ABSTRACT
She has read every story that has come out in Bow Bells for the last three years, … she knows all the names, can tell you which lord it was that saved the girl from the carriage when the ‘osses were tearing like mad toward a precipice a ‘undred feet deep, and all about the baronet for whose sake the girl went out to drown herself in the moonlight. (EW, 5) The implication of Moore’s treatment of reading is that Esther’s “powerlessness to put syllables together” in an increasingly literate culture is actually power, for it prevents her from developing dangerously romantic notions about the world. In following with this logic, she adheres to what Moore presents as her instinctual nature, overcoming many hardships and ultimately persevering. Through the themes of racing and reading in Esther Waters, Moore engages in two very timely and converging controversies of the late century: gambling and literary production. Although the debates that ensued from these issues differ widely in topic and scope, at the heart of both is concern over the disruption and renegotiation of social, economic, and aesthetic hierarchies. In the same way that the time-honored, aristocratic valence of horse racing was altered at the end of the century by the transformation of the turf into a mass-betting industry, traditional aesthetic hierarchies were being similarly challenged by growing literacy rates, advanced technologies of literary production, and the concurrent rise of mass culture which threatened the aesthetic authority of art critics and artists alike. In the debates over the proper form and function of art during the late century, controversial authors such as George Moore2 were in the curious position of defending their artistic territory from the accusations of moralists, while, at the same time, they were moralizing about the uses of art and the deterioration of high culture by the influences of mass production. And in the case of Esther Waters, these vexed and varied aesthetic discourses-inflected as they were with concerns about gender and class, reading and writing, and the uses of leisure and pleasureintersect on the territories of the turf itself. The Fin De Siècle and the Degeneration of the Turf Writing in 1885, journalist Thomas H. Escott asserts, “The turf and the operations essential or subsidiary to it possess more of a universal power in society … than anything else … It is the ruling passion.”3 While Escott may exaggerate, technological advancements of the late century transformed horse racing, which traditionally had been a relatively exclusive, aristocratic pursuit, into a popular, commercial, mass-betting industry. Improvements in transportation, communication, and print technology consolidated the business of the turf and democratized the thoroughbred’s pedigreed body: races became daily events, as horse trainers could now safely transport champion mounts on the railway to meetings around the country; telegraphs issued immediate race results, and a
profusion of racing rags published the news of the day, allowing city dwellers to follow their favorites from afar and wager without ever witnessing a competition; gentlemen and laborers alike placed bets with a growing body of professional bookmakers; and through advertisements in the popular press, shrewd tipsters promised to impart inside information to all comers for a price.4 While gaming itself had been the ostensible vice of the leisure and lower classes during the earlyindustrial period, by the late-Victorian age, staking money on horses was a recreational activity available to the entire population and practiced on a massive scale.5 As horse racing became increasingly professionalized, many viewed betting on horses as an affront to the Victorian virtues of industry, thrift, and prudence-as an irrational endeavor that fostered improbable hopes for easy earnings. Thus, the popularity of gambling incited a concomitant enthusiasm for its abolition, and the foreboding rhetoric denouncing the turf drew upon and helped to promulgate the contemporary theory of degeneration, which, in the final decades of the nineteenth century, foretold the end of imperial progress by tracking decay on national, social, and aesthetic planes. According to Daniel Pick, degeneration theory gained acceptance in the 1880s, when “there was sustained and growing pessimism … about the ramifications of evolution, the efficacy of liberalism, the life in and of the metropolis, the future of society in a perceived world of mass democracy and socialism.”6 Noting the ubiquity of degeneracy discourse, Stephen Arata states: “Degeneracy afflicted the individual, but its supposed causes … and effects … reached deep into the collective life of the people. At every point the biological model of the degenerate provided ways to theorize social decay.”7 Anti-gambling rhetoric did just that, linking the perceived “vice” and “misery” of betting on horses directly to the deterioration of character, the domestic sphere, professional enterprise, and empire itself. As one pundit describes it:
