Search

Abstract: During the Victorian Era, it was common for women to use hair from loved ones to create intricate pieces of jewelry and art, particularly for mourning mementos. This thesis endeavoured to answer the research question: “What can an object analysis of a nineteenth-century mourning hair jewelry piece tell us about Victorian mourning practices?” through an object analysis of a hair bracelet located in the Anne Lambert Clothing and Textiles Collection (ALCTC). I used Ingrid Mida and Alexandra Kim’s object-based research methodology and drew on three artifacts in external collections and three primary text sources: Godey’s Lady’s Book from 1830 to 1890, Mark Campbell’s 1867 Self-Instruction in the Art of Hair Work, Dressing Hair, Making Curls, Switches, Braids, and Hair Jewelry of Every Description, and Alexandra Speight’s 1871 The Lock of Hair: Its History, Ancient and Modern, Natural and Artistic. The ALCTC hair bracelet analysis produced a number of conclusions: the object was handmade, its structure lends itself to frequent use, based on other jewelry surveyed and the plaiting techniques, the bracelet was likely made and worn between 1849 and 1863, and it was worn as a mourning or fashion piece. The popularity of mourning jewelry led to an industry of makers who specialized in hairwork and contributed to mourning jewelry evolving into a fashion object. Hair bracelets were considered a second or half mourning custom in 1849 to 1850 but merged into fashionable attire by 1858. Hair bracelets began waning in popularity in 1863, and, by 1871, hair jewelry was being advertised primarily as fashionable accessories rather than mourning jewelry. The research question, which was rooted in mourning practices, thus pivoted to suggest a shift in the use of hair jewelry and may suggest that the growth observed in the popularity of hairwork after the 1861 death of Prince Albert could correspond to the rise of hair jewelry as fashion objects.

“Nothing Extraordinary: Feminist Everyday History in Victorian Novels of the Recent Past” argues that Victorian novels of the recent past written by women leverage the decades-long gap between publication and plot to proffer alternative modes of practicing history that accommodate — and even prioritize — ordinary life. The nineteenth-century novels studied in this dissertation delineate the limits of traditional modes of history and historical fiction, namely that history does not typically attend to the ordinary, gendered concerns of women such as marriage, child-rearing, and homemaking. In addition to highlighting the conspicuous absence of women’s everyday lives from history, these novels also demonstrate that ordinary life is a complex, mutable assemblage of phenomena. Consequently, these Victorian novels of the recent past engage in a feminist mode of alternative retrospection that both expands what qualifies as historical to encompass the ordinary and complicates the authority of traditional historical knowledge. This dissertation includes three chapters focusing on novels of the recent past written by Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Flora Annie Steel, and George Eliot. Each chapter understands the gap between plot and publication as a different relational, gendered structure of time that emphasizes the vitality of ordinary life: the first chapter traces the significance of generational gaps between women in Shirley and Wuthering Heights, the second chapter sketches how commemoration enshrines racialized gender roles in On the Face of the Waters, and the third chapter illustrates how women in Middlemarch enact symbolic homecomings making new homes through marriage. Together, these chapters conclude that these novels of the recent past are distinctly gendered forms of history that rely on ordinary, domestic life to accomplish the work traditionally reserved for public history, especially garnering nationalism and national identity.

Victorian Media Re-Viewed: Literature and the Politics of Visual Representation in Britain, 1839-1879 examines Victorian theater, photography, and literature as forms of media that responded to their political milieu through formal assimilation. I use the term media in relation to Victorian objects to both situate my work within the broader discourse of media history and foreground social interactions with and interventions between different modalities of cultural production. At the center of this dissertation is an exploration of the politics of viewing as it relates to power differentials between middle-class viewers and working-class and poor subjects. Throughout, I investigate the tension between who or what was represented in and occluded from a variety of visual and textual forms. As such, this dissertation approaches Victorian objects through the framework of social reading and viewing practices. In examining interactions with and interventions between forms, I reveal what I call blind spots, in other words what cultural producers of these objects may have missed or obscured in their representational practices and what scholars have overlooked in reviewing these objects. Moving chronologically through the middle of the century, I demonstrate the ways in which these blind spots in different modalities of cultural production mediated sentiments of discontent, facilitated pathways for resistance, and negotiated authenticity and truth based not only on what was written, but equally, on what was and was not observed. Through a series of case studies, Victorian Media Re-Viewed presents a model for reading nineteenth-century objects with an eye for the peripheral, unseen, and underrepresented. Consequently, each chapter focuses on a different type of object: a novel, a social text, a play, and a collection of photographs. Chapter 1 explores the significance of the “sketch” in British literary and photographic contexts by way of introducing the notion of the “literal photograph” in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848). Through both visual and textual analyses of Thackeray’s sketches, I discuss the political significance of the “literal photograph” as I relate it to the broader themes of poverty, class, and revolution. Chapter 2 expands on the visibility of poverty, revealing the ways in which the laboring class’s engagement with theater, photography, and illustrated periodicals aided in the performance and mediation of class culture in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851). Transitioning from the political affordances of performance in Mayhew’s serialized text, Chapter 3 turns to the photographic stage by examining Dion Boucicault’s play The Octoroon (1859, 1861). In analyzing the photographic elements of the drama, audience reception, and the alternate British ending, I argue that Boucicault frames the diverging paths of British and American nationalism around the question of liberty while reconstituting a critique of the British nation and its civilizing mission in the empire. Chapter 4 revisits the relationship between the literal and the photographic. It explores the genre of what George Eliot calls “literary photographs” as a point of comparison between Julia Margaret Cameron’s allegorical works and her concluding photographs taken during her time in the British colony of Ceylon. I argue that Cameron’s photographs from Ceylon embody the theatrical exchanges emblematic of her earlier “literary photographs” while marking a difference in the way her exported practice was confronted by resistance to English photographic and aesthetic practices.

This thesis explores the operation of the tragic in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native by taking as a starting point the formalist approach to the genre of tragedy, before extending its definition to encompass the key concept of tragic conflict. This thesis argues that Hardy’s tragic vision takes for object human history, and especially the effects of new, unveiled knowledge on the human psyche, thus locating the root cause of tragedy in these contingencies. This continuum between individual action and the larger historical causes that shape it is expressed via the narrator’s discourse, and the discrepancy between his broader knowledge of his characters’ situations and their blind recourse to a dominant power in charge. Then, using Michel Foucault’s concept of the dispositif, this work analyzes the tragic fates of the novel’s female protagonists. Finally, this thesis explores the progressive potentialities in The Return of the Native with regards to the social structure contemporary to its writing.

With her body of work, Virginia Woolf joins a host of female novelists decrying the lack of power that women in general wield in a patriarchal society. Specifically, her novels To the Lighthouse and Orlando provide a hopeful response to the dismal depiction of the female artist in Victorian literature, namely Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Because of its subject matter of domestic abuse, unfortunately the experience of too many women in a society in which husbands are given too much power, Tenant was not regarded with respect in Brontë's lifetime. The novel so obviously portrays a woman without power in such dire circumstances it is indeed unsettling for most audiences. However, in her novel, Brontë’s inventive techniques of using embedded and nonlinear narration to bring this mistreatment to light illustrates how the unbalance of power debilitated the expression of the female artist in her character Helen Graham.Although there is no direct evidence that Woolf read Anne Brontë’s novel, Woolf responds to this hopeless depiction with modernist experimental and more nuanced strategies such as free indirect style and interrupted narration to paint a much more hopeful picture of the possibility of the female artist confronting the power of the patriarchy with success and freedom of expression. In doing so, she upends Victorian tropes and expected narrative structure to provide a scathing critique of the Victorian patriarchal culture in which she, herself, was raised.

There is a dissonance between the folkloric fairies and those presented by pop-cultural institutions such as Disney which has effected modern literary criticism of nineteenth-century British literature. The Disnified fairy is feminine, small, capable of flight, often with insect-like wings, and equipped with a magic wand with which she does good deeds to help others. She is largely based on fairy tales and is the embodiment of the modern conceptualization of the fairy, but she bears little, if any, resemblance to the fearsome fairies of Celtic folklore. Although nineteenth-century literature is rife with folkloric fairy references, those references are frequently undervalued by modern-day critics who read them through a Disney-tinted lens. Because such critics undervalue nineteenth-century fairy references, they overlook the voice the fairies give to marginalized groups in nineteenth-century societal discourses. This dissertation seeks to rectify this shortcoming by exploring the folklore published throughout the nineteenth century and applying it to nineteenth-century literature in a way that adds significance to those folkloric fairy references and highlights their place in nineteenth-century British social discourses. To more fully explore why nineteenth-century authors include references to the folkloric fairies in their works and to better understand how knowledge of this folklore helps the reader better interpret the work itself, each chapter of this dissertation explores the fairies in relationship to one of the century’s dominant social discourses: national identity, industrialism, science and religion, and childhood education. This dissertation also looks at atypical fairy works in relationship to each discourse. These are canonical works that are not typically discussed in relationship to the fairies, but which, I argue, either have characters within them that have yet to be properly identified as fairy or are fairy influenced.

