Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture) 9781009296564, 9781009296540, 1009296566

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FASHIONABLE FICTIONS AND THE CURRENCY OF THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH NOVEL

Revealing how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel and its representation of social change and individual and collective life in nineteenth-century Britain, Lauren Gillingham ­ offers a revisionist history of the novel. With particular attention to the ­fiction of the 1820s through 1840s, this study focuses on n ­ ovels that use fashion’s idiom of currency and obsolescence to link ­narrative form to a heightened sense of the present and the visibility of public life. It contends that novelists steeped their fiction in d ­ ate-stamped matters of dress, manners, and media sensations to articulate a sense of ­history as unfolding not in epochal change, but in transient issues and interests capturing the public’s imagination. Reading fiction by Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, Letitia Landon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, W. H. Ainsworth, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and others, Fashionable Fictions tells the story of a nineteenth-century genre commitment to contemporaneity that restyles the novel itself. L aur en Gil l ingh a m  is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa. Her work focuses on ­nineteenth-century British fiction and melodrama and their contemporary afterlives. She was the recipient of the Monroe Kirk Spears Award for Best Essay in volume 49 of SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900.

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C a mbr idge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Liter atur e a nd Cultur e F ounding E ditors Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley G eneral E ditors Kate Flint, University of Southern California Clare Pettitt, King’s College London Editorial Board Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck, University of London Ali Behdad, University of California, Los Angeles Alison Chapman, University of Victoria Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck, University of London Josephine McDonagh, University of Chicago Elizabeth Miller, University of California, Davis Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine Cannon Schmitt, University of Toronto Sujit Sivasundaram, University of Cambridge Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia Mark Turner, King’s College London Nineteenth-century literature and culture have proved a rich field for interdisciplinary studies. Since 1994, books in this series have tracked the intersections and tensions between Victorian literature and the visual arts, politics, gender and sexuality, race, social organisation, economic life, technical innovations, scientific thought – in short, culture in its broadest sense. Many of our books are now classics in a field which since the series’ inception has seen powerful engagements with Marxism, feminism, visual studies, post-colonialism, critical race studies, new historicism, new formalism, transnationalism, queer studies, human rights and liberalism, disability studies and global studies. Theoretical challenges and historiographical shifts continue to unsettle scholarship on the nineteenth century in productive ways. New work on the body and the senses, the environment and climate, race and the decolonisation of literary studies, biopolitics and materiality, the animal and the human, the local and the global, politics and form, queerness and gender identities, and intersectional theory is re-animating the field. This series aims to accommodate and promote the most interesting work being undertaken on the frontiers of nineteenth-century literary studies, connecting the field with the urgent critical questions that are being asked today. We seek to publish work from a diverse range of authors, and stand for anti-racism, anti-colonialism and against discrimination in all forms. A complete list of titles published will be found at the end of the book.

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FA S H ION A BL E F IC T IONS AND THE C U R R E NC Y OF T H E N I N E T E E N T H- C E N T U RY BR I T I S H NOV E L L AU R EN GI L L I NGH A M University of Ottawa

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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009296564 DOI: 10.1017/9781009296540 © Lauren Gillingham 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Gillingham, Lauren, 1968– author. title: Fashionable fictions and the currency of the nineteenth-century British novel / Lauren Gillingham. descr iption: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Series: Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2022048198 | isbn 9781009296564 (hardback) | isbn 9781009296540 (ebook) subjects: lcsh: English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism. | Fashion in literature. | Literature and society – England – History – 19th century. | lcgft: Literary criticism. cl assification: lcc pr868.f34 g55 2023 | ddc 823/.809–dc23/eng/20230207 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022048198 ISBN 978-1-009-29656-4 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of Figures page vi Acknowledgements vii

Introduction: Fashion and Its Vicissitudes: Contingency, Temporality, Narrative

1

P a r t I  T h e S i l v e r - F o r k N o v e l a n d t h e Tr a nsient Wor ld 1

“All This Phantasmagoria”: Landon, Shelley, and the Texture of Contemporary Life

2

Picaresque Movements: Pelham, Cecil, and the Rejection of Bildung91

51

Pa r t I I   De mo t ic C e l e br i t i e s  3 Spectacular Objects: Criminal Celebrity and the Newgate School

129

4 After Criminality: Dickens and the Celebrity of Everyday Life

190

P a r t I I I  H y p e r c u r r e n c y a n d t h e S e n s a t i o n Nov el 5 Affective Distance and the Temporality of Sensation Fiction

241



273

Coda: Fiction and Fashion Now

Bibliography 281 Index 299 v

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Figures

1 George Cruikshank, “The Portrait.” In William Harrison Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard: A Romance. London: Richard Bentley, 1839. page 26 2 George Cruikshank, “The Procession of Jack Sheppard from Newgate to Tyburn.” In William Harrison Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard: A Romance. London: Richard Bentley, 1839. 169 3 George Cruikshank, “The Last Scene.” In William Harrison Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard: A Romance. London: Richard Bentley, 1839. 170 4 William Hogarth, “The Idle ‘Prentice Executed at Tyburn.” Plate XI, Industry and Idleness. Designed and engraved by William Hogarth, 1747. 171 5 Hablot Browne, “Hugh’s Curse.” In Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge. Master Humphrey’s Clock, Vol. 3. London: Chapman and Hall, 1841. 201 6 George Cruikshank, “Jack Sheppard’s Irons Knocked Off in the Stone Hall at Newgate.” In William Harrison Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard: A Romance. London: Richard Bentley, 1839. 202