Degeneracy discourse, much like the debates over gambling, was an effort toward social control. According to William Greenslade, degenerationism was “an enabling strategy by which the conventional and respectable classes could justify and articulate their hostility to the deviant, the diseased and the subversive.”9 Drawing upon the culturally current vocabulary of degeneration, therefore, antiracing reformers represented gaming as an utterly pathological activity-one that
distorted the otherwise healthy impulse toward profit and industry into an infectious, all-consuming desire for wealth without work. In response to the moral hazards posed by the racetrack, the National AntiGambling League formed in 1890 and organized its opposition to betting around three main principles: first, gambling was a risky, non-productive, irrational pursuit, which defied man’s natural capacity for reason; second, because avarice motivated the gambler, relations between gamblers were asocial and dangerous; and third, the level of chance involved in gambling, opposed as it was to the institution of patrilineal succession, made it an illegitimate means of transferring property.10 Such allegations resonated with the reforming middle classes; in the opinion of league vice-president Seton Churchill, there was scarcely a social ill that gambling did not provoke:
Although the reactionary rhetoric of such groups often attacked the leisure practices of the gentry as well, whose perceived profligacy was thought to influence negatively the work ethic of the laboring populations, the primary object of these campaigns was the moral regulation of what was perceived as the dangerously impoverished and increasingly restive under classes.12 Much of the opposition to gambling, therefore, was markedly class-conscious, for only when certain populations practiced the unfettered acquisition and exchange of capital did the regulation and/or prohibition of betting become a national concern. The steward of the Jockey Club, Admiral Rous, expresses this tradition of paternalism when he states in 1844, “the poor should be protected; but I would let a rich man ruin himself if he pleases.”13 Among the series of legislative acts attempting to curtail gambling from mid-century on, the Betting Houses Act of 1853 was most discriminatory by class, for it rendered illegal the use of any room or house for the purposes of betting or the receipt of any money as a wager in advance of an event.14 According to David Dixon, because the law did not pertain to wagers made in private clubs or based on credit, this ordinance was “an attempt to deal with the problems associated with working class gambling without infringing on betting facilities enjoyed by those higher on the social scale.”15 Ironically, such legislation only exacerbated the problem by making it more visible. Wray Vamplew explains, “The general effect of the 1853 Act was to shift the locus of working class betting from the public house into the street.”16 As evidenced by the implementation of the 1853 Act, as well as subsequent betting acts, the impulse not to work, which gambling clearly symbolized in the cultural
imagination, was ever more menacing when acted upon by the lower classes. In the debates over gambling, therefore, categories of high and low culture, virtue and vice, and the individual and the masses are obscured in order that they be redefined, for as one commentator observes in 1889, “A haze hangs about the Turf, and all the principles which should guide human nature are blurred and distorted; the high-minded, honourable racing men can do nothing or next to nothing, and the scum work their will in only too many instances.”17 While reformers and legislators objected to gambling outright, even sporting men who wrote in defense of the turf had their qualms about the “common” element that they saw permeating the track and whom they blamed for instigating the racing world’s apparent degradation. For such traditionalists, professional gambling violated the concept of casual punting among peers, thereby polluting in their minds the “sport of kings.” As early as 1868, Anthony Trollope articulated a gentlemen’s standard of rationality, purpose, and purity that was clearly classspecific when he warned against betting that was “unreasonable in its expenditure, immoral and selfish in its tendencies, or worse of all, unclean and dishonest in its traffic.”18 By 1889, James Runciman depicts this new breed of players as a craven “mob of stay at home gamblers,” complaining that such people “do not care a rush for horses; they long, with all the crazy greed of true dupes, to gain money without working for it, which is where the mischief comes in.”19 Gambling, in Runciman’s opinion, poses a distinct threat to the productivity and virility of working-class men, for as he goes on to say, “Cupidity, mean anxieties, unwholesome excitements, gradually sap the morality of really sturdy fellows-the last shred of manliness is torn away, and the ordinary human intelligence