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At the turn of the nineteenth century, publishing houses in London, New York, Paris, Stuttgart, and Berlin produced books in ever greater numbers. But it was not just the advent of mass printing that created the era's “bookish” culture. According to this book, romantic writing and romantic writers played a crucial role in adjusting readers to this increasingly international and overflowing literary environment. Learning how to use and to want books occurred through more than the technological, commercial, or legal conditions that made the growing proliferation of books possible; the making of such bibliographic fantasies was importantly a product of the symbolic operations contained within books as well. Examining novels, critical editions, gift books, translations, and illustrated books, as well as the communities who made them, this book tells a wide-ranging story of the book's identity at the turn of the nineteenth century. In so doing, it shows how many of the most pressing modern communicative concerns are not unique to the digital age but emerged with a particular sense of urgency during the bookish upheavals of the romantic era.

This book, which contributes to the history and theory of scientific knowledge, explores the paradoxes of our modern ideal of objectivity, in particular its emphasis on the impersonality and disinterestedness of truth. How, the author asks, did this idea of selfless knowledge come to be established and moralized in the nineteenth century? The author shows that for nineteenth-century scientists, novelists, poets, and philosophers, access to the truth depended on conditions of such profound self-abnegation that pursuit of it might be taken as tantamount to the pursuit of death. The Victorians, he argues, were dying to know in the sense that they could imagine achieving pure knowledge only in a condition where the body ceases to make its claims: to achieve enlightenment, virtue, and salvation, one must die. This book is ultimately a study of this moral ideal of epistemology. But it is also something much more: a spirited defense of the difficult pursuit of objectivity, the ethical significance of sacrifice, and the importance of finding a shareable form of knowledge.

How did banking, borrowing, investing, and even losing money—in other words, participating in the modern financial system—come to seem like routine activities of everyday life? This book addresses this question by examining the history of financial instruments and representations of finance in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Chronicling the process by which some of our most important conceptual categories were naturalized, the author explores complex relationships among forms of writing that are not usually viewed together, from bills of exchange and bank checks, to realist novels and Romantic poems, to economic theory and financial journalism. Taking up all early forms of financial and monetary writing, she argues that these genres mediated for early modern Britons the operations of a market system organized around credit and debt. By arguing that genre is a critical tool for historical and theoretical analysis, and an agent in the events that formed the modern world, the author offers a new way to appreciate the character of the credit economy and demonstrates the contribution historians and literary scholars can make to understanding its operations. Much more than an exploration of writing on and around money, the book offers insights into the evolution of disciplines and the separation of factual and fictional genres.

While the Victorian novel famously describes, catalogs, and inundates the reader with things, the protocols for reading it have long enjoined readers not to interpret most of what crowds its pages. This book explores apparently inconsequential objects in popular Victorian texts to make contact with their fugitive meanings. Developing an innovative approach to analyzing nineteenth-century fiction, the book reconnects the things readers unwittingly ignore to the stories they tell. Building its case around objects from three well-known Victorian novels—the mahogany furniture in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, the calico curtains in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, and “Negro head” tobacco in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations—it argues that these things are connected to histories that the novels barely acknowledge, generating darker meanings outside their symbolic systems. Contributing to the new field of object studies in the humanities, the book pushes readers' thinking about things beyond established concepts of commodity and fetish.

Nineteenth-century Britain did not invent chronic illness, but its social climate allowed hundreds of men and women, from intellectuals to factory workers, to assume the identity of “invalid.” Whether they suffered from a temporary condition or an incurable disease, many wrote about their experiences, leaving behind a rich and varied record of disability in Victorian Britain. Using an array of primary sources, this book constructs a cultural history of invalidism. It describes the ways that evangelicalism, industrialization, and changing patterns of doctor–patient relationships all converged to allow a culture of invalidism to flourish, and explores what it meant for a person to be designated—or to deem oneself—an invalid. Highlighting how different types of invalids developed distinct rhetorical strategies, the book shows that, contrary to popular belief, many of the period's most prominent and prolific invalids were men, while many women found invalidism an unexpected opportunity for authority. In uncovering the wide range of cultural and social responses to notions of incapacity, the book sheds light on our own historical moment, similarly fraught with equally complicated attitudes toward mental and physical disorder.