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Acknowledgements

This is a book about the intersection of fashion, temporality, and narrative in the nineteenth-century British novel. Focused on how a modern notion of fashion transformed the novel, this study takes its cue from authors who aimed not to transcend their historical moment but rather to develop narrative forms commensurate with the ephemerality and contingency of their age. If transience is one of the book’s keywords, there has been, paradoxically, nothing fleeting about the process of writing it. This project has lived with me long enough that the only style I might claim for it is “timeless classic,” though that runs at odds with my argument that, from the late eighteenth century on, the fashion system makes “timelessness” as date-stamped a style as this year’s trends. The benefit of my longue durée writing practice is that I have profited from the excellent scholarship that has emerged in the interim, and drawn on the friendship and generosity of a great many people whose support has helped me and strengthened my book in innumerable ways. I am fortunate to work with some wonderful colleagues in Ottawa whose support and conviviality have provided much needed sustenance. Special thanks to Tom Allen, Jennifer Blair, James Brooke-Smith, Victoria Burke, Frans De Bruyn, Ian Dennis, Ina Ferris, Paul Keen, Sara Landreth, Barbara Leckie, April London, Jennifer Panek, Mark Salber Phillips, Anne Raine, Geoff Rector, Janice Schroeder, Robert Stacey, and Keith Wilson. I am grateful to the members of the Montréal-Ottawa Romantics Working Group for their comments on early sections of the project. I received invaluable feedback on my plans for the book from Ina Ferris, April London, Deidre Lynch, Danny O’Quinn, and Jonathan Sachs. I have also benefitted over the years from generative conversations at many conferences, with particular thanks for thought-provoking questions that helped me clarify the project’s argument to Tim Campbell, Lauren Goodlad, Shelley King, Anna Kornbluh, Beverly Lemire, and Tabitha Sparks. I owe a debt of gratitude to the two readers for Cambridge University Press, vii

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Acknowledgements

whose astonishingly generous, incisive reports on the manuscript helped to bring its longer lines into much sharper focus. I began developing this argument under the guidance of Kim Michasiw, who honed my narrative sensibilities and encouraged my love of quirky novels. A group of excellent friends, many of whom have been in my life even longer than this project, have kept me grounded throughout: heartfelt thanks to Judy Barton, Katherine Binhammer, Jenn Blair, Keith Denny, Craig Gordon, Jennifer Henderson, Elska Malek, Peter Sinnema, Robert Stacey, Jolanda Turley, and Jan Wesselius. My parents, Jack and Marion Gillingham, have provided encouragement, respite from work, and more than a few games of Scrabble. Finally, to my beautiful family, Julie, Benjamin, Samuel, Alex, and Wade – for farm weekends and farther-flung travels, Datsun dinners and movie nights, my never-ending love and gratitude. None of this would have been possible without you. My deepest thanks go to my partner, Julie Murray, who has been with me and this book from the beginning, has read every word, and cheered me on over every hurdle. For her impeccable critical instincts, unflagging patience, and irrepressible laughter, and everything else that has kept me going for so many years, I am forever indebted. This book is for her.

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Introduction: Fashion and Its Vicissitudes Contingency, Temporality, Narrative

Fashion always occupies the dividing-line between the past and the future, and consequently conveys a stronger feeling of the present, at least while it is at its height, than most other phenomena.

– Georg Simmel, “Fashion” (1904)1

In 1839, on the strength of his success with Rookwood (1834), which featured the eighteenth-century highwayman Dick Turpin, William ­ Harrison Ainsworth published another novel about a legendary eighteenth-­century criminal: Jack Sheppard. The new novel was an instant hit. Kathryn Chittick has observed that “Jack Sheppard may now be a forgotten book, but in 1839 it inspired a mania that went beyond the literary pages of the newspapers.”2 Collaborating with George Cruikshank who produced 27 illustrations for the novel, Ainsworth fictionalized the remarkable true story of the young thief who escaped from prison four times, including two escapes from Newgate Prison, before being hanged at Tyburn in 1724 at the age of 21.3 A century later there were few cobwebs to dust off this historical figure: Sheppard’s extraordinary prison breaks made him a household name in his own day, and through the remainder of the century his fame rarely waned. His crimes were reported in the newspapers during his lifetime and a biography attributed to Daniel Defoe was sold on the day of his hanging and republished frequently in the years afterward.4 Sheppard’s story was widely available through the eighteenth century in the form of ballads, penny narratives, and street theatre; it may have inspired John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and William Hogarth’s print series Industry and Idleness (1747).5 Sheppard was a key figure as well in The Newgate Calendar, a five-volume compendium of criminal biographies first published in 1774 and updated and republished twice in the early nineteenth century. As Patricia Anderson has shown, moreover, the proliferating print culture 1

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market of the 1830s and 40s that was aimed specifically at working people gave new life to the Sheppard legend in the form of many more narrative and illustrated versions of his story.6 If Ainsworth turned to the pages of history for his latest story, his criminal protagonist seemed to speak to contemporary readers in the 1830s in an idiom of their own moment. Ainsworth brought his characteristic historical assiduity to details of setting and plot such as the interior of Newgate and the legendary prison breaks, but the criminal’s story and image proved conducive to a translation into contemporary nineteenth-century media that made Jack’s figure singularly current; at the same time, I will suggest, this translation revealed the complex interplay between residual and emergent cultural forms, technologies, and organizations of collective life that distinguished this moment in British history. As the novel’s serialization drew to a close in Bentley’s Miscellany in late 1839, fans in the metropolis could purchase inexpensive reproductions of Cruikshank’s illustrations at print shops all over town, hum the songs that Ainsworth had written for the novel, or take in one of eight theatrical adaptations running concurrently.7 W.  M. Thackeray remarked that one could even buy “Shepherd-bags [sic]” in one of the theatre lobbies that would include “a few pick-locks … a screw driver, and iron lever.”8 This 100-year-old figure was the talk of the town, his long-familiar story and image intersecting with new media and forms of consumption to create something distinctly contemporary. Jack Sheppard remediated Jack Sheppard in ways that have a great deal to tell us about the work of the novel in Britain in the nineteenth century and especially the permeation of currency, contingency, and spectacle into the novel form and its conception of modernity.9 That work, and its implications for our histories of the novel, constitute the focus of this study. As I will argue in the following pages, Jack Sheppard is one of a raft of novels published in Britain from the 1820s through 1860s that gave narrative form to the sense of contemporaneity developing in the nineteenth century through shifting notions of temporality and history and new forms of individual and collective identification. These novels conceptualized emergent social formations of spectacle, spectatorship, and what I will call demotic celebrity. They registered a structure of change that unfolded apart from history’s grand narratives of causality. They were regularly accused of neglecting what William Hazlitt called the proper “business of literature” in preference for ephemeral matters such as the movements of high society and consumer-focused urban panoramas; cultural sensations in the form of fads and fashions; or the experience of contemporary life in an age of proliferating media. Their narrative emphases on immediacy and proximity left