is replaced by vulpine cunning.”20 Likewise, turf correspondent L.H. Curzon envisions the contemporary racetrack as a battleground besieged by vulgar commercial interests when he writes in 1892, “It has been said of the ‘sport of kings’ that, so long as it is surrounded by that army of gamblers, which now so flatly flourishes on all our racecourses, it will continue to be what it has long since become, a monstrous game of speculation.”21 By the century’s end, therefore, the public outcry over gambling took the form of a moral panic, compelling Lord Beaconsfield to pronounce publicly that the turf had become “a vast engine of national demoralization.”22 Having identified within the lower classes both the primary perpetuators and the most vulnerable victims of corruption at the track, the gambling debates assumed a paternalistic, moralizing, and reformative tone. Curiously, however, although gambling as a growing industry prompted outrage that was both prevalent and pronounced, historians contend that the evils associated with the turf were essentially groundless, for as Dixon states: “it was a leisure activity which did not dominate the lives of any but a small minority.”23 Similarly, Ross McKibbin notes that despite efforts on the part of governmental commissions to link gambling with economic or social destitution, they “could find no general relationship between gambling and poverty, or between gambling and crime, other than that most gambling was illegal to start with.”24 Mark Clapson argues that “punters, despite
the claims of irrationality and wastefulness made against them, participated in this culture of betting and gambling with an outlook based on a complex system of beliefs and betting strategies which was almost always underpinned by selfrestraint.”25 Thus, Dixon concludes that, “The driving force of the anti-gambling movement was not so much moralism …, but rather concern about gambling’s effects on individual and national efficiency and on social and political stability.”26 While turf historians ascertain that gambling did not pose a legitimate threat to particular classes or the nation, nevertheless, they do not adequately explain why gambling became such a heated issue at the turn of the century. One way to elucidate this phenomenon is to examine how, in the late-Victorian imagination, the problem of the turf resonated with the very real challenges to systems of socioeconomic and aesthetic power occurring in other arenas, such as that of literary production. The Literary Machine and the Monstrous Masses Much as social and technological advancements-such as increased leisure time, higher wages, affordable transportation, and cheap publications-transformed the topography of the turf by late century, so did they revolutionize the literary marketplace. Forster’s Education Act of 1870 established compulsory elementary education, which cultivated literacy among the lower classes by the 1880s and 1890s.27 New print and paper-making technology not only decreased the price of books, dissolving the monopoly held by the circulating libraries and dethroning the novel’s ponderous, three-decker format, but gave rise to new journalism, or the mass-production of inexpensive publications which targeted the tastes of a large, popular audience. Rita S. Kranidis observes that “new journalism’s contribution to the mass production of visual art and literature served to broaden and problematize the term ‘art’ itself, its contents, and the classification of its audiences.”28 According to Rachel Bowlby, “More than at any time since the invention of printing and the beginnings of the first commodified literary genre … printed matter in general was becoming just another ‘novelty’ to be devoured or consumed as fast as fashions changed.”29 As literacy spread and the variety and volume of printed material grew, reading for pleasure became an increasingly suspect activity, and ironically, the ensuing debate over the reading habits of the public was conducted largely in the popular press.30 The expanding publishing industry and the size and diversity of the new readership had a paradoxical effect on aesthetic production: these developments widened circulation and altered that which had been a largely homogeneous and circumscribed audience, thus allowing for more artistic and generic experimentation. At the same time, however, the growth of readership and the print industry helped to originate a powerful mass culture that would upset the aesthetic authority of the critics and which many authors would view as marking
the demise of high-minded, artistic endeavor. In his discussion of the phenomenon of print capitalism in America, Jonathan Elmer remarks on this inherent contradiction:
