Abstract
In 1983, the historian R.F. Foster stated that in the realm of nineteenth-century scholarship, study of the working class was ‘historigraphically exhausted’ but the aristocracy was ‘not yet academically respectable’; the middle classes would therefore be the next major locus for critical examination. Foster’s prediction was accurate. Now, forty years later, academic work on the aristocracy is limited, while research on the middle and working classes remains very active. This is especially true in the field of Victorian literature, where the scholastic reticence to discuss an entire social class is, frankly, remarkable. The aristocracy in the nineteenth century was ‘consistently less than 1 per cent of Britain’s population’, and yet literature from the time disproportionately abounds with aristocratic characters. Noteworthy though this critical silence may be, perhaps it is understandable—society is increasingly fatigued by the rich and powerful, of their prominence in much of recorded history (which they often wrote or patronised themselves), of the same stories being retold while other narratives and voices and traditions get ploughed over. To study representations of the aristocracy, one runs the risk of being seen as its ardent supporter or a dull thinker treading the same well-worn paths of scholarship that the upper classes themselves often carved out.
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Notes
- 1.
R.F. Foster, ‘Tory Democracy and Political Elitism’ in Parliament and Community, ed. by Art Cosgrove and J.I. McGuire (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1983), pp. 147–175 (151).
- 2.
Jennifer Newby, Women’s Lives: Researching Women’s Social History 1800–1939 (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2011), p. 109.
- 3.
Antony Taylor, Lords of Misrule: Hostility to Aristocracy in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Britain (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 3.
- 4.
There was, as Taylor’s work illustrates, a very slight upsurge in academic work on the aristocracy in the 1990s and early 200s, although this was largely accomplished by Taylor himself and a few other historians, most notably: David Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain (London: Yale University Press, 1999); Lawrence James, Aristocrats (2009) (London: Abacus, 2010); Stella Tillyard, Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa, and Sarah Lennox, 1740–1832 (London: Vintage, 1995); and, far earlier in the twentieth century, Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (1939), trans. by Edmund Jephcott (1978), ed. by Eric Dunning, John Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994, repr. 2000), and The Court Society (1969), trans. Edmund Jephcott (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1983; repr. 2006). Their expansion of the field, while crucial and ground-breaking, is largely restricted to an historical approach.
- 5.
‘aristocracy, n.’, OED Online (Oxford University Press, June 2015) http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/10753?redirectedFrom=aristocracy#eid [accessed 7 July 2015].
- 6.
Dominic Lieven, The Aristocracy in Europe, 1815–1914 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. xiii.
- 7.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), trans. by Richard Nice (1984) (London: Routledge, 1984, repr. 1999), p. 2.
- 8.
For comprehensive examinations of this concept, see Marie Mulvey-Roberts, ‘Introduction’ in Cheveley, or The Man of Honour by Rosina Bulwer Lytton (1839), ed. by Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Silver Fork Novels, 1826–1841, 6 vols, series ed. by Harried Devine Jump (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), V, pp. ix–xxvii (xxiv); Gwen Hyman, Making A Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2009); David Castronovo, The English Gentleman: Images and Ideals in Literature and Society (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1987); and Robin Gilmour’s The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981).
- 9.
Lady Theresa Lewis, Dacre: A Novel, ed. by The Countess of Morley, 3 vols (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman, 1834), I, p. 150, emphasis mine.
- 10.
D.A. Smith, ‘Lewis, Lady (Maria) Theresa (1803–1865)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), Online edn., October 2006 http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16595 [accessed 13 January 2015].
- 11.
Antonia Gallenga, ‘The Aristocrat of Italy’, The Foreign Quarterly Review, 28:56 (January 1842), 362–397 (p. 362, emphasis mine).
- 12.
Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in medieval political Theology (1957) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), pp. 221–23; p. 87; p. 338.
- 13.
Elias, The Court Society, p. 71; p. 116.
- 14.
James Frazer, The Golden Bough, 1922 edition (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 202.
- 15.
Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, England and the English, 5th ed. (Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1836) p. 237.
- 16.
Christine Marks, ‘Reading the DSM-5 Through Literature: The Value of Subjective Knowing’, New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies, ed. Stephanie M. Hilger (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 165–79 (p. 166).
- 17.
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1963), trans. A. M. Sheridan (1973) (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003), p. 89.
- 18.
Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, repr. 2006), p. 178.
- 19.
David Hillman and Ulrika Maude, ‘Introduction’, The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, eds. David Hillman and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 1–9 (p. 5).
- 20.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972, repr. 2008), p. 1.
- 21.
Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown, (1986) (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), p. 9; p. 12.
- 22.
Stephanie M. Hilger, ‘Introduction: Bridging the Divide Between Literature and Medicine’, New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies, ed. Stephanie M. Hilger (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 1–12 (p. 2).
- 23.
Marks, ‘Reading the DSM-5’, p. 165.
- 24.
Jan G. van den Tweel and Clive R. Taylor, ‘A brief history of pathology’, Virchows Archiv: European Journal of Pathology 457 (2010), pp. 3–10 (p. 3).
- 25.
‘Pathology, n.’ OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2023, www.oed.com/view/Entry/138805. [Accessed 16 March 2023].
- 26.
Taylor, Lords, p. 7.
- 27.
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, ‘Popular Fiction Studies: The Advantages of a New Field’, Studies in Popular Culture, 33:1 (Fall 2010), pp. 21–35 (p. 22).
- 28.
Victor E. Neuburg, Popular Literature: A History and Guide from the Beginning of Printing to the Year 1897 (London: The Woburn Press, 1977), p. 12.
- 29.
Emma Liggins and Daniel Duffy, ‘Introduction’, Feminist Readings of Victorian Popular Texts: Divergent Femininities, eds. Emma Liggins and Daniel Duffy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. xiii–xxiv (p. xiii).
- 30.
Richard Faber, Proper Stations: Class in Victorian Fiction (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), pp. 12–13.
- 31.
Len Platt, Aristocracies of Fiction: The Idea of Aristocracy in Late-Nineteenth-Century and Early-Twentieth-Century Literary Culture (Wesport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2001), p. 26.
- 32.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (1953) 3rd ed. (1967) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, repr. 1986).
- 33.
Sianne Ngai, ‘On Cruel Optimism’, Social Text Online (15 Jan 2013): https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/on-cruel-optimism/ [accessed 2 Apr 2023].
- 34.
Maurizio Meloni, Political Biology: Science and Social Values in Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 37–38.
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Liggins, Emma, and Daniel Duffy, ‘Introduction’, Feminist Readings of Victorian Popular Texts: Divergent Femininities, eds. Emma Liggins and Daniel Duffy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. xiii–xxiv.
Marks, Christine, ‘Reading the DSM-5 Through Literature: The Value of Subjective Knowing’, New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies, ed. Stephanie M. Hilger (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 165–79.
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Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (1953) 3rd ed. (1967) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, repr. 1986).
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Boucher, A. (2023). Introduction. In: Science, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41141-0_1
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