This project explores the transcultural and transhistorical impact of the Victorian novelon the culture, politics, and storytelling traditions of writers, artists, intellectuals of thepostcolonial Bengal, India and addresses the question: why should someone born incontemporary South Asia, so far removed in space, time and culture from VictorianEngland care about its literature? Over 5 chapters, the project follows chronologically theevolving relationship between the Bengali middle class with western modernity over acourse of 150 years, early 1800s to 1960s, and examines how the English-educatedBengali middle class of India have historically consumed and indigenized the tropes,characters, and reformist liberal ethos from the novels of Charles Dickens, George Eliot,Elizabeth Gaskell, and Anthony Trollope into their own Bengali novels and popular postcolonialfilms in the 1950s and ’60s, in order to address their own grievances andconcerns with industrial modernity.

The English melodramatic plays and novels of the 19th century have many notable features in common: variation between comedy and tragedy, dastardly villains and dashing heroes, and a fascination with sensationally dramatic tropes like bigamy, mistaken identity, and false death. Underwriting these superficial features, Peter Brooks identifies the melodramatic impulse, or a desire to create “a fictional system for making sense of experience” (xiii) by turning to style of moral polarization that charges every gesture with “the conflict between light and darkness, salvation and damnation” (5). Brooks’s conception of melodrama is compelling, but it fails to fully elaborate what makes melodrama so exciting to engage with. I argue that the other driving force of melodramatic tropes is the necessity of melodramatic rhythm—a cyclical pulsing wherein delicious and tantalizing suspense is built up and released over and over again. As Juliet John describes, such rhythm is “a series of waves: the moment of stasis is remarkable because it is transitory; moments of excess signify imminent excess and vice versa” (31). Turning to Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby, Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, in this paper I establish how all three authors betray an investment in melodramatic rhythm with their construction of installments. Dickens with his variation between comedic and tragic, Collins with his shameless and frequent use of intense intrigue and shattering revelations, and Braddon with her negotiation between the readers’ relative surplus and Robert Audley’s relative lack of information. All three of these authors, too, are linked by the medium of serial publication. Whether or not there is a causal relationship between publication in monthly/weekly installments and melodramatic rhythm, each author begins and ends their installments very strategically, using the gap between installments as another technique to enhance their novels’ melodramatic rhythms. Ultimately, this paper argues that the engrossing and dependable melodramatic rhythm that drives these three novels is the key to their popularity.

The English melodramatic plays and novels of the 19th century have many notable features in common: variation between comedy and tragedy, dastardly villains and dashing heroes, and a fascination with sensationally dramatic tropes like bigamy, mistaken identity, and false death. Underwriting these superficial features, Peter Brooks identifies the melodramatic impulse, or a desire to create “a fictional system for making sense of experience” (xiii) by turning to style of moral polarization that charges every gesture with “the conflict between light and darkness, salvation and damnation” (5). Brooks’s conception of melodrama is compelling, but it fails to fully elaborate what makes melodrama so exciting to engage with. I argue that the other driving force of melodramatic tropes is the necessity of melodramatic rhythm—a cyclical pulsing wherein delicious and tantalizing suspense is built up and released over and over again. As Juliet John describes, such rhythm is “a series of waves: the moment of stasis is remarkable because it is transitory; moments of excess signify imminent excess and vice versa” (31). Turning to Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby, Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, in this paper I establish how all three authors betray an investment in melodramatic rhythm with their construction of installments. Dickens with his variation between comedic and tragic, Collins with his shameless and frequent use of intense intrigue and shattering revelations, and Braddon with her negotiation between the readers’ relative surplus and Robert Audley’s relative lack of information. All three of these authors, too, are linked by the medium of serial publication. Whether or not there is a causal relationship between publication in monthly/weekly installments and melodramatic rhythm, each author begins and ends their installments very strategically, using the gap between installments as another technique to enhance their novels’ melodramatic rhythms. Ultimately, this paper argues that the engrossing and dependable melodramatic rhythm that drives these three novels is the key to their popularity.

This dissertation investigates the production of physical disability and the function of prosthesis in nineteenth-century British fiction. My intervention in disability studies readings of Victorian literature attends to the prosthetic object and prosthetic body not only as the dual products of medicine and art, but also as catalytic elements of fiction and culture. I read reciprocal developments in medical technology and disabled characterization in the Victorian novel to demonstrate how the artistic translation of the prosthetic object effected a set of criteria for defining people through both bodies and things and, in so doing, revealed the ways in which the modern body is not insular but codependent. To trace the coalescence of physically-othered bodies with prosthetics in nineteenth-century fiction, then, is to consider, more broadly, the human body as embodied and embedded in a wider, material world—to parse our coevolution with medical and technological tools. In pursuit of this project, I look to deployments of the prosthetic object, such as artificial limbs and mobility aids, in the works of Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and Wilkie Collins. The human-object nexus in their novels—the way in which the disabled body is entangled with or enhanced by assistive technology—underscores how these authors anticipated the ethics and terms of corporeal difference. The aesthetic redefinitions of what it means to be (or counts as) human in the primary texts of this dissertation, I argue, continue to influence our interpretation of bodily alterity. While this study also takes up texts from earlier nineteenth-century British authors (like Mary Shelley) and nineteenth-century authors from beyond the British Isles (like Edgar Allan Poe and Gustave Flaubert), it focuses primarily on the Victorian novel’s capacity to register and respond to the evolution of the prosthetic object as it intersects with the disabled body. Ultimately, in reading prosthetics in the novel as dynamic, integral features of disabled characterization, we can acknowledge the complex state of disunity, patchwork extension, and contingency that we all occupy as human bodies circulating though the world.

In the chemical world, entropy, or the randomness and chaos of a system, must continually increase; it is much more favorable for things to fall apart than to be put together. This scientific concept can also be rightly applied to the study of literature. While it is true books contain information put together into some sense of order from chaos, making them counterintuitive to entropy, I am convinced these works must still obey the laws of thermodynamics. There must be an increase in chaos somewhere, and if it is not within the words themselves, it must lie within the ideas they represent, their interpretation by readers, and the deconstruction of the text through literary analysis. In this study, the works of Victorian authors including Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy are deconstructed into entropic elements including the lack of a reliable center and the struggle between the compulsion to repeat and the desire for revolution. Examination of entropy in these texts validates their claims to be realistic novels portraying the nuance of authentic life. Entropy applied to literature calls readers to continually deconstruct, wait expectantly for the inevitable eb and flow of light and darkness, and accept unanswerable questions and incomplete endings. This is real life; this is entropy.

“The Group: Victorian Novels of Milieu,” defines and defends the mid-sized group as a form that challenges the way much novel studies thinks about social organization. Our usual models tend to operate at scalar extremes of the individual and the state or the one versus the many, reproducing an antithetical relation that may date from the Victorian period but does not fully represent its cultural forms or how they continue to shape us today. What if group thinking were not a simply a statistical abstraction or an ideological mirage? Then we might be able explain why queer communities, by definition anti-normative, nevertheless produce norms; or why the tourism industry excuses its attachment to colonial architecture by evoking milieu, an antiquated and thus evasive racial formation. Unlike recent affect-based or biopolitical scholarship, my project resolves questions like these by identifying a significant middle scale: the group, or a site-specific assemblage that is improvised, temporary, and productive of surprising identities and new modes of distributed agency and intention. In contrast to other accounts of the novel’s social form, “The Group” historicizes how Victorian fiction quantifies the social, drawing on strategies in emerging disciplines like sociology, art history, and philosophy of language as well as feminist and queer life practices that are more systematic than you might think. Combining genre analysis with more fine-grained sociolinguistic techniques, I examine how the novel relies on specific group concepts (milieu, party, and school) to exemplify, exploit, and undermine acts of reflexive self-definition characteristic of modern life. By examining neglected Victorian group-think and thinking about the group, this project raises still pertinent questions about how we experience local and transient identities, while addressing conversations in literary studies around linguistic anthropology, queer (anti-)normativity, and quantitative reading practices.

When a children’s recital piece from the nineteenth century opens with the interrogation, “Well, Dolly, what are you saying, / When you blink and wink your eyes?” the implication is clear: the doll’s silence speaks volumes. Articulating Dolls means to anatomize Dolly’s cryptic body, to decipher dolls not just as articulated figures of parts but as articulated figures of speech. Dolls in the Victorian popular imagination are saying something, and this dissertation designs to find out what.Speaking the Victorian pediolect that molded Woman like a statue, played her for a puppet, transacted her like a doll, or took her for a dummy (a sororal synonymy that contemporary Dolls Studies is only just beginning to elaborate), this project dissects the doll-inflected discourse framing femininity to anatomize how true womanhood was made to share the mold with ideal sculpture and other dolliform bodies of man-ufactured perfection. Following an introductory etiology that historicizes definitions of Pygmalionism--a paraphilia that to the Victorians inscribed a desire not for the simulated woman who comes alive but for the Gal(atea) who (re)turns to stone--chapter one emphasizes how the desire for women who were statues(que) compels their decease as the feminine form was sartorially and semiotically impressed into a fashion for mortification. Showing that the sculptural was intrinsically sepulchral, chapter two analyzes the intrinsically (nec)romantic idioms of dollification in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. More expressly executed female bodies are the subject of chapter three, in which ventriloquial phonodolls are made of the morbid (and thus more biddable) “Venuses” in Du Maurier’s Trilby and Villiers’s The Future Eve. The still(ed) lifes of statues (non) vivants are the focus of Carroll’s narrative photography in chapter four, while chapter five filters his Alice books through the author’s “photographic memory” of a lost Liddell doll. Decoding the crypsis of girls, or “dolls,” of the period and literary doll-players like Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp, chapter six considers how the Gal(atea) who plays dummy turns the tableaux on the chauvinist Pyg(malion). Pursuing cryptic dollification through sensation fiction, chapter seven de-crypts graven Galateas, examining how the fatal affects of an oppressive gender binary are re-fused by the guise and dolls of femmes fatales. The epilogue surveys the antiprosopopoeic anti-Pygmalionism of anti-Alice texts that play on dolls precisely as they play on words--as paranomasiac acts of dissent, re-articulations that empower Gal(atea)s caught between petrification and a hard place to turn their pedestals into platforms and use their marble(s).Articulating Dolls articulates the joints within the interdisciplinary field of Dolls Studies, suturing the seams and interrogating the interstices between material histories, poststructuralist theories, and feminist epistemologies. Reading dolls as they are materially or metonymically construed decodes how the nineteenth-century feminine subject is (en)gendered as object--commoditized, socialized, sexualized, and essentialized--but also how the terms of that construction might be re-articulated to object. Assembling dolls to deconstruct a histoire de mentalité, Articulating Dolls plays out the ambiguous, ambivalent, or even antithetical ways that dolls signify within the Victorian imaginary and, ultimately, our own.

