Chapter 3 contends that the crime novels of the Newgate school stage the emergence of novelty, spectacle, and celebrity in the everyday lives of the low-born and ordinary. Newgate novels of the 1830s and 1840s examine how, in an emergent mass media culture, notorious figures and extraordinary actions reverberate through the collective consciousness. I argue that Newgate novelists develop a notion of demotic celebrity, showing how the criminal’s talents and achievements might capture the public’s imagination and bring celebrity within reach of insignificant individuals. Reading W. H. Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830) in relation to William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) and Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–38), the chapter shows that the criminal in these novels is a figure aware of his own visibility and conscious of how best to present himself to an audience. The Newgate novels interest in the production of celebrity reflects the permeation of fashion’s logics of contingency and spectacle into quotidian experience across the social spectrum.

As he developed his own faith, working it out as he lived and wrote, Tolstoy responded to varieties of religious experience and expression, including English ones. From early on, Tolstoy found in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and the novels of Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and others, information about English religious life and examples of how to novelize religious experience. In turn, when Tolstoy emerged, later in life, as a religious seeker and moral authority, English readers responded to Tolstoy both as a novelist and as a thinker.

Public engagement with the twin scandals associated with the railways was much more direct, as most of the victims were ordinary citizens. These individuals shared their experiences by writing eyewitness accounts of crashes, or of approaches made by speculative stags, in letters to the press. Some of the newspapers that published these letters of protest were themselves caught up in the politics of the ‘railway interest’, occasionally engaging in internecine warfare through statements written by their editors. And Sir Robert Peel, whose government was responsible for the control of the railways, was prepared to address the nation directly, if anonymously, by drafting text for a Times leading article in a letter to his chancellor of the exchequer.

‘Transport’ was an increasingly complex word in the nineteenth century, linking developments in transport technology to an older sense of being carried away by powerful emotions. This chapter shows how inventively Victorian narrative styles responded to new and established forms of transport, including stagecoach, train and boat, and how much was at stake in those imaginative engagements. Style was a way of responding not only to the rhythms and mechanics of travel but to its many associations, questions about progress and control, challenges to genre and to selfhood, even a rekindling of primal impulses.

In his review of Our Mutual Friend (1864–5), Henry James claimed the novel showed signs of its author’s ‘exhaustion’. In this chapter, Garrett Stewart shows, by way of contrast and rebuttal, the exhaustive catalogue of stylistic effects that Dickens energetically employs in his last complete novel. The chapter individuates distinct features of style from Dickens’s long-standing repertoire – including the dextrous use of adjectives and negatives, ingenuity of syntax and inversion, sound and word play, renovation of idiom and cliché – to show Dickens flaunting and holding up to inspection his own characteristic verbal and phrasal habits.

This chapter considers the changing but enduring fortunes of didacticism across the Victorian period, from Romanticism before it to Modernism after it; it does so by investigating the function of the rhetorical question as it is shaped by scenes of correction in didactic fiction. The chapter shows that those scenes of correction exemplified in pre-Victorian novels are recast satirically by Dickens and Brontë, among others, while the tradition of didacticism remains an influence upon Thackeray’s narrative style.

This chapter shows that the management of perspective in narrative fiction is a matter of technique at the level of the sentence, involving diction, syntax and punctuation. Ruth Bernard Yeazell distinguishes different varieties of perspective available in fiction (third person, first person, free indirect style) and shows how they work in practice. Her suggestion that the familiar but misleading concept of the ‘omniscient narrator’ emerges from ‘confusing the power theoretically open to novelists from the actual behavior of novelists’ indicates the benefits of attending to examples of prose in practice.

This chapter analyzes the recent popular television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, showing how serial storytelling has extended the social and political discussions begun by the novel. Specific attention is paid to the political implications of soundtrack and visual aesthetics, including the series’ allusions to painting, photography, and cinema, as well as costume, lighting, and choreography. The technique of alternating mass scenes, as in the Prayvaganza and the Particicution, overhead shots, and shallow focus close-up is considered. The visual impact of the Handmaids’ costumes extends to their widespread use in contemporary human rights demonstrations. Finally, the chapter reviews viewers’ responses both positive and negative, including concerns about the problematic “color-blindness” of the series. The debate around the series exposes the interdependence of aesthetic, intellectual, and moral categories that reflect a range of sociocultural preoccupations.

