Robert Mighall
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199262182
- eISBN:
- 9780191698835
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199262182.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book is a full-length study of Victorian Gothic fiction. Combining original readings of familiar texts with historical sources, this book is a historicist survey of 19th-century Gothic ...
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This book is a full-length study of Victorian Gothic fiction. Combining original readings of familiar texts with historical sources, this book is a historicist survey of 19th-century Gothic writing—from Dickens to Stoker, Wilkie Collins to Conan Doyle, through European travelogues, sexological textbooks, ecclesiastic histories and pamphlets on the perils of self-abuse. Critics have thus far tended to concentrate on specific angles of Gothic writing (gender or race), or the belief that the Gothic ‘returned’ at the so-called fin de siècle. By contrast, this book demonstrates how the Gothic mode was active throughout the Victorian period, and provides historical explanations for its development from the late 18th century, through the ‘Urban Gothic’ fictions of the mid-Victorian period, the ‘Suburban Gothic’ of the Sensation vogue, through to the somatic horrors of Stevenson, Machen, Stoker, and Doyle at the century' close. The book challenges the psychological approach to Gothic fiction that currently prevails, demonstrating the importance of geographical, historical, and discursive factors that have been largely neglected by critics, and employing a variety of original sources to demonstrate the contexts of Gothic fiction and explain its development in the Victorian period.Less
This book is a full-length study of Victorian Gothic fiction. Combining original readings of familiar texts with historical sources, this book is a historicist survey of 19th-century Gothic writing—from Dickens to Stoker, Wilkie Collins to Conan Doyle, through European travelogues, sexological textbooks, ecclesiastic histories and pamphlets on the perils of self-abuse. Critics have thus far tended to concentrate on specific angles of Gothic writing (gender or race), or the belief that the Gothic ‘returned’ at the so-called fin de siècle. By contrast, this book demonstrates how the Gothic mode was active throughout the Victorian period, and provides historical explanations for its development from the late 18th century, through the ‘Urban Gothic’ fictions of the mid-Victorian period, the ‘Suburban Gothic’ of the Sensation vogue, through to the somatic horrors of Stevenson, Machen, Stoker, and Doyle at the century' close. The book challenges the psychological approach to Gothic fiction that currently prevails, demonstrating the importance of geographical, historical, and discursive factors that have been largely neglected by critics, and employing a variety of original sources to demonstrate the contexts of Gothic fiction and explain its development in the Victorian period.
Helen Small
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198184911
- eISBN:
- 9780191674396
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184911.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
For Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, writing at a time when powerful sectors of the medical profession were increasingly insisting that knowledge of human life would be grounded in physiology ...
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For Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, writing at a time when powerful sectors of the medical profession were increasingly insisting that knowledge of human life would be grounded in physiology rather than psychology, the love-mad woman provided a means of asking what constituted ‘real’ pain. Such women had always raised the question of ‘truth’. Because they have suffered directly by men's falsehood or, indirectly, by the world's inability to guarantee their happiness, they prompt doubt about what can be assured in life. Couching their stories in hyperbole, they nevertheless resist the equation of excess with lying. Although they convey other stories within nineteenth-century fiction — and, in the process, come to mean both more and less than their own desolation — they still command pathos in themselves, even in the unsentimental world of the 1860s.Less
For Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, writing at a time when powerful sectors of the medical profession were increasingly insisting that knowledge of human life would be grounded in physiology rather than psychology, the love-mad woman provided a means of asking what constituted ‘real’ pain. Such women had always raised the question of ‘truth’. Because they have suffered directly by men's falsehood or, indirectly, by the world's inability to guarantee their happiness, they prompt doubt about what can be assured in life. Couching their stories in hyperbole, they nevertheless resist the equation of excess with lying. Although they convey other stories within nineteenth-century fiction — and, in the process, come to mean both more and less than their own desolation — they still command pathos in themselves, even in the unsentimental world of the 1860s.
Andrew Smith
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074462
- eISBN:
- 9781781700006
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074462.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter studies images of spectrality that can be found in Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale and The Haunted Hotel. It determines that Collins believed that money immorally ...
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This chapter studies images of spectrality that can be found in Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale and The Haunted Hotel. It determines that Collins believed that money immorally or illegally acquired makes the self ghostly and visible to the amorality of the economic system. It then introduces ‘The Ghost in the Bank of England’, where Collins addresses the relationship between paper money and the ghostly.Less
This chapter studies images of spectrality that can be found in Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale and The Haunted Hotel. It determines that Collins believed that money immorally or illegally acquired makes the self ghostly and visible to the amorality of the economic system. It then introduces ‘The Ghost in the Bank of England’, where Collins addresses the relationship between paper money and the ghostly.
