Quite Argumentative

In 'the place of the implicit', an article that describes creating an MA in Victorian literature, Philip Davis makes a comparison between two kinds of student response: 'When a student said, "It is almost as though . . ." as a launch-pad for speculative thought (rather than "Isn't this just Victorian class-prejudice?" – where the word "just" is the give-away), then I knew we were getting somewhere.'¹ Equally revealing here is the word 'Victorian', used with apparent confidence in the second response but absent from the first student's speculative opening. Davis suggests a difference between a critical position that assigns categories from an apparently superior vantage point and one of sympathetic identification: 'almost' is an acknowledgement of distance and at the same time of proximity.

Such moments from the classroom have wider implications for critical debate, as Brigid Lowe shows in Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy:

it is often assumed that the 'dominant' voices of the period are so audible as to be virtually our own; no special sympathetic effort should be needed to see Dickens's perspective. But as Tillotson points out, in an observation which is surely even more pertinent now than it was in the 1950s, the Victorian age is for most people a confused 'phantasmagoria of stage-coaches, Barsets hire, women in white, and Hug h Thomson illustrations; and a class of undergraduate students, invited to expose their knowledge of the field, will begin by happily hazarding Jane Austen' (or, in my more recent experience, Wilfred Owen and the war poets). Furthermore, the typical reaction of the modern general reader or undergraduate student to a nineteenth century novel, far from exhibiting the dangerous sympathy that new historicism so fears,is to condemn it for being sexist, racist and so on (by our standards).

(p. 40)

Most teachers and students will recognise such a moment of feeling 'exposed', and the difficulty of confronting one's own assumptions. By invoking the earlier Tillotson, Lowe rightly asserts that there are inherent difficulties in seeking identification with an earlier period. The three words in parentheses at the end of this section function in much the same way as Davis's analysis of the word 'just': they are a plea against a critical stance that commits itself too early. A scepticism about 'our standards', a sense that the fiction of the Victorian period might have something to teach us, is at the heart of this book. But if the difficulties in identification are general, Lowe argues that a strain of contemporary criticism is responsible for specific assumptions that prevent sympathetic response. The introduction to her study, 'Critical Missiles and Sympathetic Ink', questions a view that it sees as 'institutionally enshrined everywhere' that 'the function of literature [is] to act as vehicle for ideological control' (p. 1) .

The 'is' here is a 'was' in the book because it is a backward glance at D. A. Miller's The Novel and the Police (1988). The tense suggests a problem (or opportunity): some of the works Lowe posits as influential seem dated. Lowe's study depends upon making a persuasive case that this 'suspicion' is still dominant, and on showing how Victorian texts themselves complicate or answer such critical concerns.

The five chapters that follow are connected through hide as that are abstract and imaginative. Chapter 1, 'Charles Dickens, Uncommercial Space-Time Traveller', acknowledges the necessity in reading Dickens of 'some vigorous wrestling with the ethics of history', and argues that '[p]ost-colonial and new historicist critics have grasped this nettle bravely, though perhaps sometimes rather roughly' (p. 39). Through a reading of Dombey and Son (1846–8) that is informed by Dickens's work as a journalist, Lowe concludes that this novel 'enacts the thematised difficulty of recording and narrating history' (p. 47). Chapter 2 has a wider scope, arguing for serious attention to what Lowe calls 'feminine fiction': a category, borrowed...