In 'A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism', Jerome J. McGann writes, '[A]n author's work possesses autonomy only when it remains an unheard melody'. For the published and successful writer in the nineteenth century, such autonomy was often unattainable. Publications such as The Pickwick Papers inspired an array of opportunistic successors, including stage plays, unauthorized sequels, jest books, song books, and shilling and penny imitations. Despite the proliferation, this strain of writing is rarely studied. This thesis recovers ephemeral, scurrilous texts, often anonymous or pseudonymous, and reads them in the context of their canonical sources. Retrieving bibliographical environments, it demonstrates how plagiaristic, parodic, and willfully unoriginal works impacted on the careers of three novelists: Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer Lytton, and George Eliot. The thesis argues that formal distinctions among modes of Victorian writing - criticism, parody, and plagiarism - often blur. Further, it argues that our understanding of a particular novelist's work must be broadened to include sequels, spinoffs, and imitations: to know a particular author means to know the spurious and oftentimes bad (morally or aesthetically) works that the author inspired. The Spurious Victorians of the title form something of countercanon to the 'major' writers of the period. Thomas Peckett Prest, Rosina Bulwer Lytton, and Joseph Liggins, among many others, informed and influenced the literary history that has in turn denied them admission. William Makepeace Thackeray wrote, 'If only men of genius were to write, Lord help us! how many books would there be?' Of course, Victorian print culture found room for the genius and the subgenius, Boz as well as Bos. 'Spurious Victorians' recovers works that have been lost from view in order to better understand the process by which an individual authorial voice emerged amid an echo chamber of competing, imitative voices.

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My thesis revives the term raciology to describe collectively the literature which emanated out of philological ethnology, that is, out of the studies of man inspired by the rapid advances in linguistic science in the early nineteeenth century. Raciological Thought in Victorian Culture is divided into two parts: it examines the development and dissemination of nineteenth-century raciological knowledge in the works of celebrated philologists and anthropologists; and then investigates typical features of raciological discourse in Victorian and Victorian Canadian culture. It views this regional British literature as a field for the political and educational deployment of British raciological conceptions, and comments on some of the implications of the circulation of raciological doctrine. My argument begins with discussion of the often overlooked celebrity and authority of philologists in Victorian culture, tracing the derivation from philology of raciological typologies which established the raciological associations of terms like "Britons," "Anglo-Saxons," and "Teutons" during the early and middle-Victorian periods. An important aspect of the thesis is a re-evaluation of the influence of Friedrich Max Muller, the most influential comparative philologist and mythologist in the Victorian world. I argue that his use of etymological study for archaeological data greatly contributed to the rapid dissemination of raciological thought among the educated and educating classes. The first part of the thesis concludes with discussion of issues which animated raciological discourse. The second part follows the dissemination of Victorian raciological thought to Canada, and illustrates its effects in an imperial context. It demonstrates the use of raciology in establishing Canada's legitimacy as a British nation, and documents the place of raciology in establishing the authenticity of Canadian continuity with a British culture running into deep antiquity. After discussing neglected raciological aspects of several important Victorian Canadian source works, it goes on to outline the importance of raciological mythology to the preservation of the Dominion from American annexation and Fenian incursion. My epilogue briefly documents the decline of raciological thought in Britain after the 1890s. By investigating numerous neglected Victorian sources, Raciological Thought in Victorian Culture establishes raciology as an important element in Victorian political-and, in particular, nationalist-thinking. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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“The Sixth Sense: Synaesthesia and British Aestheticism 1860-1900” is an interdisciplinary examination of the emergence of synaesthesia conceptually and rhetorically within the ‘art for art’s sake’ movement in mid-to-late Victorian Britain. Chapter One investigates Swinburne’s focal role as both theorist and literary spokesman for the nascent British Aesthetic movement. I argue that Swinburne was the first to practice what Pater meant by ‘aesthetic criticism’ and that synaesthesia played a decisive role in ‘Aestheticising’ critical discourse. Chapter Two examines Whistler’s varied motivations for using synaesthetic metaphor, the way that synaesthesia informed his identity as an aesthete, and the way that critical reactions to his work played a formative role in linking synaesthesia with Aestheticism in the popular imagination of Victorian England. Chapter Three explores Pater’s methods and style as an ‘aesthetic critic.’ Even more than Swinburne, Pater blurred the distinction between criticism and creation. I use ‘synaesthesia’ to contextualise Pater’s theory of “Anders-streben” and to further contribute to our understanding of his infamous musical paradigm as a linguistic ideal, which governed his own approach to critical language. Chapter Four considers Wilde’s decadent redevelopment of synaesthetic metaphor. I use ‘synaesthesia’ to locate Wilde’s style and theory of style within the context of decadence; or, to put it another way, to locate decadence within the context of Wilde. Each chapter examines the highly nuanced claim that art should exist for its own sake and the ways in which artists in the mid-to-late Victorian period attempted to realise this desire on theoretical and rhetorical levels.

Cemetery companies were the principal agency of the transition from a traditional reliance on graveyards to the use of modern extra-mural cemeteries. The thesis comprises a study of the 113 cemetery companies established from 1820 to 1853, a period which saw the origin of this type of enterprise and its spreading throughout Britain. The companies are not analysed as economic entities, but rather as representations of a range of attitudes towards the problems associated with intramural interment. To facilitate discerning different trends relating to the public perceptions of the burial problem, the companies have been classified according to type. This is an exercise which relies on textual analysis of company documents to understand the principal motivation of each group of directors. Three different types of company are examined in the thesis. Directors of enterprises within the first group to emerge saw the burial problem as a religious-political issue, and used cemetery companies as a means of providing extended space for burial which was independent of the Established Church. The new cemeteries had unconsecrated ground, and offered the freedom for Dissenters to adopt any burial service they wished. The increased enthusiasm for all joint-stock enterprise in the mid-1830s saw the advent of the speculative cemetery company, which saw in the burial issue the potential to make profits in one of three ways: by tapping a specific territorial market, a particular class market, or by buying and selling the scrip of grand and impractical necropolitan schemes. A third type of company dominated the 1840s, and its main concern was the provision of extra-mural cemeteries as a sanitary measure. In addition to studies of these three groups of companies, the thesis presents analysis of two additional themes essential to the progress of burial reform: fears concerning the integrity of the corpse; and the cultural significance thought to attach to cemetery foundation. The thesis demonstrates, by studying these companies, that the reasons for taking action to found cemetery companies could vary considerably, and that perception of the burial issue altered a number of times.