Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (review)

Through the image of the mercantile “display window,” Andrew H. Miller explores the relationship between the novel and the emergent commodity culture of Victorian England. Drawing on recent scholarship in critical theory, feminism, and social history, this book traces the lines of tension shot through nineteenth-century culture by the fear that the social world was being reduced to a display window behind which people, their actions, and their convictions were exhibited for the economic appetites of others. Miller, who is well informed about the technological and mercantile history of his period, resists the temptation to “flatten and occlude the unevenness of large-scale historical change, to package and wrap the ungainly object of study” (13). He is acutely sensitive to the seductive possibilities as well as the dangers of commodification—and, in particular, to the possibilities an dangers of conceiving literary products as commodities. Affecting the most basic elements of Victorian life—the vagaries of desire, the rationalization of social life, the gendering of subjectivity, the power of nostalgia, the fear of mortality, the cyclical routines of the household—the ambivalence generated by commodity culture organizes the thematic concerns of Victorian fiction and the society it represents. Taking the commodity as their point of departure, chapters devoted to Thackeray, Gaskell, Dickens, Trollope, Eliot, and the Great Exhibition of 1851 suggest that Victorian novels provide us with graphic and enduring images of the power of commodities to affect the varied activities and beliefs of individual and social experience.