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This thesis investigates the effect of astronomy on the Victorian poetic imagination. It centres on four writers of the period: Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas De Quincey, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy. To date this subject has received surprisingly little critical focus. This study redresses this lack, by revealing how these writers engaged creatively with the possibilities and limitations of contemporary astronomical science and its technologies. It argues that astronomy gave all four writers important metaphors and analogies, enabling them to project a sense of self-discovery in their writing. It shows how their interest in scientific texts, their association with prominent astronomers of the period, and their own astronomical observations, had a profound effect on their creative imagination. This thesis uses their texts, personal diaries, notebooks, letters and library collections to reveal their interest in the science of astronomy. Likewise, it researches the astronomical texts they studied, including those of the leading scientists of the day such as John Frederick William Herschel, John Pringle Nichol and Richard Anthony Proctor. The argument places Tennyson, De Quincey, Hopkins and Hardy's interest in astronomy within the period's cultural fascination with the science, and establishes them as both consumers and producers of astronomical knowledge. Each of the writers studied avidly watched the night sky through the telescopes he owned, had access to, or by the naked eye. Important to this enquiry, is a discussion of the optical technology of the telescope as a transparent framing and mirroring device, and how its use results in intense and visionary experiences in the work of these writers. This study crosses the traditional divides of science and literature, to show how these four writers achieved a synthesis of scientific and poetic thought in their writing.

The present thesis examines the idea of aesthetic education of three eminent Victorians: John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin. By focusing on the essence of what they meant with ‘the cultivation of the beautiful’ and, more importantly, the way their ideas of beauty informed their criticism of society, my study aims to contribute to our understanding of the idea of aesthetic education in the Victorian context and, further, to participate in a recent debate about the nature of beauty and aesthetic education. Chapter One focuses on John Stuart Mill’s concept of ‘feeling’ in a series of essays. I will demonstrate how Mill’s idea of ‘aesthetic education’ was an ‘education of feelings,’ and moreover, how this idea was integrated into his literary criticism, his later critique of democratisation, his description of an ideal liberal society and even his own style of writing. Chapter Two contains a comparative study of Matthew Arnold and Friedrich Schiller. Through a rereading of Arnold, I will argue that his idea of aesthetic education is essentially Schillerian and that their resemblance consists primarily in their stress on the importance of aesthetic unity for modern life, which was becoming increasingly fragmentary and multitudinous. Chapter Three examines John Ruskin’s idea of aesthetic education and concentrates particularly on the cultivation of perception. Perception, as I shall show, was pivotal in Ruskin’s idea of aesthetic education. Just as what happened in Mill and Arnold, the emphasis on the education of seeing continued from his early writings well into his art and social criticisms. It not only differentiated him from his fellow art critics; the conviction that people should perceive with a pure heart also enabled him to link observation of artistic details with moral criticism of contemporary society and, thereby, to turn the cultivation of the beautiful into a moral-aesthetic experience.

This thesis examines Oscar Wilde’s theories of art in connection with specific debates ongoing in Victorian psychology as it emerged in the periodical press. By cross examining Wilde’s periodical contributions with psychological theories, concepts and discussions disseminated through periodicals this thesis offers a contextual account of Wilde’s creativity. Scholars generally look to Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks to gain an insight into his interaction with scientific culture. While the notebooks are an invaluable source to scholars they only cover Wilde’s learning in the 1870s and therefore exclude the influential context of the 1880s when he was engaged as a journalist for numerous periodicals and newspapers. Chapter one will demonstrate how reading Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray alongside neighbouring articles in the Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine reveals the hidden context of psychology in which the editors of the issue attempted to establish the text. The second chapter explores Wilde’s engagement in the disputes over psychological nomenclature alongside the psychology of George Henry Lewes, James Sully and other contributors. The third chapter will investigate the network in which Wilde’s reviewing for the Pall Mall Gazette established him. Wilde’s exchanges with aesthetic theorists and fellow reviewers Sully and Grant Allen will also be documented. The fourth chapter will demonstrate how Wilde creatively engaged with theories of atomism, emotionalist psychology and physiological aesthetics. The final chapter will examine the ethical questions posed by Wildean aesthetics in relation to scientific naturalism. Wilde originally communicated his theories through periodicals but also delivered lectures (which were reported in magazines), as well as eventually transforming his periodical articles into book publications. While this thesis places the onus on the periodical formats of Wilde’s texts, his lectures and revised editions of his writings will also be examined where relevant.

This thesis will discuss Charles and Mary Lamb'€™s 1807 Tales from Shakespeare and Thomas Bowdler'€™s 1818 The Family Shakespeare in a critical and historical context. Running through this thesis is the argument that these texts are cornerstones of children'€™s Shakespeare, though their reputations and contributions to the genre are buried beneath generations of misconceptions and sensationalism. This thesis provides a new perspective on Tales from Shakespeare and The Family Shakespeare that exposes the prejudices and misinformation surrounding them, offering an assessment of their respective adaptation methods and editorial influence over Shakespeare from the nineteenth century to the present. The first chapter introduces the thesis and identifies the scope of its research. It discusses the misconceptions surrounding the Lambs'€™ and Bowdler'€™s texts and examines the practice of reading Shakespeare in the home. The second chapter establishes the historical context of Tales from Shakespeare and The Family Shakespeare by examining the origins of both children's literature and Shakespeare adaptations. It highlights influential educational philosophies, editorial trends, and critical debates in both of these fields. The third chapter discusses and contrasts the distinctive adaptation methods used by Charles and Mary Lamb respectively in Tales from Shakespeare. The fourth chapter discusses the adaptation methods used by Thomas Bowdler in The Family Shakespeare and distinguishes them from the accepted term bowdlerization. The fifth chapter establishes the legacy of the Lambs'€™ and Bowdler'€™s texts by discussing their influences over subsequent Shakespeare adaptations for children during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The sixth chapter presents the concluding arguments and final observations of the thesis.

This thesis explores the relationship between imperial rhetoric and metaphors of literary production. It focuses on British literature from the late nineteenth century, a period that was crucial to the development of 'New Imperialism'. Beginning in the 1870s, when the South African diamond rush radically altered Britain's colonial policy, this thesis offers a reevaluation of the relationship between literature and empire as it is expressed by colonial discourse about South Africa. It examines what is at stake when the same language and imagery used to express the value of literary labour is also drawn upon to popularise colonial expansion. Chapter One investigates the textual practice of 'jewel- setting', the reuse of extracts to create new texts. It juxtaposes the creative ideology that one novelist, Charles Reade, attached to this method with the political symbolism that imbues the recutting and resetting of the famous Koh-i-noor diamond. Chapter Two places Anthony Trollope's relentless literary labour in the context of South African diamond fever and the political rhetoric of rush. It analyses how his 1878 travelogue, South Africa, conveyed the experience of 'rush' to its British readers. Chapter Three offers a counterpoint to the implicitly masculinist energy of rush with an assessment of Lady Barker's maternal perspective on South Africa. Barker, who travelled to Natal as the spouse of a colonial official, represents a revealing confluence of domestic duty and professional authorship in her maternal literary persona. This chapter places that persona in the context of cultural attitudes to home and the mother country. Chapter Four brings together a collection of adventure writers whose boy heroes travelled to South Africa in the 1880s. This chapter explores the relationship between journalism and the evolution of this brand of boys' own fiction and the longing it conveys for an empire innocent of the business of diamonds.

