This thesis examines the portrayal of gentleman collectors in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century literature, arguing that they often find themselves challenged and destabilised by their collections. The collecting depicted contrasts revealingly with the Enlightenment practices of classification, taxonomy, and commodification, associated with the growth of both the public museum and the market economy. The dominance of such practices was bound up with the way they promoted subject-object relations that defined and empowered masculine identity. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer note that “[i]n the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty” (3). That being so, this study explores how the drive to classify and commodify the material world found oppositional, fictional form in gothicly inflected texts depicting a fascinating but frightening world of unknowable, alien objects and abject, emasculated subjects. The study draws upon Fred Botting’s contention that gothic extremes are a reaction to the “framework” of “reductive and normalising limits of bourgeois morality and modes of production” (89). Examining novels and short stories by Richard Marsh, M.R. James, Arthur Machen, Vernon Lee, George Gissing, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, Mary Cholmondeley, and Mary Ward, the thesis shows how gothicised instances of unproductive-masochism, pathological collecting, thwarted professionals, and emasculated heirs broke down the “framework” within which men and material culture were understood to interact productively and safely. Individual chapters dealing respectively with acquisition, possession, dissemination and inheritance, respond to the recent “material turn” in the humanities, bringing together literary criticism and historically grounded scholarship to reveal the collector and the collection as the locus 3 for concerns with masculinity and materiality that preoccupied a turn-of-the-century mindset.

The central intention of this thesis is to analyse a body of Victorian legislation, which was enacted to control atmospheric pollution by the chemical industry. Its concern is predominately with enforcement, and the principal aim is to assess the role and effectiveness of the British State and its agencies in this respect. The major focus is a somewhat neglected body of legislation - the Alkali Acts of 1863-1906. These initiated the State regulation of noxious emissions from the early heavy chemical (alkali) industry, and set up a central government body, the Alkali Inspectorate, to this end. The major focus is the ability of Victorian institutions to formulate and implement environmental reforms, especially those which necessitated the increased control of industrial behaviour. It will explore the enforcement and decision making processes, assessing how priorities were set and whose interests were served. Furthermore, it examines the influence of economic, legislative, social, ideological and political factors upon inspection and prosecution. This study also assess whether the control of industrial atmospheric pollution was the consequence of a Victorian regulationist fervour or an example of utilitarian concern with environmental degradation. The main body of the thesis is constituted by chapters on biography, the fiscal context and enforcement. These themes are drawn together by an assessment of the extent and effect of various constraints upon the Alkali Inspectorate. Throughout, some vital comparisons and contrasts with the inspectorates of factories and mines are made, in order to gauge State support for the Alkali Inspectorate. This assessment of the effectiveness of the Alkali Inspectorate and the legislation which created it, facilitates broader insights into the relationship between the State and industry and the extent of State intervention in nineteenth-century Britain

A re-evaluation of the early fiction of Harriet Martineau (1802-76) is timely. In failing to interrogate the reciprocity between Martineau’s interpretation of personal experience and her fiction, scholars have not fully appreciated its purpose. Thus, modern criticism has accepted Martineau’s dismissive judgement of her earliest tales. Five Years of Youth (1831) has been labelled a pastiche of Jane Austen, and the Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-4), which established Martineau’s fame, have also been subject to bruising attack – as poor art, and ideologically mendacious. Most scholars see the novel Deerbrook (1839) as a conventional romance. Although Linda Peterson and Lana Dalley rightly identify in Martineau’s fiction the trope of domesticity and its political dimension, the argument of this thesis is more specific. Message and discourse, whether couched as political economy, children’s adventure or romance, were shaped by Martineau’s ‘heartland concepts’. The product of her subjectivity, these core values were a sense of duty (initially allied to a previously-unacknowledged soteriology of ‘safety’); a welcome offered to adversity as a stimulus to progress; an attack on superstition as an enemy to intellectual and moral progress; and household relationships which were inclusive of children and servants and stimulated community engagement. Martineau’s definition of community, predicated on a sense of belonging, initially reflected the networking of her Norwich household. It was subsequently redefined as wherever her own household could meet a local need. This interpretation is supported by an analysis of Martineau’s engagement with her adopted community of Ambleside, where, in putting into practice her fictional teachings, she demonstrated reciprocity in action.

