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This thesis assesses the ways in which occult activities and ideas prevalent during the late-Victorian period inspired and informed contemporary popular fiction. I argue that direct involvement with occultism was not necessary in order to feel the influence of its preoccupations: magic and supernatural interests at this time were so popular as to pervade the public imagination without requiring a personal engagement with either.

Dinah Craik is generally considered a conservative author of ‘domestic’ literature, yet, as this thesis argues, she wrote forthrightly on the key socio-political topics of the day, almost invariably challenging the mainstream viewpoint. Drawing from a broad range of Craik’s journalism and fiction, the thesis considers in particular how the reconfiguration of gender boundaries suggested in her work, is radical in its insistence that the requirements for virtue and fulfilment are essentially the same for both sexes. Chapter One examines one of Craik’s periodical articles, ’War-sparkles’ (1855), an exceptional piece of journalism which encapsulates many of the key themes and values defining her work. Chapter Two explores Craik’s representations of masculinity. The hero of John Halifax, Gentleman, is commonly perceived as the product of an over-idealised view of men, but it is clear from the many essays and novels in which she vehemently condemns male conduct, that his portrayal is a reaction against the failure of the middle-classes to live up to the reformist ideals he embodies. Craik’s concept of gentlemanliness is explored further through her use of the figures of the clergyman, doctor, author, and disabled man, each illustrating her engagement with specific contemporary issues central to the construction of masculine identity. Chapter Three considers how Craik’s encouragement of female self-dependence through education and employment, and exposure of the damaging effects of ‘the want of something to do’, openly subverts the prevailing view of marriage as the only path to fulfilment, and reflects her generally pessimistic vision of domestic life. Her portrayals of self-reliant working women provide positive role models for her readers, but also reveal her understanding of the anxieties of single life. Craik’s sympathetic depictions of women who do not conform to the Victorian model of acceptable femininity, whether through physical impairment, race, or ‘fallenness’ are, it is suggested, further evidence of the progressive stance that makes her work so distinctive and compelling.

While in recent years the aesthetics and politics of British Modernism has been reevaluated and the concept and function of literary censorship redefined. Modernism's privileged status in the struggle against and the ultimate defeat of censorship remains largely unquestioned. This thesis argues, however, that the vital role played by Naturalist, New Woman and Edwardian writers in the battle against censorship and the dominant sexual ideologies that bolstered it has been significantly underestimated. It contends that late-Victorian and Edwardian writers not only produced transgressive sexual representations within the confines of an existent culture of censorship, but also reflexively incorporated themes and issues of censorship into their fiction. Moreover, the thesis situates this specific challenge to literary censorship within the broader intellectual challenge to traditional sexual morality posed by new scientific discourses, especially those that emerged from evolutionary biology. After exploring recent critical conceptualisations and contextualisations of censorship in relation to other articulations of power, those texts that most forcefully contested Victorian sexual reticence are analysed. These include the Naturalist novels of Emile Zola, George Moore and Thomas Hardy, the New Woman fiction of Grant Allen and George Egerton, and the Edwardian sex novels of H, G. Wells, Hubert Wales and Herman Sudermann. While demonstrating how these texts deploy rhetorical strategies that challenge censorship and traditional sexual morality, this thesis also focuses on the complex sexual politics of these narratives to demonstrate how texts can both oppose traditional morality but also reinforce dominant sexual ideologies in new paradigms of scientific rationality.

