It is not new, of course, to see that a literary work that excites strong feelings is cathartic and therefore to understand that catharsis as the primary purpose of the reading. And it has been noted by many critics, including P. J. Keating in The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (1971), that nineteenth-century middle-class novels about working-class characters are written with a middle-class agenda, and so, despite their ostensible focus on the poor, their main concerns are middle-class ones. This also means that the characters depicted therein are characters created in accordance with that middle-class agenda and cannot be expected to be any more real than other fictional characters—the grittiness-equals-reality notion has long been debunked. But Carolyn Betensky builds on these notions and takes them a step further in her book. These novels, she claims, shift the focus from economic concerns to affective ones and posit such reading as social action. In doing so they offer middle-class readers a way of seeing themselves anew; they see themselves in the text learning about the suffering of the poor and in the process of becoming the caring middle classes. The discovery of suffering (through reading) is ongoing as is the reading process itself, and so the act of becoming appears to be open ended and is analogous to the Victorian obsession with finding out about the poor. Betensky claims that “middle-class narratives about working-class suffering track the flow of this knowledge and ignorance [about the poor] so avidly that attention to the question of who among the bourgeoisie knows … could perhaps be considered a constitutive feature of the social-problem novel genre” (24).

Betensky takes her evidence from Frances Trollope’s Michael Armstrong (1840), Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–38), Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), George Eliot’s Felix Holt (1866), and Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima (1886). She writes that “written into the very novels that evoke middle-class sympathy for the victims of their economic and social privilege are plots contrived to manufacture sympathy for middle-class victims” (60), and, in her chapter on Sybil, she explains that middle-class characters such as Egremont are misunderstood and therefore themselves become the victims and the focus of the reader’s sympathy. The lack of understanding of the upper- or middle-class character on the part of the working-class character causes a backlash against that group. The working-class character must learn to appreciate the fact that the middle- or upper-class character does indeed have feelings for the poor. And despite the fact that actual working-class readers are not the intended target of these novels, “these novels need to have a working-class reader, even though they don’t want a real one. Sybil can help us to understand,” Betensky claims, “why there has to be a spectral working-class reader for these novels to make the cultural sense they do” (86). The (potential) middle-class reader’s feelings are validated, according to Betensky, by this imaginary, “spectral” working-class reader who is “lurking” and learning how to sympathize with the feelings of the dominant class. This ends up in the chapter on Mary Barton, with a claim that the novel “is written less about Barton than for a spectral Barton who reads himself being read” (111). I must admit that I began to feel a little less sympathy for the argument once spectral John Bartons began to appear. A hall of mirrors seemed to be creating an infinity of virtual readers in passages such as this: “[Mary Barton] speaks to the dominant classes of the feelings of the dominated, while it speaks at the same time of the feelings of the dominant classes to an imaginary working-class reader.” She goes on: “Each reads over the shoulder of the other: the spectral, lurking, working-class reader over the shoulder of the explicit addressee of the text, the actual reader over the shoulder of the virtual reader, watching as that reader reads about his feelings” (131).

In her afterword, Betensky brings the problem to today’s classroom and finds that those of us who teach such novels must “question the idea that bourgeois intentions are of the greatest significance” (191). On the whole, Betensky offers some interesting readings of these novels: her readings of Sybil and The Princess Casamassima are particularly strong. But I would have preferred less perkiness in the writing: such phrases as “Team Thornfield,” to label those supporting that character in Gaskell’s novel, and the continual references to virtual readers reading over imaginary readers’ shoulders make the book less enjoyable to read, and the argument could have been made convincingly without them.