This dissertation addresses how the philosophy, subculture, and sexuality of aestheticism interact with the form of the nineteenth-century novel. One primary result of this exploration is a nuanced delineation of the aesthetic novel in its formal characteristics, its content, and most notably, in the sexually charged silences that both this form and content reveal--silences made audible to invested aesthetic readers through coded doubleness. Through thus defining the aesthetic novel and seeking to articulate the unspoken sexual transgressions that are, as is argued, requisite therein, this project sheds new light both on the partially submerged sexuality of aestheticism as a movement, and on why novels account for so small a portion of the aesthetic movement's output--topics first raised in part by Linda Dowling, Dennis Denisoff, and Talia Schaffer. By engaging Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Vernon Lee's Miss Brown (1884), Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean (1885), Robert Hichens' The Green Carnation (1894), John Meade Falkner's The Lost Stradivarius (1895), and Aubrey Beardsley's Venus and Tannhäuser (1895), this dissertation demonstrates that, whether politically engaged as affirmation or using sexuality as a way to communicate rejection of middle-class morality and its own fascination with the unusual, aestheticism defines itself by its inclusion of unusual sexual situations. This argument is in part guided by and grapples with theoretical writings by Victorian sources including Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold, and Walter Hamilton and contemporary sources including Alistair Fowler, Nancy Armstrong, and D. A. Miller. Central to the dissertation are the suggestive silences in aesthetic novels that function not merely as the unsaid, but appear at points that beg explanation or exploration, indicating the presence of the forbidden with the frisson between interest and absence. Such moments form a pattern of mysterious sexual omissions in the novels of aestheticism, titillating audiences with their implied perversity, but never explicitly exploring it on account of legal, economic, and social censorship. Finally, this project shows that the unspeakable gaps in legal above-ground literature can easily be articulated within the already illegal world of pornography, which this dissertation accesses through the aesthetic and pornographic Teleny (1893). / English

In 1846 and 1847, ether and chloroform were used and celebrated for the first time in Britain and the United States as effective surgical anaesthetics capable of rendering individuals insensible to physical pain. During the same decade, British novels of realism were enjoying increasing cultural authority, dominating readers' attention, and evoking readers' sympathy for numerous social justice issues. This dissertation investigates a previously unanswered question in studies of literature and medicine: how did writers of social realism incorporate realistic descriptions of physical pain, a notoriously difficult sensation to describe, in an era when the very idea of pain's inevitability was challenged by medical developments and when, concurrently, novelists, journalists, and politicians were concerned with humanitarian reforms to recognize traditionally ignored and disadvantaged individuals and groups in pain? By contextualizing the emergence of specific realist novels including works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Reade, William Howard Russell, and Charles Dickens, within larger nonfiction discourses regarding factory reform, prison reform, and war, this dissertation identifies and clarifies how realist authors, who aim to demonstrate general truths about "real life," employed various descriptions of physical pain during this watershed moment in medicine and pain theory, to convince readers of their validity as well as to awaken sympathetic politics among readers. This study analyzes Gaskell's first industrial novel, Mary Barton (1848), Reade's prison-scandal novel, It is Never Too Late to Mend (1856), Russell's Crimean War correspondence (1850s) and only novel, The Adventures of Doctor Brady (1868), and Dickens's second Bildungsroman, Great Expectations (1861), thereby revealing different strategies utilized by each author representing pain - ranging from subtle to graphic, collective to individualized, urgent to remembered, and destructive to productive. This study shows how audience expectations, political timing, authorial authority, and medical theory influence and are influenced by realist authors writing pain, as they contribute to a cultural consensus that the pain of others is unacceptable and requires attention. These realist authors must, in the end, provide fictionalized accounts of pain, asking readers to act as witnesses and to use their imaginations, in order to inspire sympathy. / English

