Past might, becomes present right. But Victorian culture—even at its best: ‘one of the few English books written for grown-up people’, as Woolf said of Middlemarch—cannot accept the idea of a world dominated by perfectly lawful injustice. The contradiction is unbearable: lawfulness must become just, or injustice criminal: one way or the other, form and substance must be realigned. If capitalism cannot always be morally good, it must at least be always morally legible.
