Adulteration and the Late-Victorian Culture of Risk in Jude the Obscure

Dolin, Tim

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-57337-7_13

Adulteration and the Late-Victorian Culture of Risk in Jude the Obscure

Tim Dolin⁴

Chapter
First Online: 08 March 2018

562 Accesses

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ((PNWC))

Abstract

Few novelists were more concerned with the chronic uncertainty of modern everyday life than Thomas Hardy. This chapter reads Jude the Obscure (1896) through late-nineteenth-century risk culture. The “risk society thesis” was not propounded until the 1980s (by Ulrich Beck, after Chernobyl), to describe a condition that was unique to late modernity. Nevertheless, risk is critical to Hardyean tragedy, which happens when instinct is beset by consciousness: when the Schopenhauerean “will to life” impels individuals to actions which they or others perceive as the consequence of their decisions, and for which they feel obliged to take responsibility. In the utter solitariness of their “two-in-oneness,” and without recourse to delegitimized institutions such as marriage, family, community, universities, government, or religion, Jude and Sue must constantly make decisions about the dangers they face, but without the resources for such decision-making. Arabella, by contrast, is at home in the new risk culture.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter: USD 29.95; Price excludes VAT (USA)

eBook: USD 99.00; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Hardcover Book: USD 129.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

1.
Mads P. Sørensen and Allan Christiansen, “Ulrich Beck : An Introduction to the Theory of Second Modernity and the Risk Society,” in Ulrich Beck : Pioneer in Cosmopolitan Sociology and Risk Society, ed. Ulrich Beck , 7–13, Springer Briefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice 18 (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2014).
2.
Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).
3.
Scott Lash , “Risk Culture,” in The Risk Society and Beyond: Critical Issues for Social Theory, ed. Barbara Adam, Ulrich Beck , and Joost van Loon (London: Sage, 2000), 47–62, 48.
4.
Lash , “Risk Culture,” 48.
5.
Lash , “Risk Culture,” 48.
6.
Barbara Adam, Ulrich Beck , and Joost van Loon, eds., The Risk Society and Beyond: Critical Issues for Social Theory (London: Sage, 2000), 51.
7.
Jens Zinn, “Risk Society and Reflexive Modernization,” in Social Theories of Risk and Uncertainty: An Introduction, ed. Jens Zinn, 18–51 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 20.
8.
Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999); Jim McGuigan, “Culture and Risk,” in Beyond the Risk Society: Critical Reflections on Risk and Human Security, ed. Gabe Mythen and Sandra Walklate, 211–30 (Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press, 2006), 213.
9.
Mary Douglas , Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1992).
10.
Beck himself argues that the risk society demands the refutation of the neo-liberal conception of the minimal state. See Ulrich Beck , “Living in the World Risk Society,” Economy and Society 35, no. 3 (2006): 329–45.
11.
For example, Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso Books, 1995); Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York: Routledge, 2006); Sara Malton, “‘The Modern Vice of Unrest’: Railways, Mobility, and Fragmented Modernity in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure,” The Hardy Review 2 (1999): 168–80.
12.
Jessica Anne Richard, The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel, Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment , Romanticism and Cultures of Print (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Tina Young Choi, “Writing the Victorian City: Discourses of Risk, Connection, and Inevitability,” Victorian Studies 43, no. 4 (2001): 561–89; Elaine Freedgood, Victorian Writing About Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
13.
T. J. Clark , Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven), 7.
14.
Max Weber , “Science as a Vocation” [Wissenschaft als Beruf], in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 129–56 (New York: Oxford University Press, [1918] 1946), 155.
15.
Clark , Farewell to an Idea, 7.
16.
Clark , Farewell to an Idea, 7.
17.
Clark , Farewell to an Idea, 8.
18.
Thomas Hardy, “Apology,” in vol. 2 of Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, ed. Samuel Hynes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982–95), 557–58.
19.
Niklas Luhmann, Risk: A Sociological Theory, Communication and Social Order (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), vii.
20.
Tim Parks , “Bitten by an Adder,” review of The Return of the Native , by Thomas Hardy, ed. Simon Avery, London Review of Books 36, no. 14 (2014): 8.
21.
Thomas Hardy and Florence Hardy, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy 1840–1891 (London: Macmillan, 1928), 282.
22.
Peter Widdowson, Hardy in History: A Study in Literary Sociology (London: Routledge, 1989), 183.
23.
Parks , “Bitten by an Adder,” 10.
24.
Parks , “Bitten by an Adder,” 10.
25.
Parks , “Bitten by an Adder,” 10.
26.
Parks , “Bitten by an Adder,” 10. Interestingly, the impulsive Michael Henchard is the one conspicuous exception among Hardy’s fearful tragic protagonists, and his nemesis, Farfrae, the one example of a suavely assured manager of risk.
27.
Parks , “Bitten by an Adder,” 9.
28.
Parks , “Bitten by an Adder,” 12.
29.
Fanny Stevenson , “Letter to Margaret Stevenson, 10 September, 1885,” in Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Ernest Mehew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 287, note 1.
30.
See Widdowson, Hardy in History.
31.
Marc Angenot , “Social Discourse Analysis: Outlines of a Research Project,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 17, no. 2 (2004): 200 (emphasis in original).
32.
Thomas Hardy, Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings: Prefaces, Literary Opinions, Reminiscences, ed. Harold Orel (London: Macmillan, 1966), 133.