This thesis examines Robert Louis Stevenson's engagement with issues of cultural identity across a wide range of his writings, published as well as unpublished: romance narratives, historical novels, essays, letters, memoirs, neo-Gothic short stories, and Pacific travel writing and fiction. Beginning with a close examination of Stevenson's representation and interrogation of Scottish identities in domestic and British imperial contexts it expands outwards to show how Stevenson engaged with issues of identity within the late Victorian British Empire. This study challenges the compartmentalisation of Stevensonian criticism, and offers a detailed and holistic reading of his body of work, contextualising it within the social and ideological climate of the late Victorian era. It explores issues of cross-cultural contact and processes of negotiation and hybridisation, drawing upon colonial discourse and postcolonial theory. In addition it examines how Stevenson's own literary identity was formed, how Stevenson, coming from a position outside the prevailing stylistic 'schools' of Victorian literature, created, bulwarked, and argued his literary position, and how in so doing established a theoretical basis for the revival of Romance fiction. Further to that it explores the consistency of and changes to that identity over the course of his literary career and how Stevenson revisited, unsettled, and interrogated the themes and tropes of his own writing.

The thesis regards the extraordinary power of Sappho in the 1860s as resulting in a form of “Sapphic Possession” which laid hold on Swinburne, shaped his verse, produced a provocative new poetics, and which accounted for a critical reception of his work that was both hostile and enthralled. Using biographical material and Freudian psychology, I show how Swinburne became attracted to Sappho and came to rely on her as a substitute mistress and particular kind of muse, and I demonstrate the pre-eminence of the Sapphic presence in Poems and Ballads: 1, as a dominant female muse who exacts peculiar sacrifices from the poet of subjection, necrophilia, and even a form of “death” in the loss of his own personality; as a result, he is finally reduced to acting as the muse’s mouthpiece, a state akin to that of Pythia or Sibyl. Verse written under such duress instigates a new poetics where the demands and constructs of the muse produce a sublime composed of aberrance, fracture and the darkness of myth. To explicate this argument I read Poems and Ballads: 1 through carnival, a form of Bacchanal or Sapphic Komos which has the effect of blurring the boundaries between life and lyric, and which demands a joyous and reciprocal response from its readers, in which they must acknowledge their own attraction to the Sapphic sublime.

In recent years, feminist critics have moved from focusing on the misogynistic aspects of late-Victorian evolutionary science to recognising that many women found liberating possibilities within this science. However, most studies of evolution and gender in New Woman writing have concentrated on serious novels. This thesis is the first full-length study of representations of evolution in women’s poetry. Focusing predominantly on the work of Mathilde Blind, Constance Naden and May Kendall, I examine how the depiction of evolution in women’s poetry of the 1880s and 1890s, particularly comic poetry, responds to the conclusions of professional scientists about the application of evolutionary theory to human society. By reading the poetry in the context of contemporary scientific works, in books and periodicals, I demonstrate that, unlike many social Darwinists, who used evolutionary theory to reinforce the status quo, these poets found aspects within Darwin’s work that could be used to disrupt assumptions about natural femininity and to argue for the necessity of social change. The themes examined in this thesis include change, the blurring of boundaries and undermining of hierarchies, the association of white women with people of other races in scientific discourse, and Darwin’s representation of women’s sexual and reproductive role.

Part I concerns the extent to which Eliot’s novels raise challenging questions about the epistemic function of experimental inquiry and provoke us to reflect on the nature of cognition. In Part II, I demonstrate how Eliot’s writings interrogate the nature of right action and engage in ethical inquiry. In Part III, I contend that Eliot’s writings invite us to distinguish between three distinct modes of teaching: a doctrinal mode, an exemplary mode and an aesthetic mode. I argue that Eliot utilises the third of these modes to impart knowledge and ethical guidance of a kind that more austere forms of writing cannot accomplish, because such knowledge and guidance are inseparable from the delight that readers experience in the act of reading fiction. I grapple with three critiques of Eliot’s authorial conduct. These are Bernard Paris’, that her experiments in life were ‘rigged’; Martha Nussbaum’s, that her writings falsify our human position; and Friedrich Nietzsche’s, that morality was not (yet) a problem for Eliot. By contesting these critiques, I strive to substantiate three positive claims of my own. First, for Eliot the aim to maintain a rich mode of being must precede and inform all endeavours to construct systems of knowledge or to determine moral laws. Secondly, for Eliot it is possible to perform non-scientific experiments in ethics by developing disciplined forms of reading and fiction-making. Thirdly, Eliot had to develop a specifically aesthetic mode of teaching because such ‘truths’ as she sought to convey could not be expressed through more conventional literary forms. I demonstrate how Feuerbach and Spinoza’s conceptions of human nature shaped the structure of Eliot’s fictions, even as her utilisation of the art of fiction-making facilitated the expression of different valuations and an alternate sense of life than we find expressed in these theorists’ writings.

This doctoral thesis examines the role of animals in nineteenth-century science and Victorian Gothic fiction of the latter half of the century. It is interdisciplinary in its exploration of the interrelationship between science writings and literary prose and it seeks to place the Gothic animal body in its cultural and historical setting. This study is interested in the ways in which Gothic literature tests the limits of the human by using scientific ideas about disease, evolution, species confusion, and disability. In analysing the animal trope in Gothic scientific fiction, this thesis conceptualises the ways in which the Gothic mode functions in relation to, while setting itself apart from, contemporary scientific theories about humankind‘s place in the natural world. Chapter 1, 'Man‘s Best Fiend: Evolution, Rabies, and the Gothic Dog‘, focuses on the dog as an animal whose ability to carry and communicate deadly diseases to humans exemplified the breakdown of the animal-human boundary. I read late-nineteenth-century vampire and werewolf narratives as literary manifestations of social hysteria associated with dogs and rabies. In Chapter 2, 'Shaping Evolution: Amphibious Gothic in Edward Bulwer-Lytton‘s The Coming Race and William Hope Hodgson‘s The Boats of the “Glen Carrig”, I examine the role of the frog in Victorian science as the background to Gothic fiction‘s portrayal of the Gothic body as an amphibious being. The next chapter explores the spider‘s function in Victorian natural history as the background to its role as a protean and unstable Gothic trope in fiction. Chapter four, 'Geological Underworlds: Mythologizing the Beast in Victorian Palaeontology‘, looks at ways in which the dinosaur in science influenced the literary imaginations of Gothic writers Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen, and Bram Stoker. Under the title "Monsters Manufactured!": Humanised Animals, Freak Culture, and the Victorian Gothic‘, the final chapter concludes the study with a discussion of freak culture, making key links between unusually-shaped people in society and human/animal hybrids in the Gothic fiction of H. G. Wells, Richard Marsh, and Wilkie Collins.