(Re)mediating Math Anxieties with The Narrative, the Ephemeral, and the Visual, 1830-1930, unravels the intricate web of connections between the narrative, the material, and the affective conditions of mathematical discovery. Over the course of the century, student-centered pedagogies replaced rote memorization, leading to mass literacy and numeracy. New tools combined natural and mathematical language to ease anxiety and facilitate discovery. Beginning with Fredrich Froebel’s use of ephemera and quotidian objects, and expanding globally, pedagogues used illustrations, familiar narratives, paper, thread, and wooden blocks, to engage the learner. Activities such as paper folding and curve stitching captivated the discoverer’s visual and tactile senses, prompting them to narrate those sensory experiences as mathematical findings. For example, a parabolic trajectory is more intuitive when throwing a toy in the air and seeing how it falls. This trajectory helps learners visualize a traditional narrative arc, linking natural language to mathematical language. Newspapers and magazines regularly contained illustrative puzzles that fostered literacy and numeracy by yoking them to stories. Serialized fiction represented frustrations and breakthroughs that learners faced in the mathematical discovery process. Taken together, the sensual and cultural experience of mathematics dismantles its putative objectivity and status as a medium of scientific knowledge. Mathematics, instead, is an active form of literacy that engages with our material and social practices. The same publications that taught mathematical concepts reflected antipathetic cultural attitudes to learning math. Literary representations consistently portrayed mathematicians as villains. Novels and stories encourage readers to express frustrations with math that stem from gendered and classed preconceptions. Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia, and George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession portray successful female mathematicians as gender deviant: cold and calculating, and incapable of true happiness. When literary and visual modernism emerges, mathematics is used as a tool for formal experimentation, which reflects new positive attitudes toward mathematics and culture. For instance, James Joyce utilizes mathematical errors in the “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses to emphasize the art of mathematical discovery over computed results. Acknowledging such cultural contexts of mathematics overturns the conventional notion of mathematical objectivity in science and technology studies.

This dissertation identifies a trope from slave narrative, the trope of the British brute, and tracks it through nineteenth-century British fiction to show how Black intellectual thought influenced British writers in the nineteenth century. Because race-based chattel slavery theorized the enslaved as both human beings and animal property, the assertion of personhood was an essential component of slave narrative. The genre, following Ottobah Cugoano’s 1787 Thoughts and Sentiments, contrasted the humanity and personhood of the enslaved against the brutality of the slaver. While the dominant narrative of the brute relies on identity markers such as race, class, physicality, exposure, and labor, the British brute is made brutish by his behavior. This dissertation starts by examining the emergence of the trope in slave narrative and then looks at two specific examples, Wuthering Heights and Black Beauty, to show how the trope entered fiction and changed and was changed by it. Though the trope was reclaimed in service of white supremacy in fin de siècle transformation novels, it served to destabilize the hierarchy of British humanity in the nineteenth century.

This dissertation is a study of supernatural doubles in Victorian literature. It argues that these doubles expand our understanding of gender variance in the Victorian period. The texts in this dissertation privilege gender non-binarism through their depictions of materiality, gender embodiment, and temporality.

Abstract: This dissertation demonstrates the importance of recovering the work of nineteenth-century Dissenting women whose life and writing have been overshadowed and minimized by their husband’s pastoral ministry. Specifically, it examines the textual work of Susannah Spurgeon (1832-1903), wife of the celebrated Baptist preacher and author Charles (CH.) Spurgeon, as a lens through which to consider how Dissenting women reimagined the traditional position of the “help-meet” and, in doing so, challenged the established gendered boundaries of theological writing and reform. Through her Book Fund (1875-1903) Spurgeon distributed over two-hundred thousand Puritan books, including titles by her husband, to impoverished ministers across the world. She also wrote two volumes of Fund reports and three devotional texts, all of which remain unexamined in contemporary Victorian, literary, and theological scholarship. In her reports Spurgeon outlines the details of the Fund’s operation and the minister’s need for preaching material, but she also represents her work as both independent of her husband and extending beyond the traditional boundaries of the nineteenth-century minister’s wife. As such, her writing not only challenges the expectations and limitations associated with the “help-meet,” but also provides a new set of images through which to re-imagine the ministerial wife’s contributions to the “flock.” Furthermore, in her reports Spurgeon suggests her work is driven and inspired not only by a “famine” of books among ministers, but also by theological reform: the revival of Puritan doctrine within Dissent. Spurgeon urges Dissenting ministers and churches to return to Puritan theology and also warns, even preaches, against the “evil influences” of contemporary liberal doctrine (TYA 120). Drawing on language and imagery from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Spurgeon proclaims liberal theology is as spiritually sinful as Bunyan’s “surly” Giant (110). In doing so she not only provides doctrinal guidance to her readers, directing pilgrims to the “right road” of Puritanism, but also simultaneously contributes to a contemporary theological debate, The Down-Grade Controversy, within her Baptist tradition (TYA 28). Thus, Spurgeon’s representation of her work extends beyond mere contribution to CH. Spurgeon’s ministry; her reports perform as her own polemic against heresy and re-frame the position of the “help-meet” as one of both theological defense and reform. This dissertation also examines how Spurgeon draws on and adapts a Dissenting evangelical tradition of textual representation, one that imbues the Bible and religious texts with divine power. More specifically, to illustrate the spiritual “help” provided by her Fund, Spurgeon idealizes Puritan texts and doctrine as “absolutely necessary” sustenance not only for “hungry” ministers, but all godly men and women (TY 46). Through this dramatization, of both ministerial poverty and the performance of the book, Spurgeon validates the Puritan texts she distributes, the Book Fund she operates, and the ministerial work she performs. This examination of her life and Fund, therefore, contributes to and nuances the study of Dissenting women’s religious work, self-representation, and theological writing.�

By any measure, Mary Elizabeth Braddon was one of the most successful novelists of the Victorian era, publishing more than eighty novels between 1860 and 1915 and earning the title of “queen of the circulating libraries.” Yet her books disappeared from bookshelves within a few years of her death. In recent decades, although scholars have renewed their interest in Braddon’s work and rescued her from obscurity, few have pursued the pivotal role of literary allusion and the physical act of reading by her characters. An irony of Braddon’s career is the degree to which she integrated so many rich literary references into novels that critics condemned for their artlessness. Indeed, this thesis argues that Braddon thoughtfully layers literature into her novels through multiple techniques, including overt references to fictional works, character profiles defined by their reading tastes, the usage of an intrusive narrator, and chapter mottoes that function as meta-fictional clues for the attentive reader to decipher. This thesis demonstrates how Mary Elizabeth Braddon sought to elevate her fiction, producing novels that she intended to be sensational and literary at the same time. Furthermore, this thesis contends that Braddon consciously exploited her popularity and the circulating library paradigm to engage her female readers in questioning prevailing rules on what they should know, what they should read, and how they should behave.

The basic goal of this study is to determine the literary and historical significance of James Malcolm Rymer’s Victorian serial novel Varney the Vampyre, particularly as it pertains to early Victorian popular representations of masculinity. The perception of the vampire as a popular and appropriate symbol of the liminal aspects of the Victorian period, the era’s increased literacy among the working-class and resulting passion for penny dreadful serial novels, and the representation of masculine performativity in Victorian literature and culture accentuate the novel’s significance. Two primary questions guide this investigation: How might we understand the cognitive dissonance between Sir Francis Varney’s intellect and his monstrous acts or role as the supposed villain? In addition, how can readers reconcile Rymer’s writing of Varney the Vampire with his attack against popular writing three years before Varney the Vampyre’s serialization? Reader-response theory and deconstructive procedures inform this post-structural analysis of the text. Rymer’s use of linguistic and situational ambiguity, as well as the work’s repeated combination of vampire motifs and gentlemanly behavior, emphasize Sir Francis Varney’s role as the anti-hero of the novel. The serial, with its decidedly liminal anti-hero, as well as its narrative and situational mockery of intellectual rigidity and social norms, emphasizes sexual and epistemological ambiguity over conformity on several levels. Varney the Vampyre reflects the same vitriol toward common opinion as iv Rymer’s early editorial, “Popular Writing,” only this hostility is couched in a work of popular fiction—one that stringently follows Rymer’s advice on writing outlined in the editorial. Through the character of a gentleman-monster, Varney the Vampyre simultaneously critiques Victorian concepts of masculinity and popularizes liminality for working-class readers. Rymer’s critically overlooked vampire serial, then, strikes a delicate balance between scathing social commentary and escapist recreational reading for a community of readers navigating a society in flux. To conclude, the title of the thesis emphasizes that occasionally the ambiguity was so great that even Varney’s potential victims became enraptured by his gentlemanly performativity and could not perceive of him as a pure villain; one character comments, “…he is quite an old acquaintance of ours, is old Varney; sometimes he hunts us, sometimes we hunt him. He is rather a troublesome acquaintance, notwithstanding, and I think there are a good many people in the world, a jolly right worse vampyres than Varney” (479). This moment demonstrates the fluidity of liminality pervasive throughout the work and also underscores Rymer’s social commentary about the vampire as a lesser villain than those who conform to common negative human behaviors.