Jane Wood
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198187608
- eISBN:
- 9780191674723
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198187608.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
In what was once described as ‘the century of nerves’, a fascination with the mysterious processes governing physical and psychological states was shared by medical and fiction writers alike. This ...
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In what was once described as ‘the century of nerves’, a fascination with the mysterious processes governing physical and psychological states was shared by medical and fiction writers alike. This elegant study offers an integrated analysis of how medicine and literature figured the connection between the body and the mind. The book looks at some of the century's most influential neurological and physiological theories, and gives readings of both major and relatively neglected fictions — a range which includes work by Charlotte Brontë and George MacDonald, George Eliot and Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy and George Gissing. Stepping into an already lively area of interdisciplinary debate, this book is distinguished by its recognition of the intellectual and imaginative force of both discourses: it extends our understanding of the interaction between science and literature in the wider culture of the period.Less
In what was once described as ‘the century of nerves’, a fascination with the mysterious processes governing physical and psychological states was shared by medical and fiction writers alike. This elegant study offers an integrated analysis of how medicine and literature figured the connection between the body and the mind. The book looks at some of the century's most influential neurological and physiological theories, and gives readings of both major and relatively neglected fictions — a range which includes work by Charlotte Brontë and George MacDonald, George Eliot and Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy and George Gissing. Stepping into an already lively area of interdisciplinary debate, this book is distinguished by its recognition of the intellectual and imaginative force of both discourses: it extends our understanding of the interaction between science and literature in the wider culture of the period.
Philipp Erchinger
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474438957
- eISBN:
- 9781474453790
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474438957.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
The argument of this chapter is that the writing of sensation fiction was itself part of the critical endeavour to make sense of the enormous excitement that it produced. There is, in other words, a ...
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The argument of this chapter is that the writing of sensation fiction was itself part of the critical endeavour to make sense of the enormous excitement that it produced. There is, in other words, a tendency towards self-investigation and self-reflection inherent in the sensational imagination. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd, for instance, seem to read and review, repeatedly, the very art that constitutes them. In accordance with Braddon’s letters to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, these novels, being engaged in a quest for their own meaning and social function, are uncertain about the very sensational effects that they helped to create. Likewise, the stories of Wilkie Collins’s Armadale and The Moonstone contain within themselves various models of the creative activity through which they were assembled and made into their characteristically suspended, drawn-out shape. By means of such models, the chapter argues, Collins’s writing makes itself legible, between the lines, as an experimental practice that composes its form as it goes along, rather than on the basis of a predefined plan.Less
The argument of this chapter is that the writing of sensation fiction was itself part of the critical endeavour to make sense of the enormous excitement that it produced. There is, in other words, a tendency towards self-investigation and self-reflection inherent in the sensational imagination. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd, for instance, seem to read and review, repeatedly, the very art that constitutes them. In accordance with Braddon’s letters to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, these novels, being engaged in a quest for their own meaning and social function, are uncertain about the very sensational effects that they helped to create. Likewise, the stories of Wilkie Collins’s Armadale and The Moonstone contain within themselves various models of the creative activity through which they were assembled and made into their characteristically suspended, drawn-out shape. By means of such models, the chapter argues, Collins’s writing makes itself legible, between the lines, as an experimental practice that composes its form as it goes along, rather than on the basis of a predefined plan.
Lauren M. E. Goodlad
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780198728276
- eISBN:
- 9780191794490
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198728276.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
The form and tone of Wilkie Collins’s fiction are strikingly different from Trollope’s. Instead of naturalism, the perception of breached heirloom sovereignty gives rise to multi-perspectival ...