This thesis examines the work of the nineteenth century journalist George Augustus Sala. Previous studies of Sala have focused upon the biographical aspects of his life at the expense of critical analysis of the prolific contributions he made to newspapers and periodicals. This thesis will readdress this imbalance by a close reading of Sala's visual and textual output together with an examination of the contemporary debates and issues surrounding his work. In particular it will suggest that Sala's journalistic style was a product of the very different mediums he was working in, and how this personal style along with his innovations in form would influence the New Journalism at the end of the century. For so long a misunderstood and neglected figure, this thesis will endeavour to reposition Sala at the centre of nineteenth-century media culture rather than at its margins. My research links Sala's role as an engraver, illustrator, and scene-painter to his career as an essayist for Dickens's Household Words. It will demonstrate how this in turn influenced his experiments with the form of the novel which would impact on his work as the pre-eminent Special Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. In an age of rapid press and cultural transformation my research will highlight Sala's engagement with theories of urban modernity and commodity culture; gambling, finance capitalism and the uncertainty of modern life; the culture of literary bohemia and the plight of the poor and the oppressed; and the role of the journalist. I will pursue Sala's commitment to sensationalism and realism in his novels, and his fluctuating opinions on race, slavery and imperialism in his travel writing. This thesis will also shed light on Sala's relationship with some of the most important journalists, authors, and artists of the nineteenth century – Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Mary Braddon, WP Frith, Henry Vizetelly, Frederick Greenwood and W.T. Stead. Necessarily interdisciplinary in focus, my research draws on critical work by cultural historians and literary theorists like Tim Barringer, P.D. Edwards, Mary Gluck, Lynda Nead, Deborah Nord, Matthew Rubery, Richard Sennett, Ralph Straus, Catherine Waters and Ruth Yeazell, among others. By examining contemporary periodicals, newspapers and letters this thesis will contribute to the burgeoning field of nineteenth-century print culture, while adding to the knowledge and understanding of the man many considered to be the 'beau-ideal' of a journalist.

This thesis examines Shelley’s art of sensuous imagery, or poetics of sensibility. To elucidate Shelley’s concept of sensibility which links his poetry to its ethical and aesthetic concerns, I combine close textual readings of Shelley’s imagery of the senses with his intellectual and cultural inheritance from the ‘Age of Sensibility’ which encompasses ‘moral philosophy’ (ethics and aesthetics) and ‘natural philosophy’ (science). Chapter I focuses on Shelley’s notions of sensuous pleasure and sympathy. _A Defence of Poetry_ is a pivotal text that expounds Shelley’s aesthetic and ethical taste, exemplified by his concept of sympathy. Taking up this argument, Chapter II investigates Shelley’s vegetarian politics in _Queen Mab_, rooted in what I call _(dis)gusto_, ‘taste’ in both its physical and aesthetic senses. Chapter III focuses on aural imagery in ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and ‘Mont Blanc.’ Exploring the interplay between motion and emotion reveals how aesthetics and psychology, in Shelley’s lyrics, are associated with the vocalisation of poetic inspiration. Chapter IV considers the relation of sight to Shelley’s notion of the fragmentary in two ekphrastic texts concerned with visual representation, ‘The Coliseum’ and ‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, In the Florentine Gallery,’ which illuminate Shelley’s idea of a circulating and sympathetic power that unifies humans or subject with object, alongside a fragmentary imperative within these texts. Chapter V investigates Shelley’s treatment of touch and Nature’s economy in ‘The Sensitive-Plant’ by juxtaposing Shelley’s poem with Erasmus Darwin’s cyclical system of Nature known as ‘organic happiness,’ which is recognised only by sympathetic sensibility. Chapter VI considers the intermingled imagery of scent and sympathetic love in _Epipsychidion_ in conjunction with Shelley’s theory of nervous vibrations influenced by eighteenth-century psycho-physiological discourses, mediated through the imagery of Venus, whose duality embodies the interrelations between sensuous pleasure and ideal beauty in Shelley’s poetics of sensibility.

Story-telling is a mode central to the practice and achievement of John Keats. In ‘Sleep and Poetry’, he refers to life as ‘The reading of an ever-changing tale’. This line suggests his sense of the centrality of narrative to human experiences. Yet the Keatsian narrative is as a medium for Keats to investigate the nature and development of his poetic identity. His idea of poetry and of the poet, and his narrative figuring of himself as a poet are my subject, as they are his, when in the phrase the thesis takes for its title Keats writes of a poet in Endymion, ‘He sang the story up into the air’ (II, 838). Recent scholarship has interpreted Keats’s narrative techniques in different ways. Critical approaches have modified the Bloomian concept of the anxiety of influence by using a reader response approach, or have taken on board or swerved from a McGannian New Historicist perspective. In the process Keats’s formal achievement, once celebrated by critics such as Walter Jackson Bate and Helen Vendler, has received comparatively little attention. This thesis, adopting ideas and approaches associated with narratology (including its application to lyric poetry), analyses Keats’s poetic career, focusing on the poetry’s narrative techniques and its treatment of the narrator’s role. My approach might be described as aiming to accomplish a ‘poetics of attention’. This thesis consists of eight chapters. Chapter one discusses ‘I stood tip-toe upon a little hill’ and ‘Sleep and Poetry’, poems that are crucial in understanding Keats’s use of narrative to explore his poetic identity. In chapter two, concentrating on Endymion’s enactment of imaginative struggle, I attempt to show the purposeful function of the poem’s ‘wandering’ and complex narrative structure, which allows Keats space to develop and examine his beliefs about mythology, beauty, and visionary quest. Chapters three and four examine narrative techniques and the narrator’s role in ‘Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil’ and ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ as Keats questions the nature and function of ‘old Romance’, even as he employs it, thus bringing a modern self-consciousness to bear on his task. Chapters five and six are devoted to the narrativity shown in the odes. Such an exploration of the ‘lyric narrative’ seeks to shed new light on our understanding of Keats’s odes. Chapter seven considers the ambivalence that Keats creates in ‘Lamia’. Lamia’s enigmatic identity as a woman and a serpent makes the narrative complex and the narrator perplexed. Chapter eight analyses ‘Hyperion: A Fragment’ and ‘The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream’, arguing that Keats uses these two poems as narratives to explore his idea of poetry and of the poet. In his short creative life, Keats demonstrates different and various narrative skills. These narrative skills shape his ideas and ideals of poetry as well as of the poet. Via his use of narrative, we are able to see the evolution of his poetic identity. He presents himself as what he recommended a poet should be, a shape-changing figure, who might be best described as a ‘camelion Poet’.