Whimsical, anthropomorphic taxidermy of the Victorian era has historically been dismissed as a marginal novelty. Yet why do we feel it to be, in some undefined way, emblematic of Victorian culture? Anthropomorphic works--such as studious rabbits intent at their desks in a rural village schoolroom, athletic toads playing a frenetic game of stick-and-hoop, or elegantly attired kittens sharing tea at a communal table--represent a conflation of human and animal, of death and life, which simultaneously evokes fascination and repulsion. A closer look compels questions about the historical context of its development and the creative process driving its creators: why did such grotesque anthropomorphic expression flourish at this precise point in history? On careful scrutiny, its encoded meanings reveal rich veins of information about the quality and meaning of anthropomorphism within the Victorian psyche, suggestive of a wider anxiety surrounding the shifting association between humans and animals in Victorian Britain, a shift which itself was representative of a cascade--a series of shocks--of changing social and cultural inter-relationships. With an interpretation of the creative process based upon attachment theory, anthropomorphic taxidermy is seen as a creative response to the devastating effects of industrialism and startling developments in science, tempered by traditions of anthropomorphism and existing on a continuum with related concurrent trends in visual art.

For late-Victorian authors and sexologists, Roman literary culture was essential to the development of the British decadent movement. My dissertation explores how authors including Walter Pater and Michael Field return to Roman epicureanism and decadence as a way of justifying their literary style and personae as gender and sexually nonconforming authors. Scholarship in the history of sexuality and nineteenth-century classical studies has tended to focus on the relationship between Victorian homosexuality and Greek pederasty using an older model of gay and lesbian studies. From this perspective, Victorian homophiles constitute homosexuality on the basis of Greek pederasty, reversing the discourse of the state to justify a newly constituted homosexual identity. My dissertation, by contrast, examines Victorian and Roman gender-sex deviancy from a queer theoretical lens. This research brings queer theory’s resistance to identitarian politics into Victorian neoclassical literature. Starting with the premise that an excess of sexual and gender categories flourished in imperial Roman society because the Romans neither sanctioned nor criminalized same-sex desire, I discuss how late-Victorian authors revived queer Roman literary history to prefigure their dissent from predominant gender-sex paradigms. “Queer Decadent Classicism” thus explores how nineteenth-century authors forged a genealogy from Roman literary figures and imagined a queer aesthetic history. My first chapter, “‘Aesthetically, Very Seductive’: Pater’s Homoerotic Epicureanism in Marius,” explores how Marius the Epicurean (1885), an historical novel, published the same year England re-criminalized homosexuality and set in second-century CE, the period affiliated with the rise of decadence and decline of Rome, represents a specifically Roman queer literary culture. I argue that Pater showcases several different models of homosocial intimacy available to Roman men. Within the novel, Marius’s “natural epicureanism” becomes not only a philosophy and lifestyle but also the literary style that Pater’s modern-day narrator self-consciously affiliates with nineteenth-century decadence. Tracing the roots of modern decadence to Epicurean philosophy helps Pater justify the connection between queer desire and aesthetic philosophy. After making a case for how Pater theorizes queer decadence in terms of a modern-day epicureanism, I turn my attention to Pater’s inserted translations, which he frames with homoerotic scenes between men. I show how the epicurean principle of egalitarianism allows Pater to reconstitute representations of homoerotic scholarship that level the conventional power dynamics of the ancient Greek world. Whereas the eromenos, the pupil philosopher and youthful lover, had for the most part acted as interlocutor in Greek dialogues, Pater imagines a more collaborative Roman literary community of co-authorship. Each homoerotic scene of classical reception Pater features in his novel—which includes literary criticism, translation, and adaptation of the classics— showcases collaborative authorship between men. Moreover, I demonstrate how Pater constrains heteronormativity within the inserted translation, while allowing homoerotic lives to flourish in the Roman world of the second century, formally echoing the decadent Roman world’s less restrictive hold on queer sexualities. The second chapter, “Metamorphic Aesthetics in Michael Field’s Ovidian Poems,” introduces unpublished poetry by the co-authors and lovers Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote classically themed poetry under the masculine pseudonym Michael Field. This chapter discusses how they turned to Ovid’s erotic epic to experiment with “mutatas formas”—textually as well as physically changed forms--to prefigure unfixed and fluid gender and sexual subjectivities. The first part introduces Field’s dramatic trialogue on the Philomela myth. In their version, two sisters change into a mating pair of songbirds, thus rewriting Ovid’s story about the power of sisterhood into a late-Victorian story about a queer feminist relationship. The second half of the chapter introduces Field’s Aphrodite poems, inspired by Sappho, written on the topic of the “gods in exile” popularized by Pater in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) and subsequently used to analogize experiences of persecution, exile, and censorship under the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885. I discuss Field’s Aphrodite series, comprised of their unpublished translation of Sappho’s “Hymn to Aphrodite” and To an Exile,. arguing that this project merges Sappho’s Lesbian symbolism with Ovid’s metamorphic characters and poetics to articulate more clearly the model of queer feminist kinship they first explored in the Philomela trialogue. In my third and final chapter, I introduce Michael Field’s Roman Trilogy, a series of metatheatrical closet dramas situated in decadent Rome and featuring queer pantomime dancers, entitled The Race of Leaves (1901), The World at Auction (1898), and Julia Domna (1903). I argue that the genre of tragedy enables authors to disentangle queer decadence from its imperial history. Examining Field’s Roman Trilogy, I explore how Field re-elevates pantomime dancers, generally taken as symptoms of Roman decadence, to their origin as the creators of Greek tragedy according to Aristotle. On the one hand, this reevaluation helps Field make a case for the emergence of aesthetic decadence from the Greeks. On the other hand, Field also offers the pantomime’s queerness—gender fluidity and pansexuality—as a model of non-conformativity emerging alongside Greek pederasty. Interrogating the Victorian decadent movement’s queer representations of Roman decadence through the genres of the novel, lyric, and drama, my dissertation contributes to a lacuna in both Victorian and history of sexuality studies. I make a case for understanding decadence as a literary style and a philosophical lifestyle that developed apart from and in opposition to imperial decadence. By understanding decadence’s resistance to institutionalized forms of sexuality, I suggest that decadent authors anticipated queer theory’s insistence on ambiguity and fluidity, and in an anti-identitarian sexual politics we find mirrored in the experimental forms they created.

Despite challenges made to Freud’s theories by psychologists and literary theorists, psychoanalysis continues to hold sway over interpretations of the Victorian novel. Consciously or unconsciously, Victorian literary critics and twenty-first century readers have internalized Freud, and continue to read through the psychoanalytic assumption that all desire is erotic. But the sexual paradigm does not encompass all expressions of narrative desire. In “Beyond Sex: Arotic Desire in the Victorian Realist Novel,” I argue that refusing to see all relational desire as inevitably about sexual pairing unsettles traditional ways of reading characters and relationships in the Victorian novel. Reading for “arotic desire”—a term I coined to indicate impulses other than eros—I argue that Victorian realism both creates and depends on structural and formal narrative possibilities offered by non-normative relational desire. I consider Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?, Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son, and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure as case studies for my theory. I offer close readings of arotically-motivated characters in these novels that challenge our preconceptions of how characters relate, and of what types of relationships the novel values. I then use these readings to suggest that arotic desire functions in a concrete, formal way in the novel—revealing narrative possibilities and strategies beyond what is offered by standard erotic forms such as the love triangle or the marriage plot.

How is the literary imaginary shaped by an understanding of the materiality of the universe? More specifically, if an author believed the universe was composed of a substance called ether, how did that impact the worldviews represented in their fiction? Today “the ether” refers to a mysterious realm into which car keys disappear and where emails languish, but before Einsteinian relativity became accepted in the 1920s, and for at least a decade afterward, the ether was an established scientific concept that formed the backbone of electromagnetics. Electricity, light, and radio were all believed to be waves carried by the luminiferous (or light-bearing) ether. What began as a mechanical explanation for the propagation of light waves ultimately became the hypothesized foundation for myriad phenomena – even, according to late-nineteenth century universal ether theories, matter. In the British literary imaginary, the ether’s role as unifying principle of the physical universe was expanded further: it became the concept through which other forms of connection – media, empire, and Spiritualism – could be represented. This dissertation argues that British authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used the ether to represent and conceptualize continuity in narratives of modernity. In theorizing the role of the ether in literature, this dissertation advances an alternative understanding of literary Modernism that is based in mainstream culture. Traditional understandings of Modernism, grounded in elite, “highbrow” texts, characterize it in terms of formal experimentation that responds to the fragmentation, isolation, and rupture of modernity. I approach Modernism instead by using historicism and new materialism to examine fictional representations of the ether in texts that are mostly popular or middlebrow. These texts characterize the experience of modernity in terms of connection: telecommunication, imperialism, and spiritualist connection with the afterlife are figured in terms of the ethereally connected universe. I uncover an understanding of Modernism founded on continuity rather than discontinuity, and that acknowledges the Victorian and the Modern as two ends of a historical continuum rather than distinctly separate periods. Ultimately, this dissertation reconstructs the atmosphere, both literal and cultural, in which Victorian and Modernist literature circulated.