The first chapter traces the origins of the London police courts and the introduction of courtroom scenes as a literary and journalistic subject in the later eighteenth century. In the absence of an official police force, an orderly, hierarchical courtroom was necessary to sustain magistrates’ public legitimacy and to justify the considerable expansion of the summary court system. In the reformation of summary justice amidst its widening public portrayals, the courtroom’s legal capacity to punish disorder became indelibly linked to its cultural capacity to define public order and the putative threats to it. The first generation of courtroom reporters and the magistrates working in the early decades of the nineteenth century employed the locale to propose distinct visions of moral and social order in the metropolis. They set many of the precedents that would continue to define the courts and their public portrayals in subsequent decades.

This chapter focuses on the picture of the dead hand, as it recurs across the nineteenth-century novel, from Wollstonecraft to Austen to Dickens, Zola, Eliot and Melville. It suggests that the obsession with the dead hand arises from the capacity of the novel to engage with biomaterial, and to make of such material the living stuff of being. The novel enters into a conjunction with the prosthetic – with the dead hand – to give animation to our being, as it is reshaped by the forces of industrialisation. But the chapter also argues that the novel encounters a resistance, a refusal of prosthetic material to give way to the demands of mind – a refusal which is central to the operation of the prosthetic imagination.

This chapter explores the pervasive ways in which Gothic forces and affiliations appear in Dickens’s writings. The word ‘Gothic’ is rare in his work but an awareness of Gothic tropes, plottings and conventions is vital to understanding it. Gothic is used in highly innovative ways: to explore asymmetrical power relations of many sorts; to limit-test the idea of the ‘human’; and as radical social critique. The diabolical and uncanny are particularly powerful modes, and Dickens is pioneering both in his use of ‘virtual’ Gothic in A Christmas Carol and in the creation of ‘paranoid Gothic’ in the violent same-sex eroticism of Our Mutual Friend and the Mystery of Edwin Drood. Gothic is also an essential component of such scenes as Miss Havisham’s resemblance to ‘waxwork and skeleton’ in Great Expectations and Fagin’s and Monks’s appearance at the sleeping Oliver Twist’s window. The chapter discusses a wide range of Gothic presences in these and other works, concluding with a discussion of Dicken’s remarkable late essay ‘Nurse’s Stories’ (1863), a complex ‘meta-Gothic’ reflection on uncanny repetition and its simultaneously comic and diabolical power in subjective experience and narration.

Though railways have been frequently depicted as icons of the progressive and the dynamic within British Victorian fiction, their secular and timetabled culture is, in fact, more often than not freighted with a disruptive Gothic presence. This chapter begins by noting how the construction of the railways in the nineteenth century literally impacted upon the built and cultural environments, laying waste to familiar landmarks and marking the bodies of those who travel as well as those who serve the engines of progress. The chapter considers the theme of physical violence and sexual interference within the closed space of the railway carriage, making reference to popular newspaper reportage and erotic fiction before engaging with the issue of psychological trauma and isolation, particularly among those whose task is as much to protect, as to transport, the travelling public.

This chapter considers a range of methods for writing about literary soundscapes. R. Murray Schafer’s seminal coinage of soundscape residually informs current debates about the sonic dimensions of literary form, but the discursive alignment of print and voice and reading and listening is an enduring aspect of the history of modern literature. This history extends from the capacious descriptive ambition of the realist novel through to, and beyond, literary modernism’s experimental ambition to capture the sounds of modern life at a critical moment when an array of recording devices emerged to do what literature could not – record sound in real time. Spanning from Charles Dickens to Elizabeth Bowen, this chapter analyses the various ways writers from the nineteenth century to the present have responded to the sound worlds in which they lived by attending to the distinctive sonic textures of literary language and its unique capacity to channel the rhythms and voices of everyday socially embodied sound.

An analysis of Victorian conceptions of reason and cause and the literary challenge to Mill and positivism.

“No Plots for Old Men” argues that aging raised a problem for Charles Dickens’s literary project: the novel’s difficulty of representing temporal continuity over long spans of time. For the old man, the meaningful plots of the nineteenth century—such as the bildungsroman or the marriage plot—are behind him. An object of little narrative interest from the perspective of these plots, the old man is continually activated in Dickens’s novels, setting up a competition between the natural death he staves off and the closure of the narrative in which he is enmeshed. By examining three of Dickens’s early novels, this chapter shows how old men are excluded from the youthful plot of development central to the progress of a modernizing society. No longer the subject of the plot and yet bound by ambition, the elderly male engages in a narrative compulsion that underlines the imaginative power of what has been left behind by both the realist novel and the modernity it represents. By doing so, the old man serves as the site through which Dickens addresses an impasse of the novel form, where its duration is marked by its inability to faithfully represent the texture of passing time.