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them, Hazlitt insisted, unable “to direct the mind’s eye beyond the present moment and the present object.”10 I contend that these novels had their finger on the pulse of the age. Their interest in manners, custom, novelty, and spectacle constituted an effort to conceptualize in narrative form the texture of the contemporary and the “powerfully modern feeling” that the “extraordinary [might] emerge … from the fabric of the mundane.”11 The novels on which I focus belong to three nineteenth-century schools – the silver-fork, Newgate, and sensation novel – that embodied what Hazlitt termed in the same period, albeit with reference to quite different literature, “the spirit of the age.”12 Widely popular during their respective heydays, these schools innovated narrative models that allowed them to articulate the temporality of modern life and “the bent of the public mind,”13 and to do so largely outside the conventional bounds of domestic realism, the provincial novel, and the Bildungsroman, which orient our accounts of fiction in the period. The cultural phenomenon that informed their generic innovations, I argue, was fashion: pervading British society since the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century, fashion became a force central to economic, commercial, and cultural development, and, as Timothy Campbell has shown, a new model of historical consciousness.14 By the nineteenth century, fashion had established itself as a fully synthesized system that organized virtually every aspect of contemporary life. Paul Keen remarks that fashion’s power was “simultaneously social and deeply personal, inseparable from the broader web of commercial transactions that helped to define the nation but inextricably linked by an economy of desire to the private world of affective interiority.”15 Fashion came equally to embody “an aesthetic of the urban,” a newly honed sense of taste and style that Roy Porter suggests “was now defined not by King, court, or country but by the manners of town, that is, the West End.”16 According to Ulrich Lehmann, two of the leading theorists of fashion and modernity, Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, “regard[ed] fashion as the obvious determinant of modernity,” not its by-product.17 Premised on what Anne Hollander describes as an “ideal of perpetual contingency” and “perpetual currency,” fashion offered nineteenth-century novelists an apt idiom in which to articulate the cultural energies and customary practices of the present.18

The Fashion System Fashion was of course not new to the eighteenth century. Since antiquity it had been associated with opulence and indulgence: the ancients possessed a concept of fashion-consciousness and recognized fashion’s power

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to induce frivolity and excess.19 Most fashion historians agree, however, that a distinctly modern notion of fashion emerged in Western societies in the late medieval period which turned on principles of novelty and ephemerality. Gilles Lipovetsky observes, for example, that “it was only at the end of the Middle Ages that the order of fashion itself became recognizable – fashion as a system, with its endless metamorphoses, its fits and starts, its extravagance.”20 From this point on, he suggests, “the transitory would come to function as one of the constitutive structures of modern life.”21 In Britain, Campbell argues, fashion extended its reach further into the social order and the collective psyche “in the mid-eighteenth century, when the visual and textual genre of the ‘dress of the year’ first became iconic.”22 Fashion engravings began to appear regularly in British periodicals in the 1750s; by the 1780s, coloured fashion plates accompanying the latest fashion news were published monthly.23 Publications such as The Lady’s Magazine and La Belle Assemblée illustrated for their readers the latest London fashions, and as Campbell contends, bred in consumers a consciousness of fashion’s temporality, or the “now-familiar dynamics of currency and obsolescence in everyday commercial life.”24 The “revolution in consumption” that transformed Britain in the ­eighteenth century has been well remarked.25 Fashion played a key role in driving and consolidating such widespread change: it worked hand in glove with commerce and the pictorial arts, fuelling the imagination, stimulating desire, and, in Bernard Mandeville’s words, “turn[ing]” the “very wheel … [of] trade.”26 Fashion’s permeation of British society depended not only on material developments in production and consumption such as increased global trade, a growing abundance of commodities, the industrialization of textile manufacturing, the proliferation of printed matter, and the establishment of communications infrastructure.27 The generalization of the fashion system turned as well on the penetration of visual culture into the domain of everyday life and the bases of individual and collective identity. Jonathan Lamb argues that from the early eighteenth century, the “effects of market uncertainties upon the imaginations of people” obliged individuals to conceptualize themselves and their relation to the social in increasingly abstract, phantasmatic terms: “Whether they wanted to or not, men and women living in these circumstances [commercial society’s unpredictable fluctuations] were forced to imagine who they were and how they related to things.”28 By the turn of the nineteenth century, fashion’s extensive reach ensured that it furnished many of the forms in which these imagined relations took shape. People’s imagination of their own identity and their relationship to the world around them drew on available

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imagery, making fashion a constitutive structure of modern selfhood and social organization. Leo Braudy observes that the early nineteenth century saw a “remarkable flurry of new visual forms” in print culture: these fostered a new emphasis on visibility and spectacle in public life and, as we will see, a modern notion of celebrity.29 The visual array of dress fashions – the patterns, colours, textures, and shapes that people saw around them in print, in shop windows, and on the streets – merged with ubiquitous images of prominent individuals to create a pictorial language that was widely shared and increasingly became the means by which individuals signalled their participation in the social. The visual language of fashion also produced new forms of social consciousness: Campbell suggests that “community … came together” in the nineteenth century through “a collective practice of deciding what counted aesthetically.”30 Feeding what Hollander describes as “an independent imaginative life for the eye,”31 fashion enabled individuals to position themselves distinctively, seemingly autonomously; at the same time, it ensured that such self-fashioning meant something only insofar as individual “looks” referred back to the dynamic pictorial lexicon held in common and thus available to all. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith offers one of the period’s most incisive theorizations of fashion and its role in structuring the individual’s relationship to the social. Smith insists that the “principles [of] custom and fashion … extend their dominion over our judgments concerning beauty of every kind.”32 Their influence is by no means limited to the familiar domains of “[d]ress and furniture,” he observes, but rather “extends itself to whatever is in any respect the object of taste, to music, to poetry, to architecture.”33 Although in some domains, he suggests, fashion’s pace of change is comparatively slow – architectural style, for example, moves on a much longer cycle than dress fashion – Smith ­contends that all shifts in taste are the products of fashion’s movements.34 This applies equally to artistic productions and objects of the natural world, to “the human form,” “flowers,” or “any other species of things.”35 Crucially, Smith argues that our notions of taste and beauty are shaped by the “conjunction[s]” and “arrangement[s]” with which custom familiarizes us, rather than any meaning inherent in objects themselves.36 Perceiving well before Karl Marx or Walter Benjamin the distance between “the function of objects and the desires congealed there,”37 Smith theorizes the contingent process through which certain objects and styles become invested with aesthetic value and possessed of allure. Dismissing the widely held belief that principles of taste are disinterested and rational,

