This thesis examines the representation of medical practitioners between the 1830s and 1910s in Britain and its Empire, drawing on the medical press and fiction. Moving away from the notion that practitioners' identities were determined chiefly by their qualification or professional appointment, it considers how they were constructed in relation to different axes of identity: age, gender, race, and the spaces of practice. Each chapter concentrates on a different figure or professional identity. I begin by looking at the struggling young medical man, before examining metropolitan practitioners (from elite consultants to slum doctors), and the hard-working country general practitioner. I then consider how gender and professional identities intersected in the figure of the medical woman. The last chapter examines practitioners of colonial medicine in British India. This thesis considers a range of medical journals, from well-known titles such as the Lancet and British Medical Journal, to overlooked periodicals including the Medical Mirror, Midland Medical Miscellany, and Indian Medical Record. It also examines fiction by medical authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle and W. Somerset Maugham, and lesser-known figures including Margaret Todd and Henry Martineau Greenhow. I read these texts alongside other contemporary writing (from advice guides for medical men to fiction by lay authors) to scrutinise how ideas about practice were shaped in the medical and cultural imagination. My research demonstrates not only how medical journals fashioned networks among disparate groups of practitioners but also how they facilitated professional rivalries. I reveal the democratising tendency of print culture, highlighting how it enabled a range of medical men and women to write about practice. Ultimately, the thesis develops our understanding of medical history and literary studies by uncovering how the profession engaged with textual practices in the formation of medical identities.

The Earthly Paradise was William Morris’s first real success, and it remained his best-known work even after his death. It has not fared as well since the mid-twentieth century, when it became overlooked and problematic, as the Morris of The Earthly Paradise years became coextensive with a portrait of Victorian middle-class myopia. This verdict has been brought to the doors of the poem’s first readers, who are imagined to have liked it for uncomplicated reasons of fashion and entertainment. I reconsider these assumptions by returning to the contemporary reception of the poem to ask what audiences thought about Morris as a public figure, what it was that they so responded to in his work, and what the poem itself says about reception—the relationship between story, audience, and speaker. I argue both within the text and in the reception of it, such relationships are nearly always understood as communal, as storytellers—Morris and those in his text—address audiences as collective publics, and speak on behalf of them. Moreover, this speech is always marked by a mutually inclusive relationship with text, so that stories are properly understood as arising from the discursive field established through the participation, both textual and vocal, of anyone who understands himself or herself addressed by the discourse.

Over the course of the 1830s and 1840s, a professional scientific and medical community was coming into being. Exclusive membership, limits to the definition of science, and separation of the professional from the popular sphere became important elements in the consolidation of scientific authority. Studies exploring Victorian scientific authority have tended to focus on professional journals and organs of middle-class culture; this thesis takes a new approach in exploring how this authority is reflected and negotiated across the content of the popular mass-market periodicals which provided leisure reading for working- and lower-class men and women. It uses as examples Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, Reynolds's Miscellany and the Family Herald. The readers of these publications were consumers of scientific information, participants in popularised science and beneficiaries and subjects of new research, but were increasingly excluded from the formal processes of developing scientific theory and practice. Examining representations of anatomy and of mesmerism, health advice and theories of class and gender, the thesis argues for an expanded understanding of mass-market periodicals as communicators of scientific ideas, showing how such material widely informs the content of these publications from fiction to jokes to full-length factual articles. However, the role of the periodicals is much wider than simply the transmission of received ideas, and the thesis reveals a plurality of positions with regard to science and medicine within the popular press. The periodicals engage with modern science in complex and varied ways, accepting, modifying and challenging scientific theories and methods from different positions. The form of the periodical is key, presenting multiple sources of knowledge and ways in which readers may be invited to respond. Chambers's broad support for scientific progress is informed by its useful knowledge identity but tempered by its founding editor's own ambivalent relationship to the scientific establishment. The Herald, influenced by both the periodical's commercial character and its editor's adherence to a spiritual, anti-materialist view of existence, is strongly resistant to modern science, while Reynolds's incorporates it alongside other forms of knowledge in its aim to educate, entertain and empower readers from a socialist perspective.