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The form and tone of Wilkie Collins’s fiction are strikingly different from Trollope’s. Instead of naturalism, the perception of breached heirloom sovereignty gives rise to multi-perspectival narration, elaborate plotting, and outlandish events that conduce toward an almost postmodern notion of sovereignty as porous and pluralized. Collins’s mixed-raced characters migrate to the foreground where their unconventional stories stimulate the rendering of that historically cumulative form of experience which Walter Benjamin called Erfahrung. Armadale, a novel begun midway through the US Civil War, uses fictive archeology to explore the disavowed history of Britain’s participation in Atlantic slavery, while The Moonstone, often read as a “mutiny” narrative, traces a multi-authored path to truth. Whereas Ozias Midwinter’s story excavates a submerged Atlantic experience, Ezra Jennings, a character whose crucial piebald knowledge “is entirely out of the experience of the mass of mankind” (388), enables a formal shift from detective narrative to utopian romance.Less
The form and tone of Wilkie Collins’s fiction are strikingly different from Trollope’s. Instead of naturalism, the perception of breached heirloom sovereignty gives rise to multi-perspectival narration, elaborate plotting, and outlandish events that conduce toward an almost postmodern notion of sovereignty as porous and pluralized. Collins’s mixed-raced characters migrate to the foreground where their unconventional stories stimulate the rendering of that historically cumulative form of experience which Walter Benjamin called Erfahrung. Armadale, a novel begun midway through the US Civil War, uses fictive archeology to explore the disavowed history of Britain’s participation in Atlantic slavery, while The Moonstone, often read as a “mutiny” narrative, traces a multi-authored path to truth. Whereas Ozias Midwinter’s story excavates a submerged Atlantic experience, Ezra Jennings, a character whose crucial piebald knowledge “is entirely out of the experience of the mass of mankind” (388), enables a formal shift from detective narrative to utopian romance.
Helena Ifill
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781784995133
- eISBN:
- 9781526136275
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784995133.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Basil’s Robert Mannion, and No Name’s Magdalen Vanstone are both subject to monomaniacal impulses. In Basil, Collins draws on early-nineteenth-century theories of insanity and moral management, ...
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Basil’s Robert Mannion, and No Name’s Magdalen Vanstone are both subject to monomaniacal impulses. In Basil, Collins draws on early-nineteenth-century theories of insanity and moral management, promoted by “alienists” such as John Connolly and J. C. Prichard, which warned of domination by unruly passions. Mannion allows himself to be swept away by his uncontrolled emotions, and therefore contributes to his own mental deterioration. In No Name, Collins makes use of mid-Victorian theories of the will, developed by mental physiologists such as William Benjamin Carpenter, to depict Magdalen as someone who has not been trained to manage her willpower correctly and is therefore overwhelmed by a monomaniacal urge when faced with sudden tragedy. Unlike Mannion, Magdalen also possesses intrinsic reserves of moral strength and endures a series of internal conflicts between her monomania and her ‘better’ nature. In his contemplation of the different aspects which comprise the individual personality, Collis asserts (and so counters mid-century associationist psychology as propounded by men like Alexander Bain) that we are not ‘born with dispositions like blank sheets of paper’, but also insists that our inborn traits may be cultivated for better or for worse.Less
Basil’s Robert Mannion, and No Name’s Magdalen Vanstone are both subject to monomaniacal impulses. In Basil, Collins draws on early-nineteenth-century theories of insanity and moral management, promoted by “alienists” such as John Connolly and J. C. Prichard, which warned of domination by unruly passions. Mannion allows himself to be swept away by his uncontrolled emotions, and therefore contributes to his own mental deterioration. In No Name, Collins makes use of mid-Victorian theories of the will, developed by mental physiologists such as William Benjamin Carpenter, to depict Magdalen as someone who has not been trained to manage her willpower correctly and is therefore overwhelmed by a monomaniacal urge when faced with sudden tragedy. Unlike Mannion, Magdalen also possesses intrinsic reserves of moral strength and endures a series of internal conflicts between her monomania and her ‘better’ nature. In his contemplation of the different aspects which comprise the individual personality, Collis asserts (and so counters mid-century associationist psychology as propounded by men like Alexander Bain) that we are not ‘born with dispositions like blank sheets of paper’, but also insists that our inborn traits may be cultivated for better or for worse.
Matthew Rubery
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195369267
- eISBN:
- 9780199871148
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195369267.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter looks at the reading communities formed through the personal advertisements on the newspaper's front page. Its second column came to be known in the late 19th century as the “agony ...
