BAVS2013 Royal Holloway, 29th-31st August: Nineteenth-Century
Numbers
Abstracts by Panel Order
Thursday 3pm Panel A
A1 President’s Panel: The Victorian Economy New Directions in Research
A2 MX034A Measurement and Risk
Irene Wiltshire, The Age of Measurement ‘’Tis three feet long, and two feet wide’: the rise of land
surveying and its challenge to the Romantic aesthetic.
This paper would look at the rise of land surveying (with its reliance on numerical measuring) in
response to the demands of the built environment and its challenge to the Romantic aesthetic.
Wordsworth’s famous words from his poem ‘The Thorn’ may be seen as reductive or even as risible
in the context of the poem. They may also be seen as the reaction of a practical and unimaginative
man asked to describe a particular natural feature. For the Romantic poet each natural feature is
imbued with associations of feeling; for the practical man the same feature is merely something to
be measured and recorded numerically.
This paper would look at the development of land surveying and its establishment as a profession
based on accurate measuring, with its own professional apparatus including the Institution of
Chartered Surveyors founded in 1868, by which time more people lived in an urban environment
than on the land. Consideration would also be given to the confrontational relationship between the
Romantic aesthetic, as expressed in Romantic poetry and Romantic landscapes, and this new
discipline with its more practical and less imaginative approach. These opposing views may be
illustrated by the damming of natural lakes to create reservoirs to provide water to the expanding
industrial centres. A prime example is the building of the Thirlmere dam in Cumbria, in the 1890s, so
that Manchester, the city of James Joule and Joseph Whitworth, could benefit from the despoilment
of natural landscape and destruction of rural livelihoods : a triumph for the age of measurement.
Anna Mohr ETH Zurich, Travelling Numbers – Medicine, the Empire and the Making of British
Statistics
The early Victorian period saw the formation and consolidation of what has been termed the ‘British
statistical movement’. The involved statisticians were eager collectors of numbers, and aspired to
devise of methods that would allow them to understand the workings of society and remedy its ills.
The collection of medical data such as the mortality and morbidity of social groups was crucial for
the intellectual and the institutional development of the ‘statistical movement’.
This paper will investigate the British imperial project on the Indian subcontinent as an outlet of
early ‘statistical enthusiasm’. Medical practitioners serving with the troops of the East India
Company and the Royal Army propagated the collection, compilation, and analysis of death and
disease statistics in order to get a grip on the high mortality and morbidity among Europeans in
India. Not only the statistical data, but in many cases these medical statisticians themselves travelled
from the colonial ‘periphery’ to the metropolitan ‘centre’ and entered the incipient statistical
discourse. The paper will follow statistical knowledge and personnel on their journey across the
Empire and try to assess its impact on early Victorian statistics. It will thus situate the history of
statistics in the larger framework of the history of the British Empire and its multifarious connections
with and repercussions in the metropolis. It will argue that ‘colonial knowledge’ and imperial
connections took part in the formation of the British ‘statistical movement’ and that this impact can
best be studied by looking at debates surrounding medical issues such as the impact of
environmental factors on health.
James Kneale and Samuel Randalls, University College London, Bean Counters? Weather, climate
and insurance calculations in Britain, c.1840-1900
In Britain by the 1840s actuarial practice seemed to have established a scientific basis for the
calculation of risk. To do this, insurance offices had to collect and collate many different kinds of
information, translating it into numerical form. Numbers begat more numbers, according to
actuarial principles.
At the same time the development of meteorological networks in countries like the UK created
centres of calculation in which meteorological records could be assembled and discussed as data
flowed in from the counties. These scientific networks were paralleled by the development of an
actuarial knowledge of weather and climate that was derived from statistical information from
insurance claims allied to expert judgments.
Drawing on the examples of hail insurance and life insurance for travel overseas, this paper explores
the importance of numbers in creating actuarial forms of weather and climate knowledge 18401900. We argue that insurers drew from broad scientific understandings of weather and climate, but
formed their own expertise in applying principles to the pricing of policies. Indeed, in the case of hail
insurance, insurers constructed extensive statistical analyses of hail risk with a close attention to the
detail of such figures in developing a robust industry that was not exposed to areas (geographical or
by crop type) perceived as being too high a level of hail risk. While policy rates were debated
numerically, the paper evaluates the diverse ways numbers were discussed and hypothesized about
within the networks of people involved in weather and climate insurance.
A3 MX001 Numbering the Mass and the Spaces of Fiction
Jay Parker, Leeds, Numbers, individuality, and the patriarchy of democracy in The Secret Agent
In this paper I will focus on issues of gender and individuation in relation to liberal democracy. I will
argue that The Secret Agent (1907) deconstructs the individualism at the heart of liberal democracy,
which relates to democratic process’s need to map a person onto a number. The starting point for
my analysis will be Conrad’s own presentation of the number nineteen in his dedication for the
novel ‘a simple tale of the XIX century.’ I will argue that this number introduces a deconstruction of
liberal individualism which posits it as deeply patriarchal, and that this patriarchy places limits on
men and women which restrict yet also constitute their individual agency. The relative power of men
and women in the novel means that although men also suffer from these structures, their most
tragic effect is the erasure of women from the public and political sphere. Futhermore, I will show
how The Secret Agent uses a tragedic idiom to deconstruct a rationalist liberal rhetoric of freedom
and equality. The novel’s allusions to Greek tragedy remind us of modern democracy’s relationship
to the Athenian political system which was blemished by oligarchy, slavery, and the
disenfranchisement of women, highlighting how contemporary versions of liberal democracy
reproduce aspects of this problematic heritage.
Peter Garratt, Durham, The Feeling of Numerical Fact: Herbert Spencer, Realism and the Status of
Numbers
'Great magnitudes, great durations, great numbers,' Herbert Spencer writes in First Principles (1855),
'are none of them actually conceived, but are all of them conceived more or less symbolically'.
Spencer touches here not just on the notion of a quantitative mathematical sublime inherited by the
Victorian period from Kant, but also, somewhat more modishly, on the mid nineteenth-century
concern with the dubious facticity of positive numbers. By end of Victoria's reign, unreliability was
felt to haunt even the simplest of numerical facts, as the famously vacillating opening to Conrad's
Lord Jim (1901) attests ('He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet...'). As Spencer and Conrad
acknowledge in different ways, numerical description was both abstract and immediate, caught up
in larger norms of representation despite its apparently direct relation to real quantities of matter
and things, and its necessity to commonsense judgment. Moreover, the very familiarity of numbers
belied their abstract or idealist nature, which estranged them from the substantial reality to which
they could be applied as tools of description. This paper will look at the function and status of
numerical description - as a marker of measurement, physical dimension, quantitative detail,
magnitude, and so on - in realist fiction before the emergence of Conrad's impressionism. It will
suggest that the invoking of numerical accuracy as a gambit of realism can be found entangled with
other techniques of implied observational and spectatorial rigour, as examples from narrative
moments from Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy will uncover, and yet that this very
task is beset by the feeling that innocent integers tend to scale to a point beyond mental
conceivability, or otherwise lose their purchase on the real, just as Spencer proposed.
Sophie Gilmartin, Royal Holloway, An echoing footstep and the tramp of the mob: the impact of
the footstep on Victorian writing
Victorian workers were designated commonly as ‘hands’, a synecdoche which reduced their
individuality to a commodified body part. As ‘hands’ they were a useful, controllable, functional part
of a whole – not the whole of themselves, from which they were alienated – but of a capitalist
system that required them in great numbers. While ‘hands’ signified a numerosity that was
reassuringly biddable, ‘feet’, and especially the sound and abrasion of the foot against the ground,
carried very different cultural associations in this period. As early as Crusoe’s terror of the single
footprint in the sand, the mark of the foot and sound of a footstep has meant something about the
power of singleness , of the individual. In A Tale of Two Cities Dickens uses the ‘echoes of footsteps’
to indicate many things: the urban sound of unknown people in the streets, their particular
footsteps evoking an individuality which is mysteriously heard and present, but unknown; the foot
tramp of the revolutionary mob in Paris; the traumatized mind of Dr Manette, whose footsteps at
night mean he has remembered his Bastille cell, and the shoe-making that helped him to survive
imaginatively his prison doom to know few footsteps other than his own. Like Van Gogh’s many
drawings of workmen’s boots, which I shall also discuss, Manette’s shoes help him to imaginatively
create individuals to fit the footwear.
In this paper I will explore the powerfully evocative single footstep, and the great numbers of
footsteps associated with the threatening mob. I will argue that even in the tramp of the mob the
single footstep is heard by many Victorian writers, preventing them from dismissing a mob as great
numbers of the same, and forcing them and their readers to make the sometimes painful
recognition of the individual’s tread and impact, even amidst numerosity. In addition to A Tale of
Two Cities, I will consider Dickens’ Night Walks, selections of Thomas Hardy’s poetry and fiction,
some social realist artists, and some fascinating but forgotten stories by Arthur Quiller-Couch.
A4 MBS02-3 Dickens and Commodities on the Move
Hannah Lewis-Bill, Exeter, Quantifying the representation of China and Chinese commodities in
Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit: Facts, Figures and Flora Finching
In Dickens’s Little Dorrit, anxieties about the increasing presence and number of Chinese
commodities such as tea and chinaware in the British market place play a central role. In addition to
this, the inclusion within the narrative of references to Chinese nationals and their arrival on British
shores, along with a genuine apprehension about the increasing influence China was having on
British culture is ever present. Whilst British taxation of Chinese commodities at 180% attempted to
establish a power balance that fell firmly in the British favour - in contrast to Britain which was taxed
at only at 6% - Dickens’s novel shows an increasing dependence on such commodities that offers a
challenging reading not only of Britishness but also of what it was to be a global Other in the
nineteenth century commercial world.
This paper will explore the ways in which Chinese commodities are presented as being emblematic
of the Chinese nation and yet were often misrepresented and adulterated on the British shore. By
using trading figures and statistics alongside Dickens’s Little Dorrit, this paper will explore the
reconceptualisation of China in commodity terms and establish a textual commodity layering that
identifies notions of identity and nationhood.
Flora Finching is often held up as a figure of mockery, however, this paper will examine the
importance of her discourse with Arthur Clennam and suggest it plays a significant role in developing
a consciousness of China and Chinese culture. This discourse will be analysed and connections will
be developed between commodity dependence and a growing understanding of an increasingly
globalised world. In doing this I will argue that such discourses underscore an increasing anxiety
about mass mobility which sees population growth in terms of a threat to British identity; a notion
that Dickens was keen to respond to.
David McAllister, Birkbeck, University of London: ‘Ware Tu’? Getting Lost in Dickens and Bradshaw
Mr Lost, the protagonist of Dickens’s spoof traveller’s tale ‘A Narrative of Extraordinary Suffering’,
becomes hopelessly confused as he attempts to plot a route back to his country home after making
a trip to London. As he scans the timetable columns, baffled by their strings of mysterious numbers
and seemingly occult symbols, the phrase ‘Ware Tu’ (which should offer him security by referring to
a known place (Ware) at a specific time (Tuesday)) becomes instead a ‘mystic’ question to which Mr
Lost has no answer. Where to?
Lost’s confusion is characteristic of mid-Victorian responses to Bradshaw’s, whose pages, densely
packed with numbers and offering a multiplicity of different routes, required a new form of reading.
‘It requires a mathematical mind in order to comprehend the Guide to British Railways’, suggested
The Lady’s Newspaper in 1855. ‘They are so numerous and complicated, so many ways are shown of
reaching the same place by different routes, such a multitude of junctions and branch lines bewilder
the inquiring gaze of the anxious traveller, that he sits down in despair and seeks for a teacher to
explain his “Bradshaw” to him.’ Lost lacks a mathematical mind -- his brain ‘reeled’, we are told,
when he tried to unravel its complexities -- and in this he can be identified as a comic forerunner of
other lost Dickensian figures who find themselves psychologically incapable of deciding between
multiple alternative courses of action.
This paper will read ‘A Narrative…’ and Dickens’s late portmanteau tale ‘Mugby Junction’ in the
context of other mid-Victorian responses to Bradshaw, identifying in Dickens a particular anxiety
about contingency and determinism which he expressed in representations of the choices offered by
railway travel, and their schematising in the numbers and diagrams of the railway timetable.
A5 MX034B Surplus Women?
Arlene Young, Manitoba: “Vast crowds”: Middle-Class Women and Victorian Office Work
On a Tuesday morning in March 1873, the “usually quiet locality of Cannon Row,” reports the Civil
Service Gazette, “was the scene of an extraordinary excitement.” Gathered in front of the offices of
the Civil Service Commissioners were “vast crowds,” estimated at between 1000 and 1500. The
crowds blocked the steps and courtyard of the Commissioners’ offices and brought traffic to a
standstill; business in the area had to be suspended; police intervened to no avail. Occupants of
adjacent buildings jostled for a view of the unfolding spectacle, giving “the various windows looking
into Cannon Row [. . .] an appearance only to be ordinarily witnessed in our principal thoroughfares
on the occasion of some great procession.” What was perhaps most extraordinary about this milling
crowd was that it was peopled entirely by young women. But what could incite 1500 young women
to congregate in front of government offices? An inspiring orator? Some cause célèbre? It was, in
fact, nothing more nor less than an advertisement for eleven positions for “junior counterwomen [. .
.] at various metropolitan post-offices.”
The spectacle at the Civil Services Commissioners’ offices was, as the Englishwoman’s
Review remarks, only one “instance of the immense number of women who [. . . were] in search of
employment.” By the 1870s, middle-class women in the thousands were trying to enter the job
market. The demographic imbalance between males and females in Britain at the time had driven
these women into the workforce, but now they faced another imbalance—that of supply and
demand in the labour market. The overwhelming response to the 1873 advertisement for eleven
low-level positions is nevertheless startling, given the brief history of women’s employment in the
civil service up to that time. This paper will examine the cultural and social determinants, as well as
the contemporary responses to, the influx of middle-class women into the Victorian service industry,
workers whose numbers had grown from fifteen in1851, according to the census, to 274 in 1861, to
thousands in the 1870s.
Margaret Denny, Columbia College: For Love and Money: women photographers and the
illustrative print
By 1936, women photographers’ achievements in the illustrative press on both sides of the Atlantic
had reached new pinnacles. In America, Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother the iconic image of the
depression-era figure appeared in multiple publications, while Margaret Bourke-White became the
first staff photographer hired for Life magazine. Her monumental photograph of Fort Peck Dam,
Montana, earned the cover position for Life’s premier issue published November 23, 1936. Great
Britain’s Madame Yevonde pioneered color photography, which developed in her 1930s Goddesses
series featuring role-playing socialites in the guise of classical mythology. Her images appeared
regularly in popular British publications The Sketch and Tatler. Although remarkable given the maledominance of the photographic field, these achievements had their antecedents forty years earlier
at the end of the nineteenth century when improvements in halftone printing coalesced with the
increased production of printed material to create a demand for attractive photographic
illustrations. As the magazine industry grew to include more publications directed toward women’s
interests and general news publications sought to grow their female audience, women
photographers’ point of view was appreciated by readers and sought after by editors and publishers
alike. Because ones professional or amateur credentials did not limit the opportunity to make
illustrations for print media publication, commercial women photographers as well as women who
took up photography as an amateur artistic pursuit submitted their work to editors for
consideration, blurring the distinction between the two categories of photographers. The free-lance
nature of the print submittal process allowed women’s work to be valued on its own merit.
This paper examines the growing need for photographic illustrations for print media—
advertisements, calendars, books, magazines, and postcards, and the numbers of women who
produced photographs for publication. In London, portraitist Alice Hughes’ photographs of society
women appeared regularly on the covers of Country Life. In the late 1890s, she outpaced other male
photographers in garnering this coveted position. Fellow portraitist Kate Pragnell’s photographs
appeared in the magazines Ladies Field and Hearth and Home. Equally opportune, women teamed
up with writers to illustrate journals and book publications. America’s Frances Benjamin Johnston
gained fame as one of the earliest women photojournalists producing illustrated articles for
Demorest, Harper’s and Ladies Home Journal. Her colleague Gertrude Käsebier illustrated J.P.
Mowbray’s serial “The Making of a Country Home” in Everybody’s Magazine. Entrepreneurial
women such as Britain’s Christina Broom exploited and expanded the printed postcard category
supplying images of popular personae and public events. While in Chicago, Beatrice Tonnesen
entered the illustrated calendar market making promotional advertising pieces for a national
clientele. Some questions taken up in this study—what was the process of production and selection;
how closely did photographers work in collaboration with authors, editors, and/or publishers?
Which developed first image or text and/or how did the two entities support each other? Can late
nineteenth-century women’s illustrative print production and influence on their audience and/or
other women considering photography as a vocation be measured quantitatively or remuneratively?
Cordelia Smith, Birkbeck, ‘An exhibition of 10,000 pictures’: Art, shopping and fundraising in the
late nineteenth century
Fundraising charity bazaars were an established and effective way of raising money for good causes
in Britain by the 1820s. Aristocratic and upper-middle-class women sold small, generally
homemade, household items and clothing to middle-class shoppers of both sexes and all ages. As
the century progressed, the charity bazaar became an important forum for the professionalization of
women’s philanthropic work, and the commercialization of their creative labours. Bazaars also
mirrored the development of shopping and spending as middle-class leisure activities.This paper
considers the role of paintings and art exhibitions within the context of charity bazaars. Raffles for
spurious ‘old masters’ were a feature of bazaars as early as the 1820s but it was at the very end of
the nineteenth century that the money-spinning potential of art exhibitions and raffles as part of
bazaars was most effectively exploited. It is argued that the advent of the Boer War brought
renewed impetus to the philanthropic fundraising activities of charity bazaars. The appeal of
exhibitions of works by artists such as John Singer Sergent was a central means of increasing the
number of (paying) visitors to bazaars and fundraising exhibitions. Yet women’s traditional role at
the creative and organizational heart of the charity bazaar appeared to be threatened by the
increasing importance of exhibitions of professional art in raising money for war-related charities,
and by male critics’ dislike of the feminine and amateur status of the traditional fundraising bazaar.
A6 MBS0-16 Empires and Others in Fiction
Philip Steer, Massey University
“Bare statistics read like the wildest romance”: Australian Gold, British Authors, and Sensation in
the Victorian Novel and Political Economy
The Australian gold rushes of the 1850s triggered unprecedented flows of migration and trade with
Britain, and this paper argues that this colonial event also had an impact upon the formal logic of the
Victorian novel and political economy. It does so through two related claims: (1) the gold rushes
brought into being a literary network linking metropole and colony, as a number of Victorian
intellectuals were drawn to Australia—including writers Henry Kingsley and William Howitt, and
economists W. E. Hearn and W. S. Jevons; and (2) the subsequent works of these writers reveal a
changing understanding of the modern subject and society, which in turn contributed to the
“sensationalising” of the novel and political economy in the 1870s.
The sensational growth of gold-era Melbourne makes “bare statistics read like the wildest
romance,” observes the narrator of Kingsley’s The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (1859). A variety
of contemporary texts record the shock of witnessing a British society being founded upon the
dubious actions and character traits of gold prospectors—speculation, nomadic mobility, and
seemingly unconstrained desire. Associating such qualities with a primitive era of “wildest romance,”
mid-century realism and classical political economy had previously viewed them as antithetical to
modern, “settled,” capitalist society. The deeper impact of Australian gold can be seen in two later
works by visitors to the goldfields, W. S. Jevons’ Theory of Political Economy (1872) and Anthony
Trollope’s John Caldigate (1878-9), which employ similar traits of romance and sensation to re-vision
Victorian economic and novelistic form in colonial terms. Trollope’s story of an Australian bigamy
scandal disrupting British society deliberately blurs metropolitan realism and colonial romance, and
it parallels Jevons’ reorientation of political economy around a universal consuming subject, in
whose unsettled and insatiable desires the Australian gold prospector can be seen writ large.
Jacqueline Young, Hertfordshire: The Power of Two: Gothic Doubles and the Chinese Revolution
Contemporary expatriate novels of the 1911 Chinese Revolution uniformly invoked nineteenthcentury Gothic modes. Two works – The Commissioners Dilemma by Paul and Veronica King, and
Victor Segalen’s René Leys – focus on sinister twinnings that recall Trilby/Svengali, or Frankenstein
and his ‘Creature’. In a form of reverse vampirism, a ‘master’ enmeshes a ‘slave’ in a parasitic,
sinister bond and fills his mind with alien ideology. The victims are not automata, zombies, or
mesmerised subjects, but apparently freely surrender their wills, becoming complicit in their puppetmasters’ conceits.
As the ideological bifurcation of China is set in motion, multiple fractures divide a troubled nation.
North is pitted against south, Western-educated republicans contest Chinese imperial power, and
Ming restorationists seek to overturn alien Manchu rule. Throughout the two novels of political
disorder, the diabolic master–slave motif similarly recurs in the form of multiple doublings and
divisions. In absorbing their masters’ distorted ideologies, the slaves are forced to divide their minds
into a life of reality and one of illusion, compelling their divided consciousnesses constantly to seek
reunion and wholeness. Both victims are presented as ‘possessed’: ‘infected’ by bilingualism and
biculturalism, their personal and cultural identities are simultaneously doubled and divided. Segalen,
a medical doctor, extends the notion of the literary twin to encompass the autoscopic double, in
which self and other are not two entities but one: an individual haunted by an unseen, unspeaking,
shadowy version of himself.
