What type of leadership is required in an inclusive society? Where does power inhere in a public sphere that is no longer solely the domain of the privileged? And, in a mass society, how can social distinctions be maintained? These are some of the questions that Pam Morris considers in her new book Imagining Inclusive Society in Nineteenth-Century Novels: The Code of Sincerity in the Public Sphere. As such questions indicate, for Morris, the concept of inclusivity does not simply refer to a homogeneous society free from any internal division. Rather, Morris is interested in mapping the formation of “a collectivity of difference,” a transformation in the way in which British society imagined itself, which she argues took place in the 1840s through the 1860s (6).

While Morris regards the increased tendency toward what she calls massification as an imaginary act, she also considers the historical forces that rendered this inclusivity not only part of the public consciousness but also part of the political and social order. She argues that three historical events of the 1840s through the 1860s played an important role in shifting the perception of the social order from an exclusionary social hierarchy rooted in land to one based upon collectivity: the repeal of the Corn Laws, the rise of Chartism, and the flourishing of commodity culture. These changes, Morris argues, incited social anxiety—concerns about the nature of leadership, the public, and mass culture. The novels she discusses—Shirley, The History of Henry Esmond, Bleak House, North and South, Romola, and Our Mutual Friend—explore these issues while undergoing changes of their own. Each novel charts a transformation from a society marked by exclusion to one based upon inclusion. In the process, Morris suggests, we can see a debate at work, what she calls “dialogic activity,” concerning political questions of public interest (224).

On the one hand, Morris argues that, in contrast to the eighteenth-century code of civility, these novels suggest that a code of sincerity that allows for the transcendence of difference is fundamental to building community. On the other hand, she argues that these novels also demonstrate that the code of sincerity is performative and manipulative. For example, in Henry Esmond, although sincerity may engender community, there is a marked contradiction between sincerity as a public gesture and as an aspect of the self, a disparity Morris locates in the novel's narrative structure with its split between Henry the narrator and the character. Morris also suggests that while novels may posit an inclusive society as an ideal, they frequently articulate the class distinctions that undermine massification. Thus, in her nuanced narrative reading of Bleak House we can see a “slippage … between perception as aggregation and perception as individualized and personal” (119). This kind of division culminates in Our Mutual Friend to the extent that the strikingly heterogeneous public sphere is fractured into two different groups, those who are preoccupied with mass culture and those who pride themselves on aesthetic distinction.

In order to articulate this type of discord in novels’ perspectives on the issue of inclusivity, Morris suggests that it is necessary to read novels in their “discursive context”: in relation to the periodicals and political essays that were circulating at the time (6). In fact, I would suggest that one of the most striking aspects of Morris's careful scholarship is its inclusive methodology. Throughout her readings, Morris frequently includes references from such journals as the Westminster Review or Blackwood’s as a way of establishing a larger conversation at work. While Morris effectively establishes shared concerns through her subtle readings, a question may arise regarding the discursive distinctions she sees between novels and other cultural texts. Although Morris “recogniz[es] that literary forms and genres are distinctive signifying practices,” at times one might wish for a more rigorous examination of the varying exigencies of the genres she discusses, such as differences in form or audience (5). In the cases in which Morris attends to the unique complexity of the novelistic voice and perspective, however, her work is at its best. She is most persuasive when attending to the multiplicity of voices and perspectives both within and surrounding a novel and, in the process, suggesting the insight novels provide into the problems, contradictions, and sometimes even the solutions associated with producing inclusivity.

For instance, in her readings of Shirley, Henry Esmond, and Romola, Morris is able to offer an interesting take on the historical novel by resituating the novels’ concerns in their historical context. In arguing that these works engage in the cultural debates over leadership and community taking place at the time in which they were written, she not only revisits our assumptions about genre but also suggests that we view these novels as part of a previously unrecognized body of political fiction. She suggests that through their fictional explorations of the ideals of such texts as Carlyle's On Heroes and Hero-Worship, Mill's On Liberty, and Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, novelists are able to perceive the largely unforeseen complexities and limitations of these political and cultural models.

For Morris, the “imaginative quest,” the process of envisioning and revisioning a better kind of society, is one that is not limited to literature—although Morris herself is primarily interested in literary texts (229). As a literary critic who regards novels on a “discursive continuum” with cultural texts, she marshals her concern with language and narrative in the service of new ways of comprehending questions of historical and political import (5). Rather than be preoccupied with the boundaries between the real and imagined, or the literary and historical, Morris shows us that complex social questions can best be worked out, understood, and studied by examining representation—that is, by considering how issues are narrated, figured, and articulated—in literary and nonliterary works alike.