In nineteenth-century Britain, the average person's mind was an anthology containing snatches of poetry, Latin verb conjugations, Bible verses, folk songs, miscellaneous facts, and the catechism. Because secular and religious education emphasized learning by rote, students' minds were stocked with information and quotations that originated in other texts, which is reflected in characters who repeat those bits and pieces in the period's literature. My dissertation investigates concepts of personal and national identity in Victorian literature and culture, particularly through the understudied phenomenon of rote memory. George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver, for example, quotes Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ to console herself in the face of tragedy, and Lewis Carroll's Alice attempts to recite didactic schoolroom poems in her efforts to distinguish herself from her less intelligent friends. These moments of memorization--although at first appearing merely to reflect what texts were consumed and recited in nineteenth-century England--in reality suggest much more. I argue that memorization remained centrally connected to nineteenth-century conceptions of identity: people are what they remember, even if those memories do not relate to their own lives, but instead to the information stocked in their minds. My readings of Mary Shelley's Matilda and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss demonstrate rote learning's potential to erode a young woman's personal and religious identity. Instead of committing an act of powerful "poaching," as Michel de Certeau proposes, a memorizer often submits to the text's "strange invasion," as George Poulet suggests. My chapters centered on Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and R.M. Ballantyne's Jarwin and Cuffy, however, locate possibilities for gaining critical thinking skills and forming cross-cultural relationships through a person's response to quoted texts. By examining the significance of memorization in nineteenth-century novels, we gain new understandings of the Victorian period, ranging from the minutiae of everyday routines to the complexity of entire belief systems. A seemingly straightforward moment, such as a character reciting a line or two of poetry, can lead to interdisciplinary insights about forms of reading, functions of memory, ideas about gender, beliefs about religion, and methods of imperialism. As my dissertation demonstrates, nineteenth-century mental anthologies give twenty-first-century readers a veritable index to the cultural past.

Thesis advisor: Maia McAleavey / A time of rapid industrialization and burgeoning consumerism, the nineteenth century was full of things, a physical reality that is mirrored in the heavily material story worlds of Victorian literature. My dissertation investigates how objects do things in texts, exhibiting a mattered, agentic existence that decenters the human and proposes a materially-centered textual reality. In the writings of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and others, a particular set of objects-portraits, dresses, dolls, and letters-is characterized by their shared representation of the human body and the ways in which they act with, against, and independently of the characters they represent. These texts and objects emphasize the essential material components of textual realities and the ways in which objects have agency within the narrative to redefine the mattered framework of the text. The objects in this study operate on a spectrum of agency that emphasizes their role as active matter in their parent text. Going beyond the historical and cultural models that usually inform readings of things in Victorian literature, I investigate how these objects are active in upending the primacy of the human and constructing new assemblages of possibility and potentiality that cannot be accessed by the human alone. Each chapter traces the development of the agentic object in one or more texts as they reshape the structure of their fictional reality to allow objects to exist alongside with, rather than subservient to, their human creators and audiences. Acknowledging the ways in which things in texts have functioned historically and culturally in the nineteenth century, this dissertation examines how they operate textually, offering a differently centered narrative world that reimagines the role of objects as primary actors in constructing fictional realities. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

The purpose of this essay is to investigate the protagonist and narrator in Charlotte Brontës Jane Eyre, it explores how Jane to a certain extent both represents and challenges the norms set by the Victorian society since it was during this time that the novel was published. By taking a closer look at the novel in relation to Victorian society’s norms and ideals the essay will show that the conflict that Jane faces in the novel is between love, feeling and passion versus religious norms and principles. By highlighting these conflicts, the essay presents evidence that the protagonist Jane often shows a feminist sentiment. However, her actions often contradict these sentiments which creates a complexity that I hope this essay will explore.

“Sounding Bodies: Music and Physiology in Victorian Literature” argues that new scientific understandings of the physiology of music – the ways in which humans sweat, quiver, and convulse while listening or performing – particularly fascinated nineteenth-century writers looking for ways to vividly describe bodily experiences of pleasure, desire, and intimacy. In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, acoustical theorists like Hermann von Helmholtz and John Tyndall began to understand music as a physical force that ignited sensations in the human body – exciting the nerves inside the inner ear, arousing the nervous system, and precipitating muscular convulsions. In turn, Victorian authors from Charles Dickens to Vernon Lee began to depict music listening and performance as intensely corporeal events. When, for instance, a female violin player activates her strong arm muscles to perform, she achieves a sense of physical power rarely available to her in a culture that deemed women incapable of such bodily invigoration. When a male concertgoer experiences an orgasm in response to a male virtuoso’s piano performance, he accesses a same-sex erotic encounter otherwise unavailable to him. Scenes of music listening and performance enabled Victorian authors to imagine alternatives to female docility, companionate marriage, cross-sex desire, reproductive sexuality, and stable human subjectivity. Though often associated with the most highbrow and conservative of ideals, music in fact fostered some of the Victorian period’s most subversive representations of embodied life. / 2021-11-12T00:00:00Z

This thesis project investigates the relationship between education, sympathy, and marriage by analyzing the courtship process in three early nineteenth-century novels alongside three female educational texts. The role education plays in Austen’s Emma, Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Gaskell’s North and South, particularly in terms of female characters’ marriage prospects, shows how writers at this time conceived of intellectual equality and opportunities for women, and how the terms in which they did so actively engaged with conduct book discourse. This project expands on Nancy Armstrong’s foundational study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction, Desire and Domestic Fiction, to show the continued interplay between novels and conduct literature through the mid-nineteenth century, a relationship she sees as defunct after the eighteenth century, as well as the vital role that the sympathetic exchange plays in completing a woman’s education. The thesis demonstrates how this fiction transformed possibilities for female characters’ social interactions, equality, and intellectual fulfilment by reimagining the terms of their domestic and romantic relationships in a dynamic engagement with the language and precepts of key conduct texts from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

