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Between 1847 and 1851, a series of criminal trials took place in Essex, England, involving a number of women accused of fatally poisoning their husbands and children and even complete strangers. This thesis analyzes the Essex cases and their representation in the Victorian press. It focuses quite intensively on the legal proceedings involved in the Essex cases but also examines issues such as the emergence of toxicology, the availability of arsenic and the campaign against burial societies, issues which informed both the Victorian press’s treatment of the Essex cases and public responses to the story. This thesis challenges and critiques the dominant narrative of the Essex poisonings by revealing the gap between what the press claimed and the evidence actually offered in court and draws from the voluminous media coverage these cases generated to explain how and why this particular episode occurred at this particular historical moment. / Graduate

This dissertation considers how listening to reading aloud changed the English novel in the context of rising literacy rates and an accelerating print culture. Traditionally, historians associate mass literacy and cheap, fast print with a shift away from communal, oral reading in the nineteenth century. Accounts of the “revolution” in European reading practices at the end of the 1700s posit a turn toward solitary, private, and silent encounters with a wider range of texts. As a rich body of scholarship has shown, however, oral culture was alive and well in nineteenth-century print culture: public speech and speakers—orators, preachers, elocutionists, and storytellers—filled squares, pulpits, and stages (not to mention novel pages) throughout the century. But what about not-so-public speech? Oral delivery in the home? Communal but domestic, oral but routine, “household reading” slips through the cracks of our go-to methods for categorizing and researching the reading experience. Even so, ample evidence—from home entertainment guides, to elocution manuals, to women’s domestic periodicals and recommended reading pamphlets—points to the prevalence of the practice and, as I profile, its central role in period literacy programs. Family-centered and within the domestic sphere, household reading served as a safe literary practice for the century’s so-called “new readers.” Yet, according to the literature of the period, reading aloud was not “safe” at all. My dissertation identifies fiction’s unruly listeners: tired laborers who zone out while listening to the Bible, women who fall asleep to their husbands’ Shakespeare delivery, and children who eavesdrop on their parents reading the newspaper’s sex scandals. Combining sound studies and reading history, I argue that novelists deploy these intractable audience members as part of a larger campaign to articulate the value of the novel in an era still suspicious of the form and its effects on an expanding national reading public. I structure my chapters around texts frequently depicted in scenes of household reading—Shakespeare’s plays, the Bible, and the newspaper—all texts that had safely secured cultural authority and value. These were also texts associated with public speech and performance—texts read aloud in playhouses, churches, or pubs. Yet, each underwent what I call a “reception crisis”: a period when cheaper production and wider circulation brought the text into more households—in short, became affordable and accessible material for home delivery. And, as my chapters discuss, these changes prompted new anxieties about who could access each text and how they would attend (or not attend) to it. The writers I survey allude to these anxieties in order to demonstrate what their own novels can offer a growing literate public. While the authors I study want to borrow some aspect of another text—to adopt, say, Shakespeare’s cultivation of literary taste, the Bible’s moral instruction, or the newspaper’s candid communication of reality—they also need to articulate fiction’s unique offerings. Here, our unruly listeners come into play. They demonstrate how, where, and with which readers a different text, even a supposed guarantor of truth like the Bible, fails to “work.” These noncompliant listeners, then, function like any advertisement created to distinguish a new product from existing competitors. They showcase the promises of fiction by revealing the shortcomings of another text within the context of the period’s new readers and new ways of reading.

In the late nineteenth century, the use of pastels underwent a revival and many young British artists adopted the medium as a new means of expression. This surge in popularity was marked by three exhibitions dedicated to contemporary works in pastel held at the Grosvenor Gallery in London between 1888 and 1890. These shows attracted over three hundred participants and culminated in the formation of the Society of British Pastellists in 1890, which counted amongst its eminent members William Stott of Oldham (1857-1900), James Guthrie (1859-1930), George Clausen (1852-1944) and Elizabeth Armstrong (1859-1912). Despite its auspicious beginnings this movement was short-lived and the society disbanded the following year. This has caused scholars to treat the use of pastel by British artists as just a passing fad in the oeuvres of individual artists and in studies of contemporary stylistic trends. Yet, the varying involvement of these four artists with the most pioneering art movements in Britain would suggest that this medium formed an intrinsic part of their move towards a modern aesthetic. Thus, the diverse approaches of these artists will form a prism through which to examine the importance of materiality for the development of new subject matter and stylistic innovations. This study will involve not only a consideration of the formal properties of these works but also the culture in which they were produced, exhibited and critically received. Indeed, it is hoped that by situating these pastels within a wider cultural context that a further understanding of their long-term significance in the canon of modern art in Britain can be achieved. In this way, I believe that this study will contribute towards a new position for pastel as a modern medium that was essential for the invention of new artistic practices at this time.

