Counter-didactic Victorians [electronic resource] : the problems of education in the novel
Keywords: English.

If there is one thing that scholarship of Victorian aesthetics tends to agree on, it is that Victorians were prudish moralists who evaluated literature based on the ethical lessons it provided. From Richard Altick, through Deidre David to Franco Moretti, critics claim that moral and artistic purposes coincided in the period. My Dissertation, Counter-Didactic Victorians: The Problems of Education in The Novel, challenges this consensus by exposing a deep ambivalence towards didacticism in the period's novel reviews and the novels themselves. Doing so allows us to have not only a more complicated view of the culture's attitudes, but a better understanding of its novels as well. The first chapter of the dissertation, "Were the Victorians quite so Didactic? The Strange Case of Novel Reviews, " establishes the period's ambiguity towards didactic fiction via an overview of some 75 reviews, letters and novelistic commentary alternating between praise and condemnation of educational fiction. In the few cases that criticism has taken stock of this trend in Victorian reception, it has dismissed "the campaign against didacticism" as a minor undercurrent that did not really challenge the predominant call for fiction to espouse moral and political causes. My chapter, by contrast, shows that critics attacked didacticism in nearly every discussion of the role of fiction. Thus, even religious journals followed their appeals to more morality in fiction with disclaimers against religious fiction, and political journals acknowledged the artistic limits of political novels whose politics they endorsed. Far from being a secondary sentiment, then, counter-didacticism was one of the period's most consistent artistic principles. How do we account for this? Surprisingly, the answer lies with the very "frames of mind" scholars most associate with didacticism. Thus, as we would expect, the Evangelical underpinnings of Victorian reviews led critics to demand more moral education from fiction. But a didactic aesthetic more profoundly depends on a belief in the pleasures of morality, and the Evangelical movement's doctrine of original sin made such a belief nearly impossible. Therefore, when the religious critic had to assess the pleasures of moral fiction, they naturally argued that those were compromised by the unpleasantness of morality in a sinful world. Similarly, we might expect the Utilitarian spirit to enlist fiction in the battle for social and educational reform that were crucial to the Victorian Benthamites. But Utilitarianism also meant using economic principles to evaluate even literature, and educational novels violated a basic standard of political economy: "Division of labor is... scarcely less commendable in literature than in manufactures; and [didactic fiction's] attempt to combine many objects, is often productive of failure in all." Throughout the period, reviewers borrowed such economic logic to remind novelists to practice only their artistic "specialty, " primarily story-telling. My second chapter, "Moral Pocket Handkerchiefs, Dissertations on High Heels, and the Fleet Prison: The Counter-Didactic aesthetic of The Pickwick Papers, " utilizes this ambivalence to give a new reading of Dickens' first novel. The novel's humor, I argue, originates in a hostility towards didactic practices. By targeting sermons, essays, and abstraction, the novel's humor reassures its readers that Dickens is not seeking to educate them. Dialectically, this allows the novel itself to do what its humor attacks, as Pickwick stages a series of educational interventions that carry the novel's social criticism most explicitly. Most importantly, this dialectic gives readers a new methodology for analyzing Victorian fiction: when the novelist stops his narrative to clarify its educational meaning, expect a qualifying counter-measure that would suggest the narrator has "strayed from [the] story." In my third chapter, "Never...have a mission! The Problem of Social Criticism in Dickens' Later Fiction" I will use this methodology to explain the development in Dickens' later fiction towards more explicit and pervasive social criticism. In part, the later novels' increasing vitriol towards didactic figures and institutions created more space for social satire, especially as the social satire frequently incorporates an attack on pedagogues into its most pedagogical critiques. But there is more to the story. Alongside a more developed dialectic is a growing distrust towards implicit communication. We see this best in the disappearance of the phrase "profound silence, " which in earlier novels encodes the victory of implicit meaning—moments of social strife are pregnant with silences to signal the text's inherent clarity. In the later novels, silence itself becomes a source of strife modified only by negative adjectives. The postscript to this dissertation, "Victorian Aesthetics in the African-American Novel, " will offer an analysis of Native Son and Invisible Man, whose social critique uses the same artistic devices that Victorian novelists used, and whose aesthetics surprisingly aligns with Victorian aesthetics. Such analysis will suggest my dissertation's broader application for scholarship of socially motivated fiction.