Fetishism, the subject of Peter Logan's important new contribution to Victorian studies, might at first conjure up exotic images of fertility goddesses and dolls with pins in them. But Logan's subject is the British understanding and application of fetishism in the second half of the nineteenth century. He does not dispatch his field of study offshore but rather describes how this stock representation of the primitive was Britain's own creation, and how, through the influence of Freudianism, Marxism, and the late century invention of sexology, it came home to roost through native examples of commodity fetishism, the sexual fetish, and psychoanalysis. Before this time, though, Logan traces the way that three formative constructions in Victorian intellectual history—Matthew Arnold's concept of culture, George Eliot's realism, and Edward B. Tylor's anthropology—all exercised the fetish dynamic even as they used “fetish” to connote the primitive underbelly of their humanist ideals. That is, and in different ways, Arnold, Eliot, and Tylor rendered their intellectual models useful precisely by defending their realness. But in so doing, they also reified their objectivity so that it resembled the fetishes that their disciplinary hierarchies relegated to primitivism.

In chapter 1, Logan explores the intellectual history of his subject through its roots in Epicureanism, the poetry of Lucretius, and medieval- to eighteenth-century understandings of primitive anthropomorphism (including works by Kircher, Fontanelle, Vico, Hume). He traces Victorian fetishism to Auguste Comte's systematized notion of human progress in Cours de philosophie positive (1830), which identified primitive fetishism, or a fully anthropomorphic understanding of the world, as the first stage of human development (4) and which exerted a deep influence on the Victorian intellectuals at the center of Logan's study. In this tradition, Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869; the subject of chap. 2) tells a (de)volutionary tale whereby England's growing anomie results from its increasing turn to rationalism and commodification—the far side of a belief system that imbues nature with animate power. To offset this trend, Arnold recommends the free play of ideas—which he extends to everything except that idea itself. Thus, Arnold's “uncritical faith” (60) in objectivity recalls the inviolability of the fetish, or, as Logan argues, Arnold “attempt[s] to reform the society of the fetish [by] paradoxically reintroduc[ing] fetishism at a higher level of abstraction” (48).

In chapter 3, “George Eliot's Realism,” Logan begins by describing Eliot's advocacy of “works that expose rather than reinforce stereotypes, superstitions, and other forms of a priori thought.” “In this respect,” he writes, “her realism … demystified the kind of illusions that made fetishism possible” (69). But at the same time, “the Victorian theory of realism was premised on the fetishization of the art object” (81); as Eliot, in “The Natural History of German Life” (1856), famously writes, “art is the nearest thing to life” (83). If realism succeeds “only by coming to life,” (79) then Eliot's evocation of historical particularity, of illustrative details, and metaphors like the beating heart of the squirrel in Middlemarch (1874), all perform the fetish's collapse between life and representation.

The chapter on realism was convincing, but I wished that Logan—who is a professor of English—had extended his thinking about literature and also discussed the fetish dynamic in sensation novel criticism of the 1860s and 1870s. Arguably the Victorian literary genre with the most censure attached to it, sensation's more gullible readers were thought by critics to be endangered by their physiological responses to this genre's transgressive plots. As the critics painstakingly described, these stories came “alive” for their unsophisticated readers through palpitating hearts, sweaty brows, and sleeplessness—an embodied confusion of object with animate power that mirrors Logan's descriptions of the primitive fetish.

Logan's last chapters, on Edward Tylor's anthropology and sexology, map the Victorian apex and decline of fetishism's association with primitivism. Tylor's concept of anthropology predicated a universal (though not uniform) path to human development, recalling Comte's three-stage path from savagery, through barbarism, to civilization. Since he worked from his armchair rather than in the field, Tylor's data was culled from linguistic and symbolic “survivals” of primitive cultures (e.g., games, superstitions, myths). While Victorians in their abstract and rationalistic minds were “radically alienated from the concreteness of primitive myth” (108), anthropologists could, Tylor argued, access the meaning of survivals by recollecting childhood perception as an approximation of the primitive mind (108). The self-reflection that Tylor calls for, then, straddles the line between observation and recreation and, through the latter process, imitates the dynamic of the fetish.

By promoting a state of mental childhood in order to reconstruct the primitive mind, Tylor anticipates a broader move that Logan ties to late Victorian psychology and sexology. These disciplines moved the “fetish” from darkest Africa into the late Victorian unconscious writ large. Freud translated unconsciousness into a system that was at once a secret and the key to all mythology; the sexologists claimed the erotic fetish as a sign of ubiquitous, if not normal, sexual practice; Marxists named middle-class commodity fetishism a hallmark of bourgeois life (real or aspirational). All of these currents of thought thus entered the fetish into “the ahistorical domain of psychological universalism” (140), demystifying it so thoroughly that, as Logan understands it, it goes away.

Like Kathleen Blake's recent recovery of the originality and progressiveness of Benthamism (The Pleasures of Benthamism [New York, 2009]), Logan has done Victorian scholarship a great service in reconstructing through the Victorian fetish “a debate whose terms have been lost” (140). In particular, he refreshingly clarifies Arnold's liberalism, all too often lost in a simplified interpretation of the “best that is thought and said” as a vestige of rigid canon worship. (What Logan terms “The Arnold Fetish” has become a gross misreading of a great defender of intellectual freedom.) Victorian Fetishism also extends Mary Poovey's disciplinary history in Genres of a Credit Economy (Chicago, 2008) by tracing the notional parting of the ways between fact and fiction, a process that the fetish concept, as Logan shows us, both exemplifies and cancels out. As happens with many good books, you can’t quite (re)imagine the trains of thought that led Logan to his study, and you can’t quite imagine the trains of thought that did not. It reads as both ineffable and totally logical. When Logan quotes Tylor quoting Comte, “no conception can be understood except through its history” (102), we recognize an animating theory for historical projects in all disciplines and one that Victorian Fetishism has, appropriately, transformed from subject to working model.