Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (review)

It is difficult to imagine what the original proposal for this book might have looked like. How to justify a volume designed around expanded versions of three earlier articles on disparate, but more or less reform-related, subjects? Not that the three core chapters, one by each editor, are not, by and large, substantial pieces of scholarly work. Rather, it is hard to see how a coherent volume could be built around them.

Each chapter roughly corresponds to one of the three categories in the book's subtitle. For class, Keith McClelland traces the attitude of the working classes towards reform from the time of the Chartists up to the Reform League. His chapter is a useful, and profusely illustrated, summary of the subject. (The illustrations are excellent and frequent throughout.) Addressing gender, Jane Rendall pursues the question of women and their place in the political nation in the years in and around 1867. As she notes, the women's suffrage movement in that period has not enjoyed much modern scholarly attention. The strength of the chapter lies not so much in its close attention to the campaign for women's suffrage that occurred in tandem with the wider reform debate after 1865, although this account is both useful and highly interesting. Rather, Rendall's excellent treatment of what was in effect the origin of all subsequent campaigns for women's suffrage makes clear the extent to which later issues and divisions first manifested themselves in the period from 1865 to 1870. Rendall's useful and interesting account is mostly limited to England, as she herself notes. More on Ireland and (especially) Scotland would have been welcome.

Catherine Hall's chapter on race, "The nation within and without," is the most problematic of the three. Her intent—and her historiographical starting point—is clear from the outset: the chapter "uses postcolonial perspectives to rethink the nation and to grasp the ways in which Britain was constituted through its colonial 'others'" (179). This is fine—if one finds postcolonial interpretations illuminating—and it works reasonably well when Hall restricts herself to the British response to events in Jamaica, a subject where her knowledge is perhaps unrivalled. It breaks down, however, in regards to Ireland, her second example of a colonial "other" against which, or with reference to, the British nation was constituted, or reconsidered, in the 1860s. Hall blithely assumes that the "peculiar status of Ireland in relation to Britain was marked by the long history of colonialism and brutality" (206) and, bluntly, that Ireland "was a colony, not part of Britain, its Catholic population fiercely hostile to English occupation, English control of land, English Protestantism and English brutality" (208). Based on a poor and one-sided selection of secondary sources, Hall's simplistic and wholesale adoption of the republican/nationalist school of Irish history undermines everything she has to say about the island. She manages to discuss English anti-Catholicism (as it related to the Irish) without reference to the work of D. G. Paz, and the Fenians without reference to the work of R. V. Comerford. Hall is unable—or perhaps simply unwilling—to link either Jamaica or Ireland to the political events of 1867 in more than a cursory fashion. It is no surprise to learn that many, if not most, Englishmen (and women?) thought in terms of a hierarchy of races, and that the Irish were ranked ahead of black Jamaicans. This chapter gives the overall impression of a well-informed discussion of Jamaica and race linked with a poorly- informed discussion of Ireland, shoe-horned into a book purporting to discuss reform and 1867.

Defining the Victorian Nation feels cobbled together, as if the editors did not...