On the one hand, the book brings into view anew the connections between depictions of the common — the ordinary, common characters; the commonplace events; and the seemingly unremarkable mise-en-scene of everyday life that are the lifeblood of realism — and the historical existence of the literal commons — those shared lands that were once a defining feature of the British landscape and political imaginary. On the other hand, it argues for the enduring presence within nineteenth-century of utopian energies, which both hark back to the commons and point forward to a transformed society.1

This passage encapsulates a problem with the concept of “the commons” that both vexes and enriches Carolyn Lesjak’s study of character in three very different novelists considered the major British “realists.” For purposes of these remarks, I find the vexing much more instructive than I do the enriching. Here, Lesjak implies, the men who proposed, passed, and implemented the Enclosure Acts during the 17th and 18th centuries did not stop at turning virtually all the land available for common use into property the exclusive use of which was protected by law. They continued the process of enclosure at the personal and social levels until they dispelled the reassuring sense of “common characters,” “commonplace events,” and “the seemingly unremarkable mise-en-scene of everyday life” under an earlier agrarian economy. But this sense of “the common” did not disappear as the English countryside was progressively fenced, squeezed between hedge-rows, and laced with roads that connected the towns and cities. Lesjak suggests that the sense of the common that left its indelible mark on the novels of Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy persists in those strains of contemporary Marxist and environmentalist theory that “point forward to a transformed society.”

A year of quarantine leaves me keenly aware of the forms of security that accompany private property, as well as the forms of sociality it prohibits and the class distinctions it inevitably reinforces. Although the signs now point to a future in which vaccination “passports” reinforce fear of the unvaccinated mass as they allow the vaccinated to pass through the world from one sanitized enclosure to another, who among us, if given the option, would stake his or her life on herd immunity? Even the usually dysfunctional paranoiac who thrives under these conditions believes in a future where his or her negative sociality will uniquely keep the perpetual infiltration of foreign bodies at bay. Critical theory has spelled out in exact and well-documented detail the various stages in the transformation of property from real estate to foreclosures. As to how “the commons” became “the common” and, on that basis, “the afterlife of enclosure,” critical theory has not been so useful.

The idea of “the common” as the “afterlife” of enclosure presumes that the former was once the dominant term of the same “off-on” opposition on which Garrett Hardin blames “the tragedy of the commons.”2 His inflexibly digital formulation assumes that whichever term dominates — whether “commons” or “enclosure” — that term can occupy the “on” position only if it completely negates the other term, seeing to it that the two ways of imagining the disposition of natural resources cannot coexist. Elinor Ostrom culls a model from a real-life example of local self-government that demonstrates that the commons in fact can be governed while remaining common insofar as it is self-governed, that is to say, governed consensually by the same group that depends on it for a livelihood.3 This position assumes that the natural environment is not the setting and instrument of human reason but indeed has a mind of its own. If heeded, human beings can prevent what Ostrom refigures as the tragedy of primitive accumulation: a fluctuating supply of fish, the cost of overfishing, and the internal conflict arising when certain individuals assume ownership of the prime fishing spots. How can one argue with this proposition? Under what conditions could a counterargument seem only reasonable?

The recognition that any accommodation of the practices of the commons to that of enclosure is a difficult and tenuous accomplishment goes back to the early Victorian period about the time when Dickens turned from the tradition of character books in Pickwick Papers to experiment with character systems in Oliver Twist. Rather than let familiar types remain in the boxes assigned them in character books, character systems began twisting and squeezing the social taxonomy that Fielding, Richardson, and even Austen could take for granted until large segments of the population that it had “represented” for them were wrung out by a fluctuating economy and dispersed them willy-nilly across the countryside. New fences, roads, and a postal system fed them into the streams of available labor that flowed into the industrial and commercial centers of England. Here, Dickens encountered these defaced and typeless characters disappearing into what was left of common space — backstreets, forgotten attics, junk shops, waste heaps, dead-end courtrooms, and bureaucratic snarls in the Victorian city — where the last drop of economic value could be wrung from their material remains. Lesjak emphasizes the principle of continuity linking Dickens’s use of character types to the earlier system of types from which each individual derived synecdochal value in relation to what Deidre Lynch calls “the coin of character.”4 But the relation to the older vocabulary of types only increases in value, I want to suggest, if we also understand that it is a principle of rupture that gives meaning to characters once the old social taxonomy is gone. No question that Dickens felt terribly betrayed, if not by the character system that his literary forebears had taken for granted, then by the industrial machine that had remade the diverse society he loved into a zero-sum economic game. He recognized, as did Eliot and Hardy, that the semiotic rug had been ripped out from under the types he drew not only from character books, but also from walking the streets of London and assembling the bits and pieces of news, biography, and fiction in his weekly magazines. The material he gathered may appear to come from earlier books, satiric sketches, city comedies, and the like, but the social order he felt called upon to compose from its bits and pieces was irrevocably different.

