CCVPR 5/29/04 6:14 PM Page i A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel CCVPR 5/29/04 6:14 PM Page ii Blackwell Concise Companions to Literature and Culture General Editor: David Bradshaw, University of Oxford This series offers accessible, innovative approaches to major areas of literary study. Each volume provides an indispensable companion for anyone wishing to gain an authoritative understanding of a given period or movement’s intellectual character and contexts. The Restoration and Eighteenth Edited by Cynthia Wall Century The Victorian Novel Edited by Francis O’Gorman Modernism Edited by David Bradshaw Postwar American Literature Edited by Josephine G. Hendin and Culture Feminist Theory Edited by Mary Eagleton CCVPR 5/29/04 6:14 PM Page iii A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel Edited by Francis O’Gorman CCVPR 5/29/04 6:14 PM Page iv © 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization © 2005 by Francis O’Gorman BLACKWELL PUBLISHING 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton South, Melbourne, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of Francis O’Gorman to be identified as the Author of the Editorial Material in this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A concise companion to the Victorian novel / edited by Francis O’Gorman. p. cm. – (Blackwell concise companions to literature and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-4051-0319-1 (hardcover: alk. paper) – ISBN 1-4051-0320-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism – Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Literature and society – Great Britain – History – 19th century – Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. O’Gorman, Francis. II. Title. III. Series. PR871.C65 2005 823¢.809 – dc22 2003026895 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 10 on 12.5pt Meridien by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by MPG Books, Bodmin, Cornwall The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com CCVPR 5/29/04 6:14 PM Page v For Dr Tracy Hargreaves CCVPR 5/29/04 6:14 PM Page vi CCVPR 5/29/04 6:14 PM Page vii Contents Notes on Contributors ix Acknowledgements xii List of illustrations xiii Chronology xiv Introduction 1 Francis O’Gorman 1 ‘The sun and moon were made to give them light’: Empire in the Victorian Novel 4 Cannon Schmitt 2 ‘Seeing is believing?’: Visuality and Victorian Fiction 25 Kate Flint 3 ‘The boundaries of social intercourse’: Class in the Victorian Novel 47 James Eli Adams 4 Legal subjects, legal objects: The Law and Victorian Fiction 71 Clare Pettitt 5 ‘The withering of the individual’: Psychology in the Victorian Novel 91 Nicholas Dames vii CCVPR 5/29/04 6:14 PM Page viii Contents 6‘Telling of my weekly doings’: The Material Culture of the Victorian Novel 113 Mark W. Turner 7 ‘Farewell poetry and aerial flights’: The Function of the Author and Victorian Fiction 134 Richard Salmon 8 Everywhere and nowhere: Sexuality in the Victorian Novel 156 Carolyn Dever 9 ‘One of the larger lost continents’: Religion in the Victorian Novel 180 Michael Wheeler 10 ‘The difference between human beings’: Biology in the Victorian Novel 202 Angelique Richardson 11 ‘One great confederation?’: Europe in the Victorian Novel 232 John Rignall 12 ‘A long deep sob of that mysterious wondrous happiness that is one with pain’: Emotion in the Victorian Novel 253 Francis O’Gorman Index 271 viii CCVPR 5/29/04 6:14 PM Page ix Notes on Contributors James Eli Adams teaches in the Department of English at Cornell University, USA. He has published numerous studies and reviews dealing with Victorian literature and culture, including Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (1995) and Sexualities in Victo- rian Britain (1996), which he edited with Andrew Miller. From 1993 to 2000 he co-edited Victorian Studies, where he remains a member of the Advisory Board; he is also the General Editor of the Grolier Ency- clopedia of the Victorian Era. He is currently writing A History of Victorian Literature, to be published by Blackwell. Nicholas Dames is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, USA. He is the author of Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810–1870 (2001), and of several articles on British and French fiction in the nineteenth century. His current project investigates the relation between novel theory and the history of novel reading. Carolyn Dever is Associate Professor of English and Acting Director of Women’s Studies at Vanderbilt University, USA. She is the author of Death and the Mother From Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins (1998), Skeptical Feminism: Activist Theory, Activist Prac- tice (2004), and editor, with Margaret Cohen, of The Literary Channel: The Trans-National Invention of the Novel (2002). Her book in progress is titled Queer Domesticities. ix CCVPR 5/29/04 6:14 PM Page x Notes on Contributors Kate Flint is Professor of English at Rutgers University, USA, having previously taught for 15 years at Oxford University. She has published extensively on Victorian, modernist, and contemporary fiction, paint- ing, and cultural history. Her books include The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (2000) and The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (1993), both of which won the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay prize. She has edited a number of works by Dickens and Virginia Woolf, among other authors. Her forthcoming book, The Transatlantic Indian 1785–1930 looks at the interaction, both actual and imaginative, between the British and Native Americans in the nineteenth century. Francis O’Gorman is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds, UK and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His books include John Ruskin (1999), Late Ruskin: New Contexts (2001), and Blackwell’s Guide to the Victorian Novel (2002) as well as Ruskin and Gender (edited with Dinah Birch, 2002) and The Victorians and the Eigh- teenth Century: Reassessing the Tradition (edited with Katherine Turner, 2004). His Victorian Poetry: An Annotated Anthology appeared in 2004 and he is currently writing about Victorian poetry and immortal life. Clare Pettitt is Lecturer and Director of Studies in English Literature at Newnham College, Cambridge, UK. Her book, Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel, was published by Oxford University Press in 2004. Angelique Richardson is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Culture at the University of Exeter, UK. She has published widely on nineteenth- century culture and science and is currently working on a study of Hardy and the unconscious. She is the author of Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (2003), editor of Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women, 1890–1914 (2002), and co-editor of The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de- Siècle Feminisms (2001). She is also on the editorial board of Critical Quarterly. John Rignall is Reader in the Department of English and Compara- tive Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. He is the author of Realist Fiction and the Strolling Spectator (1992) and numerous articles on nineteenth-century fiction; he has edited George Eliot and Europe (1997), and is the General Editor of The Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot (2000). x CCVPR 5/29/04 6:14 PM Page xi Notes on Contributors Richard Salmon is Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Univer- sity of Leeds, UK. He is the author of Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (1997), William Makepeace Thackeray (2003), and various articles on Victorian fiction, periodicals, and cultural history. He is currently writing a book on the ‘disenchantment of the author’ in Victorian literary culture. Cannon Schmitt, Associate Professor of English at Wayne State University, USA, and editor of the journal Criticism, is author of Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (1997) as well as essays in Victorian Literature and Culture, ELH, Genre, and else- where. At present he is at work on a book-length project titled Savage Mnemonics: South America, Victorian Science, and the Reinvention of the Human. Mark W. Turner is lecturer in English at King’s College, University of London, UK. He is the author of Trollope and the Magazines (1999) and Backward Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and London (2003), and the co-editor with Caroline Levine of From Author to Text: Rereading George Eliot’s Romola (1998). He also co-edits the interdisci- plinary journal Media History. Current research projects include a study of time, memory, and serial narratives in the nineteenth century. Michael Wheeler is an independent scholar and lecturer, currently writing The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture for Cambridge University Press. He is Visiting Professor of English at the Universities of Southampton and Surrey Roehamp- ton, and Honorary Professor of Lancaster University’s Ruskin Pro- gramme.