Be It Ever So Humble: Poverty, Fiction, and the Invention of the Middle-Class Home by Scott R. MacKenzie (review)

For years I have said that libraries are my home, that I can travel the world, walk into a library anywhere from Prague to Peru and feel immediately at home. After reading Scott R. MacKenzie’s discursive analysis of home in literature, 1740–1830, especially in fictional and non-fictional texts concerning poverty, I may never make this claim again. MacKenzie’s book persuasively and thoroughly desacralizes, demystifies, and deconstructs the concept of “home,” a word that Robert Southey called “magic,” a place to rest the “tir’d mind” and draw “a mystic circle” round “that quiet haven” (quoted on 101). The most general insight offered by Be It Ever So Humble destroys the quiet of the haven and goes something like this: the place we call home has never existed in representation except as lacunae, as a “topos of closure,” or as that which is endlessly under erasure, present only through negation, as absence; and further, the home of hearth and haven that we associate with bourgeois domesticity was not created by a rising middle class but was actually born out of the literature of poverty management in the late eighteenth century. The humble cottage that will replace the unsustainable and unproductive parish poorhouse never appeared except in the future tense of “will,” but home as the imagined centre of English life was put into circulation through reformist poverty discourse. MacKenzie cleverly rewrites Nancy Armstrong’s famous assertion that “the modern individual was first and foremost a woman” as “the middle-class private home was first invented … for the poor” (7). Ironically, MacKenzie notes, as soon as the idea of home reaches a level of recognizability and signifies as bourgeois ideal, fiction is littered with examples of violated and confining homes or of nostalgia for the lost home that never was. The book’s four chapters lead to the persuasive conclusion that, be it ever so humble, “there really is no place like home” (217). Literally.

Be It Ever So Humble is most convincing when it pauses on a detail and delves into the heart of a text to show the intricate alchemy of home’s significations, the way it represents through its unrepresentability, as dream denied, abused, projected, and longed for. An incisive reading of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Home at Grasmere reveals how home is “a signifying lacuna … recognizable without being representable, at once a plenitude and a vacancy” (146). Chapter 2 compares the “proleptic mourning” for the home that never was in the Radcliffean Gothic to poverty management literature. Henry Fielding’s invention of “the noble pauper” as a trope, through which the stability of a sentimental sympathetic object emerges, illuminates the negative dialectics through which the valorized home is visible only through its negation, as homelessness, as the home desired but not yet achieved. When fiction manages to finally deliver “home” to troubled and vagabond characters like Juliet in Frances Burney’s The Wanderer, it is only to gesture towards a future after the end: “Domestic fiction can bring us to the threshold of private home, but it cannot provide actual entry” (128).

Language’s dwelling is where the book is most at home. I took pleasure, as its writer certainly did, in the continuous resurrection of dead metaphors and the rewriting and refreshing of clichés. From the “threshold crossed” in the sentence above to “the opening of a door” to an idea “in need of repairs,” MacKenzie’s prose is stylish. But nowhere is language’s dwelling, its ability to figure the real, as tactually present as in MacKenzie’s brilliant etymological lesson that opens the study. Home’s peculiar syntax lures the reader through the book’s door and distills MacKenzie’s argument in a compelling and clarifying discussion. “Home” is the only word in English that...