This thesis examines the physical effects of human emotion and the mind through selected texts written by the Shelley circle, including P. B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Lord Byron. Emotion is a significant variable that dominates human existence. For this reason, the concept of emotion continues to intrigue numerous scientists working today in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, biology, and even robotics. With the rise of neuroscientific or cognitive approaches, the materiality of the mind has also been increasingly discussed in literary studies. Critics, including Alan Richardson, Noel Jackson, and Richard Holmes, revisit the mind and English Romanticism drawing on various scientific perspectives. Other critics, such as Adela Pinch, Thomas Pfau, and Richard C. Sha, have also reflected on emotional studies and Romanticism. Finding affinities with this kind of approach, recently defined as ‘cognitive historicism’, my thesis explores the legacy of eighteenth-century mental philosophy and science in the Shelley circle, 1812-1821. I argue that the Shelley circle’s scientific understanding of the mind and emotion is influenced by the materialism, empiricism, and aesthetics prevalent in the eighteenth century, which come into their own in the Romantic period to prefigure our current scientific understanding of emotion. Chapter One surveys the Shelley circle’s preoccupation with emotion and science and how this is manifest, to varying degrees, in a wide range of critical responses to Frankenstein and writings of other members of the group during this period. During the course of this critical survey I develop the concept of the ‘materiality of emotion’, which is used in subsequent chapters to re-examine the Shelley circle’s scientific philosophy and how it is represented in literary texts written by the group. Chapter Two argues that Shelley develops his views of the mind through his atheistic and materialist reasoning. This materialist thinking of the mind in Queen Mab exerts a seminal influence on how the Shelley circle thought about the workings of human emotion. Chapter Three focuses on Mary Shelley and contemporary eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific debates to suggest that the representation of the mechanism of the body in Frankenstein points to the intricate relations between the mechanisms of the mind and emotion and offers a means to heal the schism between French materialism and vitalism. Chapter Four investigates the depiction of emotional effects on the mind in Byron’s Manfred and Shelley’s Alastor. Both poets draw on scientific reasoning and imagination to come to terms with grief, the failure of love, and the loss of ideals. Chapter Five claims that Shelley’s Frankenstein meditates on the effects of physiological elements of the beautiful and the ugly, as well as emotional responses to the sublime science. My final chapter draws on cultural history and gender theory to interpret Byron’s Don Juan (Canto One) and Shelley’s Epipsychidion in an attempt to reaffirm the beautiful and the sublime in their materialist concept of love or sexuality.

This PhD thesis explores the influence of Persian Sufi Literature on the development of the concepts of self and Other in English Romantic-period prose and poetry. The thesis considers the notions of self, idealisation, and annihilation in the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon Byron as well as the Persian Sufi literature from which these Romantic poets have drawn their inspiration and influences. The Persian poets discussed include Hafez, Maulavi, and Nezami, whose works were translated and adapted by the eighteenth-century scholars such as William Jones and Isaac D‘Israeli. The thesis presents a comparison between the two schools of thought, Lacanianism and Sufism, in order to pave the way for a comparative analysis of Sufi and Romantic conceptions of the self and Other. The thesis then goes on to discuss a range of representations of the Orient in the pre-Romantic era, including the translations and adaptations rendered by eighteenth-century Oriental scholars such as Jones and D‘Israeli. Finally the thesis focuses on the influence of Persian literature on the works of Shelley and Byron. An attempt is made in these chapters to explore the extent to which the Romantic subject‘s desire for union with the ideal Other is made possible through idealisation of and dissolution in the Other, first in the literary historical context of the Sufi tradition, and secondly in the framework of the theoretical models in Lacanian psychoanalysis. In order to analyse the concepts of self and Other in their Romantic and Sufi contexts the thesis invokes Lacan‘s discussion of supplementary jouissance and sublimation. These Lacanian formulae prove helpful in analysing the path the Romantic subject pursues toward perfection and his desire for a return to the primal state of unity which is possible through dissolution in the ideal(ised) Other.

This thesis employs a variety of theoretical approaches to examine the representation of children in the novels and journalism of Charles Dickens. Whereas previous studies of Dickensian children have concentrated on his fictional characters, I have expanded the parameters of the discussion to include his journalism, and his examination of children as readers. The discussion focuses on two novels, four significant articles in his weekly periodical Household Words, and A Child’s History of England, which was serialised in Household Words. In recent years there have been considerable efforts made to investigate Dickens's journalism, but there has been little consideration either of his writings on children's welfare nor on his nursery writings intended for young readers which were published in his periodicals. Despite the fact that he wrote specific works for children to read, there has been no examination of his representation of child readers in his novels. In analyzing three of Dickens's child readers I have drawn upon contemporary theories of reading. I have utilized a variety of modern psychological theories in my discussion of the novelist's understanding of child development. In the course of my discussion of individual texts I utilize theories of narratology, trauma theory, contemporary accounts of commodity fetishism and theories of masculinity as it impinges upon child development. In my analysis of Dickens's journal articles and their relation to specific fictional characters and episodes, I emphasize that this is not simply a case of ‘factual’ journalism set against ‘fictional’ characters and plots, but rather that Dickens's creativity is manifested in both genres, and that to understand his comprehension of child psychology and child development, both are essential.

This thesis is a critical biography of Robert Tannahill (1774-1810). As a work of recovery its aim is to lay out the details of the life and in so doing to make the case for Tannahill as a distinctive figure in Scottish literary history. Part One covers the main events in Tannahill’s life, and analyses his poetry, songs and play, The Soldier’s Return, drawing heavily on his extant correspondence throughout. Part Two of the thesis gives all of Tannahill’s extant correspondence. The received critical opinion of Tannahill in the nineteenth century was that his true talent lay in the writing of Scottish pastoral songs. In accordance with this perception the other aspects of his work have, generally, been treated as marginal by previous critics. This thesis aims to broaden the critical understanding of Tannahill as a writer working in the first decade of the 1800s by taking into consideration his social and political milieu, the writers he was influenced by and his response to particular events in his life and in the world. I argue that Tannahill was not party political, but had sympathy for Whig causes such as abolition of the death penalty and of slavery. He also opposed cock-fighting and animal cruelty. Key to understanding much of Tannahill’s output was his attitude to the wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France (1793-1815). Fear of French invasion of the British Isles was something that exercised Tannahill a good deal. His attitude to war was that it was pointless human folly, but his dislike of all imperialism, including British and French, makes his position complex and the complexity of his response to war is a recurring theme throughout. Tannahill’s upbringing in Paisley and his position as an artisan weaver had a profound effect on his writing, as did the influence of Robert Burns. Tannahill was fiercely independent, despised literary patronage and inherited wealth and power. There is an attempt to explain and understand how and why Tannahill came to hold these points of view and to point out where they find expression in his work. Chapter 1 looks at Tannahill’s upbringing and life in Paisley. Chapter 2 deals with the ‘Critical Reception’ of his work from 1815 to the present. Chapter 3 looks in depth at his attitudes to war and the threat of French invasion. Chapter 4 concentrates on Tannahill’s play The Soldier’s Return and considers how it fits into the pastoral tradition. Chapter 5 looks at the content and some formal aspects of his poetry and Chapter 6 deals with the range of his lyrics and songs. Part Two is a project of retrieval, sub-titled The Letters of Robert Tannahill, it presents in chronological order eighty-two letters, the vast majority of which were written by Tannahill to friends and acquaintances between the years 1802 and 1810. It has been compiled from holograph manuscript sources found in the University of Glasgow Library, the National Library of Scotland, University of Edinburgh Library and Paisley Central Library. In addition, letters previously published in the David Semple edition of Tannhill’s Poems, Songs and Correspondence (1876) have been inserted to give the most comprehensive collection of Tannahill correspondence to date. These letters give a fascinating insight into Tannahill’s life and work. The guiding editorial principle for transcription from holograph has been: to provide as accurately as possible a text free from editorial interference.

