Space is socially constructed, reflecting and reinforcing the nature of gender relations in society. This is evident in nineteenth century architecture, particularly domestic architecture, where space was structured around the ideology of respectability. Within the discipline of interior architecture, this study investigates the relationship between the Victorian (1837-1901) ideology of respectability and the gendering of domestic space. The problem was investigated by means of a literature review; thereafter, a set of criteria derived from the literature were applied in a critical analysis of selected examples of Victorian domestic architecture, interior space and the decoration thereof. The findings indicated that Victorian domestic architecture embodied a male/female dichotomy in which men owned and ‘ruled’ the home/house; while women maintained it. Although Victorian ideology was fissured and developed unevenly, it still functioned in terms of the ideal of respectability which was embedded and demonstrated in domestic space. / Dissertation (MInt)--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Architecture / unrestricted

Cette thèse examine des trajectoires imaginaires décrites dans l’œuvre de Charles Dickens et à partir d’elle. On y étudie le texte et les réincarnations de Great Expectations (1860-61), Oliver Twist (1837-39) puis The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), trois romans qui, depuis l’ère victorienne, pénètrent l’imaginaire collectif et alimentent des discours divers, toujours influencés par leurs conditions de production. Ainsi, cette thèse pratique des microanalyses de ses sources primaires tout en prêtant attention au contexte de chaque œuvre. Son corpus comprend des adaptations filmiques mais aussi des reprises plus indirectes, telles que des réécritures, séries télévisées ou jeux vidéo faisant apparaître des éléments identifiables comme « dickensiens ». Cet adjectif qualifie des objets imaginaires et des phénomènes culturels dont on s’attache ici à préciser la nature. En particulier, le dickensien et ses persistances sont étudiées au prisme de l’excentricité, un terme souvent utilisé pour évoquer la qualité truculente et insolite des écrits de Dickens. Mais ici, la définition de cette notion est approfondie : l’excentrique, toujours situé entre un centre et ses marges, sert à penser les ambivalences du dickensien. Au gré des contextes socio-culturels et esthétiques dans lesquels il s’incarne, l’imaginaire créé par Dickens nourrit des discours tantôt normatifs et maîtrisables, tantôt subversifs et déroutants. La cartographie chaotique dressée dans ce travail aboutit à une réflexion méthodologique : les persistances du dickensien forment des trajectoires discontinues et imprévisibles, qui contrarient les classements bibliographiques, périodisations et barrières disciplinaires / This thesis looks at the text and afterlives of Great Expectations (1860-61), Oliver Twist (1837-39) and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), by Charles Dickens. Ever since the Victorian era, these three novels have penetrated our collective imagination and have fed into various kinds of discourses, which are always determined by their conditions of production and reception. Thus, this thesis both performs microanalyses of its primary sources and explores the context in which each work was published. Its corpus includes filmic adaptations as well as more indirect reincarnations, such as rewritings, TV series and videogames featuring elements identifiable as ‘Dickensian’. The latter adjective points to a variety of fictional objects and cultural processes, which are gradually circumscribed throughout this thesis. In particular, the Dickensian and its afterlives are defined in connection with the ‘eccentric’, a term often used to conjure up the colourful and sometimes queer quality of Dickens’s texts. Here, however, a broader definition of this notion is adopted: the eccentric, which always stands halfway between a centre and its margins, is used to examine the many ambiguities of the Dickensian. For, as they move into new aesthetic and socio-cultural contexts, the fictions created by Dickens feed into discourses which can be normative and/or subversive, stereotyped and/or disturbing. My cartography of Dickensian afterlives gradually appears as chaotic, which eventually leads me to reconsider some of my methodological assumptions: Dickens’s fictions move in irregular and unpredictable ways, which often upset bibliographical, periodical and disciplinary boundaries

The aim of this thesis on the Victorian poet/novelist George Meredith is to analyse the philosophical and psychological aspects of some of his poetry in relation to his reputation as a ‘difficult’ author. The study attempts to create a working definition of poetic difficulty by referring to George Steiner’s influential work in this regard, while also discussing some of the limitations of Steiner’s theory. A consideration of Rita Felski’s examination of critique in the field of literary studies is used to frame the debate around formalist versus ideological criticism and to introduce the conciliatory and reparative approach aimed at in this study, which, though mostly focusing on formalist close readings, also acknowledges the importance of context. The introduction includes a discussion of Meredith’s reputation as a difficult author, and argues that this is one of the main reasons for his critical and popular neglect, with his poetry being seen as particularly obscure. In the first chapter I look at Meredith’s response to the mythological past, elements of which are evident throughout his writing. I suggest that a lack of familiarity with Meredith’s sources can lead to misreadings of his poems, and look at two longer narrative poems, ‘Cassandra’ and ‘The Day of the Daughter of Hades’, to illustrate these claims. The second chapter focuses on Meredith’s Modern Love sequence, and includes detailed analyses of a large selection of the sequence’s 16-line sonnets to show how Meredith makes use of indeterminate narration and other ambiguities to create a complex depiction of mid-Victorian married life. The last chapter is concerned with Meredith’s philosophy of nature, an aspect of his thought which received a great deal of critical attention in the early and mid-twentieth century, though not as much in terms of Meredith’s obscurity. I provide a detailed close reading of his long poem ‘Earth and Man’ to illustrate some of the philosophical underpinnings of his poetry, while also suggesting that his was not a rigorous or fully thought-through system, but rather a lyrical exploration of the implications of evolutionary theory for nature-poetry. I conclude my study by considering how the Modernists T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound responded to the troubling question of poetic influence from their Victorian predecessors. By referring to Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’, I suggest how Meredith’s difficult legacy — and legacy of difficulty — continues to reverberate even in the work of poets who attempted to reject Meredith and his Victorian contemporaries. / Thesis (PhD (English))--University of Pretoria, 2021. / English / PhD (English) / Restricted

