<p>This dissertation argues that the Victorian novel created a sensory self much like that articulated by Victorian physiological psychology: a multi-centered and process-oriented body that reacts to situations and stimuli as they arise by mobilizing appropriate cognitive and nervous functions. By reading Victorian fiction alongside psychology as it was developing into a distinct scientific discipline (during the 1840s-70s), this project addresses broader interdisciplinary questions about how the interaction between literature and science in the nineteenth century provided new ways of understanding human consciousness. I show that narrative engagements with psychology in the novel form made it possible for readers to understand the modern person as productively rather than pathologically heterogeneous. To accomplish this, fiction offered author and reader an experimental form for engaging ideas posed and debated concurrently in science. </p><p>The novels I read - by authors including Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot - emerge as narrative testing grounds for constructions of subjectivity and personhood unavailable to scientific discourse. I attribute the novel's ability to create a sensory self to its formal tactics, from composites of multiple first-person accounts to strange juxtapositions of omniscience and subjectivity, from gaps and shifts in narrative to the extended form-in-process of the serial novel. My side-by-side readings of scientific and literary experiments make it clear that fiction is where we find the most innovative methods of investigation into embodied forms of human experience.</p> / Dissertation

Using the example of the London-based children's organisation Barnardo's, this thesis examines the influence of contemporary ideas regarding the relationship between environment, health and disease on the organisation and everyday institutional practices of the charity. While autobiographical accounts and historical investigations have written on the 'man himself' as well as the discursive and representational strategies used by Barnardo's to justify child removal, the importance of environmental discourses to the institution remain underexplored. The thesis addresses this lacuna through a detailed analysis of archival materials relating to Barnardo's (committee minutes, pamphlets, reports, Dr Barnardo's personal notebooks) as well as through a textual analysis of Night & Day, the main outlet for publicising the work of the charity and stimulating support for it. The thesis covers the period from 1866, when Barnardo's was founded, to the death of Dr Barnardo in 1905. This is a period when the environmental idea was arguably at its strongest, with a host of social ills (from criminality and prostitution, to human health and vitality and later in the period racial degeneration) linked to the influence of the environment. Like many other social reformers and philanthropists, Dr Barnardo was a firm believer in environmental explanations for such social ills, as well as a committed evangelical Christian, and promoted the rapid removal of young people (not all were orphaned but the vast majority were destitute) from urban and familial environments believed to do harm to their physical, moral and spiritual health. Where the first part of the thesis covers the importance of environment to the Barnardo's justification for his child removal practices, the remainder of it considers the response of the institution to environmental ideas. In addition to examining the influence of environment on institutional design and on the everyday practices of the 'inmates', for example the promotion of light and air in the girl's home at Barkingside, emphasis is also placed on ideas of mobility and movement. Here the thesis explores the paradoxical relationship between the organisation's 'anti-institutional' projection and the institutional realities of constructing and policing 'out of home' care practices (trips to the country- and seaside, boarding-out, emigration). This thesis contributes to extant accounts of Dr Barnardo's; however, its primary contribution lies in its nuanced examination of the role of environmental ideas on shaping institutional design and on its influence on the everyday practices of Barnardo's young inmates.

"Girlhood Geographies: Mapping Gendered Spaces in Victorian Literature for Children," analyzes Victorian literature for girls and contemporary discourses on girlhood through the lens of cultural geography in order to examine the importance of place in the Victorian girl's identity work and negotiation of social responsibilities, pressures, and anxieties. The premise of my project is that one of the pressing cultural concerns in Victorian England, which greatly valued the stability of gender and class identities, was to teach children to know their place—not simply their proper position in society but how their position in society dictated the physical spaces in which they belonged and those in which they did not. Girls' virtue, in particular, was evinced in their ability to determine and engage in behavior appropriate to the spaces in which they lived. I argue that, by portraying girls' negotiation of the spaces of the home, outdoors, school, and street, Victorian children's literature sought to organize for the girl reader both the places in which she lived and her ability to define these places in relation to her own subjectivity. Each of my chapters considers a genre or body of children's literature that centers on place, including domestic fiction such as Charlotte Yonge's The Daisy Chain and Catherine Sinclair's Holiday House, literature set in the garden and outdoors, including Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses and Kate Greenaway's Under the Window, and school stories by such writers as L.T. Meade, Geraldine Mockler, and Evelyn Sharp. In analyzing these texts, this dissertation illuminates the manner in which girl characters' relationships with nuanced physical spaces affect their negotiation of personal interests and social responsibilities, and their development into Victorian women.

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This thesis centres on one of the most widely read illustrated fiction magazines of the nineteenth century, The London Journal. Despite its popularity, this penny weekly has received scant attention from either media historians or critics, partly because of the lack of bibliographical tools. My account of its first series (1845 - 1883) aims not only to make up for this lack (notably through its electronic appendices), but, in treating it as a case study, to explore various methods of writing about periodicals in general. I argue the necessity for an interdisciplinary vision that recognises that periodicals are commodities that occupy specific places in a changing market. "Place" here can be understood as where the periodical is located in cultural and geographical space by those who describe it, as well as where it positions itself through its contents in terms of gender and other identity categories. After an Introduction in which I review academic work on the periodical and lay out my theoretical presuppositions, I view the magazine from four main angles. Chapter 2 discusses nineteenth-century accounts of The London Journal, treating it not as a material body but as a polyvalent discursive entity. In the third chapter I read the magazine through the optic of production, examining available circulation figures, labour costs, and profits. I sketch the lives of several of its editors, proprietors and authors, relating them to changes in the magazine's contents, and considering the effects of rivalry with competitors in the same cultural zone and of relations with other now more canonical literary areas. Chapter 4 looks at The London Journal's changing gender profile over its first series, linking it to politics and to consumerism. The electronic appendix maps The London Journal bibliographically. Throughout I seek to locate and thereby defetishise the commodity-text, not least by treating some units of reading that are today considered paracanonical novels as parts of a periodical, rather than as freestanding units. These serials comprise Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1863) and a version of Zola's The Ladies' Paradise (1883). A Conclusion seeks an autocritique and proposes areas for continued research.

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