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This chapter looks at the reading communities formed through the personal advertisements on the newspaper's front page. Its second column came to be known in the late 19th century as the “agony column” for its emphasis on personal distress, ranging from pathetic tales of runaway husbands to plaintive cries for attention from lonely hearts. Such heartfelt pleas did not escape the attention of the school of sensation novelists, who were quick to capitalize on the criminal possibilities of the most interactive section of the newspaper through an improbable number of phony marriage announcements, misreported obituaries, and unanswered missing-persons inquiries among their fictional narratives. Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, Ellen Wood's East Lynne, and Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret illustrate how the newspaper could be used to begin a second life. The misuse of advertisements in these novels taps into the at-once stimulating and disturbing implications of anonymity in modern life brought within everyone's reach through the daily press. Audiences were not just reading about other people's lives in the newspaper. They were using the newspaper to change their own.Less
This chapter looks at the reading communities formed through the personal advertisements on the newspaper's front page. Its second column came to be known in the late 19th century as the “agony column” for its emphasis on personal distress, ranging from pathetic tales of runaway husbands to plaintive cries for attention from lonely hearts. Such heartfelt pleas did not escape the attention of the school of sensation novelists, who were quick to capitalize on the criminal possibilities of the most interactive section of the newspaper through an improbable number of phony marriage announcements, misreported obituaries, and unanswered missing-persons inquiries among their fictional narratives. Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, Ellen Wood's East Lynne, and Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret illustrate how the newspaper could be used to begin a second life. The misuse of advertisements in these novels taps into the at-once stimulating and disturbing implications of anonymity in modern life brought within everyone's reach through the daily press. Audiences were not just reading about other people's lives in the newspaper. They were using the newspaper to change their own.
Irene Tucker
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226922935
- eISBN:
- 9780226922959
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226922959.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The Enlightenment has one enduring historical paradox. Though it strove to create a society wherein all human are by their very nature equal, it also was the era where skin color became viewed as a ...
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The Enlightenment has one enduring historical paradox. Though it strove to create a society wherein all human are by their very nature equal, it also was the era where skin color became viewed as a difference in human capacity. This chapter takes a close look and study at Wilkie Collins’s novel The Woman in White. The chapter aims to explore the logic of race from the perspective of the impulse to literalize—to make like things manifest into something that can be witnessed. The chapter continues to argue that this impulse to make likeness perceptible emerged mainly as a solution to a particular Enlightenment problem: to make likeness instantaneously visible. The chapter shifts in analysis from Collins novel to the 1856 murder trial of the Rugeley Poisoner, William Palmer, which inspired it. Palmer was a physician that was charged with poisoning his patients under the guise of medicating them. In this exploration of likeness and sameness, Collins’s novel is well suited to the task.Less
The Enlightenment has one enduring historical paradox. Though it strove to create a society wherein all human are by their very nature equal, it also was the era where skin color became viewed as a difference in human capacity. This chapter takes a close look and study at Wilkie Collins’s novel The Woman in White. The chapter aims to explore the logic of race from the perspective of the impulse to literalize—to make like things manifest into something that can be witnessed. The chapter continues to argue that this impulse to make likeness perceptible emerged mainly as a solution to a particular Enlightenment problem: to make likeness instantaneously visible. The chapter shifts in analysis from Collins novel to the 1856 murder trial of the Rugeley Poisoner, William Palmer, which inspired it. Palmer was a physician that was charged with poisoning his patients under the guise of medicating them. In this exploration of likeness and sameness, Collins’s novel is well suited to the task.
Helen Small
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198184911
- eISBN:
- 9780191674396
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184911.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book contributes to the interdisciplinary study of insanity. Focusing on the figure of the love-mad woman, the author presents a significant reassessment of the ways in which British medical ...
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This book contributes to the interdisciplinary study of insanity. Focusing on the figure of the love-mad woman, the author presents a significant reassessment of the ways in which British medical writers and novelists of the nineteenth century thought about madness, about femininity, and about narrative convention. At the centre of the book are studies of novels by Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens, as well as insights into the historical and literary interest of hitherto neglected writings by Charles Maturin, Lady Caroline Lamb, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and others. Stories about women who go mad when they lose their lovers were extraordinarily popular during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, attracting novelists, poets, dramatists, musicians, painters, and sculptors. The representative figure of madness ceased to be the madman in chains and became instead the woman whose insanity was an extension of her female condition. This book traces the fortunes of love-mad women in fiction and in medicine between about 1800 and 1865. In literary terms, these dates demarcate the period between the decline of sentimentalism and the emergence of sensation fiction. In medical terms, they mark out a key stage in the history of insanity, beginning with major reform initiatives and ending with the establishment in 1865 of the Medico-Psychological Association. This study challenges previous assumptions about the relationship between medicine and the novel.Less
This book contributes to the interdisciplinary study of insanity. Focusing on the figure of the love-mad woman, the author presents a significant reassessment of the ways in which British medical writers and novelists of the nineteenth century thought about madness, about femininity, and about narrative convention. At the centre of the book are studies of novels by Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens, as well as insights into the historical and literary interest of hitherto neglected writings by Charles Maturin, Lady Caroline Lamb, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and others. Stories about women who go mad when they lose their lovers were extraordinarily popular during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, attracting novelists, poets, dramatists, musicians, painters, and sculptors. The representative figure of madness ceased to be the madman in chains and became instead the woman whose insanity was an extension of her female condition. This book traces the fortunes of love-mad women in fiction and in medicine between about 1800 and 1865. In literary terms, these dates demarcate the period between the decline of sentimentalism and the emergence of sensation fiction. In medical terms, they mark out a key stage in the history of insanity, beginning with major reform initiatives and ending with the establishment in 1865 of the Medico-Psychological Association. This study challenges previous assumptions about the relationship between medicine and the novel.
