Victorian literature and the Victorian state - Goodlad

Studies of Victorian governance have been profoundly influenced by "Discipline and Punish", Michel Foucault's groundbreaking genealogy of modern power. Yet, according to Lauren Goodlad, Foucault's analysis is better suited to the history of the Continent than to 19th-century Britain, with its decentralized, voluntarist institutional culture and passionate disdain for state interference. Focusing on a wide range of Victorian writing - from literary figures such as Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Harriet Martineau, J.S. Mill, Anthony Trollope and H.G. Wells to prominent social reformers such as Edwin Chadwick, Thomas Chalmers, Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth and Beatrice Webb - Goodlad shows that Foucault's later essays on liberalism and "governmentality" provide better critical tools for understanding the 19th-century British state.;The book delves deeply into contemporary debates over poor law; sanitary, education and civil service reform; and the century-long attempt to substitute organized charity for state services. Goodlad's readings elucidate the distinctive quandary of Victorian Britain and, indeed, any modern society conceived in liberal terms: the elusive quest for a "pastoral" agency that is rational, all-embracing and effective but also anti-bureaucratic, personalized and liberatory. With a grounding in literary criticism, social history and political theory, Goodlad offers a post-Foucauldian account of Victorian governance that speaks to the resurgent neoliberalism of the 21st century.