As the old world is killed off and reborn anew, René Leys obeys a narrative pattern established by
Frankenstein and Trilby in which one ‘twin’ provokes a crisis and death ensues. But The
Commissioner’s Dilemma subverts this expectation, permitting master and slave to live and offering
redemptive futures for both. These divergent outcomes epitomise the radical ambiguities of a war of
confused and conflicting ideologies. That one master–slave relationship ends in death and the other
in life suggests that Segalen viewed the republican movement as the end of China, while the Kings
construed it as an imperfect beginning.
David Agruss: “English Time and the Egyptian Other: Sexuality, Temporality, and Orientalism in
Richard Marsh’s The Beetle”
This paper examines late nineteenth-century British discourses of time and temporality in relation to
the entanglements of gender, sexuality, race, mesmerism, and Egyptomania in Richard Marsh’s postDarwinian fin-de-siècle Gothic novel The Beetle (1897). The Beetle tells the story of a menacing
creature by the same name—part man, part woman, part ancient Egyptian goddess, part scarab
beetle—that travels to late nineteenth-century London to haunt a British politician and other
members of the ruling class in retaliation for the desecration of an ancient Egyptian tomb. Because
of increasing British economic and colonial interest in Egypt, especially after 1859, when
construction began on the Suez Canal, Egypt becomes an increasingly potent and anxious symbol of
cultural, racial, and religious alterity in the popular British cultural imagination. Importantly,
however, Egypt comes to represent temporal alterity as well insofar as ongoing European
archeological excavations depict Egypt in the metropole as primarily a memorial to the lost great
civilization of ancient Egypt—an ancient, but fallen, civilization that looks uncannily like the British
Empire. This temporal doubling—ancient Egypt as both like and unlike late nineteenth-century
Britain, and therefore perhaps a harbinger of decadent Britain’s inevitable future fall—is echoed in
the Beetle’s chief power over metropolitan subjects: mesmerism. For mesmerism is, at the fin de
siècle, depicted in heated debates as both scienceand pseudoscience—that is, as both modern and
ancient—and what seems to be at stake in declaring mesmerism a science (as opposed to a
pseudoscience) is securing the continued future triumph of Britain’s civilization (as opposed to its
degeneration). But because mesmerism’s thrilling and threatening force, according to Alison Winter,
is precisely its ability to “give one person the power to affect another’s mind or body,” mesmerism
functions in the Victorian imagination as that which dissolves the distinction between self and other,
and, in Marsh’s novel, as that which the Beetle wields in order to breach and to penetrate
metropolitan subjects—transforming masculinity into femininity, and revealing New Woman
femininity to be a threatening form of pseudo-masculinity. For at one point the Beetle attempts to
copulate with a male character while he is under its mesmeric influence, and at another point the
Beetle cuts the hair of a female character and dresses her in men’s clothing while she, too, is
mesmerized by the Beetle. So it comes as no surprise that the temporal doubling of
Egypt (both ancient and disconcertingly modern) and that of mesmerism (both modern and
threateningly ancient) work in concert in The Beetle such that anachronism, both Egyptian and
mesmeric, comes to be the very structure that threatens the stability, coherence, and hegemony of
British culture, British science, and normative metropolitan masculinity and femininity.
4.30pm Panel Session B
B1: Auditorium Dealing with the Many: New Approaches to Inmates and Institutions Panel
Speakers: Jane Hamlett, Katherine Rawling, Claudia Soares
Victorian England saw a dramatic growth in institutional spaces in which large numbers of inmates
could permanently reside. From the 1830s the relief of the poor, the punishment of criminals, the
treatment of the mentally and physically ill, and the education of children were all subject to
increasing charitable activity and government intervention. Union workhouses, prisons, asylums,
hospitals and schools were built en mass, and were often carefully designed to control the behaviour
of their inmates. In many cases these institutions were much larger than their predecessors – and
brought together large numbers of poor, sick, mentally ill or children as inmates for the first time.
Institutional authorities were faced with the problem of dealing with the many, as they tried to
control them. This panel features three papers that shed fresh light on this process. The established
interpretations of institutional life – based on Goffman’s total institutions and Foucault’s discipline –
have been widely questioned. We take this further by exploring inmate life through new approaches
to social and cultural history, including the study of visual and material culture, technology, and the
history of the emotions. Taking three types of organisation aimed at very different groups – middleclass girls, lunatics (as they were known then) and destitute children – our panel offers a comparison
across institutions, affording the opportunity to consider the ways in which the Victorians tried to
deal with large numbers of individuals at once.
The Individuality and Uniformity of Psychiatric Photographs: The Camera and the Victorian
Asylum.
Katherine Rawling
The Victorian Age witnessed a huge increase in institutional inmates, none more so than psychiatric
patients in asylums. Often categorised as the ‘total institution’, the Victorian asylum often has been
regarded as little more than a medicalized prison, its endless corridors teeming with countless
patients merely contained rather than cured. This view has been tempered somewhat in recent
years and historians now have a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between patients,
their families and the institution. This paper aims to continue this re-evaluation of the asylum by
having at its heart the numerous photographs taken of psychiatric patients in the second half of the
nineteenth century, in order to examine the various ways in which the developing technology of
photography interacted with patients and institutional life. By analysing images from two very
different institutions, St Nicholas’s Hospital, Newcastle (otherwise known as Newcastle upon Tyne
City Asylum) and Holloway Sanatorium, this paper will suggest ways in which the camera was used
to identify, process, categorise and, in some cases, institutionalize individual patients, as asylum
authorities attempted to cope with an expanding patient population. In addition, the complex and
often contradictory relationship between the patient and their portrait will be discussed to suggest
ways in which photographic conventions from outside the asylum walls affected practices inside the
institution. The photographic record left by psychiatric institutions can tell us much about the way in
which vast numbers of individuals were conceptualized and treated by the authorities. Moreover,
the sheer number of photographs and the variety of ‘styles’ they represent suggest that there were
no standard practices governing how patients should be photographed. Against the backdrop of
large and expanding inmate populations, the camera could at once individualize and homogenize the
patient often with surprising and fascinating results.
‘Personal kindness and individual sympathy for the development of their nature’: individuality,
nurture and affection in the nineteenth-century children’s institution.
Claudia Soares
Scholars researching the experiences of poor children in large welfare institutions in the nineteenth
century have drawn attention to the totalising nature of institution life for inmates. Studies have
focussed on the formal systems of regulation of inmates and processes of punishment, discipline,
reform and training that served to domesticate apparently ‘savage’ children and transform ‘street
arabs’ into productive citizens. Historians have argued that the emphasis on disciplinary reform that
shaped childcare practices in large residential institutions left little room for the individual
identification and nurture of inmates. Consequently, institutional care has often been regarded as
the poor relation of foster care and an inadequate means of ensuring children’s long-term welfare
(Abrams 1998).
Examining the childcare practices of The Waifs and Strays Society (WSS) – an institution founded
in 1881 that provided homes to destitute children – this paper challenges the existing historiography
by suggesting that the emotional care of individual children was at the heart of the Society’s
ideology. Drawing on the Society’s photographic collections, fundraising literature and donation lists,
the paper examines how a range of practices implemented within the institution were shaped by
notions of home and family in order to nurture individual inhabitants. The paper analyses the
Society’s attempts to construct a sense of family in the institution, focussing on practices that sought
to enhance bonds of attachment between WSS residents and shape children’s emotional
experiences of institutional life. Furthermore, examination of children’s correspondence indicates
how these nurturing and affective practices were understood and valued by inmates. The paper
advances assumptions that children’s institutional experiences centred solely on totalising processes
of reform, discipline and regulation and contests conclusions that emotional care of inmates was
absent in the institution.
"The Niceties of Curtain Drawing": Dormitory Life and Material Culture in Schools for Middle-Class
Girls, 1840-1918.
Jane Hamlett
In the second half of the nineteenth century, a new kind of secondary school for middle-class girls
emerged, that brought large numbers of pupils together. Thanks to the campaign for higher
education for women, new establishments, notably Cheltenham Ladies' College and the North
London Collegiate School for Girls, began to teach girls the same academic curriculum as boys.
School authorities usually recommended that girls, unlike boys, should live at home and attend
school daily. In practice, however, wide demand necessitated the use of boarding houses and
dormitories. Headmistresses faced a new problem -- how to accommodate and discipline large
numbers of girls onsite, without resorting to corporal punishment. This paper will consider how this
worked through an analysis of girls' dormitories -- using space and material culture to show how
authorities attempted to control pupils, but also how the girls created their own customs.
The paper will draw on archival evidence from four case- study schools in southern England - the North London Collegiate School, Winchester High School for Girls, St Margaret's Bushy and the
co-educational radical school Bedales. Photographs, inventories and institutional documents will be
used to explore the ways in which dormitories were designed, furnished and governed. Diaries,
letters, autobiographies and memoirs will reveal how such spaces were used and lived in. The rules
and regulations imposed on boarding houses and dormitories demonstrate the anxieties of school
authorities, as they struggled to reconcile the need for discipline with domestic ideals. In contrast,
rituals developed by pupils speak of a new found confidence in school life, as intimacy and privacy
were mediated through dormitory bed curtains.
B2 MX001 Rosemary Ashton, Nick Freeman, and Gail Marshall Writing by Numbers: Year Studies in
the Victorian Period
This panel will explore the opportunities afforded literary and historical scholars by the study of a
single Victorian year. It will examine the chance afforded the writer to test broad assumptions and
generalisations about a period through the minute investigation of a single year; to try to achieve
something of the lived texture of that year; to analyse the processes whereby narrarives proliferate
and reputations flourish or fail; and to achieve in the study of one year, a rich, vertical take not
available within more chronologically dispersed research. The panel will also examine the
methodological challenges of such work, the theoretical and empirical decisions necessitated, and
the various forms of narrative that such a study might support and enable. We will consider extant
forms of this critical genre, most notably Victoria’s Year: English Literature and Culture, 1837-38, by
Richard L Stein, 1859: Entering an Age of Crisis, edited by Philip Appleman, William A. Madden and
Michael Wolff (1959), and Nick Freeman’s own 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in late-Victorian
Britain (2011). This work invites consideration of the evolving forms of interdisciplinarity which have
informed Victorian Studies from the outset, as well as the historicist and historical practices which
have shaped much recent work in the field, and the opportunities afforded by recent technological
advances which have enabled more extensive access to printed material from the nineteenth
century.
Nick Freeman, Loughborough, Writing 1895
1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain (Edinburgh UP, 2011) is a microhistory
of a uniquely turbulent year in British cultural history. In this paper, I look at some of the challenges I
faced in writing the book, and some of the organisational and methodological strategies I adopted.
The paper will combine authorial practicalities and pragmatism with more general comments about
1895 as a whole.
David Coates, Warwick: Outnumbered?: The Economics of Victorian
Private and Amateur Theatricals
Until very recently the history of aristocratic private and amateur theatricals has been swept under
the carpets of Britain’s great country and town houses and the surviving evidence for these
entertainments has lain dormant in collections and archives across the country. Sybil Rosenfeld, the
only scholar to have published substantially on private theatricals, argues in her book Temples of
Thespis that the craze for this form of entertainment ‘reached its climax in the 1780s’ and by 1820
had ‘petered out’. Theatricals after 1820 and their importance to social, cultural, theatrical, political
and, indeed, economic histories, however, have been largely ignored.
The paper I will present at BAVS 2013 will bring to light a multitude of private and amateur theatrical
enterprises of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and will assess their economic impact.
This paper will show private and amateur theatricals to be simultaneously benefitting and damaging
to the prosperity of the Victorian theatre profession and the public theatres.
On the one hand, it will argue that the theatre profession relied upon private and amateur
theatricals for a proportion of its income. It will show how the very same costumiers, perruquiers,
lighting providers, backstage hands, stage managers, scene painters and so on, were supplying and
assisting both the public and private theatres. On the other hand, this paper will show the
profession’s strong reactions against amateur performances, often because their fashionable (and
wealthy) audiences were choosing to be entertained in the drawing rooms of the aristocracy instead
of in the public theatres.
Besides this, my paper will show the costs of mounting home theatricals (using the Household
Accounts from Chatsworth House as evidence); will look at bankruptcies caused by private
theatricals; will explore at the papers of Samuel French and T. H. Lacy (who built their publishing
businesses to fuel the passion for amateur theatricals); and will explore the impact of private and
amateur theatricals on local economies.
Clare Robinson, Birmingham: PANTOMIME AND THE BANKRUPTCY OF CAPTAIN BAINBRIDGE,
1889.
In the February of 1889 Captain Bainbridge, lessee of the Manchester Theatre Royal was declared
bankrupt owing a total of £32,025. 18s. 1d. Using the Bainbridge story as a case study, this paper
considers the crucial financial role of pantomime in balancing the finances of provincial theatres in
the 1880s.
Later that year letters appeared in the Manchester Guardian complaining about ‘The Tyranny of
Pantomime’ referring to the dominance of pantomime during its lengthy season from Christmas to
Easter. It was not uncommon for every theatre across the city to be staging pantomimes and so
excluding regular theatregoers whose taste was for other theatrical genres.
At a time when all theatres operated on a commercial basis, most were dependent on the success of
the annual pantomime to generate the greatest number of attendances and largest profits of the
year, in order to generate a surplus that would subsidise in potential lean times during the rest of
the year. Managers took great risks investing vast sums of money to present the most extravagant
‘annuals’ in order to compete effectively with the productions of their competitors. The pantomime
was then at the core of the finances of the individual theatres and every other aspect of their
operation was dependent on its success.
Reporting on the first meeting of Bainbridge’s creditors on 26 March, The Standard in London had
summarized that ‘The Debtor alleged bad business, the failure of the last pantomime, and the
competition of new theatres in outlying towns as the cause of his failure.’ (1889) 27 March: 3 While
no account books exist, it is possible from the detailed newspaper accounts of the day, to trace the
main features of Captain Bainbridge’s financial history from his arrival at the Theatre Royal in 1880
to the state of affairs at the time of his bankruptcy.
Bainbridge admitted at his bankruptcy hearing that he had been aware that he was insolvent since
1884, but that each year the success of his pantomime had appeared to balance the books. This
meant, however, that he began each year without a surplus and the subsequent cost of operating
the theatre forced him further into debt. To promote the Theatre Royal as the city’s leading theatre,
Bainbridge was under additional pressure to present the most spectacular pantomime every year,
and he invested heavily to achieve this. Whilst evidence suggests that poor judgement and a failure
to exercise adequate control over his finances were at the root of his bankruptcy, his commercially
successful pantomimes can be seen to have had a central function in keeping the theatre open
throughout the 1880s. His single failure with the 1888/89 pantomime to achieve the numbers he
needed in both attendance figures and financial returns became the immediate cause of his
bankruptcy in 1889.
B4 MBS02-3 Family and Excess in Victorian Fiction
Clare Walker Gore, Cambridge: “Because we are too many”?: Numerous Families and Disability in
the Novels of Charlotte Yonge
Charlotte Yonge was a popular, prolific and wide-ranging novelist, but she has long been best known
for her family sagas. These have always been notable for their large families, none more so than her
late masterpiece, The Pillars of the House (1873), populated by the thirteen orphaned Underwoods.
Disability is strikingly central to the novel: two of the Underwoods are permanently disabled, and
most of the family suffer serious illness or impairment at some point.
Charlotte Yonge’s large body of work is in the process of being re-discovered and re-read after a
century of critical neglect, in particular by feminist critics whose insistence on the complexity of
novels once read as straightforwardly and uninterestingly conservative has led to widespread reevaluation. Yonge’s representation of large families and disability seems to me a particularly
interesting way into the critical debate and the subtleties of the work itself, for they have been at
the heart of her changing critical fortunes. Where Yonge’s numerous families were once seen as an
aspect of her warm view of family life as generative and nurturing, they came to be pathologised: in
1944 her biographer Georgina Battiscombe linked the Underwood’s numerousness as a family to
their physical weakness, in terms that suggest moral culpability. She refers to the “shocking
implications” of the Reverend Underwood’s fathering thirteen children, suggesting that the
disabilities some of his children suffer are the result of this “headlong career in parenthood”. The
eugenic overtones of this reading are clear: the Underwoods are guilty of irresponsible breeding,
and not merely the number but the disabilities of their children are distasteful to the post-Darwinian
reader, as they were not to the “innocently blind” Yonge. Her representations of disability have been
read symbolically in highly various ways since then: for Catherine Standbach-Dahlström, they
encoded the social oppression of women and were a means of curtailing their rebellious energies;
for Elizabeth Juckett, more recently, they have represented Yonge’s Tractarian religious commitment
to the disciplinary authority of the church and the religious efficacy of restriction and pain.
In this paper, I will engage with these critical responses, and attempt to offer my own close reading
of disability in The Pillars of the House, not only as a metaphor, religious or otherwise, but also as an
aspect of Yonge’s commitment to mimetically realistic representations of family life. I will attempt to
construct a reading that does justice to the variety of Yonge’s images and uses of disability in just
one novel, through her creation of a numerous family, and will explore how the interactions
between the many Underwood siblings complicate the portrayal of disability, as a socially
constructed category, a somatic reality, and a metaphor for gendered and spiritual conditions.
Sophia Hsu, Rice University: ‘Home, Biopolitics, and Too Many Women in White’
Sensation fiction is often regarded as the genre of excess. Because its plots depict too much crime,
too many lovers, and too many mixed identities, sensation novels ignite too many nerves in its too
many readers. Following D. A. Miller, critics who discuss this excess tend to do so through an early
Foucauldian lens in order to analyze how modern power excessively disciplines sensational bodies.
My paper, however, reorients these studies of excessive bodies in terms of population management
and argues that the modern power circulating within sensation novels is not discipline but
biopolitics. By focusing on the permeable home in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, this paper
argues for the home as a microcosmic biopolitical mechanism. Because familial privacy in the novel
depends on the biopolitical processes of the liberal state, I show how the same mechanisms securing
the home against excessive others also secure the nation. Biopolitical security, however, does not
mean eliminating excess; rather, it depends on managing the degree of excess so as to help the
home, and thus the nation, build resistance to danger. This paper will begin by explaining the
entanglement of the novel’s dual domestic and geopolitical plots. It will then transition to the home
to clarify how the home normalizes itself and the nation through what Roberto Esposito has called
an immunitary mechanism, an exclusionary response that regulates threats by measuring the level
of danger they pose. Following this, I track how the immunitary mechanism becomes
autoimmunitary when the home expels family members that it misrecognizes as excessive strangers.
Through this misrecognition, I will show that, even as autoimmunity is a self-destructive process, it is
also a productive act and, thereby, acquires a positive valence when it creates a new family that
bypasses the state’s immunizing call. In taking these steps, this paper will establish the family’s role
in biopolitical management.
B5 MX034A Technology, Sound and Vision
Susan Zieger, University of California, Riverside, Infinite Sets: Cigarette Cards, Collections, and
Media Addiction
Immersion in and dependence on media often incurs the charge that one has retreated from reality,
or is not living up to one’s capacities for direct experience. The compulsive collection of media
likewise suggests an inability to experience the normative flow of modern time, in which media
items are always expiring, or to recognize normative values, that deem ephemera beneath
preservation. My paper reimagines the collecting of cigarette cards as an addictive or compulsive
mode of historical materialism. The tiny cards harbored outsized historical ambitions – to document
natural history (such as tropical flowers, animals and their furs, and birds’ nests), cultural history
(kings and queens of England, Hindu gods, famous railway trains), and the history of their own
present (cinema stars, champion prizefighters, football club badges). In the period between the
1880s and 1940s, millions of people collected, traded, studied, played with, and discarded the cards,
many of which reside today in libraries, museums, and private collections. Since 1940, many others
have continued the practice as a hobby. Collecting cigarette cards may be a form of media addiction,
but not simply because of its proximity to the physiological compulsion to smoke cigarettes. This
crude analogy would not describe the rich social contexts in which the cards circulated. Rather, by
letting the collection of cigarette cards, and the notion of media addiction exert pressure on each
other, I hope to refine conceptualizations of both as ways of making history. What connects
cigarette smoking, the iconic act of modernity’s accelerated pace of life, to collecting the cards – an
enthusiasm for the past if ever one there was? And how, in a fascination dominated by counting
numbers of items within sets, can we see a mode of uncounted and possibly uncountable
experience?
Phyllis Weliver, Saint Louis University: Tennyson’s Recitations: ‘If I had heard him read before I
read’
‘If I had heard him read before I read his works I never should have thought him capable of such
exquisite effects of subtle variety – the treatment of his metres.’ Thus wrote composer Hubert Parry
in his diary upon hearing Tennyson recite ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ in 1892. Almost fifteen years earlier, the
daughter of Prime Minister Gladstone noted in her diary that Tennyson recited ‘The Revenge’ at a
dinner party ‘in an ever increasing rush + shouting out the climax.’ Mary Gladstone found it
‘perfectly Splendid’ and a ‘whirlwind of a thing.’
