Chapter 1 begins with the problem of conflicting timescales in antiquarianism. At Pompeii, the question of human significance at the scale of geological deep time inspired writers to reconsider the material past and explore alternatives to traditional timelines. This chapter shows how Charles Dickens in particular experiments with nonlinear temporal forms in his travel narrative Pictures from Italy, which I argue uses a fractal temporal form to nest infinite pasts in present sites. A fractal is a nonlinear shape that repeats its structure even when viewed at fine scales. When Dickens deploys it as a temporal form, he necessarily changes the shape of history, offering alternative possibilities for Italian politics. Chapter 1 ends by considering the ethical ramifications of linear and nonlinear temporal forms in Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage. This poem, depicting the Roman Republic of 1849, dramatizes English tourists’ attempts to reassert the historicism that casts Italy as past despite the Risorgimento. Ultimately, Chapter 1 shows how both Dickens and Clough respond to political potential in Italy by reconfiguring time.

This essay suggests that the contemporary moment sees a crisis in the experience of temporality and sequentiality, that can be felt across the anglophone world. There are a set of emerging political and ecological conditions, that offer a serious challenge to the way that we have conceived of the passage of historical time.

It is difficult as a result, the essay argues, to generate clear pictures of the future, either of Europe, or of our wider planetary environment. The essay addresses this crisis, by examining the forms in which some contemporary British authors give poetic expression to the claims that the past has on our experience of time, and by suggesting how such pictures of the past yield new ways of imagining a European future.

This chapter explores the range of essayistic writing in nineteenth-century newspapers: leaders (political and topical in focus and the principal genre of the Victorian daily and weekly press), middles (a shorter version of the leader and characteristic of some weeklies), correspondence columns from journalists at home and abroad, and reviews of both books and theatre. It charts the expansion of the press at mid-century following the abolition of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’ and an influx of literary talent that raised the quality of newspapers, and it notes the transformation of newspapers at the end of the century with the creation of literary pages, supplements, and special features (following the demise of many quarterly reviews and monthly magazines). The second half of the chapter examines the newspaper writing of John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, and argues that each made a unique contribution to the newspapers of their day.

The 1830s were dominated by the cholera pandemic (1826−37) and epidemics of influenza, typhus, and typhoid (1836−42). These events were so important at the time that the discourse of popular protest became interwoven with the language of contagion and of sanitary reform. The reformist unrest of the 1830s was recast in Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841) as the 1780 Gordon riots. This chapter explores the extent to which the political and religious unrest in Barnaby Rudge mimics epidemic transmission by placing the novel alongside modern epidemiological studies of urban riots. Further, Dickens connects the 1830s discourses of epidemic and riot with madness, focussing on the problem of the undiagnosability of madness. Barnaby Rudge raises important questions about the transmission of dangerous ideas. Moreover, it connects these to the problem of individual culpability in the case of intellectual disability.

This chapter makes a case for the importance of the 1830s in the history of the British novel. Although unmarked by the publication of novels that enjoyed the longevity of fiction published in the decades before and after, this decade produced a conjunction that was to have a major impact on the future development of the novel form: the emergence, on the one hand, of the young Charles Dickens as a talented new writer and, on the other, of London as a major subject of (predominantly visual) representation. This conjunction, the chapter argues, was to produce a new branch, in Franco Moretti’s sense, on the tree of the British novel. Specifically, the chapter shows how Dickens’s earliest work, Sketches by Boz, already fabricates, in terms of characterisation and its organisation of the social spaces that could potentially underlie plot relations, a London-driven urban aesthetic that would differ from the principles of what, by the 1860s, became consecrated as the canonical British novel.

This chapter highlights the newly significant role of embodiment in the discourses of realist aesthetics and theory of mind across the 1860s. Developing conterminously (though not in lockstep), the discourses of aesthetic realism and psychology at this time endowed material reality – including the mind – with new relevance, insisting on the interdependence of body and mind and on the fundamental sameness of scientific and psychological inquiry, whose shared pursuit was advancing the “science of human nature.” More particularly, this chapter moves beyond a familiar emphasis on the role of visual aesthetics to feature other emergent or developing discourses important to realism, including theories of sound, psychology and perception, and motion, and even ital atomic theory and what E.S. Dallas, in The Gay Science (1866), described as “the science of the laws of pleasure.”

“Victorian studies” and “decolonization” have a unique historical relation. Though the recent discourse of “decolonization” has gained unprecedented traction in Victorian studies, there is a much older relation between these two domains. For the “Victorian” itself became available as a coherent object of study and was institutionalized as an area studies field in the heyday of Third Worldist liberation and the age of decolonization – the 1950s and 60s. A field notorious for its ignorance of questions of race and empire, Victorian studies came to be in the postwar period amidst an efflorescence of area studies fields in the United States. But as should be common knowledge by now, this period in the West, and the formation of area studies fields, did not develop in isolation from the colonial peripheries. This is evinced by the fact that writers from the periphery not only make frequent mention of the Victorians but also rely on them for making the postcolonial legible. Citations to Victorian writers, of course, abound in postcolonial writing. But rather than focus on the familiar instances in which the “empire writes back” (Rhys’s Jamaica, Achebe’s excoriation of Conrad, Guerrillas’ Thrushcross Grange, and daffodils in Lucy), this chapter considers those encounters with Victorian culture and society that seek to formulate the politics of decolonization.