Nineteenth-century Britain experienced a confluence of a rapidly urbanizing physical environment, radical changes in the hierarchical relationships in society as well as in the natural sciences, and a nostalgic fascination with antiquities, especially gothic architecture. The realist novels of this period reflect this tension between dramatic social restructuring and a conservative impulse to remember and maintain the world as it has been. This dissertation focuses on the word structure to unpack the implications of these opposing forces, both for our understanding of the social structures that novels reflect, and the narrative structures that novels create. To address these issues, I examine the architectural structures described in Victorian realist novels, drawing parallels with their social and narrative structures. In Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit (1855), George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859), and Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and Jude the Obscure (1895), descriptions of houses and barns, churches and cathedrals, shops and factories, and courthouses and schools are thematically important because they draw our attention to the novels' interest in the social structures that underlie the fictional worlds they represent. Buildings provide spaces where members of a community may work towards a shared purpose; they also embody that community's common knowledge, values, and ideals. These novels take up the thematic concern with structure through their own formal narrative structuring work. Much like an architect builds a physical structure, novels build a narrative structure by carefully arranging patterns, sequences, proportions, and perspectives. An examination of a novel's description of a building reveals moments of self-reflexive consideration of the narratives it constructs. These are moments that interrogate the building materials of narrative and how their arrangement becomes meaningful, that consider what the narrative structure can accommodate and what it excludes, and that invite us to attend to the ways in which the act of structuring a narrative situates it in time, in relation to the past, present, and future. The choices an architect makes about ornaments and materials, the way a building integrates the surrounding environment, and the way its proportions compare to a human scale, all constitute a kind of language; moreover, the way people interact with, in, and around these built spaces suggests it is a dynamic and evolving language. Preeminent Victorian art and social critic John Ruskin's architectural treatise, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) serves as a master key to interpreting the Victorian understanding of architectural language in the novels under investigation. Because Ruskin's writings pervaded mid-century artistic discourse, and because he turned his critical gaze on such a wide range of the mid-nineteenth century's most important aesthetic, social, philosophical, and ethical concerns, his work provides an invaluable bridge between the physical, social, and narrative structures in these novels. Each of Ruskin's "lamps" represents a specific architectural principle; each chapter in this project pairs a novel with a lamp with thematic and formal resonance. / English

Sir John Tenniel worked for the Victorian magazine Punch for over fifty years, from 1850 to 1901, and served as head cartoonist for the latter thirty-seven years of his tenure at the magazine. Tenniel's cartoons effectively became the heart of Punch's visual lineup, and the sentiments expressed by these cartoons both reflected and influenced the opinions of the magazine']s vast middle class readership. However, they did not generally reflect the opinions of the cartoonist himself: Tenniel had little to no say in decisions regarding the content or stance of his cartoons. The artist ostensibly had no problem with this arrangement, once telling a historian, "As for political opinions, I have none… [I] profess only those of my paper." This project argues that the artist did indeed inject a degree of personal opinion into his work, albeit in hidden and unconscious ways. Instead of using the medium of cartoons as an overt vehicle for his opinion, Tenniel's values and views come out in his use of iconography and his choice of models for his drawings. As a conservative Victorian man operating in the rapidly changing world of the latter nineteenth century, Tenniel used his drawings as a way to tap into the England of his youth and possibly reclaim the art world he originally studied to join as a young man. His iconography frequently looked back to medieval England, framing current events within these themes until the end of his career. Furthermore, Tenniel doggedly refused to update his mental drawing models for certain forms of technology, even when his depictions became obviously anachronistic. This thesis examines these tendencies through the threefold lenses of Material Culture Studies, Social Constructivism, and Nostalgia Studies in an attempt to link Tenniel's treatment of medieval iconography and depiction of modern technology with the nostalgic past. / Master of Arts

The late Victorian artist Evelyn De Morgan's paintings have been analyzed and interpreted through the lens of her many stylistic influences by past critics and current art historians. This thesis seeks to restore 19th-century Spiritualism as the central influence on the subject matter and style of De Morgan's paintings. This is particularly true of works concerned with the struggles of mortal life and the moment of death, based on her anonymously published text The Result of an Experiment. Victorian mourning rituals, Spiritualism, and the writings of Swedenborg served to draw out the specific Spiritualist symbols within De Morgan's paintings. A detailed analysis of six paintings concerned with the path of mortal life and death revealed De Morgan's Spiritualist beliefs about a hopeful death after her experiment with spirit communication.

