Christopher Lane

Bulwer's misanthropes and the limits of Victorian sympathy

Twenty-one-years old, intent on writing a History of the British Public, Edward Lytton Bulwer feared in 1824 that the destruction of social values, including sympathy, would spawn widespread misery. Time and experience only intensified this concern. Having come to doubt that the age of [...] reconstruct[ion] would redress cultural misery and reform, Bulwer later revised his precocious argument.l In April 1863, for example, Bulwer, now aged sixty, published a scathing critique of The Modern Misanthrope in Blackwoods, in which he claimed that Victorian intellectuals donned their masked misan-

Matthew Arnold: The Critical Legacy (review)

VICTORIAN STUDIES cratic politician raised questions about his bases of support. By 1855, a reputation for impulsiveness, restlessness (“Johnny,” Melbourne had once told Palmerston, “can be quiet about nothing” [77]), and overweening desire for the first place had made it nearly impossible for Russell to form a government, but, Parry argues, he could still destroy one at will. He could still, more than anyone, lay down what Liberalism meant: his “rectitude,” in Angus Hawkins’s words, “exposed the soft underbelly of Palmerstonian rhetoric” (Parliament, Party and the Art of Politics in Britain 1855–1859 [1987] 34). Donald Southgate and John Vincent have both posed the question of why Russell did not stymie Palmerston and anticipate Gladstone by striking up a more intimate relationship with the forces of popular liberalism outside Westminster, which he was in so many ways equipped to rally and, at the same time, in true whig fashion, to curb. His failing to reach out to the popular support that was arguably within his grasp is characterised by Vincent as “one of the great refusals of English party history” (The Formation of the Liberal Party, 1857–1868 [1966] 146). These large themes seldom break through the surface of Scherer’s blow-by-blow narrative. Gladstone placed Russell alongside Robert Peel and Benjamin Disraeli among politicians foremost for political courage. The potential of that courage, and the limitations which Russell’s background, temperament, and opportunities placed upon its exercise, still await comprehensive exploration. Paul Smith University of Southampton