JOHN LUCASpathetic cry of protest on behalf of exploited sempstresses, had after all
been published in the Christmas 1843 number of Punch. Throughout the
middle years of the century, writers had been preoccupied to the point of
obsession with the horrors of urban life. One thinks of the start of Charles
Dickens's Bleak House (1853-53) where choking "[s]moke lowering down
from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle" produces "a general
infection of ill-temper" in the heaving crowds of London. 2 But Tennyson's
tactic is from his point of view sound enough. In a society where so many
human beings are brutalized, how can any responsible person want
"Demos" to take control? For "Demos" is precisely composed of indivi-
duals who have been brutalized - whether by economic circumstance or the
depravities of art.
It is important, therefore, to recall that Tennyson was writing "Locksley
Hall, Sixty Years After" at a time when other writers were becoming
anxious - even appalled - at the prospect of mass democracy turning "the
Parliament of Man" into licensed bedlam. George Gissing's novel Demos
appeared in 1886, as did Henry James's The Princess Casamassima and
W.H. Mallock's The Old Order Changes (the last paying conscious homage
to Tennyson in its title). All of these narratives brood over what they see as
the stirrings of "Demos": what James, in the 1908 preface to his novel,
retrospectively perceived to have been "go [ing] on irreconcilably, subver-
sively, beneath the vast smug surface" of English social life. 3 Likewise,
these fictions take seriously the threat of future anarchy: the collapse of
"The State, the Church, the Throne." Each narrative responds to actual
events of that year when the streets of London were regularly filled with
marches led by the unemployed - and by campaigners agitating for
economic and political reform.
Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, moreover, innovative forms of art,
fiction, and poetry were often subject to censure. In 1885, for example,
George Moore produced his pamphlet Literature at Nurse, or Circulating
Morals to protest the suppression of his Zolaesque novel, A Mummer's
Wife (1885), after Mudie's circulating library banned it. Moore, who had
spent some time in Paris, became convinced that the hope for the future of
fiction lay in Emile Zola's naturalist narratives. In his preface to Therese
Raquin (1867), Zola defined his modern fictional method as one in which
"l'analyse scientifique" ('scientific analysis') produced "pieces d'anatomie
nues et vivante" ('bare, live anatomical pieces'). 4 This scientific approach
struck his detractors as an excuse for laying bare sordid aspects of human
behavior, particularly sexual behavior. Behind this controversy there swells
the brouhaha first heard in Robert Buchanan's denunciation of Dante
Gabriel Rossetti as the leader of a so-called "Fleshly School of Poetry" in
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