ABSTRACT
Like twenty-first-century U.S. popular culture, Victorian novels seem to distrust not vulgarity but, rather, those who think themselves above it. When Dickens writes that “Mr. Dombey habitually looked over the vulgar herd, not at them” (351), we prepare ourselves for the delicious spectacle of Mr. Dombey’s being cut down to size. Or when one particularly repellent character in Collins’s The Woman in White says about another, “The name (in my opinion a remarkably vulgar one) was Fanny” (361), the opinion only increases our disapproving distance from the haughty antivulgarian. In Victorian fiction, to show excessive distaste for vulgarity is to betray a fatal character flaw: a concern for style and class at the expense of ethics. Having recounted one of innumerable instances of all-too-human behavior on the part of her characters, the narrator of Middlemarch pauses “to reflect on the means of elevating a low subject”:
“The reader” may bristle at this Eliotic disciplinary sarcasm, but it merely expresses what amounts to the pedagogical consensus of Victorian fiction: to prefer the “figuratively ungenteel” to the literally ungenteel – to value social distinction over moral discrimination – is to prove oneself not just a bad reader but effectively illiterate, farther beneath the community of fellow-feeling that every Victorian novel summons into being than a monkey is beneath a margrave.
