The Forms of Liberalism

Elaine Hadley's Living Liberalism is a welcome addition to the resurgence of critical interest in Victorian liberalism during recent years. It amply earns its place alongside Uday Mehta's Liberalism and Empire (1999), Lauren Goodlad's Victorian Literature and the Victorian State (2003), and Amanda Anderson's The Powers of Distance (2001) and The Way We Argue Now (2005) as important reading for anyone wanting to understand the complications of political aspiration and lived reality that characterized high Victorian liberalism from roughly 1865 to 1880. It also has much to say, at least by implication, to those, like Anderson and Anthony Appiah, concerned with how far Victorian liberalism's achievements and shortcomings carry over into modern (especially American) versions of liberalism. In its broadest outline, Hadley's thesis is a recognizably conventional one about liberalism. Her subject is the imperfect transition into lived practice of liberal idealism about the role of "cultivated thought in political individuation" (7). Put so summarily, it sounds much like any other exercise in revealing the incoherencies of political idealism. But the strengths of Hadley's argument and the pleasure of reading this long, tenaciously intelligent book derive from the quality of her thinking about exactly how a necessary incoherence revealed itself in four specific instantiations of Victorian liberal thought—the secret ballot, signature journalism at the Fortnightly Review, Irish land reform, and the lauding (by some—castigation by others) of William Gladstone as the supposed "embodiment of the Liberal cause" (qtd. in Hadley 291). A good part of her patient and sympathetic exploration of these subjects is conducted through long, detailed readings of three novels that give narrative and contextual depth to the idea of "living liberalism": Anthony Trollope's The Warden (1855) and Phineas Finn (1867–68), and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–72).

Hadley's particular questions have to do with the uncomfortable fit between "public exchange" and "private cogitation" (47). How does one live out liberalism's commitment to rational abstraction and principled disinterest without doing damage to one's coherence and credibility, or—in her nice description of Trollope's Mr. Harding—becoming "a stranger to oneself" (116)? How can one give an enabling procedure to free and fair public debate of the kind John Stuart Mill and his followers prized without falsifying the content of the debate or compromising the distinctiveness of one's own signature? Could occupation (in at least two senses: occupation of the Irish land by its farmers; of Parliament by representatives of specific locales) provide a sufficient alternative, neither too closely nor too remotely interested, for an earlier politics that guaranteed the sincerity of its political representatives through ownership, rather than occupation, of property? Was the "virtual representation" offered by Gladstone in his Midlothian campaign of 1879, to his Scottish electorate and to the whole nation, enough to bridge the gap between abstract disinterested intentions and the embodied individual presence necessary to realizing them in the political sphere?

These are good questions, arising directly out of the introduction's careful reading of Mill, Matthew Arnold, John Morley, and Leslie Stephen against the figure whom she sees as their major antecedant, John Locke. They are—deliberately—questions of a theoretical cast, and the answers given to them in the book remain predominantly in the realm of theoretical description and interpretative refinement. Hadley knows a great deal about the practical conditions of Victorian liberal debate, the history of parliamentary politics, and the development of political parties, as well as the history of political thought, but she uses that knowledge to pursue a rich description of the discursive practices of liberalism, its constantly endangered "formal utopianism" (176), rather than to rewrite political history or to judge early liberalism's strengths and blindnesses from today's perspectives. The main benefit is that, given the tact and thoroughness of her reading, the discursive focus produces a more...