Education or Exile: Individualism and Social Utility, 1870–1914

Abstract

The success of education depends on how its aims are defined. At the fin-de-siècle and in George Gissing’s novels, education serves two main purposes: on the one hand, the pursuit of individualism, the Paterian drawing of multitudes into one consciousness, associated with dandies and dilettantism; on the other hand, social utility, which involves educating the poor, acts of philanthropy, and so on. In many of Gissing’s characters, there is a tension between these two purposes, and since all schooling is imperfect, education continues long into adult life. As argued here, the contradictions in Gissing’s presentation of the world through literary realism can be attributed to the complexities and contradictions involved in this bifurcation of the purpose of education. The two strands are apparently irreconcilable in Gissing, and where the individual does not succeed in identifying one purpose for education, they become exiles, if only intellectually.
This research is given greater breadth and legitimacy by the inclusion of Marie Corelli, an author whose canonical status has wavered and whose fiction was popular in her day. Corelli is also a special case because her didactic novels, and her essays, promise social utility — through moral (Christian) instruction for the masses — yet ultimately provide a Christianised version of Paterian aesthetics. She appeals to a coterie, as did Walter Pater, yet that ‘coterie’, by exploiting a mass readership through what is here described as a literary kind of cultural performativity, proved to be vast.
Gissing and Corelli, though working in the same period on similar themes, are strikingly different in their approaches, since Gissing’s literary realism shows the effects of the tension between the two aforementioned educative purposes from a minority culture perspective, whereas Corelli’s romance, limited by a mass readership, can only perform such cultural issues and ultimately serves as Christian inculcation.