33.
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, ed. Dennis Taylor (London: Penguin, [1895] 1998), 46. References throughout (with one exception, note 53 below) are to the 1895 edition of the novel.
34.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 46–47.
35.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 61.
36.
John Burnett, Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the Present Day, rev. ed. (London: Scolar Press, 1979), 96ff.; G. R. Searle, Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 241–42.
37.
Burnett, Plenty and Want, 102.
38.
At worst, they would have been harmless flavour enhancers like salt and sugar or caramel colouring agents.
39.
Dennis Taylor, “Note on the Novel’s Chronology,” in Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, ed. Dennis Taylor (London: Penguin, 1998), 474–76.
40.
Burnett, Plenty and Want, 106.
41.
Burnett, Plenty and Want, 266. See also Searle, Morality and the Market, and Anthony S. Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). If adulteration had been as endemic later in the century as Hardy implies in Jude, not even the couple’s tea, had it arrived, would not have been safe to drink, as it was likely to have been dried re-used tea-leaves coloured with black lead or Prussian blue, or the poisonous dyes copper carbonate or lead chromate (Burnett, Plenty and Want, 241). Thomas Wakley and Arthur Hassall published the results of their meticulous investigations into food impurity in the Lancet in the early 1850s, leading to the House of Commons Select Committees in 1855 and 1856, and to the first, ineffectual, Adulteration of Foods Act of 1860. It wasn’t until 1872, with the passing of the Adulteration of Food, Drink and Drugs Act, and 1875, with the Sale of Food and Drugs Act, that “adequate legal machinery existed for the suppression of adulteration” (Wohl, Endangered Lives, 53). The 1875 Act “provided that no one should sell, to the prejudice of the purchaser, any article of food or any drug which was not ‘of the nature , substance and quality of the article demanded’” (Burnett, Plenty and Want, 262). Simultaneously, the adulteration of beer was regulated under the Licensing Act of 1872, which prohibited the possession, sale, or use of beer adulterated with anything from common salt to tobacco and salts of zinc or lead.
42.
E. N. Buxton , “The Alleged Adulteration of Beer,” Times (London ), 27 November 1893: 6.
43.
It led The Times to counter in an editorial on 7 December 1893 that: “Devotion to temperance seems to have a strange power of warping men’s judgments. There are many other evil habits besides drunkenness which undermine health and injure the prospects of future generations, yet they are comparatively unregarded and certainly never suggest to any one the propriety of incarcerating their victims. There are many forms of commercial activity besides the manufacture and sale of drink which are liable to be pushed to a point where they conflict with the general interest of the community, yet they are never attacked in the indiscriminate and violent manner that is thought good enough for the drink trade.” “Editorial: Evidence of Renewed Activity,” Times (London), 7 December 1893: 7.
44.
1 September 1840 to 9 January 1924. Buxton was also, awkwardly, a prebendary in the church.
45.
Buxton , “Alleged Adulteration of Beer,” 6.
46.
F. W. Farrar , “Drink and Crime,” Fortnightly Review 59 (1893): 795. Significantly, Farrar corrected himself in a letter of reply, admitting that he had meant to imply the practices of the previous half-century, not the present time.
47.
16 March 1906, Hansard 153, cc 1541–83.
48.
Under the terms of the 1876 Act, in fact, “practically all beer sold in modern British pubs would count as ‘adulterated,’” as Bee Wilson reminds us: it is now “permitted to contain caramel to adjust its colour, potassium chloride to adjust its flavour, phosphoric acid to change its acidity, and numerous other additives and processing aids. Brewers may choose from no fewer than seventeen different preservatives, such as calcium sulphite or sodium benzoate.” Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee: The Dark History of the Food Cheats (London : John Murray , 2008), 38.
49.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 65.
50.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 59.
51.
Angenot , “Social Discourse Analysis,” 204.
52.
John Goode, “Hardy’s Fist,” in Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy, ed. Penny Boumelha, 95–121 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000), 107 (emphasis in original). In fact, there is nothing really natural about nature in Jude the Obscure. Sue: “I said it was Nature’s intention, Nature’s law and that we should be joyful in what instincts she afforded us—instincts which civilization has taken upon itself to thwart. What dreadful things I said! And now Fate has given us this stab in the back for being such fools as to take Nature at her word!” (Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 357–58).
53.
Here I have quoted the text as Hardy emended it in 1903: Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, ed. C. H. Sisson (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, [1903] 1985). In 1895, it was a “complete and substantial female human” (Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 39).
54.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 65.
55.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 262, 260.
56.
R. G. Cox, ed., Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1970), 268.
57.
Cox, Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, 279.
58.
Cox, Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, 279.
59.
Brenda Assael, “Art or Indecency? Tableaux Vivants on the London Stage and the Failure of Late Victorian Moral Reform,” Journal of British Studies 45, no. 4 (2006): 744–45. See also S. Pennybacker, “‘It Was Not What She Said But the Way in Which She Said It’: The London County Council and the Music Halls,” in Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure, ed. Peter Bailey, 126–27 (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986).
