Bulwer-Lytton's Pelham : The Disciplinary Dandy and the Art of Government

The shifting strata of society following the Napoleonic Wars heralded the emergence of a literary genre which would effectively market social emulation. For the reading public, the silver-fork novels of the 1820s seemed to advance what Pierre Bourdieu identifies as an "ideology of taste" and were thus read as instruction or initiation manuals for "rising above." With its painstaking attention to the day-to-day details of fashionable living, the silver-fork novel was a public source of knowledge for an ideology of social differentiation and distinction; it was required reading for the nouveaux riches as well as a guidebook to exclusive society for aspiring social climbers. For Bourdieu, "objectively and subjectively aesthetic stances adopted in matters like cosmetics, clothing, or home decoration are opportunities to experience or assert one's position in social space, as a rank to be upheld or a distance to be kept";¹ that is, aesthetic taste is not so much a matter of individual preference as it is a form of cultural capital. Indeed, according to Bourdieu, taste is a knowledge of "high culture"; it is a material and institutional practice with definite social and cultural effects.² The tendency, however, of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Pelham; or the Adventures of a Gentleman (1828)—the silver-fork novel that would come to be considered "the hornbook of dandyism"—was fundamentally opposed to these popular expectations.³ Bulwer recognized and took advantage of the power of "taste," but he mobilized this ideology to construct a new form of cultural capital. In Pelham, Bulwer assiduously disrupts and reconfigures moral and social authority by bodying forth an aristocratic hero whose very privilege challenges the political hierarchy and the social decorums he supposedly enforces. Thus, Pelham works not only to interpellate its dandy hero into a grid of liberal values, but also acts as a relay of social mechanisms of regulation, conscripting and disciplining readers to a new (Victorian) moral order.

Though he was an advocate of political reform,⁴ Bulwer saw that England's post-Regency society was most in need of a fundamental reform of character, especially the character of the landed elite, as he questioned the "illegitimate" monopoly the aristocracy had long held over the country. Bulwer suggested that aristocratic rulers in parliament, rather than serving as guardians of a larger national interest, had been selfishly inattentive, if not indifferent, to the interests of their constituents⁵ and it was now the duty of the novelist to both inform and reform public opinion:

To counteract a bad moral influence . . . you must create a good moral influence. Reformed opinion precedes reformed legislation. Now is the day for writers and advisors; they prepare the path for true law givers; they are the pioneers of good; no reform is final, save the reform of the mind.⁶

Moreover, if the public was a kind of tabula rasa, as Bulwer suggested,⁷ then fiction, particularly silver-fork fiction, would provide the ideal means to propagate his social views. As a presumed "guide" to high society, the silver-fork novel's discursive strategies, like the panoptic schema, anatomize and spread throughout the social body in order to"reform," "instruct," and "put idlers to work."⁸ In Factual Fictions: Origins of the English Novel, Lennard Davis explores the ways in which the novel is divided in its commitment to "a report on the world" and fictional "invention"⁹ and argues that the genre's "fictionality is a ploy to mask the genuine ideological, reportorial, commentive function of the novel."¹⁰ Like Foucault's discursive field or Bourdieu's "habitus,"¹¹ Pelham constrains the production of "fashionable" knowledge while at the same time it enables a "new" knowledge, specifically, an emergent liberalism.¹² In locating this liberal ideology, I look not so much to Bulwer's support of a political party or program, but rather toward a theoretical vision that would come to be the dominant political force of Victorian England. Specifically, I follow Foucault's idea that liberalism should not be seen as a particular political program, doctrine, or ideology, but rather...