| From benevolent societies to secret societies, social science to socialism, Victorian England witnessed a proliferation of the term “social.” The term's expanded usage, however, is less important than its consolidation as a category denoting the fundamental condition of human existence, often articulated in contrast to the political and economic realms. In this dissertation, I examine the role Victorian novelists (George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and H. G. Wells) and theorists (John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Walter Bagehot, and Bernard Bosanquet) played in devising and disputing new theories of sociality. Increasingly for Victorian writers, I argue, the “social” comes to represent the bonds and obligations between people that precede all other affiliations. Unlike eighteenth century notions of the social, which are beholden to the political discourse of citizenship, during the nineteenth century, this close identification between the political and the social splinters. New institutions devised to foreground the reciprocal ties between persons—most notably “free” or secular associations, but also discursive forms like the novel—begin to supplant traditional political solutions to moral and economic dilemmas.; Victorian novelists, I argue, were central to debates over viewing the world as intrinsically social. Eliot, for example, envisions a social world in which the conscious participation its constituents would dispense with the need for politics. Trollope, conversely, is troubled by the increasing socialization of politics and strives to safeguard politics from becoming to “common” in its practices. Wells, writing in the wake of debates about socialism and individualism, expresses concern over the possible disappearance of social identity and the return of new and more powerful forms of political power. Although the novelists I consider take differing stances towards the notion of a pervasive sociality, each posits the need for individuals to cultivate a reflective relationship to the world around them. Moreover, because the novel illuminates the relationship between individual consciousness and the external world, it also constructs an interdependence between psychological and social identities. This dissertation thus charts three concurrent and interrelated Victorian phenomena: the rise of sociality, the emergence of the modern psychological subject, and the novel's part in establishing their mutuality. |
