Plots of Opportunity: Representing Conspiracy in Victorian England (review)

Albert Pionke's excellent book opens with the story of Thomas De Quincey's childhood fascination with secret societies, in part to indicate how Pionke's study will move beyond the simple fascination with unearthing secrets that has traditionally been the hallmark of work on groups like the Masons. Rather than trying to ferret out the "truths" of various secret societies, Pionke focuses on the much more intriguing question of how the specter of the secret society was deployed in nine-teenth-century England in order to consolidate hierarchies of power while ostensibly promoting democratic ideals. According to Pionke, the key to this apparent paradox was a "complex dialectic" between the cultural desire to condemn efforts at political secrecy and the fascinating appeal of the mysterious secret society (x). One clear example of such a dialectic, he notes, can be found in the standards for Victorian masculinity which required a kind of transparent honesty combined with the capacity to be properly reserved and private. Considering the secret society as a trope thus enables Pionke to examine the Victorian rhetoric of secrecy in terms of both its authorized uses to consolidate power – appropriate privacy – and its threatening iterations that raised fears of conspiracy – inappropriate secrecy.

His initial chapter considers the respectable form of secrecy, exemplified by the Masons who "always remained scrupulously apolitical" while concentrating public energies on works of charity (2). Focusing on the attractiveness of this model of secrecy, Pionke contends that a number of writers and thinkers who apparently supported democracy were in fact invested in the notion of select authority that was the appealing province of groups like the Masons. This valuation of select authority sets the stage for the rest of the book, which focuses on how the culture relied upon a rhetoric in which secrecy was synonymous with conspiracy in order to contain the apparent threats to British democracy posed by trade union conflicts, the Catholic Question, the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and the process of Italian unification. In his investigation of each of these crucial moments, Pionke's argument hinges on the notion that there existed a cultural imperative that "sought to keep undesirable constituencies perpetually disenfranchised by branding them as secret societies," thereby allegedly protecting the burgeoning democracy from potential treachery while actually preventing many groups from access to governing influence (xxxii).

An important goal of the study is to offer re-readings of Victorian fiction, and all but one of his chapters is anchored by a focus on at least one novel whose thematic concerns center on the particular political issue he is examining. To locate these novels within cultural conversations, Pionke draws on periodicals whose editorial biases cross the political spectrum from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine to the Westminster Review. Adding Parliamentary papers and correspondence to the mix, Pionke uses an impressive range of materials to historicize key terms in cultural debates and explore public responses to moments of political crisis, such as the Glasgow spinners strike (a framework for his investigation of trade unions). So numerous are his sources that at points it can become difficult to keep them straight enough to follow his arguments; conversely, there are moments where he focuses too narrowly on reading details from the novels to the exclusion of his larger point. The majority of this book, however, shows Pionke at his best – thoroughly integrating his readings of novels with his discussion of wide-ranging periodical sources to support arguments about how tropes of secrecy simultaneously promoted and limited democratic ideals.

The chapters on the Indian Mutiny and Italian unification are his strongest. He offers an insightful rethinking of postcolonial readings of Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone in his discussion of the Indian Mutiny and brilliantly pulls together issues from many of his earlier chapters in his discussion of Italian unification. However, both chapters (more so the latter) would benefit from further analysis of the place of Victorian standards...