Matthew Rubery
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195369267
- eISBN:
- 9780199871148
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195369267.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Nowhere is the borrowing from newspapers by novelists so clear as in the case of shipwrecks, the most frequently reported disaster in the Victorian press. This chapter shows that novelists used this ...
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Nowhere is the borrowing from newspapers by novelists so clear as in the case of shipwrecks, the most frequently reported disaster in the Victorian press. This chapter shows that novelists used this wildly popular feature drawn from the pages of Lloyd's List to highlight the impact news could have on domestic life. Although the shipping news has often been regarded as an exclusively male interest of sailors, merchants, and investors, this section of the newspaper was read with equal fervor by domestic women separated by the sea from loved ones. We know this through a remarkable sequence of parallel scenes across the 19th-century novel in which the revelation of private love takes place at the moment when the newspaper ensures that the heroine's admiration will be shared by all of England. Novelists as different as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Charlotte Yonge all recognized the counterintuitive way in which public media enabled the expression of private feeling, a response strikingly evident on dramatic occasions such as the loss of a ship at sea. Such scenes vividly illustrate a new approach to understanding catastrophe in Victorian fiction.Less
Nowhere is the borrowing from newspapers by novelists so clear as in the case of shipwrecks, the most frequently reported disaster in the Victorian press. This chapter shows that novelists used this wildly popular feature drawn from the pages of Lloyd's List to highlight the impact news could have on domestic life. Although the shipping news has often been regarded as an exclusively male interest of sailors, merchants, and investors, this section of the newspaper was read with equal fervor by domestic women separated by the sea from loved ones. We know this through a remarkable sequence of parallel scenes across the 19th-century novel in which the revelation of private love takes place at the moment when the newspaper ensures that the heroine's admiration will be shared by all of England. Novelists as different as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Charlotte Yonge all recognized the counterintuitive way in which public media enabled the expression of private feeling, a response strikingly evident on dramatic occasions such as the loss of a ship at sea. Such scenes vividly illustrate a new approach to understanding catastrophe in Victorian fiction.
Joseph McAleer
- Published in print:
- 1992
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198203292
- eISBN:
- 9780191675843
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198203292.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
This book is concerned with the reading public which Wilkie Collins and George Orwell tried to describe, during the period when Orwell wrote and which Collins would have recognised: from 1914 until ...
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This book is concerned with the reading public which Wilkie Collins and George Orwell tried to describe, during the period when Orwell wrote and which Collins would have recognised: from 1914 until 1950. The book examines three publishing houses, noting in particular their complicated editorial policies within the increasingly ‘mass’ market. These are Mills & Boon, D. C. Thomson, and the Religious Tract Society. Mills & Boon and D. C. Thomson were the quintessential publishers of the early 20th century: essentially commercial enterprises, each firm reflected changing social values within its publications while courting their readerships. The Religious Tract Society was less successful: a 19th-century foundation embodying the spirit of Victorian liberalism, it failed to adapt to a changing (and increasingly secular) world, with disastrous results.Less
This book is concerned with the reading public which Wilkie Collins and George Orwell tried to describe, during the period when Orwell wrote and which Collins would have recognised: from 1914 until 1950. The book examines three publishing houses, noting in particular their complicated editorial policies within the increasingly ‘mass’ market. These are Mills & Boon, D. C. Thomson, and the Religious Tract Society. Mills & Boon and D. C. Thomson were the quintessential publishers of the early 20th century: essentially commercial enterprises, each firm reflected changing social values within its publications while courting their readerships. The Religious Tract Society was less successful: a 19th-century foundation embodying the spirit of Victorian liberalism, it failed to adapt to a changing (and increasingly secular) world, with disastrous results.
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719089770
- eISBN:
- 9781781708651
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719089770.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines Collins's rewriting of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in Basil (1852), paying particular attention to the transformation of fears related to modern technology and visual culture. ...
