BiblioVault - Books about Victorian Fiction

Bleak Houses

Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction

Lisa Surridge

Ohio University Press, 2005

The Offenses Against the Person Act of 1828 opened magistrates' courts to abused working-class wives. Newspapers in turn reported on these proceedings, and in this way the Victorian scrutiny of domestic conduct began. But how did popular fiction treat “private” family violence? Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction traces novelists' engagement with the wife-assault debates in the public press between 1828 and the turn of the century.

Lisa Surridge examines the early works of Charles Dickens and reads Dombey and Son and Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in the context of the intense debates on wife assault and manliness in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Surridge explores George Eliot's Janet's Repentance in light of the parliamentary debates on the 1857 Divorce Act. Marital cruelty trials provide the structure for both Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and Anthony Trollope's He Knew He Was Right.

Locating the New Woman fiction of Mona Caird and the reassuring detective investigations of Sherlock Holmes in the context of late-Victorian feminism and the great marriage debate in the Daily Telegraph, Surridge illustrates how fin-de-siècle fiction brought male sexual violence and the viability of marriage itself under public scrutiny. Bleak Houses thus demonstrates how Victorian fiction was concerned about the wife-assault debates of the nineteenth century, debates which both constructed and invaded the privacy of the middle-class home.

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Darwin and the Novelists

Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction

George Levine

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Levine shows how Darwin's ideas affected nineteenth-century novelists—from Dickens and Trollope to Conrad. "Levine stands in our day as the premier critic and commentator on Victorian prose."—Frank M. Turner, Nineteenth-Century Literature. "Magnificently written, with a care and delicacy worthy of its subject."—Nina Auerbach, University of Pennsylvania

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Darwin and the Novelists

Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction

George Levine

Harvard University Press, 1988

Darwin’s theory thrust human life into time and nature and subjected it to naturalistic rather than spiritual or moral analysis. Insisting on gradual and regular–lawful–change, Darwinian thought nevertheless requires acknowledgment of chance and randomness for a full explanation of biological phenomena. George Levine shows how these conceptions affected nineteenth–century novelists—from Dickens and Trollope to Conrad—and draws illuminating contrasts with the pre–Darwinian novel and the perspective of natural theology.

Levine demonstrates how even writers ostensibly uninterested in science absorbed and influenced its vision. A central chapter treats the almost aggressively unscientific Trollope as the most Darwinian of the novelists, who worked out a gradualist realism that is representative of the mainstream of Victorian fiction and strikingly consonant with key Darwinian ideas. Levine’s boldly conceived analysis of such authors as Scott and Dickens demonstrates the pervasiveness and power of this revolution in thought and sheds new light on Victorian realism.

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The Feeling of Letting Die

Necroeconomics and Victorian Fiction

Jennifer MacLure

The Ohio State University Press, 2023

In The Feeling of Letting Die, Jennifer MacLure explores how Victorian novels depict the feelings that both fuel and are produced by an economic system that lets some people die in service of the free market. MacLure argues that Victorian authors present capitalism’s death function as a sticking point, a series of contradictions, and a problem to solve as characters grapple with systems that allow, demand, and cause the deaths of their less fortunate fellows.

Utilizing Achille Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitics, MacLure uses the term “necroeconomics,” positioning Victorian authors—even those who were deeply committed to liberal capitalism—as hyperaware of capitalism’s death function. Examining both canonical and lesser-known works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, William Morris, and George Eliot, The Feeling of Letting Die shows capitalism as not straightforwardly imposed via economic policy but instead as a system functioning through the emotions and desires of the human beings who enact it. In doing so, MacLure reveals how emotion functions as both the legitimating epistemic mode of capitalism and its most salient threat.

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Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction

Plotting Money and the Novel Genre, 1815–1901

Tamara S. Wagner

The Ohio State University Press, 2010

In Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Plotting Money and the Novel Genre, 1815-1901, Tamara S. Wagner explores the ways in which financial speculation was imagined and turned into narratives in Victorian Britain. Since there clearly was much more to literature’s use of the stock market than a mere reflection of contemporary economic crises alone, a much-needed reappraisal of the Victorians’ fascination with extended fiscal plots and metaphors also asks for a close reading of the ways in which this fascination remodeled the novel genre. It was not merely that interchanges between literary productions and the credit economy’s new instruments became self-consciously worked into fiction. Financial uncertainties functioned as an expression of indeterminacy and inscrutability, of an encompassing sense of instability.

