If literary form and railway infrastructure do not neatly align in nineteenth-century novels, then what is the significance of their close, inconsistent entanglement? Chapter 4 examines George Eliot’s 1876 novel Daniel Deronda, which takes full advantage of transport and communications infrastructure in its two mainline plots. Throughout Eliot associates markers of such systems – ‘dusty waiting rooms’, un-consulted Bradshaw’s railway guides, and telegrams relaying old news – with stasis and regression. Even where they advance the plot, they draw the narrative back in time. This chapter parallels communication infrastructure and novel form to interrogate how and why Eliot reconfigures established and well-traversed form in her final novel that pushes against the margins of literary realism. By offering an upset chronology and a refusal to drive plotlines to a conventional resolution, to what extent does Eliot reconceptualise systems rooted in timeliness and destination in Daniel Deronda?

This chapter on the Victorian bildungsroman focuses on moments when a heroine pleasurably and passively flies, floats, or is carried into a larger social world. It focuses on episodes from Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. Rather than developing a life that establishes her individuality, I argue that the heroine of the bildungsroman gets swept up in an emotion that unites her with a social ingroup. This emotion deeply fulfills the heroine, meeting ordinarily unmet needs for social relatedness and self-esteem. After analyzing the novels, the chapter describes acts of reading through which women and working-class readers affiliate with like-minded others. These include readers who see themselves as part of a group of ardent Dorothea Brookes or fiery Jane Eyres and also working-class readers who felt transported by books that connected them to other book-lovers.

This chapter enquires into the dual definitions of “realism” and “gender,” noting their shared generic messiness and common grounding in Western modernity’s history of capitalism and colonialism. Moving through a feminist and literary-critical tradition from Nancy Armstrong to Naomi Schor and representative British novels such as George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, I observe that gender and race have always played out on the deepest formal levels of realist texts. Chapter 10 ultimately claims that we can read and theorize gender in realism differently when we abandon terms such as “agency” and “identity,” and cease to link the realist novel so tightly to referential fidelity. Turning to psychoanalysis, Black feminist theory, and recent critics of the novel such as Alicia Mireles Christoff and Jill Galvan, I suggest that reading “gendering” as a relational process involving forms of negativity and longing opens the realist novel to different kinds of thinking.

Realism and modernism are often taken to be opposed literary movements, typically defined by an emphasis on content and form, respectively. When we look closely at the practices of the modernists, however, we see that they remain invested in many of the same concerns as realists – sociality, community, sentiment – even if these appear in new forms. Beginning with Henry James’s lifelong, and contradictory, engagement with George Eliot, this chapter then compares James Joyce’s Ulysses to Middlemarch, demonstrating their shared commitment to the ability of the aesthetic to both reveal and shape our common social world.

This chapter considers models of conversation, and ideas about it, that can be recovered from the 1870s, as exemplary of ‘high’ Victorianism in the later part of the nineteenth century. Good conversation was represented as intellectual exchange, amiable and uncontroversial, and speaking to the like-minded, as opposed to the rise of the public intellectual (such as the ‘Sage’) and the emergence of professional specialisms, that did not rely on or expect listening; in other words, congenial discussion as opposed to the declamatory. The chapter gives examples of good conversation as modelled by The Athenæum Club and The Athenaeum weekly journal in the 1870s (including ‘Our Library Table’), and the lived example of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, as well as contrary examples from Middlemarch and John Ruskin.

British reviewers often opposed the distasteful ‘physiological’ experiments of their European neighbours while simultaneously embracing laboratory principles and methods to dissect the practice of criticism. Chapter 8 surveys the newspapers and periodicals of the period to show that vivisectional terminology was remarkably sprawling in its applications and meanings. Experimental physiology’s modus operandi was used to shape and articulate key methodological and ideological principles emerging in late-Victorian literary-critical theory and practice. Namely, allusions to ‘vivisection’ expressed a growing professionalism and a shift from an ‘illustrative’ to a dispassionate ‘analytical’ mode, paralleling the trend towards ‘scientific’ historiography. Certain authors such as George Eliot, William Thackeray, and Charlotte Brontë were persistently labelled ‘literary vivisectors’, and the chapter ends by arguing that romanticised notions of the sympathetic female author presented one obstacle to objective, ‘vivisectional’ fin-de-siècle literary criticism.