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This chapter examines Collins's rewriting of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in Basil (1852), paying particular attention to the transformation of fears related to modern technology and visual culture. Just like Shelley's mad scientist, Basil is fatally pursued and persecuted by a monstrous being. If Mary Shelley sought to revamp the supernatural by moving away from ‘the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment’, Collins revamps dusty ghosts by setting his tale in London at the heart of modern culture. As a consequence, the sublime assault on the senses of the Romantic traveller exploring the Alps becomes an assault on the senses of the consumer. While Dr. Frankenstein is blinded to the horror of his experiment, Basil is bedazzled by the lures of commodity culture, which creates desires and fancies that haunt him and literally lead him to the brink of a precipice. Material culture is a ‘phantasmagoria,’ in Walter Benjamin's terms, which blinds and maddens the consumer, turning the phantasmagorias of the marketplace into a horror motion picture.Less
This chapter examines Collins's rewriting of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in Basil (1852), paying particular attention to the transformation of fears related to modern technology and visual culture. Just like Shelley's mad scientist, Basil is fatally pursued and persecuted by a monstrous being. If Mary Shelley sought to revamp the supernatural by moving away from ‘the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment’, Collins revamps dusty ghosts by setting his tale in London at the heart of modern culture. As a consequence, the sublime assault on the senses of the Romantic traveller exploring the Alps becomes an assault on the senses of the consumer. While Dr. Frankenstein is blinded to the horror of his experiment, Basil is bedazzled by the lures of commodity culture, which creates desires and fancies that haunt him and literally lead him to the brink of a precipice. Material culture is a ‘phantasmagoria,’ in Walter Benjamin's terms, which blinds and maddens the consumer, turning the phantasmagorias of the marketplace into a horror motion picture.
Laura Eastlake
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198833031
- eISBN:
- 9780191871351
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198833031.003.0005
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval, British and Irish History: BCE to 500CE
This chapter outlines how the British empire from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries was transformed from a naval, commercialist enterprise, for which ancient Greece and the maritime ...
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This chapter outlines how the British empire from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries was transformed from a naval, commercialist enterprise, for which ancient Greece and the maritime Athenian empire had proven a much more fitting parallel, to an expansionist, land-based project, which drew increasingly on Roman models. It outlines how imperial expansion from the 1840s catalysed a shift away from the mercantile manliness of previous centuries, towards the privileging of militaristic masculinities more in keeping with a robust, expanding empire. The second part of the chapter looks in detail at Wilkie Collins’s first published novel Antonina (1850), which, in a marked departure from the ‘antique fictions’ of earlier nineteenth-century novelists, embraces Rome in order to celebrate a liberal imperial style of masculinity and a hybrid Romano-Germanic cultural identity for Britain’s imperial male.Less
This chapter outlines how the British empire from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries was transformed from a naval, commercialist enterprise, for which ancient Greece and the maritime Athenian empire had proven a much more fitting parallel, to an expansionist, land-based project, which drew increasingly on Roman models. It outlines how imperial expansion from the 1840s catalysed a shift away from the mercantile manliness of previous centuries, towards the privileging of militaristic masculinities more in keeping with a robust, expanding empire. The second part of the chapter looks in detail at Wilkie Collins’s first published novel Antonina (1850), which, in a marked departure from the ‘antique fictions’ of earlier nineteenth-century novelists, embraces Rome in order to celebrate a liberal imperial style of masculinity and a hybrid Romano-Germanic cultural identity for Britain’s imperial male.
Nicholas Saul (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853236795
- eISBN:
- 9781846313950
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780853236795.003.0009
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter examines an aspect of the phenomenology of the Gypsies in European cultural history through an analysis of the European side of the encounter, in a novel by nineteenth-century English ...
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This chapter examines an aspect of the phenomenology of the Gypsies in European cultural history through an analysis of the European side of the encounter, in a novel by nineteenth-century English writer Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone: A Romance (1868). It shows that The Moonstone is intimately concerned with the problem of Orientalism in British colonial India. It argues that Collins' novel also has something valuable to say in this context about the discourse on Gypsies.Less
This chapter examines an aspect of the phenomenology of the Gypsies in European cultural history through an analysis of the European side of the encounter, in a novel by nineteenth-century English writer Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone: A Romance (1868). It shows that The Moonstone is intimately concerned with the problem of Orientalism in British colonial India. It argues that Collins' novel also has something valuable to say in this context about the discourse on Gypsies.
