Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel by Carolyn Betensky (review)

In this thoughtful study of the Victorian social-problem novel, Carolyn Betensky has deepened and enriched our understanding of a subgenre whose goals and effects still elude definitive interpretation. Did the social-problem novel, which in its earliest form coincides with the Chartist Movement, function as a successful call to action? Or did it merely seek to smooth over, through melodramatic plots and numerous scenes of sympathy, the threatening class conflicts taking place in the real world? Betensky’s remarkably readable and candid arguments take us a step beyond the tendency to judge whether the social-problem novel’s earnest depiction of poverty and working-class suffering was good or bad. Rather than search these novels for their stance on public policy, she sees them contributing to a larger middle-class project of exploring the scope of one’s emotional responses. By showing us how these novels tell us more about their middle-class readers than the victims of the social problems they sought to represent, Betensky also demonstrates the deep investment these readers had in their own capacity to read such narratives.

She sees social-problem novels as incitements to know more, prompts to apprehend with increasing perspicacity and acuity what knowing allows one to feel. With an audience of mostly middle-class readers, these novels enact fantasies of beneficial action that not only act to ameliorate bourgeois anxieties about social strife, but also develop new ways for valuing and discovering the feeling of being properly moved by social distress. Through examinations of Frances Trollope’s Michael Armstrong (1840), Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838), Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845), Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) and Mary Barton (1848), George Eliot’s Felix Holt (1866), and Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima (1886), Betensky persuasively shows how such novels contribute to bourgeois “selving”: in feeling for others middle-class readers are better able to find “sympathy for themselves” (4). In part, such a finding draws on well-developed forms of ideological critique, but like the work of Lauren Berlant, Audrey Jaffe, and Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Betensky focuses our attention more carefully on the shadowy politics of affect, moral values, and shared sentiment. The ideological work done by social-problem novels, she argues, emphasizes the value of the self’s emotional responses, teaching “us to read our own reading, know our own knowledge, and feel our own feeling about the poor and working class” (6).

The effect of this emotional dynamic on working-class subjectivity—or, on how working-class subjectivity is imagined—is one of the important aspects of Betensky’s work. In formulating the proposition that middle-class readers must know and emotionally experience the plight of the dominated class, these novels demand in turn that working-class individuals, or the implied, “spectral” working-class reader, develop a reciprocal sympathy and understanding of the dominant middle-class subject who feels for them (85). The middle-class reader does not only find sympathy for herself, but is assured that the working-class subject will feel a similar sympathy toward her. In other words, the middle-class reader of the social-problem novel can say to herself, in feeling your pain I feel that you can also feel my pain. On one hand, the work of this narrative teaches the implied working-class subject to feel a reciprocal sympathy for the middle-class subjects who demonstrate such sympathy for them. Middle-class readers, on the other hand, are taught to look for the sympathy being reflected back that valorizes their own novel reading.

In all of the novels in this study, Betensky demonstrates the ways in which the light meant for the social problems of the poor falls brightest on middle-class heroes and heroines. In Disraeli’s novel, for example, Egremont becomes a hero by listening with feeling to the Chartist complaints expressed by Stephen...