Nineteenth-Century and Neo-Victorian Cultures

Bringing together leading scholars from the fields of Dickens studies and decadence studies, this collection considers the ways in which Dickens’s work can be placed into dialogue with various ideas of decadence. It includes chapters dealing with Dickens’s treatment of the decadence he saw manifested in mid-Victorian society; his treatment of the themes of decadence and decay in his work, including anticipations of, and unconscious sympathies towards positions which came to define fin-de-siècle Decadence; and the ways in which Decadent writers from the 1880s–1920s responded to Dickens. This book therefore broadens our understanding of the work and the significance of Dickens as a pre-eminent Victorian novelist and also deepens our understanding of the contours of fin-de-siècle Decadence.

The closing decades of the nineteenth century saw the birth of psychology as a discipline. The question of the relationship between mind and body was a central topic of concern across an array of genres, media and textual forms during these years. In this collection we trace the role literature played in responding to fundamental questions within this interdisciplinary intersection. How do writers conceptualize perception, memory, sense-experience, understanding, empathy, cognition, and their relation to embodiment? What is the Victorian contribution to the new conceptions of the nature of thought and feeling developed by such figures as William James in America and Henri Bergson in France? Mind and Embodiment in Late Victorian Literature shows how writers grappled with pivotal intellectual and scientific developments of the nineteenth century—and how these ideas transformed Victorian literature itself.

Literary Illusions explores the dialogue between Victorian literature and one of the nineteenth century’s most popular modes of performance: conjuring. It explores the ways in which Victorian literature frequently deployed the figure of the magician to explore performance magic as a metaphor for writing itself, and the ways in which conjurors themselves were authors (of highly fictionalised biographies), while authors explored the narrative opportunities offered by magic (most notably Charles Dickens). The book theorises magic as a manifestation of Victorian concerns with authorship and the intellectual property debate, with the magician often deployed as a privileged – and occasionally parodied – figure in debates on textuality. Literary Illusions offers a reconceptualisation of the relationship between popular culture and literature in the nineteenth century, bringing canonical figures such as Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell into dialogue with lesser known Victorian bestsellers such as Henry Cockton and Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin, and innovatively blends performance history with literary criticism.

Life Writing and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Market begins from the premise that nineteenth-century life writing circulated in a market, in material and discursive forms determined substantially by the desires of publishers, readers, editors, printers, booksellers and the many other craftsmen and tradesmen who collaborated in transforming first-person narrative into a commodified thing. Studies of nineteenth-century life writing have typically focused on the major autobiographers, or on the formation of ‘genre’, or on the ways in which different class, gender, race and other affiliations shaped particular kinds of exemplary subjectivities. The aim of this collection, on the other hand, is to focus on life writing in terms to of profits and sales, contracts and copyright, printing and illustration—to treat life writing, through particular case studies and through attentive analysis of print and material cultures, as one commodity among many in the vast, complicated literary market of nineteenth-century England.

Argues that Victorian literature uses traces of a lingering past to theorize time as non-progressive and discontinuous

• Argues that the dominance of progressive history in the Victorian period has been overstated
• Considers Victorian literature in light of contemporary developments in philosophy of history
• Synthesizes critical conversations on liberal history, the temporalities of objects (in material culture studies and fashion theory), and the trajectories of the life (in Age Studies and queer temporality)
• Offers new readings of Benjamin Disraeli, William Makepeace Thackeray, Harriette Wilson, Harriet Martineau, Thomas Hardy, and Margaret Oliphant

For decades, the dominant view in Victorian studies has been that the period’s economic, political, and intellectual developments led to a broad sense that time was defined by continuous improvement—and that this masternarrative of progress was evident across Victorian writings. McAdams contributes to a broader scholarly challenge of this thesis by considering how the irregular life-cycles of individuals and objects undermine Victorian progress. Unfashionable waistcoats, aging courtesans, and remembered conversations in Victorian literature instead reveal numerous alternative conceptions of time theorized against the emerging dominance of a progress narrative. The book uncovers the heterogenous shapes of time imagined by Victorian literature—regress, cyclicality, stasis, and rupture. These shapes are not simply progress’s others, but rather constituent elements of progress’s theorization.

