E.S. Dallas, Mid-Victorian Individualism, and the Form of the Book Review

Abstract

Recent scholarship on Victorian reviewing has foregrounded the importance of E.S. Dallas and others, and provides a useful context for addressing Dallas’s work. Unlike a majority of reviewers who viewed their task as representing the work being reviewed in miniature, Dallas adopted a more critical stance, using the content and form of his reviews to engage in the public discussion of individualism that reached its peak in the 1860s. His reviews provide both literary advice on structure and proportion in texts, and ethical advice about how individuals should relate to the social whole that surrounds them. Dallas’s review of the biography of General Sir Charles James Napier, and several of his reviews of contemporary novels, reveal the principles he employs in critiquing works of different genres: where the former gives readers a sense of the individual subject whose life is being profiled, the latter evaluate the success of novels in depicting a well-proportioned social whole.