Class in Late-Victorian Britain

In the very brief introduction, Kevin Swafford claims that this study interrogates how texts "reveal the historical contingencies of class at the level of ideology and narrative" (x). Simply put, Swafford examines how Victorian novelists and characters are complicit in legitimizing and sustaining class boundaries (xi). Chapter one on The Claverings acts as an extension of the introduction, exploring Trollope's ambivalence as he endorses aristocrats' "natural" distinctions, but then admits class as performative.

In ensuing chapters, Swafford addresses several novels that are working-class in theme if not by author (many having been treated in Peter J. Keating's important criticism of the 1970s). Chapter two considers Walter Besant's disavowal of East End poverty and class conflict through the solution of cultural philanthropy in All Sorts and Conditions of Men. Swafford highlights Besant's choice of romance over realism, the ideology of colonization inherent in his project, his light, reductive treatment of working people and occlusion of their material suffering, and the book's appeal among middle-class readers. Chapter three argues that although Margaret Harkness transcended many of her contemporaries by exposing the way that economic injustice triggers Jos Coney's downfall in Out of Work, she nevertheless prescribed middle-class paternalism as a solution, imagining socialism as a gift that must be bestowed on working people.

Swafford's arguments are interesting, though some might benefit from qualifying and sharpening. For instance, Swafford shows how Harkness contrasts ineffective middle-class philanthropy against genuine benevolence among the poor in order to undermine bourgeois assumptions that the poor are greedy, dishonest, and brutal. Certainly, the spontaneous charities of the Squirrel toward Jos constitute some of the most moving moments of the novel, making her later suicide all the more poignant. Yet it seems, at times, that Harkness also gestures to random cruelties among the poor and even to a Zolaesque determinism. The Squirrel has been let down before, robbed by a boy she once loved, and Jos, while his alcoholism is prompted by the social circumstances of hunger and the cheapness of gin, is nevertheless revealed as the son of a drunkard whom "drink just seems to soak into" (see Margaret Harkness, Out of Work [London: Merlin, 1990], 158). In her vindication of the poor as victims under capitalism, Harkness permits them sins and inherent weaknesses, too. Further, the Squirrel's last visionary moments by the river as the water creeps toward her are a marvel of poetic, stream-of-consciousness writing, suggesting that Harkness sustained a belief—at odds with her paternalism—in an intuitive working-class self-consciousness.

Writing on A Child of the Jago in chapter four, Swafford identifies in Morrison a middle-class need to dissociate oneself from the slum and pathologize it as a diseased, alien zone. He shows the Jago as an autonomous anticulture, one that affirms brutality, uncleanliness, and drunkenness and victimizes the semirespectable within it. Morrison, then, would deny "the gross inequities of material wealth and access" by framing denizens' collective depravity as innate, independent of "civilized" culture and cross-class and global economics (77). Generally, this seems so, though it raises two questions. First, the novel complexly undermines some of its more general condemnations: for all that the Jago fosters savagery, Kiddo Cook, Pigeony Poll, and Dicky himself show compassion and generosity. The reader thus shifts between a general horror at Jago mores and empathy for selected inhabitants, many of whom are Jago rats, not outcasts like the Ropers. Second, while Swafford criticizes Morrison's avoidance of historic, economic factors that have created the Jago, he later does an about-face to suggest that Morrison, using Dicky's lessons in labor and indebtedness under Weech, "inadvertently exposes" and critiques the market economy that the middle classes model for the Jago (78). This thesis qualifies the one headlining the chapter, and the chapter's introduction might be revised to accommodate it.

The most developed of Swafford's chapters, chapter six, initially explores...