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This chapter assesses why secular fiction devoted so much space to jokes about tract distributing. Where tracts imitate the formal conventions of the same novels with which they competed, mid-Victorian novels almost obsessively represent characters distributing—though rarely reading—tracts. Yet tract distribution was only one among several practices that the secular press used to figure questions about the relation between supply and demand. The experiences of being handed a tract, read aloud to, and tricked into mistaking printed advertisements for personal letters, all provided the novel with mirror images for its own claim to be freely chosen. By satirizing intrusively personal forms of charitable and familial transmission, the novel made a virtue of a traditional accusation against it: that its commercial distribution and solitary consumption made the novel an antisocial genre.

This chapter explains how a literary-historical undoing can liberate the now-normative nineteenth-century British novel from its heavy centrality in Anglophone novel history. It explores what can be read if it is read against the grain of the entrenched sense of its “realism” and formal coherence. Once Victorian novel is separated from realism, many other nineteenth-century fictions—of the adventure, ghost, “mutiny,” and detective genres, for example—might also productively pull away from the strictures of a kind of novel that doesn't really exist. Examples of realism always seem to arrive with disclaimers, provisos, and qualifications, suggesting that no one can really be responsible for this critical fiction: it “wobbles,” as Fredric Jameson has recently argued, caught between the paradox of affect and plot. It wobbles between the antinomy of fictionality and reference, splitting off a seemingly infinite number of worlds.

This chapter examines a central moment in the development of moral narrative practices—one that is, at the same time, a moment in the coming into being of “the Victorian novel.” Looking at Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist and the “Newgate novel” controversy of the 1830s, it offers an example of one way in which the experience of diachronic reading could be interpreted in an explicitly moral fashion. Oliver Twist was to be distinguished from other similar novels, and particularly from William Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard, because of the ways in which it appealed to the moral sensibilities of its reader: “natural sentiment,” “moral sense.” The general implications seem clear enough: Oliver Twist is more appealing to its readers' moral feelings because it has other, “healthier,” focuses than crime alone. According to the novel's reviewers, Oliver Twist might feature crime, but unlike Jack Sheppard, crime is not the novel's subject. Ultimately, what a survey of the discourse surrounding Newgate novels makes clear is how debated this question of subject matter actually was.

This chapter explores the coalescence of two key moments in the history of novel reading: the period in the 1890s which saw not only the collapse of the three-volume novel in Britain, a relatively well-studied moment, but also the effloresence of ophthalmologic physiology and its attendant techniques for measuring and accelerating the rates of readers, which has remained almost completely neglected. It will do so through the unlikely figure of George Gissing, who, perhaps most stubbornly among major British novelists of the late nineteenth century, held out against the pressure to decrease the size, or increase the speed, of his narratives. In Gissing's fiction, an acute awareness of the acceleration of reading rates — in fact, accelerations of perception generally — is set alongside a wounded self-consciousness about changes in publishing formats and changes in the composition of the audience for novels.

Dickens provides the most varied body of spoken and written engagements with Liberal reform rhetoric in the 19th century, and — as Philip Davis notes — he reaches ‘further down and further across the social scale than any of his contemporaries’. His novelistic debut, The Pickwick Papers (1836-7), takes its bearings from his apprenticeship as a parliamentary reporter, and was published in volume form a few months before Hansard first went on sale to the general public. This chapter considers how his diverse careers as shorthand writer, journalist, speaker, and public reader informed his attempts to shape the Victorian periodical novel into a mode of civic eloquence.

This introductory chapter explains that the book provides a background on Victorian novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy—two writers who have set the fundamental terms for contemporary critical conceptualizations of late nineteenth-century realism, domestic fiction, and psychological novel. Both writers' works demonstrate an abiding interest in character and readerly interiority and in making overarching claims about social and psychic life. It talks about the practices of narration and characterization deployed by Eliot and Hardy, which are more fruitfully uneven and unintegrated than retrospective accounts that place these writers in a realist tradition. The chapter reveals some of the ways in which the profound relationality of novel reading has been foreclosed and opened back up again. In an effort to draw out the relationality of the Victorian novels, the chapter places them in conversation with a key theoretical discourse: British psychoanalysis, whose mid-twentieth- century theorists and practitioners developed “object relations” theory by building from the foundational writings of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein.

This afterword explores how the arguments in this book relate to the question of literary periodization. This is, without question, a book on Victorian literature, written in the context of Victorian moral thought. From that point of view, it is very much rooted to a specific time and place. On the other hand, many of the arguments and theoretical ideas in this book rely on a certain concept of realism that would seem to extend beyond Britain and beyond the nineteenth century. The closing thoughts of this chapter consider just how much of the book's argument is portable to a larger discussion of literary realism. In so doing, the afterword hopes to elaborate the ways in which the Victorian novel, and the moral thought that attached to it, has continued to influence people's larger sense of how works from the past can seem to be, in some odd way, about them.