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This thesis considers some of the ways in which the sea was written about and written with in English nineteenth-century prose fiction. It has become a commonplace of literary criticism that, in the century preceding modernism, prose fiction about the sea was unthinking and uninteresting: indentured to outworn generic codes, tied to certain clichés of national identity, Empire, or slipshod sublimity, and vaguely evoking some or all of them. This thesis does not attempt a general contradiction of this view. What this thesis does suggest is that Victorian fiction is not always naïve about its subject and, at times, displays an awareness of the generic and stylistic hazards attendant upon writing about the sea. To write about the sea was to risk writing vaguely. However, to Victorian novelists who wished to draw on vagueness, the sea offered a subject and a style that could be put to use. The introduction sets out the terms of my discussion both of vagueness, and of the attitudes of Victorian writers and readers to the sea as a setting and theme for fiction. The terms of philosophical vagueness are compared with the nineteenth century’s most influential aesthetics of obscurity: the sublime. The purchase of these theories is then tested, first in relation to Ruskin’s lifelong interest in representing the sea in painting and prose, and second with reference to novels by George Eliot, Thackeray, and Gaskell. Prior critical approaches are also considered, as is the topic of empire, which I explain is not my primary focus. The body of the thesis is devoted primarily to three author studies: Frederick Marryat, Charles Dickens, and Joseph Conrad. Each author wrote vaguely about the sea, though vagueness is shown to be, in all three cases, a resource that can be drawn upon with degrees of self-consciousness; if, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, vague language was considered appropriate to the sea, the linguistic resources that the sea in turn offered began to seem increasingly applicable to experiences characterised by uncertainty. I suggest that the sea establishes conditions that invite a rereading of the many repetitions in Marryat’s novels. These repetitions can be viewed, I argue, as traces of Marryat’s struggle to find a language appropriate to the ocean. In Dickens’s writing, the sea is often present as a source both of metaphor and of experience. I suggest that the slippery doubleness of the literary sea is a means by which both Dickens’s characters, and the individuals he encounters as a journalist, can be made to coexist with their ideal or literary doubles. In my chapter on Conrad, I argue that the sea forms a crucial element of the kind of literary impressionism Conrad recommends in his preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897) and elsewhere. Vagueness arises when the border between linguistic concepts becomes blurred. Two short interludes, on the subject of shores and depths respectively, consider such permeable thresholds. These interludes also provide a means of charting changes that occurred across the period, a counterpoint to the more temporally specific focus of the author studies. I conclude with a brief discussion of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931). Critics have distinguished the high modernist sea from what came before; this coda insists that the sort of vagueness valued by Woolf has an earlier origin.

This thesis intends to answers these questions: What did “curiosity” mean in the nineteenth century, and how do Charlotte Brontë's four major works represent such curiosity? How were women looked at, formulated, and situated under the nineteenth-century curious gaze? In order to answer these questions, this thesis examines Brontë's works by juxtaposing them with nineteenth-century exhibitions. Four chapters are thus dedicated to this study: in each a type of exhibition is contemplated, and in each the definition of “curiosity” is defined through the discussions of boundary-breaking. The first chapter discusses the metaphors of “cabinets of curiosities” throughout Brontë's texts. The most intimate and enclosed spaces occupied by women and / or their objects—attics, desks, drawers, lockets—are searched in order to reveal the secret relationship between Brontë's heroines and the objects they have hidden away, especially the souvenirs. From cabinets of curiosities the thesis moves to another space in which the mechanism of curiosity and display takes place—the garden. The second chapter thus discusses the supposed antithesis between the innocent and the experienced, between the Power of Nature and the Power of Man, by reading the garden imagery in Brontë's works along with nineteenth-century pleasure gardens and the Wardian case. The imagery of Eve is also taken into consideration to discuss the concept of innocence. In the third chapter, metaphors of waxworks and the Pygmalion myth are applied to discuss the image of women's bodies in Brontë's texts, and the boundary between the living body and the non-living statue is seen as blurred. In the final chapter, dolls' houses and their metaphors in Brontë's works are examined in order to explicate Brontë's concept of “home,” and the dolls' house thus poses a question on the relationships between the interior and the exterior, the gigantic and the miniature, and the domestic and the public spaces.

Victorian society had strict written and unwritten laws about what was permissible in terms of personal relationships. Anglican patriarchal church values governed behaviour between the classes and enforced codes of conduct on gender related boundaries of private individuals. Society subscribed to the traditional family of man, woman and children in the context of marriage. Homosexuality amongst men was punishable by prison. Government and religion preached Christian morality, yet the number of prostitutes had never been greater. This dissertation explores the problems of a pro-homosexual and anti-establishment Victorian author writing about human relationships forbidden by society. It exposes the consequences suffered by Oscar Wilde due to his investigative insights into the `Other' in the context of individual rights of preference in regard to sexual orientation, as expressed in selected texts, and his resolution of conflict, in De Profundis. / English Studies / MA (English)