Sympathetic Distance and Victorian Form

After the Town and County Bank fails and Miss Matty Jenkins loses her life savings, the narrator of Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1851 novel, Cranford, recounts:

[Miss Matty] had taken very little note of time, however, as she had been occupied in numberless little arrangements preparatory to the great step of giving up her house. It was evidently a relief to her to be doing something in the way of retrenchment . . . only if it made her so uncomfortable, what must it not be doing to the directors of the Bank, who must know so much more of the misery consequent upon this failure? She almost made me angry by dividing her sympathy between these directors (whom she imagined overwhelmed by self-reproach for the mismanagement of other people’s affairs), and those who were suffering like her. Indeed, of the two, she seemed to think poverty a lighter burden than self-reproach; but I privately doubted if the directors would agree with her.¹

The problem of diffusely divided sympathy figures pervasively in Victorian fiction. It fuels the plot in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, whose protagonist must learn to curtail his sympathy and succeeds in doing so, as well as in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, whose protagonist should do the same but doesn’t. Meanwhile, works such as Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues visit the psychological burden of excess sympathy upon readers, first testing the limits of the reader’s capacity for sympathetic investment before revealing the perversity of the practice. If Romantic literature explores both the possibilities and dangers of the “spontaneous overflow” of emotion, by the Victorian period literature often more predominantly emphasizes the latter: many works of the era theorize not just how one might, but that one must, mitigate the self-sacrificing effects of sympathetic inclinations. Fear that a too-diffuse sympathy with others might evacuate the individual self of the particular subjective content that gives it meaning thus leads, in numerous novels of the period, to a strategically delimited vision of modern selfhood—and one that derives, as a new critical account argues, from the eighteenth-century social vision of Adam Smith.

How is the Victorian novel—or even the novel in its transhistorical form—an engine of sympathy, even where sympathy isn’t directly thematized? Among a spate of recent books on the topic, Rae Greiner’s Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction distinguishes itself through its sustained focus on sympathy as a form rather than a feeling.² If “sympathy” now serves colloquially to signify a feeling akin to compassion or on a spectrum with pity, Greiner returns to the etymological origins of the term as it was used to designate a formal process that allows one to feel along with others. A theory of the transmission of feeling rather than a feeling itself, sympathy names one form by which we relate to those around us; consequently, Greiner focuses here less on the particular emotions we feel and instead on the formal properties of how feelings transmit in the first place. To do so, Greiner looks back to sympathy’s eighteenth-century incarnations. The major sympathetic theorists of the era, David Hume and Adam Smith, offer two strikingly different models for how sympathy not only permits affective exchange between subjects but also forms a central condition of possibility for intersubjectivity itself. In recent decades critics have been particularly interested in unveiling the afterlife of Hume’s models of sympathetic transference in Romantic and Victorian literature.³ Here, Greiner turns instead to take up Smith’s legacy, tracing where and how his rather different theories of sympathy inhere not only in the sentiments of the nineteenth-century novel but also in its striking formal correlates. Whether the Victorian authors she studies actually read Smith matters little for Greiner’s argument (although she does allude to an eminently plausible trickle-down lineage linking Smith through Walter Scott and James Hogg, writers directly influenced...