This dissertation studies the earliest years of photography’s invention. Attention to the earliest conceptions of photography reveals a more complex and contested understanding of the nature and significance of photographic representation than has previously been attributed to the Victorians of the early nineteenth century, providing not only a more comprehensive picture of the history of the new technology, but also new insights into the interactions of Victorian photography and visual culture. The earliest representations and receptions of photography are gathered from inventors’ reports, the first photographic texts produced for a specialist and general audience, and periodical articles that reveal the popular reception of photography by a non-specialist audience. The evolving representations and reception of photography are traced throughout the 1840s, as the medium grew increasingly popular, with a particular focus on photographic portraiture. Arguing that the earliest figurations of a new medium directly inform or “premediate” how the medium is negotiated as it becomes established in the culture – that is, even though the technology and use of photography changed quite rapidly, the earliest perceptions of the medium powerfully influenced how it was used, perceived, and resisted – I examine the central anxieties raised by photography that persisted throughout the 1840s and early 1850s. Using Charles Dickens’s Bleak House as a case study, I then turn to literature of the realist genre to assess how photography is imagined and contested in novelistic form. This not only provides a model with which to examine the incorporation of photographic allusions and themes into the realist novel, but also contributes new insights into the ways in which the issues of photography and other aspects of visuality intersected with the literary realist enterprise.

This thesis examines the important role of female same-sex relationships in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Whilst drawing directly upon Sharon Marcus's recent book, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, a revisionary queer reading of inter-dependent same-sex female intimacy and mainstream middle-class heteronormative ideals, my own study extends the parameters of Marcus's work by focussing on alternative contexts and previously overlooked same-sex female relationships. This thesis argues that the culturally endorsed model of Victorian female homosociality identified by Marcus was subject to disruption and transformation both within and beyond the institutions of marriage and the family. It concludes that various forms (rather than one definitive model) of homosocial desire shaped nineteenth-century female bonding. In the first chapter I explore the unstable social status of working middle-class women, and identify instances of employer/employee female intimacy organised upon a disturbance or reversal of social hierarchy. In the second chapter I demonstrate how the ideal of female amity was inevitably undermined in the literary marketplace, and that whilst women writers were engaged in constructing and disseminating this ideal in their novels, they were also embroiled in a series of professional jealousies with one another which served to undo the very ideal they were promoting. In the second part of this chapter I highlight the pluralism of mainstream homoerotic femininity by examining Dinah Mulock Craik's fictional representation of homoerotic surveillance manifest in a culturally endorsed adolescent female gaze. In the third chapter I challenge Marcus's claim that well-known independent nineteenth-century lesbians were fully accommodated into mainstream 'respectable' society by demonstrating that some of these women informed Eliza Lynn Linton's homophobic portrait of radical feminist separatism. I also explore in this chapter Linton's fictional representation of sororal eroticism, and argue that (notwithstanding mother/daughter bonds) Linton, like many of her contemporaries, regarded sisterhood as the primary bond between women. I also evidence in this chapter that Linton's portrait of 'sororophobia' is comparable with cultural ideals regarding the important function that female friends had in facilitating one another's marriage.

