The challenge of democracy : Victorian visions of political disinterestedness

Abstract

This thesis reconstructs Victorian conceptions of political disinterest (capacity to act for common good), focusing on use of the novel to explore, critique and revise existing models of disinterest.

Scholars have evaluated Victorian debates on democratic parliamentary reform in terms of competing solutions to working-class immiseration. Focusing on the 1820-1867 period, from the early utilitarians’ advocacy for democracy to the second Reform Act, this thesis reconstructs the debates in terms of competing conceptions of political disinterest. James Mill and Jeremy Bentham saw ordinary people capable of social interest out of rational self-interest, challenging the leading notion of disinterest based on (aristocratic) landownership. Subsequent debates charted models and mechanisms of disinterest other than utilitarian rationality, involving issues of imagination, divine inspiration, emotion and spiritual reason. This thesis presents a broader, deeper understanding of Victorian forms of disinterest, beyond a general model of cognitive reason attributed to the Victorians.

Reenvisaging democracy debates lays the foundation for reassessing industrial novels concerned with parliamentary reform. The industrial subgenre of Victorian novels, usually depicting workers’ misery and class conflict, is largely viewed as sympathetic yet conservative responses to working-class problems, even substituting middle-class sympathy for workers’ demand for democracy. Scholars who tried to “redeem” these novels took two main directions: tracing their flaws to a larger cultural discourse, or noting their “democratic imagination” in envisaging interclass egalitarian communication. In contrast, this thesis explores the novels’ formal innovations and their more direct promotion of democracy: seeking a stronger moral support for democracy, novelists developed new, hybrid forms of Bildungsroman in articulating a more feasible disinterest than the rejected utilitarian version. They developed what I call “didactic realism” in situating individuals within an increasingly complex social network of inseparable interests, thus using the realist novel to cultivate disinterested citizenship. This thesis argues that in portraying a realization of common interests, industrial novels do not evade class politics, but envision a more viable, reliable basis to transcend class politics; they focus on individual emotions not to displace politics, but to explore the possibility of universal embodiment of disinterested politics. This focus renders them an invaluable genre in political debates on disinterest more compelling than abstract theory.

This thesis starts by reconstructing early utilitarians’ version of rational self-interest that sees democracy promoting social happiness through capitalism (Ch.1). Robert Owen used his socialism to foster people’s rational self-interest, thus recasting the socioeconomic framework of utilitarian ethics (Ch.2). Benjamin Disraeli (Ch.3), Charles Kingsley and Elizabeth Gaskell (Ch.4) used the novel to rework traditional moral systems (landed disinterest and Christian brotherhood) and envision new figures of political disinterest. A group of liberal thinkers envisioned the masses’ disinterest on a secular basis (Chs.5-6). Mill saw in political participation a means to develop workers’ rational self-interest as guided by the educated middle class. Alternatively, Arnold and Eliot saw disinterest to be cultivated by intellectual learning and the realist-didactic novel respectively, observing that contemporary party politics encouraged selfish, narrow, class-based thinking. The conclusion recapitulates the Victorian debate on disinterest, noting its continuing relevance today.