Victoria's coronation in 1837 signals the official inception of the literary form that we now designate the Victorian novel, just as her death in 1901 marks its official demise. However, for at least a century before the start of the period in literary history we term “Victorian,” the British novel had enjoyed cultural visibility and weathered critical scrutiny, so in a sense there was nothing momentously new about the novel in 1837. But critical discussion generated by the genre's increasing popularity in a profitable marketplace acquired a distinctive intensity as authors and literary intellectuals initiated an almost century-long debate about the moral and aesthetic nature of the novel. The central questions that fueled this debate tended to revisit with some regularity issues of whether novels should retain their racy affiliations with romance, teach uplifting moral lessons, educate curious readers about a rapidly changing society, or aim for a narrative singularity that would provide aesthetic correlation for the domestic realism that ruled the form for most of the period. By the end of the nineteenth century, after decades of cultural rule, novel-reading itself had become identified with those attitudes we now term “Victorian” (primarily to do with sexual repression, stultifying middle-class family life, and cramped vistas for women's lives), then being vigorously rejected. In George Gissing's The Odd Women (1893), for example, the feminist character Rhoda Nunn traces the defection from women's causes on the part of a Miss Royston to novel-reading, asking contemptuously, “What is more vulgar than the ideal of novelists?”

In her otherwise favorable review of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (i860), novelist Margaret Oliphant cautioned that novels that focused their attention upon the detection of crime as insistently as this one did represented a significant threat to the integrity of Victorian literature: “What Mr. Wilkie Collins has done with delicate care and laborious reticence, his followers will attempt without any such discretion,” she predicted. “We have already had specimens, as many as are desirable, of what the detective policeman can do for the enlivenment of literature: and it is into the hands of the literary Detective that this school of story-telling must inevitably fall at last.”Mrs. Oliphant's prophecy about the impending (if undesired) dominance of the field of Victorian fiction by the literary detective proved to be quite accurate. As she noted, several such figures had appeared on the scene already, and there would certainly be many more to come. Indeed, if we are to take The Woman in White as an example, where the detective work is carried out not by a policeman or a professional detective but by a drawing instructor who transforms himself into a collector of evidence and a solver of mysteries, the terms “detection” and “the Victorian novel” increasingly become synonymous as the nineteenth century progresses.

In On Revolution Hannah Arendt tried to settle accounts with both the liberal-democratic and Marxist traditions; that is, with the two dominant traditions of modern political thought which, in one way or another, can be traced back to the Enlightenment. Her basic thesis is that both liberal democrats and Marxists have misunderstood the drama of modern revolutions because they have not understood that what was actually revolutionary about these revolutions was their attempt to create a constitutio libertatis - a repeatedly frustrated attempt to establish a political space of public freedom in which people, as free and equal citizens, would take their common concerns into their own hands. Both the liberals and the Marxists harbored a conception of the political according to which the final goal of politics was something beyond politics - whether this be the unconstrained pursuit of private happiness, the realization of social justice, or the free association of producers in a classless society. Arendt's critique of Marxist politics has already become a locus classicus and requires no further justification. Her critique of the liberal and social democracies of the modern industrial societies seems more provocative from the point of view of the present. I want to raise the question of whether her provocation remains a genuine one.

On June 1, 1599 Archbishop Whitgift and Bishop Bancroft denounced and proscribed a range of recent works by, among others, Thomas Nashe, Gabriel Harvey, John Marston, Joseph Hall and Thomas Middleton. Many of these described themselves as “snarling” or “biting” satires, and the Bishops ban specifically required “That no Satires or Epigrams be printed hereafter.” Yet later that year Ben Jonson produced Every Man out of his Humour and called it a “comicall satyre”:the label figures prominently in the entry of the play in the Stationers' Register (April 8, 1600) and on the title page of the quarto printed shortly afterwards, the first of his plays in print. It is a gesture typical of the young Jonson, who seems to challenge authority by openly writing in a mode that had been proscribed.

“All is race; there is no other truth.”So says Sidonia, Benjamin Disraeli's fictional Jewish sage and alter ego. The novel in which Sidonia makes this pronouncement is Tancred (1847), the third in Disraeli's Young England trilogy. Even during his years as Prime Minister, Disraeli continued to believe in race as an all-encompassing explanatory category.

The metaphor of “choicest families,” suggesting divinely chosen branches of the one “great race,” provides Disraeli with a formulaic - indeed, stereotypic - explanation of Western civilization and its two ancient sources, classical Greece and Judaeo-Christianity.