Bringing together canonical and still rarely discussed texts, this study analyzes the making and adaptation of specific motifs, of variously adapted tropes, extended metaphors, and recurring figures, including their transformation of a series of crises into narratives. Since these crises were often personal and emotional as well as financial, the new plots of speculation described maps of some of the major themes of nineteenth-century literature. These maps led across overlapping categories of literary culture, generating zones of intersection between otherwise markedly different subgenres that ranged from silver-fork fiction to the surprisingly protean versions of the sensation novel’s domestic Gothic. Financial plots fascinatingly operated as the intersecting points in these overlapping developments, compelling a reconsideration of literary form.

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Medical Women and Victorian Fiction

Kristine Swenson

University of Missouri Press, 2005

In Medical Women and Victorian Fiction, Kristine Swenson explores the cultural intersections of fiction, feminism, and medicine during the second half of the nineteenth century in Britain and her colonies by looking at the complex and reciprocal relationship between women and medicine in Victorian culture. Her examination centers around two distinct though related figures: the Nightingale nurse and the New Woman doctor. The medical women in the fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell (Ruth), Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White), Dr. Margaret Todd (Mona McLean, Medical Student), Hilda Gregg (Peace with Honour), and others are analyzed in relation to nonfictional discussions of nurses and women doctors in medical publications, nursing tracts, feminist histories, and newspapers.

Victorian anxieties over sexuality, disease, and moral corruption came together most persistently around the figure of a prostitute. However, Swenson takes as her focus for this volume an opposing figure, the medical woman, whom Victorians deployed to combat these social ills. As symbols of traditional female morality informed and transformed by the new social and medical sciences, representations of medical women influenced public debate surrounding women’s education and employment, the Contagious Diseases Acts, and the health of the empire.

At the same time, the presence of these educated, independent women, who received payment for performing tasks traditionally assigned to domestic women or servants, inevitably altered the meaning of womanhood and the positions of other women in Victorian culture. Swenson challenges more conventional histories of the rise of the actual nurse and the woman doctor by treating as equally important the development of cultural representations of these figures.

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Novel Violence

A Narratography of Victorian Fiction

Garrett Stewart

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Victorian novels, Garrett Stewart argues, hurtle forward in prose as violent as the brutal human existence they chronicle. In Novel Violence, he explains how such language assaults the norms of written expression and how, in doing so, it counteracts the narratives it simultaneously propels.

Immersing himself in the troubling plots of Charles Dickens, Anne Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, Stewart uses his brilliant new method of narratography to trace the microplots of language as they unfold syllable by syllable. By pinpointing where these linguistic narratives collide with the stories that give them context, he makes a powerful case for the centrality of verbal conflict to the experience of reading Victorian novels. He also maps his finely wrought argument on the spectrum of influential theories of the novel—including those of Georg Lukács and Ian Watt—and tests it against Edgar Allan Poe’s antinovelistic techniques. In the process, Stewart shifts critical focus toward the grain of narrative and away from more abstract analyses of structure or cultural context, revealing how novels achieve their semantic and psychic effects and unearthing, in prose, something akin to poetry.

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The Romantic Impulse in Victorian Fiction

Donald David Stone

Harvard University Press, 1980

Sex Scandal

The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction

William A. Cohen

Duke University Press, 1996

Never has the Victorian novel appeared so perverse as it does in these pages—and never his its perversity seemed so fundamental to its accomplishment. Whether discussing George Eliot’s lesbian readers, Anthony Trollope’s whorish heroines, or Charles Dickens’s masturbating characters, William A. Cohen’s study explodes the decorum of mainstream nineteenth-century fiction. By viewing this fiction alongside the most alarming public scandals of the day, Cohen exposes both the scandalousness of this literature and its sexiness.
Scandal, then as now, makes public the secret indiscretions of prominent people, engrossing its audience in salacious details that violate the very code of propriety it aims to enforce. In narratives ranging from Great Expectations to the Boulton and Park sodomy scandal of 1870–71, from Eliot’s and Trollope’s novels about scandalous women to Oscar Wilde’s writing and his trials for homosexuality, Cohen shows how, in each instance, sexuality appears couched in coded terms. He identifies an assortment of cunning narrative techniques used to insinuate sex into Victorian writing, demonstrating that even as such narratives air the scandalous subject, they emphasize its unspeakable nature.
Written with an eye toward the sex scandals that still whet the appetites of consumers of news and novels, this work is suggestive about our own modes of imagining sexuality today and how we arrived at them. Sex Scandal will appeal to scholars and general readers interested in Victorian literature, the history of sexuality, gender studies, nineteenth-century Britain, and gay, lesbian, and queer studies.

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The Worlds of Victorian Fiction

Jerome H. Buckley

Harvard University Press