Food historians have revealed that what constituted a working-class British woman's diet in the nineteenth century was quite different in calorific and nutritional content from what her family consumed. This work explores the nineteenth-century maternal diet and the effect this nutritional inequality had on the health of women and their infants. Divided into three sections, this dissertation deals with different aspects of nineteenth-century maternal nutrition. Section one explores the nineteenth-century medical understanding of diet, as well as the influences of class and traditional beliefs on eating habits, and how these factors determined the diet prescribed to mothers during pregnancy. Section two investigates the factors that perpetuated the unequal distribution and consumption of food within households. Factors explored include regional variations in working-class diet; gender associations with foods; economic changes in material wealth and expectations, and the pressures of respectability on female food denial. This section concludes that food refusal and unequal distribution were reinforced throughout the long nineteenth century because these behaviours appeared to have value, real or imagined, as long-term economic strategies. Food refusal maintained respectability, and helped women secure an economic support network. Mothers' self-denial seems to have secured the economic loyalties of children, making her the recipient of their income. The final section addresses how deprivation and dietary changes affected infant and maternal health, specifically examining how insufficient vitamin D and rickets influenced birth outcomes, and how the switch from a rural diet to an urban diet contributed to a rise in neural tube disorders in Wales. The analysis of childbirth data revealed a significant correlation between rickets and childbirth complications. The findings of this section also suggest that the dietary changes that followed migration and the change from an agricultural lifestyle to a market-integrated, industrial lifestyle for a majority of the Welsh population reduced women's intake of folic acid leaving their children susceptible to neural tube disorders.

This thesis examines the status of caricature in the literary culture of early-nineteenth- century Britain, with a focus on the novel. It shows how the early-nineteenth- century novel developed a variety of literary forms that negotiated and remade caricature for the bourgeois literary sphere. Case studies are drawn primarily from the published writings and manuscript drafts of Thomas Love Peacock, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Walter Scott. The first chapter elucidates the various meanings and uses of 'caricature' in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the term was more ambiguous and broadly applied than literary criticism and print history have acknowledged. I counter the assumption that the single-sheet satirical print was central to conceptions and practices of caricature in this period, giving examples of the textual, dramatic, and real-life 'caricatures' that were more often under discussion. The second and third chapters consider the unstable distinction between textual caricature and satirical characterisation in early-nineteenth-century literary culture. They explain how the literary construction of textual caricature developed from two sources: Augustan rulings against publishing satires on individuals, and caricature portraits as a pastime beloved of genteel British society. I argue that Peacock and Austen adapted forms of 'caricaturistic writing' that were conscious of the satirical literary work's relation to caricature. Subsequent chapters turn to the thematic uses of caricature in the early-nineteenth- century novel. In the fourth chapter, I uncover the significance of caricature to deformity in Mary Shelley's fiction, presenting evidence that her monsters' disproportion was inherited from the 'real-life' caricatures diagnosed in philosophical and medical texts of the eighteenth century. The final chapter traces ideas about caricature through the writings of Walter Scott, and finds that Scott conceived of exemplary graphic and textual caricatures as artefacts of antiquarian interest.

This thesis examines the intersections of the concept of pilgrimage and the visual imagination in Britain from the years 1790 to 1850. Historically, distinctions between understandings of pilgrimage as motif, metaphor, artistic process, and actual journey have been blurred to varying degrees, resulting in the creation of images that were at once narratives, memorials, and stimuli for contemplative journeys from pictorial space to imagination. In the first half of the nineteenth century, religious architecture, sacred landscapes, and the emblematic figure of the pilgrim with coat, hat, and scrip functioned as temporal reminders of a promised land to come, as mediated through artistic practice. Through a close analysis of a range of interrelated visual sources, I contend that pilgrimage, both in practice and as a form of mental contemplation, helped to shape the religious, literary, and artistic imagination of the period and beyond. This study draws out the various levels at which pilgrimage engaged the visual imagination. In doing so it offers a detailed perspective on the conjunction of content, form, meaning, and process for artists and theorists, as notions of the transfer of ‘spirit’ from sacred space to represented space re-emerged as a key aspect of the theological and artistic discourse of the period. Chapter 1 outlines the antiquarian dissemination of medieval pilgrimage texts and images. I suggest that an awareness of pilgrimage as embodying the real and imagined emerged with the recovery of allegorical texts, histories of actual pilgrimages, and an interest in pilgrimage souvenirs. The discussion moves on to intersections between pilgrimage and religious art in Chapters 2 - 4, including the idea of painting as pilgrimage, as demonstrated through specific case studies, and the refashioning of relics and religious ruins as contemporary sites of pilgrimage (Chapter 5).