In the mid-Victorian era, liberalism was a practical politics: it had a party, it informed legislation, and it had adherents who identified with and expressed it as opinion. It was also the first British political movement to depend more on people than property, and on opinion rather than interest. But how would these subjects of liberal politics actually live liberalism? To answer this question, this book focuses on the key concept of individuation—how it is embodied in politics and daily life and how it is expressed through opinion, discussion, and sincerity. These are concerns that have been absent from commentary on the liberal subject. This book argues that the properties of liberalism—citizenship, the vote, the candidate, and reform, among others—were developed in response to a chaotic and antagonistic world. In exploring how political liberalism imagined its impact on Victorian society, the book reveals an entirely new and unexpected prehistory of our modern liberal politics.

In Britain between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, the term literature, once a term for erudition and study in general, gradually took on its familiar, modern meaning and came to designate a narrow canon of exclusively imaginative works. As many histories of the disciplines, publishing, canon-formation, and taste have established, literature emerged in this period as a distinctive sort of object of professional study, pedagogy, and marketing. This book, however, explores how that reinvention of literature also represented an event in the history of the emotions and personal life, indelibly marked by the imperatives of a long era of sensibility. Literature, in that new sense of the word, was also a name given to an object of the nation’s intimate affections. Literature solicited and demanded readers’ love, not simply their admiration. To do justice to the affective dimensions of the history of literariness, this book traces the institutions, reading practices, and etiquettes of appreciation that were developed to bring poetry and fiction home, into actual interiors and the interior spaces of the mind. It considers treatises on taste, early literary histories, the new science of bibliography, testaments of bibliophilia, almanacs, commonplace books, albums, physicians’ neurological accounts of reading, and middlebrow travelogues mapping authors’ homes and haunts. Throughout, this book emphasizes the complexity of the literary cults it examines, recovering love’s links with negative, edgy, and even gothic emotions. It shows why, since the dawn of the literary era, English studies has had a love-hate relationship to love.

This book traces the claim that England at the turn of the nineteenth century through the Romantic period and beyond was not what we know today as a “Western” country. It identifies Occidentalism as a set of discourses articulating a decades-long process that made England Western across a wide range of transformative economic, political, and cultural processes. From the late eighteenth century on, a range of interior populations, today considered white and English, came to be seen from a certain privileged standpoint as culturally and racially separate and inferior (savage, uncivilized, Orientalized), hence not fit as members of the nation, alien, when compared with an emergent notion of a “we” or an “us,” those considered more appropriately at home in a Westernizing and modernizing England. The process involved the development and consolidation of a new cultural and civilizational notion of the West, an Occident to which England could eventually claim to belong. Unlike much postcolonial criticism, this book reads metropolitan and colonial spaces as overlapping and for a time inseparable, with many of the same discourses of power, race, and claims of a civilizing mission deployed internally as well as externally against populations who were regarded as inferior in cultural, racial and civilizational terms--not merely class-based. Thus the space that would eventually come to be established as the Occident—the site of a culture or civilization claiming to be democratic, modern, fair, liberal, progressive, scientific, secular, rational, productive, and so on—had first to be Occidentalized.

This book is an in-depth study of the shocking, groundbreaking, and sometimes beautiful writings of the gentlemen of the “heroic age” of geology and of the contribution these men made to the literary culture of their day. For these men, literature was an essential part of the practice of science itself, as important to their efforts as mapmaking, fieldwork, and observation. The reading and writing of imaginative literatures helped them to discover, imagine, debate, and give shape and meaning to millions of years of previously undiscovered earth history. Borrowing from the historical fictions of Walter Scott and the poetry of Lord Byron, they invented geology as a science, discovered many of the creatures we now call the dinosaurs, and were the first to unravel and map the sequence and structure of stratified rock. As the book shows, they did this by rejecting the grand narratives of older theories of the earth or of biblical cosmogony: theirs would be a humble science, faithfully recording minute details and leaving the big picture for future generations to paint. It also reveals how these scientists—just as they had drawn inspiration from their literary predecessors—gave Victorian realist novelists such as George Eliot, Charles Kingsley, and Charles Dickens a powerful language with which to create dark and disturbing ruptures in the too-seductive sweep of story.

Literary critics have taken the realist novel’s claim to referentiality for granted, and have treated the act of referring as an unanalyzable simple, and the characters and things that are referred to as sites for an examination of the affective engagement they produce, or the sociocultural or historical conditions that produce them. Object Lessons draws on analyses of reference in the philosophy of language to show how novels refer to objects. The logic of the referential act itself—the conditions that must obtain in order for a reference to make sense—is a fascination for authors of the realist novel, whose challenge to build a world out of unreal objects entails an examination of how a relationship between words and objects happens in the first place. Through an examination of novels by George Meredith, William Makepeace Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Iris Murdoch that provide allegories of language use in their descriptions, characters, and plots, Object Lessons not only shows how novels make references, but how they are about referring.