By Lauren M. E. Goodlad
Stories of Victorian governance were profoundly prompted by means of self-discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault's groundbreaking family tree of contemporary energy. but, in keeping with Lauren Goodlad, Foucault's research is healthier fitted to the background of the Continent than to nineteenth-century Britain, with its decentralized, voluntarist institutional tradition and passionate disdain for nation interference. concentrating on a variety of Victorian writing—from literary figures similar to Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Harriet Martineau, J. S. Mill, Anthony Trollope, and H. G. Wells to well-liked social reformers akin to Edwin Chadwick, Thomas Chalmers, Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, and Beatrice Webb—Goodlad indicates that Foucault's later essays on liberalism and "governmentality" supply higher severe instruments for knowing the nineteenth-century British nation. Victorian Literature and the Victorian nation delves into modern debates over sanitary, schooling, and civil carrier reform, the negative legislation, and the century-long try to replacement equipped charity for kingdom companies. Goodlad's readings elucidate the particular crisis of Victorian Britain and, certainly, any smooth society conceived in liberal phrases: the elusive quest for a "pastoral" enterprise that's rational, all-embracing, and potent but additionally anti-bureaucratic, customized, and liberatory. during this research, impressively grounded in literary feedback, social background, and political concept, Goodlad bargains a well timed post-Foucauldian account of Victorian governance that speaks to the resurgent neoliberalism of our personal day. (2004)
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Additional info for Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society
Sample text
From the moment one is to manipulate a society, one cannot consider it completely penetrable by police. —michel foucault, “space, knowledge, and power” No less than Michel Foucault, John Stuart Mill devoted his life’s work to the problem of individuality in modern societies. Although he was raised by James Mill to be Bentham’s scion, Mill’s careful reading of romantic thinkers such as Tocqueville, Coleridge, and Wilhelm von Humboldt persuaded him that human individuality—the diversification and strengthening of character—was the highest social good.
To be sure, Edwin Chadwick, the Benthamite disciple who became zealous secretary to the Poor Law Commission, had a more far-reaching vision in mind. Ever the ambitious technocrat, Chadwick saw the reform of the Old Poor Law as a prelude to centralized education and policing. But, in aiming to implement 34 Victorian Literature and the Victorian State pastoral measures by centralized legislative means, Chadwick ran counter to the sentiments of most of his contemporaries, including the elite Whigs on whose favor he was professionally dependent (see Finer 147–53; Donajgrodzki, “Social Police”).
This is not the Foucauldian paradox of the individual’s dependence on external and normalizing forms of authority (a point to which I will return), but the uniquely British par- Beyond the Panopticon 21 adox of the middle- and upper-class Victorians who demanded effective governance only to be confounded by their own ingrained liberal predilections. Dickens was representative in his desire for a catachrestic pastoral authority: one that would be rational but unbureaucratic, omnipresent but personal, authoritative but liberatory, efficient but English.