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he insists that we perceive beauty according to custom’s “habitual arrangement of our ideas.”38 “Tho’ independent of custom, there should be no real beauty” in the “union” of particular objects or forms, “yet when custom has thus connected them together, we feel an impropriety in their separation.”39 Smith makes clear that the principles on which fashion and custom operate are not simply interested; they are arbitrary and illusory. Even when a fashionable object is tiny and insignificant, its customary association with a particular form can make it essential to the beauty of the whole: “we find a meanness or aukwardness in the absence even of a haunch button,” he remarks, if custom has associated its particular placement with the elegance of a “suit of cloaths.”40 However “indifferent” the object in itself, once it has become integral to the fashion image, it “is connected in our imaginations with the idea of something that is genteel and magnificent.”41 Smith’s analysis of the power that resides in a fashionable detail reveals that imagination and fantasy are bound up with supposedly universal judgments of taste and beauty; he also shows us the formative role that fashion and custom play in organizing community by means of a shared aesthetic sense. James Noggle reads in Smith’s theory of fashion and custom an exposure of the ideological illusions that underpin our collective ideals of beauty and our individual experience of taste and desire. In the example of the haunch button, Noggle contends, Smith acknowledges that “knowing about the arbitrariness of the connection in no way dispels its glamour. … One knows very well, but still.”42 We might expand Smith’s insight into the illusions that invest a button with a general sense of elegance to apply it to the fashion system as a whole. One knows well that fashion’s dictates are irrational and sometimes outrageous; we may decry fashion’s influence and rail against its folly. That knowledge proves insufficient, however, to disenchant its allure. A critique of fashion has in fact been built into the system’s mechanisms from the outset. Hollander contends that from the beginning of modern fashion’s “robust, long life,” it was clear that “the charm of fashion would always lie in its treacherous unconscious operation, its necessary visualization of fantasies otherwise not expressed.”43 Fashion’s appeal arises precisely from its independence of intellectual and moral ­ideals. Neither purely individual nor wholly imposed from without, fashion infuses the cultural discourse from which we learn principles of taste and beauty, and through which we identify the desires that distinguish our interiority. There can be no rational explanation of the beauty of a “haunch button,” but to wear it – or equally to renounce it – is visually to signal something about ourselves and our relation to the social.

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Smith’s investigation of the magnificence of a humble button brings into focus as well the class inflections of custom’s habitual arrangements. He associates fashion with those perennial arbiters of style, the “great”: the “graceful, the easy and commanding manners of the great, joined to the usual richness and magnificence of their dress, give a grace to the very form which they happen to bestow upon it.”44 Smith’s alignment of fashion with the elite, however, in no way naturalizes their sense of style as innately superior. Following Smith’s theory through to its logical ends, Noggle argues that the “magical power of the great to make clothes fashionable … is also based on an association,” and thus as much a product of custom as any other notion of beauty.45 To confirm Noggle’s point, we need only think of “fashion from below,” a phenomenon which emerged in the late nineteenth century to invert the customary associations of trendsetting and social status.46 Fashion infiltrated the lower orders, moreover, as fully as it shaped the practices of the wealthy and elite. John Styles confirms that, as a temporal and social concept, fashion permeated the “customary assumptions and practices that ordered many aspects of plebian life.”47 Where the consolidation of consumer society across Britain’s diverse population and geography was halting and inconsistent, dress fashion proved an exception: Styles contends that for working people in the later eighteenth century, clothing constituted the one reliably accessible “area of consumption where relative abundance prevailed and the exercise of discrimination was a possibility,” allowing them “to participate in attractive forms of commercialized consumption.”48 However modest such forms of participation might be, perhaps involving only the alteration of a piece of trim on an existing garment, their possibility meant that fashion-consciousness was a regular part of daily life for almost everyone. Styles argues that fashion became “implicated in the fundamental temporal ordering of everyday life.”49 In identifying fashion’s ubiquity across ranks, however, Styles stresses the importance of recognizing the autonomy and agency of the lower orders in their fashionable consumption. Emulation was one motive, but he cautions against overreliance on imitation as the sole explanation of fashion’s social significance: “The cut and decoration of the clothes donned for [religious and festive] events may often have descended to their plebeian wearers from the beau monde by a process that can be termed emulative, but the same cannot be said of the uses to which the clothes were put or the ways they were understood.”50 The ton may have been set by the fashionable elite – or by their dressmakers and tailors, as critics would insist51 – but as ­fashion moved through different spheres, it gained new life and new meaning,

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simultaneously connecting consumers across the nation and fostering a degree of autonomous significance within local communities. With the expansion of the ready-made and second-hand clothing trades in the nineteenth century as well as the explosion of print imagery on city streets, fashion’s “temporal ordering of everyday life” extended even into the customary practices of the poor.52 While the scant resources of the poor severely limited their ability to exercise choice in dress, Vivienne Richmond contends that “this did not mean they were entirely without agency”: “the very absence of clothing enhanced the significance of the garments they did possess.”53 Richmond remarks that the customs governing community identity and belonging among the poor extended to sartorial practices, which “could be read as immediate indicators of respectability.” Not to conform to those “most basic social codes” was to “risk exclusion, scorn or ridicule.”54 One hesitates to overstate the fashion-consciousness of poorer communities, where customs did not change quickly and metropolitan trends would have little impact. Nonetheless, minor alterations of style did find their way into local practices, the new visual media penetrated into poorer neighbourhoods, and the illusory, variable bases of taste and beauty that bind communities together pertained as much there as in wealthier circles. James Laver comments, “Clothes are never a frivolity. They are always an expression of the fundamental social and economic pressures of the time.”55 Inflected by the circumstances and practices of local populations, fashion served as a material signifier of currency for almost everyone. That individuals of any station might find themselves beholden to fashion alarmed commentators in the period, as it does today. There seemed few effective means, however, to distance oneself from a system increasingly bound up with every aspect of society. Fashion was seen on the one hand to enslave the individual and cultivate caprice and extravagance, and on the other to drive commerce and trade.56 It seemed poised to level traditional distinctions of rank, beguiling alike the “peer, prince, peasant, soldier, squire, divine,”57 but in place of these to erect a new status hierarchy based on an adherence to fashion’s arbitrary laws. As Erin Mackie has shown in her influential work on the early eighteenth-century periodicals The Tatler and The Spectator, the contradictions inherent in fashion were part and parcel of its power as an emergent cultural phenomenon. Fashion inspired denunciations of waste, fickleness, and effeminacy but simultaneously provided an “unruly” object around which “rationalizing projects of social management” could coalesce.58 Mackie argues that The Tatler and The Spectator made themselves “fashionable and innovative” in order to “compet[e] on the opinion market for the role of principal

