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Desperate Remedies, Thomas Hardy’s first novel, published under a pseudonym, is often regarded as a sensation novel. In the 1870s, though the literary genre was no longer as popular as it had been a decade before, resorting to sensational motifs and plot-patterns was still a significant means to foreground a modern world marked by capitalism, progress and urbanization. Moreover, the genre’s constant play upon bodies—whether the bodies of the characters or those of its readers—typified its close relationship with modernity. Sensation fiction was more often than not haunted by anxious, neurasthenic or even insane characters, as though they were nervously exhausted by their stimulating and stressful modern society. This paper explores how Thomas Hardy reworks the literary conventions of the sensation novel in Desperate Remedies. Featuring an illegitimate child, a husband suspected of bigamy, drugs, poisons and characters hiding beneath deceitful appearances, Desperate Remedies revisits Victorian sensationalism and investigates sensations and the senses in a brand new way.

This chapter examines how the Georgian scientific enterprise permeated early children’s literature. The development of children’s literature from the second half of the eighteenth century, climaxing in the highly entertaining works published by John Harris at the turn of the nineteenth century, coincided with the discovery, analysis and description of new and sometimes surprising creatures, mostly coming from the New World. Thus, this chapter provides a survey of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century children’s literature in order to show how the children’s books of the period reflected Enlightenment Britain, its growing scientific knowledge about the natural world and the non-European species regularly brought back to Britain and kept in menageries.

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Depuis le premier essor de la ceroplastie anatomique, a partir des premieres decennies du XVIIIesiecle, les representations tridimensionnelles du corps humain et de ses parties – en cire, mais aussi en bois, en terre-cuite, en papier mâche, hybrides ou composites – n’ont cesse de circuler a travers l’Europe, beaucoup plus que toute autre categorie d’objets susceptibles d’etre ranges dans des musees medicaux. Ces artefacts font l’objet d’achats, de dons, de prets ou de reproductions, pour etre disposes dans des lieux ouverts ou semi-ouverts a la visite d’un public. La pratique anatomique, le savoir-faire artisanal, la constitution de collections et les choix des pouvoirs politiques donnent lieu a des circuits par lesquels des espaces d’exhibition d’objets issus du savoir medical s’installent et se reproduisent a l’echelle du continent. Aussi l’histoire des musees de medecine s’ecrit-elle en partie en suivant la trame des circulations transfrontalieres des modeles anatomiques et des modeleurs.

In ‘Gruesome models: European Displays of Natural History and Anatomy and Nineteenth-Century Literature’ Laurence Talairach-Vielmas explores the process in which from the second half of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, medical museums opened their doors throughout Europe and anatomical models circulated between Italy, Germany, France and England, serving to educate professional medical audiences and thrilling lay audiences keen on freaks and fairs. The chapter argues that the popularisation of anatomy and the circulation of anatomical models and modellers, exhibitions and anatomists throughout Europe was reflected in nineteenth-century literature, from Gothic novels to realistic narratives and even children’s fiction. Looking at the impact of the material culture of medicine upon the literary field, Talairach-Vielmas examines the relationship between literature and the European anatomical culture by exploring nineteenth-century narratives from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) in the first decades of the nineteenth-century to Charles Dickens’s fiction in the 1860s, analysing novels alongside travel guides and journal articles which demonstrate how the specific example of anatomy influenced the literary culture.

Scientists often claim that science is necessarily non-metaphorical and that scientific knowledge is poles apart from imagination. However, there is a long-standing debate on metaphors and analogies in science. This essay will raise the issue of the dual or unstable position of metaphorical language in scientific theory, focussing on the giant beasts that fascinated the Victorians and were spectacularised and sensationalised throughout the nineteenth century in shows, public lectures, popular science books and novels. Throughout the nineteenth century, works of popular science and scientific essays were full of structural metaphors and analogies that attempted to give shape to creatures that were extinct. Analogies were thus essential to scientific reasoning and Palaeontological discourse. Yet this type of metaphorical language was used in different ways: on the one hand, it served the authors’ and publishers’ commercial ambitions; on the other, it aimed to promote the scientific validity of an emerging d...

This article deals with Mary Louisa Molesworth's The Tapestry Room (1879), and examines the way in which Molesworth rewrites the figure of the storyteller. By contrasting male and female characters, fantasy and reality, Molesworth associates the fairy tale with a feminine tradition, and borrows from folk tales to devise assertive and independent princesses. Her example is an example of Victorian women writers’ attempt at carving out a niche for themselves in the literary marketplace and vindicating a feminine discourse.

Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850), written a decade before the publication of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, emphasizes newly-emerging definitions of nature and modern perceptions of the interrelations between the human social system and the ecosystem. In so doing, the modern conceptions of the natural environment which the novel highlights, shape a utopian model for a more democratic society. As this paper points out, by using environmental metaphors, Kingsley questions human nature and the potential of the environment to change it. As a result, his depiction of natural ecosystems, though charged with ideology and the weight of conservative discourse, is progressive, inviting humans to change society—and themselves in the process.

This article explores the reception of some anatomical collections in Georgian and Victorian England. Both private medical museums and public anatomical museums reflected the central role played by anatomy in medical knowledge and education in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, because they were associated with death and sexuality, anatomical museums were both products of enlightenment science and potentially immoral loci likely to corrupt young and innocent women. But, as this article shows, the reasons behind the hostile receptions of some collections varied throughout the centuries, revealing in so doing the gradual professionalization of the medical field and growing monopoly of medical professionals over medical knowledge.

This paper looks at the way Charlotte Bronte deals with the feminine ideal in Jane Eyre. As she plays upon a heroine comparing herself to other models of femininity, the novel brings to light the significance of visual culture in the construction of the romance between Jane and Rochester. However, Charlotte's use of Gothic stereotypes ultimately discredits images of ideal femininity. The figure of the ghost, which marks Jane's invisibility throughout the novel, eventually enables her to evade Rochester's grasp and, in so doing, male authority.

Charles Perrault’s classical “Little Red Riding-Hood,” in which a young woman is commodified as a red riding-hood, makes explicit that the more the woman’s outer appearance is in keeping with the fashion standards of the day, the more she should be able to regulate her nature. This idea was even more emphasized in the Victorian period, which saw the advent of mass visual culture. Both Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s and Harriet Louisa Childe-Pemberton’s 1867 and 1882 revisions of Perrault’s tale foreground the link between the illusory nature of reality and modern femininity in order to challenge dominant (bourgeois) definitions of femininity as image.

how to interpret the most obscure diagnoses of all mental diseases that can afflict her mistress, she knows when the ivory complexion is bought and paid for when the pearly teeth are foreign substances fashioned by the dentist when the glossy plaits are the relics of the dead, rather than the property of the living; and she knows other and more sacred secrets than these. She knows when the sweet smile is more false than