Victorian Writing About Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World (review)

In her wide-ranging, engaging, and informative book on Victorians and risk, Elaine Freedgood examines the "massive, disorganized, and highly successful" cultural enterprise of textually constructing England as safe in a world of change and danger (1). Her attempt to map the "geography of risk" in the period between 1832 and 1897 stakes its argument on two key theses. The first, theoretical one is that modernity is not characterized by its acceptance of the permanence of risk, as Anthony Giddens, among others, has asserted. Rather, for Freedgood, modernity's relationship with risk is distinguished more by its strategies for containing it, the consequent payoff of these "modern cosmologies" being "large-scale consolation and reassurance" (2). Her second fundamental claim is textual. Because these cosmologies must be directly on point, flexible, and ultimately expendable, they reside most successfully in the ephemera of culture, those texts that quickly gain cultural prominence only to recede with nearly as much celerity into the footnotes of historians and literary and cultural critics.

Freedgood's main interest, then, is with works that define, and then offer quick solutions to, particular dangers to self and nation during this period. Taking a few chances of her own, Freedgood examines a collection of texts that seem only tangentially related. Yet her insistence on the significance of ephemera for disseminating cosmologies of safety and risk turns the odds a bit in her favor in defense of her choices: the political economy writings of J. R. McCulloch and Harriet Martineau, the sanitary reform works of Edwin Chadwick and Florence Nightingale, hot-air ballooning reports, mountaineering memoirs, and the African travel/missionary writing of Mary Kingsley and David Livingstone. In the first chapter, on McCulloch and Martineau, and in the second, on Chadwick and Nightingale, Freedgood is especially persuasive about her concept of cosmologies. McCulloch and Martineau did promote laissez-faire economics as a reassurance against fears of the consequences of unchecked capitalism. Likewise, Chadwick and Nightingale temporarily assuaged fears over illness by repudiating contagion theories, linking disease instead to effluvia and dirt, which can simply be cleaned up.

Victorian Writing about Risk changes pace after these first two chapters, turning its attention in successive sections to writings about ballooning, mountaineering, and traveling and living among Africans. The shift is palpable, for England is now seen from a different perspective. While the political economists and the sanitary reformers were describing the nation from within and according to the effects of their discourse upon it, writers such as James Glaisher, Leslie Stephen, Kingsley, and Livingstone view it from above or recall it in relation to adventures in the Alps or in Africa. It is also in the second half of this book that the abstract individual of the discourses of sanitary reform and political economy transmutes into the concrete and the plural. They have names; they face specific dangers, and sometimes they die. Indeed, for Freedgood it is in these discourses of personal danger that individuals can assert their agency, performing a particular (often masculine) form of Englishness while simultaneously glorying in their isolation, or at the very least in their distance from England itself.

This book is at its most engaging as its texts move outward (and upward) from England. However, it is also in this shift that Victorian Writing about Risk is the most speculative, and its assertions about the connections between cosmologies and ephemera the least convincing. Freedgood argues, for instance, that ballooning and the writing about it provided the possibility of therapeutic regression, allowing the reader—or aeronaut—to "experience or re-experience [...] a simple and pleasurable relationship to an empty world" (98), consequently helping the Victorians to acclimate to their hectic life. Aeronauts' reports and experiences of these pleasurable feelings were important to the "emotional basis" of the "risk taking and...