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

Jesse Rosenthal's Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel is a book about literary form, the trajectory of narrative, the experience of reading, and critical practice. Its central premise is that the ethical preoccupations of the Victorian novel are not a result of the moralizing tendencies that have led to its repudiation by modernist novelists and critics. Rather, the Victorian novel's "moral ideas" are "part of the narrative structure" (4) and therefore a formal property. To make his argument, Rosenthal recovers a tradition of moral intuitionism that has been lost in debates over utilitarianism to show how the former, intuitionism, "is the name that Victorians gave to the experience of anticipated, developing, formal satisfaction" (5). Rosenthal goes further to argue intuitionism not only shapes the Victorian novel, but it is also an implicit characteristic of twentieth-century narrative theory and criticism.

The opening chapter provides moral intuitionism with an intellectual history, traces its legacy in contemporary criticism, and reads Gaskell's Mary Barton and Dickens' Hard Times as novels that illustrate how "narrative method becomes the means by which the novel represents internal intuition" and by extension "make the reader feel the internal, and sensible, existence of morality" (30). Three subsequent chapters focus on suspense in the Newgate novel, humor in David Copperfield, and Bildung as specific "means" that allows form to determine a work's ethical force. One of the arguments in these three chapters is that the experience of reading Victorian novels obviates the gap or disconnect between the singular individual and the social world. In other words, the use of humor in Dickens provides a "sense of implicit community" (80) just as the Bildungsroman enables a "communal bases for one's intuition" (126). The fifth chapter turns to Eliot's Daniel Deronda as a novel that seemingly refuses a satisfactory ending and thus exacerbates the potential fractures between the individual and his or her community. However, Rosenthal situates Daniel Deronda alongside Eliot's interest in gambling, statistics, and probability to suggest that the "logic of large numbers" (188) allows readers to see how the novel's failed marriage and apparent irresolution can resolve itself in the indeterminate future.

Taken separately, Rosenthal's readings of individual novels and genres are perspicacious and satisfying. For example, the contrast of Oliver Twist and William Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard in the chapter on the Newgate novel helps Rosenthal demonstrate how, despite the criminal setting, the focus on the titular hero's ethical development in Oliver Twist enables the novel to stand apart from others in the genre that also depict criminality and vice. As a consequence, Rosenthal contends that Dickens gives us the prototype for the Victorian novel whose successful blending of moral content and narrative form has made it canonical while so many other Newgate novels like Jack Sheppard have disappeared. Similarly, the genealogy of humor in the chapter on David Copperfield persuasively shows us how Dickens produced "a form of communal connection" (90).

As a whole, however, the limited scope of novels discussed and the breadth of Good Form's argumentative reach raise many questions. As the two chapters mentioned above suggest, Good Form may as well be a book about Dickens, or at least specific Victorian novels and genres. But Rosenthal's desire to extend his argument about the influence of moral intuition as the driving force behind a reader's expectation of narrative development beyond the scope of the Victorian period seems awkward without attending to novels from other periods and traditions. Rosenthal accounts for his focus on the Victorian novel in an "Afterword" that addresses "the question…of presentism and historicism: how do we connect our own experiences to these objects and experiences which are centuries old?" (191). The answer is to reflect on the nature of Victorian studies itself and why its members continually gravitate toward particular texts. In other words, why do we still read Oliver Twist and not Jack Shephard...