Proposing a politics of recitation, this paper considers how spoken word performances in the
Victorian salon were crucial to communicating those acoustic aspects of verse that lived off the
page. It reclaims facets of Tennyson’s poetry that relied upon sonic effect to communicate the
poem’s meaning through a lack of attention to printed meter. In recurring social situations among
those who were part of Tennyson’s circle, print was an alternative effect or variant in contrast to the
live voice of the poet whose performance was inseparable from the poetry’s meaning. As Tennyson
recited (and partially sang) his verse, his performances embodied his belief that ‘there ought to be
some melody in poetry’. This paper recovers traces of Tennyson’s voice by examining Parry’s copy of
‘The Lotus-Eaters’, annotated while Tennyson recited. It then considers Tennyson’s rushing delivery
as political by comparing it to W.E. Gladstone’s recitations and annotations made in reaction to the
poet’s request for the statesman’s commentary on the proofs to his play, Harold. Tennyson’s and
Gladstone’s spoken word performances are finally placed within the context of the growth of the
Aesthetic Critic: its Arnoldian measured Liberalism on the one hand and its Paterian impressionism
on the other.
Nicole Bush, Durham: Many into One: Making the Moving Image in the mid-Nineteenth Century
A certain type of new nineteenth-century technology offered its viewer a spectacle never before
seen—that of the motion picture—and created, as Tom Gunning has recently claimed, something
resembling a Victorian cinema (Victorian Studies, 54:3, 2012). Unlike the earlier camera obscura
which could only represent an image of external animation, nineteenth-century optical technologies
could generate a flickering, whirling, and transforming scene of the virtualised moving image. These
mechanical contrivances not only amused but also instructed, and in the case of persistence of vision
devices like the revolving phenakistiscope, zoetrope, or the stroboscope, they functioned as
instruments in the investigation, experimentation, and demonstration of scientific concepts such as
the visual afterimage and were popular in both private and public forums.
In discussing the position of these devices within their contemporary scientific, philosophical, and
literary contexts, this paper seeks to explore how nineteenth-century moving-image technologies
co-opted the many into one. Persistence of vision devices, for example, contained a series of twelve
to sixteen images painted on a revolving disc which, when in operation, gave the intriguing and
novel illusion of showing a successive phase of movement occurring upon a fixed spot. This
technologically-generated moving image was explained using the principle of the duration of visual
impressions, in which images were thought to linger on the retina for a quantifiable amount of time.
Beginning by offering a brief history of the scientific investigation into the measurable persistence of
the image and the ratio of impression to duration, this paper then addresses instances of durable
moving images in the fiction of the period and gestures towards how the aesthetic of the perceptual
blend of successive serial images into a newly fused unit was used to represent and explore the
operation of thought, memory, and speculative imagination in mid-nineteenth-century fiction
B6 MX034B The Ages of Men
Lisa Coar, Leicester: Fat and Forty: The Mid-riff Crisis of the ‘Calculable’ Gent
The weight, shape and age awareness which forms a substantial part of all body-conscious cultures
tends to afflict its sufferers with what I shall refer to as ‘number neuroticism.’ From the counting of
calories, to the racking-up of wrinkles, our bodies are constantly subject to the rigours of statistical
awareness. Underweight, or overweight; above average, or below average, the human body is
repeatedly scrutinised with quantitative precision. As pounds are gained, and ounces are lost, as our
bodies get older by the day, and our waistlines get wider by the week, numerical tracking forms a
constitutional part of our everyday lives.
Without doubt, the burdens of today’s anti-ageing and weight-loss industries are
predominantly placed on women. However, the nineteenth-century forerunner to modernity’s
eponymous “Fat and Forty Syndrome” was, in fact, the Victorian male. Indeed, throughout the epoch
in question, the existential narrative of male ‘ageing’ was repeatedly depicted as one of unremitting
horror. Ruddy-faced and rotund, grey-haired and gargantuan, the Victorian male was often dupe to
a pound-and-inch-frenzied, ‘mid-riff’ crisis. With countless advertisements for rejuvenating ‘life pills’
and girth-curtailing ‘diet potions’ in print, such enumerative patterns of ‘mid-riff’ consciousness
were beginning to saturate the male-targeted press. Alongside the ceaseless publication of such fatphobic material, height and weight charts and mechanical scales were also coming to assume an
integral part in forming the somatic identity of the Victorian male. As a result, the burgeoning bodies
of the period’s once ineffectual ‘calorie counters’ were to be submerged into an unprecedented
state of mathematical monitoring and regulation: they were to be quantified and modified with
numerical precision; or, to borrow Michel Foucault’s term, rendered ‘calculable.’
From a critical examination of the epoch’s weight-focussed periodical works, to a discussion
of the ‘number neurotics’ imbuing William Banting’s, Letter on Corpulence (1863) this paper shall
expose how – when read through the lens of age anxiety – the fat male body often fortified the
angst which underpinned Victorian notions of senescence. It will likewise reveal how the nineteenth
century’s interest in fat, both dietary and bodily, was symptomatic of a more general fascination
with proportionate control and quantification. In tracing the cultural evolution of these interrelated
age/fat phobias, this paper will ultimately disclose how the nineteenth-century male risked
transforming his corporeal feats of weight-and-measure centred dieting into an anorectically-driven,
age-defying act: a number-conscious, nostalgic unburdening stimulated by ‘mid riff’ despondency,
and sustained through ageist ‘dis-ease.’
Alice Crossley, Leeds: ‘Men of Murdered Halves’: Male Adolescence in George Meredith’s Fiction
During the nineteenth century, adolescence was perceived by some as a biological imperative,
determined both by age and by the physiological changes of puberty. Others, however, elaborated a
less precise concept of youth, understood as a complex social role that was not simply reiterated by
each subsequent generation. The apparent liberality, or inclusiveness, of this view of youth –
particularly male youth – supports a modern, psychological, analysis of this ‘yeasty condition of life’.1
It also, however, gives rise to paternalistic anxieties about the experience and character of young
men, whose views and attitudes seemed to be odds with those of their fathers. This generational
conflict consequently forms the subject of much writing in the period, both as a way of
understanding the concept of adolescence itself – by no means a unified identity –and as a way into
reflective considerations of the crystallised ideals of manliness. Male adolescence becomes a
metaphor for what George Meredith described as the ‘double man’, or ‘men of murdered halves’.2
For Meredith this period of unstable duality begs the question: ‘Is he we call a young man an
individual – who is a pair of alternately kicking scales? Is he educated, when he dreams not that he is
divided?’3
In Meredith’s fiction the inconsistencies of manliness are particularly prominent during youth. This is
the period when fictional young men – such as Algernon Blancove, Richard Feverel, Wilfrid Pole, and
Harry Richmond – are witnessed in Meredith’s narratives as agents of their own self-exposure. The
male adolescent therefore becomes, collectively, its own type of unstable masculinity. The
sentimental, egotistical, or self-indulgent young man may be dismissed as foolish, but as Meredith
admits in Rhoda Fleming, ‘He is naked in his simplicity; he can tell us much, and suggest more. […]
Where fools are numerous, one of them must be prominent now and then in a veracious narration.’4
By repetitively isolating male youth as a subject of interest, Meredith returns to the limitations and
possibilities of adolescent growth.
Meredith’s male adolescents will be examined in this paper to demonstrate the anxieties about male
inadequacy engendered by such figures. This paper will consider the ways that discrepancies of age
– numerical distance – are seen to intensify the tensions of inter-generational relationships. At the
same time, the insufficiencies of youth gesture towards the integral instability of this category of
identity, so that male youth is calculated as ‘two men’ and ‘men of murdered halves’
simultaneously.5
David Ibitson, Leeds: Three’s a crowd: Jerome K. Jerome and the Economics of Masculinity
In the Saturday Review, in 1889, the protagonists of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat were
dismissed as being ‘like other clerks’, mere ‘specimens’ encountered ‘for the thousandth time’. This
disdain is an expression of a nineteenth-century anxiety about a perceived enervation of the urban
mass, and its detrimental effect on national fitness. Such concerns, exemplified by Gustav Le Bon’s
The Crowd (1895), often clustered around the office clerk as representative of a degenerate
masculinity, and would find literary expression in works of imperial adventure. This paper focuses on
two works by Jerome K. Jerome: Three Men in a Boat (1889) and Novel Notes (1893). Both feature
groups of three men which evoke the adventurous trios of H. Rider Haggard’s romances.
With Jerome’s men viewed as aspects of mass culture, this paper will examine their critical
conceptualisation in economic terms, by way of Herbert Spencer’s somatic view of economics, and
of the marginal utility theories of Herman Gossen and Stanley Jevons. Marginal utility, stating that
the benefit gained from each additional homogenous unit of a product, decreases as the supply
increases, finds sympathy with imperial adventure. Writers such as Haggard and G.A. Henty portray
a world in which bespoke heroes, not the mercantile homogenous crowd, succeed in Empire. The
mass is rendered inferior by what might be termed an economics of masculinity.
1
George Meredith, Rhoda Fleming (Milton Keynes: Dodo Press, 2010), 38
George Meredith, Sandra Belloni (Milton Keynes: Dodo Press, 2010), 260.
3 Sandra Belloni, 260.
4 Rhoda Fleming, 299.
5 Sandra Belloni, 260.
2
I will conclude that Three Men in a Boat and Novel Notes use their trios of men to parody
imperial narratives; evoking the anxieties surrounding the mass urban man only to mock them.
Appropriating the tropes of the imperial adventurer, they claim a heroic individualism for the the
clerkish crowd. Jerome’s work functions as a literature of resistance, and affirmation of a maligned
class. His protagonists are men, not the mass; names rather than numbers.
Friday 30th 10.45 Panel Session C
C1 Auditorium Statistics, Sympathy and Passion
M. Eileen Magnello, UCL: Passion, Darwin and Victorian Statisticians
Victorian Britain witnessed an explosion of industrial, technological and social changes along with
the urbanisation of England and a rapidly growing population, which led to the coexistence of
immense variation and apparent randomness in society. The convergence of these twinned
statistical concepts of variation and randomness became a source of diversification and
quantification that was harnessed by the mid-Victorian vital statisticians to undertake statistical
investigations of mass phenomena. Colossal amounts of data were collected by state agencies,
private organisations and various individuals interested in such social phenomena as poverty,
disease, and suicide, which, in turn, led to the proliferation of statistical societies across Britain in
the 1860s.
For many mid-Victorian statisticians, statistics was more than the mere collection of social data or a
set of techniques; for this group statistics embodied a separate sociological academic discipline for
the study of man in society.These statisticians felt empowered by the pervasive passion for statistics,
which gave them a new tool to enumerate, classify and, ultimately, understand the social conditions
of English society. As the ‘Passionate Statistician’, Florence Nightingale’s innovative statistical work
and graphs shaped her ideas of nursing that led to her reforms in nursing. Her pioneering use of
statistics and evidence-based medicine became a powerful directive in garnering support from the
medical community and the government, which led to essential sanitary reforms in military and
civilian hospitals. By the 1870s William Farr, as Statistical Superintendent of the GRO,
professionalised and redefined vital statistics ‘as a method of analysis rather than a social discipline
in itself’.
The vital statisticians’ emphasis on averages, as the primary unit of statistical measurement, would
lose its ubiquitous authority at the end of the nineteenth-century when a new mathematically based
statistical methodology began to take shape, largely because Francis Galton, W.F.R Weldon, and
especially Karl Pearson harnessed Charles Darwin’s ideas of measuring biological variation to
statistically assess his tenets of statistical populations of species and to find empirical evidence of
natural selection. Their work led to the creation of new statistical tools that enabled Pearson to
develop and professionalise the new discipline of mathematical statistics. This paper will give an
overview of the Victorians passionate interest in statistics that led to public health reforms and
transformed our vision of nature. Particular attention will be given to the mid-Victorian vital
statisticians of Edwin Chadwick, William Farr and Florence Nightingale and the late-Victorian
mathematical statisticians of Francis Galton, Karl Pearson and W.F.R. Weldon.
Guy Woolnough, Keele: Counting the residuum
Bureaucratic technologies of the 19th cent promised the means to count, record and thereby control
the residuum. This paper theorises the praxis of vagrant relief in the nineteenth century, and
explains why the promise failed to deliver: those who were meant to manage the bureaucracy, and
those who were supposed to be controlled, deliberately or unconsciously subverted the system.
Experts such as Chadwick and Ribton-Turner expected that the agents of poor relief and the newly
established police forces would monitor, control and reduce the most intractable element of the
‘problem.’ Bureaucratic systems and paid officers using inflexible procedures were supposed to
reduce and finally eliminate vagrancy.
Little has published about the management of vagrancy since the 1977. (Vorspan: Vagrancy and the
New poor Law; D.J.V.Jones, ‘A dead loss to the community.’) This paper uses some unusual primary
sources from Cumbria to analyse (quantitatively and qualitatively) the management of vagrancy in
the 19th century. The functioning of the bureaucratic systems is examined in a region which felt
under threat from itinerants. The praxis of poor relief and vagrancy is revealed to show how the
bureaucracy operated at the lowest stratum. The messy reality of poor relief and vagrancy law
defeated the aspirations of the bureaucratic system. Although attempts were made to count and
control vagrants, the were several obstacles, including reluctant police, magistrates and relieving
officers and the uncooperative vagrants. When the paths of vagrants, police and magistrates
crossed, each used his or her practical consciousness to negotiate the situation. The result was far
from what had been intended.
C2 MX0-16 Childhoods Lost
Melissa Dickson: The Multiplication and Mutation of the Arabian Nights in Early NineteenthCentury Britain
In its conversion from an oral history with no material referent to a material history in an expanding
print culture, the Arabian Nights to some degree always maintained its oral structure of mutation
and evolution. In the nineteenth century, the Arabian Nights was generally first encountered in
childhood and significant attention has been devoted to the fact that writers like Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Mary Shelley, De Quincey, Tennyson, the Brontës, and Dickens read the tales in their
youth. This collection of tales was undoubtedly a rich intertextual reference for nineteenth-century
writers; however, the question of what was actually being read and experienced in childhood, and
subsequently referenced in adulthood, requires further scrutiny. Surprisingly little is known of the
formats and transmission of the tales within the domestic space. What was the nature of the
childhood encounter with the Nights and its magical Orient? In what manner and formats did it
impinge upon the child’s consciousness? How did its instability and continuing adaptations influence
memories both of the work itself and childhood more generally?
This paper takes up the Arabian Nights as a representational object and investigates the
work it performs in material culture and memory. I analyse the nature of the childhood encounter
with the stories before considering how these objects function not only as childhood souvenirs, but
as stand-ins for childhood itself, representative of an irrational, unstable childhood consciousness. I
will show that, as it multiplied across the nineteenth century – in chapbooks, new and revised
editions, and continuations of the tales for example – the Arabian Nights became an important
marker or sequence of markers in the life cycle of individuals, offering a kind of measure of the
childhood experience and the ways this experience was remembered and reconstructed.
Christine Chettle, Leeds: Traumatic Numbers: Child Mortality Rates, Tale Types, and Consolation
Literature in George MacDonald’s Adela Cathcart
George MacDonald’s short story ‘Birth, Dreaming and Death’ is one of twelve stories collected into
MacDonald’s 1864 novel Adela Cathcart. It dramatizes the complexities of neo-natal mortality in the
mid-Victorian period. The events take place during a suggested period of 1820-1840, in which, as
Pat Jalland observes, the infant mortality rate (death of a child under 1 year) totalled ‘over 100,000
infants a year dying before their first birthday – one-quarter of all deaths’.6 Robert Woods puts neonatal mortality (death within the first 6 days) at 23 per 1,000 live births, contributing to the general
child mortality rates of 154 a year.7 However, while the tale assumes the reader will be familiar with
a culture of high infant mortality, it concerns itself more with exploring the lived experience behind
these statistics. Though the plot evokes a contemporary trope in consolation literature of grieving
parents finding comfort in God,8 the tale’s location in a wider framework of a therapeutic storytelling
club assigns a context of catharsis, instead of simply resignation to the will of the divine. The
narrative shifts between the two perspectives of the father and the mother in relating the
complexities of first longing for a child and then losing this desired child. References within the tale
to multiple fairy tale types emphasise connections between the loss of a child and wider losses of
financial and gender identity. Though MacDonald’s tale has not received much critical attention,
examination of this tale reveals the potential for patterns and sequences of storytelling in the text to
interrogate shifting definitions of social value and the realities of grieving beyond accepted
conventions which emerge through this narrative of birth and death. My paper will explore how
these representations of an extended and multi-faceted trauma lay the foundations for the
development of new connections of class and morality within the Victorian period.
C3 MBS02-3 Liminal Spaces
Beth Rodgers, Aberystwyth: Girls On the Borderland: Defining and Debating Adolescent Girlhood
in the Late Nineteenth Century
In ‘On the Borderland,’ an 1887 article in the Girl’s Own Paper, the journalist Lily Watson
commented that ‘There is scarcely a more favourite subject for delineation by poet and artist than
the period when childhood is just melting into womanhood.’ My research to date has been
concerned with these borderland girls. These ‘daughters of today,’ ‘juvenile spinsters’ and ‘modern
girls,’ as the press variously termed them, occupying a borderland between childhood and
womanhood, were seen to be inextricably connected to late-nineteenth-century modernity. The
adolescent girl was not just a talking point: adolescent girls as a marketable readership were
increasingly targeted by new books and magazines in the 1880s and 90s.
But exactly what age range are we talking about when we talk about this ‘melting,’
transitional period of adolescence? The range of ages associated with adolescence that are cited by
many late-Victorian commentators are rather different from our twenty-first-century conception of
this stage of life. As a result, the exact definition of adolescence in terms of age has been a recurring
question in my research, and this conference offers the opportunity to consider this issue more
closely. This paper will therefore examine how age is used to define girlhood in a number of sources.
In particular, the paper will explore the ways in which age is used by girls’ magazines such as the
Girl’s Own Paper, the Girl’s Realm, Atalanta and Young Woman in order to target and define their
readership. Guidelines for reading clubs and competitions frequently indicate the age range of the
intended readership, but these numbers can vary across magazines and indeed within the same
6
Pat Jalland, Death and the Victorian Family (Oxford: OUP,1996), p. 120.
Robert Woods, ‘Lying-in and Laying-out: Fetal Health and the Contribution of Midwifery’, Bulletin of the History of
Medicine, 81. 4 (2007), pp. 730-759 (pp. 743-744).
7
8 Jalland, Death and the Victorian Family, p. 122.
magazine. Why these discrepancies? The paper will explore what these age ranges reveal about each
magazine and its readers, and will consider what we might therefore learn about the nature of
Victorian girlhood more broadly.
Maria Damkjaer, KCL: Making up the numbers: bad magazine fiction, advertorials and other genrecrossers
In a shortlived magazine called the Household Friend: a Magazine of Domestic Economy, Literature,
Amusement, Instruction, Knitting, Netting, Crochet, and Fancy Needlework, which began publication
in 1851, one of the serial stories is called ‘The Happy Family’. The story is poorly written and veers
violently between genres: it starts as a mundane story about a domestic knitting club for some
young friends, but soon shifts into melodrama, before coming to an abrupt and unexplained end,
some months before the magazine itself founders. It is clearly there to make up the numbers, but it
has another, hidden function: almost every element of the magazine’s subtitle – amusement,
instruction, knitting, netting, etc. – is given a nod within the story. It is, almost literally, written by
numbers.
Both a page filler and an advertorial, this story straddles genres competently, despite its
badness. My paper will explore this and other more obvious advertorials – including particularly
blatant examples in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine – and argue that periodicals in the
nineteenth century played with mutable genres as a side-product of their effort to make up their
numbers. An advertorial could pretend to be a story while it was very obvious to readers that it was
an advertisement. The paper asks where the cracks become visible – the cracks between the
polished, inevitable product the periodical is supposed to be, and the scrambling, haphazard work
underlying it all. The promises which a periodical makes – of consistency, continuity, editorial
excellence, etc. – cannot always be kept. This paper links genre mutability with the periodical’s need
to fill up the numbers to argue that advertising and self-promotion invaded fiction at every turn,
thereby creating new genres and showing the joy of experimentation.
Michael Parrish Lee, Leeds Met: Writing the Malthusian Body: Parasitic Food Plots in George
Gissing’s New Grub Street
Responding to mass literary production, late-nineteenth-century writers sought to mark out the
novel’s aesthetic value by redefining the novel as an organic life form, as something vital and fertile.
However, I argue that such efforts were complicated by Darwinian-Malthusian re-imaginings of “life”
itself as fundamentally parasitic. I focus on how George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) imagines a
form of parasitism lurking at the heart of narrative and literary production, literature becoming “a
morbid excrescence upon human life” (172). New Grub Street, I argue, presents writing first as a
form of work done in order to escape hunger, but ultimately as a parasitic form of culture that feeds
on life and stands as a figure for the body’s own Malthusian narrative of ceaseless appetite. Even as
Gissing’s characters write to escape poverty and hunger, the work they produce devours their bodily
calories and drags them into the very narratives of hunger they write to escape. Through this
parasitic writing, then, Gissing meditates on the entanglement between narrative and embodiment,
imagining subjectivity as a host for the bodily narrative of hunger. Thus the starving Edwin Reardon’s
squeamishness about “trying to devise a ‘plot’” (68) is less a matter of aesthetic snobbery than a
reflection of a deeper uneasiness about his own “character” dissolving into “plot” in its barest, most
bodily form—what I call “the food plot.” While writing in New Grub Street takes on an organic
vitality, it is the vitality of the hungry Malthusian body, generating a monstrous food plot, that
“suck[s] the blood of English novelists” (203).
