A recent article in the New Yorker entitled “Everybody Have Fun: What Can Policymakers Learn from Happiness Research?” (March 22, 2009, 72–74) points up the political and counterintuitive findings of the most recent contributions to the science of happiness, a field perhaps initiated by those legendary purveyors of the pursuit of happiness, the French and American revolutionaries and their compatriot Jeremy Bentham. Kathleen Blake's entry into studies of Bentham is, if you will, a pleasure to read. Exquisite in its concision, expansive in its scholarly depth, Blake's scholarship dismantles many stereotypes about Benthamism and its Victorian uses. Though we intuitively feel that only the Victorians would turn the pursuit of happiness into an earnest matter of work, making it the focus of creaky calibrations and fusty formulas, Blake dusts off our typecasting. Indeed, it has always been much too easy to make fun of Bentham's felicific calculus, as if happiness were not the most serious of pursuits. As Blake shows, it is only in the post-Benthamite world that we simply cannot imagine leaving pleasure out of any public or private calculation.

Noting that in the Victorian period “liberalism” is another term for utilitarian political economy, Blake examines the “eloquent and shaping articulations of a ‘world’” found in Victorian literary texts vis-à-vis the Benthamite political tradition that sought to remake the world in the image of pleasure (7). The literary texts studied include Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1853), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Cranford (1851), and The Warden (1855), and though Blake's revaluation of the other two great Utilitarian philosophers (James Mill and John Stuart Mill) is astute, her readings of Victorian literary works through the lens of Utilitarian philosophy is the more pleasurable task, what with her fresh, startling, and often brilliant literary analysis.

One of the pleasures of Blake's approach is that she implicitly shows how impossible it is to firmly label Victorians as “liberal” or “conservative,” so complicated were their motivations and politics. Thus, she sees Bentham as both a capitalist “in pursuit of utility alike in commerce and industry” as well as a champion of freedom and “levelling in terms of class and gender” (7). In this deconstructive vein, this scholar acutely shows how limited and imprisoning is Foucault's “dogmatic” mangling of Bentham's panopticon (6). As Blake suggests, even Karl Marx saw the panoptic “factory inspectors, her medical reporters on public health, her commissioners of inquiry into the exploitation of women and children, into housing and food” as implied partners in his own radical analysis of the widespread suffering brought about by capitalism (Karl Marx, “Preface” to the 1st German ed.; Capital: A Critique of Political Economy [Student, ed.; London, 1992], xxiv; quoted in Blake, 6).

Further, as Blake's analysis of Bleak House illustrates, legal institutions like Chancery were hardly suffocating in their supposed Foucauldian illustration of the carceral. Rather, Chancery, in its idiotic ineptitude, should be understood as a colossal representation of how not to do the carceral. Indeed, Blake depicts institutions as far more complex than Foucault is able to delineate, for, though Victorian legal, educational, and cultural institutions might be seen as forebears of modern carceral institutions, they were only fumbling toward the monolithic while still immersed in the pleasures of human fallibility and ambivalence.

The chapter on Hard Times is particularly bracing, showing as it does how the Inimitable is perhaps most subversively Utilitarian in the novel in which he is most vociferous about Benthamite boneheadedness. To wit, as Blake asserts, while Bentham is associated with “hard Gradgrindery and carceral panopticism,” Gradgrind cannot accept what is central to Bentham's Utilitarianism, that is, that “the fire of desire” and the “energy of personal interest” are the foundation of “human action” (65). Thus, at the end of the novel, Gradgrind, the so-called ultimate Benthamite, must learn how to feel the very pleasures he has worked so hard to extinguish in his clinically depressed daughter Louisa.

Similarly, Blake brilliantly unwinds the anti-Utilitarian sage of work and self-abnegation, Thomas Carlyle. She does so literally by teasing out the weave of his clothes philosophy, reminding the reader that at the beginning of Sartor Resartus (1838) the Philosophy of Clothes is compared with the era's Doctrine of Rent and Theory of Value. Given this context, while Teufelsdröckh seems an ascetic who endlessly derides Utilitarianism, yet his clothes philosophy is founded upon the principle that the main function of clothing is not as physical protection of the body but rather as ornament or decoration. Teufelsdröckh's profound pleasure in ornament is, then, says Blake, hardly the austere philosophy he seems to espouse. In fact, Teufelsdröckh's extravagant love of language—another form of clothing in Carlyle's philosophy—also takes pleasure in literacy as decoration. A text so informed by bricolage—biblical jeremiad, romantic poetry, character sketch, jocular punditry, and stern grotesquery—Sartor Resartus is a mine of surplus pleasures. As Blake asserts, Carlyle's philosophy of work is displayed ornamentally “in a most playful manner” and thus looks “less insistently self-denying” and more “oriented towards realization of personal welfare” or pleasure (100, 93).

My only quibble with this beautifully wrought study is with Blake's definition of liberalism. In her attempt to recuperate Bentham from the derision she believes he has received from literary and cultural studies scholars, Blake elides Foucault's important critique of the liberal subject as unified, autonomous, and free. An engagement with the postmodern understanding of the liberal subject would only have enriched Blake's analysis of the Utilitarian notion of liberalism. It would also have illustrated even more so just how complex Dickens, Eliot, Carlyle, Mill, and Bentham are in their representations of both. Nevertheless, not to have this book upon one's shelf is a denial of the pleasures of studying the Victorians and their influential others.