Hatred and Civility

Christopher Lane's urbane and nuanced study of that most anomalous yet central figure-the good Victorian hater-restores to us the shadowy other of the age's much-vaunted ethic of sympathy. Hatred and Civility is a dramatic and timely advance in our understanding of Victorian sociability. -- Nicholas Dames, Columbia University The invention of the idea of civility acknowledges the scope of hatred. What Lane has to tell us about the Victorians-our cartoon philanthropists-in this wonderfully cunning and lucid book is that hearing the voices of hatred in nineteenth-century literature is key to understanding the contentions and hedonisms, the pieties and principles of their society, which is so like our own. Hatred and Civility puts us more closely in touch with the wilder energies of a culture. -- Adam Phillips, author of Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories In his brilliant new book, Christopher Lane examines representations of an intractably anticommunitarian hatred in Victorian literature. Going far beyond familiar accounts of complexities and duplicities in the ethical and sexual ideals of Victorian culture, Lane discovers in the works of great writers of the period-notably Dickens, George Eliot, and Browning-affects of rage and hate that exceed all narrative control. With impeccable scholarship and admirable clarity, he gives us an often harrowing portrait of these writers' fascination with drives that are irreducible to psychological explanations-drives of self-extinction and of motiveless rage at the happiness of others. This is a major work of cultural criticism. -- Leo Bersani, author of The Culture of Redemption Hatred and Civility... contains all of my heroes, and I devoured it with the utmost pleasure. -- Florence King, The Misanthrope's Corner and author of With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy

Offering an account of works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Robert Browning, and Joseph Conrad, this title explains why many Victorians nursed a hostile vision of man and society and how misanthropy - once a means of conveying integrity and justified disdain of society's excesses - turned immoral and quasi-criminal.To understand hatred and civility in today's world, argues Christopher Lane, we should start with Victorian fiction. Although the word "Victorian" generally brings to mind images of prudish sexuality and well-heeled snobbery, it has above all become synonymous with self-sacrifice, earnest devotion, and moral rectitude. Yet this idealized version of Victorian England is surprisingly scarce in the period's literature--and its journalism, sermons, poems, and plays--where villains, hypocrites, murderers, and cheats of all types abound.