Uncovers the role of children’s periodicals in the development of charitable ideals for children between 1840–1930

• The first book-length study highlighting the role of children’s periodicals in the development of charitable ideals for children between 1840-1930
• Considers the role of middle- and working-class children as charitable donors and the extent to which children could occupy dual roles as both donors and recipients
• Demonstrates how children’s magazines and children’s columns encouraged children to undertake charitable work by considering their agency, motivations, subjectivity and habits
• Highlights the transnational circulation of charitable ideals for young people

Drawing on a wealth of material from children’s periodicals from the Victorian era to the early twentieth century, Kristine Moruzi examines how the concept of the charitable child has been defined through the press. Charitable ideals became increasingly prevalent at a time of burgeoning social inequities and cultural change, shaping expectations that children were capable of and responsible for charitable giving. While the child as the object of charity has received considerable attention, less focus has been paid to how and why children have been encouraged to help others. Yet the ways in which children were positioned to see themselves as people who could and should help – in whatever forms that assistance might take – are crucial to understanding how children and childhood were conceptualised in the past. This book uses children’s print culture to examine the relationship between children and charitable institutions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to foreground children’s active roles.

The first edited essay collection of its kind to focus on innovators and innovations in the mass-market press from 1820–45

• Explores 1820–45 as a crucial era in the development of the modern press
• Promotes greater understanding of the period between 1820 and 1845 as an era of innovation in nineteenth-century print culture
• Each chapter is designed as a case study that models ways of entering into a vast field of study, drawing attention to the interactivity of readers, editors, publishers and print forms in a period of unprecedented change
• Draws attention to the ways in which our access to this history is enabled by twenty-first-century technologies – digitization, keyword searches and distant reading – that provide access to the periodicals, newspapers and rare books that fuel and shape our research
• Explores intersections between periodicals, books and newspapers within the media system of the period, demonstrating how change affected not only individual titles but also a broader media ecology in which old media were adapted to new contexts and the launch of new publications produced and harnessed new readerships

The emergence of a mass reading public during the early decades of the nineteenth century sparked a period of creative innovation in the popular press. This collection focuses on the early decades of the nineteenth century as a key period of innovation in the popular press. Steam printing, popular education campaigns, and new technologies of illustration led to new trends in book and periodical production.

Brings together queer theory and textual studies to revise our understanding of nineteenth-century print culture

• Examines the collaboration of queer writers and artists: Aubrey Beardsley, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (Michael Field), John Gray, Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon, and Oscar Wilde are central figures of concern
• Brings together important criticism from the fields of Victorian studies, queer theory, and Textual studies (postmodern approaches to bibliography, archives, etc)
• Revises our conception of nineteenth-century print culture through both popular printing as well as the beautiful work of William Morris at the Kelmscott Press to differentiate heteronormative experiences from the queer book
• Focuses on queer lives, their influence on book history and their contributions to the Revival of Printing, serving as a reassessment of print culture outside of heteronormative boundaries
• Based on primary research that examined, in addition to the books being studied by accounting ledgers, correspondence, diaries, and contemporary criticism from the late-Victorian age

Queer books, like LGBTQ+ people, adapt heteronormative structures and institutions to introduce space for discourses of queer desire. Queer Books of Late-Victorian Print Culture explores print culture adaptations of the material book, examining the works of Aubrey Beardsley, Michael Field, John Gray, Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon and Oscar Wilde. It closely analyses the material book, including the elements of binding, typography, paper, ink and illustration, and brings textual studies and queer theory into conversation with literary experiments in free verse, fairy tales and symbolist drama. King argues that queer authors and artists revised the Revival of Printing’s ideals for their own diverse and unique desires, adapting new technological innovations in print culture. Their books created a community of like-minded aesthetes who challenged legal and representational discourses of same-sex desire with one of aesthetic sensuality.