This thesis contends that the idea of productive sexual continence - that is, abstinence from sexual activity understood as a constructive practice - significantly shaped a branch of thought within and around the British Aesthetic Movement of the late nineteenth century. Recent critical work has stressed sexual liberation or permissiveness as among the values of Aestheticism, and has read Aesthetic representations of continent states as indications of repressed, sublimated, or coded sexuality. Reading these representations through period-specific sexual discourses, I reveal an alternative discursive tradition within Aestheticism, in which the idea of productive sexual continence formed an important part of thinking about the 'aesthetic life', or the life lived according to aesthetic principles. The enquiry privileges the place of sexual ideas and values in the context of the intellectual culture of the Aesthetic Movement, and of the late-Victorian period generally, rather than focusing (as much scholarship has done) upon the writers' 'real-life' sexual behaviour, desires or identities. Sexual continence was often understood in the period as conducive both to individual health and happiness, and to one's relationship with society. At a time when Aesthetic writers were often accused of endorsing excessive individualism and excessive sensuality, this idea facilitated the elaboration of an aesthetic ethic that could incorporate intense sensuous (but not sensual) pleasure and also responsible sociability. After an Introduction that outlines the scope and method of the thesis, Chapter One illustrates the ubiquity of this idea in medical writing (professional and popular) about the sexual body in the period, and within Classical and Christian intellectual discourses commonly drawn upon by Aesthetic authors. Four chapters follow in which roughly the same idea is shown to take a central role in representations of the 'aesthetic life' in the work of four major writers. Chapter Two posits that there were broadly two traditions of reading Walter Pater in the late nineteenth century: one in which he was taken as an apologist for a radical sensual individualism, and another that emphasized his advocacy of restraint and reserve as both stylistic and ethical principles. Informed by early readings in this latter tradition, I demonstrate the plausibility of an interpretation of Pater as carefully distinguishing between aesthetic sensuousness and sensuality. Pater also, I argue, can viably be read as assessing the ideal aesthetic life in terms of health and love, and representing sexual continence as compatible with both. Chapter Three looks at Lionel Johnson's incorporation of this continent ideal into his Christianized cultural humanism, evolved in his letters, poetry, and criticism. In the poetry resistance to temptation is described as a process by which potentially sensual experience is made safely sensuous, while in the letters and criticism can be found admiration for various continent states that reconcile individual aesthetic experience with social responsibility. In Chapter Four, the pre-1900 essays of Vernon Lee are shown to be consistently anti-sensual, while distinguishing this sensuality from a kind of continent sense experience identified as aesthetic, and associated with Pater. Lee also uses this aesthetic sensuousness as a model for ideal - i.e. disinterested and respectful - relations between people, and between people and things. Chapter Five examines the co-existence of this discourse with other, contradictory models of aesthetic living in the work of George Moore. Moore was generally pro-sensual, and considered 'sex' (in the abstract) to be integral to art; but he also associated the production of art with continent states. An alternative, sexually continent Paterian tradition can, I argue, help to account for these discordant moments. A Conclusion briefly indicates the further relevance of such thinking beyond the bounds of the Aesthetic Movement.

During the nineteenth century, as today, nausea and vomiting were common signs and symptoms of illness, the interpretation of which contributed to doctors' diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic choices. At the core of this thesis lies the research question: how did medical understandings and management of nausea and vomiting change in the period 1800-1900? In addition to being signs of bodily disorder, nausea and vomiting constituted an individual, typically non-medicalised experience of sickness. As such, a secondary thesis question is: how were nausea and vomiting experienced, interpreted and responded to by sufferers? These questions are pursued through four key themes: physiology, vomit analysis, morning sickness and sea-sickness. Medical textbooks, journals, hospital case reports, newspapers, letters and diaries are the principal source base. Throughout the nineteenth century physiological explanations for nausea and vomiting followed a generally reductionist path. In the 1830s Marshall Hall's reflex theory encouraged new perceptions of the nervous mechanisms involved in nausea and vomiting, and helped stimulate their redefinition into local, central and peripheral causes. Changing physiological explanations for nausea and vomiting were also contemporaneous to the growth of microscopy. This thesis draws attention to the interest nineteenth-century practitioners showed in using vomited matters as pathological fluids. This is explored primarily through a case study of sarcina ventriculi, a vegetable microorganism discovered in fermenting vomit. Responses to this discovery showed that laboratory techniques were largely inapplicable to everyday occurrences of nausea and vomiting. Consequently, neither the increasing localisation of the causes of vomiting, nor interest in vomited matters as pathological fluids, contributed to specificity in diagnoses or treatments. This research thereby demonstrates the cumulative and overlapping nature of nineteenth-century medical cosmologies - 'bedside', 'hospital' and 'laboratory' - and the continuation of the 'clinical art'. The histories of morning sickness and sea-sickness contextualise medical understandings of nausea and vomiting in relation to these transient conditions. They bring to the fore perceptions of health and sickness and show that medical theory was often secondary to cultural beliefs and practices. Specifically, this thesis questions the medicalisation of pregnancy during the nineteenth century and uses experiences of sea-sickness to reveal new features of Victorian understandings of the mind-body relationship. This thesis shows that 'feeling sick' (nausea) was arguably as significant to contemporaries as actually 'being sick' (vomiting). It also confirms the complexity and fluidity of taken-for-granted terms such as: 'patient', 'sufferer', 'disease', 'illness' 'sign' and 'symptom', and, of course, 'sick'. Furthermore, it demonstrates the importance to historians of studying everyday, self-limiting illnesses and morbidity.

