This chapter considers the influential argument that there is a formal and substantive complicity between disciplinary surveillance and the novel, specifically the realist novel. Foucauldian readings of literature argue that the nineteenth-century realist novel functioned as a kind of disciplinary power, acting as a complement to the spatial technologies of a disciplinary society. This argument has not been readily acknowledged by the spatial turn in literary studies, but this chapter revisits the disciplinary theme in Dickens’ David Copperfield and compares that novel to Thackeray’s Pendennis. Finding very different treatments of space, surveillance, and the self leads to a reassessment of Foucauldian criticism and the idea that the novel is complicit with disciplinary spatiality. As Bildungsromans, Pendennis and David Copperfield have many similarities, but whereas Dickens plays up the themes of disciplinary introspection and an internalised form of carceral surveillance, Thackeray’s hero remains subject only to a worldly form of discipline, including the business of literature itself. Thackeray moreover suggests that prisons are a microcosm of society rather than that the techniques of the prison extend to a disciplinary spatiality. The chapter concludes that literature exhibits and exemplifies different kinds of spatiality and different versions of the carceral imaginary.

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.

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.

Of all Victorian authors, Trollope comes closest to aspiring to the “degree zero” style that has played such an important role in modern theorizations of prose. Committed to an ideal of stylistic transparency, Trollope sought the unmediated transmission of authorial thought-content, borrowing from the more psychological strains of belletrism. However, Chapter 5 challenges the moralization of Trollope’s “disappearing” style as honest or forthright by cataloguing the acts of formal deception necessary to render such effects. Moreover, Trollope’s writings on style reveal his interest in non-mimetic features of prose such as harmony and rhythm, challenging “ease” and “lucidity” as preeminent realist virtues. The chapter concludes that Trollope’s blend of Attic simplicity with Ciceronian schemes proves his style to be one of the most artfully mannered in Victorian English, creating an impression of aesthetic virtuosity where many critics have seen only functional pedestrianism.