The Victorian World Picture: Perceptions and Introspections in an Age of Change (review)

Is it possible, any longer, to write of a Victorian “age,” or of an “age of improvement,” let alone attempt a “portrait” ? David Newsome anticipates the problems inherent in his synthetic project when he concedes, early on, that “there are as many world pictures as there are people who seek a meaning in the events around them,” and speaks of the “inescapable subjectivity” of the undertaking (5).

Newsome marshals his material into five sections: Looking Inwards, Looking Outwards, Looking Before and After, Looking Beyond, and Looking Ahead. These categories work well for him. Firstly, they allow a structure which embodies his sense of the necessary plurality of perspective at which such a study as this cannot baulk. Secondly, they permit modes of representing the diverse perspectives, or ways of knowing, which he considers were available to the Victorians themselves. From these considerations springs his technique as a narrator. For in painting his “picture” Newsome relies closely on the aid of significant witnesses to the “spirit of the age,” that Romantic legacy from Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Hazlitt which the Victorians very much made their own. He habitually makes and illuminates a proposition, not via generalisation, but through a quite specific piece of observation, of which the speaker becomes, symptomatically, the illustration. Newsome draws widely on novels, political speeches, sermons, and essays. His choice of examples is invariably well-judged. They are also unusually arresting since as he frequently deploys them as clinching evidence of a general point, they perform their own rhetorical work. Sometimes this can allow for a refreshing comic note, as when in discussing the apparent “stamina” of the Victorians in their “absorption of pulpit oratory” (143), he uncovers a 210-minute sermon, delivered from memory at an Independent Meeting House, which appears to have tested the congregation to its limits as some of its members pelted the pulpit with oranges. At other times, he engagingly infers the necessary multiplicity of perspectives on the meaning of a particular, charged event, for example, the conflict of judgement on the Indian Mutiny between John Bright, Thomas Babington Macaulay, and Richard Cobden (108).

Newsome’s approach is to allow significant Victorians to have their voice: the intellectual, theologian, or politician (and of course such figures as Gladstone could be all three) is very much in charge. Of course, in reinstating the centrality of the human subject, Newsome is far removed from poststructuralist concern for discourse, and the notion that power shapes and is shaped through language. There is little of the linguistic turn here, rather a turn back to a method which reaffirms the human subject and optimistically infers that human actions have demonstrable, and, more frequently than not, demonstrably positive effects on the world around them. This is seen in his generous interpretation of British imperial policy. Quite against recent trends, he enters a justification of certain empire-makers such as David Livingstone, Viceroy Elgin, and Arthur Gordon, Governor of Fiji, (but not Governor Eyre) as morally on the side of the angels.

Through a process of accretion, such an approach becomes in itself an act of interpretation, and one which bears real fruit, insofar as Newsome’s approach seems particularly suited to how high-minded Victorians liked to interpret their role to their publics. Here were significant men and women with significant things to say who would be taken seriously, their precepts as quietly potent as those of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72) the narrator of which, in closing, speaks of the “incalculably diffusive” effect of her “being” on “those around her.”

A key Victorian concern, with which antihumanism has struggled to make sense, is the importance of heroism and the widespread cultural valorisation of the hero as object of emulation and celebration. It follows from Newsome’s general stance that he writes with conviction on the topic of the Victorian hero...