Material Ambitions: Self-Help and Victorian Literature by Rebecca Richardson (review)

Anthony Trollope is still inspiring writers today with his notoriously regimented work schedule. Allowing himself no mercy, every day he woke at 5:30 a.m. and cranked out 250 words every fifteen minutes, tabulating his output in carefully kept workbooks. In Rebecca Richardson’s Material Ambitions: Self-Help and Victorian Literature, we find that although Trollope’s work habits may be the best known, many Victorian writers kept similarly disciplined schedules. Harriet Martineau boiled her coffee at 7 or 7:30 a.m., worked from 8 a.m. until 2 p.m., and then had visitors, which seems reasonable until we are told she was going to bed at 1 a.m., averaging only five or five and a half hours of sleep. Dinah Craik wrote every morning, forgoing social occasions in the evening so she could be fresh for writing the next day. It was these seemingly replicable qualities of industry, perseverance, and self-denial that Samuel Smiles praised in Self-Help (1859), leading to a global industry with an estimated worth in excess of ten billion dollars today, suggesting that self-improvement is within an individual’s control with straightforward habits.

In Material Ambitions, Richardson uncovers the darker side of self-help, showing how this emphasis on individual goals rose in tandem with systemic ableism, colonialism, and environmental harm. An able body and mind were necessary to keep up with punishing work schedules—schedules that could and did make authors ill—and an individual’s success was often predicated on harm to both Indigenous peoples and the environment. Writers including Smiles and George Lillie Craik (not coincidentally, Dinah Craik’s uncle-in-law) tried to reframe ambition, long seen as criminal, as the noble quality of self-help, which would lift up not only the individual but the entire nation. The self-help narrative subsequently influenced the Victorian novel: Richardson argues that ambition reimagined as the noble quality of self-help often drives the plot. Ambition had a bad reputation as a personal trait in the early nineteenth century. For example, in Charles Dickens’s works, it is often villains like Uriah Heep, Josiah Bounderby, and Bradley Headstone who are the most ambitious. The energy of these ambitious villains, however, drives the plot forward as they push the less ambitious, and thus more genteel, heroes into action. Beginning with an introduction orienting the reader to the ways that Victorian fiction participates in cultural discourses about ambition through these examples from Dickens, followed by a chapter doing the same with Smiles, Richardson’s methodology brings self-help literature, biographies, memoirs, nonfiction, and fiction together.

Chapters 2 and 3 highlight the role that disability plays in narratives of self-help and ambition in readings of Martineau’s Autobiography (1877) and Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34), and Dinah Craik’s bestseller John Halifax, Gentleman (1856). Martineau’s and Craik’s depictions of disabled, ill, and neurodiverse characters undermine ideals of independence and competition, theorizing an alternative to the capitalist economic system through interdependence and collaboration. In Craik’s novel, the rags-to-riches tale of the eponymous protagonist is narrated through the point of view of his disabled friend. Richardson finds in this pair a submerged competition that speaks to the potential harms of ambition: Phineas registers ambition’s discontents even as his nostalgic narration of John’s nearly perfect life smooths them over. One of Martineau’s tales in Political Economy, Weal and Woe in Garveloch, imagines individuals, including one who is neurodiverse, competing for food on a famine-struck island. The tale can be read as an apology for capitalism even while it illustrates characters’ interdependence on each other and the environment.

Chapters 4 and 5 expand on how ambition and self-help shape the plots of novels by William Makepeace Thackeray and Trollope, as the authors stage zero-sum games in which characters compete for a limited number of titles, inheritances, professional opportunities, and suitors. Thackeray’s...