Responding to critics who argue that telegraphy is an analogy for style (or at least for realism) in Victorian fiction, in this chapter David Trotter argues conversely that it is in fact inimical to style. Telegraphic communication, while hard to represent, or distasteful in its crudeness, could not be ignored. The novelists understood that it could be essential to human intercourse and, on occasion, oddly romantic. Daniel Deronda is the example par excellence.

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, both medical and literary writers sought to come to terms with the perceived problems of modernity, exploring the consequences for both body and mind of the emerging forms of a pressured, deracinated society. With her ‘fits of nervous dread’ and descent into mental turmoil, George Eliot’s heroine Gwendolen Harleth, from Daniel Deronda (1876), becomes a key figure in late-Victorian representations of the over-stimulated, nervous, and rootless creature of the age. George Gissing, in The Whirlpool (1896), similarly explores the life of a nervous young woman, Alma Fotheringham, caught up in the trammels of late-century city life. This essay focuses on Eliot’s and Gissing’s engagement with medical discourses of the era in their pessimistic case studies of the ways in which pathological forms of economic and social life are imprinted on the mind and body, from the gambling salon and debased culture of the health spa in Eliot’s novel to Gissing’s explicit deployment of fin-de-siècle discourses of degeneration. It also overturns commonly held assumptions that we need to wait until Modernism for a thorough diagnosis of the diseases of modernity.

The sixth chapter continues this focus on the theme of adoption by considering the portrayal of orphans and foundlings in the ‘adoption’ novels of George Eliot. At a time when questions of filial dependence or entitlements were being rigidly regulated in the colony, writers from Charles Dickens to Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot imbued adoptive relations with special sentimental and social value to expansively reform ideas of how family, home, and kinship are understood. So, for instance, this chapter shows how Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) champions the surrogate parental relation over wealth and property inheritance precisely when the Sumroo case legally restricts these ties in the Indian context. Yet, even for Eliot, when adoption raises the specter of racial or national difference as in Daniel Deronda (1876) kinship remains ancestral, its hallmark being genealogical and not open to the caprice of nurture. What this chapter thus clarifies is a contrapuntal relationship between law and literature around the question of adoption. Some of the most celebrated nineteenth century English novels use adoption to break with the family romance plot, upending legal assumptions about rights and descent. However, race proves a limit point even for these works with otherwise capacious imaginations.