The 1870s were a watershed decade for British feminism. Major changes were afoot that had a profound impact on women’s legal, educational, and social status. The first bill aiming to give women the vote may have failed in Parliament in 1870, but it was the start of a decade that saw enormous progress in women’s position in society at large, from the establishment of the first women’s colleges in Oxbridge to opportunities for employment in the civil service. Feminist campaigners including Annie Besant, Josephine Butler, Frances Power Cobbe, and Millicent Garrett Fawcett advocated for women’s increasing economic, educational, and bodily autonomy in public speaking and journalism. Writers including George Eliot, Dinah Craik, and Augusta Webster wrote novels and poetry to intervene in parliamentary debates ranging from the right of married women to own property to the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act. Combining data on women writers with close reading, this chapter explores the powerful role that women’s writing played in imagining and advocating for women’s rights in the 1870s

This chapter argues that, throughout the 1870s, literary understandings of voice were transformed by, and also helped to shape, acoustic technologies and sciences. Developments in physics and physiology, and the invention of the telephone and the phonograph at the decade’s end, offered new ways of describing how the human voice was formed, transmitted, and heard. However, these developments also reimagined voice as something not exclusively human, continuous with a wide spectrum of inarticulate and non-human sounds. This dehumanisation threatened to undermine established definitions of literary voice, but literary and scientific writers also identified similarities between their respective theorisations of speech and sound, and ‘voice’ became a keyword that was frequently used to examine the wider relations between science and literature. After discussing George Eliot’s views on the possible implications of new vocal technologies for prose fiction, the chapter turns to the sonnets of Emily Pfeiffer, which examine how scientific models of voice might complicate and reimagine poetry’s conventional status as the most essentially vocal of literary forms.

Genealogically rooted in the Gothic, melodrama, and prose romance of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, sensationalism proliferated and even intensified throughout the 1870s as authors sought new forms of emotional and visceral connection with their increasingly desensitized readers. This essay recovers this somewhat more knowing second decade as the ‘post-sensational seventies,’ wherein the ‘post’ is understood in the same way that it might be if conjoined within other more familiar compounds, such as ‘post-colonial’ or ‘post-feminist,’ not as beyond a phenomenon that is past but rather as grappling self-consciously with the legacies, internal contradictions, possibilities, and pervasiveness of a set of practices that are still very much present. Ultimately, recognizing the 1870s as post-sensational means acknowledging that novelistic representations shifted decisively to accommodate the coincidental, the criminal, the nonrational, and the scandalous, as well as structurally resistant forms of gender and class, as constituent fractions of the real.

This chapter situates George Eliot’s ground-breaking realist novel, Middlemarch, in the context of a longer tradition of provincial fiction. By the time Eliot published Middlemarch, fiction that put small-town life at its centre had developed from the early nineteenth-century ‘sketch’ or ‘tale’ to the chronicle novels of Trollope and Oliphant in the 1850s and 1860s. This chapter argues that Middlemarch is a deliberate provocation regarding the cultural and aesthetic value attributed to the common, the middling, and the local in the 1870s as London exerted ever-clearer centralizing force on culture and education. Middlemarch expands the small forms of provincial fiction through expansive patterning and repetition of everyday plots and locales. This establishes a type of ethical realism in which the fact of frequency does not mean the common is dismissed, but rather is revalued in the narrative as commonality: a ground for collective identity.

This chapter argues that what Gerard Manley Hopkins termed the “rural scene” provided a focal point in the 1870s for profound changes in the Victorian understanding, valuation, and transformation of the natural world. British writing at this time demonstrates a shift from viewing the rural scene as picturesque landscape, as evidenced in provincial novels such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, to conceiving of it as an environment encompassing human and nonhuman nature, notably in Richard Jefferies’ nature writings and Thomas Hardy’s first Wessex novels. Grasping the full scope of Victorian responses to the rural scene in the 1870s also requires looking to the expanding pastoral industries of the settler empire. Writing in and about the settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand, by Lady Barker, Rolf Boldrewood, and Anthony Trollope, highlights how a perceived absence of rural aesthetic values helped render colonial nature available for transformation and subsequent economic exploitation.

Gail Marshall reflects on the European roots of George Eliot’s formulation of realism, the way in which her European experiences in the 1850s coincided with those of a very young Henry James, and how both writers embrace the challenging difference of their experiences of Europe as a prelude to developing their respective practices of realism. ‘George Eliot, Henry James, Realism, and Europe’ examines the novelists’ travels in Europe in the 1850s, the availability of European culture in Britain, Thomas Cook’s first tours to Europe, a nostalgic interest in peasants, and the publication in 1859 of David Masson’s British Novelists and their Styles: Being a Critical Sketch of the History of British Prose Fiction. The chapter argues that the experience of European travel is intrinsic to both Eliot and James’s aesthetic, as well as to the ethical practice of realism.

Chapter 4 focuses on moments of scientific and imaginative engagement with the question of what lay beyond the limits of human audibility. It begins by considering writings by Charles Babbage, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Florence McLandburgh, each of whom explored the possibilities of accessing the continuing sounds of ordinary life beyond the physiological boundaries of human hearing, and the potential artistic, philosophical, and spiritual truths that might be gleaned from so doing. Conversely, the second part of this chapter looks to representations of the limits of individual auditory perception as a newly recognised weakness or vulnerability in the modern subject. The gothic monsters and sensationalised beings of Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Wilkie Collins, were, I argue, born in part of a paranoid white imperialist mindset, for whom superior auditory perception in others might pose a distinct threat to British social and cultural structures.

