James Buzard has written a clever apologia for the nineteenth-century British novel. Against critics who have condemned the British novel for appropriating universalist language as a weapon of cultural conquest or for retarding the development of an ethnographic sensibility by exalting the individual hero or heroine's free will without regard to cultural backdrop, Buzard argues that English novelists Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot can be read precisely as contributing to the advent of a relativistic concept of cultures because they tried to “hold the category of the global at bay by reinventing and focusing detail-rapt attention upon the national” (51). He argues that these English novelists learned from Irish and Scottish authors the necessity of preserving a sense of national difference against the universalizing tendencies of Britishness. He reads and celebrates their glorification of all things English as primarily an act of self-preservation.

Embedded within Buzard's apologia of the English Victorian novel is an apologia of modern anthropology. He insists that the Victorian-born science of anthropology ought not to be dismissed “as the false consciousness of imperial dupes and stooges” because it was, after all, part and parcel of the “progressive invalidation of traditional theological underpinnings for society” (14). Buzard argues that when twentieth-century anthropology's “participant observer” is viewed as heir to the nineteenth-century novel's embedded narrator, it becomes clear that this identity was not invented as a tool for conquest and control but rather for the task of self-liberation. The purpose, Buzard suggests, of the thick description and fictitious distancing that characterize the ethnographic sensibility as it emerges in the Victorian novel was not primarily to invent the “other” in order to subjugate it but to objectify and understand one's own culture in order to assert one's individual freedom within it. Buzard points out that after the 1801 Act of Parliament creating the United Kingdom, Irish and Scottish writers developed the auto-ethnographic form of novel as a defensive measure, and that English novelists later adapted the form for themselves. These auto-ethnographic novelists used discrete cultures as a place from which to protest the British “self-universalizing mentality” (11). They thereby surpass earlier writers like Thomas More, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson, who, Buzard tells us, showed no ability to move from the observation of differences among human practices to the creation of a “zone of productive ambivalence” from which the self could posit simultaneously the constructedness of the cultural value system and a commitment to it. Buzard's argument is that English Victorian novelists were at the cusp of the shift from a singular notion of human culture to modern ethnographic pluralism, a shift, that is, from the comparative study of various peoples’ progress on an evolutionary path toward “Culture” to the relativizing discourse of “cultures.” Buzard insists that only when we realize the liberating achievement of the Victorian novelists can we safely gauge what new directions to take. He seems afeard that proposals “to restore human nature to the throne from which ideas about the sway of culture had deposed it” (he cites Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate [New York, 2002]) will turn back the tide of secularization accomplished by the Victorian novelists and their ethnographic heirs in the twentieth century (5).

Buzard launches his case for the British novel from Christopher Herbert's chapter on the novel in Culture and Anomie (1991). In that chapter Herbert credits only Anthony Trollope with an ethnographic sensibility and dismisses other British novelists as stubborn holdouts—too attached to the idea of individual freedom to follow the historical and sociological tendencies of the age. Buzard's book extends Herbert's work by rereading several more novelists in the same vein. Buzard clearly considers himself a Dickens man and places Charles Dickens's Bleak House at the heart of his argument: Dickens's midcentury appropriation of Walter Scott's auto-ethnographic style is the turning point for the history of the English novel, and Dickens's double narrator device and embedded narrator stand at the core of the argument that the British novelist invented anthropology's “Participant Observer.” Brontë and Eliot extend and deepen the English novel's auto-ethnographic commitment, but it is to Dickens that Buzard gives the title of innovator.

Buzard argues that in Bleak House, by introducing Esther Summerson, a nobody with no cultural role or place, who takes up the role of embedded narrator, Dickens helped lay the groundwork for pluralistic and relativistic anthropology by liberating his characters and readers from the reign of a dogmatic, single, universal Culture embodied in the Omniscient narrator. Esther moves from the position supposedly achieved by the omniscient narrator—a nobody from nowhere—into the English world of the novel as a field for performing her duty to create a meaningful and manageable community. Her movement implies even greater dissolution of the all-encompassing claims of culture, surpassing the omniscient narrator's attempts to escape the bounds of particular cultural perspective by its implicit acknowledgment that culture is not natural and inescapable, but artificial, constructed, fragile, and therefore “refunctionable.” Buzard insists that more important than Dickens's genuflections to an omniscient and benevolent God of Christianity and the “everything-is-connected” argument of the book is Dickens's tendency to assert the interconnectedness and meaningfulness of English national life against a backdrop of a world not credited with the same degree of coherence. In other words, Buzard argues that only to the extent that the reader accepts a secularized worldview of disconnection, entropy, and meaninglessness will she be properly surprised by the way that Dickens's Englishmen and women are woven together in a single meaningful plot.

Buzard's choice of Bleak House as the Dickens's masterpiece par excellence seems driven by the complexity it affords to literary interpretation rather than by its representativeness or popularity as the Dickensian novel. Surely Herbert's argument is rather proven than disproven in the work of Dickens taken as a whole. Esther Summerson remains one of Dickens's immortal free beings, rather than a sociologically downtrodden and culturally overridden modern type. Nor is Esther so postmodern as to invent English interconnectedness in Bleak House for her own salvation; she transforms the preexisting interconnectedness created by the Chancery case. It is not just the linearity of Esther's romance plot that saves Dickens's atonal realistic novel of stiflingly self-referential omni-significance; there is no anomie either before or after in Bleak House. Perhaps Dickens couldnot help himself; perhaps he knew his audience too well. At any rate, by the end of Buzard's tour de force of modern anthropology cum literary interpretation one is forced to conclude that it is a rather exhausting and overintricate task to celebrate the nineteenth-century British novel on the terms dictated by our current nominalism.