60.
Assael, “Art or Indecency?,” 751, 753–54.
61.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 26. Vilbert is also closely associated with fabrication, and with animal products, as in the “pot of coloured lard” which “could only be obtained from a particular animal which grazed on Mount Sinai” (Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 26–27).
62.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 287.
63.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 287.
64.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 287.
65.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 337.
66.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 217.
67.
Cox, Thomas Hardy, 268–69.
68.
Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1975), 138.
69.
John Goode, “Sue Bridehead and the New Woman,” in Women Writing and Writing About Women, ed. Mary Jacobus, 100–13 (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 108.
70.
“The term is mostly used as a pejorative to imply poor hygiene, low-level language skills, limited education, slovenly or sexual style of dress, sexual flirtation and promiscuity, and aggressive social behaviour” (“Trailer Trash,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailer_trash).
71.
D. H. Lawrence , Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 106.
72.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 27.
73.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 79.
74.
Cox, Thomas Hardy, 258.
75.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 64.
76.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 318.
77.
Lawrence , Study of Thomas Hardy, 102.
78.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 141.
79.
Penny Boumelha, “Jude the Obscure: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form,” in Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy, ed. Penny Boumelha, 53–74 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000), 65.
80.
Thomas Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters, ed. Tim Dolin (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 312.
81.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 296.
82.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 296.
83.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 228.
84.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 133.
85.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 345.
86.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 327.
87.
Marjorie Garson, “Jude the Obscure: What Does a Man Want?” in Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy, ed. Penny Boumelha, 179–208 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000), 186.
88.
Lawrence , “Study of Thomas Hardy,” 494.
89.
Peter Widdowson, “Thomas Hardy at the End of Two Centuries: From Page to Screen,” in Thomas Hardy and Contemporary Literary Studies, ed. Tim Dolin and Peter Widdowson, 178–98 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 186.
90.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 85.
91.
Penny Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form (Brighton, UK: Harvester Press, 1982), 135.
92.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 136.
93.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 187.
94.
St Pancras Station, facaded with the Cathedral-like Victorian gothic Midland Hotel, was a construction of the 1860s–1870s. Many critics have noted the contemporaneity of Jude the Obscure. It “can be seen as attempting to superimpose the sexual and marital preoccupations of the 1890s upon the intellectual concerns of the 1860s, Hebraism and Hellenism and Mill’s liberal individualism” (Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women, 38).
95.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 156.
96.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 112.
97.
Hardy and Hardy, Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 309.
98.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 247.
99.
See F. R. Leavis, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (Cambridge: Gordon Fraser, 1930); Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto and Windus, 1932); and Pennybacker, “‘It Was Not What She Said But the Way in Which She Said It’.”
100.
Hubert Parry , “Inaugural Address to the Folk-Song Society,” The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular 40, no. 673 (1899): 168. I am indebted to Tim Barringer for this reference.
101.
Hardy, Complete Poetical Works, 2: 319.
102.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 338.
103.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 327.
104.
Zinn, “Risk Society and Reflexive Modernization,” 32.
105.
Zinn, “Risk Society and Reflexive Modernization,” 32.
106.
Ulrich Beck , Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Theory, Culture & Society (London: Sage, 1992), 131.
107.
Zinn, “Risk Society and Reflexive Modernization,” 33.
108.
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 47.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Curtin University, Perth, WA, Australia
Tim Dolin

Authors

Tim Dolin
View author publications
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Grace Moore
Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Michelle J. Smith

Copyright information

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Dolin, T. (2018). Adulteration and the Late-Victorian Culture of Risk in Jude the Obscure . In: Moore, G., Smith, M. (eds) Victorian Environments. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57337-7_13

Download citation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57337-7_13
Published: 08 March 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-57336-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-57337-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics