Christopher Lane's latest book follows in the grand tradition of interventions, exemplified by works such as Steven Marcus's The Other Victorians, that cheerfully debunk tenacious stereotypes of the Victorians that exist both within the field of nineteenth-century studies and outside of it. Rather than sexuality, Lane takes aim at popular misconceptions about Victorian civility. While we still associate Victorian heroes and heroines with moral didacticism, duty, and self-abnegation—and tend to align the nineteenth-century novel as a whole with bourgeois liberal values and Christian ethics—Hatred and Civility argues that we do so at the risk of missing the complex emotional register of many of the period's most powerful novels. Hatred, misanthropy, and a venomous glee at the misfortune of others pervade the Victorian novel, according to Lane, and the power of these insidious sentiments often overrides the lip service paid to compassion, civic virtue, and fellow feeling. Though narrative closure may attempt to combat or conceal these affects, Lane argues that the pleasure of the text, its psychic impact, resides in the subversive force of its antisocial impulses.

If civility is the ostensible value that the Victorian novel promotes, then, hatred is its snarling, incendiary doppelgänger. Following a loosely chronological structure, Lane examines a wide range of texts that enact the tension that the book's title describes. In attentive and surprising readings of works by Edward Lytton Bulwer, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Robert Browning, and Joseph Conrad, he deftly traces this tension through significant swaths of each author's corpus to give an impressively detailed sense of how their relationship to the disruptive energies of their own work changes over time. Of particular interest are the chapters that focus on the book's more unlikely misanthropes. It is not surprising to find Brontë, Conrad, and even Browning in a work on uncivil desires, but Dickens and Eliot—the progenitors of the period's most self-sacrificing heroines—are, at least on the surface, less likely haters.

Lane's work on Dickens, however, does much to explain why the author's villains are more compelling than his heroes. Dickens's “attraction of repulsion,” as embodied in his numerous antiheroes, only increases over the course of his career so that by the writing of Our Mutual Friend a dark fascination with death and hatred irrevocably permeates his novel's form and content. Similarly, a chapter on Eliot shows how the author's thinking about altruism and empathy is consistently challenged by, if not predicated upon, her sense of the predatory and corrupting nature of communities. Looking at understudied but telling works such as The Lifted Veil alongside her more celebrated novels, Lane's book makes it impossible not to see the degree to which fantasies of vengeance and neighborly schadenfreude underwrite the narrative excitement of a significant portion of Eliot's work.

The originality and force of Hatred and Civility's argument resides in its claim that the pleasure of vengeance, a Wildean delight in the failures of our friends, and a sense of the ongoing incompatibility of the individual's desires with society's demands are crucial ways that texts stimulate us and hold our interest. What is this pleasure exactly, though? One explanation Lane gives for antisocial narrative pleasure is that hatred and other negative impulses in the novel reflect irresolvable contradictions in Victorian liberal ideology about progress and the possibility of social arrangements. Rather than lending facile closure to the questions, the authors who keep these contradictions alive in their texts allow them to resonate with gratifyingly real tension, which produces narrative interest.

But Lane's chief understanding of this pleasure is psychoanalytic. At key moments in the book, he aligns his authors’ insights with Freudian and Lacanian ideas about the death drive and life envy (the impulse to gauge our happiness against that of others). The writers that interest him are those that flout the conventional wisdom of nineteenth-century philosophy and psychology to give expression to the uncontrollable and often destructive drives that propel human action, and narrative plot, over and against their best intentions to promote what they thought of as the social good. Though these drives are unavoidable, according to Lane's theory, they are not necessarily undesirable. In works like Villette, for instance, they liberate individuals, at least temporarily, from the restrictive impacts of social mores. Sometimes the book's sense of the universality of these psychic impulses detracts from the strength of its historical argument, however. At one point, Lane compares the Victorian fascination with public hangings to the morbid satisfaction some contemporary Americans seem to derive from death penalty executions, but these two phenomena are arguably due to very different historical, cultural, and political conditions. While the book's use of cultural context and chronological structure suggests the importance of history to its argument, some of the questions it engages could be opened up further. The decline of religious faith and rise of existentialist philosophy on the Continent, as well as the slow spread of Darwinist thought, degeneration discourse, and scientific theories of entropy over the course of the century, all seem like possible explanations for the Victorians’ increasing inability to place their faith in ideals of the social good, but Hatred and Civility largely chooses not to engage with these contexts. While this might be because they have been well documented by other critics, or because Lane is more concerned with the irrational and innate nature of the drives he describes, it would have been interesting to learn more about how he understands the relationship between his authors’ growing apprehension of these drives and the epistemological uncertainty that surrounded them.

Whether or not one is sympathetic to the Freudian bias of the argument, however, Lane's vision of the period as one rife with antisocial sentiment is provocative and convincing, and amply demonstrated through the breadth of his analysis and the strength of his readings. It is also particularly timely now that there is a surge of interest in the field in questions of ethics, community, objectivity, and the liberal public sphere; in his vision of the Victorians as frequently unethical and illiberal, Lane presents a significant challenge to those interested in arguing otherwise.