Masculinity and the English Working Class: Studies in Victorian Autobiography and Fiction, and: New Men in Trollope's Novels: Rewriting the Victorian Male (review)

Ying S. Lee's Masculinity and the English Working Class exhibits the best attributes of a successfully revised dissertation: a smart theoretical position, an innovative tweak of methodology, and an informed, up-to-date argument. The book advances the literary study of both class and gender, joining a handful of monographs (by Bruce Robbins, Ian Haywood, and Pamela Fox, among others) that stress the "need to account for class identity from an individual perspective" (9). Margaret Markwick's New Men in Trollope's Novels is similarly learned, and she is immersed in her materials as only a scholar of Anthony Trollope can be. But where Lee offers both a corrective to earlier scholarship and a forward-looking thesis, Markwick's book lacks a reviving breeze of innovation. The individual parts of the book treat Trollope with impressive erudition, but the overall argument is needlessly murky and its pieces sometimes puzzlingly disconnected.

Lee seeks to describe the experience of class by recognizing the remarkable variety and distinctiveness of working-class identities, an insight routinely forfeited in literary studies and social and labor histories. Too often in such work, the working classes—the masses—seem to "have, between them, only one story to tell" (2), and the texts they produce are lumped together as a bulk product. In contrast, Lee contends that class happens to people in very personal ways, and its effects are mostly felt outside the "active, highly self-conscious" political identities that scholars generally use to describe them (8). Yet, she argues, because "individual identity is often rooted in the communal and the external," we can reliably trace the effects of class in the self-representation of subjectivities formed "through family and community bonds, responsibilities to others, labor performed, and assigned roles" (12).

Drawing from nineteenth-century working-class autobiographies for her evidence, Lee goes where few scholars have chosen to tread (David Vincent, Regenia Gagnier, and Jonathan Rose are notable exceptions). In my own experience, this corpus of autobiographies is not an easy genre to work with. Such memoirs and autobiographies are regularly obtuse and unreflective, and, as Lee points out, "what is central" in them "often exists in the margins," thus demanding "a different way of reading and thinking about subjectivity" (12). In concentrating her study on a close and subtle reading of only three autobiographies—by William Tayler, a footman; "Bill," a railway navvy; and Hall Caine, who became a bestselling novelist in spite of his working-class background—she quells the inclination to aggregate such texts.

Part of Lee's methodological ingenuity involves pairing each autobiography with a novel featuring a similar set of classed figures. She contrasts the Diary of William Tayler (1837) with the representation of Sam Weller in Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), matches Bill's The Autobiography of a Working Man (1862) with Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848), and couples Caine's My Story (1908) with Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke (1850). At times Lee strains to make these pairs consistently compatible, but they do establish strong evidentiary links between experience and culture, ultimately altering our view of the canonical fiction. For example, Tayler's diary of his life as a "working-class dandy" and the strain of his multiple, conflicting identities is amplified by the way that Sam Weller's highly visible—and wildly popular—character is ultimately subsumed by Pickwick's bourgeois authority. Conversely, Weller's dual role as Pickwick's caregiver (essentially his wife) and a specularized and emasculated Cockney body is better illustrated through comparison with the objectified, decorative position of the footman, who exists to supplement the "look" and authority of his employer. Like Weller, Tayler's...