Narrative

I. Reading the Philanthropic Romance

In an 1888 article titled “Two Philanthropic Novelists,” Edith Sichel identifies Walter Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) as a specimen of a new genre of fiction: “We have had the Historical Romance, the Mystic Romance, the Social Romance, the Psychological Romance; it has remained for the present day to give us the Philanthropic Romance … [Though Dickens and Gaskell] described the poorer classes with master-pens, Dickens had little or no purpose of their mental improvement. ‘Oliver Twist’ was certainly not written to induce reform among thieves, [and Gaskell proposed] purely local and temporary answers to purely local and temporary questions” (506). These new “philanthropic romances,” she argues, are written with a wider aim. Besant advocates for “a [form of] modern asceticism [which] differs from medieval asceticism, in so far as it takes for its end the redemption of humanity instead of personal salvation” (506). Sichel suggests that Besant shows the ways in which interiority disconnects people from one another, even those living in a city: [End Page 372] “We may be monks and nuns in the midst of a crowd, and none the less narrow than those of old, because our cells live within us, instead of our living within them” (517).

The novel’s preoccupation with representing the “personal salvation” of exemplary individuals has been noted by many scholars, including Fredric Jameson, György Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Wolfgang Iser, all of whom have argued that the novel’s form reflects a movement away from the epic’s narration of the collective history of a people by telling the story of the “destiny of a particular individual” (Jameson 30). For Benjamin, “the birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual” (364) and for this reason—unlike oral storytelling, which was a communal experience—reading novels isolates people from one another. Yet Sichel suggests that the philanthropic romance is a novel about a community’s development rather than an individual’s.

As Ian Hunter has noted, according to early Christian reading practices, “reading was the means by which the monk would be required and motivated to turn inward, deciphering and transforming himself by discriminating the inner meaning of the holy books” (1110–11). On this view, reading difficult texts leads to salvation because it induces internal reflection by which individuals construct a rich and private subjectivity. Hunter, Bruce Robbins, John Guillory, Simon During, and others have argued that twentieth-century practices of literary criticism secularized this model of early Christian reading; the elite few trained to read difficult texts in PhD programs “saved” themselves from the perils of modern democratic capitalism by constructing an exemplary internal subjectivity. Both literary criticism and the novel imagined “salvation” lay in cultivating the reader’s introspection, as Wolfgang Iser has observed: “The book is meant to … lead the believer to recognize himself. … It is in fact the ultimate uncertainty of salvation that leads to closer and closer inspection of the self, for it is only through his own transformation that the believer can detect the signs he is looking for” (The Implied Reader 7).

In early novels like The Pilgrim’s Progress, Iser argues, “the narrative technique alternates between omniscient narration and dialogue” (The Implied Reader 9), and the increase in dialogue becomes a sign of the protagonist’s salvation, achieved through the cultivation of an internalized subjectivity. In later novels, interior monologues and free indirect discourse replace the dialogues of Pilgrim’s Progress as a sign of the protagonist’s development. Narrative salvation (or development) is represented primarily through the growth of interiority. Previous criticism on the bildungsroman has defined bildung as the “auto-production of the self” (Redfield 79) realized through the cultivation of an introspective subjectivity.¹ However, between the 1880s and the 1920s popular authors such as Walter Besant, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and H. G. Wells represented bildung not as the achievement of “inner culture”—or the individual’s realization of an ideal self through the cultivation of private subjectivity—but as a collective process that contributes to the development of humanity through the act of imagining an ideal, democratic nation.

Besant...