This thesis argues that a ‘tradition of moral analysis’ between Jane Austen and George Eliot — a common ground which has been identified by critics from F.R. Leavis to Gillian Beer, but never fully explored — can be illuminated by turning to what this thesis calls ‘the reflective tradition’. In the eighteenth century, ideas about reflection provided a new and influential way of thinking about the human mind; about how we come to know ourselves and the world around us through the mind. The belief in the individual to act as his/her own guide through the cultivation of a reflective mind and attentiveness to a reflective voice emerges across a wide range of discourses. This thesis begins with an examination of reflection in the philosophy, children’s literature, novels, poetry, educational tracts and sermons that would have been known to Austen. It then defines Austen’s development of reflective dynamics by looking at her six major novels; finally, it analyzes Middlemarch to define Eliot’s proximity to this aspect of Austen’s art. The thesis documents Eliot’s reading of Austen through the criticism of G. H. Lewes to support a reading of Eliot’s assimilation of an Austenian attention to mental processes in her novels. Reflection is at the heart of moral life and growth for both novelists. This thesis corrects a tendency in Austen’s reception to focus on the mimetic aspect of her art, thereby overlooking the introspective sense of reflection. It offers new insights into Austen’s and Eliot’s work, and it contributes to an understanding of the development of the realist novel and the ethical dimension in the role of the novel reader.

This thesis offers a re-evaluation of the fiction of George MacDonald (1824-1905), both fantasy and non-fantasy. The general trend in MacDonald studies is to focus primarily on his works of fantasy, either ignoring the rest (which includes non-fantasy fiction, sermons, poetry, and criticism) or using them to illuminate the fantasies. The overall critical consensus is that these works, particularly MacDonald’s non-fantasy fiction, possess little inherent value. Though many critics acknowledge similarities between MacDonald’s fantasy fiction and his non-fantasy fiction, MacDonald has been the victim of a critical double standard that treats fantasy and realism as completely irreconcilable, and allows certain features to be acceptable, even desirable, in one form that are completely unacceptable in the other. The thesis begins by looking at MacDonald’s writings about the imagination and about literature, from which a clear theory of literature emerges, one with strong opinions about the function and purpose of literature, as well as about what makes good literature. By re-examining MacDonald’s fiction, its plots, characterization and narration, in the light of his own theories, the reasons underlying the artistic choices made throughout his fiction take on a more deliberate and calculated appearance. Furthermore, by placing MacDonald in his proper context, and looking at the diversity of generic options available to the Victorian writer, the critical double standard underlying much MacDonald scholarship, based on a strict fantasy/realism separation, crumbles. What emerges from this analysis is a different MacDonald—a careful craftsman who consciously and skillfully uses the tools of his trade to produce a unique and specific reading experience.

This Ph. D. thesis investigates the use of fantasy by British and Irish 'Decadent' authors and illustrators, including Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, Aubrey Beardsley, 'Vernon Lee' (Violet Paget), Ernest Dowson, and Charles Ricketts. Furthermore, this study demonstrates why fantasy was an apposite form for literary Decadence, which is defined in this thesis as a supra-generic mode characterized by its anti-mimetic impulse, its view of language as autonomous and artificial, its frequent use of parody and pastiche, and its transgression of boundaries between art forms. Literary Decadence in the United Kingdom derives its view of autonomous language from Anglo-German Romantic philology and literature, consequently being distinguished from French Decadence by its resistance to realism and Naturalism, which assume language's power to signify the 'real world'. Understanding language to be inorganic, Decadent writers blithely countermand notions of linguistic fitness and employ devices such as catachresis, paradox, and tautology, which in turn emphasize the self-referentiality of Decadent texts. Fantasy furthers the Decadent argument about language because works of fantasy bear no specific relationship to 'reality'; they can express anything evocable within language, as J.R.R. Tolkien demonstrates with his example of "the green sun" (a phrase that can exist independent of the sun's actually being green). The thesis argues that fantasy's usefulness in underscoring arguments about linguistic autonomy explains its widespread presence in Decadent prose and visual art, especially in genres that had become associated with realism and Naturalism, such as the novel (Chapter 1), the short story (Chapter 3), drama (Chapter 4), and textual illustration (Chapter 2). The thesis also analyzes Decadents' use of a wholly non-realistic genre, the fairy tale (see Chapter 5), in order to delineate the consequences of their use of fantasy for the construction of character and gender within their texts.

Nineteenth-century preoccupation with the meaning of Englishness began with the origin of the term in 1804. By the late nineteenth century, an ideology of Englishness had been established which was both reflected in and shaped by cultural forms and emerging myths in general and Tennyson's poetry in particular. Critics identified Tennyson as an English poet from the first reviews of his published poems in the late 1820s. As Poet Laureate for over forty years, Tennyson became the authoritative public voice of English poetry. This thesis examines Tennyson's 'domestic poetry' - his portrayals of English nature and landscape, monarchy, medievalism, and the 'English Empire' - written throughout his career and in their changing nineteenth-century context - to confirm that many representations of England and the English were more idealized than real, hence fabrications. However, the thesis argues that Tennyson's representations of Englishness are complex and often conflicting fabrications, revealing ideological and personal faultlines. Although Tennyson's oeuvre reveals an enduring love of English nature and landscape, poetic imagery suggests a qualified commitment to the developing ideology of rural England. His poems of monarchy mirror and enhance increasing public veneration of monarchy and fail to acknowledge the continuing co-existence of radical and republican sentiment. Tennyson's Arthurian poems reveal that emerging gendered moralities were mythologized and both supported and qualified by revived interest in medievalism. Nineteenth-century concepts of Englishness were increasingly shaped by the imperial project and related questions of race. Tennyson's attitude to the 'English Empire' changed from early ambivalence to resounding defence of 'ever-broadening England'. Ultimately therefore Tennyson attained an imperial position in poetry in both senses of the term. This study confirms that the poet both reflected and shaped defining 'moments of Englishness' throughout his career and concludes that a significant defining moment of nineteenth-century Englishness was the birth of Alfred Tennyson in 1809.

In a world of material needs and wants, economics and ethics are inextricably linked. George Eliot recognised this seminal inter-relationship and sought to unravel its intricacies and complexities through her writing. My thesis explores this contention by reference to two principal questions: how did Eliot conceptualise economic value within her broader individual and social ethics? And how was the integration of economic and wider concepts of the “good” explored and tested within the novels? I frame these questions against the great changes in how economics was theorised over her writing career and, by tracing intellectual connections with Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and later writers attempting to define and secure the moral underpinnings of political economy, I argue that Eliot was better informed and engaged with that process than most criticism has acknowledged. I also re-examine the equally remarkable developments in Eliot’s life and material circumstances, particularly after the success of her first novels. Her wealth and management of financial capital brought a particular focus to all questions of valuation, not least in relation to her own work and intellectual property. I contend that an inability fully to reconcile the moral and aesthetic core of her art and the high financial rewards it was generating gave the economic ethics she tested in the novels an extraordinary urgency and complexity. In my readings of, in particular, the later novels, I argue that the crucial motivations and actions by which her characters attempt to manage economic choice simultaneously parallel and are contained within competing contemporary moral philosophical systems. I conclude that her dissatisfaction with any rule-based system, whether of outcome or duty, led her to consider an essentially Aristotelian ethics of virtue in relation to economic ethics. My final chapters look out beyond individual ethical choice to consider how Eliot’s social and political vision accommodated the economic and its attendant institutions and to suggest a connection with the new liberalism which was starting to emerge in the final years of her life.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s ghost haunts women’s writing of the Romantic period. After her untimely death in 1797, and the publication of William Godwin’s candid biography in 1798, Wollstonecraft’s reputation was besmirched by the reactionary press in an attack on radical support for revolutionary ideals. Wollstonecraft’s campaign for women’s rights was conflated with a representation of her as sexually promiscuous, politically dangerous and religiously unorthodox. For women writing after Wollstonecraft’s death, an engagement with her political ideals risked identification with her lifestyle, deemed both improper and impious. My thesis explores how women writers negotiated Wollstonecraft’s scandalous reputation in order to discuss her influential feminist arguments and develop their own positions on these pressing issues in post-revolutionary Britain. In the early nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft’s life and work gets elided with the figure of the female philosopher, already popular in both pro- and counter-revolutionary writing of the 1790s. After Wollstonecraft’s death, fictional female philosophers echo elements of her biography whilst voicing an often caricatured version of her arguments. By rejecting these satirically overblown feminist positions, women writers could adopt a more moderate form of feminism, often closer to Wollstonecraft’s original polemic, to critique cultural restrictions on women, revealing how these warp female behaviour. My project modifies our understanding of the origins of modern feminism by focussing on Wollstonecraft’s reception across a range of socially and politically diverse texts, and the ways in which the process of reading itself is treated as potentially revolutionary.

