The Citizen’s Body: Desire, Health, and the Social in Victorian England (review)

The architect Robert Kerr, better known as the author of The Gentleman’s House (1864), appears briefly in Gilbert’s book as an unlikely defender of working-class desire. Against the middle-class housing reform creed that workers should be taught to wish for three rooms in their tenements rather than being allowed to prefer to ‘pig together’ in one, Kerr suggested, in an address to the Royal Institute of British Architects, that perhaps one room might better meet the simpler needs, habits and resources of those working poor who could not afford to heat, light, and decorate multiple rooms. Kerr’s audacious suggestion was rejected, and the three-room dogma went on to stir cravings for parlours and pianos – the pretensions of middle-class privacy and domesticity which, paradoxically, needed to be displayed. According to the familiar critical idiom inherited from Foucault in which The Citizen’s Body proceeds, Kerr had contested the middle-class management of the working poor’s wayward wants. But in Gilbert’s ambitious and insightful critical narrative, he had questioned something even more powerful: ‘the social’ itself, considered as the ground upon which liberal government mediated private, domestic spaces and the public sphere, and from which sprang fitness as the criterion of citizenship. Engaging theorists of liberalism, the public sphere, and the social body such as Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, Mary Poovey, Giorgio Agamben, and Richard Rorty, and ranging through Reform debates, the rise of professional social work, and novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, Gilbert’s incisive genealogy traces the ways in which the social made the management of individual bodies central to citizenship, while simultaneously excluding such private aspects of identity and life from political representation. The Citizen’s Body thus creates a valuable conversation between two areas within Victorian studies that have traditionally remained aloof, the rise of liberal government – understood here in Foucauldian terms as governmentality – and cultural and literary ideals of health and citizenship.

Among the first of the book’s several achievements is to revise the significance of Reform, by demonstrating how the First and Second Reform Bill debates and related sanitary activism created a new conceptual framework of the social body, and incorporated the worker into it as a morally and physically robust citizen who could manage his own body. ‘Fitness’ included not merely health but literacy, personal money management, and, motivating these practices, appropriately middle-class, individualistic desires. Pro-Reformers contended that citizenship would dilute class loyalty with national identification; anti-Reformers claimed that workers, mired in the body, were not yet intellectually fit enough for the franchise. But both sides shared the same new yardstick of the social, which paradoxically included individuals on the basis of their class, while making their class identity secondary to their individuality as citizens. The passage of the Second Reform Bill can thus be seen as an index of the social’s ascendancy over class, as the primary mode of mediating between the individual and the state. In Gilbert’s trenchant critique, ‘This delicate art – that of bringing workers within the social body while retaining social and economic inequality – is the art of civil society under capitalism’ (50). This is not merely a Marxist observation. Gilbert’s lapidary analysis illuminates this ‘double gesture’, by which the realm of the private, which included the techniques of economic self-management encoded in the domestic, the body, and femininity, became central to government but was also excluded from representation.

Gilbert expands on the centrality of a domestic sphere of feminine-controlled privacy to this conceptualisation of the social in the second section of The Citizen’s Body, by analysing the housing movement. In the example discussed in chapter 6, the housing reformer Octavia Hill resisted the professionalisation of social work that she helped...