Philanthropy in British and American Fiction: Dickens, Hawthorne, Eliot and Howells (review)

Misrepresentations of philanthropy in academic writing are unfortunately all too common. Probably the most routine is the critical tendency to reduce the movement to an isolated institution when, in fact, philanthropy represented an evolving set of cultural practices designed to reconcile the problem of gross urban poverty with the philosophy of free-market capitalism. In Philanthropy in British and American Fiction, the first book-length study from Frank Christianson, the evolution of the nineteenth century's ethical and aesthetic processes—what Christianson characterizes as the development of the "altruistic imagination" (17)—provides the foundation for understanding the convergence of widely differing economic classes in the works of British and American fiction. Citing cultural processes that suggest the development of a strikingly similar middle-class identity in England and the United States during the latter half of the nineteenth century, Christianson argues for the need to shift discussions of philanthropy's significance away from images of want and destitution and toward the cultural figures who shaped those images for public consumption.

At a disciplinary level, Philanthropy in British and American Fiction is an important study because it complicates a number of assumptions about how class works. Readers of nineteenth-century literature generally agree that the period's conception of economic status strongly informs the composition of its fictional characters. Where these readers tend to diverge is on the question of exactly which aspects of class scholars should prioritize. In claiming that philanthropy is central to the development of literary realism, Christianson stands on the conviction that textual representations of the philanthropic movement provide something more than thematic material or historical backdrop: they are significant cultural phenomena enabling scholars to chart the progression of economic individualism. Acting on the development of the nineteenth century's transatlantic book market, literate members of the British and American middle class embraced their heightened sense of connectivity to transform the hemisphere's literature into an important site for the expression and transmission of public morals. Their efforts to establish paternalistic relationships between fictional characters across class lines demonstrates literature's unique capacity to revise nineteenth-century scripts of middle-class identity through the cultivation of taste.

In other words, in the nineteenth century, fictional representations of philanthropy served a didactic function in helping English and American readers differentiate between effective and ineffective forms of giving. To account then for philanthropy's existence "as distinct from charity, noblesse oblige, or gift-giving" (11), Philanthropy in British and American Fiction begins by exploring the origins of sympathy, the central category in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concepts of human sociality. Expanding the implications of earlier arguments that complicate representations of economic man—among them, Stefan Collini's Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (1991), Gilles Deleuze's Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature (1991), and David Kaufmann's The Business of Common Life (1995)—Christianson contends that concern for sympathy's naive and potentially unruly nature led to the emergence of an altruism that eschews sentimental egoism. Through altruism, modern philanthropists argued, moral work could surpass self-interest. So too, by reinscribing the affect of a sympathetic impulse with middle-class sensibility, nineteenth-century authors employed representations of altruistic philanthropists—be they laudatory, satirical, or reformist—to interrogate public policy and, in some cases, reconcile gaps in the logic of capitalism.

Having established a strong link between aesthetics and ethics in the opening chapter, the subsequent sections of Philanthropy in British and American Fiction offer several effective, interconnected readings that identify important turning points in the evolution of literary realism. The center chapters on Charles Dickens and Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, are appropriately linked in their respective critiques of indiscriminate sympathetic identification at midcentury. In this section, Christianson reads Bleak House (1852–53) and The Blithedale Romance (1852) as describing "a transition from traditions of paternalism and agrarian utopianism to a...