Fact Into Fiction: English Literature and the Industrial Scene, 1750-1850. by Ivanka Kovačević;Representations: Essays on Literature and Society. by Steven MarcusReview by: Asa BriggsNineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Jun., 1977), pp. 118-121Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2933462 .

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118 Nineteenth-Century Fiction

in tracing Holmes's origin from real and fictional figures, but such accounts have recently become almost commonplace. When Ousby de- tails yet again the scientific background of the great detective, or the story of Joseph Bell, Doyle's former professor who both was and was not the model for Holmes, most readers will find little that is new. Ousby does make some good points along the way, particularly when he notes the formal relationship between the Holmes "memoirs" and nineteenth-cen-tury autobiography; I wish he had developed this parallel more fully.

One of the broader aims of the Holmes chapter is to trace the evolu- tion-or degeneration-of Holmes into a chauvinistic snob. Ousby has noted an important shift in Conan Doyle's portrayal of his detective hero, but the argument seems overstated, particularly when it incorpo- rates and relies on biographical corroboration. Ousby echoes a con- ventional view of Conan Doyle which Pierre Nordon's biography (1966)-a work obviously known to Ousby- should have helped to dis- pel. At times Ousby is simply unfair to Conan Doyle, alluding to his ''patriotic gestures" and attributing Conan Doyle's "passionate and successful fights" on behalf of those falsely accused and imprisoned to "a strong sense of noblesse oblige" (p. 164). This final chapter appears to have been in some sense obligatory, and indeed it does nicely round out Ousby's treatment of the nineteenth century; but it also strikes me as perfunctory and, at times, distorted, both in its literary criticism and in its history.

In spite of these problems, the book remains a valuable contribution to a field steadily growing in importance. Ousby's style is clear and graceful, his thesis illuminating and neatly defined, and these virtues are enhanced by a quality rare in most contemporary university press publications-a handsomely produced, well-printed book. The illustra- tions-from Paget, Cruikshank, Gillray, "Phiz," and others-are par- ticularly well chosen and carefully printed. Bloodhounds of Heaven contributes both to nineteenth-century literary criticism and to nine- teenth-century social history. Even for the nonspecialist, the book is well worth reading.

ALBERT D. HUTTER

University of California, Los Angeles

IVANKA KOVACEVIC, ed., Fact into Fiction: English Literature and the Industrial Scene, 1750-1850. Leicester and Belgrade: Leicester Univer- sity Press and the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philology, 1975. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1975. Pp. 424. ?7.50. $20.25.

STEVEN MARCUS, Representations: Essays on Literature and Society. New York: Random House, 1975. Pp. xvii + 331. $12.95.

Both these books deal with fiction broadly interpreted to include that

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Reviews 119

which is made or constructed. Both are concerned with the relationship, formal and imaginative, between that which is made and constructed and that which exists in the "real" world. Both deal with the impact of industrialization. There the resemblances end. Ivanka Kovatevic assem- bles an anthology of pieces written between 1793 (William Paley and Hannah More) and 1850 (R. H. Horne's "The True Story of a Coal Fire"): she introduces them with a useful but rather unexciting intro- duction, which includes a few shaky passages. Steven Marcus collects a volume of his own essays, wide-ranging in themes and treatment, and leads off with a lucid statement of his own intentions and approach as a literary and social critic. There is no shakiness here, for his knowledge of attitudes as well as of facts is secure. He recognizes, however, that while it is fascinating to discover answers to "problems," many of the best answers retain elements of ambiguity. Some of the ground covered by Kova&evic has recently been covered even more fully by Martha Vicinus and Louis James, and the materials with which they have been preoccupied are richer and more varied than those considered by her. Marcus, by contrast, is always exploring the unknown. No one else could have written the essays in Representations. The maps are his and his alone.

Kovacevic`s shakiness is revealed in her handling of Hard Times, a novel which has interested Marcus and to whiclh he once refers in his book. She approaches it in the light of formal Marxist analysis of class relations, as many critics have done, and adds nothing to its under- standing. She does not like the style, "self-conscious because his [Dick- ens's] feelings are out of harmony with his ideas," and, more important to her, she does not like the characterization. Blackpool would have fitted better into a novelette by Harriet Martineau or into an essay by Carlyle. He should have been a trade unionist: he should never have gone to Bounderby in distress. No social historian would make these points so dogmatically. Most workers were not trade unionists: most Lancashire towns, though not all, permitted cross-class meetings. Hindle Wakes, Stanley Houglhton's prize-winning play of 1912 dealing with mills, employers, and workers, showed clearly that as late as that, human relations did not fit tidily into categories. It is Kovatevic`s own style which is artificial when she deals with this novel. And who would now claim that "Hard Times is a tough book, an argumentative rather than an imaginative narrative"?