This chapter analyses the diverse textual sources emanating from Norfolk Island, which were captured in colonial and imperial archives, to explore how metropolitan ideas could be trialled in remote colonial Australian locales, brought into metropolitan inquiries, then circulated through imperial print culture. Ambitious and curious men such as Alexander Maconochie saw the Australian colonies as opportunities for personal advancement and intellectual endeavour. He experimented with prison reform in Tasmania, then was appointed as Commandant at Norfolk Island, where he both implemented and wrote his new ‘mark system’ of prison management. On his return to Britain, Maconochie produced multiple publications promoting his scheme. He appeared before governmental inquiries to defend his reputation and extend his influence; and in so doing inaugurated many of the foundational modern principles of penology. Maconochie also encouraged prisoners to write, and thus a rich archive of convict memoirs emerged from Norfolk Island, including those by James Lawrence and William Henry Barber. These connected with progressive publishers, such as Thomas Chambers, and writers such as Charles Dickens, who included convict voices and narratives in their metropolitan publications and built public support for the end of transportation.

An exploration of the complex relationship between Collins and Dickens, arguing that Collins was more than Dickens’s protégé.

Chapter 4 reads Charles Dickenss Barnaby Rudge (1841) and David Copperfield (1849–50) as sustained meditations on the visual figure of the public man and the communal work of celebrity culture. These novels confirm the reverberations through British fiction of the temporality of fashion and its logics of currency and spectacle. The chapter analyzes Barnaby Rudge, a novel openly in conversation with the Newgate school, in terms of Dickens’s efforts to negate the criminal protagonist’s purchase on demotic celebrity, and to claim for respectable characters the possibilities for celebrity and publicness that the earlier crime novels had made imaginable. The chapter then offers a fresh take on David Copperfield that moves beyond biographical and psychoanalytic readings of the novel. I argue that Dickens shows in David Copperfield that by mid-century, an awareness of one’s own visibility has become an integral component of identity formation and a prerequisite to participation in social life.

The chapter analyses the integral role that literary writing in English, and especially the realist novel, played in imaginatively shaping, structuring and on occasion obscuring processes of nineteenth-century globalization. Taking Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) as case studies, we make two main points: first, that empire formed the constitutive ground of processes of globalization in the period; and, second, that realist fiction provided a means through which these processes could be understood and questioned, from vantage points both metropolitan or northern (Dickens) and peripheral or southern (Schreiner). We proceed in this chapter on the conviction that imperialism was an essential aspect of globalization throughout the long nineteenth century, redistributing wealth and restructuring the global economy in favour of imperial power. Globalization and empire were therefore folded into one another, taking on different features at their geographic and economic cores and peripheral edges. Taking illustrative examples from Dickens in the heart of the Empire and Schreiner at a zone of peripheral extraction, the chapter captures two contrasting yet complementary literary responses to this system.

The tropes of bondage that pervade Emily Dickinson’s lyric poems were significant to contemporary American accounts of the lyric and its relation to individual liberty. Dickinson is often held up as the paradigmatic lyric poet: reclusive, but unbounded in her imagination; pure voice, speaking on the other side of the door. Dickinson herself returns endlessly to tropes of the prison, chains and bonds. At times she even expresses a sadistic delight in imagining the torture of others. The chapter argues that, given the convulsions of her time and her family’s direct political engagements with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Fugitive Slave Act and the Civil War, it is surprising that slavery is almost entirely absent from Dickinson’s poetry. The chapter reflects on the tropes of incarceration or bondage in Dickinson’s poetics, to consider what the missing slave means for the model of lyric that she has come to represent.

Vagrants abound in the writings of British travellers who visited antebellum America. This chapter focuses on the representation of three of these vagrant figures. First, the pauper immigrant, a figure whose mobility was vigorously contested by British and American commentators. For the British these immigrants belong to the deserving poor – their rootlessness was temporary and incidental; for the Americans they were often perceived as undeserving vagrants and a potential financial burden. Second, the American Indian, a figure who was frequently compared to the English Gypsy, and whose nomadism was often repositioned as vagrancy and a sign of their impending extinction. And third, the American vagabond, a vagrant and anarchic figure who was represented as a lawless reprobate living on the frontiers. These three figures were interpreted using a range of representational strategies that were current in Britain, and together they demonstrate the flexibility of vagrant discourses – their ability to circulate globally as well as locally. Among other writers, this chapter examines the works of Frances Trollope, Harriet Martineau and Charles Dickens.