C4 MX034A Dickens, Structure, and Numbers I
Gowan Dawson, Leicester: Dickens, Dinosaurs and Design
Charles Dickens famously invoked the “Megalosaurus …waddling like an elephantine lizard up
Holborn Hill” in the opening scenes of Bleak House, but otherwise his novels only rarely feature
images of prehistoric creatures. Since the mid-1840s Dickens had enjoyed a close friendship with
Richard Owen, the foremost paleontologist in Victorian Britain, and, despite the paucity of actual
prehistoric megafauna in his novels, Dickens was alert to the relevance of his friends’ paleontological
methods for his fiction. In particular, Owen was famous for his ability to reconstruct extinct
creatures by revealing the perfect relation between all the apparently anomalous elements of their
anatomy, and showing that this harmonious relation between each part allowed habits of life that,
while often ungainly, were closely suited to the particular environment in which the gigantic
creatures had lived. Dinosaurs, a term Owen coined in 1842, were therefore monstrous and
ungainly creatures, but nonetheless examples of perfect design. For Victorian novelists like Dickens,
eager to disclose the underlying design of their own ostensibly ill-proportioned serialized fiction, this
must have seemed a particularly appealing skill. Like Tennyson’s preference for “compact and
vertebrate poems” over verse formed limply from “organizable lymph”, Dickens envisaged the serial
numbers of his novels as fragments that required “fusing together as an uninterrupted whole” like
the similarly fused fossil vertebra discovered in dinosaur remains. Owen insisted that the bones of
such creatures could be accurately pieced together because of the “existence of design in the
construction of any part of an organized body”, while, for Dickens, in writing serial fiction there
“must be a special design, to overcome that especially trying mode of publication”. While Dickens’s
earlier, more picaresque fiction was frequently condemned precisely for its “absence of design”, the
notion of design was one that became increasingly crucial to the painstaking planning of the
numbers of his later novels. This paper will consider Dickens’s last completed novel, Our Mutual
Friend (1863), and especially how Mr. Venus, the melancholic taxidermist who articulates skeletal
structures according to a larger “pattern” exemplified—in language inflected with natural
theological overtones—by the “bones of a leg and foot, beautifully pure, and put together with
exquisite neatness”, helps reveals the novel’s own complex structural design.
Cole Wehrle, University of Texas: “I really should have had no rest from him”: Minor Characters
and Narrative Control in Dickens’s Bleak House
Though they might overwhelm and confound students of literature, at t heir heart, numbers are
instruments of organization, and the Nineteenth Century novel presents plenty to organize.
Characters spill out of every opening, tumble into every street, crowd very office, and complicate
every plot. Fortunately , in case of Dickens, his peculiar, authoritarian narrator gives its readers
consistent, perhaps masterful demonstrations in the ways in which the mass can be organized and
leveraged for dramatic effect and encapsulated into simple signs like Pip’s parents are folded into
the letters cut into a gravestone. Of course, things are not always so clean. This paper investigates a
curious failure to organize minor characters in one of Dickens’ major novels. Using Alex Woloch’s
theories about character system and character space, the paper turns to Bleak House and offers a
comparative narratological study of the ways in which the two competing modes of narration, the
classic Dickensian narrator and Esther’s more personal coming of age story, work to organize and
enumerate the
masses. I direct particular attention at the ways in which the form of the bildungsroman frustrates
this process, and, by the end of the novel, renders organization completely untenable. Esther’s
magnanimous style of narration, which gives consideration to everything it encounters, is simply
narratologically unequipped to cleanout these characters, which continually surface directly into the
storyline. Through this critical lens, a very different understanding of the Victorian novel and of
Dickens’ late work emerges, where every Jellyby and Skimpole threatens to usurp the order of the
novel and destabilize the necessities ofplot,wherea kind of numbering is the only recourse against
the masses, just outside ,pressing against the gates.
Emma Curry, Birkbeck: Doubling Dickens: mirrors, masses, and the multiplication of perspective in
Barnaby Rudge
Dickens’s use of doubling has been a rich source of comment for critics of his fiction from his own
time to the present day. A huge variety of instances of the trope’s use have been identified, from the
historical novels’ concern with ghosts, echoes, and repetition, to the phrenic ‘twinning’ of the later
works, in which doubled characters combine to create a single, psychologically-nuanced ‘whole’. In
this paper, however, I would like to explore a form of doubling that has received much less
comment; a more materially-focused duality, which is particularly played out in the madcap,
experimental pages of Dickens’s first historical novel, Barnaby Rudge.
In much of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writing on perception, he is drawn to
interrogating the double nature of embodied experience, describing the body as ‘a being of two
leaves’, in which ‘my body for me’ and ‘my body for others’ simultaneously ‘coexist’. In exploring
how his characters witness, enact, and react to historical events in Barnaby Rudge, I will argue that
Dickens is particularly drawn to this dialectic between the ‘body for me’ and the ‘body for others’;
and frequently literalises such confrontations of perspective by placing his characters in front of
mirrors, windows, and other reflective surfaces. From Sim Tappertit’s narcissistic glances at his legs
in his sliver of looking glass, to the reassurance Hugh the hostler finds in his own reflection; from
Dolly Varden’s emphatically staged beauty, to John Chester’s meticulous arrangement of his own
dying body: in this novel Dickens is perpetually concerned with interrogating the double perspective
of bodily experience, as his characters struggle to control both witnessing and being witnessed. As
events escalate and the mob’s numbers swell, these dual perspectives become ever more complex,
chaotically multiplying and fragmenting amidst the smashed windows and damaged bodies of the
riot.
In exploring these reflections and refractions of bodily perception, I hope to emphasize in this paper
how Dickens problematizes the notion of viewpoint in Barnaby Rudge, negating the possibility of
narrating a mass historical event from a single, unified perspective by focusing instead upon the
witnessed/witnessing body’s inherent potential for dissidence and fallibility. This emphasis presents
a history that is thus correspondingly mutable and multiple, and deeply interested in the relationship
between matter and the masses.
C5 MX034B The Many and the One in Mayhew
Robert O’Kell, Manitoba: Mayhew and the Rhetoric of Numbers
The symbiotic relationships among the voices, images and numbers of Henry Mayhew’s London
Labour and London Poor are the most interesting feature of that remarkable work. But the numbers
in particular are important both for the way they authenticate individuals’ experience and establish
the economic significance of the peripatetic collectivity that Mayhew investigates. This paper
explores both the vulnerability of the working poor, as revealed by the numerical evidence in their
accounts of their day to day struggles to sustain themselves by selling in the streets, and the social
meaning of their collective economic activity, as revealed in the numerical tables and statistical
analyses provided by Mayhew himself.
These statistical summaries and tables do not function merely as a para-text to Mayhew’s narrative
and the incorporated voices of the labouring poor . Mayhew’s overtly anthropological explorations
of the material conditions in which these “exotic” people spent their days and nights do capture
both the misery and poignancy of their “life apart.” But it is, I would argue, his sociological or
utilitarian impulse to express their experience in numbers that paradoxically expands the readers’
sense of its significance. Mayhew’s overwhelming emphasis on the presentation of numerical
information seems designed to do two different things. On the one hand, much of it focuses on the
capital and incomes of types of street-sellers, providing the middle-class reader, whose own
respectable identity is directly tied to money, with a contrasting sense of the poor person’s extreme
physical and moral vulnerability. On the other hand, the statistical tables constantly reiterate the
huge collective economic value of the thousands of individuals’ aggregate labour, and they highlight
the social scope and importance of such seemingly marginal and irregular, yet actually extensive and
symbiotic economic activities. The result is that the information so provided, as much as the
individual voices and images, constitutes a powerful indictment of the reader’s previous ignorance
of, and moral diffidence about, the world of the labouring poor.
While members of the middle-class would have had some partial knowledge of the existence of both
respectable and destitute street people in Victorian London prior to the publication of Mayhew’s
descriptions and interviews (first in the Morning Chronicle, 1849-50, and later in volume form), none
of them would have had any sense of how these people related to one another. Nor would they
have had a holistic sense of how the economy of the individual, desperately entrepreneurial streetsellers and opportunistic thieves formed a collective underpinning of bourgeois society, through the
commercial exchanges motivated by useful convenience, charity and crime. Those understandings
could only be derived from the synergy of images, voices and numbers outlined above.
Owen Clayton, Lincoln: The Many verses the One: Illustrating Individuals in Henry Mayhew’s
London Labour and the London Poor
The question of ‘numbers’ has been of central importance to much of the scholarship surrounding
Henry Mayhew’s investigative odyssey London Labour and the London Poor (1849-1861). More
particularly, critics have tended to focus on the relationship between the crowd and Malthusian
population theories in the journalist’s most famous work. This paper will re-think some of the
assumptions around London Labour by focusing on one aspect which has tended to be overlooked:
Mayhew’s portrayal of individual human beings, particularly through his use of illustration.
I will begin by suggesting that Mayhew’s supposedly Malthusian ‘racialising’ of the London poor has
tended to be overstated. After this, I will argue that the serial nature of his original publication and,
more especially, his use of photographic imagery, were part of a project of re-imagining the
picturesque aesthetic mode for an urban environment. This re-imagining involved not simply
changing the picturesque away from a pastoral aesthetic, but also using picturesque techniques to
focus on individuals.
Mayhew’s interviews and his accompanying daguerreotype-engravings bring out the singular
qualities of his subjects. This suggestion goes against much scholarship that sees Mayhew’s text and
his images as supporting a typological, ethnographic view of London’s ‘street folk’. Instead, I claim
that he intended his images to be seen as indexical portraits of actually-existing individuals.
Moreover indexicality was, as I will show, also the way in which at least some of Mayhew’s readers
responded to his photographs. Finally, this paper will conclude that much of the ‘individual’ quality
of the images emerges from their translation from daguerreotype to engraving to illustration.
Lesa Scholl, Queensland: Starving to Excess: Irish Migrant Domesticity and the Terror of the Ghetto
David Lloyd has argued that the British perception of the Irish during the Great Famine (c. 1845-52)
was shaped by representations “of the Irish as excess, as irrational and immoral, as a redundant
surplus that threatens to overwhelm England”.9 The practical concerns regarding increased
economic pressures, criminality and the spread of disease were overlaid with more ideological fears
of the spread of Catholicism, as the British imagined a flood of Irishness as mass migration to British
shores occurred from the starving isle. In spite of the Union, Britain sought to distance itself from
Ireland, as well as from accountability for mismanagement. A perverted aesthetic of excess spoke to
fears of overpopulation and under-employment, exacerbated by the perceived threat of an influx of
already diseased, starving and poor migrants at a time when Britain was already struggling to
maintain “their own” poor.
This paper critiques Henry Mayhew’s claustrophobic presentation of Irish migrant domesticity in his
ethnographic study, London Labour and the London Poor (1851-52). The domestic space is described
as “crowded to excess with chairs and tables,” with “printed curtains drawn closely round” and the
oppressive heat of an unnecessary midday fire, with an overwhelming number of parents, children
9
David Lloyd, “The Indigent Sublime: Specters of Irish Hunger.” Representations 92.1 (2005): 160.
and visitors seeming suffocated in the small space.10 The Irish ghettoes of London threaten to
overflow, flooding the city and the rest of the nation. In this way, Mayhew buys into fears of the
specifically Irish tendency toward overpopulation (as condemned by Malthus) infiltrating Britain. His
representation is at once sublime and grotesque, rewriting the conventional gothic threat of
Continental Catholicism into Irish Catholicism. The language of terror and the sublime speak to the
impact of Irish migration, underpinned by the more scientific, rationalised narrative of political
economy.
C6 MX001 Things Victorian in Bulgarian Research: Literary and Cultural Perspectives
Vladimir Trendafilov, Sofia: The Dickens Case in Bulgaria: Three Stages of Reception History
The paper discusses the long, and rich, reception history of the works of Charles Dickens in Bulgaria.
It started in the novelist’s lifetime and has passed through three distinct stages which coincide with
abrupt shifts in the political situation in the country, the paradigm of cultural attitudes and the mode
of literary appreciation. The chief aim of the paper is thus necessarily twofold: to outline the great
Victorian novelist as a prominent literary and cultural presence in Bulgaria, and to use this body of
presence as a probing tool to get some deeper knowledge about the local mechanisms essential for
the production of literary values and norms.
Milean Kirova, Sofia: Bulgaria Imagined: English travelnotes on Bulgaria from mid 19th century
About mid 19th century European international politics was dominated by “The Eastern Question”: a
struggle for political and economic influence on the Ottoman Empire – once mighty, in a process of
disintegration at that time – and control of the national states, which were in the process of
emerging in South-Eastern Europe. The Balkans turned into a zone of great interest; a wave of WestEuropean travelers, many journalists and writers among them, visited Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania,
and some of them published travel notes. This paper is focused on a little known, and even less
researched, book: “Residence in Bulgaria” authored by Stanislas St. Clair and Charles A. Brophy
(1869). Both writers claim to know “the plain and literal truth”, to be thoroughly competent of their
subject but their narrative strategy unambiguously served the colonial politics of the British
government. The book constructs an imagined Bulgaria, which neither needs, nor deserves national
independence. The paper follows the mechanisms which make it possible to imagine the other by
projecting upon it a series of stereotypes worked out in a long literary tradition of colonialist
experience.
Yana Rowland, Plovdiv, The Critical Reception of Tennyson in Bulgaria (1884 to the present)
Although sparse, the range of critical studies of Tennyson produced by Bulgarian scholars since 1884
demonstrates avid interest especially in the early ballads, dramatic monologues, as well as some
later poetical dramas. Peculiarly enough, however, Tennyson’s mature longer works, such as Maud,
Enoch Arden, The Princess, Idylls of the King, and In Memoriam, have been reviewed whilst almost
none of these have actually ever been officially translated in full. In my presentation I focus on four
significant studies of Tennyson in the above period to reveal his Bulgarian critics’ unabashed concern
for the social value, the possibilities of pragmatic accommodation within the local literary canon, as
well as the intimate character description, of a poetic genius who is yet to be discovered in the
Bulgarian academic tradition. My reflections are based on my research of Victorian poetry on the
premises of hermeneutics, onto-philosophy and existential ethics, particularly as regards the themes
of memory, history and mortality.
Friday 30th 2pm Panel Session D
10
Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 1. 1851-52. London: Griffin, Bohn and Co., 1861-62. 110.
D1 Auditorium Mathematics and Writing the Human
David R. Sorenson: “The Steady Turning of the Handle”: Mathematics versus “Mathesis” in
Carlyle’s Practice of History
In his essay “Signs of the Times” (1829) Thomas Carlyle, himself a trained mathematician, remarked
that in “our favourite” discipline, “excellence in what is called its higher departments depends less
on natural genius than on acquired expertness in wielding its machinery.” Mathematics amounted to
little more than “a cunningly-constructed . . . arithmetical mill; where all the factors being put in,
are, as it were, ground into the true product, under cover, and without other effort on our part than
steady turning of the handle. We have more Mathematics than ever; but less Mathesis.” The latter
power he identified with intuition and spontaneous synthesis, and the former with pre-calculation
and predictability. The distinction was crucial to Carlyle, not only as a mathematician, but as a
historian who sought to apply mathematical reasoning to the study of the past. He was alert to the
myriad ways in which the profession of history had exploited mechanical models of mathematics in
order to raise itself to the stature of a science. In his major historical writings—The French
Revolution, Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, and Frederick the Great—Carlyle held up his own
methods in opposition to those of Saint Simon, Comte, Buckle, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Guizot,
and Ranke in order to discredit the assumption that the historian’s primary task was to “grind” the
evidence in the “machinery” of probability to arrive at fixed and predictable patterns of human
behavior. This mathematical paradigm, rooted in a constrictive conception of the discipline’s
possibilities, reinforced the tendency of historians to obliterate themselves from their narratives,
and to fulfill what Lord Acton called the imperative to “repress the poet, the patriot, the religious or
political partisan, to sustain no cause, to banish himself from his books, and to write nothing that
would gratify his own feelings or disclose his private connections.” The triumph of this mechanistic
model was as fatal to mathematics as it was to history: in both instances, the pivotal role of the
imagination was eviscerated in the dogged pursuit of homogeneous conclusions and irreducible
certainties.
Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway: Hardy’s Maths
In his poem ‘He Revisits His First School’, Hardy imagines a mathematical haunting at the Stinsford
and Bockhampton National School: ‘There sits his shade / In his olden haunt – just as he was / When
in Walkingame he / Conned the grand Rule-of-Three’. The reference is to Francis Walkingame’s
famous textbook The Tutor's Assistant: being a compendium of practical arithmetic, published in
many versions from 1751. In his autobiography Hardy remembers that he was still using the textbook at Isaac Last’s Academy, aged 16:
his course of instruction included elementary drawing, advanced arithmetic, geometry, and
algebra, in which he was fairly good, always saying that he found a certain poetry in the rule
for the extraction of the cube-root, owing to its rhythm, and in some of the ‘Miscellaneous
Questions’ of Walkingame .
This paper asks what it would mean to take that ‘certain poetry’ seriously. It explores Hardy’s
schoolboy maths in the context of Victorian mathematical education (Barnes, de Morgan, etc.), and
the mature novelist and poet’s preoccupation – rooted in Zeno, Spencer, Russell and others – with
ratio, sequence and sets; from the ‘mathematical road’ of The Well Beloved to his late ‘sequence
metre’. But more generally it asks whether the extraordinary late Victorian developments in
mathematical thinking – especially the work of Dedekind and Cantor on set theory, cardinality and
the number line – could be said to have any parallels in the literature of the period.
D2 MX001 Corpus Stylistics in Dickens and Beyond:
Michaela Mahlberg University of Nottingham: Dickens, characterisation and the corpus:
employing computer-assisted methodology to study textual patterns in Dickens’s novels
This paper proposes a corpus stylistic approach to the study of characterisation in Dickens’s novels.
Corpora are typically defined as large collections of computer-readable text. Advantages of corpus
methodology are seen in the identification of repeated linguistic patterns and the retrieval of
quantitative information on linguistic phenomena. Research in corpus ‘stylistics’ aims for an
approach where computer methodology and literary interpretation complement one another. This
paper focuses on the identification of textual patterns functioning as building blocks for fictional
worlds. The underlying corpus methodology deals with the retrieval of ‘clusters’, i.e. repeated
sequences of words such as I am glad to hear, with a shriek and a, all that sort of thing or with his
back to the (cf. Mahlberg 2013). In Dickens’s fictional worlds, characters take an important place and
clusters contribute to textual patterns of character information. While striking habitual phrases that
are associated with specific characters have been extensively discussed in the literature (e.g. Brook
1970), this paper is interested in the range of patterns that contribute to the construction of fictional
characters. Such patterns also include those that readers may be less consciously aware of and that
require corpus methods so they can be systematically studied. Textual patterns of character
information include, for instance, body language presentation, speech patterns and patterns of
narrator comments. The paper will illustrate different types of patterns and the textual functions
they fulfil - either in a specific novel or across several novels. The functional discussion also raises
wider theoretical questions relating to the ideological principles underlying Dickens’s externalised
techniques of characterisation (John 2001) and the possible reactions that patterns can trigger in the
reader (Rosenberg 1996).
Rafaella Antinucci, Pathenope Naples: “Heaps of” Things in Dickens’s fiction
It is well known that Dickens’s novels teem with all varieties of items, especially useless and curious
things, invariably grouped together or piled up, and many a time enumerated in long lists. In most
cases they represent treasures or, at the opposite, curses for their owners and/or for other
characters, disclosing a hidden, disquieting, “other” dimension of some Victorian social practices
that Dickens tries to unearth and expose. If in Victorian Things Asa Briggs regarded Dickens’s novels
“necessary reading for the historian of things, which are often brilliantly – and poetically –
described”, Dickens himself seemed to be fascinated by familiar objects that, in his opinion, had “a
kind of soul in their stupendous bodies”. In the last decades the critical fields of Objects Studies and
Thing Theory have shown the close connection between consumerism and the appearance of defunctionalized objects in Western literature.
Moving from these premises, my paper aims to investigate Dickens’s metaphorical use of
“heaps” of various objects that frequently materialize in his fiction through the adoption of a corpus
stylistics approach. In particular, by making use of the Query Processor of the University of Lancaster
and of its corpus “Works of Dickens” (WD), I will first identify the novels and passages that are more
relevant to my analysis and then proceed to lemmatize “heap/s” in order to extract concordance
lines and discuss their collocations.
Kathleen Pacious, National University of Ireland, Galway: Numbered Narrators: Rhetorical
Statistics in Daniel Deronda and Our Mutual Friend
The relationship between narrators and readers in Victorian texts is a problematic one. Robyn
Warhol addressed the purpose of the “engaging narrator,” first in her “Toward a Theory of the
Engaging Narrator” (1986) which led to her 1989 Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the
Victorian Novel. In it she states that female novelists were much more likely to use engaging
techniques in order to reach audiences typically withheld from them and to arouse the sympathies
of their readers. These engaging techniques are strategies of earnest intervention which work to
unite the narratee and reader. They include the name by which the narratee is addressed, frequency
of direct address, minimal irony, a nonfictional stance towards characters, and a realistic attitude
towards narration. Engaging interventions have not received critical attention, which is problematic
as they are widely used as a strategy of 19th century fiction. Although Warhol’s study offers a
significant narratological paradigm for Victorian texts, she contextualizes her work in gender studies
but not in rhetoric or ethics. My paper examines the frequency of narratorial interventions,
especially direct address in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend.
