Studies in the Novel

Jesse Rosenthal's Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel provides a meticulously researched and original approach to both Victorian literature and novel theory, all the more impressive given that this is the author's first book. Rosenthal's readings reveal an expansive knowledge of Victorian culture, novel theory, and the history of Western moral philosophy. His examination of particularities of Victorian thought and behavior ranges from theories about the difference between wit and humor, to the generic classification of the "Newgate" novel, to nineteenth-century gambling and statistics. His argument is that for the Victorians the moral dimensions of a novel were linked to its formal properties, and that "the moral principles that attached to the Victorian understanding of the novel form have persisted, and become an implicit part of our ongoing critical practice" (2). Thus, examining Victorian moral thought allows a "greater understanding of the moral undercurrents of our critical and theoretical heritage" (7).

From his first chapter on, Rosenthal seeks to demonstrate how Victorian moral concerns are conflated with "what we have come to see as a satisfying narrative structure" (11). Our feeling of what is "supposed" to happen in a novel's plot development or conclusion is still central to novel reading and novel theory. "Narrative necessity" (4) is an ongoing staple of novel criticism, though we have come to see it as "ethically neutral"—whether in the form of Georg Lukács's "poetic necessity" or Peter Brooks's "narrative desire" (5). Rosenthal traces the roots of this idea back to the "intuitionist" moral philosophy that set itself against utilitarianism in the nineteenth century. Using Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton as an example, he reveals the way that in the Victorian novel the individual's moral sentiments are formed more internally than through social interaction, and how this is reflected in [End Page 292] Gaskell's formal choice to focus on a single individual's feelings (the heroine's) as she makes her social critique.

In his second chapter, Rosenthal uses Oliver Twist and the lesser-known novel Jack Sheppard to demonstrate how the novels that survived in the canon as recognizably Victorian shared formal properties, in particular that of suspense, that stimulate the reader's interest in what could be considered a "moral" way. Such novels create suspense by temporarily withholding information from the reader, but always suggest that the plot is directed by an outside moral law. Rosenthal also observes that literary theorists have dismissed novels that maintain the reader's interest only through representations of vice and crime as bad literature, while novels like Oliver Twist that may depict vice or crime, but are not about them so much as they are about a character's moral progress, survive in the canon.

In his third chapter, Rosenthal argues that humor, like suspense, functioned as both a formal and a moral property in Victorian novels, creating a sense of shared, if tacit, moral agreement in the reader, and thus a moral connectedness or fellow-feeling with other members of society. Of David Copperfield, for example, he notes that the characters' eccentricities and differences are fodder for sympathetic humor but not for judgment or ridicule, so that the narrative builds a sense of community around such characters. "What is most moral in humor, then, is that it is a sort of sympathy that maintains distinctions" (99), he observes. In making these claims, Rosenthal addresses the abundant recent scholarship on sympathy in the Victorian novel, while also seeking to expand our thinking about Victorian ethics beyond that focus. In his fourth chapter, Rosenthal argues that the Bildungsroman structure represents "the communal basis of moral intuition" (132), as characters develop by coming to recognize their role not only as individuals but as part of a social whole. The choices of characters like Great Expectations' Pip, Rosenthal suggests, are underwritten by a narrative necessity rooted in that character's communal context.

The book's last...