London was a centre of vagrancy in the Victorian period. Its refuges, lodging-houses and workhouses ensured that large numbers of vagrants travelled to the capital, especially during the winter months when travelling on the open road could be difficult and dangerous. The first half of this chapter examines how these forms of relief structured the vagrants’ movement and resulted in what I call ‘metropolitan vagrancy’. This was a constrained form of movement, typically limited to the winter months, that was contoured by the resources that the vagrant poor were able to access and the mounting restrictions that were placed on them by the Poor Law. The second half examines an understudied depiction of homelessness that was, in part, a product of these restrictions: the queue outside the ‘casual’ or vagrant ward of the workhouse. This became an image that articulated anxieties about the difficult distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, and also conveyed fears about the illiberality of the Poor Law and the potentially revolutionary response that it might provoke. This chapter examines works by Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley and the painter Luke Fildes.

Most actual poachers were not vagrants in the Victorian period; but a significant number of literary ones were, especially during the so-called Hungry Forties. Examining popular and literary sources from across the political spectrum, this chapter argues that the vagrant poacher became a politically loaded figure in British print culture during the 1840s. In the conservative ‘poacher’s progress’ the poacher’s vagrancy was a sign of selfishness and a staging post on the road to ruin. These morality tales supported the landowning elite and their monopoly on game by depicting the poacher as a predatory criminal. Meanwhile, in radical literature, such as Charles Dickens’s The Chimes (1844), the poacher was represented as a victim of permissive laws; these included both the vagrancy laws and the game laws. In these texts the poacher’s vagrancy was a sign of social oppression and was used to critique what many liberals and radicals perceived as the criminalisation of poverty. Alongside Dickens, this chapter examines Charles Kingsley’s Yeast (1848) as well as works by Hannah More and Charlton Carew.

Chapter Two, “The Social Life of Crime: Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and Philip Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug” reads the oppositional evolution of criminal justice in England and India by comparing the two novels. I begin with the observation that the movement toward rehabilitation and the humanization of the criminal in nineteenth century England occurs in tandem with the rise of corporal punishment and penal transportation in India. Taking the two novels as instances of this contradictory impulse, I examine the figure of the thug as a cipher for racialized fears of Indian criminality. In particular, I look at representations of paternity and masculinity within both novels. I show that Abel Magwitch becomes humanized in Dickens’s novel by taking on the mantle of fatherhood for Pip. By contrast, Ameer Ali is condemned for his paradigmatic inability to foster a viable childhood. I argue that criminality emerges within a Victorian matrix of race and patriarchy in which to be a father, or father figure, is to be properly human.

This final chapter addresses the concreteness of fictional experiences on which Brontë’s, Trollope’s, and Thackeray’s various uses of the novel depend. I examine nineteenth-century medical responses to Coleridge’s paracosmic play, in particular their cautions against imagined environments as precursors to hallucination, and the continuity of this discourse with more general anxieties about fictional or poetic experience; for instance, George Henry Lewes singled out Dickens as an author who shared his pseudo-hallucinations through novels. This view of novel-reading as imaginative sensory participation has since been overshadowed by the cinematic and the digital, but represents an important precedent for the everyday presence of non-material things and spaces. In a reading of Little Dorrit, where multiple characters form their unrealised hopes and plans into fantasised environments, I argue that play, hallucination, and fiction provided nineteenth-century critics with tools to conceptualise a phenomenology of the virtual, or even its reparative value.

The development of the Victorian ghost story can be contextualised in relation to an array of interleaving discourses of the unseen: the science of optics; the advent of new, invisible technologies that constituted a form of modern supernatural; and the rise of Spiritualism and the pseudo-scientific investigation of the paranormal. Many ghost story writers explored, even embraced, the spectral effects of modernity and the ghost story flourished in an historical moment when scientific and technological progress was shadowed by the occult. For women writers, the ghost story is a tale of increasing visibility and opportunity: in a climate of social and political reform, women occupied a prominent role in the genre, exploiting the growing appetite for popular and marketable writing, particularly in shorter forms. The chapter explores how the Victorian ghost story provided an often oblique vision of gender and class inequalities, and raised fundamental questions about faith and knowledge.

Oriented by theoretical work form C. S. Peirce and Walter Ong through conceptual poet John Cayley, from John Stuart Mill on poetry as ‘overheard’ to Steven Connor on the ‘white voice’ of silent enunciation – as well as, in contrast, by book sculpture in the conceptual mode of the bibliobjet, closed to all reading – this essay lends intensive granular audition to passages from Dickens through Virginia Woolf to Toni Morrison. Its effort is to register, and further to generalise, the phonemic dimension of what, loosely but famously called ‘secret prose’ in Dickens by Graham Greene, I will be identifying (after Ong’s ‘secondary orality’) as the ‘secondary vocality’ of the reading event in cases of uniquely impacted audiovisual overlap identified as ‘graphonic’ wording.