Dickens Quarterly

Gregory Vargo's book is an incisive and timely contribution to extant scholarship on the nineteenth-century radical canon. While critics such as Louis James and Martha Vicinus have tended to isolate radical writing from mainstream middle-class fiction, Vargo focuses on the "mutual engagement" and "generative exchange" (2) that animated and shaped these apparently disparate literary worlds. The underexplored relationship between early-and mid-Victorian social problem novels by the likes of Dickens and Gaskell and working-class fiction and journalism is a richly rewarding subject, and Vargo analyzes an impressive range of texts [End Page 182] to reveal middle-class novelists' indebtedness to radical print culture, and vice versa. Along the way, he addresses a variety of interesting topics, from the debates surrounding working-class education to Chartist critiques of Britain's colonial expansion project.

Chapter one explores how Harriet Martineau's didactic novella Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated drew on governmental propaganda, particularly the report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry (1832–34), to endorse key aspects of the New Poor Law while simultaneously engaging, albeit critically, with the theories of pioneering radical journalist William Cobbett. Vargo is attuned to the ideological contradictions in Martineau's writing, which, he argues, speak "as much to the dynamic interplay between the worlds of middle-class reform and working-class radicalism as to their separation" (41). This "interplay" is scrutinized further in chapter four, which discusses how Elizabeth Gaskell's engagement with Chartism enriches our understanding of the contradictory politics of Mary Barton. Vargo's reading of the novel is nuanced and convincing, acknowledging Gaskell's rejection of "mass politics" (139) while highlighting how Chartist theories about education fuelled her enthusiasm for "individual and collective improvement" (135).

Chapters two, three, and five make visible the cultural contributions of little-known radical writers who adapted the conventions of two formative Victorian genres: melodrama and the Bildungsroman. In chapter two, Vargo shows how anti-New Poor Law journalism married traits typically associated with stage melodrama, such as emotional intensity and moral dualism, with a critique of the operations of the market. Although he draws on Elaine Hadley's definition of melodrama as a "mode" and "structure of feeling," Vargo demonstrates that, in radical journals, this mode co-existed alongside "a self-consciously learned and objective posture" (74) that parodied the abstracting tendencies of utilitarian discourse. Chapter three dissects the work of Chartist writer Thomas Cooper and his skeptical approach to the Bildungsroman's seductive narrative of psychological development and self-making. Using Cooper's two-volume collection of short stories, Wise Saws and Modern Instances (1845), as a case study, Vargo convincingly argues that these tales were inventive both in terms of their fragmented structure and in their endorsement of communities as a positive alternative to autonomy. Depicting his protagonists as "social atoms at the mercy of unseen political and economic forces" (113), rather than self-governing individuals, allowed Cooper to place a spotlight on entrenched and systemic social oppression.

Chapter five, which examines villainy in stage melodrama and Ernest Jones's fiction, is particularly persuasive. Many of Vargo's readers may be unacquainted with Jones's work, but as a poet, literary reviewer, essayist, author of crime and adventure stories, romantic fables, five novellas, and a fictionalised account of the Chartist movement, he was remarkably [End Page 183] prolific. Vargo effectively conveys the diversity, uniqueness, and ideological sophistication of Jones's output: his series of five novellas, Woman's Wrongs, exposed the flawed nature of domestic ideology and female subjugation across the class divide, but his fiction was also innovative in generic terms. Although he drew on the aesthetic strategies and ethical concerns of melodrama, he revised its formulas, proving that the genre could, and did, anatomize the failings of social institutions in subtle and surprising ways. Vargo...