Critics have long recognised the conflicting tendencies towards progress and conservatism in George Eliot, which are reflected in the behaviour of her characters. This study focuses on the oscillating pattern of desire in this behaviour. As the characters alternately fight with and succumb to their desires, these desires seem to be disproportionately intensified, often leading to tragic consequences. The thesis seeks to analyse this process in the light of G. W. F. Hegel's and Jacques Lacan's elaborations on the nature of desire, which provide the theoretical basis for the discussion of the fiction. While Lacan sees desire as seeking its own sustenance and intensification, ultimately converting itself into a desire for an unfulfilled desire, Hegel sees desire as a movement of self-consciousness towards a return to itself that is accomplished by desiring the desire of another self-consciousness, that is, recognition. The thesis will explore several variations on the logic of desire which divert it from its path towards recognition, and these can also be seen as various types of addiction: namely, the art of hunger, Protestantism, money-hoarding, Orphic desire, the vicious circle of writing, the gambling appetite and the dialectic of homecoming. By examining through close reading how these motifs are given vivid illustration in George Eliot's fiction, this thesis will demonstrate that the theme of intensified desire is a prominent feature that runs throughout her works and is of central importance in understanding the complex emotional lives and interactions of her characters. The myth of Orpheus's descent to the underworld, which depicts an intensification of a desire for a structurally unattainable love object that is the dead Eurydice, can be seen as a paradigm that is applicable to Eliot's early works. The ascetic figure of Maggie in The Mill on the Floss is then compared to the hunger artist in Franz Kafka's short story, through analysing the abundant food references in the novel. Her adolescent asceticism can be figuratively understood as a kind of anorexia and later develops into a kind of bulimia in her relationship with Stephen. Silas in Silas Marner, too, can be seen as a hunger artist in his addiction to work, until he is freed from his fixation through raising Eppie. In Middlemarch, there is a continuity between the earlier figure of Maggie and Dorothea, and also between Silas and Casaubon. Dorothea, who marries Casaubon out of her art of hunger, utilises her marital relationship to work out and overcome that same art of hunger, guided by Ladislaw as the advocate of spontaneous enjoyment. In the other unhappy marriage, Lydgate's relationship with Rosamond is examined in relation to his appetite for gambling, and that appetite is then seen to play a central part in Daniel Deronda where it is related to Gwendolen's mode of desire, which feeds off and intensifies the desires of others until it is stifled by Grandcourt. Deronda, on the other hand, finds a tentative solution to the impasses of desire in his commitment to the Jewish cause, which can be understood in relation to the text's references to the myth of Ulysses. The centrality of the problem of desire in Eliot's fiction is finally underlined by its reappearance in the work of one of her important successors in the exploration of the psyche, Henry James, whose The Portrait of a Lady can be seen to inherit its critique of desire from Daniel Deronda.

This thesis is a study of the Gothic fiction of Sabine Baring-Gould (1834- 1924), with particular attention given to Baring-Gould’s roles as squire and parson. I have chosen to analyze two of Baring-Gould’s Gothic works, the novel Mehalah (1880) and the novella Margery of Quether (1884), both which allow a particularly profitable examination of the influence of Baring-Gould’s roles on his fiction. In studying these texts I apply my theory of Gothic fiction as a particularly modern genre built upon a "Gothic threshold," a meeting point of extreme opposites which ambivalently contrasts and merges the categories of the modern and the medieval. In the first chapter I describe how Baring-Gould’s unique Hegelian-influenced Tractarian philosophy influenced his creation of the dialectical setting of Mehalah. I argue that because of this influence Mehalah should be recognized as a significant contribution to the literature of the Oxford Movement. In the second chapter I argue that Mehalah’s historical setting in the time of the French Revolution and the influence of Wuthering Heights reinforce Mehalah’s use of the “Gothic threshold” structure and contribute to its theme of ambivalent progress. In the third chapter I discuss the influence of Baring-Gould’s sermon-writing on Mehalah and consider connections between Baring-Gould’s role as parson and the novel’s botched marriage theme. In the final chapter I discuss Margery of Quether as an innovation in the Gothic and vampire tradition as perhaps the only Gothic work that directly dramatizes the Land Law debate and presents that debate as a "Gothic" contest. I argue that Margery channels Baring-Gould’s tensions as a landowner. In the conclusion I argue that Mehalah and Margery display Baring-Gould’s technique of constructing miniature Gothic battles that relate to larger confrontations, and that the ultimate terror presented in these works is the conclusion of the battle between ancient and modern forces.

This thesis looks at the women who inhabit Victorian literature, focusing on the ways in which they are represented as well as the way in which they choose to represent themselves. I argue that this self-definition takes place consciously, and that Victorian heroines often choose to display their selfhood through sartorial austerity. Through resisting the inclusion in a scopic economy where worth is judged by appearance, these women make their choice of clothing a highly expressive medium for registering a critique of reading subjectivity through appearance, and the critique of a society where women's bodies are constant loci of scrutiny. But it is also a choice that reveals their unease with their own sexuality, their struggles with their desires, as well as their attempts to exert control over their bodies. They instead manage to create a private space within a public mode of expression, a space from which to resist societal pressures. The dressing room then becomes a significant site for the creation of female identity, as well as a certain kind of feminine intimacy. A room privileged as uniquely feminine, it provides the privacy for female friendships. Also central to this self-creation is the mirror, a fraught terrain where contemporary anxieties about women are relocated. But in numerous novels, this is not just a site for vanity and duplication of identity, but also for self-reflection. The thesis concludes with an examination of the literary representation of hair, its polysemic meanings, and its autonomous expressive quality. The writers focused on are Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Brad- don, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. The paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt also provide a double narrative to these literary representations.

