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From seduced maidens to adulterous wives, bigamists, courtesans, kept women, and streetwalkers, the so-called ‘fallen woman’ was a ubiquitous and enduring figure on the Victorian and Edwardian stage. Acts of Desire traces the theatrical representation of illicit female sexuality from early nineteenth-century melodramas, through sensation dramas, Ibsenite sex-problem plays, and suffrage dramas, to early social realism and the well-made plays of Pinero, Jones, Maugham, and Coward. This study reveals and analyses enduring plot lines and tropes that continue to influence contemporary theatre and film. Women’s illicit desires became a theatrical focus for anxieties and debates surrounding gender roles, women’s rights, sexual morality, class conflict, economics, eugenics, and female employment. The theatre played a central role in both establishing and challenging sexual norms, and many playwrights exploited the ambiguities and implications of performance to stage disruptive spectacles of female desire, agency, energy, and resourcefulness, using ingenuity and skill to evade the control of that ever watchful state censor, the Lord Chamberlain. Acts of Desire challenges the currency and validity of the long-established critical term ‘the fallen woman’. Encompassing a vast range of published and unpublished plays, archival material, censorship records, social and political texts, and contemporary reviews, it reveals the surprising continuities, covert meanings, and exuberant spectacles which marked the history of theatrical representations of female sexuality. Engaging with popular and ‘high art’ performances, this study also reveals the vital connections and exchange of influences between Victorian drama, narrative painting, and the novel, and shows theatre to be a crucial but neglected element in the cultural history of women’s sexuality.

Using street-names referring to Waverley and Abbotsford as a starting point, this book explains how the work of Walter Scott (1771-1832) became an all-pervasive point of reference for cultural memory and collective identity in the nineteenth century, and why he no longer has this role. It breaks new ground in memory studies and the study of literary reception by examining the dynamics of cultural memory and the ‘social life’ of literary texts across several generations and multiple media. Attention is paid to the remediation of the Waverley novels as they travelled into painting, the theatre, and material culture, as well as to the role of ‘Scott’ as a memory site in the public sphere for a century after his death. Using a wide range of examples and supported by many illustrations, this book demonstrates how remembering Scott’s work helped shape national and transnational identities up to World War I, and contributed to the emergence of the idea of an English-speaking world encompassing Scotland, the British Empire, and the United States. It shows how Scott’s work provided an imaginative resource for creating a collective relation to the past that was compatible with widespread mobility and social change; and that he thus forged a potent alliance between memory, literature, and identity that was eminently suited to modernizing. In the process he helped prepare his own obsolescence. But if Scott’s work is now largely forgotten, his legacy continues in the widespread belief that showcasing the past is a condition for transcending it.

This book investigates the shaping influence of the American slave narrative on the Victorian novel in the years between the British Abolition Act and the American Emancipation Proclamation. In a period when few books sold more than five hundred copies, slave narratives sold in the tens of thousands, providing British readers vivid accounts of the violence and privation experienced by American slaves. The book argues that Charlotte Brontë, W. M. Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson integrated into their works generic elements of the slave narrative, from the emphasis on literacy as a tool of liberation, to the teleological journey from slavery to freedom, to the ethics of resistance over submission. It contends that Victorian novelists were attempting to access the slave narrative's paradigm of resistance, illuminate the transnational dimension of slavery, and articulate Britain's role in the global community. The slave narrative becomes part of the textual network of the English novel, making visible how black literary, as well as economic, production contributed to English culture.

Alf layla wa layla (known in English as A Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights) changed the world on a scale unrivalled by any other literary text. Inspired by a 14th-century Syrian manuscript, the appearance of Antoine Galland's twelve-volume Mille et Une Nuits in English translation (1704-1717), closely followed by the Grub Street English edition, drew the text into European circulation. Over the following three hundred years, a widely heterogeneous series of editions, compilations, translations, and variations circled the globe to reveal the absorption of The Arabian Nights into English, continental, and global literatures, and its transformative return to modern Arabic literature, where it now enjoys a degree of prominence that it had never attained during the classical period. Beginning with a thorough introduction situating The Arabian Nights in its historical and cultural contexts—and offering a fresh examination of the text's multiple locations in the long history of modern Orientalism—this collection of chapters by noted scholars from “East,” “West,” and in-between reassesses the influence of the Nights in Enlightenment and Romantic literature, as well as the text's vigorous afterlife in the contemporary Arabic novel.