Lesjak’s convincing argument for Dickens’s debt to the eighteenth-century character system ironically performs a service for scholarship by sliding over the possibility, as the character books themselves did, that something very much like the epistemic shift Foucault identifies in The Order of Thingsleft its indelible mark on the novel form at some point between, say, the publication of Austen’s Persuasion and the outburst of sensation novels and forms of realism that developed during the 1850s and 1860s. Assuming this mark was not an easy one to absorb and conceal, Lesjak’s case for the continuity of the literary language of types tells me this is exactly where we must look for the artistry that negotiated this decisive shift in the relation between the concepts of “enclosure” and “the commons.” By the late 1840s, I am quite sure, the two terms no longer conjured two contrary systems of value but indicated a relation of absolute contradiction. The pair of theoretical debates between Victor Frankenstein and his creature explicitly spell out the far-reaching implications of this transformation, as Victor first concedes the creature’s point that there is abundant space and resources in the world for both species of man but then breaks his agreement to create the female companion for which the creature longs. Against the reasoning based on recognition of their common loneliness and deep need for each other, the second debate pits Victor’s tortured version of the logic that surfaces in Hardin, logic that compels Frankenstein to dismember the half-assembled female, against the ethics of the common. Victor’s counterargument to the right to the common not only negates the proposition that there are sufficient natural resources on earth to provide for both communities; it also criminalizes Victor’s momentary submission to the creature’s claim that they could both enjoy a better future that way.

No wonder Charles Dickens was hopping mad, so mad that he thumbed through character books and walked the streets of London incessantly taking notes and comparing the people he saw to their graphic representations. Day after day, as his notebooks attest, he bore witness to bits and scraps of humanity, no two of which were sufficiently similar to be represented by the same type, each therefore a type unto itself. This social information provided raw material for a character system that reconceptualized human nature along the same line Charles Darwin was rethinking the interrelation of animal species. Both formulated a dynamic field overcrowded with phenotypes consequently jostling one another for a place to call home. No static taxonomy, this metropolis resembled Darwin’s “entangled bank” in the merciless complexity of its interacting parts driven by a struggle that determined who was fit to survive.5 But there the parallel ended. What drove the struggle among human individuals, groups, and generations was the pervasive conviction that to survive as an individual one had, at all costs, to avoid disappearing into the group. To do so was to become as replaceable as the particular plant, bird, insect, and worm that provided the material for Darwin’s image of the “entangled bank,” as testimony to nature’s artistry in choreographing a struggle for the means of survival. Dickens’s snapshots of the urban wilderness in which he felt at home suggest that he was no less fascinated than Darwin with the diversity of human life forms allowing each phenotype to find a space in the new competitive economy to which it was uniquely adapted.6 His characters were who or what they were by virtue, not of continuity with the past, then, but because of their variations from shifting norms, or genotypes.

The sudden loss of the commonality among members of a type expresses itself in Dickens’s felt need to compensate for the lack of typicality that can no longer assure either novelist or reader a place in the social classification system. This need finds expression in the singular deficiencies of speech and behavior that mark his common characters along with their physical anomalies, exaggerated mannerisms, and prosthetic attachment to signature objects. The accumulation of differentia invariably piles up in his urban settings to the point where it defies indexicality. Characters hop out of their columns, spill over the pages, and escape the covers and bindings of Household Words and All the Year Round,the format in which his novels first appeared. Thanks to Dickens’s sustained success at publishing serial novels, the characters that enjoyed this afterlife accumulated to the point where they constituted the holograph-like system recognized by the full range of readers and scholars as “the Dickens world.” What makes this afterlife so powerful that it remains intact even today, where it continues at once to bludgeon and to entertain us with the systemic violence that destroys the sense of common, representative, or typical humanity captured in character books? The Afterlife of Enclosurepersuades me that Dickens’s sustained, exuberant, and absolutely unprecedented expression of negative energy marks a decisive rupture in the long history of the relation between “enclosure” and the concept of the “commons.”