Yes / Dig! Arts Access Project brought together excavation with artistic interpretations using collage, painting, drawing and poetry, to engage school learners in the legacy of the Whitworth Park Community Archaeology and History project. Through a series of workshops and site visits with local schools, participants expressed some of the ambiguities felt by urban children about parks. However, by the end of the sessions, they had increased their understanding of the history and heritage of their everyday places and were more confident about visiting parks. / Martin Harris Centre and University of Manchester Alumni Funding - Arts Access Funding

This dissertation concerns nineteenth-century British novelists’ representations of unachieved aspirations. Through a blend of affect theory, materialist literary criticism, and formalist analysis, I examine a particularly frustrating problem addressed by these writers: the gap between a dream of social mobility and a reality of class paralysis for many working-class people. I am interested in the tropes of imprisonment, constraint, and confinement through which Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and Arthur Morrison pondered this problem. I take into account these writers’ own limitations and imperfect social-progress ideology of melioration. These metaphors highlight the exploitation of impoverished people by the very institutions purportedly meant to encourage and mobilize them. In this project, I draw on Lauren Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism, Carolyn Lesjak’s study of the depleasurization of work in the Victorian novel, and Bruce Robbins’s theory of mobility and welfare as frameworks for interpreting what Victorian middle-class fiction writers do with the lived experience of poverty.

Late nineteenth-century Victorian adventure novels offer a complex depiction of manhood in relation to colonial adversaries. H. Rider Haggard's 1880s novels portray imperial adventure as an opportunity for masculine rejuvenation, while later adventure novels express a sense of imperial dread and suggest that adventure traumatizes, instead of rejuvenates, masculinity. All of these novels offer insight into a larger shift in Victorian thought concerning Britain's role as an imperial power. The novels define masculinity in two distinct ways: as modern and as medieval. Each novel approaches modern manhood as impotent when faced with the colonial threat, but the narratives all offers a different interpretation of medieval masculinity, underscoring the vexed nature of the Victorian's relationship with the past. H. Rider Haggard's novels, King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1887), suggest that imperial adventure offers modern manhood rejuvenation and purpose through interaction and eventual suppression of the colonial female. Haggard offers an optimistic portrayal of adventure because of both the men's distinctly medieval form of physical rejuvenation and the men's ability to influence the landscape in their favor. Authors Bram Stoker and Richard Marsh present a vastly different interpretation of empire and medieval masculinity in their 1897 novels Dracula and The Beetle. Adventure traumatizes the men in the later novels, and their hysteria attests to their effeminate lack of masculine virility. The 1897 novels critique both the optimistic depiction of imperial adventure and the unnatural reliance on medieval forms of masculinity offered in novels such as Haggard's.

Coming from current scholarly debate and research about relationships between women, this study seeks to situate the current debate amongst larger examinations of gender relations in Victorian England as well as examine the importance of sister relationships to understanding female relationships and how these relations provide multiple ways of subverting the dominant culture of the Victorian age. After a review of several different nineteenth-century and Victorian writers, I have selected a small sample of poetry and prose with which to form an argument about the importance of sisterly relationships. This importance is two-fold: it allows women a space in which to define themselves without masculine interference and it allows women to subvert the patriarchy in ways which are much more socially acceptable than others. Relationships between women are discussed in the framework of a variety of scholarly debate and criticism which allows a more comprehensive understanding of the complexity of female relationships and their importance in the development of an emerging consciousness that would encourage women to agitate for women's rights.

During the end of the 19th century there was a shift in the perception of femininity in England. The Victorian ideal of the Angel in the House was challenged by the idea of the New Woman. This essay attempts to answer the question how Mina Harker (née Murray) and Lucy Westenra compare to these ideas of womanhood. Lucy Westenra displays the traits of the Angel in the House, adhering closely to the Victorian norms of femininity. Mina Harker is a more complicated case, displaying traits of both the Angel in the House and the New Woman. Furthermore, Mina’s New Woman traits play an integral part of the plot, leading to Count Dracula’s defeat.