Victorian serial novels were bound with pages upon pages of advertisements marketing goods to readers, yet the relative inattention paid to this significant material component of the novel is surprising. This project explores the interaction between fictional narrative and commercial advertisements, and aims to recover the material context in which three Victorian novels—Bleak House, Middlemarch, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—were first published and read. These three case studies—a novel published in 20 monthly serial numbers, another packaged in the rare format of eight “books” in bimonthly installments, and the third published in a monthly magazine in three excerpts—are exemplary of a larger phenomenon in Victorian book production wherein fiction and commerce were inextricably bound. This project investigates the ways in which the advertisements can be reconceived as a significant element of the novel, mediating the reader’s experience of the text. The Bleak House chapter examines how the advertisements for hair products in the “Bleak House Advertiser” serve to highlight an aspect of Charles Dickens’s text about Victorian responses to the mass of new consumer goods and individuals’ desire to control the physical aspects of their world. The following chapter considers George Eliot’s (Mary Ann Evans’s) Middlemarch, finding that just as the narrator’s asides compel readers to attend to the temporal difference between the 1830s setting of the novel and the 1870s perspective of the serial edition, sewing machine advertisements in the advertising supplement of the novel serve to remind readers of their role as observers of past events. The examination of Mark Twain’s (Samuel Clemens’s) Huck Finn, as published in three excerpts in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, demonstrates that the magazine articles, the excerpts from Huck Finn, and the advertisements all engage in a project of unifying the nation and alleviating the physical and metaphorical wounds of war. The unity of the message emerges when the excerpts are read together with the many advertisements for wheelchairs and other such implements for disabled bodies. The dissertation ends with a chapter indicating the merits of further analysis and critical discussion of advertisements in the undergraduate literature classroom. / text

The nineteenth century was a time of rapid change, brought about by increasing industrial development and changing patterns of thought and belief. Dickens's attitude to industrialism was ambivalent. He was not averse to progress, but feared that the ills of society would remain overshadowed. This dissertation explores representations of loss in Bleak House and examines some of the challenges the subject presents. The first chapter concentrates on examples of the wide range of losses with which Dickens deals in the novel to create the cumulative impression of individuals and a nation existing in a state of chaos and decay. Chapter Two focuses on the loss of physical life and the state of death-in-life. Chapter Three deals with the narrative techniques which Dickens uses to represent loss in the novel. / English Studies / M.A.

The worlds of Dickens's novels and of Darwin's science reveal striking similarity in spite of their involvement in different areas. The similarity comes from the fact that they shared the ethos of Victorian society: laissez-faire capitalism. In The Origin of Species, which was published on 1859, Charles Darwin theorizes that nature has evolved through the rules of natural selection, survival of the fittest, and the struggle for existence. Although his conclusion comes from the scientific evidence that was acquired from his five-year voyage, it is clear that Dawinian nature is reflected in cruel Victorian capitalism. Three novels of Charles Dickens which were published around 1859, Bleak House, Hard Times, and Our Mutual Friend, share Darwinian aspects in their fictional worlds. In Bleak House, the central image, the Court of Chancery as the background of the novel, resembles Darwinian nature which is anti-Platonic in essence. The characters in Hard Times are divided into two groups: the winners and the losers in the arena of survival. The winners survive in Coketown, and the losers disappear from the city. The rules controlling the fates of Coketown people are the same as the rules of Darwinian nature. Our Mutual Friend can be interpreted as a matter of money. In the novel, everything is connected with money, and the relationship among people is predation to get money. Money is the central metaphor of the novel and around the money, the characters kill and are killed like the nature of Darwin in which animals kill each other. When a dominant ideology of a particular period permeates ingredients of the society, nobody can escape the controlling power of the ideology. Darwin and Dickens, although they worked in different areas, give evidence that their works are products of the ethos of Victorian England.

Through their editorial arrangements of African-American, Euro-American and European poetry, fiction and news, Frederick Douglass’s anti-slavery periodicals (The North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper) imagine a cosmopolitan discourse that predates the segregated realities of the antebellum United States. In spite of Southern blockades against the infiltration of Northern texts, Douglass’s material space uniquely capitalized on the limited restrictions of his reprinting culture to relocate the voice of the ‘outraged slave’ onto a global stage. From the poems of Phillis Wheatley and William Cowper to Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Douglass’s own novella “The Heroic Slave,” this project considers how Douglass’s literary inclusions—and exclusions—complicate our static considerations of the historicized Douglass and exhibit his savvy insertions of black print into an exclusive, transatlantic nineteenth-century print culture.

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This dissertation asserts a strong connection between democratic culture and the novel form in the period 1832--1867. As England debated constitutional reform and the extension of the franchise, novelists Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot endeavoured to define human communities on democratic terms. Drawing on work of contemporary political philosopher John Rawls to develop a methodology that considers constitutions and novelistic representations as analogous contexts for reasoning about shared political values and citizenship, this study provides readings of Bleak House, North and South, and Felix Holt that emphasize each novel's contribution to the period's ongoing deliberations about pluralism, justice, and the meaning of membership in democratic life. When read alongside Bentham's work on legislative reform, Bleak House offers a parallel model of social interaction that weighs the values of diversity of thought, security from coercion, and the nature of harmful actions. Felix Holt and North and South are novelistic contributions to defining and contesting the attributes of the new liberal citizen. Through their central characters, as well as in their respective novelistic practices, Eliot and Gaskell highlight the difficulty of uniting autonomous individuals with collective social groups, and this was as much a problem for literary practice in the period as it was for constitutional reform.

The character of the detective in Victorian literature and entertainment seems to be a paradox: tasked with surveillance but enacting it via disguise and other performative and even theatrical hallmarks. Scholars have often read the detective as an extension of the panoptic state, as a policing figure whose investigative work is undertaken through surveillance. How, then, are we to explain why Victorian detectives are so performative, which seems hardly compatible with surveillance? In this dissertation, I look beyond surveillance as the detective’s main function, towards the process of detection overall—which I demonstrate is completed through the detective’s use of performance and involves the manipulation of spectacle and evaluation of audience expectations. In redefining detection as a performative practice, I look at four different cases in which Victorian fictional detectives rely on a specific performance practice, style, or tradition to complete their detective work. The first two chapters establish the embeddedness of performance within the practice of detection, focusing on feats of non-theatrical performance by detectives who rely on and cultivate spectacle around them. In Chapter One, I analyze Dickens’s detectives, Mr. Nadgett of Martin Chuzzlewit and Inspector Bucket of Bleak House: conjuror figures who rely on controlled concealment, illusionistic demonstrations, and enthralling revelations to crime-solve, in a way that will win the favor of the Victorian public. In Chapter Two, I detail how Sherlock Holmes borrows the spectacular conventions of Victorian scientific performance to legitimize his own “Science of Deduction” as a discipline. The third and fourth chapters examine cases in which the feats of performance undertaken by detectives demonstrate the ways that detection is essential to the practice of performance—and that performance itself is not only a logical act, but also an interactively educational one. In Chapter Three, I analyze the practices of “lady detective” characters who have had prior careers as professional actresses and use the acting skills they cultivated on the stage to un-spectacularize themselves, achieving a level of invisibility that allows them mobility, access, and information. In Chapter Four, I look at two stage detective characters who are themselves performing roles: Hawkshaw in Tom Taylor’s The Ticket-of-Leave Man and Gripper in W.S. Gilbert’s A Sensation Novel. I analyze how these plays showcase the detective’s acting to refocus the ways that the actor is doing detection—that is, the ways in which, through performance, the theater is able to disseminate news and critique institutions of power, like the police itself.

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