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  • Literature, Immigration, and Diaspora in Fin-de-Siècle England: A Cultural History of the 1905 Aliens Act by David Glover, and: Re-imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in fin de siècle Literature by Robbie McLaughlan
  • Siobhan Carroll (bio)
Literature, Immigration, and Diaspora in Fin-de-Siècle England: A Cultural History of the 1905 Aliens Act, by David Glover; pp. x + 229. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012, £59.99, $104.95.
Re-imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in fin de siècle Literature, by Robbie McLaughlan; pp. viii + 237. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, £70.00, $120.00.

The Victorian nation was never a static affair. It was, instead, an imagined community undergoing continuous renovation in response to the circulation of people, objects, and ideas. A pair of recent books by David Glover and Robbie McLaughlan underwrite this understanding as they examine Victorian legal and cultural responses to migrations represented as importations of otherness. Both authors have produced historically grounded scholarship that reads Victorian literature in an attempt to shed light not only on the transnational implications of nineteenth-century British culture but also on the legacies that the Victorians left the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Comprehensively researched and succinctly articulated, David Glover’s Literature, Immigration, and Diaspora in Fin-de-Siècle England will prove an important resource for scholars interested in Jewish identity and the politics of immigration in late Victorian Britain. With admirable focus and nuanced argument, Glover provides a cultural history of debates over Jewish immigration in the four decades leading up to the passage of the 1905 Aliens Act. Arguably the first modern attempt at immigration control in Britain, the Aliens Act was by no means a historical inevitability. As Glover observes, the legislation marked a distinct turn away from Britain’s self-image as an asylum for refugees and as a supporter of free movement across national borders. How then did it come about? Rather than offer an easy answer, Glover instead uses this question as a departure point for mapping complex currents of cultural change. In tracing the Act’s emergence, Glover suggests the rise of popular antiSemitism in Britain and a cultural conflation of the “undesirable alien” with the figure of “the Jew” helped to precipitate its passage (2, 10).

Glover uses George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) as a touchstone for his argument. In his first chapter, Glover positions Daniel Deronda as a text that captures the unsettled nature of national identity, citizenship, and mobility in the 1860s, and which anticipates challenges that will surface later in the century. While Glover reads Eliot’s novel skillfully, his argument is most fascinating when he traces how the novel was received by later generations of readers and incorporated into debates about the future of Jewish peoples in Britain. Here and elsewhere, Glover deftly weaves together textual interpretation with historical explication, clarifying the political resonances of passages in Eliot’s [End Page 148] novel even as he reveals the cultural work performed by Daniel Deronda in diasporic reading communities.

Glover’s second chapter turns to one of the spaces characteristically associated with Jewish immigration: London’s East End. Examining the representations of labor in texts by Walter Besant, Margaret Harkness, and Jane Hardy, Glover reveals the degree to which different authors imagined the possibility of working-class solidarity within the East End community. This chapter, while well-crafted, serves mainly to prepare the ground for the following chapter on the growth of anti-Semitism.

Chapter 3, “Counterpublics of anti-Semitism,” emerges as one of the most significant chapters in an already impressive book. Glover avoids the temptation to characterize antiSemitic movements in broad strokes, instead positioning British anti-Semitism as “part of a … deeply contested racial imaginary … which formed a cultural matrix that allowed the possibility of anti-alien legislation to become thinkable” (81). As Glover points out, antiSemitism’s European origins made it a problematic discourse to invoke in the context of British nationalism: to express anti-Semitism could mark one’s own metaphorical foreignness to British ideals. A number of right-wing writers therefore made ostensive stands against anti-Semitism, even as popular melodramas and novels...

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