Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867. (Reviews).

Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867. By Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, Jane Rendall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xiii plus 303 pp. $69.96/cloth $24.95/paper).

Historians looking for a new political interpretation of the passing of Disraeli's 1867 Reform Act will be disappointed with Defining the Victorian Nation. The authors, Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall, spend relatively little time discussing the complicated events of the Act's formation and passing. For that readers are instructed to refer to the classic accounts by F. B. Smith and Maurice Cowling. The aim of this new book is to not to displace these earlier interpretations, but rather to put them in a wider context: to demonstrate how the idea of the nation was understood by various constituencies in the mid-Victorian period, and to explore the various cultural and social contexts--gendered and racialized, as well as class specific--in which ideas of the nation were deployed in the politics of the 1860s. This is a far more ambitious project than a re-narrating of the passing of the 1867 Act, and this book is an excellent introduction to this larger project.

The book is comprised of three chapters each written by one author, prefaced by an introduction written by all three contributors. The introduction sets out the historiography of the 1867 Act itself, and discusses recent developments in British political historiography generally, including an appraisal of the historical sociology of politics pioneered by John Vincent and others, as well as the contribution of Marxist social history. The authors suggest that the recent historiographical attention to high politics needs to be tempered with an understanding of the wider social and cultural context. A discussion of cultural approaches to the study of 19th century politics follows, outlining the recent debates about the importance of political language, along with a precis of recent work on gender and politics, and insightful commentary on recent work on national and racial identities. This 70-page introduction wraps up with a preliminary discussion of the meaning of citizenship in the context of 1860s Britain, by focusing on the liberalism of John Stuart Mill--a figure discussed in each of the substantive chapters. As a whole the introduction draws together several diverse bodies of scholarly activity--from high-political narrative to post-colonial theory--and provides an intelligent explication of each. However, this careful elaboration of context leads to heightened expectations that the substantive chapters will fully incorporate the broad range of perspectives summarized, expectations which are not fully met.

The three chapters, all extensions of previously published articles, tackle differing, though overlapping, constituencies and perspectives. Keith McClelland looks at the group which ultimately benefited most from the actual reform, working-class men, by examining the views of reformers both within and outside of this group. He demonstrates how, after the demise of Chartism, both English middle- and working-class activists framed an argument for the enfranchisement of the "independent" man at work. This gendered construction of the respectable working-class citizen drew on a number of radical traditions, but ultimately McClelland argues, lead to a "masculinisation" of popular politics, wherein working-class citizenship was defined increasingly in terms of those men who could act as free agents within the economy and market.

Jane Rendall's essay explores how middle-class women figured in, and helped shape, the debates about citizenship and enfranchisement, and how they responded to their exclusion from the national franchise in the late 1860s while paradoxically gaining municipal franchise rights by 1870. Middle-class feminists used the same radical and liberal traditions that in the hands of middle- and working-class men had turned the right to citizenship into an exclusively male preserve, but came to strikingly different conclusions. Rendall's account highlights how vigorous both the intellectual and organizational sides of the women's suffrage movement were in the 1860s (while acknowledging the need for more research on this period), and corrects any lingering whiggish perceptions that the development of Victorian feminism followed a simple evolutionary and progressive path.

Lastly, Catherine Hall examines ideas about race as a marker of citizenship, particularly in the context of the white, English reaction to the black Jamaican revolt at Morant Bay and to Irish Fenian activity in the 1860s, demonstrating that these events provided a cultural context to the debates about electoral reform. Hall rightly insists on placing contemporary ideas about citizenship within a framework that is attentive to racial categorization that was often expressed using gendered language, by arguing that "imperial" events of the mid-1860s were crucial to the boundaries of belonging within England. This essay, the most comprehensive of the book, draws many of the book's themes together (although the lack of a substantive conclusion to the book is still a significant absence and weakness). As she herself concludes: "Race, gender, property, labour and purported level of civilisation now determined who was included in and excluded from the political nation, how groups belonged to the social body" (p. 233) .

Each of the essays, individually, is strong, but together this book is somewhat less than the sum of its parts. The problem is that the authors set out such an ambitious program in the introduction that the substantive chapters cannot possibly cover all the angles and issues that are suggested as significant. Hall's essay is the most successful at being both inclusive and methodologically catholic, but it is also the most allusive: her claims are on a meta-narrative level, connecting large cultural concerns with general political rhetoric. McClelland and Rendall's essays are more narrowly focused case-studies on particular groups and their arguments. And despite the stated importance of providing more than just an Anglo-centric view of 1867, and with the exceptions of a few pages in the introduction and Hall's focus on the Irish as an "other" to the English racial imagination, the Scots, Irish and Welsh populations are mentioned only in passing or as statistics in the tables showing the outcome of the various reforms. After finishing the book I was left wanting to know more about these national constituencies (as agents rather than as objects) and the many others not addressed: rural laborers, for example, and working-class women both urban and rural. In short, what is in this book is good, but there needs to be more of it. The authors, no doubt, see this book as the initiation of a broader project within historical sociology: I hope that they, and others, can follow-up and fully flesh it out.