Victorian Vulgarity: Taste in Verbal and Visual Culture (review)

The diverse essays in this fine anthology explore the wide-ranging use of “vulgarity” within the Victorian context. By charting shifts in the term as it was used in the arts, politics, and religion, the authors persuade us that vulgarity functioned as a “broad, multifarious” (11), and above all, significant keyword for the Victorians.

The editors have organized the essays in the collection into four sections, covering spheres where the term performed different but distinct kinds of cultural work: within British linguistics, as an epithet wielded by a hegemonic middle class in the effort to stigmatize lower-class subjects and cultural minorities, as a means of policing middle-class identity, and within controversies in arts and crafts in the late-Victorian age. Despite the ample breadth of analysis, the writers and editors share the same aim of utilizing a discourse that many Victorian intellectuals used to distinguish themselves from various “others” as a means to explore the numerous contradictions of British middle-class identity.

Victorian Vulgarity is more or less evenly divided between studies of middle-class writers who shore up bourgeois values against threats posed by the “vulgar,” and studies of intellectuals, mostly from the later years of the nineteenth century, who seek to contest or reframe an older discourse that stigmatized cultural difference. Essays by Beth Newman, James Buzard, Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, and Elsie B. Michie provide case studies of the former phenomena. Buzard focuses on Charles Dickens’s representations of cross-class encounters in The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) to make the case for Dickens as the exemplary Victorian novelist, reveling in the representation of vital, energetic lower-class characters, chiefly distinguished by their unselfconscious use of language, while at the same time disavowing this attraction by means of the novel’s many scrupulously constructed sentimental plot digressions. Meri-Jane Rochelson’s essay explains how Israel Zangwill provided an alternative view of East-End Jewish life by underscoring the “spiritual underpinnings” of religious observance (129). Susan David Bernstein’s study of contemporary representations of the British Museum Reading Room in texts by George Paston, Amy Levy, and Ella Hepworth Dixon focuses on how these late-Victorian writers celebrate the value of “common readers and writers” in the face of prejudice against this notoriously accessible space (115), a chauvinism largely reproduced in George Gissing’s treatment of the space in New Grub Street (1891). Julie F. Codell’s essay elaborates on how Indian nationalists, by the end of the long nineteenth century, developed a specific critique of the debilitating effects of imported British goods in India and turned it into a means to contest the imposition of “imperial aesthetic” values (232).

Yet it is misleading to single out essays; all the work in the collection is first-rate. On the whole, theoretical acumen works in tandem with close textual analysis. Buzard’s essay is a particularly accomplished close reading, shrewdly integrating issues of form and content in Dickens’s novel. Joseph Litvak’s reading of “tableaus of vulgarity” in Middlemarch (1871–72) highlights the term’s subtle meanings in order to suggest a startling commonality between George Eliot and Alain Badiou (171). Even if the comparison is not fully convincing, Litvak nonetheless highlights subtleties usually glossed over in serially teaching this well-worn text. Invariably, the methods of close reading are accompanied by careful scrutiny of each text’s historical context. Michie’s reading of Frances Trollope’s The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837) develops into a broader investigation of a discourse that emerged in response to the 1829 repeal of the Test and Corporation Act, constructed by intellectuals as dissimilar as Thomas Carlyle and Edward Irving, and which tarred both Utilitarians and Evangelicals with the same brush of mercenary ambition. Ronald R. Thomas’s essay on The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) convincingly argues that cinema, as a mechanical apparatus for turning the “vulgar” traces of physical life into spectacle, offers the...