Abstract
This chapter theorizes how Matthew Arnold’s mid-to-late writings on culture facilitated the endemicity of thinking of cultural contagion as a threat to social order in biological terms. It argues that Arnold saw cultural forms, like literature, as both a threat and antidote for the diseased state of Victorian England. Reading Arnold within the context of the period’s sociological theories of contagious crowd behaviors and the advent of germ theory reveal how culture became a way to understand and attempt to control the vivification and spread of potentially dangerous ideas and affects: from unrestrained liberty and revolution to infectious and pernicious literature. Ultimately, this understanding leads to a new way to think about the roots of cultural study and its links to biomedical history.
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- 1.
For an extended discussion of this idea vis-à-vis French sociology theories at the fin de siècle, see Mitchell, P. (2014) Contagious metaphor. London: Bloomsbury.
- 2.
For the sake of clarity, I will use the capitalized Culture to refer to Matthew Arnold’s definition and culture for the more generally accepted and commonly used anthropological definition: a particular way of life of period, people, or of humanity as a whole, or the set of values, beliefs, ideas, and rules that allow a group to continue to function. The origin for this definition is most commonly attributed to the Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Cultures (1871), where he defines it as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Tylor, E. (1920) Primitive Cultures. (2 vols). New York: Putnman. Vol 1, p. 1. The focus on “primitive culture” certainly bespeaks not only colonial logic at work in Victorian anthropology but also the investment of “civilizing” in defining the term culture.
- 3.
Contagion seemed to have supplanted by communicable in strict medical lexicon early in the twentieth century to distance transmittable infectious disease from earlier etiological controversies. See also Willis, W.F. (1955) Airborne Contagion and Air Hygiene. Boston: Harvard University Press, p. xxv.
- 4.
Please see the Introduction for a more expansive history on disease theories in the nineteenth century.
- 5.
Although contagionism and miasma theory were widely debated, the stakes involved were more than just scientific but also political. Furthermore, the boundaries between the three disease theories were not always clear-cut. For a detailed history of this debate, see Ackerknecht, E. H. (2009) ‘Anticontagionism between 1821 and 1867: The Fielding H. Garrison Lecture’, International Journal of Epidemiology, 38(1), pp. 7–21. See also Pelling, M. (2001) ‘The meaning of contagion’, in Bashford, A. & Hooker, C. (eds.) Contagion: historical and cultural studies: Vol. 15. London: Routledge, pp. 15–39.
- 6.
Although the scientific community and much of the public accepted germ theory in 1880s, it did not become fully accepted amongst the vast majority of the lay public until the close of the century.
- 7.
The second major Reform Bill in the Victorian period. The 1866 bill sought increase enfranchisement by decreasing the wage requirements set by the 1832 bill. A version was later passed in 1867.
- 8.
I am grateful for Christopher Forth’s translation. See Forth’s extended discussion on moral contagion in late nineteenth-century France. Forth, C. E. (2001) ‘Moral Contagion and the Will’, in Bashford, A. & Hooker, C. (eds.) Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge.
- 9.
Means contends that “The warning cry which Goethe uttered against ‘the Anglo Saxon Contagion’ was at bottom a protest against rising democracy, and in the next generation, Renan, the most accomplished critic in Europe could see in the growing power and influence of the people only the huge, half-human form of Caliban” (p. 327).
- 10.
Philistines is Arnold’s term for the middle class.
- 11.
Dracula is described as a parasite. It is worth noting here the novel was published during the discovery of the malarial parasite’s life cycle.
- 12.
See Arnold’s “introduction” in The Study of Poetry (1880).
- 13.
Pittard contends that “sensation fiction was viewed as a form of contagion that spread from class to class and acting on the body in a way suspiciously close to that of pornography” (p. 39).
- 14.
See also Wagner, T. S. (2010) Antifeminism and the Victorian novel: rereading nineteenth-century women writers. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press; Swenson, K. (2007) Medical women and Victorian fiction. Norman: University of Missouri.
- 15.
Arnold does seek exploring art without intention in insofar as it should be connected to politics and the like; however, what I mean here is that as it is clear from Arnold’s writing, he does have an end in mind for teaching literature.
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Servitje, L. (2016). Contagion and Anarchy: Matthew Arnold and the Disease of Modern Life. In: Nixon, K., Servitje, L. (eds) Endemic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52141-5_2
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