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The Angel in the House: An Unstable Icon examines the ways in which the figure named in Coventry Patmore's series of mid-nineteenth century poems provoked an anxiety that manifests itself consistently in British literature throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, where the family beacon, the one whose raison d'être was to guide her husband and children away from the immorality rife in the public sphere, instead actively interfered with the good instincts of her offspring, substituted her own wishes for theirs, and caused irreparable harm in the process. This dissertation analyzes the ways in which mother figures in mid-century novels interrogate the angel-mother in particular and suggest the destructive capability inherent in that figure. It argues that the literary questioning of the ideal supports what Poovey calls "uneven development" in the construction of a gender model. The Angel in the House: An Unstable Icon will demonstrate that at the hands of Thomas Hardy and Henry James in particular, the mother is reimagined into a figure bearing little resemblance to the Angel mother, except in her inheritance of a belief that the mother must remain her child's guide, despite the inclinations of their adult children toward a new autonomy. While the Victorian consciousness seems to have experienced a splitting--women were either good or bad, mothers were either good or bad--Hardy and James resist such splitting, instead exploring the gaps and flaws in the Angel-in-the-House ideology, in the process establishing the prototype for mother figures who little resemble Angels, in other words, fully human mothers, that both British and American Modernists such as D. H. Lawrence, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf would adapt as central figures in their major works. / English

This dissertation argues that mid-Victorian detective fiction critiques concurrent shifts in Victorian information culture. Detectives in fiction check alibis, investigate clues, and perform acts of detection and ratiocination which link their labor to social procedures of information management. We can read the genre as a response to drastic mid-Victorian changes in the perception of “information.” Specifically, I argue that detective fiction of the 1860s and 70s demonstrates skepticism of the developing mid-Victorian concept of abstract information. Abstract information is content detached from context, supposedly able to exist free from space, materiality, or necessary connection to human meaning. Mid-Victorian detective fiction challenges that perception. Recovering how mid-Victorian detective fiction embodies social ambivalence towards changing perceptions of information helps us avoid writing a fallacious developmental narrative onto the genre. Detective fiction of the early twentieth century imagines a split between the “rational” and “sensational” material in the genre. The procedures of information management within the novel—gathering and ordering clues, collecting evidence, making deductions—are usually considered “rational” parts of the genre. Reading mid-Victorian novels within this framework, we are apt to see the mid-Victorian detective’s acts of information management as being inherently “rational.” When re-examined through the lens of contemporary information culture, however, we see that information management actually serves in these novels and stories as an indicator of the “sensational.” Rather than tending to advance towards order, as we might expect, mid-Victorian fictions evoke the procedures of information to evoke uncanny feelings and undermine the apparent conclusions of their detectives. We read a novel or short story from the 1860s and see the use of factual information, such as Robert Audley manipulating a railway timetable or Sergeant Cuff carefully collecting testimony. We tend to think of their endeavors as rational, prototypical examples of detective reasoning. But in making that assumption, we overlook how problematic information was in mid-Victorian society and how self-conscious contemporaries were of its limits and contradictions. What we overlook, in short, is the possibility that “information” in mid-Victorian detective fiction serves as another indicator of the “sensational.” To misread the use of information in mid-Victorian detective fiction is to risk misunderstanding Victorian information culture, as well as the text’s adoption and adaptation of other informational forms. While all of the texts I examine exhibit skepticism of the perception of abstract information, this dissertation also traces a development in the texts’ attitudes towards information in the 1860s and beyond. Abstract information, each fiction suggests, is not a perfectly accurate concept, but in the later texts I consider, this becomes less of a problem. For Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), abstract information is a deeply problematic idea, and the text sets a trap for us into which we might fall if we fail to understand the alienated nature of such information. Bracebridge Hemyng’s Telegraph Secrets (1867) challenges the idea of that information can be disembodied from material contexts, but the novel’s attempt to critique it backfires and creates aesthetic oddities in the text. Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), a transitional novel, shows the idea of decontextualized abstract information breaking down, but this is not problematic. Instead, the novel begins to exploit the possibilities offered by an information age which can imagine information freely acquiring new meaning in different contexts. Finally, the many critics of Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) actively celebrate the aesthetic possibilities offered by the idea of abstract information, creating a proliferating collection of new creative work out of the gap left in the original text. / English

Janet Taylor made major contributions to Victorian navigational practices. She did so through creating business opportunities for herself as an educator, author, and inventor of nautical instruments. / Master of Arts / Janet Taylor, a woman who made major contributions to Victorian navigation, is representative of a large historiographical gap in maritime and nautical histories. In these fields historians are typically inclined to look at famous men in navigation: John Hadley, John Campbell, and others who invented nautical instruments such as the octant and sextant. However, we have failed to contextualize the significant women who have innovated maritime practices throughout history. Taylor, for example, adjusted calculations for locating positions at sea according to the realization that the shape of the earth is not spherical, but spheroidal. She conveyed this new mathematical principle to the maritime community of London through the classes she taught at her nautical academies, the dozens of books she would publish, and the navigational tools she invented or innovated. Her multiple careers, and her success in each of them, were varied and far-reaching, making her truly a Jane of all trades. Her success as a woman in a male-dominated field was largely dependent on the industrial spirit of the nation and time in which she lived. As the industrial revolution created a need for advancement in technology and navigation, gender norms and the public/private dichotomy of Victorian England began to blur.