Positions the sensation novel, and nineteenth-century popular fiction more generally, as vital to the history of feeling

• Argues for the literary significance of this popular form
• Examines work by lesser-known female writers, such as Caroline Clive, Annie Edwards and Florence Wilford
• Demonstrates that sensationalism can be traced across a wide range of writers and genres, from spasmodic poetry to the novels of Louisa May Alcott
• Connects Victorian writing on feeling to contemporary affect theory

Narrative, Affect, and Victorian Sensation: Wilful Bodies argues that Victorian sensation novels – long dismissed as plot-driven, silly, and feminine – develop complex theories of narrative affect, our embodied responses to reading, imagining, and even writing a narrative. The popular sensation novel thus should be understood as a key contribution to the novel’s assessment of its own workings, especially the ways in which reading and writing figure as affective acts. Additionally, the book radically expands the field of sensation fiction, taking seriously lesser-known female authors, and reading them alongside a range of writers not typically considered sensational. These novels insist that feelings are not bound to a single body and that bodies generate meaning when they are put in relation to other bodies and systems of knowledge.

Uncovers the central and leading roles of women in the development of organised consumer activism in the UK and the USA between 1885 and 1920

• Gives insight into the extensive influence of women activists around the turn of the twentieth century
• Works across academic disciplines to provide an historicised and critical analysis of the consumers’ league movement and its impact
• Traces the international awareness behind campaigns against labour exploitation and for protective labour legislation
• Explores the roots of ethical consumerism and consumer activist strategies that remain current and recognisable

Ethical consumption and consumer choice are at the heart of public debates today, but consumer activism has a long history. At the end of the nineteenth century, groups of women activists in different countries weaponised their reputation as consumers to mount campaigns against labour exploitation. By the early twentieth century, they had built an international network of Consumers’ Leagues that influenced public opinion and achieved legislative change. Analysing the campaign writing of women activists, including both well-known and recently rediscovered historical figures, Flore Janssen provides new insights into the campaigns that underpinned important developments in the rights of workers and the social position of women. Highlighting the social, economic and political influence of women as activists, this book discusses campaign strategies, but also draws attention to problematic politics within these campaigns. Through its critically contextualised analysis of this specific consumer movement, the book reveals the origins of many consumer campaign strategies that remain familiar today.

Considers the interrelated careers of three highly significant women writers of the nineteenth century

• Traces a chain of influence among three highly significant women writers of the nineteenth century: Mary Russell Mitford, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot
• Reconsiders the literary category of provincialism and the genre of the village story with due consideration of a range of publication formats and contexts
• Works across literary periods to offer innovative rereadings of several important Romantic- and Victorian-era texts
• Combines nineteenth-century cultural-historical and literary analysis to advance recent revaluations of liberalism by considering its emotive and not just its ratiocinative dimensions

In this lively and illuminating work, Kevin A. Morrison offers a reassessment of Mary Russell Mitford’s and Elizabeth Gaskell’s provincial fiction, sometimes deprecated within a genre frequently considered ‘minor literature’, and demonstrates the importance of their work to the development of George Eliot’s liberalism in the age of high realism. Although Gaskell was influenced by Mitford, and Eliot by Gaskell, only a handful of scholars have considered the affinities and resemblances among them. None have done so in depth. Establishing a chain of influence, this book examines the three authors’ interrelated careers: the challenges they encountered in achieving distinction within the literary sphere; the various pressures exerted on them by publishers, reviewers, and editors; and the career-enhancing possibilities afforded, and the limitations imposed, by different modes of publication. Attending to publication history, genre, and narrative voice, Morrison suggests new ways to think about provincialism, liberalism, and women’s networked authorship in the nineteenth century.

