The Citizen's Body: Desire, Health, and the Social in Victorian England (review)

In The Citizen's Body, Pamela K. Gilbert explores perceptions of, and attempts to produce, citizens who were fit for the franchise between the 1832 and 1867 Reform Bills. In the first section, Gilbert focuses on the political and sanitary discourses of citizenship, drawing heavily on Hansard's Parliamentary Debates to reveal how MPs and other policymakers measured the fitness of those who were potentially to be newly enfranchised. To avoid the threat of the discontented masses, the working classes were encouraged to abandon class feeling in favour of individuality, which in practice meant fostering a perception of oneself in national (rather than class) terms, and being encouraged to adopt middle-class capitalist practices and, more importantly, desires. One example particularly relevant to Victorian periodicals scholars is the ambivalence with which the increasing availability of affordable newspapers was viewed: although working-class readers could now access news on a national level, it was questioned whether the low-culture penny press would inculcate suitably middle-class standards in its readers.

The second section of The Citizen's Body begins by theorizing the function of the emerging social realm in mid-Victorian England as a buffer zone between the public and private realms, in which some of the most important attempts to manage the private lives of poorer, supposedly unfit citizens took place. Gilbert claims that, because suitable social desires were initially established in the domestic sphere, working-class fitness came to be measured by domestic practice: the overcrowded, unhygienic homes of the poor were seen to both reflect and cause bad domestic habits; housing and sanitary reformers consequently emphasised the need for greater privacy, and therefore more space, between families and individuals. Octavia Hill's social work practices provide a case study of how residents were to be persuaded, rather than coerced, into displaying more appropriate desires, becoming fitter citizens in the process.

Gilbert demonstrates how tropes of fit and unfit bodies recur in Victorian discussions of economic, intellectual, and moral suitability, and how physical health was an essential starting point for achieving these other forms of fitness. Perceptions and representations of the unfit (pauperised, working-class) body as uncontained, diseased, freely mingling with others, and defined by its orifices and secretions, are repeatedly contrasted with the self-contained, individual fit citizen. In the final section, Gilbert reads several novels in the light of these concepts of fitness and unfitness. The interaction of the public, private, social, and political domains is explored in Disraeli's Sybil and Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks. The cultivation of appropriate desire and images of uncontained, as opposed to properly restrained, bodies and social practices are examined in Gaskell's North and South and Mary Barton, and in Dickens's Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend. Finally, notions of correct desire are contrasted with the immoderate desire of addiction in Eliot's Felix Holt. Gilbert concludes by thought-provokingly linking Victorian liberal ideas of public and private with our own twenty-first-century social policies.