Specifically, I count the occurrence of these earnest interventions and contextualize them in their
rhetorical purpose. I juxtapose these two authors in order to compare whether the difference in
frequency is one of gender or rhetoric. I argue that Eliot’s use of earnest interventions is more
frequent than Dickens’ but both authors use engaging techniques to bring about ethical effects, and
more typically do so in order to manipulate or coerce an affective response from the reader towards
a character or situation that would be naturally repulsive. By tracking the frequency of direct address
by both a female and male author, this paper uses a statistical approach to bridge from stylistics to
poetics in order to show that even Victorian numbers had a rhetorical purpose.
D3 MX034A Measuring Sameness and Difference
Richa Dwor, Leicester: ‘Take half a pound of matso flour, two ounces of chopped suet’: Judith
Montefiore’s The Jewish Manual (1846)
In 1846, Lady Judith Montefiore (1784-1862) published anonymously a work titled The Jewish
Manual: Practical Information In Jewish And Modern Cookery With a Collection of Valuable Recipes &
Hints Relating to the Toilette. As the wife of the Jewish banker and philanthropist Sir Moses
Montefiore, she traveled extensively in Europe, Russia, North Africa and the Holy Land and
published several accounts of these journeys. Her foray into cookery and domestic guidance reflects
a cosmopolitan culinary range whilst also addressing the role of Jewish women in aligning kashruth
(Jewish dietary laws) with aspirational British dining and hospitality. Directions pertaining to
kashruth are not, however, signaled as having a different status. Thus, a recipe for Matso soup
appears alongside those for Yorkshire puddings and escabeche. Nevertheless, dairy-free variations
are given for dishes to be served with meat (egg yolks for butter and cream in véloute and
béchamel) and forbidden items such as shellfish and pork are tacitly omitted (a concoction of
rendered suet is advised in place of lard).
While it may be that Judith is taking her readers’ knowledge of kashruth for granted, we may
also read her subtle approach to broadcasting Jewish difference as seeking to bring refinement to
kitchens which may already be kosher. The Jewish Manual draws on Ashkenazic and Sephardic
traditions to show how Jewish and British culinary practices may be accommodated at the same
table. When it was published, wealthy Jewish families were experiencing rapid social mobility which
risked the erosion of ritual practices. These practices were adhered to more scrupulously by the
large number of destitute Jews who were aided through the philanthropy of the Montefiores and
their circle. This paper examines how, in spoonfuls, ounces, quarts, pecks and pounds Judith
Montefiore uses the cookery genre to measure the parameters of Jewish piety and worldliness.
Jenny Holt, Meiji University, Tokyo: "A Profound Contempt for the Laws of Perspective": The
Distortion of Size and Proportion in Victorian Literary Representations of Japan.
Recently, historical and cultural scholars have been examining how racial categories have been
constructed over history in terms of physical attributes. For example, Michael Keevak, in Becoming
Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking, has shown how in the nineteenth century East Asians,
previously classified as ‘white’, were increasingly described in both science and popular culture as
‘yellow’, in order to intensify perceived differences between ethnic groups. In this paper, I will
consider another variable commonly used in racial classification - physical size - and its central role in
defining the Japanese both for travel and fiction writers.
Late Victorian statisticians aimed to apply rigorous standards to the collection of anthropometric
data, and, in theory, size is a property that can be measured more objectively than skin colour.
However, in literature, the representation of size was as arbitrary as that of flesh tone. Even allowing
for actual differences in stature between Europeans and East Asians due to nutritional,
socioeconomic and genetic factors, disparities between the heights of Europeans and the Japanese
were massively exaggerated. Not only this, but, in texts the relative sizes of people, and of buildings
and objects, fluctuate wildly, Alice-in-Wonderland fashion; one moment, Europeans and Japanese
appear roughly the same size, and the next, Europeans become monstrously large and barbarically
clumsy, while the Japanese assume delicate, fairy-like proportions.
Victorian Japanophiles were fascinated by the way traditional Japanese art distorted perspective for
dramatic effect, and they seem to have incorporated this anti-perspectival worldview into the way
they represented Japan in literature. I will refer to writers such as Isabella Bird, Pierre Loti, Lafcadio
Hearn and Clive Holland, to argue that for western writers Japanese ‘smallness’ was less a reality
than a literary antidote to the psychological anxieties of the age; in particular, the sense of the
agoraphobia and anomie that writers experienced in the modern industrialized west, and their
desire to take refuge from it in Japan.
D4 MX034B Numbers on London’s Streets
Carlos Lόpez Galviz,
School of Advanced Study, University of London: Into, out and across:
mapping street traffic in Victorian London
The paper will examine a series of traffic reports published in the 1860s by the Commissioners of
Sewers of the City of London. Through them, the author, William Haywood, produced a systematic
account of the traffic situation in the City and the metropolis, which was concerned not only with
the moral cost of traffic as exemplified with the rise of deaths caused by street accidents, but,
crucially, with understanding traffic and congestion at a particular time of London’s history. That
understanding involved counting, mapping and imagining the future metropolis. Haywood’s ideas
were representative of the conflict of interests associated to administrative boundaries, and their
relationship to the agency and, often, disruptive forces of transport technologies, notably horsedrawn vehicles and railways. I will show the extent to which the reports contributed to regulating
traffic and structuring congestion, providing a unique insight into the characteristics of the
metropolitan experience in London during this period.
Matthew Ingleby: ‘No. 1 is an Egyptian tomb!...No. 2 is a Swiss chalet’: House Numbers and Names
in Victorian Suburbia
…one of those new dwellings which yearly spring up north of the Regent’s Park – dwellings
that, attesting the eccentricity of the national character, task the fancy of the architect and
the gravity of the beholder – each tenement so tortured into contrast with the other, that,
on one little rood of ground, all ages seemed blended, and all races encamped. No. 1 is an
Egyptian tomb! – Pharaohs may repose there! No. 2 is a Swiss chalet – William Tell may be
shooting in its garden!
Throughout the nineteenth century, London sprawled, expanding from one to over six million
residents between 1800 and 1900. As the above passage from Bulwer Lytton’s What Will He Do With
It? (1859) exemplifies, the new speculative developments that kept ‘springing up’ began by the midcentury to provoke ironic and satirical responses in a number of novels and periodical articles, which
variously carry anxieties about overpopulation, environmental despoliation, class instability, and
anonymity. In this paper I will discuss these texts in relation to house naming and -numbering,
reading these practices as tactics for the maintenance of the aura of domestic individuality within a
context of mass-marketed residential products that routinely failed to live up to the ‘bourgeois
utopia’ Robert Fishman has described. Commentary upon the attempts of speculators and residents
to distinguish between unprecedentedly large numbers of new dwellings arises as a topos in cultural
discourse about the city in which the contradictions inherent in suburbia are made manifest.
While Bulwer Lytton’s narrator contrasts the consecutive blankness of the house numbers with the
ahistorical eclecticism of the (derivative) architectural productions themselves, much of the
periodical writing and fictional accounts of suburbia remark on the way identikit brick boxes eschew
numbers in favour of names reminiscent of the pastoral or aristocratic. As a satirical article in All the
Year Round from 1866 puts it, ‘In none of these roads do we number our houses. That would be too
town-like.’ House names might be a way of leveraging oneself out of or compensating for the
unsatisfactory position one finds oneself in, but they might also provoke the mirth of those that
spotted the distance of authentic ideal and shoddy reality. The irony of elaborately denominated but
physically underwhelming suburban houses is captured aptly in George Grossmith’s The Diary of a
Nobody (1892), for instance, whose ‘The Laurels, Brickfield Terrace’ deconstructs suburban housenaming concisely. This paper will explore the role of house numbers and their suppression in the
construction of metropolitan suburban identity between 1850 and 1910, exploring the practice in a
range of texts, from articles in journals such as Saint Pauls and Belgravia, and novels by Braddon,
Gissing, Grossmith and Chesterton, to the Post Office Directory.
Mary L. Shannon, KCL: Street Numbers: Uncovering the Real Spaces of Bohemia
Street numbering holds wonderful clues to the past. Despite the Victorian passion for rebuilding,
renaming and renumbering their city streets, nineteenth-century street numbering is a code worth
unlocking. ‘Bohemia’ is often thought of as a largely cultural space, a useful geographic metaphor for
literary and theatrical networks. This paper, however, argues that street numbering reveals Bohemia
emerged out of real spaces experienced across cities: the theatrical and print culture districts
common to London, Paris, and colonial Melbourne.
WM Thackeray lived at 54 and then 15 bis, Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin, in 1830s Paris, at the same
time as GWM Reynolds worked in the English language bookshop at no. 55. This street was right by
l’Opera, and near the booksellers who later became Reynolds’s French agents. A decade later, across
the Channel, street numbering shows that London’s Bohemia located itself in Covent Garden:
between theatres, taverns, and newspaper offices, surrounded by musical instrument makers and
the musical press. In 1860s colonial Melbourne, the watering-holes, theatre, and newspaper offices
of neighbouring Bourke and Collins streets were home to a new and vigorous Bohemian network on
the other side of the globe from ‘Old Europe’.
This paper will develop archival work presented in my doctoral thesis and establish Bohemia as a
real, rather than just a symbolic, cultural space, shaped by shared encounters within real streets. It
will argue that part of what made Bohemia an international community was its shared spaces across
cities, as Bohemian circles established themselves in music and theatre districts like l’Opera in Paris
and Bourke Street in Melbourne. I will show that shared spaces were as important as shared ideas in
helping to form a specific kind of global-yet-local masculine community, which complicates
discussions about the importance of print culture to the formation of the modern nation state.
D5 MB0-16 Quantifying Ethics
Kirsten Harris, University of Nottingham: ‘Life be cheap, and money dear’: Taking Stock in Socialist
Periodical Poetry
‘The characteristics of the past are division and subtraction; those of the [socialist] future addition
and multiplication’, averred Alfred Orage in the Labour Leader, linking socialist ideals of equality and
unity with a transcendent literary aesthetic which would encompass the whole instead of focusing
on parts. Certainly, there is a strain of such poetry in nineteenth-century socialist periodicals, but
another, less spiritual, poetic impulse is also present – one that is concerned with the tangible and
the material, with numbers, units, percentages and fractions. This second type of poetry, which
tends to be droll, witty, and sometimes blistering in its censure of capitalist economic structures, is
the focus of my paper. I will discuss how such poetry, written to be timely rather than timeless,
employs fiscal and numeric motifs in order to promote its political agenda in two socialist
publications, the Commonweal and the Labour Leader. By focusing on what is divisible, separate and
therefore countable – in terms of money, goods, or numbers of people – poets such as Tom Maguire
(writing as Bardolph in the Labour Leader) were able to establish a dialectic that compares and
contrasts the ‘fortunes’ of the working classes with those of their employers. These ‘fortunes’ are in
one sense financial: many of the poems ‘do the accounts’ and are concerned with deficit and
surplus; a worker’s wage, what this can buy and how many it must feed is calculated and contrasted
with the profit made at his or her expense. In another sense, the ‘fortunes’ are ideological: the
‘millions’ of people who make up the working classes are pitted against the few who have the
‘millions’; the hopeful suggestion is posited that a change of fortune could be brought about by the
sheer force of numbers. I will discuss how literary forms such as the nursery rhyme are adapted – as
in earlier nineteenth-century radical movements, there are a number of versions of ‘The House that
Jack Built’, for example – and analyse the poetic tropes and structures that lie behind this thematic
focus, such as parallelism and synecdoche.
Dominic Rainsford, Aarhus: Literature, Ethics, Mathematics: Calculating Suffering in Victorian Texts
Is it worse when something terrible happens to ten people instead of just one? Most people would
say, ‘Of course!’ - and this assumption underlies many aspects of law and social policy. But what if
one instance is, in some sense, infinitely bad? What happens, then, to the moral arithmetic? And, if
one instance is not infinitely bad, is it not, given the scale of past, present and future suffering in the
world, therefore negligible? This is a set of problems that preoccupied a wide range of Victorian
moral philosophers and literary authors, more or less explicitly. It underlies more familiar, less
abstract, discussions of the one and the many, self and society, and of the purpose and practice of
religion, as well as reactions to the changed sense of scale and individual significance brought about
by nineteenth-century science. It still shadows the work of contemporary philosophers with
nineteenth-century roots. Major Victorian novelists and poets whose work needs to be seen in this
light include Tennyson, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy and Hopkins. This paper will discuss instances of the
clash of morals and mathematics in texts by some of these authors, relating them to developments
in Victorian philosophy, theology and science.
Ingrid Hanson, University of Hull, ‘God’ll send the Bill to you’: W.T. Stead and the Accounts of War
In his anti-Boer War pamphlet of 1901, Methods of Barbarism, W. T. Stead argues that ‘the
fundamental fallacy upon which the whole of this war is based has been the assumption […] that
God Almighty does not count’. For Stead himself, by contrast, in every way, God counts. War against
War in South Africa, the antiwar newspaper that Stead edited, kept a regular tally of the numbers of
dead and wounded on both sides, presented alongside a cartoon of Colonial Secretary Joseph
Chamberlain as both the grim reaper himself and the recipient of this ‘Butcher’s Bill’. That the
payment of the moral bill for war is due to God is emphasized repeatedly in Stead’s publications and
dramatized in his polemical Shall I Slay my Brother Boer? with a prefatory quotation from James
Russell Lowell’s homely antiwar persona, Hosea Biglow: ‘Ef you take a sword an’ dror it / An go to
stick a feller thro’ […] / God’ll send the bill to you.’
Drawing on the close connection that W.J.T. Mitchell notes between telling and tallying, as well as
on Stead’s own use of counting as both enumerating and signifying, this paper will consider the
records, bills, statistics and accounts of all kinds threaded through these intertextual pro-Boer
publications. I will argue that Stead uses numbers and numerousness to offer an account of war that
conflates its moral, spiritual and economic costs. From what Roland Barthes terms the ‘numberless’
narratives of the world, Stead eclectically borrows cartoons, poems, lists, letters, articles and
sermons to tell his own polyvocal tale; if it fails to achieve its ends, this is – at least in part –
because, despite the sensationalist power of each item, the final bill, addressed ambiguously to the
individual and the collective ‘you’, is unimaginable and morally unpayable.
D6 MBS02-3 Managing Over-Population
Dan Bivona, Arizona State: “The coming universal wish not to live”: Regression Towards the Mean
of Suicide in the Late Nineteenth Century
British social theorists of the late nineteenth century who were under the spell of Darwinism worried
over the prospects for outfitting Britain for successful competition with other world powers. How to
guarantee British success in an increasingly competitive world order became the question of the day
in the 1890s. After all, what was the point of being a world power if not to best other powers in
imperial competition?
Debates about the health of the British polity and the British Empire in the late nineteenth
century often seem to be marked by increasingly dismal appraisals of the prospects for the “race” in
this international competition. The near-hysterical fears of physical “degeneration” voiced by neoMalthusians such as Arnold White, who, at the beginning of the Boer War promulgated the claim
that Army recruiters had found more than 40% of the British male population to be physically unfit
for military service, are well-known (he later raised his estimate to claim that three in five British
working class men were “unfit”). However, new work on eugenic discourse such as that of
Angelique Richardson has shifted our attention somewhat in this field, away from a preoccupation
with the gloomy eugenicist and neo-Malthusian predictions of “race suicide” to a focus on the story
of how intellectuals and artists in this period began to envision how an improved “race’s” future
prospects could be bettered either by, on the eugenic side, the practice of “rational reproduction,”
or, on the “social efficiency” side, the promotion of “equality of opportunity,” a phrase Benjamin
Kidd claims -- wrongly -- to have invented. In short, despite the gloomy note in warnings of
eugenicists and neo-Malthusians, the gloom was often tinged with social and scientific optimism
about the prospects for improving “the race.”
The prominent eugenicist Karl Pearson, who eventually came to hold the “Galton Chair” at
University College London, was troubled by the threat of what he called “race suicide,” which, he
claimed, was a looming demographic catastrophe for the British middle and upper classes who were
under threat of “engulfment” by less fit types. What’s interesting about the concept is the fact that
“suicide” in this case is an affair of statistical averages rather than, more dramatically, self-murder in
the literal sense of the term, although that fact did not prevent Pearson from talking about it in the
most lurid tones (or, indeed, to discuss it as if he were referring to a form of self-murder consciously
chosen by those he anomalously classified as “more fit”). As the less fit breed faster than the fit,
they come to form as a group a statistically larger proportion of the overall population, thus dragging
the “average” or “norm” down: this, in short, is what “race suicide” is all about. As he argues in
National Life from the Standpoint of Science (1900):
You cannot change the leopard’s spots and you cannot change bad stock to good;
you may dilute it, possibly spread it over a wider area, spoiling good stock, but until
it ceases to multiply it will not cease to be. (NLSS 16-17)
As Ian Hacking and others have noted, the invention of statistical normality in the
nineteenth century eventually led to a repeated confusion of the norm with, on the one hand, the
statistical average and, on the other, a goal to be striven for, a state of “health” in opposition to “the
pathological state,” however that was defined. In sliding from description to prescription, from “the
norm” as a statistical average to “the norm” as a goal to be striven for, the goal of social
improvement for eugenicists like Pearson becomes to push the statistical average higher by infusing
the “stock” with more fit individuals that will raise the the quality of the overall average.
In this paper, I will discuss the anomalies that come to vex the debate over how to “improve the
race,” focusing primarily on Pearson as a representative figure. In works such as Thomas Hardy’s
Jude the Obscure (1895), the contradictory logic of “race suicide” is underlined precisely because
Hardy focuses the drama on individuals rather than groups. Anchored in a statistical inference
rather than an individual intention, Pearson’s notion of “race suicide” nonetheless implicitly
attributes intentionality -- a desire for self-extinction -- to a process that can only be seen as
intentional if one ignores its origin in a statistical modeling. Like Father Time in Hardy’s novel,
struggling to grasp how to make sense of Sue’s pregnancy which threatens the family with
starvation, he falls back on purposive intentionality.
D7 MBS04-5 Prosody
Marie Banfield: Number And Verse: The New Prosody And Metrical Experiments Of Gerard Manley
Hopkins
Prosody, the architecture or scaffolding of measured verse, and the tension between ‘law’ and
‘license’ held particular fascination for Hopkins: Greek prosody, with its strict adherence to number
and quantity; the rugged vigour of Anglo Saxon alliterative verse; the sonorous chiming qualities of
Welsh poetry; and the more flexible patterns of modern English verse. Milton’s poetry he saw as a
bridge between classical and modern poetry, while Whitman’s ‘savage ‘and ‘original’ art,
uncomfortably like his own, looked to new rhythmic patterns. In his own poetry, Hopkins shows
himself to be a meticulous prosodist and an ingenious experimenter. Mathematical in his precision,
he imparted to fellow poet Richard Watson Dixon an equation for ‘the perfect sonnet’: ‘(4+4) + (3+3)
= 2.4 + 2.3 = 2(4+3) = 14’. Though struggling to understand the ‘new prosody’, Dixon observed that it
was likely to start a revolution. An enthusiastic amateur musician, Hopkins possessed an acute sense
of melody and rhythm. The ‘Deutschland’, he explained to Dixon, began as new rhythm haunting his
ear. As a poet, he was also deeply aware of the possibilities of language and the extraordinary
emotional range of the human voice. His empirical interest in the acoustic properties of music and
poetry, I argue in this paper, may well have been reinforced by modern advances in the
understanding of the nature of sound, and by scientific methods that stimulated precise, analytical
approaches to both music and language. The science of acoustics, as developed by Helmholtz and
disseminated by Tyndall, was applied to poetry by musician and poet Sidney Lanier, an account of
whose early death saddened Hopkins. This paper considers the implications of the new science of
acoustics for poetry and its possible influence on Hopkins’s prosody: his adaptations of counterpoint,
his development of sprung rhythm and his sonnet variations.
Friday 3.30pm Panel Session E
E1 MBX034A Religion and Numbers
Mark Knight, Toronto: Reading Victorian Religious Periodicals and the Limits of Painting Religion
by Numbers
Our understanding of Victorian periodicals has grown exponentially in recent decades. Reasons
include the careful archival work of scholars, the greater access provided by digitization projects, and
the theoretical insights of those who attend to aspects of material culture and the means of
production. The last of these reasons is worth pausing on briefly, for most of the scholarship on
Victorian periodicals is heavily reliant on economic modes of analysis. Helpful though such
approaches can be, they encounter major methodological limits. This is especially apparent when we
turn to religion. Much of the scholarship on periodicals struggles in the face of theology and lacks
the means of thinking critically and sympathetically about periodicals that identify themselves as
religious. Although we can attribute some of our interpretative difficulties to the death of Josef
Altholz and the loss of his considerable expertise, there is a larger theoretical problem. Something
significant is lost when we try to paint our picture of religion by numbers. In making this claim, I do
not wish to position economics or material culture as polar opposites to religion. I do, however,
want to suggest that we see too little when we rely on numbers to tell us everything about Victorian
religious periodicals. Taking three mid-century evangelical journals as case studies (Good Words, The
Christian Observer, and the Evangelical Magazine), this paper will focus on the hermeneutics of
reading religious periodicals. Numbers have their place but they offer a limited form of language,
and in the last part of this paper I will outline some of the ways by which we might move beyond
painting by numbers to reading with a more capacious critical vocabulary.
