Studies of Victorian governance have been profoundly influenced by Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault's groundbreaking genealogy of modern power. Yet, according to Lauren Goodlad, Foucault's analysis is better suited to the history of the Continent than to nineteenth-century Britain, with its decentralized, voluntarist institutional culture and passionate disdain for state interference. Focusing on a wide range of Victorian writing -- from literary figures such as Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Harriet Martineau, J. S. Mill, Anthony Trollope, and H. G. Wells to prominent social reformers such as Edwin Chadwick, Thomas Chalmers, Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, and Beatrice Webb -- Goodlad shows that Foucault's later essays on liberalism and ''governmentality'' provide better critical tools for understanding the nineteenth-century British state.Victorian Literature and the Victorian State delves deeply into contemporary debates over poor law; sanitary, education, and civil service reform; and the century-long attempt to substitute organized charity for state services. Goodlad's readings elucidate the distinctive quandary of Victorian Britain and, indeed, any modern society conceived in liberal terms: the elusive quest for a ''pastoral'' agency that is rational, all-embracing, and effective but also anti-bureaucratic, personalized, and liberatory. With impressive grounding in literary criticism, social history, and political theory, Goodlad offers a timely post-Foucauldian account of Victorian governance that speaks to the resurgent neoliberalism of our own day.
Preface1. Beyond the Panopticon: The Critical Challenge of a Liberal Society2. Making the Working Man Like Me: Charity, the Novel, and the New Poor Law3. Is There a Pastor in the House? Sanitary Reform and Governing Agency in Dickens's Midcentury Fiction4. An Officer and a Gentleman: Civil Service Reform and the Early Career of Anthony Trollope5. A Riddle without an Answer: Character and Education in Our Mutual Friend6. Dueling Pastors, Dueling WorldviewsEpilogue: Social SecurityNotesWorks CitedIndex
""This study offers frequently persuasive readings of literary texts in relation to Victorian attempts to reform poor relief, the civil service, sanitation, and education... It does an effective job of balancing literature and history so that detailed discussions of phenomena from those different realms cast light on each other.""
