The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (review)

The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics by John Plotz. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 263. $48.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.

The subject of this book, "the crowd" and how we find it represented in six British texts, which are dated between 1800 and 1850, is a fascinating and challenging one. In the western capitalist tradition of individualism in particular, the idea of "crowds," of grouping in any form, triggers uncomfortable reactions which are related to a perceived lack of control over the forceful, amorphous anonymity of the crowd. In his introduction, Plotz points out that new crowds emerge in England between 1800 and 1850, and that his book is "about the effects of these new crowds, riots, and demonstrations on the period's literature" (2). The period's literature is represented in this book by six works which are dealt with in successive chapters: Book Seven of William Wordsworth's The Prelude (1805), Maria Edgeworth's Harrington (1817), Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) and "The English Mailcoach" (1849), Thomas Carlyle's Chartism (1839), and Charlotte Brontë's Shirley (1849). The book's overall argument is summarized as follows:

I argue that the unprecedented and unparalleled range of observations about and reflections upon crowds in aesthetic texts comes about because the enormous changes in the rules of public speech and public behavior between 1800 and 1850 make crowds, variously defined, into a potent rival to the representational claims of literary texts themselves. Sometimes the crowd comes to embody all the chaos that a literary text may revile and yet admire; at other times crowds offer a variety of new structures that help a writer delineate some future order. But every text centrally concerned with crowds proves interested in establishing the role of literature itself within a public discursive space at least partially defined by those very crowds. (2)

Plotz's penchant for superlatives and absolutes in this paragraph ("unprecedented," "unparalleled") is indicative of the exuberant confidence with which he addresses his topic. This confidence works well in the initial delineation of the "inherent unfixity" (7) of definitions of the crowd, but any detailed exploration of the issues is unfortunately undermined by the rash, impatient conclusions which are drawn about the texts.

The most exciting aspect of Plotz's thinking is his departure from Habermas's idea that "the public sphere is essentially defined by rational interaction without contingent pressure or power exerted from without" (9). Instead, Plotz posits that "the public sphere in early nineteenth-century Britain was not a site where rational-critical conversation either took place or failed to take place, but the arena wherein the disputes between various discursive logics were staged: the space, one might say, in which it was decided what would come to count as public conversation at all" (10). The insight that the public sphere is not necessarily characterized by a rational-critical conversation is a useful one, but it needed development beyond the idea that the public sphere is "always the product of a struggle to order meaning, a struggle at once epistemological and ideological" (10). At the end of the rather impressionistic but enthusiastic introduction Plotz argues that "the trick, then, is not to find the particular ideology that trumps all others, but to describe the matrix, the shared public space, within which competition among ideologies can take place" (12).

Unfortunately, Plotz's readings did little to enlighten me about the matrix. Instead I was greatly troubled by a whole range of problems, some of which could be attributed to the editors and publishers of this book. Despite the flexibility and openness displayed in the introduction, I got a strong sense that Plotz had made up his mind that the authors of his six texts all had a serious (and similar) axe to grind with the "crowd." It remains unclear throughout the book what exactly the perceived threat consists of, apart from the...