This thesis investigates the representation of the supernatural in the literature of Walter Scott and James Hogg. In comparing both authors it takes advantage of two recent scholarly editions: the Stirling/South Carolina edition of Hogg and the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels. I trace the development of Scott’s persistent interest in various categories of the supernatural: the uncanny; witchcraft; second sight; and astrology. His literary career began in 1796 with translations of German Romantic poetry. These were followed by publication of his collection of ballads and folklore, known as the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 1802-3, and by the longer poems such as The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 1805. Subsequently, Scott’s investigation of the supernatural would continue within a number of key novels and his shorter fiction. The Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, addressed to J. G. Lockhart, Esq., 1830, was one of his final attempts to establish how far the evidence of a credible witness might supply ineluctable testimony in accounts of the supernatural. Scott’s legal training, and antiquarian skills, lent particular authority into his investigations of the possibilities of the existence, or otherwise, of the supernatural. By way of contrast, James Hogg’s lack of formal education, and scanty knowledge of the progressive advances of the Scottish Enlightenment, was associated with a ready credulity in matters of the supernatural. His literary work, such as The Mountain Bard, 1807, or his later collection of Winter Evening Tales, 1820, demonstrated a familiarity with ballads, and an unlettered folklore tradition, that appeared to confirm his position as a believer in superstitious and irrational practices. However, this thesis will argue that Hogg actually possesses a shrewd and sophisticated understanding of the authority of the supernatural. This is manifest in his literary efforts to record and investigate various types of uncanny testimony, when compared with those of Scott. Hogg’s view of the supernatural is complex and essentially subversive. His final novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, 1824, and his later contributions to the fashionable annuals and giftbooks published between 1826 and 1834, reveal an author deeply engaged with demonstrating the unique role of the supernatural within Scottish society, particularly as a channel of dissent and discord. The Ettrick Shepherd and the Author of Waverley founded their literary relationship upon a shared enthusiasm for the supernatural tales and traditions of the Scottish Borders. Their friendship was both competitive and complementary. Critics have generally tended to assume that Scott, rather than Hogg, was the sceptical party where belief in the existence of the supernatural is concerned. However, closer examination of their work reveals that such assumptions do not necessarily stand up. Ultimately, Hogg emerges as the author with greater resistance to an irrational belief in the supernatural. His position as an observer, and critic, of the antiquarian and enlightened literary establishment, with its dependence on the authority of printed texts, is developed through his literary investigation of the supernatural. My choice of works to consider has been necessarily limited by questions of space. Where possible, I have selected those texts that seem to me to offer ready comparison between the two authors. Some novels such as Scott’s The Antiquary, 1816, or The Pirate, 1822, might be regarded as worthy of inclusion in this study of the supernatural. However, there are no real equivalents of these in Hogg’s work.

This thesis addresses the central role of the haunted house in mid-to-late Victorian Gothic texts. It argues that haunting in fiction derives from distinct architectural and spatial traits that the middle-class Victorian home possessed. These design qualities both reflected and reinforced current social norms, and anxiety about the latter surfaced in Gothic texts. In this interdisciplinary study, literary analysis works alongside spatial examination, under the premise that literature is a space that can be penetrated and deciphered in the same way that buildings are texts that can be read and interpreted. This work is divided into two main sections, with the first three chapters introducing theoretical, historical and architectural notions that provide a background to the literary works to be discussed. The first chapter presents various theorists’ notions behind haunting and the convergence of spectrality and space, giving rise to the discussion of domestic haunting and its appeal. The second chapter examines the Crystal Palace as the icon of public space in Victorian times, its capacity for haunting, as well as its ability to frame the domestic both socially and historically. The third chapter focuses on the prototype of private space at the time—the middle-class home—in order to highlight the specificity of this dwelling, both as an architectural and symbolic entity. The second section also consists of three chapters, dedicated to the “dissection” of the haunted house, divided into three different areas: liminal, secret, and surrounding space. The fourth chapter examines works where marginal space, in the shape of hallways and staircases, is the site of intense haunting. A novel by Richard Marsh and stories by Bulwer-Lytton, Algernon Blackwood and W.W. Jacobs are analyzed here. The fifth chapter is a journey through rooms and secretive space of the spectral home; works by authors such as Wilkie Collins, J.H. Riddell and Sheridan Le Fanu are considered in order to argue that the home’s exceptional compartmentalization and its concern for secrecy translated effortlessly into Gothic fiction. The final chapter addresses an integral yet external part of the Victorian home—the grounds. Gardens in works by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Margaret Oliphant, M.R. James, and Oscar Wilde are inspected, proving Gothic fiction’s disregard for boundaries and its ability to exceed the parameters of the home.

Thomas Carlyle’s History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, called Frederick the Great was published in six volumes between 1858 and 1865 and was his last major work. Carlyle had a specific purpose in mind when he began writing Frederick. He believed that contemporary events had left Europe in disarray and the British nation fragmented. In his view, the nation needed to function as a family unit, with the older, more experienced members of the group instructing and educating the young. Carlyle’s attempt to address the situation with the publication of his Latter-Day Pamphlets in 1850 had failed, largely due to their aggressive tone. He adopted an entirely different approach when it came to writing Frederick. Chapter one explores Carlyle’s vacillation over his choice of Frederick as a suitable subject for his history and investigates his soul-searching over whether or not to proceed with the project. It examines the three-way relationship which Carlyle created between himself, Frederick and the reader and explores the various language techniques that Carlyle used to create and maintain this relationship. In chapter two, Carlyle’s style of writing in Frederick is investigated. It argues that Carlyle was engaged in the act of storytelling and explores the various literary techniques that he used to achieve this. Chapter three consists of an in-depth examination of Carlyle’s use of oral techniques in Frederick, investigating the variety of oral devices he employed in order to ‘speak’ to his readers and create a unified readership. Chapters four and five focus on Carlyle’s research methods. They examine the texts which Carlyle used for his research—original manuscripts, printed texts, letters, histories and biographies—investigating how these were incorporated into Frederick and evaluating whether or not Carlyle was true to his source material. Carlyle’s two trips to Germany in order to research material are also investigated. In Chapters six and seven, the contemporary reception of Frederick is explored. Chapter six focuses on the reaction to the first two volumes which were published together in 1858, whilst chapter seven investigates the response to the later volumes, exploring the ways in which the completed work influenced the public’s perception of Carlyle as a historian and ending by examining both Carlyle’s and Frederick’s places in posterity. Despite Carlyle’s labours on Frederick it never received the acclaim of his earlier productions but was regarded by many as a marker which signalled the end of Carlyle’s long and illustrious literary career.

It is often acknowledged that the sexually intermediate body destabilises sexual dimorphisms, but, so far, little attention has been paid to the way sexual intermediacy relates to normative figurations of time. Focusing mainly on literary and cultural discourses from late Romanticism to Modernism, the thesis examines how constructions of sexual intermediacy have contributed and responded to shifting concerns with temporality. It also investigates the relationship between literature and science through a comparative engagement with evolutionary, psychoanalytic and sexological discourses. The individual chapters deal with the conflicted temporality of the substantiated androgyne; the haunted and uncanny materiality of the hermaphroditic body in late nineteenth-century science and literature; sexual intermediacy and the prescriptive linear narrative of the case history; the sexual, temporal and national crises of World War I; and sexual travels in time and space. Overall, the thesis illustrates that sex and time are intimately related and shows that the changing understanding of sexual intermediacy opens up a powerful critique of sexual and temporal structures.