Focusing on the three-year period from 1859 to 1862 during which the poet Walt Whitman frequented Pfaff's Beer Cellar on Broadway in New York, this dissertation examines how the barroom and its unique clientele shaped the poet's life and writings. This project demonstrates that Pfaff's functioned as an American saloon and a popular salon and argues that the communities of beer cellar regulars Whitman joined there made Pfaff's the most significant social and literary space of his career. Whitman's participation in two social and intellectual communities at Pfaff's was vital to his literary production before and during the Civil War. While Whitman prepared the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass for publication, he joined a group of writers and artists at the beer cellar--a group now recognized as the first American Bohemians. Later, he became a central figure in the "Fred Gray Association," a little-known group of young Pfaffians. This dissertation shows that Whitman's membership in the Bohemian coterie influenced his writing and revision of his homoerotic Calamus poems, first published in Leaves of Grass (1860). It also reveals that Whitman's time with the Fred Gray members served as a foreground for his volunteer work in Washington's wartime hospitals, where he not only attempted to recreate the beer cellar environment as best he could under terrible conditions, but he also continued to practice the theories of affection he put forth in Calamus . By studying Whitman's years at Pfaff's through an interdisciplinary approach that draws on methodologies ranging from cultural studies and literary history to gender and sexuality studies, this dissertation makes significant contributions to several fields of literary study. In addition to offering a fuller understanding of Whitman's literary production at Pfaff's, it contributes to biographical studies of the poet by drawing connections between his personal and professional transitions from temperance writer to bar-hopping Bohemian, and, finally, from a Pfaffian poet to a hospital volunteer. This study also adds to the history of sexuality by places Whitman's Calamus poems, which are counted among his most sexually radical, in the context of nineteenth-century debates concerning gender and sexuality. It also explores the counter-cultural communities that formed at Pfaff's and illuminates how Whitman's writing is intertwined with the space of the barroom and his relationships to its inhabitants. Finally, this dissertation illustrates how underground networks respond to the larger social and cultural milieus that they both exist within and position themselves against.

No description available.

Writers of the 1830s and 1840s sought to interpret their changing society in an explosion of new forms, developing an all-inclusive aesthetic that saw writing as a direct expression of individual experience, without boundary between life and page and without hierarchy of genre or subject matter. Analyses of social types and behaviour proliferated in which two current preoccupations stood out: the materialist motivation of an industrialising society with an expanding middle class, and the degree of theatricality involved in manoevring for a place in that society. Often groundbreaking, the analyses of August Lewald (1792–1871) were informed by his broad experience which included commerce and the theatre, and for which he was renowned. Contemporary reviews acknowledge the innovativeness of his writing and his sure eye for key issues of the day. In the new conditions after 1848, however, his popularity soon vanished, and he has been largely overlooked since then. My thesis aims to demonstrate that such a strong representative of the period in both his life and works calls for reinstatement as significant writer and personality. Three of Lewald’s works have been selected to support this aim. After an Introduction which tries to place Lewald within the experimental context of the Vormärz, Chapters 1–3 will offer a close reading of each work, contextualised by reference to other works, contemporary reviews, and biographical detail where it seems relevant. Sketches from Album aus Paris exemplify Lewald’s early and influential innovativeness in their humorous scrutiny of social behaviour through observation of its external manifestations, in the style of French Physiologies. Memoiren eines Banquiers exploits fictionalised life-writing as a cover behind which to confront controversial issues around money, Jewish emancipation and prejudice. Theater-Roman plays with the metaphor of society as theatre, conveying the ultimately futile illusoriness of contemporary society’s values, and foreshadowing Lewald’s own increasing rejection of his Vormärz life- and writing style after 1848. My Conclusion claims for Lewald’s life and writing individuality and originality as well as qualities that make him exemplary of his time. It proposes, as a project among other topics for further research, that a new edition of his sketches in particular, enjoyable in their own right, would be a valuable contribution to knowledge of the Vormärz period.