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My dissertation tracks an emergent theory of character in the wake of the ecological turn in the mid-Victorian period. It identifies the connection between changing representations of character in the popular sensation novel and developments in contemporary psychology. “The Social Ecology of Character” tells the story of how the idea of character fundamentally changed as a result of the development and popularization of the theory of ecology, the burgeoning notion of organisms as plastic and dynamic, given form by the precarious balance between internal physiobiological expression and external social forces. Rather than an innate quality or the result of “blank slate” impressions, character was conceptualized as a dynamic nexus of internal and external pressures in constant adjustment to its physical and social environment. This, what I call, “ecology of character” is intelligible in the sensation novel, a genre born out of a complicated overlap between the perceived physiological effects on readers and the scandalous storylines and infamous for its complex relationship between character and plot. I demonstrate how the sensation novel dramatizes the dynamic interplay between the internal and external forces that determine psychological development. Drawing on an interdisciplinary combination of literary theory, history of psychology, philosophy of science, theories of realism, gender studies, and novel and periodical theory, my dissertation argues that the sensation genre brings to the foreground the effects of the mid-Victorian ecological turn on literary character and incubates a distinctly mid-Victorian British determinism that anticipates late nineteenth-century naturalism. / English

While writers of the Victorian era were free to address contemporary social issues, playwrights were forced to contend with government censorship that ostensibly discouraged them from debating politically controversial topics. An adjunct of the Lord Chamberlain's Office, the Examiner of Plays was responsible for censoring morally and politically sensitive material, giving this individual tremendous influence over the English stage. My dissertation, Dramatic Anxieties: William Bodham Donne, Censorship and the Victorian Theatre, 1849-18 74, focuses on the career of one dramatic censor, William Bodham Donne (1807-82). Throughout his tenure as Examiner (1849-74), Donne controlled the written content of every play performed in every theatre in England. His was a position of remarkable cultural and social influence, offering him the opportunity to shape the performed drama, and thereby the attitudes of those who attended it. This study examines Donne's censorship of dramatists' attempts to treat in a serious manner such political and social issues as Anglo-Jewish emancipation, Chartism, the repeal of the Com Laws, prison reform, and the condition of the working classes. I demonstrate that to evaluate the cultural impact of dramatic censorship in the Victorian period requires an understanding of the ongoing tension between Donne and the playwrights who, despite the professional ignominy that accompanied censorship, often struggled to address the political and social issues of their time. The relationship between Victorian playwrights and the Examiner involves a cultural dialectic that negotiates the boundaries of a licensed public space. In exposing the explicit and implicit pressures which one such Examiner brought to bear on dramatists, this study begins to uncover what is still a largely unexplored feature of Victorian theatre history. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis advisor: Alan Richardson / This thesis examines the ways two Victorian authors employed the literary vampire to respond to contemporary anxieties regarding women and their role in society. The primary texts of interest in this thesis are Florence Marryat's 1897 novel The Blood of the Vampire and Sheridan LeFanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla. This thesis explores the way each story frames the vampire’s gender, sexuality, and racial background through the lens of her monstrosity. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: English.

Note: pages 126, 183, and 209a are missing from the original. / Designed in 1870 and opened in 1876, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston was encrusted with ornamental terracotta, a material essentially unknown in America at that time. Across the Atlantic the South Kensington Museums in London (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) had grown up following the Great Exhibition of 1851. By 1869 they were housed in buildings which are among the best known examples of terracotta architecture in the world. In both philosophy and structure, the South Kensington Museums were the model for the Boston enterprise, the first great public art museum in America. The mid-nineteenth century re-emergence of terracotta has been an accepted fact for some time. Heretofore most scholarly attention has arisen in connection with its application as cladding to steel frame structures like skyscrapers in the last quarter of the century. Consequently, research on the origins and use of the material is fragmented and inconclusive. This dissertation addresses questions of its technological development, early applications in England at mid-century, and its long-range aesthetic implications which have not been generally recognized by architectural historians. Because of its specific and documented transatlantic connections, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, assumes a central role in the matter of the terracotta revival and stylistic influences from England to America. It would appear that Sturgis and Brigham (1866-1886), architects of the museum, were in a unique position to design and execute a terracotta building in America in 1870 because of the English education and affiliations of John Sturgis (1834-1888), who was able to research and contract the production of the terracotta ornament in Stamford, Lincolnshire from John Marriott Blashfield. With his able young partner, Charles Brigham (1841-1925) running the Boston office during his long absences abroad, the complexities of the construction were carried forward on a transatlantic basis by Sturgis, the prime designer. Much new source material concerning those personalities involved with the early nineteenth century production and use of terra cotta in England is contained in the letters and papers of John Sturgis, the foundation of this work. This study attempts to establish the nineteenth century chronology of the terracotta revival in England prior to 1870. The technological development of the material and its role within the South Kensington Museums is explored in detail. Major terracotta installations in England prior to 1870 are identified and the relationship of the material to museum architecture, a newly emerging form, is discussed. The Boston museum is then assessed in terms of its origins. On a larger, aesthetic base the role of terracotta is reviewed within the framework of the Gothic and Queen Anne Revivals of the third quarter of the nineteenth century.