Sarah Flew, Open: ‘Statistics as to the Religious Condition of London’: how the Church of England
used statistics to its shape home missionary strategy in the 1850s and 1860s
This paper explores how the Church of England used statistics to shape its home missionary strategy.
These statistics calculated the deficiency in standards of spiritual provision and quantified: the
number of churches, parsonages, mission buildings and the school places that the Church needed to
supply; and the number of scripture readers, missionaries, mission women and lay helpers that the
Church needed to employ.
At the start of the nineteenth century, the Church of England began to express its concerns
regarding the rapidly growing populations in the cities and the lack of religious provision. These
concerns were amplified with the publication of Horace Mann’s report (1854) on the 1851 Religious
Census. The census had been commissioned in order to obtain figures regarding the provision of
church accommodation for public worship. The report found that only 58% of the population
attended church on Census Sunday; even allowing for the non-attendance of the young, the sick and
elderly, and those that lived in isolated rural areas. The report calculated that London, however, only
had enough church accommodation to provide for 30% of its population. This report prompted the
formation of a House of Lords Select Committee to enquire into the ‘deficiency of means of spiritual
instruction and places of divine worship in the metropolis, and in other populous districts in England
and Wales’. This committee in turn produced its own lengthy report of statistics in 1858.
This analysis of the state of religious provision in the cities, prompted the new Bishop of London
(Archibald Campbell Tait, Bishop of London between 1856 and 1868) to carry out an intensive survey
of the Diocese of London. Bishops had traditionally carried out a brief survey (called visitation
returns) of the state of their diocese approximately every four years as part of their preparation to
compile their Bishop’s Charge (a public address). Under Tait, the ‘schedule of inquiries’ asked of
incumbents greatly increased from about 10 to nearly 40 questions. Their replies were compiled as
the ‘Statistics as to the Religious Condition of London’ which formed the basis of a major new
diocesan strategy for London. The detailed report, published in 1864, set out the Bishop’s strategy
for the next ten years in connection with his newly established organisation the Bishop of London’s
Fund.
Niamh Brown, Glasgow: Almanacs and Hymnals
This paper will discuss almanacs and hymnals as texts which provided some of the rhythm of
nineteenth century life, each providing cyclical structures around which physical and spiritual life
was based. The almanacs published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge over much
of the nineteenth century followed the same pattern of year by year, each section mapping out with
minimal commentary the charts, timetables and notable dates of the year ahead – the numbers and
facts which provided one kind of structure in a Victorian’s life. The numerical elements and the
spiritual sides of the almanac’s audience are brought together in the monthly notices, which note,
side by side, ‘Sunday Lessons’ and ‘astronomical’ phenomena; holy days and hunting season dates.
Histories of the nineteenth century widely discuss the ‘conflict’ between science and religion, but
the SDUK almanac shows itself to be a privileged space in which the material and the spiritual run
parallel without requiring the reader to choose between either.
In a similar way that the SDUK almanacs provided the Victorian populace with the dates and
numbers they required for their everyday needs, so hymnals, especially those which were structured
by occasion, such as Hymns Ancient and Modern (1867) and John Keble’s The Christian Year (1827),
provided a wealth of stories, lessons and thoughts to support their readers or signers through the
day, week, or year. The sources here – Hymns Ancient and Modern, The Christian Year, and The
SDUK Almanacs from 1842 to 1880, are all texts which were widely accessible; almanacs were
available for pennies, and hymns for all occasions sung in churches. Thus these numbers and hymns,
and the cycles and ideas which they perpetuated, were pervasive, as established by Brian Maidment
in his chapter ‘Rearranging the Year’, which tracks the readership and form of the almanac and
yearbook until the middle of the nineteenth century. By building on Maidment’s conclusions,
analysing almanacs and hymnals, and comparing their uses of numbers, rhythms and cycles, these
sources provide unique insight into the ways in which the spiritual and mundane were reconciled,
and how numbers and cycles concretely affected the general public.
This paper explores the significance of the cycles constructed by almanacs and hymnals, and argues
that numbers can act as a meeting point for matters of the mind, body and soul alike, exemplified in
these sources.
E2 MBX034B Dickens, Structure, and Numbers II
Neil MacFarlane, Birkbeck: Decreasing 'the surplus population': was Scrooge alluding to Benjamin
Franklin as well as Thomas Malthus?
In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge's ultimately self-defeating comments on charity are usually seen as
resuming Oliver Twist's criticism of the New Poor Law and its essentially British roots in Benthamite
utilitarianism and Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population.
But this ignores the fact that Dickens's first Christmas book (December 1843) was written just after
the mid-point of Martin Chuzzlewit's serialisation: his only novel with a substantial sub-plot set in a
nightmarishly commodified United States describes its citizens as having 'cares, hopes, joys,
affections, virtues, and associations, [which] seemed to be melted down into dollars'. Benjamin
Franklin is clearly referred to in Chuzzlewit, as having warned against such spiritual degradation, and
his collected works are recorded in Dickens's library both in 1844 and 1870.
When researching the New World before his 1842 visit, Dickens almost certainly read Harriet
Martineau's accounts of her own, eight years before. The prominent elucidator and advocate of
British political economy drew attention, in her American books, to Franklin's anticipation of
Malthus in his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, published in 1751 but
overshadowed by his electrical researches and invention of the lightning rod.
By 1843, Franklin had been dead for over fifty years, and although his roles as scientist and American
revolutionary were by no means forgotten, he was best known as the author of The Way to Wealth.
Widely (and incorrectly) perceived as a mere collection of homespun aphorisms on frugality and selfhelp, Franklin's ambivalent stance towards accumulative capitalism was probably appreciated by
Dickens, who may have been directly alluding to Franklin's 'fools make feasts and wise men eat
them' (itself in the tradition of Erasmus's Praise of Folly) when Scrooge's spiritual conversion is
marked not only by his purchasing the turkey for 'lunatic' Bob Cratchit, but also by taking up his
foolish nephew's invitation to Christmas dinner.
Peter Orford, Buckingham: A multidrood of sins: the repetition and reputation of John Jasper in
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
This paper is about John Jasper; or rather John Jaspers. Dickens may have started The Mystery of
Edwin Drood, but he didn't finish it, resulting in an overwhelming response from scholars, authors
and screenwriters, all of whom are resolved to continue and conclude Dickens's plot. But little to no
attention has been paid to the way in which these solutions have continued Dickens's characters,
and how this in turn impacts on our analysis and understanding of the protagonists in Dickens's final
novel.
For many years Drood studies constituted the bulk of Dickens scholarship at a time when Dickens
himself was seen as inappropriate fodder for academia; in turn, subsequent scholars have been
somewhat embarrassed by their predecessors boundless enthusiasm for “solving” the mystery, as a
consequence of which, there is little discussion of the book outside of the solutions. Therefore if we
are looking for responses and analysis of The Mystery of Edwin Drood we must mine the many
sequels to see the text beneath the text; to see what they are telling us not as new endings, but as
interpretations of Dickens’s original text. By doing this they cease to become repetitions of the same
moment, but rather a sequence of evolving ideas through the years. In particular, Edwin’s uncle John
Jasper has been re-imagined over time as a serial killer, reluctant murder, innocent man or a
psychopath with multiple personalities. This paper will look at the fixation with completing Jasper
and the impact of all these clones on our perception of the original.
E3 Auditorium Measuring Criminal Bodies
Edward Higgs, Essex: ‘Numbering identity: quantification and the identification of the criminal in
19th century Britain’?
This paper examines the shift in the identification of the criminal body in the 19th century, from
surface signs to the quantification of physical systems, and the implications this has for modern
forms of biometric IDs. In the period before 1800 the criminal body was identified in Britain via
external signs – branding, prose description, mutilation – which reflected a world in which the
surface of the body carried signs of a person’s internal nature. This was replaced in the early
Victorian period by the register of distinguishing marks and the photographic mug shot, but neither
of these was of great use in practice. The late Victorian period sees the quantification of criminal
identification systems, first through the anthropometric system of Alphonse Bertillon, and later
through the work of Francis Galton on fingerprints. In the anthropometric system, closely linked to
contemporary racial anthropology, the dimensions of the criminal body were rigorously recorded,
and reduced to a numerical code. Galton believed that Bertillon’s system was unsound because it
reduced continuous measurements to ordinal measurements. Instead he suggested using the
fingerprint as the main method of identification for everyone, not just criminals. Although his
interest in fingerprinting grew out of racial eugenics, central to Galton’s later science of the
fingerprint were probabilistic proofs of the (relative) uniqueness of individual prints. All subsequent
forms of biometrics depend on such probabilities. The paper would thus explore some of the
fundamental changes in the understanding of the world in the period, from signs to quantifiable
systems. It would also explain the odd fact that modern identification is not based on a one-to-one
correspondence but on chance – we have all become risks rather than individuals.
Marlene Tromp, Arizona State University, Volume of Blood, Quantity of Fibres, and Dimensions of
Lacerations: The Failure of Forensic Science
In the Jess McPherson murder case, police (and then the press) analyzed the volume of blood and
precise location of bloody marks in the kitchen, alongside the exact number, shape, and size of the
forty cleaver blows to her head and neck. They cut floorboards imprinted with an exact footprint
from the murdered women’s room. In Harriet Buswell’s murder, investigators gathered the
dimensions of the mortal wounds in her throat and the precise location of those injuries. They cast
the toothmarks in an apple on her bedside table and assessed the dimensions of the murder
weapon, as revealed by the blood mark on the towel on which it was cleaned. Though still in its
legal infancy, forensic science played an important role in the Victorian courtroom of murder cases.
Forensics had its limits, however. Fingerprinting was only an emergent science in the late-
nineteenth century, and blood could not be typed during the period (though it could be identified as
human by cell shape). Still, the Victorians expressed deep faith in the numerical data: the science of
exact size, shape, and volume. With the volume of evidence available in these cases, we might think
it would have been simple to discover the murderer but, significantly, the numbers could not resolve
these mysteries. Indeed, what these cases revealed was how little certainty even ample forensics
could supply in determining guilt or innocence—and more disturbingly, even the basic facts of the
case—deeply unsettling propositions for a culture with a growing investment in the power of
scientific fact. In fact, I would argue, it was the often markedly divergent narratives that offered the
most significant “truths” in the wake of both murders, not the numbers or the science.
Even modern forensic techniques would likely not have untangled the mysteries of these
crimes. Though both brutal murders initiated the collection of significant amounts of forensic
evidence, both of the courtroom dramas came down to the narratives of the suspects. In the
McPherson case it was the prisoner’s accusation of an elderly employer after her capital conviction.
This story occasioned both public outrage and extrajudicial crown-commissioned hearings. It was
such a compelling narrative that the prisoner’s death sentence was commuted and the employer’s
family lived under the shadow of the accusation until the old man’s death. In the Buswell case, the
arrest of an unexpected suspect led to the publication of a story that incited the compassion of the
nation for him, as well as ire against the police. It is only with careful analysis of the stories that we
can make any meaningful analysis of these crimes—a fact that makes a strong case for the social
importance of the work of literary critics in a global climate that tends to valorize science as the
primary source of truth.
E4 MBS02-3 Infinity and Final Causes
Bethan Carney, Birkbeck, Calculating man’s soul: Fairy-tale, Fantasy and Empiricism in the
Nineteenth Century
In September 1840, the Quarterly Review published a review of Sara Coleridge’s novel, Phantasmion
(1837), which claimed ‘[Phantasmion] is one of a race that has particularly suffered under the
assaults of political economy and useful knowledge; – a Fairy Tale, – the last, we suppose, that will
ever be written in England, and unique in its kind’. The opposition set up in the review (attributed to
Sara’s husband, Henry Nelson Coleridge), between political economy and useful knowledge on the
one hand and fairy-tales on the other, echoes Thomas Carlyle’s dichotomy between the calculating
‘mechanical’ philosophies of the day and a ‘science of dynamics’ concerned with ‘the primary,
unmodified forces and energies of man, the mysterious springs of Love, and Fear, and Wonder, of
Enthusiasm, Poetry, Religion, all which have a truly vital and infinite character’ (‘Signs of the Times’
(1829)).
As it happened, Phantasmion was not the last fairy-tale to be written in England and was in fact soon
followed by similar stories by Charles Dickens and George MacDonald amongst others. This paper
will argue that their fairy-tales, and the subsequent literary mode of fantasy, emerged from a
Carlylean critique of the prevailing ‘calculating’ philosophies of utilitarianism, political economy and
empiricism. Further, that fantasy drew upon strains of German Idealism (which had influenced both
Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge) in an attempt to forge an alternative, yet still scientific and
psychologically realistic, discourse to the empirical realism of many nineteenth-century novels.
David Gillott, Birkbeck: ‘A very finite kind of infinity’: Samuel Butler, Agnosticism, and the Logical
Incoherence of Scientific Naturalism
During the 1870s, mathematician Georg Cantor began to reconceive the mathematical concept of
infinity. He demonstrated the existence of an ‘actual infinity’, in contrast to the more abstract
metaphysical infinity employed by earlier post-Kantian thinkers such as Sir William Hamilton and his
conception of the Absolute. Moreover, he proved that there were different sizes of infinity: some
infinities, paradoxically, were bigger than others. The deeply religious Cantor became increasingly
concerned about the theological implications of his work, and strove to convince the Roman Catholic
Church that his idea of an actual infinity did not undermine the ‘absolute infinite’ nature of God.
Before Cantor’s seemingly contradictory ideas concerning infinity, theologian Henry Mansel,
influenced by the philosophy of Hamilton, had written The Limits of Religious Thought (1858), based
upon his Bampton Lectures of that year, in which he argued that we can have no knowledge of the
infinite or absolute, and that revelation is our only means of knowledge about God. This work was
seized upon enthusiastically by Thomas Huxley as a theological justification for his adoption of an
agnostic stance towards religious belief.
My paper examines the relationship between nineteenth-century conceptions of infinity and
agnosticism via the work of Samuel Butler, who discussed the infinite in his unpublished Life and
Habit, vol. 2. Butler’s work is a useful lens through which to view the apparent conflict of reason and
religious faith. Whereas Huxley used Mansel’s ideas to justify his own self-defined agnosticism,
Butler characteristically inverted the arguments against faith employed by Huxley and others in
order to undermine the epistemology upon which scientific naturalism was founded. He maintained
that any logical examination of the infinite involves a contradiction in terms, which we are forced to
admit. His criticism of scientific naturalism, several of whose proponents, such as Huxley, were also
agnostics, was that the epistemological incoherence on which it was based was never
acknowledged. Via his consideration of such concepts as infinity, I show that Butler came to realize
that faith, rather than reason, was the ultimate ground of all knowledge.
E5 MBS016 Sizing Up: Animal Shapes and Sizes, Numbers and Nuisances
Michael Worboys, University of Manchester: Points Win Prizes: The Invention of modern dog
breeds
In this paper I discuss the first attempts to define modern conformation dog breeds, which
developed in the 1860s with the growth in the size and number of dog shows. Judging became a
major problem, in part because the authority and honesty of those awarding prizes was in doubt and
in part because there was no agreement on what was being assessed. Thus, a spaniel might come
first in a class at the Birmingham show in November, last at Belle Vue in the Manchester Christmas
show, and then be excluded at Chelsea the following spring for not being a spaniel at all. In 1865,
John Henry Walsh (aka Stonehenge), the Editor of The Field, began creating breed standards for
every variety, with the parts of the dog's body each apportioned points, which added up to 100. This
paper charts the origin, impact and fate of the points system of breed standards.
Julie-Marie Strange, University of Manchester How much is that dog...? Scandal and welfare in the
‘points win prizes’ pedigree culture: a late-Victorian concern.
Recent scandals on pedigree dog breeding where breeders’ preoccupation with ‘breed standards’
has significantly altered the shape of dog breeds over a period of time (for example, by elongating
spines or severely contracting muzzles) have brought the world of dog showing into disrepute. This
paper locates these concerns within an historical context by examining how a points win prizes
system in dog showing, where the length of a tail or size of an ear could determine a dog’s success or
failure in the show ring, led to artificial modification practices such as ‘cropping’ and ‘docking’. By
the latter decades of the nineteenth century, some ‘doggy people’, as contemporaries affectionately
called breeders, exposed the scandal of the doctored dog and called for tighter welfare regulations
at dog shows and in breeding practices. That many of these reformers were aristocratic women
invites reflection on cultural comparisons between dogs and women, both in terms of conformation,
welfare and the ‘market’.
Neil Pemberton, Manchester, Eleven Rats and the Rat-Catcher’s Prank
The funniest thing that ever happened in a West London pub involved two rat catchers, eleven
scruffy rats and a clever prank, at least according to the rat-catcher who initiated the entire incident.
Jack Black – the self-appointed rat-catcher to Queen Victoria – retold the whole episode in an
interview with the famed nineteenth century social investigator Henry Mayhew.
Focusing on the practices of and rhetorics surrounding a much overlooked profession, this paper will
examine the relationship between population control, the practices of killing rats and categories of
vermin in the early Victorian period with a special emphasis on London’s foremost rat-catching
prankster Jack Black and the fate of eleven rats.
I will achieve this by unpicking the labour of the rat-catcher but also the proponents of Ratting (the
urban and spectator sport of killing rats with terrier dogs), in order to reveal the different ways in
which rats have been brought into the open, under the label of vermin; and killed. I focus on the
place of ‘everyday’ knowledge and practices of rat-catching and ‘rattiness’, but also to follow the
movements of the rats themselves – not simply their representation or their evocation – in the
cityscape of London through its ‘underworlds’, from sewers to drain-pipes, and ‘overworlds’,
including Londoner’s homes and fields. I will argue that the rat and rat-catcher were interlinked
figures co-constructed through a discourse of cunningness and counter-cunningness. To catch
London's cunning, furry marauders the rat-catcher needed to become 'more-than-human'. He had to
become rat. It is this process of becoming rat which intriguingly underpinned the aforementioned
funny episode involving two-rat-catchers, a prank, eleven rats and a West London pub.
E6 MX001 Transport
Jonathan Stafford, Kingston: Temporal flux in nineteenth century steam navigation
The introduction in the early nineteenth century of steam power as a motive force constituted a
rupture in the world of maritime transportation comparable to the (industrial) revolution occurring
simultaneously upon land. This transformation achieved the ‘annihilation of space and time’
characteristic of nineteenth century modernity, not through the frantic speeding up of experience
which typifies that narrative, but rather through the agency of regularity and bureaucratic
administration. For the first time sea voyages could be made predictable and run to timetables; no
longer restricted by the whim of the elements which constrained sailing ships. This paper will
examine the impact of this temporal break upon the occupants of the ships themselves, reflecting on
the way in which time as an experiential category underwent subtle yet radical changes as a result of
wider societal factors.
I would like to consider to what extent life on board the steam vessels of the Peninsular and Oriental
Steam Navigation Company – widely known today as P and O – can be seen as a reflection of a new
preoccupation with the attention to detail, measurement and disciplining of time introduced to
navigation as a consequence of the industrial revolution. As a ship leaves the shore behind the
passenger becomes cut off from the experience of historical time. While sailing vessels offer a
dreamlike sense of isolation, on board the steamship temporal fluidity is replaced by the tyranny of
the clock; the time of capital. With particular reference to the experience of duration, to boredom
and repetition and the time of labour and leisure on board, I hope to explore the meanings of
temporality more generally as it intersects with imperialism and progress in the space of the ship.
Di Drummond, Leeds Trinity: ‘A single glance cast upon the map recalling to mind the vast extent
of the Empire we hold....’11: The British Imperial Imagination and ‘mapping, making and marketing’
the Railways of India, 1851-1900.
11
‘174 Minute by Lord Dalhousie to the Court of Directors 20th April 1853. PP Mf Reel No 60 correspondence regarding
Railway Communication in India, pp,141-168 in Bhanes Misra (ed.), Railway Construction in India; Select Documents vol II,
1853-1873, Indian Council of Historical Research, New Delhi, 1999, p.25.
John Marriott’s The Other Empire: Metropolis, India and the Colonial Imperative (Studies in
Imperialism), Manchester University Press, 2009, argues that various numerical assessments of the
Indian subcontinent, as seen in surveying and mapping, and in acts of enumeration, surveillance and
description involved its documentation, were key to the consolidation of British power there from
the eighteenth century onwards.12 Marriott states that this huge body of ‘official’ documentation
helped to place ‘India within a European imagination’.13 ‘Nineteenth century numbers’ allowed
Europeans/the British to appreciate, in the words of Governor-General Dalhousie in 1853, ‘the vast
extent of [their Indian] Empire in a single glance’. This gave the British immense cultural power over
India and her people. This was sufficient ‘....to ....secure British dominance’ there until well into the
twentieth century.14
The proposed paper will examine this British ‘numbering’ of India as seen through the various forms
of documentation that charted the development of the railways of the subcontinent during the
nineteenth century. Commencing with the ‘official’ vision of British India as outlined in the work
published on the civil engineers engaged by the Government of India in creating the railways of India
from the 1850s, the paper will go on to examine how the publication of timetables and guides for
international tourists produced from the 1870s and ‘80s, helped to generate a more ‘popular’
imaginative understanding of the Empire amongst the British.
