Carolyn Betensky. Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action and the Victorian Novel. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8139-3061-9. Price: US$39.50

In Feeling for the Poor, Carolyn Betensky argues that, despite its altruistic pose, Victorian “social-problem fiction” is not primarily concerned with the conditions of the working poor but rather with the emotions of the misunderstood bourgeoisie. The implications of this argument extend beyond nineteenth-century fiction, as she maintains, since such “novels are largely responsible for the idea that it matters how I feel about poverty, whether or not I do anything more than care about it” (1). This tendency to stop at the fact (or fiction) of feeling is crystallized in an apt epigraph from Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil; or, The Two Nations: “Enough that their sympathies are awakened; time and thought will bring the rest” (qtd. 1). It is hardly breaking news that Victorian novels tend to address middle-class concerns. Yet the ideological critique of middle-class fiction is newly persuasive here. This is due to the cumulative effect of a series of close (yet deep structural) readings of individual novels, which illustrate Betensky’s thesis to stunning effect. Her readings of Michael Armstrong (1839-40), Oliver Twist (1837-39), Sybil (1845), Mary Barton (1848), North and South (1854-55), Felix Holt (1866), and The Princess Casamassima (1885-86) reveal a striking pattern in which the caring of “misunderstood dominant” characters actively displaces the (actual) concerns of the workers in each plot. Again and again, the narrative energy unleashed by a class divide is resolved by the conversion of dominant individuals to right feeling. Even more crucial than this conversion narrative, however, is the revelation to a “spectral working-class reader” that these individuals really do care. Betensky’s argument is swashbuckling and damning, rather than subtle and ambivalent. As she notes in an afterword, it offers a rebuke to the assumption that “texts could be ‘subversive’ without actually subverting anything” (188). The book’s structure is roughly chronological; it begins with the discovery of the gap between the rich and the (manufacturing) poor as “two nations” in the 1830s and 1840s, and it ends with a society bent on befriending the poor in the 1880s. Yet the narrative arc trumps chronology in refreshing ways. The first chapter, for example, opens with a reading of Frances Trollope’s The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, before moving on to Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. This allows Betensky to introduce the ideological accomplishments of the genre in this period before honing in on an emergent discourse. With its special care for the “ignorance, innocence, or knowing indifference of its bourgeois characters in relation to the travails of the poor,” Michael Armstrong reveals with unusual clarity how “attention to the question of who among the bourgeoisie knows – and who doesn’t” becomes a “constitutive feature of the social-problem novel genre” (24). This emphasis on knowledge illuminates the odd doubling of middle-class rescuers in Oliver Twist. As Betensky notes, “Oliver doesn’t need two middle-class homes; he doesn’t need the kindness of two sets of warmhearted, generous people who are not only willing but moreover extremely eager to take him in” (48). Yet the fact that he is rescued not once but twice allows for the comparison of “two alternative modes of action”: the “act-now model” and the “seek-more-knowledge model” (52). It is the “new approach to knowledge” that carries the day (52). Betensky’s reading of Sybil in chapter two is similarly incisive. She diagnoses “the ‘two-nations’ trope” as “a recurring fantasy of radical class otherness and of symmetry between the classes despite that otherness, a fantasy that structures and encodes much bourgeois reformist discourse of the 1840s (and beyond)” (60). …