Matthew Arnold’s “Disinterestedness” and the Prevalence of Ideology within Victorian Periodical Reviews

Anthony T Garcia
Old Dominion University

In the review genre, the nineteenth century produced a sustained
engagement within the public sphere, addressing topics as diverse as
politics, history, science, literature, and culture. These reviews,
while putatively exploring academic pursuits, adopted contemporary
politics in an effort to normalize economic, political, gender, and
aesthetic ideologies. Against this culture of bias, Matthew Arnold’s
seminal piece of cultural theory, “The Function of Criticism at the
Present Time,” argues for the concept of disinterestedness, a
deliberate neglect of political motivation in aesthetic and
philosophical analysis. Despite Arnold’s legacy as a progenitor of
twentieth century literary theory, his contribution to literary and
cultural studies emerges from the social forces competing within his
public sphere, a deliberate effort at guiding the course of the review
genre. While scholars have made significant efforts in describing the
political leanings of various Victorian periodicals, studies have yet
to tabulate the predominance of political imposition within the review
genre. This dearth of information leaves scholars unsure on whether
the biased review was a general trend with publications adopting
ideological criteria for the majority of their reviews or a series of
isolated events in which political reviews noticeably depart from
norms of objectivity. Moreover, these trends were not confined solely
to literary reviews as Arnold indicates in quoting his own previous
statements that ‘It is the business of the critical power … ‘in
all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art,
science, to see the object as it itself it really is’,” a
statement which he supports by addressing a wide variety of political,
theological, and religious texts within “The Function of
Criticism” (728). Work in the field has not yet attempted to answer
the question of how many reviews actually adopted the mode which
Arnold excoriates. This piece conducts a detailed analysis of the
political thought within popular criticism, including a quantified
documentation of these phenomenon within eight periodicals during the
decade prior to publication of “The Function of Criticism.” This
quantified data contextualizes Arnold’s essay within the dominant
trends of the mid-Victorian periodical press and shows that a majority
of reviews did foreground their ideologies in reviewing texts. Final
results contribute to the Thematic Overview aspect of the conference
by providing numerical data based on the random sampling to provide
context for Arnold’s battle against bias within the periodical
press.

Newspapers and Periodicals in Britain and Ireland from 1800 to 1900