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cultural arbitrator”; as such, they used fashion as both object of critique and cultural medium to establish their own timeliness and appeal.59 By the end of the eighteenth century, commentators acknowledged that few spheres were immune to fashion’s influence. Condemnations of fashion’s tyranny persisted, but most observers recommended a tempered adherence to fashion’s dictates on the grounds of its wholesale permeation of modern life. In Lectures on Female Education and Manners (1793), for example, John Burton remarks: “Seeing … that the decrees of Fashion are so arbitrary and universal, you might incur the censure of singularity, were you wholly to disregard them.”60 Lord Chesterfield comments similarly, in his Advice to his Son on Men and Manners (1775), that “it is necessary to dress to avoid singularity and ridicule. Great care should be taken to be always dressed like the reasonable people of our own age in the place where we are.”61 Individuals must take the measure of the customary practices of the age and place in which they find themselves, he counsels, in order to mark their rationality and community-mindedness. As these authors demonstrate, commentary on fashion in the period rarely focused on garments themselves but rather on the ideas and values with which the fashion phenomenon was associated.62 The tension between fashion’s materiality and immateriality lies at the heart of its social mechanism – between actual clothing, on the one hand, and the concepts, idioms, and imagery that fashion sets into motion, on the other. “‘Fashion’ is racks of garments we can touch and feel,” Elizabeth Wilson observes, “but it is equally a virtual spectacle, a regime of images, celebrating a continual carnival of change.”63 Fashion is nothing without material objects, but those objects possess aesthetic significance only insofar as they relate to a “regime of images” shared collectively. “[W]e are usually brought to fashion objects only by a parade of prior images,” Campbell suggests, which leaves us prone to perpetual disappointment: “Fashion inevitably gives us objects that do not and cannot fully correspond to the images it has shaped for our fantasies.”64 In late eighteenth-century Britain, fashion’s growing hold over the collective psyche did not result from all individuals seeing and desiring exactly the same clothes or emulating the same styles.65 Rather, fashion’s dominion arose in tandem with the expansion of consumer needs and the conception of those needs as temporalized. Fashion epitomized what critics agree was the “objective acceleration of material life during the eighteenth century.”66 “At the turn of the nineteenth century,” Ina Ferris observes, “temporal concepts entered rapidly into the everyday and the public domain, impelled largely by an acceleration of time widely (and still) understood as modernity’s hallmark.”67 The serial renewal

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of fashion imagery made individuals alert to the currency or datedness of objects, styles, and forms; while the pace of renewal varied significantly from one sphere to another, the principle underlying such change, which Lipovetsky identifies as “the law of obsolescence, seduction, and diversification,”68 remained constant. The broad applicability of a “law” that webbed together commerce, aesthetics, and individual desire helped to reorganize society at large on the model of the fashion system. Lipovetsky observes that as the “taste for novelty bec[ame] a consistent and regular principle, … function[ing] as an autonomous cultural requirement,” ever greater swaths of society were “tilt[ed] … into the orbit of the fashion form.”69 Intimately bound from the outset with commerce and commodity culture, fashion extended its logic of change, of planned obsolescence and an insatiable appetite for novelty, into literally every social domain, from literature, media, and performance to economics, politics, and national identity. The effect of fashion’s generalization was, quite simply, to heighten a collective sense of the present. In the epigraph with which I began, Georg Simmel claims that “[f]ashion always occupies the dividing-line between the past and the future, and consequently conveys a stronger feeling of the present, at least while it is at its height, than most other phenomena.”70 By the turn of the nineteenth century, fashion had become no mere index of style, but the epitome of social currency as such. Fashion invested the present age with a spirit that could be easily defined by comparison with the styles of the recent past.71 As a “practice of pleasures,” especially the pleasure “produced by the stimulus of change, the metamorphosis of forms,” fashion also promised a future full of potential for novelty if not more meaningful change.72 That future would arrive, moreover, not at some distant moment, but imminently. Simmel contends that “[f]ew phenomena of social life possess such a pointed curve of consciousness as does fashion. As soon as the social consciousness attains to the highest point designated by fashion, it marks the beginning of the end for the latter.”73 Far from diminishing its value, however, fashion’s ephemerality sharpens its appeal and significatory power.74 Perpetually poised on the cusp of the future, signifying that sliver of time we know as the present, fashion embodies what Benjamin terms “the presence of the now.”75

History, Custom, and the Dual Temporality of Fashion In an important modulation on eighteenth-century commentary, ­nineteenth-century critics began to identify in fashion’s cyclical rhythms less the principle of novelty intrinsic to commercial modernity than the

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historical continuity and invariability of aristocratic life. While a statusbased critique of fashion was longstanding insofar as the classical notion of luxury, defined in terms of gluttony and idleness, was aligned with the wealthy,76 critical denunciations of fashion’s class associations in the ­nineteenth century gained newly temporal inflections. Alongside a c­ ensure of fashion’s ephemerality, critics expressed a growing concern with its indifference to progress and futurity. Fashion was framed repeatedly as a disease originating in the upper orders and infecting those beneath them, at the root of which were patrician lassitude and resistance to change. In the atmosphere of the Reform Bill in the late 1820s and early 1830s, critics cast fashion as a phenomenon of the preceding decade, one that had served its purpose in cultivating a taste for change but whose moment was past. In his social treatise England and the English (1833), for instance, Edward Bulwer-Lytton credits silver-fork fiction with fostering a desire for reform by disgusting readers with the caprice and vanity of the elite. The “three-years’ run of the fashionable novels was a shrewd sign of the times,” he remarks; “straws they were, but they showed the upgathering of the storm.”77 Proclaiming the end of a genre that he had helped to popularize, Bulwer insists that fashionable fiction has had its day. Once the spirit of reform took hold of the national heart, he claims, a “description of the mere frivolities of fashion [was] no longer coveted.”78 Hazlitt mounts a similar argument in an essay on “The Dandy School” (1827), railing against the frivolity and servility of fiction that concerns itself with fashion. The principal aim of novels of this stripe, he contends, is to promote “the admiration of the folly, caprice, insolence, and affectation of a certain class.”79 “You have no new inlet to thought or feeling opened to you; but the passing object, the topic of the day (however insipid or repulsive) is served up to you with a self-sufficient air, as if you had not already had enough of it.”80 As I suggested at the outset, Hazlitt insists that fiction can have no truck with fashion, for literature should “place us in the situations of others and enable us to feel an interest in all that strikes them”; it should “enlarge the bounds of knowledge and feeling” by carrying us beyond “the present moment and the present object.”81 With this prerequisite to literary value, fiction that concerns itself with fashion is unable by its very contemporaneity to transact literature’s proper business. Hazlitt frames his critique of fashionable novels in terms of fashion’s constriction: rather than “extending your sympathies, they are narrowed to a single point.” “Instead of transporting you to faery-land or into the middle ages,” he observes, “you take a turn down Bond Street or go through the mazes of the dance at Almack’s.”82 Fashion pins us to the immediate

