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This dissertation examines the modes, means, and merit of the literary production of short stories in London periodicals between 1850 and 1870. Shorter forms were derided by contemporary critics, dismissed on the assumption that quantity equals quality, yet popular and respectable novelists, namely Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant, were writing and printing them. Navigating discourses about literature and writing to delineate and ascertain the implications of the contextual position of certain short stories, this study characterizes a previously unexamined genre, here called the Market Story. Defined by their relationship to a publishing industry that was actively creating a space for, demanding, and disseminating texts based on their potential to generate sales figures, draw attention to a particular organ, author, or publisher, or gather and hold a captive audience, Market Stories indicate their authors’ self-aware commentary on the relativity of literary and generic value, and ultimately constitute a discourse on value. Following an outline of the historical field in which market stories were produced, Chapter One reads Trollope’s six “Editor’s Tales” as intensely comic and interrogative of extant conceptions of cultural and literary value; Trollope glories in the exposure and dismantling of seemingly-reliable externality. Chapter Two considers “Somebody’s Luggage” as Dickens’s argument for the contrivance of literary genre insofar as it constructs an exaggerated system of exchanges whereby the short story generates unprecedented income. Chapter Three moves to Gaskell’s “Cranford Papers” to argue that their diligent tracing of the careful consumption of small wholes and cultivation of irregular habits constitutes an insistence on the plurality of appropriate models of consumption and value. Shifting the discussion from content to form, Gaskell’s text throws the shape of the market story into relief. Finally, Chapter Four considers Oliphant’s “Dinglefield Stories” as a figurative argument that generic and literary value is always inextricably contextualized. As literary works and cultural products, these stories embody the tensions between the utilitarian and the ‘purely’ artistic that underwrote much nineteenth-century discussion of art and culture, and these authors were unmistakably aware of the external conditions enabling and affecting the production and valuation of literary work.

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The Victorian period was an incredibly volatile time for the issues of women and work. The population imbalance between men and women meant that many middle-class women would not be able to marry and instead were forced to rely on work for financial support. This paper explores the entry of middle-class women into the working world and the way in which traditional femininity became incorporated into the concept of the working woman. As the period progressed, and new types of labour became available to women, representations of the working woman changed and the image of the New Woman emerged. Fictional representations of women and work in the Victorian period reveal a tense struggle to blend traditional idealism with a newer, more modern type of femininity.

The Victorian period was an incredibly volatile time for the issues of women and work. The population imbalance between men and women meant that many middle-class women would not be able to marry and instead were forced to rely on work for financial support. This paper explores the entry of middle-class women into the working world and the way in which traditional femininity became incorporated into the concept of the working woman. As the period progressed, and new types of labour became available to women, representations of the working woman changed and the image of the New Woman emerged. Fictional representations of women and work in the Victorian period reveal a tense struggle to blend traditional idealism with a newer, more modern type of femininity.

This biographical study accessed genealogical records, wills, probate records, and contemporary newspaper accounts to examine the lives of six generations of the middle-class merchant Dawbarn family of nineteenth-century Wisbech, Cambridgeshire and Liverpool. The purpose was to assess the extent to which the experiences of this Dissenter family, with a focus on third-generation businessman and author William Dawbarn (1819-1881), conform to the well-known story of the rise of the English middle class. The Dawbarns did conform to the commercial and social patterns established by the middle class: sons joined fathers’ businesses; religion was central to life; successful businessmen participated in local politics; membership in associations was common; and partible inheritance was the norm when passing wealth to the next generation. All of this was accomplished within a society which placed a high value on conformity. Yet a close reading of William Dawbarn’s writing reveals a benevolently eccentric individual. / Graduate

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This thesis considers, from a sociological viewpoint, the intellectual movement in Victorian Britain known as scientific naturalism. It argues that the naturalist cosmology needs to be seen as part of the strategy of certain social groups; in particular, naturalism expressed the interests of the newly emerging scientific profession in nineteenth century Britain. The professionalisation of science was part of a larger social development: the appearance of a 'new' professional middle-class. The thesis considers how other new professionals, especially those connected with medicine, deployed naturalistic formulations in their own attempts to secure social recognition and resources. An attempt is made to place naturalism in a broader historical perspective as well as to describe the intellectual background from which it emerged. There are six chapters. The first describes social conditions relevant to an understanding of naturalism; the next four discuss the leading themes of the naturalist world-view; the last considers the wider significance of naturalistic approaches to man and society at the turn of the nineteenth century.

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This thesis explores, and seeks an historical interpretation of, representations of women both as victims and perpetrators of crime in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Moving beyond how criminal offences were defined, perceived and disciplined, the analysis highlights their broader social and cultural contexts and effects. Focusing primarily on media accounts and literary narratives of "sensational" and serious cases, it argues that the treatment of crimes of spousal murder, sexual violence and infanticide can be read for cultural and political meanings. At a time when the technological and commercial abilities to satisfy the public appetite for crime stories were rapidly expanding, these narratives became a significant arena in which social preoccupations, anxieties, and conflicts were symbolically explored. As forms of cultural production, therefore, crime narratives constituted, communicated and contested social and political values relating, for example, to issues of class and gender, morality and character, public order and the body. At the heart of this study, therefore, lies the opportunity to explore how the female figures of such accounts, whether murdering women or rape victims, related to their wider world. Unlike court proceedings and legal records, which were accessed by a small minority only, many of the sources on which this analysis is based were produced for popular consumption; they were available to an increasing audience. Thus, local newspaper reporting of Assizes cases are examined alongside the national press, the writings of middle class reformers and social commentators, and a range of literary texts including broadsides, melodramas, "respectable" novels and cheap, sensational fiction. Graphic illustration provides an additional site of representation, particularly influential as it could be read by everyone including the wholly illiterate. However, crime narratives cannot be treated as simple windows into the past - they constitute particularly constructed images, fashioned in accordance with journalistic practices, commercial enterprise and literary conventions as well as the cultural and power dynamics of the period. Female criminals and victims of crime in early Victorian society were defined as damaging and damaged; in order to explore the wider social meaning of these representations close textual analysis of primary sources is allied with a detailed identification and contextualisation of the specificities of the different narrative forms.