One commentator identifies the crux of the problem when he dramatically proclaims in 1896, “Reading, it is safe to say, is a lost art. And what has killed it is the spread of reading.”32 Due to an increasingly literate population on one hand, and the emergence of radical modern literary movements on the other, the traditional aesthetic hierarchies of the Victorians were becoming more and more vexed during the 1880s and 1890s. In discussions over artistic merit and function, conservative arbiters of aesthetic form reacted with outrage to the very different literary models of the realists, naturalists, aesthetes, and decadents, whose art was seen as mutually depraved due to its sometimes graphic, often coarse and/or overtly sexual subject matter, its corrupt characters and inglorious themes of ruin and dissolution, and its disregard for larger social and moral obligations. What was perceived as the utter immoderation of these works registered for conservative audiences the dangerous extent to which English literature had fallen. For instance, in his 1894 article entitled “Reticence in Literature,” Arthur Waugh locates two poles of excess that envision in modern literary production and consumption the shameful collapse of gender categories:
Although the beliefs and practices of late century aesthetic movements were much more complex and diverse than the general censure toward them implies, the artists and novelists who enacted them were largely unified in the belief that art must adhere to “truth” in content and aesthetic form, and therefore, it must be free from binding moral, philosophical, or social concerns. Yet while these artists were intent on defending art and high culture against simpering middle-class moralists, they too were troubled by the mechanization of literary production and what they perceived to be the appallingly base appetites of a growing body of readers, in which the degradation of art by the rise of literacy and consumerism was embodied in the specter of the evermore powerful masses. As George Gissing’s character Henry Ryecroft remarks in New Grub Street (1891), “Democracy is full of menace
to all the finer hopes of civilisation.”34 The paradox that Gissing’s novel hyperbolically represents is that in order to gain actual and cultural capital, an artist must be popular, but by being popular, the male artist necessarily sacrifices his aspirations toward artistic excellence. The aesthetic movements of the late century began as a rebellion against the ugliness of the industrial age, against mass production and mass education, and against the strictures of Victorian morality by which the culture was bound. Yet the same impulses that separated such aesthetes from conventional society aligned them with bourgeois morality, for they felt they had to define their art in opposition to what they saw as the banal pleasuring of the masses in popular culture. Andreas Huyssen notes this conflict:
Thus, the artists of these modern literary movements were in the untenable position of denouncing the interdictions of moralists while simultaneously moralizing about the proper uses of literacy and art. Much like the turf at the end of the century, literacy became a site of mass cultural production, so that the accusations leveled at gambling and reading were one and the same. In the eyes of conservative moralists, both activities were seen as denigrating traditional gender roles, as being dangerously addictive, and as marking a loss of productivity. “The lure of mass culture,” as Huyssen observes, “has traditionally been described as the threat of losing oneself in dreams and delusions and of merely consuming rather than producing.”36 In an essay from 1874 entitled “The Vice of Reading,” the author admonishes his audience in a tone that is nearly indistinguishable from the hysterical response to gambling: “Such reading as at present prevails has, by reason both of its quality and quantity, led to a deterioration of the human species, physically, mentally, and morally.” He goes on to assert that “we entertain no doubt; nor do we see how, unless the vicious habit be somehow corrected, the race can escape from being ultimately divided into two sections, the members of one which will be little removed from invalids, and the members of the other scarcely distinguishable from cretins.”37 Similar to the unwarranted claims regarding the ill-effects of gambling, however, the purported alienation of the artist in a culture of commercialized, mass production was largely unfounded. According to Patrick Brantlinger, “While there were more readers than ever before … and while it is also the case that many mediocre novelists managed to write bestsellers, it is not true that writers of aesthetic and intellectual material were excluded from the expanding literary marketplace.”38 What occurs in the aesthetic and gambling debates of the fin de siècle, therefore, is