Victorian literary criticism has within it a longstanding tradition of inquiring about the degree to which literature of the period reflects the realities of nineteenthcentury Christian faith. Many of these studies are admirable in the way that they demonstrate the challenges confronting religion in this period of dynamic social, cultural, economic, political, and scientific change and growth. Similarly, this study will examine the critical intersections between nineteenth-century Christianity and literature. However, this project is unique by virtue of the methodology used in order to access both the expressed and latent perspectives on Victorian faith at play within a given text. I propose that that a spatial, place-based reading has heretofore been largely ignored in critical explorations of nineteenth-century faith and literature. While, literary criticism utilising concepts related to spatiality, geography, topography, and place have increased within recent decades, these critical works are largely silent on the issue of the narrative representations of “place” and the expression and understanding of Victorian Christianity. This project suggests a model for just such a reading of nineteenth-century texts. More specifically, this thesis proposes that by reading for sacred place in the Victorian novel one is able to explore the issue of Christianity and literature from a unique and neglected point of narrative and critical reference. Using Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure as primary texts, this study demonstrates that a careful exploration of sacred place within a particular narrative reflects an author's and, more broadly, a culture's perceptions of a faith. Reading Victorian religion from the vantage point of place acknowledges that place is itself an inescapable and fundamental medium through which individuals and cultures mediate the most mundane and the most exhilarating of their personal and collective experiences and beliefs. Similarly, faith, especially in nineteenth-century England, is a dominant and pervasive metaphysical ideology that is connected to and possesses repercussions for virtually all aspects of individual and social life. A critical reading that unites place and faith – these two fundamental paradigms of human experience and understanding – will inevitably provide fertile soil for a productive reading of the texts under consideration.

The tension between experiential chaos and artistic control is a constant if varying presence, and acts as a fertile, dangerous, but ultimately enriching principle, in the poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Yeats. Each poet is highly self-conscious about this tension, a self-consciousness traceable to their Romantic and post-Romantic understanding of the nature of poetry. Situating itself in the present post-McGannian critical landscape, my thesis looks at poetry through the lens of a new formalism. The thesis valorises aesthetic subtleties and lays emphasis on poetry’s performative intelligence. The Introduction describes in detail the approach, method, and contents of the thesis. Section one examines the poetics of Byron, Shelley and Yeats, focusing on how each poet figures his attempted control of the potentially chaotic text. The first chapter, on Byron’s poetics, centres on Don Juan, Beppo and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and argues for the presence of a coherent poetics in his oeuvre. Chapter two, on Shelley’s poetics, examines A Defence of Poetry and its relationship with Shelley’s poetry, giving particular attention to Alastor and “Mont Blanc.” Chapter three examines the self-consciousness of Yeats’s poetics, and explores the way in which he makes poetry express his effort towards mastery while retaining the chaos that permits creative freedom in The Wanderings of Oisin, the Byzantium poems, and “Easter 1916.” The struggle to assert poetic control is a form of heroism, and the second section examines the concept of the hero in works by each of the poets. I illustrate how traditional critical accounts of the poets underestimate the complexity that governs their versions of heroism. Chapter four, on Cain and The Giaour, and chapter five, on Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, trace Byron’s evolving challenge to any straightforward notion of heroism. Chapter six views Shelley’s Epipsychidion as a climactic exploration of the poet-as-hero, while chapter seven explores Adonais’s radical refiguring of the heroic and the elegiac. Chapters eight and nine focus on “The Tower,” on Yeats’s creation of a uniquely personal, yet carefully impersonal, poetic monument to the poet-hero. The chaos of the actual, from which Byron, Shelley, and Yeats create their poetry, wars constantly with, but also paradoxically enables, the control they attempt to establish. It is their staging of the quarrel between chaos and control that not only provides them with the material out of which they make poetry but also means that their practice foreshadows and at times outflanks our critical constructions.

This thesis examines the representations of the self as a cultural agent, both reacting to and actively shaping codes of social and artistic respectability, as displayed in the diaries of the canonical Victorian writers Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, Henry Crabb Robinson, George Eliot, George Gissing, John Ruskin and Gerard Manley Hopkins. It analyses the impact of wider ideological and social imperatives on the diarists’ subjective experience and reads their tendency to silence the self as a symptom of the cultural pressure to merge their private and public persona. These diaries represented a forum in which the diarists perpetually negotiated their own value within the Victorian ideology of productivity and thus not only reflect their inner world but also the cultural climate of the nineteenth century. Chapter One traces the selected diarists’ reluctance to reveal private information, as well as their tendency to foreground professional productivity, to the social pressure to efface emotions relating to the self and to only cultivate those that nurtured the community. It identifies the similarities between the compulsive self-discipline advocated in the psychological discourse of the period, particularly Alexander Bain’s The Emotions and the Will (1859), and the willingness to both live up to and actively shape the cultural codes of respectability that Elizabeth Eastlake and Henry Crabb Robinson display in their diaries. Chapter Two compares and contrasts the desire for maximal professional productivity as exhibited in George Eliot’s and George Gissing’s diaries. Both worked obstinately in order to increase their own value: whereas Eliot sought to redeem her ‘guilt of the privileged,’ Gissing desperately needed to increase his financial solvency through literary output. Chapter Three discusses the ways in which John Ruskin’s diary helped him block out unrespectable and painful private experiences through transforming his obsessive desire to appropriate and “feel” visual experience into a professional task. Chapter Four shows that Gerard Manley Hopkins—because he was acutely concerned by his cultural otherness caused by his homosexuality—not only sought refuge and validation by joining the Jesuits, but by narrowing his realm of experience to nature, merged the private and the public self into the figure of the professional, asexual, dutiful and disinterested observer.

In this study I examine the works of Thomas Hardy with the aim of 'identifying empire's fingerprints' in his writings. The extent to which British domestic culture was influenced by empire is a matter of considerable debate amongst social and cultural theorists, and I join this debate by analysing an author not usually recognised as being an 'imperial' writer, despite the fact that he was writing during a period of major imperial expansion. The expansion of British imperial power after the Napoleonic Wars was closely associated with the growth of powerful national institutions within Britain, and I suggest that a direct relationship exists between processes occurring in rural England, as described by Hardy, and processes occurring in the colonies of the empire in the latter half of the nineteenth century. I examine the many references to the Roman Empire and the Napoleonic Wars in Hardy's writing and suggest that these works reveal much about his own attitudes towards empire and historical progress. The binary opposition between ideas of the primitive and civilised was a central tenet of colonialism in the nineteenth century, and in his work Hardy questions this opposition and demonstrates the effect of outsiders on so-called 'primitive' communities. I examine the debate surrounding the use of gender as an articulated category with race and class when considering the oppressions of imperialism, and show how, by exposing the power structures operating within Britain, Hardy produces a critique of all forms of ideological oppression.

This study looks at the figure of the child in the novels of Thomas Hardy. It argues that Hardy, in his various presentations of the child, draws on mythologies generated by the figure of the child in the nineteenth century. The introduction describes the existence and proliferation of these mythologies during the time in which Hardy was writing. It summarizes representations of the child in history, science and literature, and reviews existing critical literature on the topic. The study comprises six chapters. The first looks at babies and young children, the second at Jude the Obscure, the third at Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the fourth at pregnant women and the fifth at the child within the family unit. The final chapter uses close reading to provide a re-evaluation of two of Hardy’s ‘minor’ novels. Each chapter draws on specific historical contexts to reveal different aspects of the child myth. The study as a whole looks at the different ways in which Hardy uses the myth. At times he participates in it, or appears to, while at others he exposes it, or employs it to expose class and gender divisions in nineteenth century society. Ultimately, Hardy acknowledges the power of the child myth in literature and in society, while simultaneously recognising it as a fallacy that is both inaccurate and dangerous.