Marriage and morals among the Victorians: essays by Gertrude Himmelfarb.

Marriage and Morals among the Victorians

THE WORD "Victorian," especially as adjective, calls up to most modern minds something like the following definition from a desk dictionary: "pertaining to English life and sentiment during the reign of Queen Victoria; esp. fastidious, prudish, or narrow in opinion or expression, particularly regarding conduct." It was not ever thus. The OED (compiled, of course, during the Victorian era) confines itself to the purely factual and chronological. The so-called Webster's First of 1909 also carries no pejorative in its definition. But by the time of Webster's Second in 1934 and ever thereafter, Bloomsbury had wreaked its revenge on its fathers; prudish and sexually repressive had become part of the meaning of the word. As Gertrude Himmelfarb quotes from Lord Acton: "Ideas have a radiation and development, an ancestry and posterity of their own, in which men play the part of godfathers and godmothers more than that of legitimate parents." In this case we have Lytton Strachey as godfather and Virginia Woolf as godmother, neither of them any sort of parents in the real world.

But there have always been dissenters from the received modern wisdom about the Victorians, and in the half-century-long struggle in the academy to rehabilitate things Victorian, no one has done greater service than Gertrude Himmelfarb. In previous studies of the Victorians, especially her studies of Acton, Darwin, and Mill, as well as in her penetrating Victorian Minds, Miss Himmelfarb has done much to clear away the Bloomsbury accretions that have, like Lytton Strachey confronting the hypothetical German soldier bent on raping his sister, interposed themselves between Victorians and moderns. The current collection of essays in part continues Miss Himmelfarb's estimable practice of showing the value of things Victorian, but it also ranges farther afield and may, by its misleading title, promise some readers something other than what it delivers.

"Marriage and Morals among the Victorians" is actually the title of the first essay in the volume, a review-essay sparked by Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives, a recent, reductionist study of five Victorian marriages. Telling as Miss Himmelfarb's treatment of this subject is, it does not constitute the main concern of the collection. Elsewhere in this volume "marriage," Victorian or otherwise, figures only occasionally, and "morals" has philosophical more than social or sexual connotations. Four of the 11 essays are not on matters properly Victorian at all, but on such pre-Victorians as Jeremy Bentham (two essays) and William Godwin, and on the twentieth-century British political thinker Michael Oakeshott. The remaining seven treat some distinctly Victorian matters, such as Darwinism, the Webbs, and Victorian religion and science, but they also range from the pre-Victorian Clapham Sect to the post-Victorian Bloomsberries (as they coyly called themselves).

But take away what may well be a publisher's would-be suggestive choice of volume title, subdue all thoughts of salacious revelations about the domestic habits of the Victorians, and you have a collection of extraordinarily intelligent essays, held together not by a single thread of argument but by the sustained moral imagination of an acute student of nineteenth-century life and thought. Indeed, Miss Himmelfarb finds that "moral imagination"--a phrase she came upon first in Lionel Trilling and only later discovered was originally Burke's--is what distinguishes the great Victorians generally. It also denotes, as much as any single concept, what separates us from those earnest Victorians so facilely derided by Bloomsbury.

Whether she is casting her searching gaze upon the rationalist follies of Jeremy Bentham or upon the modest, sensible, lower-case-conservative vision of Michael Oakeshott, Miss Himmelfarb herself exercises a moral imagination that would do credit to the best of the Victorian minds. Thus in the essay "Who Now Reads Macaulay?" she scrutinizes not only the great Whig historian but several of his fellows, like Freeman, Froude, and Stubbs, and finds in their often conflicting views a shared underlying conception of history as fundamentally political history, history of a polity, a far loftier conception than modern notions of history as the essence of innumerable pedestrian lives.

The real delight of this volume, however, is to see Miss Himmelfarb at work demythologizing precisely those figures that the modern world has held to be worthy of some respect, figures like Bentham and Godwin, for example, to say nothing of the Bloomsburyites themselves. Her two essays on Bentham reveal not only the banality of his writing (Bentham must surely have the most deadening prose style of any writer, not excluding compilers of telephone books), but the self-serving and even at times deceitful character of his thought, especially his thought about his own works and achievement. Miss Himmelfarb inspects closely what she calls "Bentham's Utopia," a plan for taking care of pauperism and unemployment that he designed as a companion and indeed constituent part of his "Panopticon," which in turn was his plan for a modern prison. Despite the straight-faced glorification of Bentham by generations of subsequent commentators as a "great humanist," the grandiose scheme for imprisoning one million of the nine million inhabitants of Britain could bring a gleam to the eye of no one but a commissar. Which, we finally understand, is what, beneath the skin, so many of our liberal practitioners would be.

It is both hilarious and sobering to find Bentham so ably dissected, as it is to see Miss Himmelfarb at work on the equally fatuous and personally yet more ludicrous William Godwin or Beatrice Webb. It is also heartening to see her stand up for the moral imagination as it manifested itself in such Victorians as George Eliot and Matthew Arnold, the former with her solemn proclamation of the "peremptory and absolute" nature of Duty, despite her loss of religious belief, and the latter with a mind too fine to be violated by "an idea so gross as Darwinism." Miss Himmelfarb's essays make clear that there was nothing wrong with either the Victorians' morality or their imaginations. It is we moderns who have banished morality from imagination. We are now in danger of losing even imagination itself.