19th-century and Victorian Literature

What is the difference between a lie and a fantasy, when the subject is a child? Moving between literary and scientific texts, this book explores the range of fascinating issues that emerge when the inner world of the child becomes, for the first time, the explicit focus of literary and medical attention. Starting in the 1840s, which saw the publication of explorations of child development by Brontë and Dickens, as well as some of the first psychiatric studies of childhood, this book progresses through post-Darwinian considerations of the child's relations to the animal kingdom, to chart the rise of the Child Study Movement of the 1890s. The book offers detailed readings of novels by Dickens, Meredith, James, Hardy, and others, as well as the first overview of the early histories of child psychology and psychiatry. Chapters cover issues such as fears and night terrors, imaginary lands, the precocious child, child sexuality and adolescence, and the relationship between child and monkey. Experiments on babies, the first baby shows, and domestic monkey keeping also feature. Many of our current concerns with reference to childhood are shown to have their parallels in the Victorian age: from the pressures of school examinations, or the problems of adolescence, through to the disturbing issue of child suicide. Childhood, from this period, took on new importance as holding the key to the adult mind.

This book explains why the Victorian novel is best understood alongside the simultaneous development of the news as a commercial commodity read by up to a million readers per day. The commercial press arising in 19th-century Britain had a profound influence on the fiction of Mary Braddon, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Anthony Trollope, and many other novelists who all used narrative conventions derived from the press in their fiction. The chapters of this book distinguish five of the most important of these narrative conventions—shipping intelligence, personal advertisements, leading articles, interviews, and foreign correspondence—in order to show how concretely journalism influenced the novel at this time. This book thereby challenges the assumed divide between the period's literature and journalism, with all of its implications for the production of an idea of culture and hierarchies of reading, by demonstrating how the daily newspaper was integral to the Victorian novel's development—what this book calls “the novelty of newspapers”.

‘“Originality” is only plagiarizing from a great many’, remarked Rupert Brooke, stealing the line from Voltaire. Questions of originality and accusations of plagiarism, are as old as literature, but different literary cultures have interpreted the relationship between originality and plagiarism in startlingly dissimilar ways. This book investigates and documents the drastic reappraisal of literary originality and plagiarism which occurred over the course of the 19th century: from the heroic visions of original authorship that characterised the 1820s and 1830s, through to the stickle-brick creativity of Oscar Wilde and Lionel Johnson at the century's end. It reveals how ideas of originality and plagiarism were not only a theoretical concern of Victorian commentators on literature, but also provided many important Victorian writers — Eliot, Dickens, Reade, Pater, Wilde, and Lionel Johnson among them — with a creative resource. Moving between numerous different fields of thought and knowledge — literary criticism, the history of science, manuscript culture, anthropology — this book shows that the ideas of originality and plagiarism were the subjects of 19th-century literature, as well as what it was subject to.

This book is a materialist account of Wilde's career as a writer. It contests three widely held assumptions about his success: that there is a clear distinction between his life as a journalist and his artistic celebrity; that he was an aesthetic ‘purist’ in his attitude towards his own books; and that his career was driven by oppositional sexual or nationalist politics. The authors bring together evidence from the publishing trade, from Wilde's contracts and correspondence with publishers, and from documentation about his earnings (particularly the plays) to show that he always worked for money, but that he achieved far less financial success than is usually thought. Far from subverting the nascent consumerism of his time, he was thoroughly immersed in its values — in the commodification of culture in which books became product. At the same time, the book provides a detailed account of Wilde's processes of composition: it surveys his writing practices across the whole of the oeuvre, and radically reinterprets the significance of his revision and ‘plagiarism’.

This book begins with two fatal duels, as the best introduction to a literary period best defined by its antagonisms – between England and Scotland, Whigs and Tories, men and women, and between poets and their critics. It covers the years in which publishing became an industry serving a mass readership, and focuses on the three publishing phenomena of the age: the novels of Walter Scott, Byron's Don Juan, and the new literary magazines. It attempts a radical reconfiguration of our understanding of literary culture in the years after Waterloo.

This book reevaluates twentieth-century literature and culture by studying the interrelations between English, Creole, and Indonesian formations of literary modernism. Each modernist formation is explained through a set of comparative studies of the fiction of Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Conrad's canonical profile in literary histories of English modernism is placed side by side with Rhys's contested position in postcolonial accounts of Caribbean writing and Pramoedya's prominent role in the history of Indonesian anti-colonial nationalism. The different models of reading at the heart of each writer's fiction lead to a reassessment of transnational modernism. The book argues that each passage of literature becomes the site of a contest between competing genealogies of modernism and modernity. Re-examining the linguistic and literary coordinates of Anglophone modernist studies, and combining the insights of Caribbean writers and theorists with recent work in Indonesian studies, the book outlines the imperatives of a new postcolonial philology and resituates European modernism within the literary, linguistic, and historical context of decolonization.

In what was once described as ‘the century of nerves’, a fascination with the mysterious processes governing physical and psychological states was shared by medical and fiction writers alike. This elegant study offers an integrated analysis of how medicine and literature figured the connection between the body and the mind. The book looks at some of the century's most influential neurological and physiological theories, and gives readings of both major and relatively neglected fictions — a range which includes work by Charlotte Brontë and George MacDonald, George Eliot and Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy and George Gissing. Stepping into an already lively area of interdisciplinary debate, this book is distinguished by its recognition of the intellectual and imaginative force of both discourses: it extends our understanding of the interaction between science and literature in the wider culture of the period.

Although much has been written about the history of copyright and authorship in the 18th and 19th centuries, very little attention has been given to the impact of the development of other kinds of intellectual property on the ways in which writers viewed their work in Victorian England. This book is the first to suggest that the fierce debates over patent law and the discussion of invention in popular texts during the Victorian period informed the parallel debate over authors' professional status. The book examines the shared rhetoric surrounding the creation of the ‘inventor’ and the ‘author’ in the debate of the 1830s, and the challenge of the emerging technologies of mass production to traditional ideas of art and industry is addressed in a chapter on authorship at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Subsequent chapters show how novelists Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot participated in debates over the value and ownership of labour in the 1850s, such as patent reform and the controversy over married women's property. The book shows the ways in which these were reflected in their novels. It also suggests that the publication of those novels, and their authors' celebrity, had a substantial effect on the subsequent direction of these debates. This book ends by suggesting that detailed study of the debate over intellectual property in the 19th century leads to a better understanding of the complex negotiations over the bounds of selfhood and social responsibility in the period.

How did the Victorians read novels? The author answers that deceptively simple question by revealing a now-forgotten range of nineteenth-century theories of the novel, a range based in a study of human physiology during the act of reading. He demonstrates the ways in which the Victorians thought they read, and uncovers surprising responses to the question of what might have transpired in the minds and bodies of readers of Victorian fiction. His detailed studies of novel critics who were also interested in neurological science, combined with readings of novels by Thackeray, Eliot, Meredith, and Gissing, propose a vision of the Victorian novel-reader as far from the quietly immersed being we now imagine — as instead a reader whose nervous system was addressed, attacked, and soothed by authors newly aware of the neural operations of their public. Rich in unexpected intersections, from the British response to Wagnerian opera to the birth of speed-reading in the late nineteenth century, this book challenges our assumptions about what novel reading once did, and still does, to the individual reader, and provides new answers to the question of how novels influenced a culture's way of reading, responding, and feeling.