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and the proximate. Underlying this framework that makes spatial and historical distance necessary for affective engagement, a point to which I will return in Chapter 5 in the context of sensation fiction, Hazlitt opens a new angle of critique by equating fashion, paradoxically, with a resistance to change. A novel that privileges “the present moment and the present object” may immerse readers in contemporaneity, he argues, but it offers no movement, no real change. The fashionable novel’s inability to “exten[d] [our] sympathies” beyond the point immediately before us means that it cannot teach us to be compassionate with others; such a novel “considers it a circumstance of no consequence if a whole nation starves.”83 To focus on the immediate is to preclude change: the change of a moment does not bring about the change the present requires. On Hazlitt’s account of the work of fictional representation, temporal and social contemporaneity are incommensurable. A temporal idiom ordered by novelty and obsolescence cannot produce true understanding of the contemporary nor of the complex ties that bind the individual to the social. Key to this argument is a class-based inflection of fashion’s temporality: far from embodying the ephemerality of the present, fashion is equated with a “certain class” and by implication, with stagnancy. In the inaugural issue of Fraser’s Magazine in 1830, William Maginn takes up this angle of critique to mount a strenuous campaign against both fashionable novels and fashionable society. He argues that fashionable fiction is characterized by the “currents” of “high society,” which are “unchangeably driving in one direction, and setting at defiance all power of helm and compass.”84 “The thoughts, feelings, habits, mode of life, movements of all fashionable circles,” he contends, “are actuated and guided by certain fixed, invariable principles.”85 These he defines as “artific[e] and convention,” manifest as a commitment to manners and customs which produces “an indomitable sterility.”86 This is the same representation of fashion as “deadened” that readers would encounter two decades later in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), where the narrator describes the “world of fashion” as self-enclosed and stagnant, “wrapped in too much jeweller’s cotton and fine wool, [so that it] cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds” outside its walls.87 This representation of fashion as torpid stands in interesting tension with the premise of its transience, producing a paradox that sees fashion as possessed of a dual temporality, as simultaneously ephemeral and unchanging. To bring that dual temporality into view, we might juxtapose Hazlitt’s assertion of fashion’s stagnancy with his view in an earlier article, “On Fashion” (1818), where he observes:

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Fashion constantly begins and ends in the two things it abhors most, ­singularity and vulgarity. It is the perpetual setting up and disowning a certain standard of taste, elegance, and refinement, which has no other foundation or authority than that it is the prevailing distinction of the moment, which was yesterday ridiculous from its being new, and to-morrow will be odious from its being common.88

Here, Hazlitt’s stress falls on fashion’s transitoriness. A century before Simmel, he conceptualizes the “pointed curve of consciousness” that distinguishes the fashion phenomenon.89 In language consistent with that of the eighteenth-century analyses of fashion we have considered, Hazlitt underscores fashion’s temporal measure, remarking that an outmoded fashion provides a touchstone against which presentness, the “distinction of the moment,” materializes. That distinction, however, tells us nothing more interesting than that “[f]ashion is an odd jumble of contradictions, of sympathies and antipathies.” Rather than an idiom of change that might throw larger cultural, economic, and political structures into relief, Hazlitt regards fashion as “the most slight and insignificant of all things,” and thus “not any thing in itself.”90 Encapsulating the positions of many late eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury critics, Hazlitt’s two articles bring into focus fashion’s strangely conflicted temporality: fashion is simultaneously too historical and not historical enough. Fashion is understood, on the one hand, to be immediately, irrevocably dated, embedded in a “distinction of the moment” whose significance evaporates once the moment has passed. “Of the day only, like one’s newspaper,” Matthew Rosa observes, “fashion becomes ridiculous – old-fashioned – overnight, and when a century has passed, impossible of anything but the faintest recreation.”91 On this argument, fashion’s evanescence makes it nearly impossible to excavate from the rubble of history the interest that a fashion once held for its contemporaries. If fashion conveys a “feeling of the present,” as Simmel claims, it is a present that perpetually estranges itself from us as it moves into the past.92 A modernity premised on fashion’s cycle of novelty and obsolescence threatens to “keep on … falling rapidly to ruins,” Eva Badowska remarks, “leaving us (at best) in a land of museums or (at worst) in a wasteland of discarded toys.”93 Opposed to this suggestion of its undue historical embeddedness, however, fashion appears on the other hand to disregard history altogether. Skimming along the surface of the social, fashion privileges spectacle and sensation over the change that produces a sense of being a part of historical change. Fashion proceeds on the authority of merely passing distinctions; based on nothing of substance, it figures as a phenomenon too flimsy and