This dissertation uncovers the crucial role that chapter epigraphs played in the evolution of the English novel’s form and develops a new theory for reading this structurally significant paratext. Drawing our attention to epigraphs’ profoundly expressive non-semantic qualities, including size, attribution, aggregation, optionality, diversion, and hierarchical organization, “Epigraphic Encounters” argues that writers of the long nineteenth century harnessed these elements in order to create meaning and negotiate generic transformations—first from poetry to the novel, and then from one novel genre to another. Case studies of Ann Radcliffe, Walter Scott, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot demonstrate how chapter epigraphs facilitated the emergence of gothic, historical, and realist novels by making literary-historical negotiations an indelible part of their structural framework. The fifth chapter examines the influence of these texts on the twentieth-century writer John Fowles, and the role his novels played in characterizing chapter epigraphs as a “quintessentially” Victorian phenomenon. These readings ultimately lead to a more capacious understanding of epigraphic form in spatial, temporal, social, and material terms.

The connection between liberal economics, Victorian conservation science, and the naturalization of laissez-faire capitalism has been established by Allen MacDuffie, Ted Underwood, and Tina Young Choi among others, yet relatively little scholarship has investigated the contemporary social landscape, including how correlating capitalism to the physical sciences affected both economic value and ethical values. MacDuffie’s Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination and Underwood’s “How Did the Conservation of Energy Become ‘The Highest Law in All Science’?” explore how Victorians understood conservation theory and why they were primed to accept it, respectively. However, neither delves fully into how conservation science authorized theories about capitalism, and how the convergence of these two subjects impacted culture. Thus, investigations into popular literature are needed in order to gauge popular sentiment around these topics and to elucidate how these phenomena changed the foundations of society. Realist novels are the aesthetic emanation of these changes. The popular literature of Charles Dickens offers a relatively organic account of how these phenomena were absorbed into the public consciousness. Along with a scarcity of scholarship on how a scientifically authorized capitalism was reflected in contemporary notions of morality, there is a dearth of criticism surrounding Dickens’s early career participation in conversations about contemporary science. Indeed, since Ann Wilkinson’s “Bleak House: From Faraday to Judgment Day” (1967) and later, George Levine’s “Dickens and Darwin, Science and Narrative Form” (1986) scholarship has focused primarily on his later career, and in particular, on the teeming interconnectivity that aligns his fiction with Darwin’s theory of evolution. There is, on the other hand, relatively little scholarship on Dickens’s interest in and understanding of science prior to his mid-career, despite his having written several early texts that explicitly take up its contemporary status: Pickwick’s silliness is part and parcel with his having contributed to a scientific journal, and The Mudfog Papers and Hard Times both focus their satire on a variety of scientific fields. And, as I argue, the effects of contemporary conservation science on perceptions of capitalism as a natural phenomenon can also be seen in the logic of Martin Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son. As Underwood shows, science became popularized, conservation theory in particular was taken up by the public, because it reflected moral ideas connected to Protestantism: waste and dissipation were anathema to a capitalistic work ethic, and when conservation science proved that it was natural to conserve energy, Victorian notions of work were affirmed. This dissertation’s chapters collectively argue that, as science naturalized capital markets and as the government adapted its policy to accommodate the ideological force of that naturalization, that mutually reinforcing cultural and economic apparatus increasingly structures Dickens’s oeuvre. By comparing significant moments in the naturalization of industrial capitalism with developments in Dickens’s philosophy and form, we can understand how the naturalization of capitalist markets changed representations of character and of interpersonal relations. In four chapters, I explore how Dickens’s displaces his social critique of capitalist society onto the emergent institutionalization of science in The Mudfog Papers and Hard Times; then, how financial and cultural turmoil during the transition to capitalism as a social system further delayed a turn towards realism in Dickens. To explain why Dickensian realism emerged when it did, I show that Dickens’s “maturity” coincided with a convergence of scientific and economic ideas that established the reality principle animating Dombey and Son. And, I argue that mid-Victorian capitalism effected an aesthetic change associated with Dickens’s realism: characteristics coded as villainy in early Dickens become a brother or neighbor’s mere “bad faith” in later Dickens—a change that occurs as capitalism becomes the ‘natural’ way of being together in society.

During the nineteenth century burgeoning cities in the United States saw the spread of disease. Most common among all parts of society was tuberculosis or as it was commonly known at the time, consumption. The most terrifying aspect of consumption was that it could attack anyone at any time and no cure existed. The poetic image of a red stained handkerchief was a death sentence. The common cure was to seek fresh air in a warmer climate. However, for some Americans an experimental cure seemed hopeful and easily accessible, drinking blood. According to many newspaper accounts consumptive victims were not only participating in this cure but finding results. Because physicians were not able to cure consumption, desperate victims turned to an unlikely cure from an unlikely source, the butcher, a trade worker. The grotesque imagery of a pale, emaciated consumptive victim drinking blood from a freshly slaughtered animal conjures one image strongly, that of a vampire. These blood drinking consumptives were indeed compared to vampires and feared by both the press and parts of the medical community. Using romantic literature of the time and of the future a strong correlation is found between these blood drinking consumptives and the western vampire character we are so familiar with today. Consumptives’ doubts that the medical community could offer anything to save them, led to drastic decisions being made in regards to their health. Newspaper accounts containing interviews with consumptives, butchers, and medical men were heavily drawn on to answer questions of why this cure was tried and reactions to the cure. Medical journals and romantic literature were also investigated in order to examine the risks that were believed to accompany this cure. These sources together provide a complete picture of just how desperate these people were to try this blood cure.

Janet Taylor made major contributions to Victorian navigational practices. She did so through creating business opportunities for herself as an educator, author, and inventor of nautical instruments.

Findlay, Ohio’s nineteenth-century newspapers published crime reports, legislative actions, and opinion pieces about prostitution within the city. Victorian ideology was inherently rigid and imbalanced between men and women, which is why nonconforming sexual activity, specifically sex for sale, represents a rhetorically significant phenomenon. When considering Findlay’s historical and contemporary reputation as a politically conservative and traditional family-focused municipality, the newspaper articles show that some residents resisted gendered behavioral standards that city leaders sought to uphold during its most socioeconomically formative years. This thesis critically looks at previously unstudied, male-authored Victorian prostitution articles to determine how journalists ideologically situated and represented the female-centric trade within the community. The project also identifies new information that reflects the women’s rhetorical presence. This paper argues that, despite the phallocentric nature of the newspaper articles, prostitutes’ voices can still be “heard” and recognized for their rhetorical contributions, thereby encouraging historical revisioning.

This dissertation provides the first comprehensive account of the phenomenon of the fictional novelist as a character in literature. By identifying trends in a large corpus of author-stories and analysing representative texts, I offer a theory which elucidates the forms and functions of author-stories and the characters within them. I argue that author-stories act as textual sites at which questions of literary value and cultural conceptions of the author and the novel are constantly negotiated and revised by authors. The dissertation focuses on the years between 1850 and 1950, a pivotal period in literary history during which authorship was becoming increasingly professionalised, and the novel was rapidly gaining the cultural and critical significance which culminated in its institutionalisation as a subject of university study, and in the founding of prestigious literary awards. I argue that author-stories rise to prominence during the second half of the nineteenth century, as novelists were attempting to frame their work as a profession deserving of legal rights and remuneration, but were also championing the novel’s moral, intellectual, and artistic qualities. The dominant narrative of late Victorian author-stories is a binary in which struggling and starving writers clash with the unscrupulous authors, editors, and publishers who produce shallow commercial fiction. During the reign of literary modernism, however, the dominant narrative shifts to focus on the individual author-as-Artist, now entirely aloof from the marketplace and the literary sphere. Attendant to this broader concern is a consideration of the way that gender becomes inextricably entangled with this dichotomy of commercial and artistic value. I explore the extent to which representations of female authorship which circulated around the turn of the twentieth century tended to affirm the association of women writers with the low-brow and the commercial, whilst representations of male authorship have frequently strengthened the pervasive view that men’s writing is the realm of high art. In doing so, the thesis highlights the fact that these dominant narratives and stereotypes do not go unchallenged, and that author-stories become a vital source for examining the methods by which cultural conceptions of the author and the novel have been created, consecrated and contested within the literary sphere.

