The social practice of tact was an invention of the nineteenth century,
a period when Britain was witnessing unprecedented urbanization,
industrialization, and population growth. In an era when more and more
people lived more closely than ever before with people they knew less
and less about, tact was a new mode of feeling one's way with others in
complex modern conditions. In this book, David Russell traces how the
essay genre came to exemplify this sensuous new ethic and aesthetic.
Russell argues that the essay form provided the resources for the
performance of tact in this period and analyzes its techniques in the
writings of Charles Lamb, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, George
Eliot, and Walter Pater. He shows how their essays offer grounds for a
claim about the relationship among art, education, and human freedom-an
"aesthetic liberalism"-not encompassed by traditional political
philosophy or in literary criticism. For these writers, tact is not
about codes of politeness but about making an art of ordinary encounters
with people and objects and evoking the fullest potential in each new
encounter. Russell demonstrates how their essays serve as a model for a
critical handling of the world that is open to surprises, and from which
egalitarian demands for new relationships are made.
Offering fresh approaches to thinking about criticism, sociability,
politics, and art, Tact concludes by following a legacy of essayistic
tact to the practice of British psychoanalysts like D. W. Winnicott and
Marion Milner.
