For decades now literary critics and literary historians have turned to the “materiality” of the texts they study—be that materiality represented by the physicality of print, the economics of the literary marketplace, or even the corporeality of the writing act—as a way to generate a sense of scandal. The implicit gesture behind such work is intended to function as a rousing act of demythologizing. Look here (so the critic's gesture signifies): the canonical authors of the past had grossly material things—money, print design, their own bodies—on their minds; they were not as innocent or as exalted as they seem. As a reaction to poststructuralist abstraction such a critical maneuver was often welcome and productive, but the predictability of such a call upon our sense of shock at the materiality of past literary work may have more to say about our need to imagine ourselves uncovering what the past occluded than any actual occlusions in the past. So, at least, runs the essential argument of Daniel Hack's brilliantly nuanced Material Interests of the Victorian Novel. Hack's canny argument depends not on “reading against the grain” to find a materiality Victorian novelists sought to hide but instead on reading with the Victorians to demonstrate the ways in which our own thinking about materiality is anticipated and at least in part determined by their complex engagements with various forms of the materiality of writing. In the broadest sense, Hack's book reminds us that the materiality of canonical texts is no scandal.
Much of the book's work, which involves sustained readings of Thackeray's Henry Esmond, Dickens's Bleak House, Collins's No Name, and Eliot's Daniel Deronda, is devoted to both demarcating the boundaries between different kinds of materiality and then demonstrating how, in Victorian fiction, those different kinds are often mutually implicated. The four registers of materiality Hack describes—the socioeconomic (the text's presence in a market), the corporeal (the physical act of writing), the textual (the bibliographic conventions of the day), and the linguistic (the workings of signification)—have, he argues, never been as separable in actual literary practice as they have in critical theory, where, for instance, book historians, poststructuralists, and sociologists of literature have been able to successfully ignore each other's work by taking their own brand of materiality as the essential one. Each one of Hack's readings demonstrates how a fuller understanding of “the material” in a given novel depends upon marshaling at least two of those modalities of the material. The exemplary reading of Bleak House, for instance, blends both a book history methodology, via an interest in the novel's copious advertisements, and a sociological methodology, in that Hack reads the controversy over Dickens's use of spontaneous combustion as an instance of a novelist claiming expert status because of what Hack calls the “meaningful materiality of texts,” which for Dickens could carry the same epistemic charge as actual bodies. Such careful work thoroughly substantiates the overall argument that “the material” in literature must be studied through multiple methodological lenses.
If the word “material” is amply illuminated by Hack, the other key word in his title—“interest”—receives equal attention, if more implicitly. The book insists upon the cultural stakes for Victorian novelists in the materiality of their work, arguing that novelists resisted the “virtuality” of text in order to maintain cultural authority and agency. The centerpiece of Hack's investigation of the “interest” of Victorian novelists is a crucial diptych of chapters that look at the phenomenon of begging-letter writing in the mid-Victorian period, as a site where writing-as-labor and writing-as-parasitical-activity battle it out. Even treating the begging letter as a cultural text worth studying is an innovative, revealing move; Hack's readings of actual letters sent to the Royal Literary Fund, including one by Henry Mayhew, demonstrate the striking complicity between such an abjected genre and the appeals for readerly sympathy made by respectable realist fiction. In these chapters, perhaps the book's most nuanced and complex section, Hack reveals the narrow, switchback path Victorian novelists had to tread in order to avoid the abject materialism of the begging letter and yet still claim to be doing real, “material” work in the world. The labor of novelistic writing had to employ the same rhetorical gestures as the begging letter while disavowing the real-world effects sought by the begging letter. The outcome, as Hack states with understatement, is a reading practice associated with realist fiction, one that “allows for affective indulgence by making it an end in itself, detached from the question of action (which is to say, the question of ethics)” (120).
As much as possible within the material confines of a five-chapter literary-critical monograph, Hack's book shows what might be gained by breaking down the boundaries between the competing, and usually isolationist, versions of materiality now current in literary studies. A book historian would be gratified by Hack's attention to Bleak House's advertisements and Henry Esmond's antique typography; a sociologist of literature would find plenty to ponder in Hack's discussion of the status of literary labor in Carlyle's “The Hero as Man of Letters”; the cultural historian will feel drawn to the begging-letter narratives that Hack reveals; and the poststructuralist critic, if any still exist, will be fed by the elegant and sinuous close readings here, particularly the demonstration, in Daniel Deronda, of Eliot's ambivalences about the material bases of any cultural practice, from religion to novel writing. But more than most current literary-critical monographs, the most compelling interest here is in the methodological mixtures being attempted. Hack invites us to imagine a critical practice that would not simply be tolerant of different approaches in a “to each his own” manner but that would continually bounce different versions of materiality off each other, seeking always the mutual implication of bibliographic, sociological, and linguistic realities. This is clearly a strenuous program, but, at least in Hack's book, nonetheless attractive for its potential rigors.
