ABSTRACT
For Victorian critics cleverness functioned as the kind of minor aesthetic category that Sianne Ngai has recently identified in the culture of modernism. Like cuteness in its relation to beauty, cleverness was typically opposed to the higher category of genius, as when a reviewer of Wilkie Collins explains that “[w]e should . . . prefer to assign to [the author] overflowing cleverness rather than genius” (Page 264). Consigning an author to a secondary status, cleverness had the double function Ngai finds in cuteness, allowing critics to convey a pleasurable response to a work of art while at the same time insisting on the work’s limited importance. Functioning as “the means by which one judges under cover of describing” (40), such categories mark an uneasy awareness of the link between capitalism and aesthetic production. But while Ngai has associated such uneasiness primarily with modern artistic practices, an exploration of cleverness allows us to locate it also in the Victorian novel, which was born at the moment Thomas Carlyle identified with the emergence of the “cash nexus.” To track this connection, I turn to Frances and Anthony Trollope, whose practice, reviews, and novels allow us to analyze changes that took place in the uses of cleverness between the 1830s and 1840s, when Frances became a famous author in the years that also marked the beginning of Charles Dickens’s career, and the 1860s and 1870s, when the Victorian novel took its most distinctively complex form in the late works of Anthony Trollope, as well as Charles Dickens and George Eliot.