Widely recognized as one of the most original and influential political thinkers of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt remains an elusive figure. She never wrote a systematic political philosophy in the mode of Thomas Hobbes or John Rawls, and the books she did write are extremely diverse in topic, covering totalitarianism, the place of political action in human life, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the meaning of the modern revolutionary tradition, the nature of political freedom and authority, and the faculties which make up “the life of the mind.” These works are not constructed upon a single argument, diligently unfolded, or upon a linear narrative. Rather, they are grounded upon a series of striking conceptual distinctions - between tyranny and totalitarianism; action, labor, and work; political revolution and struggles for liberation; thinking, willing, and judging - which Arendt elaborates and weaves into complex thematic strands. The interconnections between the strands are sometimes left to the reader. Thus, it is no surprise that newcomers to her work are often baffled by how the pieces fit together (not only from book to book, but often within a single volume). They cannot help wondering whether there is, in fact, a consistent perspective behind her varied reflections on the nature of political evil, the glories of political action, and the fragility of civilized society (the “human artifice”) in the face of mounting natural, technological, and political pressure. The situation is not helped by the fact that many commentators on Arendt have tended to seize upon one strand of her oeuvre, elevating her reflections on political action, or her theory of totalitarianism, to a position of unquestioned preeminence.

John Dryden's confession that “I admire [Jonson], but I love Shakespeare” helped to establish the discourse for subsequent response to the two great figures of English Renaissance drama. The first assessment is intellectual, the second chiefly emotional, and for the next three centuries most readers and audiences endorsed these judgments and developed the critical conversation accordingly. Thus Jonson has usually been regarded as pedantic, classical, satiric, Shakespeare as natural, accessible, romantic. Actually the division began even earlier than Dryden, originating to some degree in Jonson's own stated and implicit articulation of the difference: he the scrupulous classicist, Poet, and disdainer of the “public riot,” Shakespeare the crowd-pleasing professional and fluent writer who (unfortunately) never blotted a line. Later critics accepted the comparative description but inverted the evaluation, preferring the work and persona of the natural genius to those of his crabbed competitor. For most of the twentieth century, scholarship agreed to observe a rigid critical segregation: Shakespeareans rarely devoted much attention to Jonson, while most Jonsonians sought to remove their subject from the shadow of the master. It is heartening to observe that recent critical trends, particularly the interrogation of canonicity and renewed interest in historicism, have encouraged simultaneous consideration and helped to identify some theatrical and thematic intersections between the men and their work.

It is not unusual among the readers of Hannah Arendt to ascribe to her an exclusively performative conception of action and consequently to suspect a certain Graecomania in her meditations on the constitutive features of the political realm. Those readers would contend that, by reason of her distinction between genuine action and every mode of production of works or tangible results, Arendt limited the notion of action to the spontaneity of a pure performance which essentially consists in the glory of its ephemeral appearance. Consequently her political thought, so they argue, would have been excessively focused on the model of the Greek city. In short it would have been affected by a Graecomania of which those readers find evidence in her comments on the funeral oration attributed to Pericles by Thucydides. Indeed, referring to that oration in The Human Condition, Arendt claims that the Athenians ascribed a “twofold function” to the institution of their polis: (1) “to multiply the occasions to win 'immortal fame,' that is, to multiply the chances for everybody to distinguish himself, to show in deed and word who he was in his unique distinctness” (p. 197), and (2) “to offer a remedy for the futility of action and speech,” thanks to “the organization of the polis, physically secured by the wall around the City and physiognomically guaranteed by its laws,” an organization which was a kind of “organized remembrance” (pp. 197-198).

Because Ben Jonson creates such a powerful representation of himself in his poetry and in the prologues to his plays, he seems to stand before us a stable and knowable self. Abraham van Blyenberch's painting of Jonson in the National Portrait Gallery shows a man alone, without any symbolic accoutrements. Jonson's enormous head and shoulders fill the canvas: there is nothing to see but Jonson, plainly dressed, large featured, deep eyed, craggy faced. To describe Jonson's life means to fill in the blank background of the canvas, to show all we can of the relationships that created and constituted what Jonson terms the “gathered self.” Even a brief sketch of his life requires attention to the way relationships were crucial to him, both in his life and in his work. There are few personal lyrics among his poems, no soliloquies in his plays: his is an art of community and contest. It is also a professional art: Jonson was the first Englishman to earn his living as a writer, exploiting every form of the literary medium to address private, public, and courtly audiences. This brief account of his life will focus on his relationships with his family, friends, rivals, patrons, and audience, setting his works in that dynamic context.