This essay examines the limitations of societal gender norms and expectations of the late nineteenth-century and how the fictional character Ántonia Shimerda adheres to and fails to conform to them. In nineteenth-century America men and women were divided into two different spheres. Women were expected to stay within the four walls of the home and take care of cooking, housekeeping and raising the family’s children. The home was believed to be the only place where a woman could be truly happy. However, in the novel Ántonia proves that women can be happy performing physically demanding tasks outside of the expected sphere for women. To explore Ántonia’s gender fluidity this essay focuses on gender expectations and norms in the historical setting of the novel and analyzes the reasons for her to abandon her gender and the consequences this has in her life. The representation of a character that both adheres to and fails to conform to the nineteenth-century gender perceptions indicates the performative nature of gender. Cather creates a fluid gender in Ántonia, who proves to be both an independent and strong character that clearly illustrates the limitations of rigid gender norms.

This thesis revisits William Wordsworth’s practical and poetic engagement with education as epitomised in his claim that “Every Great poet is a Teacher: I wish either to be considered as a Teacher, or as nothing.” By situating this claim in the larger contexts of Wordsworth’s writings and Britain’s educational development from the late eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, it argues that Wordsworth advocated a poetic education of receptive and creative imagination as a corrective to the practical education of passive learning and reading, and that his authority as a poet-teacher was confirmed rather than challenged by the wide divergence of his reception in Nineteenth Century Britain. The introduction defines the research topic, argues for Wordsworth’s relevance as a poet-teacher against his dubious reception in contemporary educational institutions, and examines some mistaken notions of him as a poet of nature and childhood. Chapter One investigates Wordsworth’s lifelong critique of contemporary pedagogical theories and practices for their confusion of education with instruction and their neglect of religion. Chapter Two studies Wordsworth’s proposal for an alternative mode of poetic education that relies on nature, books, and religion to foster the individual’s religious imagination, which informed Wordsworth’s vocation as a poet, and underlay the revisions of the educational backgrounds of his major poetic speakers. Chapter Three explores Wordsworth’s endeavours to cultivate readers’ receptive and creative imagination against the prevalent literary taste through differentiating strategies of communication in his poetic theories and short poems written between 1794 and 1815. Chapter Four discusses the educational uses made of Wordsworth’s poetry through studying the representative selections of his poems edited by Victorian educators, so as to reveal the slow, winding, but steady process of his being recognised as a teacher in both practical and poetic senses. The thesis concludes with a reaffirmation of Wordsworth’s authority and relevance as a teacher, both then and now.

This thesis analyses the Scottish Whig party between 1801 and 1820 with particular focus on party structure, organisation, and ideology. It seeks to provide a picture of the Scottish Whig party between these dates and to demonstrate that the party developed and maintained a sophisticated structure, cultivated an active and diverse body of members, and contributed to the intellectual development of the national Whig party. Chapter One explores the multiple opinions that existed within the Scottish Whigs on the issue of reform and how these ideas were disseminated in the press. Chapter Two discusses the fissures that existed within the Edinburgh Whigs and notes the generational gap which saw the younger Whigs compete with the older ones for pre-eminence within the party. Chapter Three extends this study beyond the confines of Edinburgh and examines the importance of a culture of conviviality to the party through a study of the dinners held throughout Scotland in honour of Charles James Fox. Extending beyond the urban centres, Chapter Four delves into the complexities of county politics in Scotland and the methods that the Whigs developed in order to overcome local challenges. Chapter Five explores the practical means by which the opposition party maintained itself, specifically through the patronage of university chairs and livings in the Church of Scotland. Through a brief exploration of the career of John Allen, Chapter Six discusses the importance of London and Holland House to the Scottish Whigs and provides suggestions for further research. Finally, it is asserted that, by the 1820s, a diverse and dynamic Scottish Whig party had emerged and was actively contributing to the national Whig party intellectually, by developing a 'new' Scottish Whiggism, and in terms of personnel. Throughout, this thesis demonstrates the flexibility of terms such as 'Whig' and 'Foxite principles' and argues for a broader interpretation of political activity and involvement as being vital to the study of early nineteenth-century politics.