The 1846 première in Paris of Hector Berlioz’s (1803–1869) dramatic choral adaptation of Goethe’s poem La Damnation de Faust was initially deemed a failure. Undeterred, two years later Berlioz traveled to London to promote his music to the British public. While initially failing to capture the lasting attention of British audiences, by the end of the century, Faust had transformed from a virtually unknown musical work to a popular standard on British concert programs. Using the performance history of Faust as a case study, this dissertation tracks and contextualizes the work within the transformative shift in musical taste that occurred in Britain between 1848 and 1918. In trying to understand the move of highbrow musical forms into the realm of working-class culture, some scholars have begun addressing the use of music by nineteenth-century governments as a socioeconomic tool for class development; others have begun documenting the amateur choral movement in Victorian Britain. More work is needed, however, on understanding the link between the development of Victorian musical taste and the growing socioeconomic changes of class morality and structure through music education as a response to industrialization. In addition to identifying the British première of the work in February 1880 as the catalyst for cementing Berlioz’s permanent place in the British orchestral repertoire, this study also discusses the orchestral training and audience development required for this first performance to occur as well as the transformative effect that it had on British concert life, particularly at the regional triennial musical festivals. Furthermore, this study explores the transition of Faust from the concert hall to popular seaside resorts and how this development laid the foundation for the even greater interest in Berlioz’s music in the mid-twentieth century. By applying current theoretical discussions on the topics of British performance history, historiography, and transnational identity to data that was obtained through archival investigation, this research contributes towards a greater understanding of the cultural development in musical taste that occurred in late nineteenth-century Britain as well as the use of music as a philanthropic and socioeconomic tool in transnational contexts.

Feminists and gender theorists need a better way of thinking about what it means for a Victorian male character to be in pain. Because we’ve thoroughly codified the reduction of female characters to vulnerable bodies, we’ve ended up with an essentialist association between pain, femininity, and disempowerment. Male characters’ pain doesn’t result from disempowerment or oppression, and so its representation enables female novelists to explore suffering to various political and aesthetic ends. This dissertation illuminates how three Victorian women novelists use this same figure—the suffering man—to highlight different intersections between pain, gender, and the novel form. In Wuthering Heights (1847), Emily Bronte does not imagine a just world in which men’s violence is punished but rather creates an aesthetic space in which pain becomes a spiritualized artistic medium. Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), on the other hand, rejects the political expedience of a sensationless industrial masculinity and advocates instead for the pains of erotic love. Finally, Marie Corelli foments aesthetic and political heresy in her bestselling novel The Sorrows of Satan (1895), which combines Satan and Christ into a tortured outcast genius who both desires and rejects the approval of establishment authorities. Because critics have shown how commonly Victorian female characters in pain are figured either as self-sacrificing martyrs or justly punished sinners, critics have tended to refer to male characters’ pain as “feminization,” which they have conflated with reformation. Ultimately, however, I show that rather than merely weaving fantasies of punishing patriarchs, these three novelists reconfigured the relationship between torture, gendered justice, and the novel in unexpected and uncomfortable ways.

This essay considers the significance of undirected childhood reading on an author’s mind and the reason some authors reference specific real books in their fiction. I argue that independent reading (as against schooling or formal education), and the direct and indirect references to certain books in Jane Eyre[1] were deliberate, well-thought-out inclusions for specific purposes at different points in the story. When a title pointedly says Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, it is probable that a significant part of the author’s life has seeped into her creation which makes it essential to consider the relevant parts of her life to analyze my claim. To do this, this essay considers the childhood reading in the Brontë family and focuses on some of the Bronte siblings’ favorite readings, which happened to be popular in the Victorian era. It then considers their powerful impact on Charlotte Brontë’s mind. After briefly considering the general attitude towards the reading woman in the era and how the Brontë family was different in that regard, this essay considers the long-lasting impact of Arabian Nights and Thomas Bewick’s The History of British Birds on Jane Eyre. Both books were the Brontë children’s favorite readings and had a significant impact on their writings from the juvenilia to the novels that they wrote as adults. By referring to these books in Jane Eyre Brontë was paying a tribute to the act of reading and to those specific books. While acknowledging that there are always multiple influences on a writer’s mind, I will be considering the impact of Arabian Nights[2] and Bewick’s The History of British Birds as two major influences on Jane Eyre because these issues have not been theorized as much as some other aspects of Brontë’s work. The Eastern link and debt to the Arabian Nights is especially interesting to me as an Indian. [1] I have used the text of Jane Eyre from A Norton Critical Edition edited by Richard J. Dunn, referred here onwards as JE. [2] For this essay I am using Sir Richard Burton’s translation of the Arabian Nights, which would not be the one the Brontës read; nonetheless the essential stories would still be the same. They may have read the earlier versions which Burton derides in the introduction to his translation. Advisors: Laura White, Beverley Rilett

In mid-to-late Victorian fiction, pollution and waste drip, ooze, and seep through the built environment, threatening the boundaries between public and private, rich and poor, healthy and ill. Refuse and dirt held a paradoxical place in nineteenth-century society, as matter that was economically valuable, yet had the capacity to contaminate. My dissertation moves from this tension to ask three questions: What roles did dirt and waste play in critiques of capitalism? How did industrial and organic pollution shape the way that the Victorians imagined the natural world in the latter half of the nineteenth century? And how did changing views of the environment transform what constituted a “natural” social order? The project focuses on four Victorian authors fascinated by pollution and waste – Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, and Richard Jefferies – and contextualizes their work in a broader discourse on waste by such figures as John Ruskin, John Stuart Mill, Henry Mayhew, and Charles Darwin. For the Victorians, questions of nature and pollution were not only environmental or scientific. They also had serious implications for the way that society was structured. I argue that for some nineteenth-century writers, visions of strange, contaminated environments offered novel versions of the “natural” order, which in turn allowed them to depict alternative social orders that emphasized stewardship and care while challenging the logic of industrial capitalism. Scholars of the Victorian period have largely discussed depictions of filth in the context of England’s public health movement of the 1840s, identifying links between the containment of dirt and social boundaries. My dissertation builds on this work by arguing that pollution undermined Victorian efforts to distinguish the natural from the unnatural, enabling writers to portray different “natural” models of social, political, and economic organization. Taken together, the works of Mayhew, Braddon, Dickens, Browning, and Jefferies reflect a strain of Victorian thought that saw dirt and waste as central to the development of a just and compassionate social order. Rather than expressing an unmitigated disgust for contaminated spaces, these writers move beyond the nineteenth-century desire for the containment of filth to inscribe otherwise monstrous spaces with possibility.

In her landmark works The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913), and The Age of Innocence (1920), Edith Wharton responds to earlier depictions of the classical, pure Victorian and Edwardian woman. Wharton's "inconvenient" women overturn popular stereotypes. Subsequently, they are barred from their social groups, but they are independent, unlike the complicit and obedient women of the classical body, most of whom ascribe to the trope of the "Angel in the House." The grotesque seeks to undercut the unrealistic expectations enforced by the classical through its embodiment of progression and humanity, and Wharton is drawn to its libertine nature. Using theorists and critics such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Laura Mulvey, and Judith Butler, as well as secondary critics Emily J. Orlando, Claire Preston, and Elizabeth Ammons, this thesis will explore Wharton's preoccupation with the grotesque and her ultimate preference for the transitional body--a combination of the two opposing ideals.

My thesis explores the depiction of the British Empire in Victorian and Neo-Victorian children’s fiction. Though scholars may expect to find simplistic imperial triumphalism in texts written in the late Victorian period and incisive critiques of empire in contemporary texts, my work demonstrates that the ideology of empire is much more contradictory, unstable, and incohesive than one might assume. By looking at the instability of imperial ideology through the lens of children’s fiction, I examine the ways in which that ideology is contested in the text rather than a stable site of ideological transference from adult to child. Thus, my thesis is divided into two parts. Part I examines two giants of late-Victorian imperial fiction. Chapter 1 concerns H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, and how that texts reveals anxieties about British racial superiority through its depiction of African characters. Chapter 2 is centered on two works by Rudyard Kipling, “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” and Kim. In this chapter, I trace Kipling’s depiction of the ideal native subject as at once affectionate and undermined by notions of British racial superiority. Part II of my thesis examines two contemporary children’s novels set in the Victorian period, with characters who have connections to the British Empire. Chapter 3 examines Philip Pullman’s The Ruby and the Smoke and deconstructs Pullman’s critique of the British Empire by demonstrating how Pullman reifies imperialist aesthetics. In Chapter 4, I turn my attention to Libba Bray’s novel A Great and Terrible Beauty and its two sequels, to show that Bray’s more subversive depiction of a romance between an Anglo-Indian girl and an Indian boy is incapable of escaping from imperial ideology. My hope is that, by exploring these instabilities, I further our collective understanding of how imperial ideology is both reproduced and undermined.

The Victorians habitually framed knowing as a matter of seeing things clearly, but they were also deeply aware of the limits of human perception. “The Victorian Mind’s Eye” uncovers how aesthetic and scientific thinkers of the period employed literary form to achieve visual and epistemological clarity. Current critical approaches to perception in science and literature tend to reduce literature to a conduit for scientific ideas or treat scientific discovery and technological innovation as the drivers of change in literary form. In this dissertation, I instead argue that for a wide range of Victorian intellectuals, literary forms were not a mere vehicle for scientific knowledge, nor second-order reflections of such knowledge, but were privileged as effective tools for establishing new perceptual modes and changing how readers understood their world. In a series of four case studies that pair Victorians who shaped how we view art with Victorians who changed how we view nature—John Ruskin and Charles Darwin in chapter one, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and James Clerk Maxwell in two, George Meredith and Karl Pearson in three, and Walter Pater and William James in four—I demonstrate that their disparate projects were driven by the same dilemma: how can we know what we cannot see with our own eyes? Drawing on current trends in philosophy of science that posit an analogy between scientific models and literature, I reframe these writers’ use of literary form as a technology of perception rather than an element of style. Much as Victorians used scientific models to detect new phenomena, writers across the arts and sciences used poetic devices including metaphor, juxtaposition, and aphorism to expand readers’ perceptual capabilities beyond the perspectival limits of the individual observer.

