Was Capitalism Good for Victorian Literature? (2004)

The following books are under consideration in this review: Literature, Money and the Market from Trollope to Amis,by Paul Delany; pp. iii + 243. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, £44.00, $49.95. The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era,by David Finkelstein; pp. viii + 198. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2002, $55.00. Oscar Wilde's Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century, by Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small; pp. x + 314. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, £55.00, $85.00. George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880-1910: Culture and Profit, by Kate Jackson; pp. xi + 293. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2001, £47.50, $84.95. Macmillan: A Publishing Tradition, edited by Elizabeth James; pp. xxvii + 273. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, £50.00, $69.95. A few years ago, in a Rod Serling-esque mood, I ventured a prediction: in the not-distant future, when Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan have gone the way of the New Criticism, "the truly hot literary theorist of the day [will be] Paul Samuelson" (Rose 132). Today I can report that it is coming to pass, and sooner than I expected. We are now witnessing the emergence of something quite unprecedented—a capitalist criticism. Take a moment to let that sink in. Marxist criticism we know, but capitalist criticism? Is such a thing possible? And who on earth is doing it? Conservatives perpetually complain that literature professors are all lefties, to which the obvious riposte is: Yes, but how could they be otherwise without violating the most established traditions of their [End Page 489] profession? Consider all the critics and schools of criticism that have cycled through the history of literary studies—New Historicists, Deconstructionists, Postcolonialists, Feminists, Marxists of assorted stripes, the New York Intellectuals, the New Criticism, the Southern Agrarians, the Great Books Program, the Genteel Tradition, Irving Howe, Edmund Wilson, H. L. Mencken, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, G. K. Chesterton, Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, the Lake Poets, Hugh Blair. What is their sole common denominator? They were all—in diverse ways, to differing degrees, and from various points on the ideological compass—critics of capitalism. Some of them (Carlyle, Eliot, the Southern Agrarians) criticized capitalism from the right, and conservative anticapitalism as a tradition still has some life in Europe, especially France. But in America, since the death of Russell Kirk, all conservatives have been passionately pro-business. That, it would seem, disqualifies them from literary criticism. If literature is a criticism of life, and we live under capitalism, literary studies must be adversarial, true? At any rate it has been adversarial from its very origins. The first university-level courses in English literature were taught by none other than Adam Smith, which on reflection is not surprising. Smith did not believe that human beings were motivated solely by self-interest. He recognized that all societies require moral standards, and as he witnessed the industrialization of Scotland, he was all too aware that capitalism, without some checks, could subvert those standards. The result might be the kind of kleptocracy that now governs many underdeveloped countries, and keeps them underdeveloped. But Smith insisted, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), that individuals also had a natural capacity for altruism that could be cultivated by education. And in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1762-63) he demonstrated that ethical lessons could be taught through what would now be called a Great Books course. Such was the basis of his lectures on English literature at the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh—lectures that (remember) he delivered as a Professor of Moral Philosophy. His students, the sons of Scotland's rising mercantile men, had to learn to temper acquisitiveness with the values of sympathy, charity, and taste. Capitalism and English studies, then, are fraternal twins, born simultaneously, intimately related...