The American Experiment and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture, 1776–1914 ed. by Ella Dzelzainis and Ruth Livesey (review)

“A great democratic revolution is taking place among us: all see it, but all do not judge it in the same manner. Some consider it a new thing, and taking it for an accident, they still hope to be able to stop it; whereas others judge it irresistible because to them it seems the most continuous, the oldest, and the most permanent fact known in history.” The quotation comes from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835–40), a work that greatly accelerated the British discussion of the American political experiment and, to varying degrees, shaped the reaction of leading Victorian thinkers to the United States (edited by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop [University of Chicago Press, 2000], 3).

As R. K. Webb noted years ago, Europeans who traveled to America in the nineteenth century were like those western visitors to the Soviet Union in the 1930s: they sought to witness a great cultural and political adventure. While most Britons glimpsed the future across the Atlantic from their armchairs, they wished to know whether it prefigured the political fate of their own form of oligarchic government, which was undergoing incremental reform in the nineteenth century. In the battleground of ideas, British observers seized on the facts that suited their prejudices, while the political parties converted Tocqueville’s analysis to party purposes. John Stuart Mill, for example, adopted the liberal line that the Frenchman’s conclusions leaned “towards radicalism,” while Tories picked out phrases like “the tyranny of the majority” and turned Tocqueville into a conservative (qtd. in Prochaska, Eminent Victorians on American Democracy [Oxford University Press, 2012], 27).

The American Experiment and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture, 1776–1914 seeks to illuminate a challenging subject that has attracted a host of historians in the past, including David Crook, John Burrow, George Lillibridge, Hugh Tulloch, and indeed, this reviewer. The book grew out of a conference in London in 2008 on “The Idea of America,” and the contributions range from Mark Philp’s “Representing America: Paine and the New Democracy” to Duncan Bell’s “Dreaming the Future: Anglo-America as Utopia, 1880–1914.” Among other noteworthy essays are “Democracy at the Crossroads: Tocqueville, Mill, and the Conflict of Interests” by Lucy Hartley, “John Bull and Brother Jonathan: Cobden, America, and the Liberal Mind” by Anthony Howe, “British Liberties, American Emancipation, and the Democracy of Race” by Richard Huzzey, “Victorian Radicalism and the Idea of America: Reynolds’s Newspaper, 1850–1900” by Adam I.P. Smith, and “Democracy, Culture, and Criticism: Henry James Revisits America” by Ruth Livesey.

The object of the exercise, as Livesey and her co-editor Ella Dzelzainis explain in their introduction, is to explore cultural phenomena alongside political issues. Thus it assesses democracy both as a social condition and as a set of political arrangements. The talented band of contributors, drawn mostly from British universities, examines the “sense of democracy” running through “poetry, fiction, newspapers, correspondence, and travel writing, as well as parliamentary debates” (6). As the editors are both nineteenth-century literary scholars, there is an attempt at an interdisciplinary balance between the literary and historical that is unusual in collections of essays on what is normally treated as a grand political theme.

Inevitably a good deal will be left out in a book of specialist essays on such a large subject. Still, there is a question of balance in the topics chosen. One is reminded of the well-worn notion of selective Victorianism. Perhaps indicative of their own academic sentiment, the contributors are disposed to favor radical and liberal interpreters such as Mill, Thomas Paine, and Reynolds’s Newspaper, rather than, for example, Walter Bagehot, Sir Henry Maine, and Blackwood’s. As Robert Saunders observes in his essay “‘Let America be the Test’: Democracy and Reform in Britain, 1832–1867,” “it...