Examines history, modernity, gender, and sexuality through the literary innovations of two late-Victorian female co-authors

• Offers new readings of a wide range of Michael Field texts (Callirrhoë, Fair Rosamund, Canute the Great, Long Ago, Sight and Song, Underneath the Bough, Wild Honey, Poems of Adoration, Mystic Trees, Whym Chow, the joint diary Works and Days and many unpublished poems)
• Uses interdisciplinary methods to bring Michael Field’s life and work in conversation with queer and feminist approaches to literary form, art history, ecocriticism, disability studies and religious studies
• Identifies the literary, visual, and philosophical precursors of Michael Field’s adaptations and proposes that we read their appropriations as a deliberate blend of objective and subjective epistemologies
• Traces resonances between fin-de-siècle culture and today’s theoretical debates about historicist vs. presentist approaches to the archive and Foucauldian vs. phenomenological understandings of subjectivity, gender and sexuality
• Situates Michael Field in relation to literary texts and philosophical thought of their contemporaries—the late Victorians and Decadent Moderns with whom they bridge the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

All authors try to do something new, or tell an old story in a new way; but for Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote as Michael Field and called themselves ‘Poets and Lovers’, rewriting old stories, history and traditional literary forms with extraordinary innovation was nothing short of high art. Offering new readings of a wide range of Michael Field texts, this book asks: how do ambitious experiments with a joint diary, closet drama, ekphrasis, elegy and nature, devotional and love poetry help these women navigate the paradox of looking backward in order to achieve their goal ‘to make all things new’? How do their revisionary poetics help the co-authors, as queer, female Aesthetes, cope with late-Victorian modernity? Through an interdisciplinary approach to their passionate and sometimes eccentric life and work, this book provokes thought about the fin-de-siècle and invites readers, like Michael Field themselves, to engage the past in order to create transtemporal community and to make sense of the present.

Investigates whether a popular magazine can promote social mobility by joking about clubs

• Focuses on Victorian humour, a subject that is undergoing a renaissance
• Primary sources are mainly published literary works, both periodicals and books
• Connects, biographically and stylistically, figures that have developed disparate reputations
• Treats well-known, yet under-studied, popular authors: Jerome K. Jerome and P. G. Wodehouse especially
• Treats lesser-known or lesser-studied works by authors who attract more critical attention: J. M. Barrie, G. K. Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson and Israel Zangwill
• Introduces humour into the discussion of feelings about reading

Poking fun at Victorian social clubs became a way of asserting and redefining social belonging. At the turn of the century, amid intense social change, the club became the subject of sustained humour in the Idler magazine and its circle, from editors Jerome K. Jerome and Robert Barr to J. M. Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Barry Pain, Israel Zangwill, and even P. G. Wodehouse. Rather than doing away with the club itself, these authors embraced the paradoxes of the club and re-defined it as a space of possibility. Their humorous, fictional clubs aided the social mobility of the authors who created them, who in turn served as models for the readers who might never cross the literal thresholds of Clubland.

Uncovers the impact of architectural practices and discourses on the sexual imagination

• Includes unpublished sources from German, French and English architectural archives
• Sets out new approaches to architectural theory and the uses of literature>/li>
• Establishes a link between the Architectural Humanities and the History of Sexuality
• Discovers the powerful role of architecture in suggesting sexual practices

This book sheds light on the contributions of architecture and its literary representations to a series of changes taking place in sexual culture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, England, Germany and Austria. By analysing an important set of architectural discourses and literary representations of domestic architecture, the book illustrates the constant tension between an increasing sexual permissiveness and more conservative approaches to domesticity and sexuality. It shows the ways in which literature imagined the impact of new architectural designs on sexual culture that suggested the creation of more fluid forms of organisation of space and sexual mores.

Examines how novelists engaged with the emergence of the IQ concept of intelligence and the meritocratic ideal

• Traces the Victorian genealogy of the modern concept of IQ
• Situates Victorian and Edwardian bildungsromane in relation to the advent of mass education and the rise of eugenic thinking
• Reveals the centrality of ideas about intellectual ability and disability to five major novelists
• Theorises how the novel form engages with the concept of meritocracy

How did Victorian novelists engage with the new theories of human intelligence that emerged from late nineteenth-century psychology and evolutionary science? Assessing Intelligence traces the genealogy of the modern concept of IQ. It examines how five writers – George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, HG Wells and Virginia Woolf – used the bildungsroman, or the novel of education, to wrestle with the moral and political implications of the IQ model of intelligence and the fantasies of meritocracy it provoked. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière, Sara Lyons argues that Victorian and Edwardian novelists were by turns complicit in the biopolitics of intelligence and sought radical ways to affirm the equality of minds.