For Dore Ashton

Many of us must have experienced a sensation of relief while celebrating the advent of the new millennium. The relief consisted first in having survived, and then in saying adieu to a century that more than any other in the long history of mankind had been marked by evil. As if torn from a corpse, the ligatures of that evil - binding total war to totalitarianism; the totalitarian destruction of entire peoples to the invention of nuclear weapons; and the proliferation of nuclear weapons in a post-totalitarian world to the unprecedented capacity of mankind to annihilate itself - revealed the identifying scars of the century that had come to its calendric end. But New Year and even millennial celebrations tend to be followed by sober, frequently painful awakenings. Has our “morning after” found us in a new world? Has the mere passage of time from the twentieth to the twenty-first century healed the wounds of the former and enabled us to be reconciled to the latter? If we heed the Russian poet Akhmatova, who was not thinking of the calendar when she spoke of “the real twentieth century,” are we not forced to ask ourselves: What, if anything, has ended? Hannah Arendt might counsel us to ask a somewhat different question: What, if anything, has begun?

For most of the eighteenth century the novel's physical form was highly variable: it might be published in one or two volumes, but it was equally likely to appear in three or more. Fanny Burney's Camilla (1796) was published in five volumes, Fielding's Tom ]ones (1749) in six, Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe (1748) in seven, and Sterne's Tristram Shandy in nine volumes spread over eight years (1760-67). By the early nineteenth century things had started to stabilize, and the standard number of volumes for a first edition of a novel had settled down to three or four. Each volume was usually priced at five shillings or six shillings so a three-volume novel would normally retail at between fifteen shillings and eighteen shillings.

The author who changed all that was Sir Walter Scott. Scott's influence on both poetry and prose in the early nineteenth century was immense. He may be little read now, but in his time and for a few decades afterwards his poems and novels were probably more widely distributed and consumed than the work of any other serious contemporary writer. At the height of the Romantic movement, many more people read Scott's poetry than Wordsworth's. In terms of copies printed and copies read, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley were negligible. Only Byron was sometimes able to rival Scott in terms of numbers of readers. It was later, during the Victorian period, that Wordsworth and Coleridge, Keats and Shelley acquired their belated and relative popularity.

The impact and tenacity of the argument launched in Thomas Malthus's famous Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) can mean only one thing: the nineteenth century opened onto a very different field of narrative possibilities than had preoccupied and entertained the previous century, possibilities in terms of which Victorian authors and readers would imagine their lives, write their novels, and hammer out domestic and colonial policy. Although infant mortality rates had changed little for most of the people and would not improve significantly throughout the nineteenth century, the English population was growing younger. Compounded by the fact that no bouts of plague, famine, or other natural disasters had limited the growth of the population, people were marrying at a younger age. Marry a man with whom you were emotionally compatible if you could, but marry a man of material means you must, such novels as Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1816) seemed to say, or else face the degradation of impoverishment or, worse, the need to work for a living. Given that the population under twenty-five years of age shot up from 46 to 58 percent of the population between the mid-eighteenth century and the beginning of Victoria's reign in 1837, courtship rituals to ensure that deserving women would meet and win the hearts of eligible men could not have been considered a frivolous activity. Nor could knowledge of the social rituals of the sort that fill Austen's pages be distinguished from the political power of a group of men and women who were neither aristocratic nor forced to work for a living. The delicate nuances of feeling and elaborate rituals that gave those feelings both vigor and charm not only consolidated this group but also contained the secret of its perpetuation.

The Origins of Totalitarianism, first published in 1951, established Hannah Arendt's reputation as a political thinker and has a good claim to be regarded as the key to her work, for trains of thought reflecting on the catastrophic experiences it seeks to understand can be traced to the heart of her later and more overtly theoretical writings. Half a century after the book's appearance there has been a revival of interest in the idea of totalitarianism, but the concept itself remains controversial. Far more than a technical term for use by political scientists and historians, it has always incorporated a diagnosis and explanation of modern political dangers, carrying with it warnings and prescriptions. This chapter will argue that “totalitarianism” as understood by Arendt meant something very different from the dominant sense of the term. The final section will attempt a reassessment of her theory.

