ABSTRACT"THERE IS SOMETHING IN ALL THIS VERY LIKE DEMOCRACY": CULTURES OF POLITICAL DISCUSSION IN THE VICTORIAN NOVELByInna Yevgenievna VolkovaI examine a strain of Victorian novels that I call "novels of discussion" and their imaginings of various models of political discussion in the public sphere. In their aspiration for the liberal ideals of a "free and equal discussion (15)," to use John Stuart Mill's phrase, these novels articulate a variety of such blueprints that compete with and build on one another. Analyzing the potentialities and internal contradictions of these models, I intervene in three areas of scholarly interest: Victorian liberalism, the form of the novel, and public sphere theory. I focus on Victorian liberalism's investments in the formal organization of political discussion in the public sphere and suggest that the changeability and free play among discussion models lie at the heart of liberalism's project, calling for on an ongoing revision of how to discuss ideas and exchange opinions. I argue that Victorian liberal culture had high stakes in conceiving of the individual's agency in terms of an active discursive presence in the public arena and a collaborative pursuit of "truth" through face-to-face discussion. I seek to show the limitations of a commonly held view among Victorianists that nineteenth-century liberalism privileged privatized interiority and individuated reflection and conceived of social agency through the processes of inward cognition. In contrast, I show that novels often cultivated the argumentative energy and the intersubjective collaboration in discussion as a means to grapple with socio-economic and cultural issues. While I refrain from reading novels as instruments of disciplinary power, I also do not view them as texts that simply propagate a "free and equal discussion." Rather, my close-readings reveal how the novels showcase the progressive potentialities of various discussion models, while also exploring these models' dangers, impracticability, ambivalences, and internal tensions. In an attempt to strive for social justice and inclusion, the novels gesture specifically to face-to-face discussion as a process that facilitates a sincere exchange of opinions, ensures equality based on mutual respect and recognition, and so lays the foundation of democratic sociality. As an artifact of print culture that created a mediated relationship with its anonymous faceless readership, the novel becomes a seemingly paradoxical site of advocating for a face-to-face unmediated political discussion. I do not view this phenomenon as Victorians' nostalgia for the golden age before print. Rather, novelistic representation of face-to-face discussion was a way for Victorian novelists to bring it into full relief. They often self-consciously contrasted face-to-face discussion with the very medium through which it was represented. The project is arranged chronologically, spanning the late 1820's to the Edwardian period of the early twentieth century. The chapters focus on Harriet Martineau's tales of political economy, Benjamin Disraeli's novel Sybil, Charles Reade's Put Yourself in His Place, Walter Besant's All Sorts and Conditions of Men, George Gissing's Demos, and Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. While these novels at one time enjoyed widespread popularity, they are no longer staples of Victorian literature today. However, these novels' past popularity suggests that their preoccupation with political discussion reflects crucial facets of Victorian culture. Similar preoccupations, perhaps in less explicit ways, surface in more canonical authors such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and others. In what Walter Bagehot called the "age of discussion," the novels operated as an experimental ground for Victorians' ideals, hopes, and competing views about the public sphere.
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