Chris Baldick
- Published in print:
- 1990
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122494
- eISBN:
- 9780191671432
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122494.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Like Herman Melville, Wilkie Collins has whetted the appetite for medical villainy, only to dispel the experimenter's Gothic allure by reminding us of the real mundane fallibility of chemists and ...
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Like Herman Melville, Wilkie Collins has whetted the appetite for medical villainy, only to dispel the experimenter's Gothic allure by reminding us of the real mundane fallibility of chemists and doctors: accident, incompetence, timidity, and the paltry distractions of worldly existence all bar the physician's path to heroic transgression. Traps of this kind are a typical parodic ploy of literary realism. From Don Quixote to Ulysses and beyond, the tradition of the novel has relied heavily upon bathetic deflation of romance or sentimentality, but in the nineteenth century this tendency flourished to the point at which it became a dominant novelistic ethic. Among the more promising candidates for this ritual sacrifice of the Romantic ego to the Reality Principle was the figure of the aspiring doctor, anatomist, or chemist.Less
Like Herman Melville, Wilkie Collins has whetted the appetite for medical villainy, only to dispel the experimenter's Gothic allure by reminding us of the real mundane fallibility of chemists and doctors: accident, incompetence, timidity, and the paltry distractions of worldly existence all bar the physician's path to heroic transgression. Traps of this kind are a typical parodic ploy of literary realism. From Don Quixote to Ulysses and beyond, the tradition of the novel has relied heavily upon bathetic deflation of romance or sentimentality, but in the nineteenth century this tendency flourished to the point at which it became a dominant novelistic ethic. Among the more promising candidates for this ritual sacrifice of the Romantic ego to the Reality Principle was the figure of the aspiring doctor, anatomist, or chemist.
Joseph McAleer
- Published in print:
- 1992
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198203292
- eISBN:
- 9780191675843
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198203292.003.0009
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
It is clear that Wilkie Collins and George Orwell were largely correct in their conclusions about the reading public and the popular publishing industry. They both claimed that reading among both ...
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It is clear that Wilkie Collins and George Orwell were largely correct in their conclusions about the reading public and the popular publishing industry. They both claimed that reading among both adults and children in the lower-middle and working classes was a popular leisure activity. This book agrees with two of Orwell's assertions about the contents of boys' weeklies and romantic novels: the resolution of good fortune; there was no social or collective solution, and no alternative image of social improvement or organisation was presented. In fact, publishers such as Mills & Boon and D. C. Thomson were careful to make their plots as apolitical and ‘uncontroversial’ as possible. However, the ‘Unknown Public’, which this book has tried to define, did not graduate to ‘high-brow’ novels and non-fiction, as Collins predicted with robust optimism.Less
It is clear that Wilkie Collins and George Orwell were largely correct in their conclusions about the reading public and the popular publishing industry. They both claimed that reading among both adults and children in the lower-middle and working classes was a popular leisure activity. This book agrees with two of Orwell's assertions about the contents of boys' weeklies and romantic novels: the resolution of good fortune; there was no social or collective solution, and no alternative image of social improvement or organisation was presented. In fact, publishers such as Mills & Boon and D. C. Thomson were careful to make their plots as apolitical and ‘uncontroversial’ as possible. However, the ‘Unknown Public’, which this book has tried to define, did not graduate to ‘high-brow’ novels and non-fiction, as Collins predicted with robust optimism.
Valerie Pedlar
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853238393
- eISBN:
- 9781846314186
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846314186
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Victorian literature is rife with scenes of madness, with mental disorder functioning as everything from a simple plot device to a commentary on the foundations of Victorian society. But while ...
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Victorian literature is rife with scenes of madness, with mental disorder functioning as everything from a simple plot device to a commentary on the foundations of Victorian society. But while madness in Victorian fiction has been much studied, most scholarship has focused on the portrayal of madness in women; male mental disorder in the period has suffered comparative neglect. This book corrects this imbalance by exploring a wide range of Victorian writings to consider the relationship between the portrayal of mental illness in literary works and the portrayal of similar disorders in the writings of doctors and psychologists. The book presents in-depth studies of Dickens' Barnaby Rudge, Tennyson's Maud, Wilkie Collins' Basil and Trollope's He Knew He Was Right, considering each work in the context of Victorian understandings — and fears — of mental degeneracy.Less
Victorian literature is rife with scenes of madness, with mental disorder functioning as everything from a simple plot device to a commentary on the foundations of Victorian society. But while madness in Victorian fiction has been much studied, most scholarship has focused on the portrayal of madness in women; male mental disorder in the period has suffered comparative neglect. This book corrects this imbalance by exploring a wide range of Victorian writings to consider the relationship between the portrayal of mental illness in literary works and the portrayal of similar disorders in the writings of doctors and psychologists. The book presents in-depth studies of Dickens' Barnaby Rudge, Tennyson's Maud, Wilkie Collins' Basil and Trollope's He Knew He Was Right, considering each work in the context of Victorian understandings — and fears — of mental degeneracy.
