The St. George of Rochester” (1894) exemplify an advanced liberal emphasis on open-endedness, local knowledge, and heterogeneity that differs widely from the treatment of a pathologized, monotonous East End as seen by Morrison’s distanced, authoritative observer in Tales of Mean Streets (1894).

Of course literature could bring its own challenges, as the book’s final chapter demonstrates with its analysis of the Massingham writers’ response to modernist literature. Many critical accounts of modernism emphasize its hostility to a liberalism associated with rationality, legalism, and bourgeois complacency. Yet as Macleod points out, advanced liberalism itself was often at odds with these norms, identifying them with earlier versions of liberalism. And, like modernism, advanced liberalism adopted a “radical and oppositional stance to the dominant culture” (152). For the Massingham network, the word “modernism” did not refer...