This thesis examines nostalgia as a central literary trope of burgeoning modernisation in the mid-Victorian historical novel. Nostalgia began as a pathological form of homesickness and rapidly engaged with the perceived distancing from the past brought about by accelerated modernisation. This thesis suggests that literary representations of social, cultural and technological change echo nostalgic reactions of loss and longing. Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot are the primary focus of this study. Selected works by these authors are situated within the wider context of Victorian historical fiction which – following Walter Scott’s phenomenal success at the beginning of the century – became, as Franco Moretti put it, a ‘key genre’ in the Victorian era. Nostalgia’s first victims were soldiers and students displaced from home by new opportunities for mobility and new reasons to travel long distances and live away from home; it was a disease that responded to modernisation or, as Kevis Goodman has put it, ‘historical growing pains’. Nostalgia’s combination of historical and psychological dimensions, I argue, made it an aesthetic peculiarly suited to the historical novel. This thesis suggests that nostalgia was an important novelistic trope during the nineteenth century and argues that it quickly became enmeshed with the historical novel in a way that has seldom been acknowledged. Because of its medical origins, alongside its continued development as a poetic trope, nostalgia provided a language with which to intertwine emotional and psychological reactions to change with the fictional representation of real historical events. The thesis begins with a detailed account of nostalgia’s etymological history, scientific entanglements and early literary manifestations; the introduction establishes the theoretical and historical framework for the thematically organised chapters that follow. Chapter 1 explores the interlacing of personal and historical subject matter in Thackeray’s historical fiction. This chapter suggests that these interactions took place in Thackeray’s historical fiction through the mingling of nostalgic tropes in the person of his central protagonists. These figures frequently follow Scott’s Edward Waverley in being insipid spectator-participants who have been displaced from their homes and (directly or indirectly) mediate events from a perspective of nostalgic exile. Chapter 2 considers the transformation of landscape as a node of nostalgic representation. It explores the confusion of time and place in the original case studies collected by doctors studying nostalgia as a disease in relation to nineteenth-century representations of past landscapes. It suggests that part of the historicising potential of geographical places comes from this instinctive association of time with place. This overlap is exploited in the historical novel to represent changing times via changing places. Chapter 3 takes George Eliot’s Romola, frequently criticised both by contemporary commentators and subsequent critics for being too full of minutely researched objects, as a illustrative example of how things can become ‘memorative signs’ around which to build a narrative. This ‘clutter’ is reinterpreted as a system of souvenirs, artefacts and mementoes through which public history is reconstructed from excavated fragments of private life. Chapter 4 explores how mid-Victorian historical fiction tested the limits of its own nostalgic tropes. It uses Sylvia’s Lovers to probe the point at which forgetfulness overtakes the most carefully memorialised people and events. It discusses the ways in which these novels use nostalgia to represent a perilous closeness between memorialisation and erasure. It considers whether a trope premised on loss might require the threat of encroaching historical oblivion to complete its own metaphors. The thesis concludes with a coda looking forward to later nineteenth-century uses of nostalgia in historical fiction through a reading of Thomas Hardy’s The Trumpet Major (1880) and The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886).

This thesis examines the popular and non-canonical Victorian novelist Ouida (Maria Louise de la Ramée) her relationship with her publishers and the reception of her works. In particular, through the study of published and unpublished correspondence, as well as nineteenth century periodicals, certain views concerning the writer and her oeuvre will be revised and amended, especially in the context of social and moral standards, anticipated from the female fictional character and the artist, the writer. The first chapter will concentrate on Ouida’s correspondence and will argue that the author’s reputation and sales were not only damaged by her ostensibly immoral plots but also as a result of her publishers’s differing priorities. In order to delineate the content of these ‘indecent’ novels and later the impact they had on reviewers, critics and readers, as well as Ouida’s writing, four of her three-decker novels have been selected for critical discussion. Strathmore (1865) is discussed in relation to sensation fiction and marriage law and Folle-Farine (1871) as an examination of inequality between classes and genders. Francis Cowley Burnand’s parody Strapmore (1878) is then read as a critical account of and response to Ouida’s ideologies. The thesis will then examine the controversy surrounding Moths (1880), and In Maremma (1882) will be read as a response to this controversy through its relation to mythology and the representation of the artist. The analysis of these novels and Ouida’s correspondence with her agent and publishers will trace the path that led to the gradual decline in her reputation and the posterior obscurity of her works.

No description available.

This study identifies and addresses representations of Eve and the Madonna exhibited at seven well-known London venues during the Victorian era (1838-1901). The subjects of Eve and the Madonna are here selected for detailed analysis from the broader context of Victorian religious subject pictures, a category of Victorian art that remains arguably under-researched. Nineteenth-century religious art was rooted in a Romantic sensibility and was invested with the purpose of providing a balm during a course, commercial industrial age, which, like the Enlightenment that preceded it, heralded the birth of modern life. Religious art of the nineteenth-century was promoted for consumption by the emerging middle class as a balm to the material age. However, the art that reflected this anti-modern, anti-capitalist impulse served, paradoxically, as both an antidote to and a participant in the materialist marketplace. During the mid-nineteenth century, a moralizing, instructional value was invested in art and religious subjects in general, which experienced a peak in exhibition c. 1850. By the 1860s, however, British art was characterized by a less narrative and didactic sensibility, reflected in Aestheticism, which was concerned with ‘a separation of art from the concerns of ‘real life,’ as well as the Venetian Renaissance. In the 188s, Symbolism emerged, characterized not by style, but a sensibility, which included preoccupation with emotions, dream states, mythologies and religion, innocence, sin, beauty, motherhood, sex, disease, death. Although they were traditional figures, the Madonna and Eve were each invested with, and emblematic of, some of these fin-de-siècle themes. The seven prominent Victorian London exhibition venues examined range from conservative promoters of academicism to sites that promoted the risk-takers of the nineteenth century, such as the Grosvenor Gallery and the New Gallery. These were venues where national tastes were codified, national heroes were made and international artistic values were reexamined and reevaluated. This dissertation examines a nineteenth-century trajectory, from the early Victorian era through the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, identifying styles if art through which to biblical icons of feminine identity, Eve and the Madonna, were expressed, and examining the ideas invested in them, all within the context of the Victorian revival of interest in Renaissance art and the stylistic trends in nineteenth-century art making.