Eleanor Packham: ‘A passion for size’: Brunel’s Great Eastern and the Victorian numerical
imaginary
My paper will explore the way in which numbers were used in the newspaper reports, magazine
articles and souvenir guides published to mark the launch of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great
Eastern Steam Ship in 1857. I will pay particular attention to the form in which these numbers
appear: the list, that characteristically Victorian device - as expressive of the modern appetite for
the serial, multiple and mass-produced as indeed the Great Eastern’s pre-fabricated modular hull
was. This ship manifested what one contemporary commentator called ‘a passion for size.’ It was
part of a high Victorian cult of the big: at the time of its construction six times bigger than the next
biggest vessel afloat and the largest moving object ever made. Many of the writers who attempted
to describe the Great Eastern complained of the inadequacy of numbers to the task: ‘we may reckon
them up; we may work sums with them on slates; we may put them in Blue-books – putting millions
for units, we may use them in no end of calculations; but our minds cannot grasp them.’ This sense
of difficulty is reflected in the formal and stylistic qualities of the texts, which are typically strange
amalgams of extravagant similes (the ship as palace, pyramid, antediluvian monster) and lists of
mind-bogglingly large measurements. Traditional means of representation in the form of expressive
illustrations and analogical description work uneasily alongside modern techniques: tables of
statistics, sectional plans, etc. My paper will argue that these throwaway press reports and cheap
pamphlets were self-consciously seeking a mytho-technical style for an age of industrial wonders.
They explore what happens when a literary and numerical imaginary come together, and ask
whether the competing romantic and empirical impulses of the age can be reconciled.
Saturday 31st August 9am Panel Session F
F1 MX001 ‘Reading Dickens and Collins By Numbers’: A Round Table on Online Reading Projects’
Holly Furneaux, Leicester; Andrew Mangham, Reading; Joanne Shattock, Leicester; Peter Orford,
Buckingham.
F2 MBS02-3 Replication and Visual Culture
12
Marriott, The Other Empire, pp.5-6.
Ibid, p.6.
14 Ibid, pp.5-6.
13
Amelia Yeates, Liverpool Hope University: Seeing Double: Multiple Images of Femininity in
Nineteenth-Century Art
Multiple images of women are common in nineteenth-century art, be they sisters, friends or
acquaintances, and yet such representations have received little critical attention. As Sharon Marcus
has argued in Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (2007),
relationships between women in the nineteenth century were remarkably fluid and were not
governed by the same hetero- and homosexual paradigms that inform contemporary
understandings of gender. Visual representations reflect this fluidity and picture women in a range
of settings and relationships. Drawing on scholarly approaches to inter-female friendships and
relationships during the nineteenth century, this paper will explore a number of visual
representations of multiple femininity – including double and triple portraits – to investigate how
such works are informed by, and contribute to, codes of femininity during this period. Issues
explored include the eroticisation of sameness, perceived connections between femininity and
multiplicity and notions of female kinship and friendship. In recent years, gender theorists have
challenged the idea of the homosexual and homosocial ‘continuum’ as a way of understanding
same-sex, especially female, relations, instead drawing attention to more complex and less heterocentric models. Drawing on such developments, this paper will argue that whilst images of multiple
women conform in many ways to a notionally dominant male gaze, they cannot be explained as
purely masculine fantasies of abundant femininity and speak too in a variety of ways to female
viewers.
Cristina Pascu-Tulbure, Bangor University: The Romaunt of the Rose: Chaucer Many Times Re-Told
by Burne-Jones
Myth, legend, the Bible, fairy tales and mediaeval allegorical narratives were constant sources of
inspiration for Edward Burne-Jones. He was never, though, a mere illustrator. Not only did he
engage with the narrative in a sophisticate interpretive manner, but continued to return to it and
produce studies after studies, versions after versions, series after series, in various media, of the
motifs, symbols, or patterns of significance which fired his imagination. The Briar Rose, Cupid and
Psyche, Perseus, The Holy Grail, St George and the Dragon are sequences of designs and pictures
commenting on the original tales. Some of these series were later revisited and reworked, to
incorporate Burne-Jones’s successive reinterpretations, as was the case of The Briar Rose, for
example, periodically appearing in new versions over the course of thirty years.
Among the texts that fascinated Burne-Jones – a fascination he shared with his friend William Morris
– was Le Roman de la Rose in Chaucer’s translation. When Morris finally achieved one of his life’s
dreams – to publish beautifully printed worthy texts – he included the Romaunt of the Rose in his
Kelmscott Press Chaucer (1896), with woodcuts after designs by Burne-Jones. By that time BurneJones had produced work based on the Romaunt for twenty years; he only finished revising his Love
Leading the Pilgrim oil (begun in 1877) one year after the Kelmscott Chaucer. My paper explores the
relationship among the several consecutive versions of The Heart of the Rose, The Garden of Love,
and the Pilgrim and the God of Love which Burne-Jones painted from the Romaunt. ‘Chaucer ReTold’ argues that, by periodically re-drawing, re-painting and refining the originally clear allegory of
the art of love, Burne-Jones re-interprets Chaucer and creates a series of symbolic meditations on
emotional and aesthetic fulfilment which reach into the anxious modernity of the early twentieth
century.
F3 MBS016 Feeling and Infection in the Crowd
Carolyn Burdett, Birkbeck: ‘Emotion is no solitary thing: emotional contagion and aesthetic
sharing’
Writing in 1888, Frances Power Cobbe asserts that ‘[e]very human emotion appears to be
transmissible by contagion; and to be also more often so developed than it is solitarily evolved’.
Emotions may have been as intensely and personally felt by Victorians in the final decades of the
nineteenth century as ever they had been but they were being discussed, theorised about and
experimented with in distinctively new ways. The contagious quality of feelings that arrests Power
Cobbe’s attention had long been acknowledged and described – most influentially in the eighteenth
century by David Hume. But in the wake of evolutionary and psychological developments of the
latter part of the nineteenth, emotions were central to new theorisation of the nature of crowds and
masses. Gustave Le Bon, declaring that ‘[t]he age we are about to enter will in truth be the ERA OF
CROWDS’, announced the need for a new type of psychological analysis fitted to investigate the
collective mind and collective emotions which predominate in modernity. At the same time as Le
Bon and others were developing crowd psychology, an assortment of scientists, psychologists and
other commentators were intent on establishing aesthetics as a valid science and some important
voices amongst them identified the shared, social aspect of aesthetic experience as its unique
quality. This shift in perspective in relation to aesthetics – away from the individual and their
discrete moment of perception to notions of deep evolutionary time, race and species – is explored
in this paper alongside the contexts of group psychology that seemed often to be associated with
more negative and anxious images of emotional transmission.
Ruth Doherty, TCD: ‘An inexhaustible reservoir of concealment’: individual characters and the
London crowd in Godwin, Poe and Wells
In his Psychologie des foules (1895; published in English as The Crowd in 1896), Gustave le Bon
attempted to theorise what he saw as the contagious, overwhelming nature of the crowd. The
book’s status as a bestseller suggests that Le Bon was tapping into some widely-held beliefs about
the crowd. In many nineteenth-century British novels, the urban crowd of the streets of Victorian
London is experienced by the protagonist as terrifyingly other, threatening to engulf and destroy
individuality. The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens reminds us that, in Dombey and Son (184648), ‘Florence Dombey’s early life is forever marked by being lost on the London streets, “stunned by
the noise and confusion”’.15 However, there are occasions when being swallowed up by the urban
crowd, surrendering individuality to the mass, is precisely what a character wishes could happen;
paradoxically, when this is most desired it seems most difficult to achieve.
This paper will focus on three texts from the long nineteenth century in which an individual
character attempts, and fails, to blend in to the London crowd. William Godwin’s Caleb Williams
seeks freedom in the anonymity of London, but is relentlessly pursued and repeatedly discovered.
The narrator of Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840) follows a mysterious man who
seems comfortable, or in fact is able to exist, only when amid a large throng on the streets of
London. H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man discovers that his invisibility actually makes it more difficult for
him to ‘disappear’ in a crowded street.16 This paper will use these examples to take another look at
the crowd-as-threat in Victorian novels, to ask whether its menace is defused when a character can
never be truly, fully, lost.
F4 MBX034A Infinity, Sequence, and Self in Nineteenth-Century Poetics
Anna Barton, Sheffield: Love, told and untold, in the Victorian Sonnet Sequence
15
Anne Humpherys, ‘Streets and street traders’, in ‘London’, in Paul Schlicke, ed., The Oxford Companion to Charles
Dickens, Anniversary Edition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 361-63 (362).
16
Chris Baldick mentions this paradox in his In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987, repr. 1996), pp. 160-61: my paper will build on this.
What can I give thee back, O liberal
And princely giver, who hast brought the gold
And purple of thine heart, unstained, untold,
And laid them outside the wall
For such as I to take or leave withal,
In unexpected largesse? (Sonnets from the Portuguese, VIII)
The eighth sonnet in EBB’s 44-sonnet sequence, Sonnets from the Portuguese is a lyric worried by
numbers. The speaker is the uneasy recipient of the untold riches of her lover’s heart. Unable to
match this numberless gift, her own love must be told: set out in precise terms that show it to count
for little when measured against her lover’s largesse. The measures of Browning’s sonnets both carry
out this courtly arithmetic and add up to a wealth of words that can be made to count for something
within the economy of married love, so that, as the sequence progresses, the speaker can move
from a position of indebtedness to one in which she is able to offer a confident account of her
feelings. Taking this sonnet as its starting point, my paper will consider how love is told, or goes
untold, in the Victorian sonnet sequence. Taking its examples from D.G. Rossetti’s The House of Life
and Sonnets from the Portuguese, it will read the sonnet within the context of liberal definitions of
marriage, which, like the sonnet, seek to balances the freedom of emotional impulse against
religious law and social custom.
Helen Luu, Royal Military College of Canada: The One and the Many: Splitting and Proliferating
Selves in Augusta Webster’s Dramatic Monologues
Many critics have recognized that a multitude of selves populate Augusta Webster’s dramatic
monologues, where dramatic speakers who sound a lot like Webster herself speak to versions of
themselves, past, present, and future. Most critics have read this proliferation as Webster’s way of
enacting a critique of the social, cultural, and political realities, discourses, and ideologies that
constitute and constrain the varied female subjects and subjectivities represented by this range of
selves (Byron; Leighton; Pearsall; Slinn). This paper will examine instead how Webster’s splitting and
proliferation of selves reflects and anticipates the many ways that “the self” is split, multiplied, and
revised in Anglo-American and European philosophies of the self and subjectivity; for example, the
split from that sovereign and stable Cartesian cogito into its competing versions of “consciousness,”
“ego,” “soul,” “subject,” “person,” or “moral agent” (Atkins 1). By bringing Webster’s dramatic
monologues into conversation with this broader range of discourses on the self, I hope to show how
her experiments with the dramatic monologue extend the genre’s characteristic capacity for
challenging “the self”. In doing so, I hope further to challenge the frequent separation of men’s and
women’s dramatic monologues into two distinct “traditions,” the former defined by its challenge to
the self and the latter associated with social critique.
Rachel Feder, Rutgers, Against Infinite Divisibility
Romantic aesthetic theories and poetic practices participate in prior mathematical debates, and
looking back to the turn of the nineteenth century can enrich our understanding of the connections
between Victorian literature and mathematics by highlighting the ways in which mathematical
concepts change over the course of the long nineteenth century and by clarifying the extent to
which Victorian literary engagements with mathematics are also engagements with recent literary
history. In order to make interdisciplinary arguments that are also historicist, I argue, we must
sometimes cross those boundaries that we use to delimit not only discourse field but also historical
period. By way of an example, I look at Wordsworth's poetic interpretation of Hume's rejection of
infinite divisibility, and ask how this history of ideas can help us think about an enigmatic moment in
Victorian poetry.
F5 Auditorium New Directions in Quantitative and Qualitative I:
Matthew Bradley, Liverpool: ‘For We Are Many’: Number-Crunching the Afterlife at Gladstone’s
Library
The Gladstone Reading Database (GladCAT) is an online resource that gives detailed information not
only concerning the 10,000+ books owned by four-times Victorian prime minister William Ewart
Gladstone, but also the detailed annotations that he made on them. This paper aims to raise key
methodological questions about how we use electronic resources like GladCAT to re-construct the
‘afterlife’ of Victorian reading; how the legion of results and potential pathways generated by even a
simple search on a database for a keyword - and in GladCAT’s case, it is a search within one single
individual’s reading - might suggest a subtly different critical model for our frequently un-theorized
notion of critical and scholarly ‘Victorian afterlives.’
I will attempt to demonstrate this by giving a sample of some of the numbers involved in a
search through the Gladstone database on a single subject: the subject being the afterlife itself. The
subject of the future state fascinated Gladstone, from his youthful enthusiasm for Dante to his late
work Studies Subsidiary to Bishop Butler (1896), and I will argue that many of the issues that
Gladstone raises in the latter work in particular can help us think about the ways in which the idea of
a ‘critical’ afterlife might exist somewhat in tension with its religious counterpart - a counterpart
which might actually help us to consider the implications of afterlife-as-critical-metaphor more fully.
I will then illustrate through the database how we can construct a narrative of Gladstone’s views on
the subject by using the five copies of Butler’s Analogy returned by a search in the database; and
then, how these might lead us, through Gladstone’s annotative interest in Origen in his reading of
Butler, to his intervention in the mid nineteenth-century Pusey/Maurice debate on the future state. I
will also attempt to demonstrate the dizzying numbers of potential search pathways even within this
specific subject,. through searches on the word ‘afterlife’ itself, ‘eternal punishment’, ‘purgatory.’
My final contention will be that the very explicitness of the ‘fusion of horizons’ that arises between
researcher and subject when the former engages in constructing a scholarly narrative about an
individual’s reading by these kinds of methods might ultimately help us towards a more nuanced
idea of ‘after-life’: the hinterland between the end of an individual’s physical existence and the
beginnings of scholarly re-writing and judgement.
Helen Rogers and John Herson, LJMU: A New Agenda for Online Quantitative and Qualitative
Analysis of Working-Class Autobiography
2014 marks the 30 year anniversary of one of the most significant resources for scholars of modern
British social and cultural history - The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated, Critical
Bibliography 3 vols (1984, 1897, 1989), ed. by John Burnett, David Mayall and David Vincent. In
partnership with Brunel University Library, Liverpool John Moores Digitool Collections is digitizing
230 memoirs collected by John Burnett, held in the Burnett Archive of Working Class
Autobiographies at Brunel. Metadata on these 230 memoirs forms the basis of an online searchable
database on working-class autobiography under construction by John Herson and Helen Rogers. We
hope this will serve as a pilot for a larger database building on Burnett, Mayall and Vincent’s
invaluable index.
With the exception of Burnett’s books based on the memoirs in his collection (Destiny Obscure,
Useful Toil), studies of working-class autobiography focus overwhelmingly on published nineteenthcentury lives, especially by autodidacts and political activists (Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and
Freedom; Gagnier, Subjectivities; Rose, Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes). The
manuscripts collected by Burnett tell very different kinds of lives: less consciously political and
intellectual, more personal, aimed at familiar readers rather than a public audience. Mostly written
in the twentieth century by authors born in the late Victorian and Edward decades they draw on a
very different constituency to those studied in the classic accounts. Half are by women compared
with 1/10 in the nineteenth-century sample.
By analyzing data on the Burnett memoirs and drawing on research by LJMU students on more than
twenty authors from the collection (www.writinglives.org), the paper aims to sketch a research
agenda for comparing continuities and changes in the form and content of 19th and 20th century
working-class autobiography.
F6 MBX034B Long, Short, and Serial Forms
Christopher Pittard, University of Portsmouth: Conjuring Numbers: Secular Magic and Serialisation
in Cranford
While Gaskell’s Cranford (1851) has often been discussed in the context of its commentary on midVictorian publishing and the politics of Dickens’ practice of publishing pieces anonymously in
Household Words, the significance of the travelling conjuror Signor Brunoni is usually overlooked in
such discussions. Yet the novel makes an explicit connection between conjuring and language (as
Miss Pole’s research into conjuring techniques leads her to proclaim “conjuring and witchcraft is a
mere affair of the alphabet” (84), or ‘spelling’ in both senses), suggesting that Brunoni potentially
offers a commentary on the politics of publication and serialisation. This paper therefore considers
the ways in which conjuring (or secular magic, to use Simon During’s term in Modern Enchantments)
can be read in relation to narration and publication in two respects, using Cranford as textual
example. The first is to consider the cultural work of conjuring with regard to historical concepts of
authorship and dissemination. As an art dependent on the ownership of secrets for its effects, and
menaced by the threat of plagiarism by other performers (a threat keenly represented in midVictorian magicians’ biographies), secular magic stands in a privileged relation to discourses of
intellectual property and the autonomy of the author. Such a relationship was certainly attractive to
Dickens (as both amateur conjuror and keen proponent of copyright reform, his practice as the
former coinciding with the height of his involvement with the latter); these issues represent a key
point of dialogue between Dickens and Gaskell. Secondly, I consider how Gaskell’s use of conjuring
offers a commentary on serialisation itself. Starting with Derrida’s observation in Specters of Marx
that “A conjuring trick in fact multiplies itself, it gets carried away with itself, and is unleashed in a
series” (159), this paper looks at how secular magic might be theorised as narrative, and as
sequential narrative in particular.
Jessica Hindes, Royal Holloway: ‘An Encylopedia of Tales’: Working on long-form serial fiction
G.W.M. Reynolds’s Mysteries of London was published in penny numbers every week for the twelve
years between October 1844 and September 1856. Divided into six two-volume series, each of which
can be read independently, and running to ‘well over a million words’, Louis James suggests that it is
‘the longest British work of fiction [published] in the nineteenth century’.17 The central focus of my
PhD thesis, it is certainly the longest text with which I have ever critically engaged. This primarily
methodological paper considers the particular difficulties encountered in working on a (very) longform serial narrative, and details some of the critical approaches I have found useful in doing so.
The Mysteries’ length and the circumstances of its composition means that its structure is not
balanced and planned as one would expect of a shorter narrative. Reynolds did not embark on his
project with an overall vision in mind: he couldn’t have known when he started the first series how
long the work would continue. However, rather than reading for the flaws, omissions and
inconsistencies in the text I have found it useful to focus on what the work actually does; the
qualities that distinguish this kind of serial and the particular narrative and stylistic techniques with
which Reynolds maintains coherence and sustains his radical political purpose.
In this paper I discuss several of these characteristic elements. In particular, I explore the use of
parallels and repetition in Reynolds’s text, relating the Mysteries to the popular formula or genre
fiction of the twentieth (and twenty-first) century; I have found work both on romance and detective
novels helpful in informing my critical approach. John Cawelti’s observation that such books are
typically read in serial has been especially useful; as with the Mysteries, formula fiction resists being
read through the lens of its conclusion. I have also drawn on criticism of soap opera and TV drama.
The construction of Reynolds’s text is in many ways similar to a contemporary television show,
divided into ‘series’ which stand independently.
I find it interesting that these disparate genres are all in a ‘popular’ mode. D.A. Miller writes that
Bleak House’s length inculcates an ‘ethic of endurance’ in its reader,18 suggesting that long works are
somehow more demanding than short; but for contemporary critics, Reynolds’ choice of the serial
form aligned him with the less experienced readers of the new mass market. If works like the short
stories discussed in Leda’s paper have been associated with the limited horizons of their woman
17
Louis James, "From Egan to Reynolds: The Shaping of Urban 'Mysteries' in England and France, 1821-48", European
Journal of English Studies 14.2 (2010): p.101.
18 D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1988: p.92.
writers, the sprawling mass-market serial is condemned as untidy and ill-thought-through,
symptomatic of a culture driven more by profit than by art. Challenging that perception, I hope to
suggest in this paper some ways that we might come to value such unwieldy texts; to open a
discussion about literary length, and what it means.
Leda Kalogeropoulou, Royal Holloway: Women Writers and Short Fiction in The Yellow Book
‘A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied’,
wrote Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray and it seems there is something analogous to the
short story. How indeed do you manage to create a finite sensation within such a short form? My
paper focuses on two short story women writers of The Yellow Book, Ella D’Arcy and Mrs Murray
Hickson (Mabel Kitcat), who managed to combine striking and daring subject matter with original,
innovative protomodernist style of writing. I argue that this is directly linked to the form that they
used, short fiction.
The intentional absence of a formal upper word limit in The Yellow Book gave rise to the
‘long short story’. In my paper, I am examining the possibilities that this opened up for women
writers in particular. This freedom from certain restrictions is linked, I suggest, to the expression of
an urgent need to discuss taboo issues of the period such as adultery in marriage, sexual desire, and
the overturning of set social and gender roles. This freedom, as felt by women writers, is not only
limited to subject matter choice but perhaps more importantly, style, placing, thus, these writers at
the forefront of the fin de siècle literary scene. In this paper, I consider the interrelation between
form and content as well as form and gender. My analysis considers how protomodernist techniques
such as ellipsis, liminality and open-ended conclusions used by the two women writers relate to fin
de siècle short fiction and how the use of these techniques allows for the birth of a new style that
differs in a number of ways from the traditional ‘male-dominated’ realism of the nineteenth century.
