ABSTRACT
This chapter starts from the well-known problem of defining “liberalism”—a word with distinct intellectual and party-political meanings in Victorian Britain, and interpreted differently again in America. It then considers three ways in which Victorian liberalism matters for students and scholars today. The first section looks at nineteenth-century liberal theory as a set of critical ideas still influential for thinking about political freedom and equality, the challenges of representative democracy, the conduct of political argument, and principles of free speech. The second section addresses the variety of “literary liberalisms” in the period, offering case studies of Matthew Arnold’s cultural criticism, George Eliot’s realist fiction, and Frederick Douglass’s distinctively American sense of the incomplete achievements of liberalism after slavery. A final section examines the changing fortunes of liberalism within critical theory over the twentieth century, and the reasons for its renewed prominence today.