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shallow to engage history. Lord Byron’s poet in Don Juan observes, for example, that in fashionable Regency society, “With much to excite, there’s little to exalt,/Nothing that speaks to all men and all times.”94 On Hazlitt’s and Maginn’s argument, moreover, fashion’s disregard for history turns as much on a class-based resistance to future-oriented progress as on its insubstantiality. Far from promoting change, fashion serves to preserve the power and privilege of the ruling class. What fashion theory from the period makes clear is that fashion’s difference from history turns not on greater or lesser degrees of speed or scale, but on a different temporal register altogether: its movements do not conform to history’s grand narratives nor do its changes respect history’s principles of causality. A model of history ordered by moments of crisis works to codify temporality within a totalizing structure that removes sheer contingency from its analysis, even when the object of representation is change itself; contingency and chance become subsumed within history’s linear narratives of progress and decline. Fashion time, by contrast, foregrounds the arbitrariness of change while following a regular cycle that defies referential explanation in terms of external events. On fashion’s model, the passage of present into past does not cohere into an explanatory logic. Fashion’s formal changes produce a sense of being in history which remains unassimilable to history’s coherent, recuperative narratives. Roland Barthes underscores fashion’s autonomy from historical narrative, for example, when he remarks that “[f]ashion does not evolve, it changes: its lexicon is new each year.”95 On Barthes’s analysis, fashion’s formal changes unfold independently of historical reference: “as long as its rhythm remains regular, Fashion remains outside history.”96 Benjamin reads fashion, by comparison, as anticipatory of rather than responsive to historical change: “the most interesting thing about fashion is its extraordinary anticipations. … Whoever understands how to read these semaphores [fashion’s seasonal creations] would know in advance not only about new currents in the arts but also about new legal codes, wars, and revolutions.”97 Benjamin contends that fashion expresses in visual form the desires and discontents that drive social change before society has begun to articulate them. Following Benjamin, Hollander suggests that fashion’s “[s]hifts can’t … be shown to follow the changes in society with any temporal exactitude. They are much more likely to precede them, as the unconscious desire for change appears in the illustrative bodily realm before anyone articulates and reasons the need.”98 While fashion’s visual forms have a history of their own that serves referentially as a ground for future citations and modulations,

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the trajectory of fashion’s changes serves no larger heuristic: fashionable “change occurs only in a gradual drift ­promoted by chance.”99 The contradictions in fashion’s temporality come more sharply into focus when we examine its relationship to the term with which Adam Smith allied it, custom. An oft-deployed, much disputed concept that was mobilized in discussions of both aesthetics and politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, custom stands precariously between the ephemerality and contingency of fashion, on one side, and the invariability of tradition, on the other. Smith positions custom alongside fashion, for instance, as intertwined aesthetic principles that influence individual sentiment and social organization and that are organized, as we’ve seen, by illusionary associations. On Smith’s account, fashion is “different from custom” only insofar as it “is a particular species of it.”100 By contrast, a concurrent use of custom opposed it to fashion by laying stress on the duration of customary practice. John Barrell explains that in the later eighteenth century a politically inflected discourse of custom which aligned it with time-honoured traditions and venerable institutions emerged in reaction against the democratic appropriation of a discourse of civic humanism. The “language of ‘custom,’ of the ‘customary,’” he argues, “seemed able to give the most authoritative definition to the distinctive nature and value of the established constitution and legal system of Britain, and … provided the most effective language in which change – almost all change – could be represented as dangerous.”101 This inflection of custom corresponds with Hazlitt’s and Maginn’s alignment of fashion with a ruling class that wards off change; the confusion of fashion with custom in their arguments is a point to which I will return momentarily. Allied on a political register by the end of the eighteenth century with the inexorable authority of long-established tradition, the discourse of custom continued to be haunted, nonetheless, by its coincident affiliation with the transience and arbitrariness of fashion. Barrell suggests that the bifurcation of custom’s allegiances becomes apparent especially in the “distinction … between customs so universal as to have become ‘a second nature,’ and customs or habits merely local, personal and transient.”102 That the concept of “second nature” itself was used in the period to straddle a middle ground between nature and culture, as James Chandler has shown, only added further complexity to an already overcharged concept.103 Discursively, these different uses of custom tended to unsettle the distinctions that the concept was meant to draw. Alternatively opposed to or conflated with fashion, custom became a term that could be mobilized from either side to challenge fashion’s allure.

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E. P. Thompson observes that, “far from having the steady permanence suggested by the word ‘tradition’, custom was a field of change and of contest, an arena in which opposing interests made conflicting claims.”104 In the case of Hazlitt’s and Maginn’s substitution of fashion for custom in their critiques of the former’s invariability, fashion crosses the floor to occupy the seat usually reserved for a notion of the customary that promotes preservation and continuity. Fashion’s interchangeability with custom in their commentaries illustrates the growing tendency in the nineteenth century to assail both concepts. In the wake of the political alignment of custom with tradition or what its critics would call stagnancy and intransigence, fashion and custom equally came under fire as principles standing in the way of a model of change framed as progress and growth. These nineteenth-century critiques work to hive off historical change from currency and novelty in order to reserve it for social improvement and personal Bildung. Arguing respectively for an expansion of “the bounds of knowledge and feeling” and a “return of vigour,” Hazlitt and Maginn attach historical process to sympathy and vitality and disqualify from consideration change that does not serve ameliorative ends.105 The connotative instability that runs through these critiques of fashion proved entirely generative for nineteenth-century fiction. Fashion’s dual temporality – its inflection as transient and intransigent – did not nullify its cultural resonance, but rather, made it the perfect idiom for figuring in nineteenth-century narrative the vicissitudes and contradictions of contemporary life. As I will contend in the following chapters, novelists drew on fashion’s mutable relationship with history and custom as a resource for conceptualizing the currents running through the social collective, currents that in some instances provided new ways of thinking collectivity as such. It was precisely in the sometimes discordant, always provisional webbing together of evanescence and convention, discourses of reform and traditional hierarchies, new modes of sociability and timehonoured customs that novelists found a way to embody the “presence of the present.”106

Novel Fashions This book is not a study of representations of dress in nineteenth-century fiction, nor does it aim simply to recover minor novels lost from our view. Rather, Fashionable Fictions considers how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel and its representations of social change and individual and collective life in nineteenth-century Britain. It contends