This chapter discusses two very different forms of omniscience, and Wayne Booth famously described and deconstructed them in A Rhetoric of Fiction. The Victorian novel is, at a certain point, annexed to a structuralist idea of French realism, which is imagined as free of intrusive narration. These combined critical moves regularize the Victorian novel into something less interesting and less problematic than what it had been for previous generations of more skeptical critics, or critics for whom that novel was not yet great. The chapter also explains that the pleasure of the text is also the pleasure of consenting to not knowing, to knowing that one does not know and having that be a condition of being in the world. Readers do not identify with characters because they are like people, but because readers are like characters, relying on forms of omniscience to keep narrating various aspects of reality for them. Omniscience hangs around as an omnipresent narrative and epistemological form. Disembodied but not disempowered, dismembered but not defunctioned.

This chapter takes a look at The Doctor’s Wife. This novel presents a chance to discuss the roles of reader (embodied in the character of Isabel Sleaford) and writer (found in the figure of sensation novelist Sigismund Smith) within the mid-Victorian literary market. The chapter studies the ‘photographic’ Braddon used in this novel, and shows that The Doctor’s Wife becomes a complicated reflection on Victorian novel writing and reading, as well as on the relationship between reality and imagination.

This chapter examines Victorian theories of the novel. It argues that Victorian novel theory had a theory of readerly consciousness (physiological psychology), a formalism (‘construction’, or plot sequence), and a master metaphor (the machine). It did not, by and large, discuss mimetic effects; its Aristotelianism was limited to Aristotle's theory of plot sequence rather than his opinions on the proper modes and objects of imitation. Put another way, it was interested in readerly attention rather than readerly belief. As a result, it was strangely silent on the question of what the novel's subject matter might properly be, aside from the mass public whose attention it solicited. ‘Realism’, in other words, was outside its purview; the result is a strange, enabling abstraction to the criticism it was able to mount and the theories it produced. It was often left to novelists themselves to wrestle with the questions of content and readerly belief that ‘high’ novel theory sidestepped.

Victorian novels describe, catalog, quantify, and in general shower us with things that threaten to crowd the narrative right off the page. These things do not get taken seriously—that is to say, they do not get interpreted—much of the time. This book assumes that critical cultural archives have been preserved, unsuspected, in the things of realism that have been so little or so lightly read. It “reads” objects with obvious imperial and industrial histories in three well-known Victorian novels: mahogany furniture in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, calico curtains in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, and “Negro head” tobacco in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. It also examines Middlemarch by George Eliot, using it as an early example of the way in which the “literary” novel works to refigure, and stabilize, our perception of the symbolic ground of fiction. This introductory chapter examines the reality effect in the Victorian novel, metonymy and its convention and contingency, the possible “evidence” the novel provides, the metonymic imagination, and social hieroglyphics.

This coda argues that the objects in Victorian novels were not fully in the grip of the kind of fetishism Karl Marx and Marxists have ascribed to industrial culture. A host of ideas resided in Victorian things: abstraction, alienation, and spectacularization had to compete for space with other kinds of object relations—ones that we have perhaps yet to appreciate. Commodity culture happened slowly: it was preceded by, and was for a long time survived by what this book calls Victorian “thing culture”: a more extravagant form of object relations than ours, one in which systems of value were not quarantined from one another and ideas of interest and meaning were perhaps far less restricted than they are for us. Thing culture, stimulated by production, display, and reproduction, inspires the representational practices that contribute to the formation of commodity culture. This coda emphasizes how slowly this may have happened and the extent to which a thing culture remained vibrantly extant well into the Victorian period, perhaps only becoming truly vitiated toward the end of the century.

Chapter 4 argues that George Gissing's The Odd Women critiques the state's encroaching powers, both actual and imagined. In particular, through the description of how municipal spaces shape characters' interiority, Gissing expresses the fear that the state, as mediated through local government, was in the process of appropriating marriage and culture. As the lynchpins of nineteenth-century bourgeois liberal individuality, these institutions furnished imagined sites from which one could both escape and critique the political. Gissing's novel registers the subtle process by which, through common law courts, the state began converting marriage's religious identity into a primarily civil one. The novel also records the state's active provision of education and public spaces, seen as the incubators of culture, to the masses. This chapter proposes that The Odd Women expresses Gissing's anxiety that the institutions of marriage and culture were becoming disarmed as traditional liberal sites of opposition to the state. In their place, he describes a model of critical consciousness based on novel reading, which comes to offer British subjects a possible position outside of the state.