Monsters and Medicine: The Evolution of a Warning in Gothic Literature / Parolles' WordProblem in All's Well That Ends Well

Over the course of the nineteenth century, writers showed an increased interest in the representation of two or more moments of simultaneous action. Often this interest has been understood as a response to the new “space-collapsing” technologies of the age such as the railway or the telegraph. However, I argue that such narratives are better understood in the context of the storytelling practices of the imperial state. These practices, which I call “proximity plots,” minimize the anarchic geographic realities faced by states while comforting and their audiences with the assurance that the world is smaller than it seems. I begin my project with the stakes of that lie. In my first chapter I consider the travel writings of Joseph Wolff, whose ill-fated attempt to rescue two British officers imprisoned in central Asia was informed, in part, by a sense of the world cultivated through these proximity plots. While his attempt ended in failure, the narrative of that attempt relies on the same storytelling gymnastics that helped justify it. To understand these techniques, I next look to Walter Scott’s three “crusader” novels. In my analysis, Scott emerges as a crucial thinker whose novels conjure a nation unified both socially and temporally. Wolff’s application and replication of narrative techniques employed by Scott helps us understand how literary production can directly shape how we understand the world around us. After Scott, I turn to William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Newcomes and consider how that novel undermines Scott’s temporal politics, offering a view of the world as significantly bigger and less manageable than Scott’s marauding knights might prefer. Critically, in the story I tell, it is the novelist Thackeray, rather than the journalist-adventurer Wolff, who ultimately recognizes the limits of the narrative production of proximity. Thackeray’s era saw the realization of these dreams of simultaneity with the expansion of the telegraph network and the growth of steam packets that offered global service. But rather than take these innovations for granted or use them as the foundation for an even more aggressive temporal utopianism, Thackeray emphasizes their fragility.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, writers showed an increased interest in the representation of two or more moments of simultaneous action. Often this interest has been understood as a response to the new “space-collapsing” technologies of the age such as the railway or the telegraph. However, I argue that such narratives are better understood in the context of the storytelling practices of the imperial state. These practices, which I call “proximity plots,” minimize the anarchic geographic realities faced by states while comforting and their audiences with the assurance that the world is smaller than it seems. I begin my project with the stakes of that lie. In my first chapter I consider the travel writings of Joseph Wolff, whose ill-fated attempt to rescue two British officers imprisoned in central Asia was informed, in part, by a sense of the world cultivated through these proximity plots. While his attempt ended in failure, the narrative of that attempt relies on the same storytelling gymnastics that helped justify it. To understand these techniques, I next look to Walter Scott’s three “crusader” novels. In my analysis, Scott emerges as a crucial thinker whose novels conjure a nation unified both socially and temporally. Wolff’s application and replication of narrative techniques employed by Scott helps us understand how literary production can directly shape how we understand the world around us. After Scott, I turn to William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Newcomes and consider how that novel undermines Scott’s temporal politics, offering a view of the world as significantly bigger and less manageable than Scott’s marauding knights might prefer. Critically, in the story I tell, it is the novelist Thackeray, rather than the journalist-adventurer Wolff, who ultimately recognizes the limits of the narrative production of proximity. Thackeray’s era saw the realization of these dreams of simultaneity with the expansion of the telegraph network and the growth of steam packets that offered global service. But rather than take these innovations for granted or use them as the foundation for an even more aggressive temporal utopianism, Thackeray emphasizes their fragility.

Since 1979 when Wolfgang Schivelbusch applied Marx’s phrase “annihilation of time and space” to the nineteenth-century railways, the idea that locomotives revolutionized mobility and restructured life has undergirded historical analysis. Recent scholarship challenges this long-standing assumption, countering that transportation networks expanded through evolutionary change and that cultural adaptation occurred by resisting the imposing forces of modernity. My study joins this critical departure but proposes a new conceptual model defined by regret and revision. This dissertation argues that fiction written between 1857-1891 illustrates railway growth as a recursive and participatory process. I show through the writing of Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Riddell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Dickens, and Margaret Oliphant that expansion was neither radically disruptive nor seamless but occurred through a series of fits and starts, re-assessments and alterations. Additionally, this body of fiction illuminates how Victorians actively negotiated the challenges the railways introduced, rather than merely adapting their lives to technological modernization or turning away from the present to recuperate part of a lost past. As the railways transformed from invention to commodity to industry, popular nineteenth-century engineering biographies shaped the story of the railway and its inventors, engineers, and investors into inflated myths of personal success and smooth progress. Valorizing self-interest over government interference, these narratives reinforced the laissez-faire arrangement between Parliament and railway companies. However, by mid-century redundant and abandoned lines, accidents, financial mania, and social immobility sparked debates about the detriment of lax regulation on public welfare. Along with newspapers and journals, fiction contributed to this debate. Works by Dickens, Gaskell, Riddell, Oliphant and others addressed these regrets by revising the story of the railways, correcting the strategic selection, erasure, and exaggeration of those early myths. In chapters focused on the expansion of lines, traveler safety, financial investment, and social mobility, this dissertation showcases authors who amplified the voice of public opinion in their fiction during a time when Parliament and boards of directors dominated the conversation. Demonstrating that to regret the past is also to envision a better future, such fiction provided the space within which Victorians could imagine balance between corporate, state, and public interests.

Only relatively recently has paid nursing come to be viewed as a respectable profession for women. Early-nineteenth-century literature describes hired nurses as low-class, slovenly women who smoked, drank, and abused their patients. Middle-class British society feared that hired nurses were low-class, ignorant, unsympathetic, unfeminine, and too independent from men. Beyond Nightingale examines how literature from the early nineteenth century through the early twentieth century helped alleviate these fears and altered the public perception of nursing by presenting paid nurses as middle-class women who were sympathetic, selfless, and subservient to doctors. Many authors suggested that nursing ability was not dependent upon natural femininity or personal character, but relied on training and experience. By altering the public’s perception of paid nursing, literary portrayals of nursing facilitated its transformation from an extension of the feminine, domestic sphere into an efficient medical profession for women. Beyond Nightingale examines works by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, William Thackeray, and L. T. Meade, among others, to challenge the prevailing myth that Florence Nightingale single-handedly reformed nursing in the mid-1850s. Using World War I propaganda, periodicals, novels, and memoirs, Benham also explores how the desire for efficiency was encouraged and contested in literary portrayals of nursing from 1900 – 1918. Great War nursing literature emphasized efficiency as the most important objective in nursing care. As a result, sympathy was increasingly devalued because it hindered the efficiency of the medical machine. This tension between sympathetic and efficient care has not been resolved, but continues to plague the medical profession today.Beyond Nightingale considers not only traditional literary works, but also a variety of non-literary archival sources including nursing manuals, sanitary pamphlets, women’s periodicals, and Voluntary Aid Detachment (V.A.D.) documents. Benham demonstrates how both literary and non-literary texts informed one another and contributed to a common conversation about the transformation of nursing care. With this wealth of sources, Benham traces the evolution of the literary representation of nursing from a denigrated and despised last resort for poor widows to an esteemed, efficient profession for middle-class British women.

This study re-examines established views on gender divisions in the nineteenth century and further investigates the relationship between identity construction and material culture, with an emphasis on clothing. Using artifacts from the Steamboat Bertrand collection as a case study, the project explores the maintenance and performance of Victorian gender ideals in Montana mining communities. Steamboat Bertrand sank in 1865 on its maiden journey to Fort Benton, Montana, carrying a variety of goods for commercial sale, as well as the personal goods of passengers aboard the ship. The artifacts excavated from the ship provide a unique examination into the lives of men and women on the frontier. Artifact analysis and historical research serve as the primary methods for exploring concepts of gender and identity. Representative textiles for analysis were sourced from both the commercial and personal cargos to better understand the fluidity of gender role performance and translation of Victorian values into western communities. Clothing, as the most personal form of material culture, provides an accessible avenue to understand concepts of both individual and community identities. Additionally, the imbalanced demographics of mining towns, such as those in Montana, provide unique scenarios for interrogating the relationship between material culture and identity construction in the mid-nineteenth century. The written narrative of this thesis is accompanied by a digital exhibit hosted on Scalar which explores similar concepts through an object-centered investigation. The project makes use of digitized primary documents, photographs, and 3D models of artifacts to present a multimedia narrative that engages the audience in a critical examination of the past. Though the digital exhibit utilizes a broader artifact set than this thesis, both projects engage in similar analyses that re-examine the experiences of men and women on the frontier. These projects engage with narratives of the past to deepen the understanding of lived experiences in western communities. Advisor: Effie Athanassopoulos

This analysis will explore the progression and transformation of carnivalesque theory in six novels. The carnivalesque analysis will focus on Victorian women and the working class over a time period beginning around 1830 and ending in 1910. The novels that comprise this study are Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure; Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley; and finally Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale and E. M. Forster’s Howards End. The study intends to show a progression in the role of women that utilizes carnivalesque display as a vehicle. Women in the Hardy novels represent those who rebel against prescriptive Victorian mores in the midst of carnivalesque scenes. Hardy intends to use transgressive women and the suffering they endure to illustrate how Victorian rules of decorum and the institution of marriage are confining to point of being destructive. Gaskell and Bronte’s novels represent industrial or condition-of-England novels that show how Victorian women gain greater access and understanding of the working class and poor through spending time with these groups while performing charitable works. The carnivalesque has indeed undergone a partial transformation because scenes that overturn authority occur not only in public settings like the marketplace, but they also show up in the form of worker strikes and uprisings. Because the females in these novels have a greater understanding of the plight of the poor workers, they are able to advocate on their behalf and exert influence upon the managers and owners that helps to bring about reform in the workers’ situation. Finally the last two novels represent the culmination of this study as they reveal how carnivalesque scenes, both public and private, frame the experiences of two sets of sisters, both of which occupy the liminal space between the Victorian Age and Modernism. Women have progressed to the point of being able to overcome adversity and personal failure and grow into strong, independent individuals who speak for themselves, live independently, exert their own authority, and finally vote.

