Jock Macleod

Advanced Liberalism and the Cultural Value of ‘Life’

Value was a central problematic for the Victorians in general and for Victorian liberals in particular. Whether in its utilitarian, positivist or Idealist tendencies, Victorian liberalism was fundamentally concerned with arguments about the ways in which worth could be ascribed to an object or an action. Arguments for the value of literature (and culture more generally) were a key part of this problematic, revealing perhaps most obviously the intersections between three principal axiological fields: ethics, aesthetics and political economy. Let me say at once, though, that there is no simple playing out of advanced liberalism in the ways members of the Massingham network valued literature. Reviews could articulate valuations based primarily on economic criteria (‘a good shilling’s read’), ethical criteria (a ‘wholesome’ novel) and aesthetic criteria (a ‘beautifully crafted’ rendering). These discourses were taken up and used by advanced liberals in their literary reviews and essays in often quite distinct ways, sometimes resonating with residual meanings, sometimes with more emergent meanings. How these variable evaluative stances play out differs not only between publications (throughout the 1890s, for instance, the Daily Chronicle was more advanced in its literary pages than the weekly Speaker), but especially between the early 1890s and the later Edwardian years.

Between Literature and Politics

The discourses that constituted literary culture for late Victorian and Edwardian writers and readers were formed and modified in multiple arenas of public discussion. These included publishing houses, traditional and avant-garde monthly periodicals, the weekly and daily press, literary lunches, literary circles and their concomitant soirees and at-homes, and the vast array of lectures and debates put on in Settlements, ethical societies, and the University Extension Movement. These arenas were largely urban, and, in the case of the metropolis, the participants either knew each other personally or by reputation. Even humble readers of newspapers were notionally drawn into this sense of a continuing, dynamic — and often heated — public conversation.

Contesting the New

In the enormous body of scholarship on modernism that has appeared over the past 30 years, there has been increasing attention on the essentially limiting nature of the term. Scholars concerned primarily with English literary modernism have addressed in their different ways the causes and consequences of valorizing a relatively small albeit fluid number of works that have come to be designated as modernist.1 Driving this scholarship is a desire to relocate the self-attributing newness of the moderns as just one aspect of the broader changes and experiments that characterized literary culture from the 1880s through to the 1920s, particularly those changes and experiments associated with various kinds of women’s writing. English literary modernism might have reached its apogee in the years between 1910 and 1915 when London avant-garde groups were at their most active,2 but to focus primarily on this ‘highly selective field’ as the only bearer of the new, so the argument goes, is to reduce the culture’s multiple and intersecting layers, thereby impoverishing our understanding of it.3

Writing the East End

In The Condition of England (1909), Charles Masterman presents an analysis of the various layers of English society. To the present-day reader, his chapters on ‘the conquerers’, ‘the suburbans’, ‘the multitude’ (the working classes) and ‘the prisoners’ (the extreme poor, the slum dwellers) are, at first glance, redolent of Matthew Arnold’s categories of ‘barbarians’ (the aristocracy), ‘philistines’ (the middle classes) and ‘populace’ (the ‘vast residuum’) in Culture and Anarchy (1869). Masterman, however, offers a much more detailed analysis than Arnold, who is concerned primarily with showing how the different English classes all fail in their different ways to affirm his ideal of ‘culture’, the developing of ‘the best self’ through getting to know ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’.1 In the intervening 40 years, not only had the shape and geography of the English class system changed, but also a body of social analysis had been created in an effort to make sense of that system. This literature was particularly concerned with the working classes, the fragility of the circumstances that separated those in work from those out of work, and the consequent problem of poverty — ‘the social problem’, as I noted in Chapter 2.

The ‘Self-Conscious Evolution of Humanity’

During the final decades of the nineteenth century and into the Edwardian years, the East End and other areas of poverty in London and the provincial industrial cities became the focus of detailed investigation, much of which was statistical, and the problem of poverty came to be seen as the fundamental problem of modern society: ‘the social problem’, as it was called. These were the decades of Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London (1889), George Sims’s How the Poor Live and Horrible London (1889), William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), a host of East End narratives from Walter Besant, Clarence Rook, Arthur Morrison and others, and various social analyses of the poor, such as Charles Masterman’s From the Abyss (1902), Jack London’s People of the Abyss (1903) and Margaret Loane’s From Their Point of View (1908); the era of what we now would call investigative journalism, such as W. T. Stead’s exposure of the selling of children in ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ (1888); and the setting up of Settlements such as Toynbee Hall and the establishment of the People’s Palace.1

Reviewing Value: Literary Journalism and Advanced Liberalism at the Turn of the Century

Taylor and Francis GNCC_A_444913.sgm 10.1080/08905490903445528 Nineteenth-Ce tury Contexts 0890-5495 (pri t)/1477-2663 (online) Original Article 2 09 & Francis 31 4 00December 2009 JockM cleod j.macleod@g ffith.edu.au In The Social Problem (1902), the New Liberal J. A. Hobson offers a critique of orthodox economic theory from the “old” political economy of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and James Mill to the “new” political economy (which came to be called economics) of J. S. Mill, Stanley Jevons and Alfred Marshall. Despite the latter’s claim that “consumption is the keystone of economic thinking,” Hobson argues, “production or accumulation of marketable wealth still remains the backbone of ‘economics,’” This is because: