The Edinburgh Companion to Anthony Trollope, edited by Frederik Van Dam, David Skilton, and Ortwin de Graef

Abstract

Periodical culture, steeped as it was in partisan politics, constitutes an important historical backdrop for the book. Keen’s staging of these debates is meticulously detailed while also marking out quarries of knowledge that have yet to be excavated. In chapter 3, for instance, Keen reflects on the pedagogical limitations of classical learning articulated by a critic in the Edinburgh Review (1802–1929) in a consideration of Robert Edgeworth’s Essays on Professional Education (1809). It would have been interesting to see Keen engage with the volume itself, for Edgeworth was a widely read and vocal proponent of practical education; while Edgeworth remarks that the “value of all knowledge must ultimately be decided by its utility,” these claims are also underwritten by an extensive literature appealing to the concept of learning by doing (Essays on Professional Education [J. Johnson, 1809], 371). Such omissions are regrettable, however, chiefly because they might affirm the idea that Keen already makes so convincingly: namely, that the history of these debates reveals how little we actually understand the terms that underlie our own sense of purpose as humanists. And this is not, moreover, a book about education alone. It is about a cultural impulse to justify pursuits that do not always garner immediate or quantifiable results in the real world. The book’s title refers to the early nineteenth-century world Keen recreates for us—a “Utilitarian Age” replete with fears that, as Thomas Carlyle put it, we are becoming “Mechanical in head and in heart” (“Signs of the Times,” Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, vol. 2 [James Munroe and Company, 1838], 150). But we too live in a “Utilitarian Age,” as Keen puts it, in which an “atmosphere of belligerent intolerance . . . has begun to erode the foundation of the public sphere that, however imperfect, remains crucial for any genuinely democratic society” (158). In our troubled present, the humanities might constitute a form of vital activism not through the promotion of specific precepts or practices, but rather by questioning what we think we know and facing what we do not. Kimberly J. Stern University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill