Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel by Jesse Rosenthal (review)

Jesse Rosenthal's work makes a significant impact in reception studies, the history of feeling, and the study of Victorian fiction. The central question posed by the book is "What do we mean when we say that the progress of a narrative 'feels right'?" (1) Why does this feeling compel us to continue reading? Why, in contrast, did the prospect of Little Nell's death at the end of The Old Curiosity Shop feel so wrong as to cause readers to protest against the very possibility. Key to this central problem is the question of how ethical concerns of rightness or wrongness get mixed up with feeling and with form. The conjunction of these questions allows the book to make a serious and meaningful intervention both in and beyond Victorian studies. It asks about our most basic and uncontested responses to fiction and sets these reactions in a richly developed historical context running from the early part of the nineteenth century into the development of philosophical thought from the likes of John Rawls in the twentieth century. Ultimately it argues that "Victorian formalism was inextricably linked to moral thought" and that these moral readings continue to affect "what we read and how we read it" (2).

In his first chapter Rosenthal sets out the history of two oppositional strands of ethical philosophy in the nineteenth century: utilitarianism and intuitionist or internalist moral sense. The latter suggests that we have an innate faculty allowing us to perceive whether something is "good" or "bad," while the former situates the recognition of "goodness" or "badness" outside of individuals in the causation-based principles of utility, or the greatest happiness for the greatest number. He explores the writings of thinkers such as William Whewell, Adam Sedgwick, and H. L. Mansel, better known in Victorian studies for his invective against sensation fiction, and highlights the ways in which intuitionism functions "best in situations in which people have a set of shared values or conventions" (21). This mode of thinking assumes a sense of community even while concerned with private and internal moral instincts; like the act of reading itself, it is both private and implicitly dependent on a wider situatedness in the public sphere. To further unpack the fundamental research questions, the chapter uses examples from Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and Charles Dickens' Hard Times (1854). He asks us to re-think the frequent critical assumption that these novels critique utilitarian thinking without actually offering an alternative by demonstrating how they shift away from sympathy "to a more internally founded ethics" (24). Readers of both novels, Rosenthal argues, share in the "formal desire to see a false accusation removed" (28) from Jem Wilson in Mary Barton and Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times. This formal desire cannot be disentangled from the ethical drive to see a wrong righted; thus, the novels "make the reader feel the internal, and sensible, existence of morality." (30)

Each ensuing chapter of the monograph replicates these readings on a larger scale and confidently takes on a canonical Victorian novel or category of Victorian fiction. The two novels that are given entire chapters are David Copperfield (1850) in chapter 3 and Daniel Deronda (1876) in chapter 5. The subgenres central to chapters two and four are the Newgate novel and the bildungsroman, although Dickens looms large in both of these too, with thoroughgoing discussions of Oliver Twist (1837) and Great Expectations (1861) featuring respectively. The work as a whole does much to explore Dickens's centrality to the ethical history of the Victorian novel. The chapter on the Newgate Novel asks why William Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard (1839) and others like it were deemed morally questionable while Dicken's Oliver Twist (1837), although writing about the same criminal underworld, has been categorized (and valorized) much differently. Here Rosenthal focusses on the issue of suspense, suggesting that not only the underlying narrative structure but also the...