This book proposes a fundamental reconception of the 19th-century attitude toward the child. The Romantic ideology of innocence spread more slowly than we think, it contends, and the people whom we assume were most committed to it—children’s authors and members of the infamous “cult of the child”—were actually deeply ambivalent. Writers such as Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and J. M. Barrie often resisted the growing cultural pressure to erect a strict barrier between child and adult, innocence and experience. Instead of urging young people to mold themselves to match a static ideal of artless simplicity, they frequently conceived of children as precociously literate, highly socialized beings who—though indisputably shaped by the strictures of civilized life—could nevertheless cope with such influences in creative ways. By entertaining the idea that contact with the adult world does not necessarily victimize children, these authors reacted against Dickensian plots which imply that youngsters who work and play alongside adults (including the so-called Artful Dodger) are not in fact inventive or ingenious enough to avoid a sad fate. To find the truly artful child characters from this era, the book maintains, we must turn to children’s literature, a genre that celebrates the canny resourcefulness of young protagonists without claiming that they enjoy unlimited power and autonomy.

This book demonstrates that ‘the awkward age’ formed a fault-line in Victorian female experience, an unusual phase in which restlessness, self-interest, and rebellion were possible. Tracing evolving treatments of female adolescence though a host of long-forgotten women's fictions, the book reveals that representations of the girl in popular women's literature importantly anticipated depictions of the feminist in the fin de siècle New Woman writing; conservative portrayals of girls' hopes, dreams, and subsequent frustrations helped clear a literary and cultural space for the New Woman's ‘awakening’ to disaffected consciousness. The book thus both historicises the evolution and mythic appeal of the female adolescent and works to receive suggestive exchanges between apparently diverse female literary traditions.

While everyone knows that the nineteenth-century novel is obsessed with gaffes, lapses, and blunders, who could have predicted that these would have so important a structural role to play in the novel and its rise? Who knew that the novel in fact relies on its characters’ mistakes for its structural coherence, for its authority, for its form? Drawing simultaneously on the terms of narrative theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis, this book examines the necessary relation between social and literary form in the nineteenth-century novel as it is expressed at the site of the represented social mistake (eating peas with your knife, wearing the wrong thing, talking out of turn, etc.). Through close and careful readings of novels by Flaubert, Eliot, James, and others, this book shows that the novel achieves its coherence at the level of character, plot, and narration not in spite but because of the social mistake.

Drawing on a wealth of contemporary sources, this book examines British writers’ engagement with mid-nineteenth-century Paris. This historically grounded account of the ways in which Paris touched the careers and work of both major and minor Victorian writers considers both their actual experiences of an urban environment—distinctively different from anything Britain offered—and the extent to which this became absorbed and expressed within the Victorian imaginary. The first part of this book explores these writers’ reaction to the swiftly changing politics and topography of Paris, before considering the nature of their social interactions with the Parisians, through networks provided by institutions such as the British Embassy and the salons. The second part of the book examines the significance of Paris for mid-nineteenth-century Anglophone journalists, culminating in a chapter devoted to demonstrating the ways in which the young Thackeray’s exposure to Parisian print culture shaped him as both writer and artist. The final part focuses on fictional representations of Paris, revealing the frequency with which they relied upon previous literary sources, and how the surprisingly narrow palette of subgenres, structures, and characters they employed contributed to the characteristic, and sometimes contradictory, prejudices of a swiftly growing British readership.

‘On the banks of the Thames it is a tremendous chapter of accidents.’ As Henry James surveys London in 1888, he sums up what had fascinated urban observers for a century: the random and even accidental development of this unprecedented form of human settlement, the modern metropolis. By Accident or Design: Writing the Victorian Metropolis takes James at his word, arguing that accident was both a powerful metaphor and material context through which the Victorians arrested the paradoxes of metropolitan modernity and reconfigured understandings of form and change. This book shows how the material conditions of urban accidents offer new and compelling modes of analysis for intellectual and literary history. Through extensive archival study and interdisciplinary analysis of urban-industrial accidents, risk management, and civic improvements, By Accident or Design reclaims the metropolis as ground zero for some of the most important thinking about causation in the nineteenth century. It demonstrates the centrality of interdependent concepts of design and accident not only to metropolitan discourse, but also to current critical discourse about the formal and circulatory dynamics of Victorian metropolitan writing. Thus, this book offers a new vocabulary for the dialectics of the modern city and the signature forms of writing about it, including the newspaper, the illustrated periodical, the industrial novel, and urban broadsheets.