This study examines the expression and patterns of alternate history in nineteenth-century Britain and France. “Alternate history” refers to the presentation of events that did not happen in order to consider historical trajectories that might have been and the consequent displacements of present and future. The central chapters of this thesis correspond to the three fields of writing in which these texts are clustered: in narratives of undefeated and resurgent Napoleons, which I trace from the rival journalistic claims made about Napoleon and his historical significance; in accounts that re-imagine the transition from antiquity to modernity, for example by delaying the passage of Christianity from the Middle East to western Europe; and, as part of the plurality-of-worlds debate, in the popular-astronomical imagination of variant versions of human history upon other planets. Three patterns of alternate history are discernible: the romantic-utopian, the critical-reflexive and the linear-chronological. I attach to these patterns the figures of the garden, the map and the dial. These models do not correspond to the three temporal fields of the recent, antique and planetary past, and there is not a straightforward development of these patterns or modes across the nineteenth century; they rather represent a spectrum of purposes for the fictional alteration of the past which occur at various moments and contexts in the century. Alternate history in this period has never been the subject of in-depth analysis. The approach of this study will not absorb such transformations of history into a tradition of futurist writing, as some critics have done. Maintaining alternate history’s distinctness from futurism makes it possible to avoid framing the texts as precursors to science fiction’s historical anticipations. This study will argue that alternate history should instead be recognised as a category of writing that is aware of and concerned with the way that history is written and received, in particular with history’s interactions with other literary forms and the relationships between writing history and other disciplinary fields. More broadly, alternate history should be interpreted in the context of the often described formation of History as a positivist discipline by the late nineteenth century; but far from indicating a steady progression toward scientific historiography, alternate-historical texts reflect upon that transformation and its consequences in other literary fields (journalism, political theory, popular Astronomy, the romance novel) in the century whose “great obsession” is said to have been history.

Over the last two decades the potential for the combined study of literature and archaeology has been increasingly recognised. The Victorian era, which gave rise to new literary forms, and to archaeology as a science, offers a fertile area of enquiry. This thesis seeks to bring together the imaginative possibilities of archaeology and literature, conceiving their close association to be rooted in the observance and appreciation of the natural world. Focusing on the work of Thomas Hardy and Richard Jefferies, who both wrote about Wessex landscapes rich in archaeology, the thesis identifies the processes involved in the authors’ engagement with nature in archaeological settings. In 1851, Sir Daniel Wilson welcomed archaeology into the ‘circle of the sciences’, and the subject rose to popularity in the periodical press alongside rural pursuits; driven by the closing divide between town and country. Literary depictions of nature in ancient settings elevated the imaginative conception of the past, and found a receptive audience in London papers such as the Graphic and the Pall Mall Gazette, to which Hardy and Jefferies contributed. Both authors associate the mysterious qualities of prehistoric times, and the consonant sense of ‘untrodden space’, with the discovery of new subterranean territories in the self. In a society that was ‘adrift on change’, and seeking new meaning, these connections between the literary and archaeological imagination, and between the present and the past, forged at least temporary consolation. Both authors anticipated early Modern approaches to an archaeology of mind.

This dissertation addresses how Victorian class hierarchy persisted on the frontier, and manifested in aspects of military life at Fort Laramie, Wyoming. Historians have argued that Victorian culture was omnipresent, but forts were located on the frontier, which was removed from the cultural core. While social status differences were a central aspect of Victorian culture, few studies have investigated how resilient class divisions were in differing landscapes. The U.S. western frontier was a landscape of conflict, and under the continual stress of potential violence, it is possible that Victorian social status differences weakened. While status differences in the military were primarily signaled through rank insignia and uniforms, this research focuses on subtle everyday inequalities, such as diet and pet dogs. Three independent lines of evidence from Fort Laramie, Wyoming (1849–1890) suggest that Victorian social status differences did persist despite the location. The Rustic Hotel (1876–1890), a private hotel at Fort Laramie, served standardized Victorian hotel dishes, which could be found in urban upper-class hotels. Within the military, the upper-class officers dined on the best cuts of beef, hunted prestige game birds, and supplemented their diet with sauger/walleye fish. Enlisted men consumed poorer cuts of beef, hunted smaller game mammals, and caught catfish. Officers also owned well-bred hunting dogs, which were integrated into the family. In contrast, a company of enlisted men frequently adopted a communal mongrel as a pet. This project increases our knowledge of the everyday life on the frontier and social relationships between officers and enlisted men in the U.S. Army. It also contributes to a larger understanding of Victorian culture class differences in frontier regions.