In his classic work on the Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels claimed that it was not social class alone that separated the English proletariat from their erstwhile compatriots: “It is not surprising that the working class has gradually become a race wholly apart from the English bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie has more in common with every other nation of the earth than with the workers in whose midst it lives. The workers speak other dialects, have other thoughts and ideals, other customs and moral principles, a different religion and other politics than those of the bourgeoisie. Thus they are two radically dissimilar nations, as unlike as difference of race could make them.” Saree Makdisi’s refined work of literary criticism, Making England Western, shows that Engels was not alone in his intertwining of race and class.
Making England Western aims to show that settled ideas of English Occidental racial identity did not emerge fully formed, rather they came into being during the Romantic Era of the early nineteenth century (xi-xii). Drawing carefully on the work of Edward Said and Stuart Hall, Makdisi argues that emergent ideas of race intersected with similarly nascent ideas of class, exemplified by the widespread belief that the urban poor were distinct from those higher up and more “civilized” in the race/class hierarchy. This confusing situation was addressed, he argues, through a process of “Occidentalization”, a social reform of internal Others anticipating the later history of colonial reform of external Others.
In a multi-faceted review of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century English culture, Makdisi begins by identifying this process of Occidentalization in contemporary perceptions of London; he mixes textual analysis of social reformist literature with an intriguing discussion of that literature’s spatial logic. As Makdisi shows, it was not just that the “street Arabs” of urban London were seen as suitable candidates for ameliorative reform but the very spaces they inhabited were racialized and presented as exotic. Both the spaces and their inhabitants were felt to be equally in need of a strong hand to guide them into modernity. And indeed, temporality is a recurring point of discussion throughout. Provocatively, Makdisi suggests that the slum clearances of the period, which operated in tandem with a harshly racialized discourse, are of a piece with the history of ethnic cleansing:
Given that the people thus forced from their homes were in some cases black or Irish, or, when they were not, were racially configured as “Kaffirs” or “Arabs”, was this not an act of ethnic cleansing recapitulating those of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries (in Ireland or the Americas) and anticipating those of the twentieth century (in such places as Palestine and the Balkans)? Would it have been so easy to displace tens of thousands of people without their prior classification as members of a racial and civilizational other (84)?
But it was not only the common peoples and the spaces they inhabited that were “colonized”. Plebeian culture was also subjected to processes of Occidentalization. Devoting a chapter to Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798), Makdisi examines the poet’s attempts to remake and rehabilitate this popular art form. Wordsworth’s project was one of Civilizing the Ballad, as the chapter’s title makes clear. Following this, Makdisi moves to a discussion of Mansfield Park. While the imperialist context of this work has been subject to much debate, Makdisi transcends this in a reading instead dedicated to the novel’s depictions of “English” characters (whether upper- or lower-class) who fail to embody an emergent set of national characteristics: “duty, self-denial, humility, internalized self-regulating discipline, frugality, and above all the relentless productivity and nourishment of property” (143). In other words, he situates Mansfield Park in the history of Occidentalism’s domestic social reform. A chapter on Byron analyses a cultural figure who “refused the Occidentalist imperative” (157), even if Makdisi’s insistence that this refusal reinforced the very ideas of Occident and Orient is not always that convincing. A penultimate chapter on Thomas Macaulay and Robert Southey seems to suggest that this narrative of Occidentalization has a final ending:
In this chapter I want to argue that it was in the 1830s that the critical—if not quite finally the terminal—blow was struck by the now-dominant form of Orientalism against its residual opponent and that the blow took the form of the devastating attack launched by Thomas Macaulay on the poet laureate Robert Southey (174).
Later in this chapter, Makdisi talks of how, with this rise of “the universal culture of Occidental modernity”, “a relatively stable sense of who ‘we’ are emerges and ‘we’ gradually settle into a more normalized sense of identity” (184-186). The subtly ambiguous language (e.g., “not quite finally the terminal blow” and “a relatively stable sense of who ‘we’ are”) points in the opposite direction—the making of an Occidental Englishness is an open-ended process rather than a finite story. Nonetheless, he does end the chapter in the past tense: “England was made Western” (192).
The final chapter, on Dickens and “Irregular Modernization”, pushes against the idea that there is a final endpoint in his story and highlights the tensions that continue(d) to exist within Occidentalism. Makdisi’s discussion of Dickens focuses on his unfinished last work Edwin Drood. The central theme identified in Makdisi’s reading is “that it is no longer possible (leaving aside whether or not it ever ways or will be) to cleanly demarcate the space of the self from that of the other; the space of ‘whiteness’ from that of ‘blackness’; the space of Occident from that of the Orient; or for that matter an Occidental ‘us’ from an Oriental ‘them’” (198). Makdisi thus ends on a note of theoretical complexity and conscious ambiguity.
This question of finality, though, haunts the book, the one minor issue in an otherwise elegant work of literary theory that also has much to teach historians of race and class. Despite the operative present tense of the title, much of Makdisi’s text is written in the past tense; less a vision of a perpetual process of becoming Western and more a story of how the English proletariat became white in a process that is now over. Makdisi does himself a disservice here, since his focus on class and race could do much to highlight the political culture of twentieth and, even, twenty-first century Britain. There is a certain undue neatness to how Makdisi sketches out the parameters of his narrative, as if this race-class indeterminacy was expunged from England by mid-century. Yet, if race and class are always coming into being, if they are unending processes rather than stable and discrete labels (which Makdisi, to be fair, does recognise), then this is a story that cannot have any neat conclusions. Indeed, the manner in which tropes of a feral underclass and feckless and work-shy “Chavs” have (re-)emerged in England in recent years shows the long-term historical significance of Makdisi’s analysis. The English working class still remains a “race” apart.
