Susan David Bernstein and Elsie B. Michie, eds. Victorian Vulgarity: Taste in Verbal and Visual Culture. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009. ISBN: 978075466405-5. Price: US$99.95/£55.00

In the introduction to this lively collection, Susan David Bernstein and Elsie B. Michie claim “vulgarity” as a keyword in Raymond Williams’ sense: one of those “strong, difficult, and persuasive words in everyday usage,” as Williams put it. The contributions to their collection bear out the wide dispersal of the term in nineteenth-century British culture, as well as the bewildering range of uses to which it could be put. Indeed, part of the interest of the volume lies in deciphering what precisely it is (or isn’t) about: so multifarious are the contexts in which vulgarity is mobilized that it can sometimes seem less a topic in nineteenth-century culture than a synonym for it. As Bernstein and Michie put it: A strong word, then, but a maddeningly, instructively diffuse one as well. Bernstein and Michie justify the “Victorian” in their title by tracing vulgarity’s mutation from a purely descriptive term in the fifteenth century (signifying a vernacular language or the “ordinary” classes) to a pejorative, emotionally fraught one denoting coarseness and “pushing” behavior. According to Bernstein and Michie this gradual transformation starts in the seventeenth but reaches its zenith in the nineteenth century, a fact they reasonably ascribe to energies of democratization and massification that made Victorian commonness seem both more threatening and more … common. Thus Victorian vulgarity as it emerges here both was, and wasn’t just, an insult leveled at unrefined working-class people or ambitious middle-class ones; it could also target upper-class figures who too strenuously marked their social distinction. Women and Jews were other predictably easy targets for the label vulgarity (as attested here by Bernstein’s essay on women readers in the British Museum and Meri-Jane Rochelson’s on Jewish spirituality), as were, surprisingly, both the art of Indian craftsmen and the European-style mass-production of such crafts later in the century (as Julie F. Codell demonstrates in her piece on “imperial reversals”). Even the materiality of the artistic medium itself could seem suspiciously vulgar, a twist explored in Nancy Rose Marshall’s essay on the society painter James Tissot. By the end of this collection, vulgarity comes to seem less a specifiable quantity than what John Kucich, in his afterword to the collection, calls “a generalized cultural hysteria” (242). Vulgarity—and the accusation of vulgarity—emerges as the emotional fuel of rapid social realignment. Some of the strongest pieces here are finely, even uncomfortably, attuned to the volatility of the projective dynamics that result. Beth Newman’s “The Vulgarity of Elegance” tracks the “counter-intuitive association of the vulgar with the elevated” (17) in several fictional and instructional texts of the period. Newman notes that “the indirect and allusive terms chosen by some speakers for their greater delicacy serve as red flags for those with greater symbolic or cultural capital, and euphemism becomes the marker of social insecurity—hence, of inferiority” (22); deliciously, Newman notes that the word “elegant” had become a marker of a lack of elegance by mid-century. At the center of Newman’s discussion is the conversation in Chapter XI of Middlemarch (1874) in which Rosamond Vincy objects to the vulgarity of her mother’s claim that her beautiful daughter commands “the pick of” the men in the town. When Mrs. Vincy offers to amend the statement to “the most superior young men,” her son Fred objects to the vulgarity of this new phrase (“Superior is getting to be shopkeeper’s slang”) and upbraids his sister for the superfine sensibility that has led to the conversation in the first place. Thus in a few exquisitely shaded lines of dialogue, expertly analyzed by Newman, George Eliot sketches the educational distinction separating both children from their cheerfully …