The introduction provides an outline of the so-called acoustic turn of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when emerging scientific constructions of sound and its movement through the material world rendered that world audible in new and exciting ways. It argues that the new acoustic culture of the nineteenth century raised questions as to what lay beyond the limits of the human ear or scientific instrument and pointed to the existence of an inaccessible, intangible space between sound and silence, whose boundaries could not be measured and were always inherently unstable. That space, beyond the limited powers of human sensitivity, was a rich source of scientific, literary, and broader cultural reflection throughout the period. I delineate the volume’s progression through a series of auditory thresholds, each of which was brought to prominent scientific or medical attention in the period while becoming the subject of literary response and experimentation.

Chapter 3 offers a sustained reading of the nature of auditory perception in George Eliot’s Middlemarchin order to demonstrate the significance of listening and attentiveness not only to the pathological sounds of the body but to those metaphoric heart beats and vibrations that signify psychological struggles within the novel as a whole. In Eliot’s realist project, I argue, both medical and imaginative explorations of the vibrations and pulses beyond the thresholds of usual human ‘stupidity’ and sensory perception are stimulants to the imagination, but they are not a cause for horror or dread like those gothic treatments of the stethoscope discussed in the previous chapter. Rather, they offer an opportunity for cultivating medical knowledge, sympathy, and humility. Here, attentive, stethoscopic listening ultimately provides a means of discrimination, of knowing and orienting oneself, and of relating to others in the modern world.

Chapter 5 considers the ways in which animal responses to music were used as evidence of their intelligence and sensitivities. In the context of the cultural and philosophical search for the origins of music in so-called primitive forms of communication and animal cries, the medium of music provided a means of constructing and imaginatively exploring animal subjectivities, while positing an experience of listening that lay entirely beyond the limits of the human self. Such discussions, though at times making use of scientific data, contained a wealth of anecdotal evidence and casual observations, which I include as a critical component of understandings of animals and music in both the popular and scientific imagination of the period. I also consider the musical animals of fiction by George Eliot and Charles Dickens in order to demonstrate that music offers a familiar point of access into the unfamiliar mind of the other.

A key feature of the novel of ideas is the prominent role of debates between characters that stage political, philosophical, and ideological differences. Often seen as an especially artificial feature of the genre, character-character dialogue is typically contrasted unfavorably with indirect speech and narratorial description of psychological states. This opposition plays into an implicitly modernism-valorizing view and, ultimately, a privileging of the representation and analysis of thought over the representation of speech. As such, it dovetails in an interesting way with a consequential divide within literary history between idea-driven narrative and an allegedly more nuanced psychological and moral realism. Refusing this opposition, this essay considers nineteenth-century novelistic approaches to moral and political ideas around equality and justice through a complex lens involving the interplay between ruminative states and moments of punctual character-character dialogue. Authors discussed include Henry James, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot.

In moving to align narrative envisioning with the likes of CGI (computer-generated images) or laser holograms, this chapter sets out to rethink the essential text/image relation in literary reading under the generative rubric of IMAGEdTEXT: the visualization made operational, just as it sounds in that compound, by the alphabetic (and thus phonetic) momentum of written speech. This is the forward motion, at times momentarily recursive, by which mental images are produced, vistas made available, narrative scenes set and peopled, events brought to mind. It is in this sense that Western literature, rooted in what linguists call the “graphophomemic” structure of sound–symbol relations, summons sights and sounds from the spinning gears of what is at base an audiovisual engine of its own – one that, in just such a phrase, may set ringing ears spinning, dizzy with unseen wording as well as new mental pictures. Authors from George Eliot through Henry James, Proust to Richard Powers, are read into evidence on the score of such textual “audioptics.”

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.

Before Chaucer became ‘the Father of English Poetry’, the French poet Eustace Deschamps had called him ’Grant translateur’. In fact, Chaucer was the fons et origo of the English poetic tradition precisely because he was the Great Translator, because the history of English literature is also the history of European translation. Beginning with the medieval practice of translatio, whereby source and commentary fused into the new work, this chapter charts the contested views of translation from primary mode of making, to secondary exercise, back to primary production as literary translation reaffirms its centrality to the literary polysystem. It also traces the rise of the professional translator, the evolution of the literary translator, and translation studies as a discipline predicated on the development of translation theory. While Dryden in the seventeenth century could draw crucial distinctions between modes of translation, the development of translation as a formal and theorized practice (exemplified by Schleiermacher in early nineteenth-century Germany) could not be disassociated from the efflorescence of national literatures, pace Goethe, the Romantics, and George Eliot.