The book traces the course of what Oscar Wilde called his ‘ancient friendship’ with Carlos Blacker, ‘always the truest of friends and most sympathetic of companions’, from its beginning in the early 1880s to their tragic breakup in 1898. The friendship through the 1880s, ‘days of laughter and delight’ according to Wilde, was a halcyon time for both. Wilde’s long-time friend and first biographer, Robert Sherard, thought that ‘the days when I first met him [in 1883] were the happiest days he lived’, an opinion shared by a second biographer and friend, Vincent O’Sullivan. The 1890s, however, proved a less carefree time for both Wilde and Blacker. The first year of the decade witnessed the onset of what Blacker described as his ‘tempestuous affairs’, which continued to haunt him to the time of his marriage and the start of a ‘New Life’ in the middle of the decade, shortly before Wilde was brought to ruin by his own disastrous troubles. After a three-year separation, the two were reunited in Paris in March 1898, with the Dreyfus affair then at fever-pitch and the city, in Blacker’s words, ‘in a ferment’. During his extended residence abroad while his ‘tempestuous affairs’ played out, Blacker had formed a close friendship with the Italian military attaché in Paris, who, complicit with his German counterpart and fully informed about Dreyfus, confided ‘the whole & entire truth’ in sworn secrecy to Blacker who, in his emotionally charged reunion with Wilde, was impulsively moved to share the information with him. The effect of their chance involvement on the course of events in the affair proved fatal to their ‘ancient friendship’. On 25 June 1898, Blacker recorded prophetically in his diary, ‘After lunch just before dinner letter from Oscar which put an end to our friendship forever.’

This book explores the significance of rental culture in Charles Dickens’s fiction and journalism. It reveals tenancy, or the leasing of real estate in exchange for money, to be a governing force in everyday life in the nineteenth century. It casts a light into back attics and landladies’ parlours, and follows a host of characters—from slum landlords exploiting their tenants, to pairs of friends deciding to live together and share the rent. In this period, tenancy shaped individuals, structured communities, and fascinated writers. The vast majority of London’s population had an immediate economic relationship with the houses and rooms they inhabited, and Dickens was highly attuned to the social, psychological, and imaginative corollaries of this phenomenon. He may have been read as an overwhelming proponent of middle-class domestic ideology, but if we look closely, we see that his fictional universe is a dense network of rented spaces. He is comfortable in what he calls the ‘lodger world’, and he locates versions of home in a multitude of unlikely places. These are not mere settings, waiting to be recreated faithfully; rented space does not simply provide a backdrop for incident in the nineteenth-century novel. Instead, it plays an important part in influencing what takes place. For Dickens, to write about tenancy can often mean to write about writing—character, authorship, and literary collaboration. More than anything, he celebrates the fact that unassuming houses brim with narrative potential: comedies, romances, mysteries, and comings-of-age take place behind their doors.

The same week in February 1836 that Charles Dickens was hired to write his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, the first railway line in London opened. This book explores the rise of the global, high-speed passenger transport network in the nineteenth century and the indelible impact it made on Dickens’s work. The advent first of stage coaches, then of railways and transoceanic steam ships made unprecedented round-trip journeys across once seemingly far distances seem ordinary and systematic. Time itself was changed. The Victorians overran the separate, local times kept in each town, establishing instead the synchronized, ‘standard’ time, which now ticks on our clocks. This book examines the history of public transport’s systematic networking of people and how this revolutionized perceptions of time, space, and community, and how the art form of the novel played a special role in synthesizing and understanding it all. Focusing on a trio of road novels by Charles Dickens, it looks first at a key historical moment in the networked community’s coming together, then at a subsequent recognition of its tragic limits, and, finally, at the construction of a revised view that expressed the precarious, limited omniscient perspective by which passengers came to imagine their journeying in the network.

This study of Charlotte Brontë's novels draws on original research in a range of early Victorian writings, on subjects ranging from women's day-dreaming to sanitary reform, from the Great Exhibition to early Victorian religious thought. It is not, however, merely a study of context. Through a close consideration of the ways in which Brontë's novels engage with the thinking of their time, it offers a powerful argument for the ‘literary’ as a distinctive mode of intelligence, and reveals a Charlotte Brontë more alert to her historical moment and far more aesthetically sophisticated than she has usually been taken to be.