Ruth Rosaler
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198769743
- eISBN:
- 9780191822582
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769743.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Criticism/Theory
Chapter Three examines witty meta-narrative instances of sustained implicatures in sensation fiction. These implicatures encourage the reader not only to grasp unarticulated information but also to ...
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Chapter Three examines witty meta-narrative instances of sustained implicatures in sensation fiction. These implicatures encourage the reader not only to grasp unarticulated information but also to appreciate the teasing, riddle-like quality of the narration. The chapter discusses implicatures in M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, and Wilkie Collins’s Armadale. These implicatures satirize the realist tendency towards limited omniscience and play on an implied assumption of, rather than a lack of, reader knowledge. In these novels, implicature is neither a means towards acknowledging social convention nor an aid to characterization; it is rather an end in itself. This last chapter comments on the enjoyment readers derive from narrative indirection and the stylistic performativity it makes available to the author.Less
Chapter Three examines witty meta-narrative instances of sustained implicatures in sensation fiction. These implicatures encourage the reader not only to grasp unarticulated information but also to appreciate the teasing, riddle-like quality of the narration. The chapter discusses implicatures in M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, and Wilkie Collins’s Armadale. These implicatures satirize the realist tendency towards limited omniscience and play on an implied assumption of, rather than a lack of, reader knowledge. In these novels, implicature is neither a means towards acknowledging social convention nor an aid to characterization; it is rather an end in itself. This last chapter comments on the enjoyment readers derive from narrative indirection and the stylistic performativity it makes available to the author.
Helena Ifill
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781784995133
- eISBN:
- 9781526136275
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784995133.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book explores the range of ways in which the two leading sensation authors of the 1860s, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, engaged with nineteenth-century ideas about how the ...
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This book explores the range of ways in which the two leading sensation authors of the 1860s, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, engaged with nineteenth-century ideas about how the personality is formed and the extent to which it can be influenced either by the subject or by others.
Innovative readings of Braddon’s and Collins’s sensation novels – some of them canonical, others less well-known – demonstrate how they reflect, employ, and challenge Victorian theories of heredity, degeneration, willpower, inherent constitution, education, insanity, upbringing and social circumstance. Far from presenting a reductive depiction of ‘nature’ versus ‘nurture’, Braddon and Collins show the creation of character to be a complex interplay of internal and external factors that are as much reliant on chance as on the efforts of the people who try to exert control over an individual’s development. Their works raise challenging questions about responsibility and self-determinism and, as the analyses of these texts reveals, demonstrate an acute awareness that the way in which character formation is understood fundamentally influences the way people (both in fiction and reality) are perceived, judged and treated.
Drawing on material from a variety of genres, including Victorian medical textbooks, scientific and sociological treatises, specialist and popular periodical literature, Creating character shows how sensation authors situated themselves at the intersections of established and developing, conservative and radical, learned and sensationalist thought about how identity could be made and modified.Less
This book explores the range of ways in which the two leading sensation authors of the 1860s, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, engaged with nineteenth-century ideas about how the personality is formed and the extent to which it can be influenced either by the subject or by others.
Innovative readings of Braddon’s and Collins’s sensation novels – some of them canonical, others less well-known – demonstrate how they reflect, employ, and challenge Victorian theories of heredity, degeneration, willpower, inherent constitution, education, insanity, upbringing and social circumstance. Far from presenting a reductive depiction of ‘nature’ versus ‘nurture’, Braddon and Collins show the creation of character to be a complex interplay of internal and external factors that are as much reliant on chance as on the efforts of the people who try to exert control over an individual’s development. Their works raise challenging questions about responsibility and self-determinism and, as the analyses of these texts reveals, demonstrate an acute awareness that the way in which character formation is understood fundamentally influences the way people (both in fiction and reality) are perceived, judged and treated.
Drawing on material from a variety of genres, including Victorian medical textbooks, scientific and sociological treatises, specialist and popular periodical literature, Creating character shows how sensation authors situated themselves at the intersections of established and developing, conservative and radical, learned and sensationalist thought about how identity could be made and modified.