To understand this rupture symptomatically, one must identify two cultural factors as responsible for the shift in the “the commons” from land that, as Locke said, God “hath given … to men in common … to the best advantage of life and convenience” to the degraded and menacing human aggregate whose figuration Emily Steinlight describes.7 The scholar, cleric, and experimental demographer, Thomas Robert Malthus, helped to engineer that leap from “natural resources” to the exponentially increasing need to devour them. Spelled out in a simple mathematical formula that turned natural abundance into scarcity at a rate that led inevitably to famine, disease, and war, Malthus transformed the commons into the cause as well as the “check” on overpopulation. If allowed to do so, nature would cull the herd and restore the balance of food supply to demand. Never mind that Malthus’s part in engineering the Great Hunger in Ireland (1845-1852) cost a million lives and forced as many Irish people to emigrate from a country where they had managed to survive despite centuries of incompetent English rule. Still more venal was the biopolitical argument that reappears in Hardin. This principle treats laissez-faire economics like another expression of the same natural law that declared that the means of sustaining life increase at a mathematical rate while populations grow exponentially. As demand outstrips supply, the economy rights the imbalance by means of starvation or worse. We might say that by reversing the logic of the parable of the loaves and fishes, the rhetoric of scarcity provided the rationale for criminalizing such practices as gleaning, exercising the right to burial in sacred ground, hunting for game, sleeping in the streets, and begging, all of which were once considered legitimate expressions of the right to the commons.

That Oliver Twist (1837) can be classified as Dickens’s first work of literary realism is because it called upon a criminalized commons to provide a potentially utopian alternative to the “child farm,” and orphanage with too little food and too many mouths to feed. There the mild-mannered Oliver scandalizes the administrators by famously asking, on behalf of the group, “Please, sir, I want some more.”8 Overly concerned with Dickens’s use of a defamatory Jewish stereotype, scholarship has paid scant notice to the patience with which Fagin teaches his “children” to pick the pockets of those who can well afford to provide significantly better nutrition than the boys enjoyed at the orphanage. Only when Oliver is miraculously rescued by a respectable benefactor whom he artlessly tried and failed to rob does Dickens turn against his own outrage and drain that positive energy from Fagin’s Satanic aspect leaving us alone with the predator. Why, then, does Dickens indulge in the overkill that guaranteed the novel’s continuing popularity in various media? Why allow this degenerate figure a moment of Shakespearean lucidity in which to scorn the institutions that will hang him at daybreak, “What right have they to butcher me?,”only to have him dissolve in tears the next instant and play on Oliver’s sympathy to make a last-minute deal for his life? 9 Finally, as if to signal that he has run through the characters compressed in his one compound type, Dickens gives us Fagin, a stripped down voice of humanity: “He writhed and struggled with the power of desperation, and sent up shriek upon shriek that penetrated even those massive walls, and rang in their ears until they reached the open yard” surrounding the gallows.10 If Fagin’s impending execution detaches the momentary grandeur of Satanic rhetoric from his negative stereotypes as predator and Jew, then Oliver’s palliative offering of homiletic pieties comes close to the sort of emotional self-exculpation that drove Dickens nuts. Only because Oliver’s tactile memory of his parting kiss from a fellow Parish boy alone remains sufficiently unsullied by the mutually-negating encounter between the principle of enclosure and that of the commons can this trace justify the positive emotional charge that Lesjak attributes to it — a feeling that testifies to the persistence of the principle of the commons in the very culture bent on criminalizing it. In singling out this moment, I would contend, she identifies the precise rhetorical turn by which the “the commons,” as the antithesis of land enclosure, became the concept of “the common.”

In closing, let me briefly address the final claim Lesjak makes in her statement of argument, namely, that the “utopian energies” she identifies with Victorian realism not only “hark back to the commons” but also “point forward to a transformed society.” On a landscape increasingly dominated by urban commercial and industrial centers, one can see in Fagin’s oscillation from defiance to compliance flashes of the positive energy that motivates Oliver’s timid supplication on behalf of the hungry community of Parish Boys, “Please, sir, I want more.” The same body of fiction that shows how capitalism transforms the community sustained by the practices of “the commons” into a predatory system, or negative utopia, also intimates the return of what had been “nature” prior to modernity in the form of “culture” after capitalism. Thus, where Locke had claimed that God “hath given the [natural] world to men in common,”11 Matthew Arnold sought to conserve “the best that has been thought and said” by man,12 and John Stuart Mill survived a nervous breakdown by cultivating “the inner man.” And here we still are: participants in a tag team that responds to the political-economic violence intensifying all around us with descriptive theories that either meet violence with the violence of utopian crime or cultivate the future community within.

1. Carolyn Lesjak, The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021), 3.
2. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science 162.3859 (1968): 1243-1248.
3. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
4. Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
5. “It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the … conditions of life, and from use and disuse a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species(London: Penguin, 2009) 426-27.
6. Darwin was profoundly impressed by the power of worms to imperceptibly change the topography of an entire region of foothills by slowly moving the ground beneath the surface.
7. John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980) 18. See also, Emily Steinlight, Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018).
8. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (London: Penguin, 2003) 15.
9. Dickens, Oliver Twist 448.
10. Oliver Twist 449.
11. Locke, The Second Treatise18.
12. Mathew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) 5.