Two concepts of totalitarianism

There are almost as many senses of “totalitarianism” as there are writers on the subject, but a few broad similarities have tended to hide a fundamental difference between Arendt and most other theorists. Like the rest, she is concerned with a novel political phenomenon combining unprecedented coercion with an all-embracing secular ideology; like the rest she finds examples on both the left and the right of the mid-twentieth-century political spectrum. But these apparent similarities conceal more than they reveal, and much confusion has arisen from failure to realise that there is not just one “totalitarian model,” but at least two which describe different phenomena, pose different problems of understanding, and carry different theoretical and political implications.

Victorian novels and the history of sexual desire

A history of sexual desire? Are not the intimate intensities of mind and body that go by that name as insulated from the mass and massive public events that we commonly call history as hunger or pain? Is not the heart filled with passion always the same old story, a drama whose costume may vary from period to period, but whose script remains essentially unchanged? But while much that we experience as sexual desire seems a largely immutable condition of human (and perhaps not just human) existence, the scope and shape of the meanings that we attach to this experience are decided by a complex of historical forces, not least of which, for those of us who live in its aftermath, is the Victorian novel itself. Thus, for example, the great expectation, usually observed in the breach, that sexual bonds will culminate in marriage, or its contemporary cognate, the Permanent Relationship, finds its most eloquent propagations in what one of their critics calls “our books,” the novels whose promise of romance we know by heart as surely as we have forgotten the details of their plots. If we continue to acknowledge, typically in the privacy of our own disappointments, as universal truth a vision of sexual desire as the engine and origin of a partnership at least lifelong, this is in no small part because of the sentimental education we receive from the Victorian novel and its afterlife in more recent narrative forms. If, against often overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we persist in perceiving the halo of “happily ever after” light up the object of our sexual affections, that is in no small part because books like Jane Eyre (1847) and Middlemarch (1872) have taught us so well to do so.

Ben Jonson's reputation stands higher now than at any time since his own era, when it perhaps surpassed Shakespeare's. Today he ranks second in the great age of English drama and is considered one of its very best poets. He continued in high esteem after the 1660 Restoration, but later his fortunes fell as Shakespeare's rose. By the early 1800s his influence languished: his works were sometimes read and respected, occasionally admired, but almost never staged and perhaps as rarely loved. The Romantics seldom valued this professedly classical author, but it was now (ironically) that his fortunes rebounded. He found a devoted editor (William Gifford) whose defenses, though fierce, were usually factual. By now, too, Shakespeare's clear triumph made further battles pointless. Thus began a fairer, more methodical assessment of Jonson. By the mid-twentieth century a renaissance was in full swing, helped by the superb Oxford edition (1925-52). Finally, at century's end, Jonson once again seemed truly central to discussions of his period. Scholarship proliferated; his best plays were regularly (if not widely) performed; and even his “dotages” won some renewed respect. If Jonson were living at this hour, even he might be pleased.

In the years since her death in 1975, Hannah Arendt's large body of work has been ever more widely discussed. So far we can say that her readers have occupied themselves mainly with two contributions that Arendt made to political theory and the study of politics. One is her analysis of the political evil of the twentieth century, especially totalitarianism in its Stalinist and Nazi forms. The other is her analysis of the excellence of politics: its greatness and the place of individual excellence in it (HC, p. 49).

Totalitarianism pressed on her with such force that she had to respond and try to be theoretically adequate to those great horrors. But she began her life as a writer with a dissertation on the concept of love in St. Augustine. One imagines that uninterrupted by political evil, she could have gone on to write philosophically about the many faces that human experience and the human condition present to the determined philosophical observer. She perhaps would have turned her attention to politics eventually, as one more type of human experience, one more way in which human beings enter into relations or confront and deal with one another. I would say, therefore, that her analysis of political excellence grows without artificiality from her original interests.

Jonsonian topographies

Ben Jonson was one of the more traveled dramatists of the English Renaissance. He crossed the Channel twice, as a footsoldier in the Low Countries in the 1590s, and as chaperone for the visit of Sir Walter Raleigh's son to Paris in 1613. At home his most notable journey was his 1618-19 walk to Edinburgh and back, during which he laid plans for a Loch Lomond pastoral and a poem on the wonders of Scotland. Among other exploits, he visited Sir Robert Cotton in Huntingdonshire in 1603, and turned up in Rutland in 1621. But it is entirely characteristic that while away from the city, his imagination harked back to it. In Scotland, he dubbed Edinburgh “Britain's other eye” (HS 1: 143), implying that England's capital was eye number one. Incidents from the Paris trip became source material for Bartholomew Fair. At Cotton's house, he was unable to forget the danger his family stood in from the plague, and was troubled by dreams of home (HS 1: 139-40).