It is unfair to concentrate exclusively on Kovaevic's flat treatment of Dickens when she sets out explicitly to deal with "minor fiction." "My revaluation of the literary scene," she begins, "will not affect the major writers, whose achievements will only seem the greater by being con- trasted with the minor fiction and sub-fiction of the age." She is at her best in dealing with fiction as propaganda, at her least convincing in trying to explain why and in what ways fictionalized accounts reveal a bias against working-class organizations and their actions. Her reading

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120 Nineteenth-Century Fiction

is limited. She has not made much use of what historians have written about Samuel Smiles, for example, or about education, and the history in her book tends to figure as background. Yet she has great enthusiasm for her subject, enjoys discovering little-known passages which illumi- nate it, and writes vigorously.

Marcus emphasizes in his introduction that so-called nonliterary writers (e.g., Freud) create fictions as much as novelists. He prefers the word "representation" to "fiction" since it is "comparatively normal, neutral and uncharged." "Representations" often reveal values, and these interest Marcus profoundly, including relatively unfashionable values (Stalky and Co. to Evelyn Waugh). He dislikes "phony" values so much that he turns briefly to "the neutral eye of the camera." Behind the values are the traditions of societies, often conflicting traditions, but we can only deal with them fully if we also take into account aspects of individual and social psychology. In a remarkable essay on Freud and Dora, which deals not only with the details of Freud's first great case but with case histories (and much else) as genres, Marcus quotes one of Freud's many memorable phrases-"my collection of picklocks"; and although his introduction sets out his concerns formally and with great lucidity, it is only when we study in detail how he uses his own pick- locks that we can appreciate Marcus's skill. Some of his picklocks were forged by Marx, and these he shares with Kovacevic. Some are borrowed from Freud, and she acknowledges no debt there. Others, however, are unmistakably Marcus's own. The picklocks are applied to many differ- ent kinds of people and materials, as different as Cecil Woodham-Smith and Dashiell Hammett, Stanley Milgram and Michel Foucault, but there is never any doubt about the continuing identity of the lockpicker. He leaves traces of his own all the way.

He can be judged, as Kovatevic can be judged, not by what he says about minor writers, but by what he says about Dickens. His essay on Pickwick Papers is a brilliant and ingenious solution to a puzzle set out by himself. And whereas Kova&evic does not get near to relating Dickens's style in Hard Times to the structure and characterization of the novel, Marcus shows convincingly that a novel which deals with language explicitly can shift in style and must shift in style as Dickens turns from "free, wild inventive doodling" (the author at play) to something harder and with greater bite: the change takes place as Pick- wick and Dickens run into the law. The unalloyed linguistic universe proves, in fact, to be more than a world of words: it is a world of struc- tures, including property and money. There are illuminating passages in this single essay, not only on Dickens as stenographer and on words and pictures, but, as asides, a regular feature of Marcus essays, on such subjects as Dickens and Nabokov, and Dickens, Hegel, and Weber. Very occasionally Freud seems to get in the way rather than to help, but in an essay like this we are forced into thinking about almost every aspect of

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Reviews 121

fiction, and the word "representation" seems wrong just because it is too normal, neutral, and uncharged.

The detail of the essays, indeed, is as revealing as the declaration of intent in the introduction-written after the essays, not before-in which Marcus makes two claims. The first is that great gains can be secured from the introduction into literary study of certain kinds of knowledge and instruments of analysis that have been developed in other, related cognitive disciplines-history, the social sciences, and psychology. The second is that the instruments of literary criticism and analysis can and should be applied to the reading of supposedly non- literary texts, texts of historical interest, of social theory, of psychologi- cal and anthropological inquiry and speculation. Both claims stand or fall according to the mode of introduction and the techniques of appli- cation. Marcus himself is genuinely interdisciplinary: his insights co11- verge, they are not coordinated. Yet there are difficulties, and he can see some of them. The history in the Woodham-Smith essay is thin, for instance, and there is a very revealing passage in the Freud and Dora essay where, after twenty pages, he writes, "Something went wrong in the relation between Freud and Dora or-if there are any analysts still reading-in the relation between Dora and Freud." The specialists are always round the corner. With Marcus's interdisciplinarity, however, go relentless curiosity and intellectual energy. The essay on Sinclair Lewis reveals just how the combination works. And there are shrewd general comments on the nineteenth century and on Victorian England (dismissed in Main Street as "the chief mediocrity of the world") which would guarantee Marcus's introduction into any enlightened company of the most pure of historians.

ASA BRIGGS Worcester College, Oxford

WILLIAM VEEDER, Henry James-the Lessons of the Master: Popular Fiction and Personal Style in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1975. Pp. xiii + 287. $16.00. ?9.60.

In 1907, Henry James contributed a chapter to Harpers' latest pub- lishing novelty: The Whole Family: A Novel by Twelve Authors. The title page lists Howells and James along with ten popular writers of the day, including such forgotten figures as the labor journalist, Mary Vorse, the New England regionalist, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and such popular romancers as Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Henry Van Dyke. One suspects that James might have felt somewhat uncomfortable in such mixed company, and his chapter, "The Married Son," opens with what appears to be a thinly disguised defense of his art. James's

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