The Penny Post (1851–1896), a religious working-class magazine, was published following a critical time for the Oxford Movement, a High Church movement in the Church of England. The Oxford Movement's ideas were leaving the academic atmosphere of Oxford and traveling throughout the local parishes, where the ideals of Tractarian teachings met the harsh realities of practice and the motivations and beliefs of the working-class parishioners. The upper-class paternalistic ideologies of the Oxford Movement were not reflected in the parishes, and the working-classes felt distanced from their place in religious worship. The Penny Post was published and written by Tractarian clergymen and followers to "triumph in the Working Man's Home," attempting to convince a working-class audience that the upper-class Tractarian clergymen and parishioners both understood and wanted to help the poorer peoples of society. However, an analysis of the Penny Post reveals that its creators had more complex motives and were targeting a more diverse audience than they claimed. Because of these complexities, the Penny Post's creators could not reconcile the discrepancies between working-class ideologies and upper-class ideologies; the Penny Post, in the end, undermined its own intended purposes. The elements of the magazine that attempted to address working-class concerns were overshadowed by other elements that, while appearing to address working-class concerns, directly targeted an upper-class audience. This dichotomy of purpose—simultaneously addressing different classes with different, often contradictory, beliefs—reveals the multifaceted nature of the Penny Post's efforts to reach their audiences. The Penny Post is a magazine that simultaneously addresses an upper-class audience and a working-class audience, a duality that creates ideological contradictions and tensions throughout the magazine. These tensions reflect the class issues within Victorian society and the ways religious movements dealt with those tensions in periodicals like the Penny Post. The Penny Post provides an important look into how the Oxford Movement, a movement not known for its understanding of and interest in the working classes, did attempt to reach and understand the working classes through periodical literature.

Victorian prisoners were increasingly out of sight due to the ending of public displays of punishment. Although punishment was hidden in the prison, prison life was a frequent subject for representation. In this dissertation, I examine the ways Victorian illustrated newspapers, paintings, and photographs mediated an encounter with prisoners during a time when the prison was closed to outsiders. Reports and images became a significant means by which many people learned about, and defined themselves in relation to, prisoners. Previous scholarship has focused on stereotypes of prisoners that defined them as the “criminal type,” but I argue prisoners were also depicted in more ambiguous ways that aligned them with “respectable” members of society. I focus on images that compare the worlds inside and outside the prison, which reveal instabilities in representations of “the prisoner” and the ways this figure was defined against a societal norm. Such images draw attention to the act of looking at prisoners and often challenge a notion of the prison as a space of one-sided surveillance.

This thesis explores the representation of Victorian masculinity in the Boy's Own Paper. While the Boy's Own Paper (1879-1967) is widely recognised as being one of the most successful juvenile periodicals of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries there remains very little critical analysis on the publication’s literature. This thesis aims to contribute to the advancement of the study of nineteenth-century juvenile periodicals by providing the first in-depth textual study of the Boy's Own Paper. Focusing on the Boy's Own Paper during George Andrew Hutchison’s editorship (1879-1913), this project brings together masculinities studies and current research on nineteenth-century periodicals. By examining the reoccurring themes of masculinity in the Boy's Own Paper, this study reveals how the Boy's Own Paper struggled to balance Christian beliefs, changing social demands, and growing imperial objectives. Each chapter delivers a close reading of selected texts ranging from illustrated fictional stories written by leading authors of the day, such as G. A. Henty and Talbot Baines Reed, to letters sent to the editor by Christian missionaries living overseas. The first chapter outlines the editorial practices of Hutchison and addresses the publication’s implied readership. Chapter 2 examines physical masculinity as explored through the paper’s representation of the schoolboy and the athlete as national hero-figures. The relationship between masculinity, self-help, and philanthropy is studied in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 analyses how the racial stereotypes featured within the Boy's Own Paper perpetuated the ideologies of British masculine superiority. Finally, Chapter 5 broadens the study of gender by addressing the participation and representation of female contributors and characters. I conclude by considering the future of Boy's Own Paper research and the implications of periodicals studies in the digital age. In doing so, this study offers a holistic and up-to-date reading of the Boy's Own Paper.

This study considers how and why the established histories of criticism fail to recognize the Victorian woman critic. Although many women wrote critical essays for Victorian periodicals, the practice of anonymous publication and the gendered coding of certain genres ensured that the image of the critic was masculine for Victorian readers. And despite the ongoing work of The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, the growing field of periodicals research, and forty years of feminist scholarship, the Victorian critic remains, by and large, a male figure for us as well. In order to understand how women critics justified their authority and negotiated the gendered assumptions of critical discourse over the second half of the nineteenth century, this project explores the rhetorical strategies used by four prolific women journalists: Margaret Oliphant, Anne Mozley, Julia Wedgwood, and Anne Thackeray Ritchie. These case studies demonstrate how women critics defined their role in response to an expanding reading public, conservative gender ideology, the professionalization of criticism, changing aesthetics, and the establishment of English as a university discipline. They also reveal that both anonymous and signed women critics addressed these contentious issues to subtly undermine prejudices about gender and genre. In addition to demonstrating the feminist agenda of these (sometimes conservative) critics, this study also seeks to complicate the image of the moralizing woman critic symbolized by Mrs. Grundy. Moral rhetoric was common among both male and female critics in the nineteenth century, and this project argues that moral considerations are not necessarily antithetical to artistic ones in nineteenth-century discourse. We must begin to view women's critical arguments in their full context of political, aesthetic, and professional concerns if we truly wish to understand what was at stake for Victorian critics and readers. Thus, by presenting a fuller portrait of these individual women authors, this study not only critiques the gendered definitions of genre that continue to shape literary history, but also revises our understanding of Victorian critical theories. / English