Signs of Their Times: History, Labor, and the Body in Cobbett, Carlyle, and Disraeli (review)

Signs of Their Times, a study of the writings of William Cobbett, Thomas Carlyle, and Benjamin Disraeli on the "Condition of England" raises the question of the extent to which the contemporary critical occupation with questions of self-reflexivity and representation can illuminate canonical Victorian texts addressed to urgent social issues. John M. Ulrich engages the received wisdom that these writers employ an idealizing medievalism to critique abuses of industrial capitalism. His goal is to complicate our understanding of such historicist social criticism not by deploying the methods of intellectual history, but by taking a linguistic turn, focusing on the complex meanings of signs, and stressing the writers' occupation with the status of historical truth and with historical writing as the construction of narrative. This approach engages the Victorians' occupation with representation, especially with the ground of signs or signifiers. In keeping with another contemporary theoretical concern, Ulrich points to these commentators' attention to the body as malleable signifier and to the belief that meaning ultimately resides in the body. Focusing on such rhetorical and epistemological issues reveals a tension between these writers' sense that history is a narrative construct and their belief that history as a system of signs is grounded in the real.

The study argues, quite accurately, that for Cobbett in A History of the Protestant "Reformation" (1824-26) the rewriting of history becomes an assertion of historical truth since he can read the signs of such truth as written on the bodies of laborers: "Cobbett foregrounds the textuality of history in order to assert that the 'truth' of history lies in the material—specifically in the condition of laboring bodies, where he finds inscribed an all-too-legible account of degradation, poverty, and hunger" (16). Ulrich is also quite right to see that the nature of signs differs for Disraeli. In his novels of the 1840s, especially Sybil (1845), Disraeli rewrites the Whig historical narrative as fiction lacking a material ground, "a symbolic re-presentation that simulates a 'natural' correspondence [...] between the present and the past" (138). Disraeli thus bases his politics not on the claims of historical truth, but on the imaginative achievement of "hegemonic consent" (138).

Quite properly the author points to Carlyle as the central figure exemplifying the contradictions of early Victorian historicist criticism. The scene of the monks disinterring St. Edmund in Past and Present (1843) is taken to figure Carlyle's sense that truth is incarnated in the body, whereas the refusal to unwrap the body fully represents his belief in the infinite regress of the truth, underscoring "the paradoxical nature of any historical investigation: on the one hand the past will always remain, by its very definition, utterly remote and unrecoverable; on the other hand, the practice of historiography struggles against this inaccessibility, striving to represent [...] the dead" (169).

Applying such postmodern ideas about history does call attention to a certain uneasiness in Carlyle about the practice of an historicist social criticism that draws upon the malleability of history narrative. Yet applying our own sense of history as construction diverts attention from the genuine difference between early Victorian historical sensibility and our own. Ultimately, the Victorians believed in an ascertainable historical truth, however their methods of writing history may differ. Disraeli created attractive fictions that he believed would bring his readers to an accurate account of British history. Cobbett did trust in the accurate reading of the body as sign. Carlyle had faith that the typological reading of the book of history can apprehend the transcendental meaning figured in the past as in the present.

Applying our own occupation with the body, however, Ulrich does productively show how often the male body became in varied ways the crucial sign of the times for these writers. In Cobbett's materialist analysis of past and present, the body...