This book considers the lyric poems written by John Clare and three twentieth-century poets—Arthur Symons, Edmund Blunden, and John Ashbery—who turned to him at pivotal moments in their own development. These writers crafted a distinctive mode of lyric, ‘Clare’s lyric’, in which an embrace of mimesis goes hand in hand with a salient poetic medium. For these writers, accurate representation involves not only words that name objects, describe scenes, and create images pointing to a shared reality, but also patterns of sound, the syntactic organization of lines, and the shapes of whole poems and collections of poems. Chapters 1–3 explore Clare’s approach to accurate representation. In the late 1820s and 1830s, his experiments with the lyric subject, imagery, description, sound patterning, and poetic structure all bring his written words into close alignment with the world. In the 1840s and 1850s, he attempts to represent a world characterized by what it is missing, be it his beloved or his home. Chapters 4–6 examine how Symons, Blunden, and Ashbery each recreate ‘Clare’s lyric’ for themselves. Symons turns to Clare to integrate the fleeting details and resonant meanings of impressionism and symbolism with a genuine encounter with nature. Blunden takes from Clare a model for an ‘exact and complete nature-poetry’ that could represent the physical and psychic landscape destroyed by the First World War. Ashbery draws on Clare’s verse in his effort to translate the entire world in all its variety and multiplicity into a book of poems.

Focusing on a moment and a source in the 19th century, this book ponders the question: what is a classic? This question is, by virtue of its insistent recurrence, itself a classic question that returns to haunt us. It provided the title of a text for French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve in 1850 (‘Qu'est-ce qu'un classique?’), as it did in the 20th century for T.S. Eliot and John Coetzee. Centring on Sainte-Beuve in his 19th-century context, this book's inquiry takes us historically to many places (antiquity, the middle ages, the 17th and 18th as well as the 19th and early 20th centuries). The book also provides an intellectual history that travels across multiple disciplinary territories (in addition to literary criticism and literary history, classical studies, comparative philology, historiography and political thought). Against this background, this book maps the evolution of Sainte-Beuve's thought from an initially cosmopolitan conception of the classic (close in spirit to Goethe's notion of Weltliteratur) to an increasingly nationalist conception, with a strong emphasis on the heritage of Latinity and France as its principal legatee. The final chapter deals with this appropriation and ends with a question about Sainte-Beuve's original question: in the light of this bleak history, perhaps the time has come to dispense with the term ‘classic’ altogether.

An account of Coleridge's life and career which aims to be both comprehensive and searching, relying on the most up to date available information. Although arranged in roughly chronological fashion it focuses on themes and ideas, tracing the development of his varying interests and obsessions, notably in the field of psychology. Particular attention is devoted to the tension between Coleridge and James Mackintosh, his relationship with Sara Hutchinson, arguments about the reality or otherwise of his unacknowledged borrowings from other writers, the originality of his comments on Shakespeare, the course of his early interest in zoomagnetism—resumed when German thinkers abandon their initial scepticism—and the development and nature of his religious beliefs.

This book argues for a new understanding of the relation between nineteenth-century realist literary form and the socially dense environments of modernity. In a period of vast population increase in Britain (London became Europe’s first city of one million in the nineteenth century), “the literature of social density,” so called, illuminates surprising investments in the power of weak ties—ephemeral communities, anonymity, and social distance—in the age of Victorian sympathy. Bringing out the sociological imagination of this literature, the book locates that imagination amidst a range of social impulses that seem to take no single person as their object, or, that are so evanescent or attenuated as to be hardly recognizable as a social experience at all. Against histories that ally the nineteenth-century novel and realism more generally with the valuation of interiority and privatized experience, as well as the gravitational pull of the marriage plot, it marks instead how literary form is shaped by ongoing investments in the public world of strangers and the modern forms of sociality they emblematize, the dark matter of the Victorian social universe. Drawing upon a range of sociological thought for its theoretical framework, and with chapters on Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James, this book discovers a species of Victorian sociality not imagined under J. S. Mill’s description in On Liberty of society as a crowd impinging upon the individual: one attuned to the relational possibilities offered by the impersonal intimacy of life among those unknown.

Common Precedents argues that precedent constitutes a sophisticated and powerful mechanism for managing social and cultural change and that this quality accounts for its unacknowledged centrality to Victorian culture. Precedential reasoning enables the recognition of the new and its assimilation as part of a continuous past. Through this act of recognition and assimilation, it constructs a sense of a common identity essential to the Victorians. By appearing to bring the past seamlessly into the present, legal precedent became vital to the preservation of a sense of commonality and continuity crucial to the common law and Victorian legal culture, as well as to the society in which it operated and the larger culture of which it was part. These qualities extended the impact of precedent beyond legal practices and institutions to the culture at large. This analysis of law and literature shows that precedential reasoning enjoyed widespread cultural significance in nineteenth-century culture as a means of preserving a sense of common history, values and interests in the face of a new heterogeneous commonality. Understanding the structure of precedent also explains how fictionality works, its epistemology, and how its commonalities are socially constructed, maintained, and reified. Common Precedents thus presents a cultural history of precedent and the ways in which it enables and facilitates a commonality through time.