In the Victorian period, photography was associated with the ghosts of history, con artistsin the streets of London, and cultural anxieties about the future of Victorian society. TheVictorian practice of photographing ghosts, or spirit photography, showed how Victoriansviewed the past, present, and future. By examining the cultural artifact of Georgiana Houghton’sChronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual Beings (1882), it becomes clear how photographyaffected Victorian literature as well as Victorian culture. In the short stories, “Oke of Okehurst”(1886) and “A Wicked Voice” (1887), Vernon Lee compared Victorian produced art to art fromhistory. For Lee, the fast paced and highly commercialized art, which was influenced byphotography, was not as powerful as art with historical context. An earlier work, ThomasHardy’s A Laodicean: A Story of To-Day (1881), also showed the connections betweenphotography, history, and uncertainty. The characters try to use photography to try and preservea crumbling medieval castle, but their attempts end in failure. While technology like telegraphsgives Paula a sense of power, the novel leaves her wishing she had a more stable connection tothe past and the future. These examples of Victorian literature show that photography affectedVictorian culture at a deeper level than previously thought. Photography changed the wayVictorians thought about the past, present, and future.

Mediums and Their Material investigates how late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century women mediums interrupt and re-contour discourses of the body—biologically, medically, textually—through their representations of technological and spiritual contact. Recent critics have regarded women as particularly suited for mediating communication, be it through technological devices such as the typewriter or telegraph, or spiritualist practices like the seance or automatic writing. What made these women’s bodies so viable for these ends, scholars have noted, was the ubiquitous perception at the turn of the century that the female body possesses “natural” feminine qualities: passivity, moral refinement, spiritual superiority, and sympathy. Developed out of the supposed weakness of the female body, this critical attention on the social construction of femininity and women’s mediation has, to this point, eschewed any discussion of mediums’ actual bodies and the agency those bodies might express. Where most critical discussions of mediation explore the gender lines that qualify, or circumscribe, the female medium’s agency and the vulnerability afforded her by her passive qualities, my project takes a material feminist approach to develop an alternative reading of female mediation that retrieves the female body from paternalistic, patriarchal, and racist constructions, and demonstrates how female mediums’ bodies and their organic function operate as powerful sites of agency. Contributing to both material feminist conversations and the fields of Victorian and Modernist studies more generally by looking closely at the materiality of the bodies employed in spiritual and technological mediation, Mediums and Their Material imagines women mediums and their technological and spiritualist experiences as working in their own time to promote their economic and political development—through authorship, women’s rights movements, and other systems of knowledge conveyance.

Challenging prominent accounts of secularization that draw a hard line between pre-modern and modern experiences of the self and of history, this dissertation contends that pre-modern and religiously-inflected understandings of the world paradoxically subsist in modernity through their marked absence, inarticulacy, and inscrutability and that this subsistence renders the poems I consider not modern but rather "untimely." It ultimately associates this "untimeliness" of nineteenth-century poetry with the current state of the humanities, in which they appear increasingly obsolescent in a world where knowledge production is often understood as inseparable from technological production. I argue that it is precisely the anachronistic nature of the humanities, their being constantly "behind the times," that allows them to remain a present and powerful social force. The dissertation is framed by an Overture and Coda that investigate Romantic and contemporary understandings of the nature of literary knowledge. The opening section considers William Wordsworth's attempt to articulate the nature of poetry and its relationship to other forms of knowledge in his 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads and the closing section examines scholars' present attempts to bring humanities research into conversation with more dominant technological discourses, focusing especially on how the digital humanities can engage with historical texts in ways that bring into focus their resistance to full incorporation into our own dominant epistemological discourses. The body of my project is focused on close readings of three major nineteenth-century poems. My reading of Wordsworth's The Prelude in Chapters 1 and 2 locates in this autobiographical poem, which has long been considered paradigmatically modern, pre-modern experiences of the self and post-modern experiences of literature. My reading of Percy Shelley's "The Triumph of Life" in Chapter 3 similarly positions the poem between the pre-modern conceptions of temporality and history that I associate with Dante and the post-modern ones that I associate with Paul de Man. The final chapter, in moving from the Romantics to the priest-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, explores how the particular "untimeliness" I locate in Wordsworth and Shelley both subsists in and is radically altered by Hopkins's explicitly religious framework.

How did Victorian readers choose what to read, and why should this matter? Studies of Victorian reading practices have explored which texts Victorian readers chose to read and how they interpreted them, but scholars have generally neglected the actual processes through which readers became informed about and made their reading selections, as well as the Victorians’ discursive treatment of those processes. Addressing this lapse, I argue that from the Victorians’ perspective, the ways readers selected books had a profound effect on their reading experiences, shaping how they understood texts’ meanings, developed relationships with books, and characterized themselves as readers. To investigate this overlooked aspect of reading in the nineteenth century, I draw on a variety of sources from the Victorian period, including metadata, literary representations of readers, and nonfiction prose that addresses book selection, by figures such as John Stuart Mill, Henry Morley, Mark Pattison, and John Ruskin. These sources provide a rich sense of the varied ways in which Victorian readers came across books and made book selections, including searching through catalogues, following others’ recommendations, and browsing book stall shelves or stacks of books at home. I outline two divergent attitudes circulating in Victorian publications about book selection, one advocating readers’ purposeful pursuits of information about books, arranged by educated individuals, and the other celebrating the many ways readers could approach literature from outside of the formal infrastructure of information. The nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century texts that feature most prominently in my analysis of Victorian book selection habits include the catalogues of Mudie’s library from the 1850s through the 1930s, as well as a number of novels and poems: Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps (1923), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868-69), George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850), Ouida’s The Tower of Taddeo (1892), and Mark Rutherford’s Clara Hopgood (1896). I conclude the dissertation by bringing into the present the Victorians’ concerns about informed reading, analyzing Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch (2014) to study the relationship between expert guidance on texts and emotional identification with texts.

This study explores the development of British tourist guidebooks that became increasingly interested Continental Catholicism, its people, and its art and architecture over the course of the nineteenth century. The eighteenth-century Grand Tour, long the domain of young aristocrats, had been a secular pilgrimage to Rome and the capstone to a traditional Classical Oxbridge education. After the wars with France ended in 1815, however, transformations in transportation made Continental Europe accessible to middle-class British tourists. As this fresh generation of travelers went abroad, they cared less about Classical history and more about Roman Catholic cultural artefacts and practices. The dissertation shows that British tourist guidebooks, which frequently Orientalized their Catholic subject matter, became central to consolidating a specific British, Protestant identity from the 1810s onward.

This article analyzes George MacDonald’s realist novels. It looks at how David Elginbrod, Alec Forbes of Howglen, and Lilith engage with scientific discourse and epistemological concerns of the period. These scientific and epistemological dealings include a positive evaluation of evolution, a resistance to pseudoscience and Calvinism, an endorsement of non-dualism, and an analysis of scientific models and methods. The generic classification of Lilith as a realist novel with fantastical elements is discussed.

Victorian literature is crowded with scenes of women reaching out and touching one another. Women regularly show their affection through physical manifestations such as hugging, kissing, walking arm-in-arm, and with hands clasped warmly around one another’s waists. Physical manifestations of female affection recur in the great majority of Victorian fiction, from the early to the late period, in a variety of genres, in literature by both male and female authors, and often recur in chapter after chapter. My study recognizes that in any society, the tacit rules of who touches whom, when, why, where, and how, are complex and deeply-engrained social issues, and close analysis thereof may thus yield much information about a society’s most deeply held values. In addition, nineteenth-century England, with its popular reputation for extreme prudery and restraint, is an enticing place to find such myriad description of physical touch. Why, then, are they there, and why so prevalent? What functions do they serve in the texts? How were these women, and their bodies, read by onlookers? And what meaning and values were ascribed to such depictions by Victorian readers? This work begins to answer these questions, codify the implicit politics of social touching between women in Victorian England, provide a justification for the analysis of such scenes in literature, and develop an initial framework for these analyses. My research has determined that touching behaviors function as markers of various identity constructs including gender, (chapter one of this work), and nationality and social standing (chapter two). In addition, some women were able to manipulate expectations surrounding their physical behavior to accomplish their own ends (chapter three), while the physicality of others results in significant or lasting consequences for the individuals who are touched (chapter four).