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

“There is no such thing,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all” (“Preface,” The Picture of Dorian Gray). Wilde’s bold-faced challenge at the outset of his novel—I dare you to read this without moralizing—instantiates a principle dominant in the late-nineteenth-century aesthetic movement, and bequeathed by that movement to the New Critics and others early in the twentieth century. The principle that aesthetics and morality need not—perhaps ought not—have anything to do with one another, got deeply into twentieth-century literary theory and criticism, and still subsists in the minds of many readers: the way a novel, say, unfolds, is an aesthetic fact, not a moral one. Now, if this bracketing of the moral proved helpful in certain kinds of analysis, it also made some important aspects of literature harder to see. As a result, much of the critical theory since the 1960s has in a sense sought to remoralize the text, by explaining its effects in terms of one or another psychological, social, or political aim. If this procedure has come to seem forced at times—phallic readings of Jane Austen, anyone?—the best of New Historicism has tried to keep it honest, by insisting on period-specific social interpretation of texts. It is in this context that we ought to understand and be grateful for the present volume: in Good Form, Jesse Rosenthal is reading Victorian novels in terms of relevant nineteenth-century moral theory, and reflecting on the role moral judgment always plays in the aesthetic structure of those texts. Indeed, Rosenthal’s more provocative claim is that the moral structure of Victorian novels has influenced our experience of fiction ever since.

More precisely, as the first chapter makes clear, he is reading the Victorian novel in terms taken from nineteenth-century accounts of intuition. The chapter begins with the observation, widely corroborated, that nineteenth-century realist novels unfold with a certain “poetic necessity,” the events of their narratives following intelligibly, not by mere chance (10). On Rosenthal’s account, this sense of necessity arises when moral intuitions fostered early on—this man ought to get his comeuppance; that woman deserves to marry the right man—find their fulfillment later in the narrative. A realist author embeds the intuition toward the start, then continually plays upon it throughout the drama, before finally bringing it to a resolution, either pleasing or disappointing. This is a rewording of an old formula from narratology, but Rosenthal enriches it by rooting it in period accounts of moral intuition, from Adam Sedgwick, H.L. Mansel, William Whewell, and others. Their tradition arose in part out of the Scottish common-sense philosophy, and framed itself in opposition to the dominant, “externalist” school of utilitarianism. For the intuitionists, we humans share an internal sense of moral right; for the utilitarians, right and wrong can only be determined by explicit calculation of pleasure and pain. According to Rosenthal, the realist novel participates in this anti-utilitarian, “internalist” school of moral thought, and we would do well to interpret Dickens, Eliot, and the rest, in this light. Rosenthal concludes Chapter One by linking his account to a Kantian framework (about which, more below), and suggesting that the intuitionist narratives of Victorian fiction influenced not only twentieth-century novel-writing, but certain strands of moral philosophy as well.

In Chapters Two through Five, Rosenthal then works out his theory in different contexts. Chapter Two presents two “Newgate Novels,” William Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard and Dickens’ Oliver Twist, the former more popular in its day, the latter more appreciated ever since. The reason Dickens’ novel has received more attention, in Rosenthal’s telling, is its greater appeal to readers’ moral intuitions: Oliver Twist makes us long for a particular moral resolution, and thence arises its suspense, while the more titillating...