书评作者

Xavier Guégan, University of Winchester

书评正文

Is mercy in modern British culture a political act, an ideological concept, an element of self-proclaimed national identity, a religious sense of uniqueness, or a tool to conquer other cultures? This is the gigantic task that the author has set to assess in Mercy and British Culture, 1760–1960. James Gregory is no stranger to the topic of mercy; he has recently published The Royal Throne of Mercy and British Culture in the Victorian Age (2020), where he explored further the historiography of the term. Over the years he has his attention on how middle-class and upper-class Victorians reflected on their own culture, defined their identity and themselves in a society that was industrialised and modernised through studying specific cultural and political movements in Of Victorians and Vegetarians: The Vegetarian Movement in Nineteenth Century-Britain (2007) and Victorians Against the Gallows: Capital Punishment and the Abolitionist Movement in Victorian Britain (2011). In Mercy and British Culture, Gregory engages with cultural principles that tended to define how the British understood and perceived that notion. Although it belongs, as mentioned in the introduction, to the realm of emotions, this study identifies a broader mentalité.

The main structure of the book is interesting. It is constituted of two parts, which somehow form a dialogue between the perceptions and understandings of mercy and how they were tested – or challenged – in specific cases of conflict and conquest. First is the introduction, which fulfils its purpose by highlighting some key definitions, the methodological and historiographical approaches and the organisation of the book. But it felt a bit underwhelming as it does not fully grab the reader to what the book is trying to achieve. Yet, the rest of the book does much to overcome this underselling, and this survey of two centuries of definitions, representations and perceptions of British mercy brings a lot to the field by showing the constants and evolution of a concept.

Part One, ‘Religion, culture and embodiment’, is divided into three chapters. Chapter one highlights that mercy as a religious concept defined self-identification of Victorian Christians but indicates that not much more on the definition of mercy appeared within nineteenth-century British religious and philosophical discourse. The author explains how ‘in novel vocabulary old chauvinisms about national mercy and racist beliefs’ of other religions and cultures were described as not being able to comprehend Christian virtues (p. 34). The following chapter takes the depiction of mercy beyond the religious and philosophical spectrum to cultural and political discourses, where, through a survey of theatre, poetry, newspapers, fictions, sculpture, and painting, Gregory gives many examples of representation of mercy in the public eye. After having categorised the diverse types of representation of mercy in the first two chapters, chapter three delved into some thematic reflections. Gender, animal welfare, and race – though briefly, as it is developed further in later chapters – are explored in connection to how the lessons of being merciful were meant to manifest themselves. Here key objects of mercy are focussed on its relationship to childhood and kindness to animals within a ‘discourse generated by ideas of the racial other, in terms of mercifulness propensities’ through education and religious instruction (p. 73). As mentioned above, each of the two parts is responding to the other; at the end of part one, a short conclusion that would have linked to the following part would have made this method clearer.

Part Two, ‘Mercy challenged’, is divided into four case studies exploring significant theatres for British mercy from different communities. The first three chapters, Ireland (chapter four), the French Revolution (chapter five), and the British Empire (chapter six), explore further what has been highlighted in the first part, which is the use of the concept of mercy in contrast to other cultures; a definition through otherness. The chapter on Ireland, the longest of those case studies, is the most successful in letting the reader dip in to a detailed analysis and sense of chronology from the eighteenth century to the first world war; here mercy is related to struggle, martyrdom, clemency and propaganda. Although the cases of the French Revolution and the British Empire are also very interesting, those chapters are much shorter. There is an intriguing sense of similarity and yet opposition between the French Revolution’s mercy correlated to terror, cruelty, justice, clemency and memory, and the British slave-trade abolitionists’ fight for equity, benevolence and justice. Yet when one looks at the rise of the nineteenth-century British empire, its critics weaponised mercy as a British trait not applied abroad, whereas apologists ‘advocated an imperial policy of unmercy’ (p. 110). The last chapter of part two, chapter seven, is dedicated to Britain’s military activities from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the first world war. In the context of warfare, the use of mercy evolves from being a potentially dangerous virtue in eighteenth-century statecraft, to a tactic of subjectification-mercifulness for early Victorians, to a conflicted definition in the South Africa war at the end of the nineteenth century. With the traumas of the Great War the author explains that mercy became less invoked than justice and humanitarianism.

The conclusion seems to be more of a bridge between 1760–1918 and 1918–1960 than a conclusive chapter. Here, Gregory engages with several themes and questions that had been explored in the previous chapters to see if they continued in the twentieth century, finishing with the question of whether the discourse of mercy declined in post-World War II. Although located and defined somewhere else, it appears that the answer is no; mercy has still been part of British and international discourses since 1945. A topic that the author might wish to develop in a future book.

Mercy and British Culture testifies to the author’s erudition. This is a book that shows strong research, with nearly half the book consisting of endnotes. Perhaps this is also one of the weaknesses of this text. Too many categories with too many examples mean that it reads like a broad anthology but somehow too much is highlighted and, at times, more specific developed examples would have helped the reader to understand further what mercy meant in more detail. The main text of this book ought to have been doubled in its length. These comments should, however, not distract from the fact that Gregory’s book is in many ways a rich and significant work that will allow further discussions on a concept that remains elusive. Some of these cases studies can surely be developed further as single projects; and it would be interesting to explore in another study how other cultures perceived and responded to the claims of British mercifulness and justice.