Provocative account exploring how a population explosion transformed nineteenth-century European and American culture, creating shared narratives of urban life.
Bringing the collaborative process to life through an array of examples, Heather Witcher shows that sympathetic co-creation is far more than the mere act of writing together. While foregrounding the material aspects of collaboration – hands uniting on the page, blank space left for fellow contributors, the writing and exchanging of drafts – this study also illuminates its social aspects and its reliance on Victorian liberalism: dialogue, the circulation of correspondence, the lived experience of collaboration, and, on a less material plane, transhistorical collaborations with figures of the past. Witcher takes a broad approach to these partnerships and, in doing so, challenges traditional expectations surrounding the nature of authorship itself, not least its typical classification as a solitary activity. Within this new framework, collaboration enables the titles of 'coauthor,' 'influencer,' 'editor,' 'critic,' and 'inspiration' to coexist. This book celebrates the plurality of collaboration and underscores the truly social nature of nineteenth-century writing.
Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain is an original and innovative study of the stylistic tics of canonical novelists including Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray and Eliot. Jonathan Farina shows how ordinary locutions such as 'a decided turn', 'as if' and 'that sort of thing' condense nineteenth-century manners, tacit aesthetics and assumptions about what counts as knowledge. Writers recognized these recurrent 'everyday words' as signatures of 'character'. Attending to them reveals how many of the fundamental forms of characterizing fictional characters also turn out to be forms of characterizing objects, natural phenomena and inanimate, abstract things, such as physical laws, the economy and legal practice. Ultimately, this book revises what 'character' meant to nineteenth-century Britons by respecting the overlapping, transdisciplinary connotations of the category.
Revealing how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel and its representation of social change and individual and collective life in nineteenth-century Britain, Lauren Gillingham offers a revisionist history of the novel. With particular attention to the fiction of the 1820s through 1840s, this study focuses on novels that use fashion's idiom of currency and obsolescence to link narrative form to a heightened sense of the present and the visibility of public life. It contends that novelists steeped their fiction in date-stamped matters of dress, manners, and media sensations to articulate a sense of history as unfolding not in epochal change, but in transient issues and interests capturing the public's imagination. Reading fiction by Mary Shelley, Letitia Landon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, W. H. Ainsworth, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and others, Fashionable Fictions tells the story of a nineteenth-century genre commitment to contemporaneity that restyles the novel itself.
Dickensian London is brought to real and vivid life in this innovative, accessible social history, revealing the true character of this place and time through the stories of its street denizens—shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2023 London, 1857: A pair of teenage girls holding a sign that says “Fugitive Slaves” ask for money on the corner of Blackman Street. After a constable accosts them and charges them with begging, they end up in court, where national newspapers pick up their story. Are the girls truly escaped slaves from Kentucky? Or will the city’s dystopian Mendicity Society catch them in a lie, exposing them as born-and-raised Londoners and endangering their safety? With its many accounts of people like these who lived and made their living on the streets, Vagabonds forms a moving picture of London’s most compelling period (1780–1870). Piecing together contemporary sources such as newspaper articles, letters, and journal entries, historian Oskar Jensen follows the harrowing, hopeful journeys of the city’s poor: children, immigrants, street performers, thieves, and sex workers, all diverse in gender, ethnicity, ability, and origin. For the first time, their own voices give us a radical new perspective on this moment in history, with its deep inequality that bears an astonishing resemblance to our own era’s divides.
Introducing the neglected tradition of Scottish women's writing to readers who may already be familiar with English Victorian realism or the historical romances of Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, this book corrects male-dominated histories of the Scottish novel by demonstrating how women appropriated the masculine genre of romance.
This study explores the role of fiction in the social production of the West Central district of London in the nineteenth century. It tells a new history of the novel from a local geographical perspective, tracing developments in the form as it engaged with Bloomsbury in the period it emerged as the city’s dominant literary zone. A neighbourhood that was subject simultaneously to socio-economic decline and cultural ascent, fiction set in Bloomsbury is shown to have reconceived the area’s marginality as potential autonomy. Drawing on sociological theory, this book critically historicizes Bloomsbury’s trajectory to show that its association with the intellectual “fraction” known as the ‘Bloomsbury Group’ at the beginning of the twentieth century was symptomatic rather than exceptional. From the 1820s onwards, writers positioned themselves socially within the metropolitan geography they projected through their fiction. As Bloomsbury became increasingly identified with the cultural capital of writers rather than the economic capital of established wealth, writers subtly affiliated themselves with the area, and the figure of the writer and Bloomsbury became symbolically conflated.