The Ideas in Things, Elaine Freedgood's new book, is deceptively slim: “deceptively” because its readings of some of the most familiarly reworked Victorian novels are not only fresh but also large in their implications for reading Victorian fiction in a newly historical way. Freedgood locates “Victorian things” at the heart of her enterprise, a move that is not new in itself. “Material culture” has occupied Victorian scholars for a number of years now: from Asa Briggs to Thomas Richards, scholars of Victorian Britain have sifted, sorted, and probed the welter of things that mark Victorian culture as distinctively itself and distinctly modern. By taking these “things” literally, Freedgood contends, rather than understanding them as metaphors of something more important, we will more clearly see them as “an index of something culturally significant both within the novel and outside” (11). In ensuing chapters, she analyzes things like mahogany furniture, checked curtains, and Negro Head tobacco in four of the most canonical Victorian novels: Jane Eyre, Mary Barton, Great Expectations, and Middlemarch. Freedgood's insistence on what she calls “Victorian ‘thing culture’” (8) as the ground for reading is what makes her work new and enables a different kind of historicized literary analysis.

“A literal approach to the literary thing” (11) sounds, of course, rather literal-minded. This “literal approach,” though, relies upon and, in Freedgood's hands, persuasively exemplifies a sophisticated awareness of how the rhetorical device of metonymy works, a figure of speech that, unlike metaphor, is contingent and circumstantial and “tends to be read … according to a frame of reference outside the symbolic structure of the novel” (13). Unlike the ways in which Victorian readers may have understood things in novels, we often read them as metaphors for more important issues, using “what has by now become a largely middlebrow practice of reading,” Freedgood says, “a kind of reflexive, thematic reading that derives from picking out metaphors” (7). Her sense that such reading practices now prevail, especially perhaps among readers who aspire to be “literary,” seems right to me, evidenced not only by a century-long history of modernist, New Critical, structuralist, and poststructuralist training in literary analysis, but also by English majors who arrive in my classes aiming to “read right” by persistently seeing fictional things as symbols. In contrast, Freedgood aims to demonstrate what she calls “strong, literalizing, or materializing, metonymic reading” (12).

In practice, for today's metonymic reader of Victorian fiction, this involves a lot of research because novel things won’t prompt the same clusters of metonymic associations for us as they did for Victorian readers. The ubiquity of mahogany furniture in Jane Eyre, for example, leads Freedgood through a range of contemporary and recent scholarly sources about the history of colonization in Madeira, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century lumber industry, the craft of furniture making, and the Caribbean slave trade. At certain moments, this vast body of information leans toward “context,” a term often critiqued by New Historicists suspicious of “old historical” approaches. In general, though, this tendency is contained by Freedgood's expert, sophisticated grasp and use of her own key concepts, most notably “metonymy” and “thing.” Indeed, her careful use of the many complex abstractions of “thing”—“impure commodity,” “pure commodity,” “fetish”—is a great strength of the book, not least because her insistence that things can prompt different ways of reading distinguishes her work from New Historicist methods that privilege the anecdote and unusually juxtaposed texts. In addition to mahogany furniture, Freedgood pursues the metonymic associations of checked curtains in Mary Barton and Negro head tobacco in Great Expectations, guiding her readers through dense cultural thickets of Victorian allusion, reference, and writing. Especially illuminating for me was her discussion of Magwitch's plug of tobacco, a thing that tapped into a widely diffused cultural awareness of Aboriginal genocide. If we see the tobacco as a “thing,” Freedgood suggests—and not a metaphor or (only) a commodity—we’ll understand how it functions as an encoded archive of knowledge and awareness rather than just another atmospheric item in a text that largely ignores colonial issues, as a more straightforward postcolonial reading might conclude.

While Brontë, Gaskell, and Dickens provide a well-stuffed “thing culture” in their fiction, Eliot marks a shift in Freedgood's argument, with Middlemarch emerging as an inaugural novel in a long line of texts that have trained us to read metaphorically and literarily. In Eliot's narrator, Freedgood finds an authority that “curtails metonymic restlessness” (115) by fully exploring and thereby stabilizing the range of possible meanings captured by things. Rather than the jumble of unremarked things we encounter in a Dickens novel—a jumble that fosters associations not prompted by the novel itself—Middlemarch shows us how to read in the figure of its famously abstracting narrator. In the process, Freedgood claims, the novel as a form becomes “portable” (131), a literary artifact sealed off from its culture and from the messy, unpredictable effects of metonymic reading. This take on Middlemarch was illuminating, most of all because it addressed how the experiences of reading an Eliot novel and a Dickens novel differ so radically, a disparity that was probably also familiar to Victorian readers. Even so, I found this chapter the least satisfying, in part because Freedgood's argument seems ill equipped to address Eliot's particular form of hermeneutical complexity. While the novel's narrator certainly demonstrates a capacious analytical authority, I see as well a profound skepticism about the possibility of hermeneutical stability, a skepticism that is rehearsed in the narrator's frequent commentary on variable points of view and thematized in the multiple failures of large interpretative paradigms (Casaubon's key, Lydgates's tissue). If Middlemarch fosters a less metonymically rich form of reading, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the novel seeks its own sealed fixity.

My disagreement with portions of the Middlemarch chapter, however, raised questions that point to enhanced possibilities of “strong metonymic reading.” For Freedgood, the primary advantages of metonymic reading seem to inhere in its capacity to capture at least some features of a culturally and historically distant past. While she seems to date the heyday of “Victorian ‘thing culture’” to approximately 1800–1875 (an era whose end was heralded by the publication of Middlemarch in 1871), metonymic reading need not be similarly restricted. Indeed, the practice seems equally compatible with our own Googled era and the multiple, unpredictable links enabled by electronic texts. Without ignoring the wide cultural disparity between, say, 1850 and 2010, it's nonetheless interesting to ponder the unstable effects of a renewed, if not replicated, form of metonymic reading today—of Victorian texts, yes, but of many other kinds of texts as well. We may well be more Victorian than Freedgood seems to think.