not so much the reassessment and reassertion of social value and prerogative as it is a disruption of these categories, in which the reciprocal relations between high culture and mass culture become most anxiously apparent. Brantlinger states that “The rise of the mass reading public and the romantic reaction to it were related to class conflict, which is in turn inscribed in the widening split between ‘high culture and mass culture, bourgeoisie and working class’ characteristic of modernity.”39 However, the origins of this “split” in a particular class or political faction is fictitious, for as Simon Frith argues, the use of cultural and aesthetic practices to produce real or imaginary social difference is not limited to the bourgeoisie, but is a socially general phenomenon, in which distinctions of high and low culture “describe neither separate art worlds nor different class attitudes, but are, rather, all at play across all cultural practices and indeed produce each other.”40 Frith continues by asserting that “even in the nineteenth century the increasing concern to define taste boundaries reflected the extent to which tastes were actually shared across classes-the problem was the control of public space; the threat was social intermingling.”41 Raymond Williams finds, moreover, that while the discursive construct of the “masses” is enacted to define self from other, at the same time, the term’s logic draws attention to the impossibility of such distinctions:
There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.42 It is clear, therefore, that the debates over the integrity of art and its corruption by commercialism and low culture were not so much about issues of form and content as they were about fluctuations of and struggles for cultural and aesthetic power. Much as the turf was a site where unruly populations could potentially accrue social power through capital, the new literary marketplace threatened existing institutions of moral, economic, and aesthetic authority. Lynn Pykett explains, “questions of aesthetic representation-who or what may be represented in fiction, in what manner, by whom, and for whom-are deeply enmeshed with debates about political representation and with anxieties about authority and control that permeate the culture.”43 While the contest between artists and their critics evinces anxiety regarding the growing power of readers and the literary marketplace to direct and define moral and aesthetic categories, this debate is informed further by feminist and socialist discourses of the period. Because that which members of the aesthetic elite constructed and perceived as low culture disrupted traditional aesthetic hierarchies, they sought to control and mitigate its threat in part by forging a disparaging
discursive alliance between the masses and women and workers. As Kranidis claims, “The High/Low paradigm consigned to evaluations of art and culture during the Victorian age concurred with class polarities, with Low (or ‘mass’) Culture alluding to the leisure activities of the working classes, women, and other marginalized subjects.”44 She goes on to point out that “Utilizing their characteristic sympathy toward the working class ‘masses’ as an underrepresented and thematically challenging group to write about,” late-century authors “combined two contentious subjects in their novels: Women and the workingclasses became the working-class heroine.”45 Huyssen likewise determines a conceptual link between women and mass culture in modernism:
Such marginalized groups, nevertheless, maintain important ideological truck in cultural production, for as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White claim, “the low-Other is despised and denied at the level of political organization and social being whilst it is instrumentally constitutive of the shared imaginary repertoires of the dominant culture.” 47 Thus, while feminist and socialist agendas were vastly divergent and often in opposition to one another, works of British realism and naturalism, in particular, helped to unify or amass these movements in the cultural imagination. The distinctions between realism and naturalism in Britain are much less clear than they are in late-nineteenth century American literature. Both Karl Beckson and Robin Gilmour note that these two terms are used interchangeably by nineteenth-century British critics, and that what we now identify as “naturalism” was often referred to simply as “realism.” However, in most cases, current distinctions still apply, for according to Beckson, realism “implies not the scientific determinism and methodology of [naturalism] but a general fidelity to commonplace experience-in settings, characters, and dialogue-to evoke a sense of the real world as opposed to romantic fantasy.”48 Gilmour claims that naturalism “differs not only in the degree of emphasis it puts on the conditioning power of the environment, but also in its underlying ideology, which is that of a scientism derived from biology and applied with aggressive literalism to the human world.”49 We can consider British naturalism, therefore, to be a subset of realism, differing by way of its emphasis on scientific determinism and characters’ largely instinctual responses to environmental influence. That said, naturalism was never a popular form in Britain, and although some of Thomas Hardy’s works are considered naturalistic, critics agree that the genre is represented primarily in the early works of George Moore.