This paper aims to create a theoretical context in which the stories can be read as not only
original and provocative in terms of content but style and form, too. In addition, it attempts to
understand whether there are any links between the form and posterity of writers. The paper raises
questions as to whether short fiction was seen just as a type of advertising other longer, deemed
perhaps as more ‘serious’ work that built on the experimental short fiction. Consequently, to come
back to the initial analogy, if indeed the short story leaves the reader unsatisfied, then what is the
importance of the short story and does it make the reader want more? Ultimately, does the reader
want more of the same, i.e. short fiction or more of something that will provide the reader with a
traditional sense of an ending and satisfaction?
Saturday 31st 11am Panel Session G
G1 Auditorium Creation, Technology, and Reproduction
Alys Mostyn, Leeds: De Quincey2: Multiplying Books and Selves
In the extended 1856 version of the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Thomas De Quincey
describes his receipt of a letter addressed to ‘Monsieur Monsieur de Quincy, Chester’. A simple case
of misdirection, the letter was intended for an obscure French emigrant, but fell into the wrong
hands. Despite the apparent straightforwardness of the incident, De Quincey’s response shows him
incapable of separating himself from the letter’s addressee and its portents. He reads a great deal
into its mode of address: not least its use of an outmoded French fashion for iterated titles. ‘I was
astonished to find myself,’ he says, ‘translated by a touch of the pen not only into a Monsieur, but
even into a self-multiplied Monsieur; or, speaking algebraically, into the square of Monsieur; having
a chance at some future day of being perhaps cubed into Monsieur3’. One of the most troubling
aspects of this case of mistaken identity, for De Quincey, is the way in which the pen has become an
instrument of reduplication capable of destabilising the young writer’s sense of self.
By the time De Quincey was writing the revised Confessions, much of the technology
necessary for mass print production was well-established. If the designation Monsieur Monsieur
was outdated in 1802 when he received the letter, the textual multiplication it implied remained a
current issue. This paper examines his persistent anxiety over the proliferation of printed matter in
the early- to mid-nineteenth century as typified by the description of his encounter with Monsieur
De Quincey squared. Rather than welcoming the publishing opportunities offered by the century’s
increased means of production he was troubled by the possible ‘cheapness’ of the mass produced
text and by its implications for the expression of the autobiographical self.
Alice Barnaby, University of Bedfordshire: Creative Repetition: Early Victorian Pin-Prick Imagery
With the tip of a needle, and nothing else, pushed repeatedly through paper it is possible to mark
out an image one prick at a time. As the substance of the paper partially disappears it is replaced by
a minutely textured surface of absences. Through a process of subtraction something has been
made out of nothing.
Pin-prick imagery was a fashionable domestic pastime, popular amongst middle-class women and
their children in early Victorian Britain. Women’s periodicals and child-rearing manuals frequently
promoted the activity as one amongst many similar leisure pursuits that encouraged a precise and
patient disposition in the practitioner. The repetitive and restrictive nature of the object might
suggest a correspondingly negative experience of monotony and limitation in the subject. Yet in the
world of manufacturing similar skills of dexterity and consistency were positively valued as prized
indicators of workmanship, and from repetitive techniques innovations in practice would emerge. In
comparison these drawing-room acts of sewing without thread, where the labour of mark-making
ended in points of nothing, struggled to claim aesthetic or economic value. Nevertheless, even here,
with repetition comes the possibility of variation and difference. Repeated acts did not necessarily
exclude creative agency in the gendered sphere of the Victorian drawing-room. When standard
models of creative and economic work reduce this practice to a mindless or normative activity how
might we more productively account for the appeal of repetition?
Angela Dunstan, Kent, Sculpture by Numbers: Replication, Reproduction and Thomas Hardy’s
The Well-Beloved (1892; 1897)
Thomas Hardy’s neglected final novel is preoccupied with replication, reproduction and multiple
incarnations. Fittingly, the story itself exists in two versions; ‘The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved’
serialised in 1892 in The Illustrated London News and the heavily revised novel published as The
Well-Beloved in 1897. Together, the texts provide a complex plot equation of ‘three sequential
versions of the same story of frustrated love and its two endings’, as J. Hillis Miller expressed it.19 My
paper will argue that the novel and its publication history powerfully engage with late nineteenthcentury angst surrounding the reproduction of art and its circulation in multiple incarnations.
Sculpture as an art form provoked particular critical anxiety in the nineteenth century due to the
perception that it was more inherently replicable than its sister art. Sculpture was becoming
affordable and therefore more prominent in the home, circulating in many forms from Parian
replicas to medallions and bronze casts, as well as in the mass-produced ephemera which
increasingly infiltrated the domestic space. New technologies shaped this expanding market for
sculptural replication, as did the idea that machines might eventually eradicate the sculptor entirely
through the development of a ‘Sculpturing Machine’; what the Illustrated London News would by the
turn of the century call ‘an inanimate sculptor’. This paper reads Hardy’s treatment of sculpture and
numbers in The Well-Beloved in the context of such technological developments and the
contemporary anxiety they instigated about sculpture in its numbers.
G2 MX001 New Directions in Quantitative and Qualitative II
19
J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 155.
Zoe Alker, LJMU: Revisiting the mid-Victorian garrotting panics in the digital era: Street robbery in
mid-Victorian Liverpool
This paper reconsiders histories of garrotting following the digital turn. Previous histories of the midVictorian garrotting scares have argued that the episode was a classic example of Stanley Cohen’s
moral panic model.20 The London-based studies undertaken by Jennifer Davis and Robert Sindall
argued that an increase in press coverage over street robbery heightened public fears which, in turn,
led to increased activity by the police and courts, and culminated in the Garotters Act (1863) which
reintroduced flogging.21 However, the digitalisation of nineteenth-century newspapers allows us to
examine the moral panic process more systematically and to reassess the relationship between the
police, courts and the press. By examining the frequency of terminology such as ‘garrotting’ through
OCR search terms, the British Library’s 19th Century Newspapers Online and The Times Digital
Archive allow us to see where and when the panics over street robbery occurred across midVictorian Britain. Moreover, the digitalisation of local newspapers, such as the Liverpool Mercury,
allow us to examine press attention in a local context. By measuring the frequency of press
reportage against local criminal statistics and court reports it is possible to assess whether the
metropolitan-based panics over violent street crime extended to Liverpool in the 1850s and 60s. In
doing so, the paper will discuss the advantages and limitations of using digital archives to reassess
histories of public fears over violent crime.
Alison Adler Kroll, Oxford: Victorian Political Fiction and Diaries: Counting on Reform in 1867
One of the more striking features of Trollope’s Phineas Finn is the extent to which the novel’s
political actors engage in speculating upon the number of members of their party and of the
opposition who can be counted on to support or disrupt the campaign for the second reform bill. In
this paper, I propose to set Trollope’s text in dialogue with a number of political diaries from the
same year both to elucidate what seems a kind of numerical anxiety pervading political discussion in
Phineas Finn and to capture something of the political climate in the run-up to further reform,
especially in terms of the ways in which support and opposition were accounted for. One of the
concerns of the paper will be to assess canvassing in the context of a potentially expanding franchise
and of the possibility of the ballot. Diarists to include Gladstone, the15th Earl of Derby, Mary
Gladstone.
Jana Smith Elford, University of Alberta: A Thousand Links: The Late-Victorian Women’s
Movement, Social Organizations, and Network Visualization Tools
My paper considers the potential of network visualization tools as a method for exploring the way
the late-Victorian women’s movement functioned. Using the unique born-digital scholarly resource
Orlando22, a semantic Extensible Markup Language (XML)-encoded textbase of women’s writing
history in the British Isles, I will explore two visualization tools that display alternate approaches to
literary and political history. The Mandala Browser, an XML visualization tool, represents Orlando as
a clustered circular visual form, encouraging the reader to adopt a more distant or selective reading
(see Fig. 1). OrlandoVision, a prototype interactive link-node graph, allows for both “distant reading”
(Moretti 1) and close textual analysis of the Orlando materials (see Fig. 2). These two tools make it
possible to compare different ways of visualizing networked patterns of interest to literary
historians, including social and political links to people and organizations as well as intertextual
connections between individuals and groups.
20
S. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (London; MacGibbon and Key, 1972)
J. Davis, "The London Garotting Panic of 1862: A Moral Panic and the Creation of a Criminal Class in Mid-Victorian
England." In V. A. C. Gatrell, B. Lenman and G. Parker, eds., Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western
Europe since 1500 (London: Europa Publications, 1980): 190-213. R. Sindall, Street Violence in the Nineteenth Century:
Media Panic or Real Danger (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990)
22 Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present is comprised of over eight million words
of literary history in the form of over 1200 biocritical entries. The XML encoding structures and contextualizes the prose of
the textbase, and categorizes the types of relationships and links using tags such as politics, intertextuality, and influence.
21
My paper will focus on the relational patterns and intertextual linkages between the late-Victorian
women’s movement and other emerging social, political, literary, and religious organizations as they
are represented in the two visualization programs. Victorian England in the last two decades of the
nineteenth century has been characterized as a period of rapid growth in these different kinds of
social organizations. Assembled of radical-liberals, socialists, feminists, and religious malcontents,
these organizations were not stand-alone: they formed a dense network of influence and affiliation.
Yet established methods of the history of the Victorian fin de siècle period tend to isolate the
woman’s movement from other contemporaneous social movements. The result is a field of
women’s writing history split between “literary” endeavors on the one hand and “political”
endeavours on the other.
Network visualization tools have the potential to both challenge and supplement the way we
conceive of literary and political networks of influence and affiliation. While such computing tools
pose several challenges ranging from design, to processing, to methodological assumptions, they
also have the potential to challenge these assumptions, sometimes simply by throwing them into
relief. My paper will examine the results of using these two visualization tools to explore the lateVictorian women’s movement in light of social movement theory (DiCenzo 2011) and algorithmic
criticism (Ramsay 2003). As I will discuss, the dense networks of linkages and affiliations represented
by the Orlando materials are so complex and extensive that it is not possible to view one social
network entirely in isolation. At the same time, the multiplicity of linkages in some cases allows for
the possibility of selective reading at the expense of historical specificity. My paper will explore both
the strengths and weaknesses of employing such tools, and in so doing will hopefully provoke
consideration of what is at stake in our use of them.
G3 MBS016 Madness, Disease and Measurement
Stef Eastoe, Birkbeck: ‘Who were the idiots and imbeciles? Observation, knowledge and
identification in patient classifications at Caterham Imbecile Asylum’
Caterham Imbecile Asylum opened in September 1870, and was the first state provided asylum for
idiots, imbeciles and the weak minded. Its aim was to provide long term residence and care for the
incurable pauper insane, who were becoming major constituents of the workhouses of England and
Wales. Built and managed by the Metropolitan Asylum Board, an off-shoot of the Poor Law Board, it
was born of the workhouse and public health reforms of the late 1860s, following concerns about
the dire circumstances of the metropolitan poor law institutions.
10,488 patients were admitted to the asylum between 1870-1911, many of whom were classified as
suffering from idiocy, imbecility, dementia and mania. As a result many remained within the asylum
until their death, which for some equalled a residency of upwards of thirty, forty, and sometimes
fifty years. Each year the management committee would report the admission, discharge and death
rates, in tables that would become ever more populated with statistics, and information, as the MAB
become more professionalised. By the start of the 1880s, the organisation had created a Statistical
Committee, which took over the role of compiling, computing, presenting and disseminating the
annual figures, and reports.
In these annual reports, the character and condition of the patients admitted that year were
reported, frequently described as aged, infirm, and as unsuitable patients for a pauper imbecile
asylum. The patients were frequently described as suffering more from the effects of old age,
senility, and general organic infirmities than suffering from mental ailments, and thus were not
considered as truly idiot or imbecile. Whilst across the period studied the annual reports became
less qualitative, as more quantitative information was presented, discussion as to the nature of the
patients, their mental and bodily condition remained a constant, the theme often focussing on their
unsuitability and undesirability in the eyes of the Medical Superintendents.
The aim of this paper is to look behind the statistics and explore the diversity of the asylum
population, in order to assess whether they were, in the main, not truly idiot or imbecile. It will also
explore the shifting range and nature of the statistics being presented by the asylum managers, and
the MAB Statistical Society, to provide a glimpse of an overlooked section of Victorian
administrative, organisational, and institutional history. By drawing on the information contained
within the annual reports, as well as analysis of the development of the presentation and format of
the tables and data, the paper will discuss the impact of observation and knowledge gathered, and
created within the asylum.
Helen Goodman, Royal Holloway: Numbering the mad: counting and categorisation in the
nineteenth-century lunatic asylum
A Victorian obsession with categorisation and recording has often been observed in fields including
geology, palaeontology, botany and medicine. This paper considers the place of statistics and
surveys in nineteenth-century psychiatry. Madness inherently resists the ordered logic so vital in the
Victorian sciences. I suggest that this fuelled an especially strong need to understand madness by
breaking it down into categories. Dozens of new diagnostic labels came into use during the period,
such as ‘monomania’, (used from the 1820s onwards), ‘erotomania’ (coined by Esquirol in the 1830s)
and ‘neurasthenia (in common medical usage following G. M. Beard’s studies in the 1860s and
1870s).’
In 1800 approximately 5000 patients were confined in British lunatic asylums. By 1900 the
total had leapt to about 100,000.23 Such large numbers allowed plenty of scope for error. Different
national records of gender and class proportions vary considerably. For instance, according to some
statistics, the vast majority of patients were female, while others illustrate equal gender
representation or a majority of males, ranging from 60-75%. While some discrepancies may result
from collecting data from such a large number of institutions, others appear to have been
ideologically motivated, serving to reinforce cultural normativity.
Further afield, statistics comparing the prevalence of insanity among different racial groups
was frequently charted in the colonies. Those reported from India suggest that such illness was
common amongst Indian men, but rare amongst their white colonial rulers. However, recently
discovered records from secret rural asylums reveal that insanity was common amongst British army
officers. This paper examines the cultural implications of hidden and published asylum figures and
categories, seeking to redress some of the imbalances upon which modern perceptions of Victorian
madness are still based.
G4 MX034A Abstraction, Quantification and the Self
Alex Murray, Exeter: The Vitality of Dorian Gray: Wilde and Post-Darwinian Life
The Picture of Dorian Gray revolves not around its three central characters, but around an object – a
painting. Yet the painting is only one of many nonhuman objects, insects and forces that circulate
throughout the novel which are themselves the object of vivid descriptive prose. These passages of
description are often passed over in readings of the novel that locate its ‘Decadence’ and vitality in
the dialogue, in particular the witty aphorisms of Lord Henry, concurring with Mr Erskine that he
‘talks books away’ (39). It has been usual to look to the dialogue of the novel, and the positions of
the three central characters as embodying competing philosophical positions; Basil Hallward a
Paterian aestheticism, Lord Henry Wooton a new Hedonism and Dorian Gray a Decadent
individualism. This essay will isolate an alternative philosophical underpinning for the novel by
avoiding the ‘talk’ of the novel and isolating instead the dynamic nonhuman life forms that
proliferate, showing that each becomes animated, taking on a life of its own. Returning to Wilde’s
Oxford notebooks will provide the framework for reading the Darwinian philosophy of vitalism that
lies barely concealed beneath the phatic, dialogic surface of the novel. Examining the role of fire and
flame, bees and insects, along with the eponymous picture of Dorian Gray this paper will offer a
23
Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), p. 20 (first
published in 1987 as Mind Forg’d Manacles).
reading of the novel that returns it to the world of post-Darwinian science from which it was
formulated.
Harro Maas, Utrecht: Prudent Victorians and the political economy of accounting
Max Weber famously argued that the ‘foundations’ of economics were not to be found in the
complexities of the human mind, scrutinized by means of experiments in the context of the
laboratory, but in history. According to Weber, the only thing the economist needed to assume was
‘the merchant’s soul’. Just as a merchant was able to numerically rank the ‘intensity’ of his needs,
and the means to fulfill them, so did the economist theorize on the ‘increasingly true assumption’
that ‘everyone were to shape his conduct towards his environment exclusively according to the
principles of commercial bookkeeping – and, in this sense, “rationally” (Weber 1975, pp. 32-33).’
Following Weber this paper explores the relation between accounting practices and the emergence
of marginalist utility theory in political economics against the background of middle class anxieties
about the ebb and flow of economic life in the Victorian period. I am particularly interested in how
accounting practices moved from the office to the household and served there to regulate spending
and consumption patterns. When political economists such as Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) by the
1870s started to describe human deliberation in terms of a balance of pleasures and pains, this
referred as much to a widespread practice of accounting in Victorian middle class households as to
Bentham’s springs of human action.
Claire Wood, Leicester: Making the Dickens Bicentenary Count
This paper reflects upon the dizzying range of activities organised to celebrate Dickens’s life and
works in his bicentenary year. Exhibitions, public readings, and performances and screenings of
familiar adaptations, numbered significantly among the events that honoured Dickens’s memory
through faithful reproduction. More playful appropriations sought to re-imagine Dickens for the
twenty-first century, bringing new audiences to his texts through their translation into manga, rap
and contemporary dance. Such projects were loyal to the principles if not the letter of Dickens’s
work, in supporting creative talent, raising money for good causes, and bringing communities
together. Although mass-produced commemorative memorabilia iconized the bearded, sage-like
writer, the emphasis placed by different groups on various aspects of his career and personality—as
journalist, actor, travel-writer, philanthropist, family man or philanderer—indicates the multifarious
nature of ‘Dickens’ in 2012.
This paper will highlight several case studies of events that capture Dickens’s spirit in
particularly unusual or innovative ways in order to debate questions of ‘authenticity’, appropriation
and value: is anything lost, and what can be gained by these modern re-imaginings? Finally, how
important are the numbers? Hundreds of thousands of people participated in bicentenary events,
but beyond the statistics, how much did this engagement really count? This work emerges from a
project organised in association with the University of Leicester and the Charles Dickens Museum,
which seeks to record and interpret various quantitative and qualitative aspects of Dickens 2012.
G5 MX034B Seeing with Numbers
Kit Andrews, WOU: Infinity, But Not Beyond: J. H. Stirling, Hegel, and the British Idealist Critique
of Empiricism
Throughout the nineteenth century the strong current pushing to understand changing realities
through quantification was often countered by a deep undertow suspicious of such empiricist
assumptions. At least in the quantifiable terms of church attendance, many religious alternatives to
the merely finite understanding clearly lost influence. At the same time, though, the challenge to
empiricism by British Idealism steadily gained influence, eventually dominating the study and
teaching of philosophy in the last decades of the century. J. H. Stirling’s The Secret of Hegel, first
published in 1865, played a crucial role in the development of British Idealism, providing a unique
bridge between Carlyle’s belletristic pronouncements in the 1830s and T. H. Green’s far more
philosophically nuanced attack in his book-length “introduction” to the new edition of Hume’s works
in 1874. Central to this Idealist critique is Hegel’s distinction between the “bad” or “spurious”
[schlecht] infinite of the understanding, and the true infinity of reason. In a typical dialectical turn,
Hegel argues that it is precisely the overguarded limits of the understanding that demand a
transcendent beyond as the other of the understanding. This notion of a bad infinity thus, at the
same time, characterizes the empiricist limitations of scientistic understanding and the romantic or
metaphysical longing for an infinite beyond the empirical world. Stirling, through his translation of
and commentary on Hegel’s Logic, makes available to British readers, the notion of Hegel’s “true
infinity,” which like the circle remains “finite, but unbounded.” In addition to showing Stirling’s
significance for the Idealist critique of empiricism, this paper will consider the form of Stirling’s
Secret of Hegel, which recalls Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus in its strange combination of autobiography,
cultural critique, and philosophy.
Derek Ball, Leceister: 'the lower sphere might be said, at a rough guess, to be thirteen times
larger': mathematics in George Eliot's truth-telling
The novelist George Eliot was a mathematician, who, when she spent a few months in Geneva at the
age of thirty, 'took a dose of mathematics each morning to prevent my brain from becoming quite
soft'. The following year, she came to London and studied geometry on a course run by Francis
Newman. George Eliot made direct reference to mathematics in her novels through the
mathematical interests and activities of her characters and narrators. The eponymous heroes of
Eliot's first and last novels, Adam Bede and Daniel Deronda, are both mathematicians. She also used
mathematical metaphors, mathematical images and, above all, mathematical language and
mathematical thinking as key components of her craft as a novelist.
Eliot was famously committed to discovering truth, and her novels are, in large part, exercises in
getting as close as possible to truth about society. She found mathematics useful for expressing the
difference between exact truth, approximate truth and falsehood. Sometimes truth is indisputable
and in this case it is mendacious to suggest otherwise. In other cases, only approximate truth may be
available, and in yet others it may be genuinely difficult to distinguish truth from falsehood, partly
because the imperfections of the seeker after truth get in the way. Nineteenth-century astronomers,
for example, had found that it was difficult to be very accurate about their observations - of the
exact time at which a celestial event began, for example. To overcome this problem they used a
technique they called the 'personal equation', whereby different observers averaged their results to
produce a more accurate conclusion. In her novels, and particularly in Middlemarch, Eliot makes use
of what might be called the personal equation in connection with social judgements.
This paper focuses principally on two rich mathematical images: one from Adam Bede and one from
Middlemarch. Both are concerned with truthfulness and with the nature of truth. The Adam Bede
image includes a mathematics problem for readers to solve. The Middlemarch image is based on an
image created by Herbert Spencer and this paper will consider the significance of how Eliot adapted
Spencer's image.