Novelists

This is a continuation of the theme begun at my recent post on female utilitarian authors. I will just add to this post as I stumble across novelists who deal with utilitarianism in a direct fashion. Of course there are the female novelists listed at the earlier post, but that post also includes authors of non-fiction.

The depth of literature available, and the often stellar names associated with utilitarian themes (either for or against), gives an indication of the impact of Benthamite ideas on nineteenth century British society, and its offshoots.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

The English constitutional lawyer, Albert Venn Dicey wrote this to James Bryce (Bryce Papers, Bodleian Library,3-41 (18/8/05)):

‘Bulwer whose whole aim was to represent the predominant sentiment of every time in wh. he wrote gives in his earlier writings great consideration to benthamism.’ [sic]

Go to the Bulwer-Lytton contest!

When Arthur Hardy sailed to South Australia from England as an immigrant, he wrote the following on 3 Feb 1839 about Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, Ernest Maltravers:

‘I think it the best work of the kind I ever read, it has more of the Philosophy of real life than any book I know of…’

Arthur Hardy was the brother of Harriet Taylor. Taylor is listed in the female utilitarian authors post. Taylor married John Stuart Mill in 1851, but she had known him since 1830. Hardy lived at Glen Osmond, now a suburb of Adelaide.

Thomas Carlyle

Sartor Resartus -  click on ‘Read this Book’ tab, then search for ‘utilitarian’.

Charles Dickens

Hard Times

Benjamin Disraeli

Click on Disraeli’s name to go to my previous post on his novel, The Young Duke.

John Frederick Denison Maurice

Excerpt from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on James Mill

Virtually everything that James Mill ever wrote had a pedagogical purpose. He was a relentlessly didactic writer whose most important essays — Government, in particular — take the form of clipped, concise, deductive arguments. It is a style which his contemporaries either admired or detested, as can be seen for instance in F. D. Maurice’s novel Eustace Conway. When the Benthamite Morton discovers Eustace reading Mill’s Essay on Government, he asks his opinion of Mill. Eustace replies:

“I think him nearly the most wonderful prose-writer in our language.” “That do not I,” says Morton. “I approve the matter of his treatises exceedingly, but the style seems to me detestable.”

“Oh!,” says Eustace, “I cannot separate matter and style … My reason for delighting in this book is, that it gives such a fixedness and reality to all that was most vaguely brilliant in my speculations — it converts dreams into demonstrations” (quoted in Thomas 1969, 255-56).