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  • Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic
  • Anne Humpherys (bio)
David Wayne Thomas , Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), xv + 229 pages, illustrated, hardback, $45/£31.50 (ISBN 0 8122 3754 4).

This is a smart, historically grounded and detailed analysis of the ways the tension in liberalism, especially around issues of agency, in the second half of nineteenth-century Britain are imbricated in both the aestheticism of the period, and more provocatively in late twentieth-century theory and literary criticism. The book is, as the author himself declares, a 'generally redemptive account of modern liberal agency, one that recognizes the ideological work of the concept and emphasizes, at the same time, its salience as a regulative ideal in aesthetic and critical work to this day' (x). It is a recuperative project as well, as the goal is 'to wager a detailed rejoinder to those critiques that assimilate liberalism to an arid or supercilious moral rationalism' and 'to get past the reduction of aesthetics to ideology while still giving ideological critique its due' (ix).

As demonstrated by these quotations, Thomas's argument is carefully [End Page 373] balanced – one of its strengths – and thus it is difficult to summarize it without over-simplifying. But perhaps I may try to sum up the concept of liberalism or 'cultivated agency' in the term Thomas coins, 'many-sidedness', that is, the voluntary tendency to consider various points of view which involves 'practices of self-criticism, open-mindedness, and earnest conduct' (x) and brings in its wake issues of agency, originality (in which liberalism or 'cultivated agency' replaces romantic ideas), self-determination and autonomy. Many-sidedness or 'positional mobility and self-reflection' (xv) is also linked to a process wherebythe individual or collective constructs an identity through connecting to an object or idea (i.e. the Tichborne Claimant or Wilde). The goal of the book is not just to unpack the ways this liberalism is constructed in selected texts, but also to demonstrate the constitutive force ofthe concept in aestheticism and contemporary critical practices. To this end, the book is divided into two parts, 'Victorian Liberal Culture' with chapters discussing selections from George Eliot, J.S. Mill, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and the Tichborne Claimant, and 'Aesthetic Agency' with chapters on selections from Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the 1877 replica of Victorian Manchester and Salford, and a final chapter on selections from Wilde.

Chapter 1 'Cultivating Victorians' provides the historical basis of the discussions of liberal and aesthetic agency and includes discussions of aspects of Middlemarch (in which Eliot develops a 'liberal heroics'), 'On Liberty' (where Mill displays a paradox between genius and many-sidedness) and Culture and Anarchy (which articulates a similar tension between 'the best that's thought' and a voluntary disinterested many-sidedness). The chapter demonstrates how the rhetoric of 'cultivation' and the idea of self-determining agency are part of Victorian cultural practices as different as artistic response, self-improvement, and social activism. The rest of the book traces how this sense of liberal agency in many-sidedness comes to shape artistic work and aesthetic response both at the end of the nineteenth century and beyond.

As Thomas says at the end of his historical survey in Chapter 1, 'the following chapters [should be considered] semiautonomous essays in their respective contexts, efforts to understand the salience, and assess the various effects, of modern critical self-consciousness in specific historical frames' (48). It is important to keep this description of the selection of texts and the organization of the book in mind while reading the chapters that follow because the topics of these chapters (Ruskin and the Tichborne Claimant in Chapter 3, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the 1887 Manchester Exhibition in Chapter 4) can feel arbitrarily chosen and even incommensurate, though the choice of [End Page 374] examples from both high and popular culture certainly reinforces the argument about the breadth of the infusion of liberalism throughout the culture. The author's qualifications of his discussion are also important since the argument is based not only on selected texts by selected authors but on selected parts of the selected texts.

The first...

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