The book begins with a broad introduction situating the development of colonial law alongside the rise of the novel. The introduction offers an overview of the architecture of colonial sovereignty while also delving into its specifically legal context. From the move toward the codification of laws to the adjudication of cases in the Privy Council, the introduction reveals the ways in which the law provided a narrative for colonial lives. At the same time, the introduction shows how broader cultural narratives as represented in the era’s literature influenced the law. Even if, as is customarily claimed, the substance of law in the colonies was haphazard and drawn from multiple legal traditions, its authority was largely founded in claims to absolute sovereignty. The introduction frames the ways in which bloodline claims to the sovereignty of kingship were reconfigured in the colonies to enact a biopolitical sovereignty of race.

Bibliographical recoveries have decisively challenged older views about Victorian Ireland’s supposed failure to produce fiction, but the perception that the Irish novel was in many ways anomalous remains a hallmark of scholarship on the period, regardless of whether that anomaly is deplored or celebrated. This chapter reviews the main theories that have used sociological, cultural, ideological and economic factors to analyse the marginality and generic deviancy of Irish fiction, where realism is often overshadowed by allegorical and Gothic strains. It then suggests that the aesthetic standards that are used to assess the idiosyncrasies of Irish Victorian novels remain implicitly indebted to influential but questionable definitions of realism in Anglo-American literary criticism. While acknowledging some of Irish fiction’s differences from the realist canon, this chapter also highlights their mutual imbrication by tracing Irish influences and inspirations in the works of various English and French realists, and the latter’s roles in Irish literary history. Ireland’s paradoxical blend of peripherality and proximity to the centres of nineteenth-century European cultural production is here used to recontextualise terms like realism, allegory and Gothic, and to emphasise their porousness not just in Irish writing, but in the very canon from which Irish Victorian fiction is too often segregated.

This chapter analyzes Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, Oliver Twist, and Barnaby Rudge to show how the Dickensian novel includes animals in its political critiques, questions the belief that humans have access to animal subjectivity, and cultivates an alternate form of animal character. Although Dickens rarely removes himself from ideologies of pastoral power, his animals often function outside it. Dickens’s animal characters critique dominant notions of liberal character and the character of government, offering a way out from animalizing discourses of both animal and working-class character. This chapter engages with discourse surrounding the New Poor Law and Chartism, and shows how Dickens’s animal characters can be considered minor characters who reflect demands for democracy throughout the period. These three novels highlight the radical nature of Dickens’s animal politics, as they challenge larger constructions of liberal character and posit alternate animal subjectivities within a more democratic political community.

This chapter analyzes Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, Oliver Twist, and Barnaby Rudge to show how the Dickensian novel includes animals in its political critiques, questions the belief that humans have access to animal subjectivity, and cultivates an alternate form of animal character. Although Dickens rarely removes himself from ideologies of pastoral power, his animals often function outside it. Dickens’s animal characters critique dominant notions of liberal character and the character of government, offering a way out from animalizing discourses of both animal and working-class character. This chapter engages with discourse surrounding the New Poor Law and Chartism, and shows how Dickens’s animal characters can be considered minor characters who reflect demands for democracy throughout the period. These three novels highlight the radical nature of Dickens’s animal politics, as they challenge larger constructions of liberal character and posit alternate animal subjectivities within a more democratic political community.