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that nineteenth-century novelists found in fashion a temporal model for conceptualizing a heightened sense of the evanescence of modernity and the cycle of novelty and obsolescence which produces it. Always beginning in the visual realm, fashion’s formal expressions quickly permeated other social and cultural registers in the nineteenth century via an idiom of change that has become synonymous with modernity itself.107 Fashion offered a conceptual framework, moreover, for figuring the intricate relations that tie individual identity and self-expression to social and public life. In his semiotics of fashion, Barthes states that the “Fashion sign … is situated … at the point where a singular … conception and a collective image meet[;] it is simultaneously imposed and demanded.”108 Pinning that junction of singular and collective image to the individual, Joanne Entwistle remarks, “Dress lies at the margins of the body and marks the boundary between self and other, individual and society. This boundary is intimate and personal since our dress forms the visible envelope of the self …; it is also social since our dress is structured by social forces and subject to social and moral pressures.”109 Fashion encapsulates the tension between emulation and autonomy that organizes the individual’s participation in the social: as a sign of both independence and belonging, fashion binds individuals to a collective aesthetic regime while also equipping them with a visual lexicon, materialized on the body, with which to signify the self. Wilson argues that, in the modern era, to “dress fashionably is both to stand out and to merge with the crowd, to lay claim to the exclusive and to follow the herd.”110 This comment might suggest that only a commitment to stylishness, to “dress[ing] fashionably,” entangles one in fashion’s social mechanisms. Wilson acknowledges, however, that all dress engages with the aesthetics and customs of the age and place in which individuals find themselves. “[In] modern western societies,” she maintains, “no clothes are outside fashion.”111 Recognizing a consciousness of currency and social change as something experienced collectively, nineteenth-century novelists populated their narratives with singular phenomena – whether a dress style, a media sensation, a political idea, or à la Beau Brummell, a subjective pose – that might capture the broad currents of public opinion. They developed narratives commensurate with the rapidly changing manners and styles, print-cultural mediations, and organizations of collective life that radiated out from the metropolitan centre. They provided their readers with narrative forms that gave shape to the very problem of contemporaneity – that is, of conceptualizing the present as such, a temporal category that seemed newly pressing and elusive. Their innovations with the novel genre, moreover, articulated

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the presentness of the present in a manner distinct from that which had characterized earlier fiction.112 Beginning with Tobias Smollett, Frances Burney, and Maria Edgeworth, fashion featured regularly in eighteenthcentury fiction as a locus for satirizing the commodification of leisure, the social aspirations of the newly wealthy, and metropolitan trends.113 The 1820s through early 1840s mark a watershed moment, however, in the ­history of the novel: the fiction produced in this period displays a c­ onscious commitment on the part of authors to rendering currency and contemporaneity in narrative form. The era between Romantic historical fiction and the novel of manners, on one side, and Victorian realism and the Bildungsroman, on the other, barely registers in our analyses of the nineteenth-century novel. Kathleen Tillotson’s view that this period produced only “novel-fashions,” minor fictional fads that contributed little to the major generic developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, echoes the assessment of ­nineteenth-century critics like Hazlitt and remains largely unquestioned to our day.114 These novels did manifest an unprecedented consciousness of what was in fashion, both in terms of the styles of the day and the transient issues and interests capturing the public’s imagination; that consciousness, though, is not a sign of their derivativeness but rather the site of their most fulsome innovations. Their focus on currency and contemporaneity served to articulate the sense that meaningful social change might coalesce in any given moment, and that being abreast of such change would provide individuals with the requisite knowledge and perspective to act in a fast-moving landscape. They demonstrated that, without an awareness of what is in fashion in the broadest sense, individuals cannot achieve a proper balance between “personal taste and integrity” and “responsible worldliness.”115 By showing that this idiom of change permeated quotidian experience across the social spectrum from high to low, moreover, they raised the possibility that ordinary individuals might participate in the social in ways that would bring them into the public eye. Novelists writing in this period turned their attention to sites and spaces in which the distinctive temporal and social dimensions of the present would most readily appear. They steeped their narratives in date-stamped matters of dress, manners, and urban pastimes, and embraced rather than shied away from fads and popular figures. Some novelists focused on the vagaries of elite society and the conversational practices of fashionable circles; others brought into the novel new demotic experiences of spectacle and the visuality of public life. Together they articulated a collective sense of history as unfolding not in the epochal but in the everyday, not in the

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tectonic shifts that had preoccupied the historical novel but in quotidian encounters with the extraordinary and sensational. They exemplified the “historical sense” emerging in the 1820s and 1830s that Clare Pettitt argues displaced an understanding of “history as a series of singular and spectacular ‘fixed’ events,” replacing it with a “more pliant, plastic, and permeable idea of history as a forming and formative process in which they could participate.”116 When this genre commitment to contemporaneity re-emerged in the 1860s, novelists turned to fashion once again to render in narrative the confluence of affect with the visuality and ephemerality of modern life. Sensation novelists probed the workings of affect that mediate the individual’s inhabitation of the present, showing the contemporary to be rife with forces that function analogously to fashion’s structural tensions – namely, through a dialectical opposition between materiality and immateriality, attraction and repellence, singularity and servility.

Fashion, Celebrity, and Public Life Novels that were attuned to the temporality of fashion staged for their readers an increasingly mediated modernity, what Charles Lamb called in 1802 “the multitudinous moving picture” of the metropolis.117 That figurative picture show took literal form in the early decades of the nineteenth century in a flood of imagery of famous individuals, entertainments, advertisements, and in the material idiom of style. Amidst what one silver-fork character terms “all this phantasmagoria,” novels that engaged with fashion gave narrative form to the perpetually shifting scenes and experiences of metropolitan life in order to critique them and, at the same time, revel in their excesses.118 These novels represent society as a glittering spectacle that is simultaneously mesmerizing and grotesque; a character in Mary Shelley’s Lodore (1835) suggests that the “moving crowd” of urban contemporaneity is both vibrant and spectral.119 The mash-up of scathing satire, ambivalence, and unabashed enjoyment of fashion forms part of this fiction’s aesthetic: it shows affective incongruity to be a defining experience of nineteenth-century modernity. Caroline Evans remarks that the “fashionable being is constantly in the process of re-imagining and re-creating him or herself in a rootless world. This process of self-fashioning may be simultaneously pleasurable and alienating.”120 Captivation, alienation, delight, and censure are bound up together in the novels’ representation of the spectacles and sensations that emerge from everyday life and form the warp and weft of the individual’s relationship to the social.

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These novels attest to the fact that in an age of crowds and commodities, media sensations and consumer appetites, publicness is inseparable from visibility: it plays out as much through a media-based diffusion of images, affects, and identifications as through self-expression or performance in front of spectators. The distinctive modernity of public life emerged in part through the eighteenth-century print cultural developments documented in the now well-rehearsed models of Jürgen Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere and Benedict Anderson’s imagined community.121 Nineteenthcentury transformations, though, extended beyond what is captured by notions of a coffee-klatch democracy or a dispersed community of readers experiencing a print text synchronously. On the representation of fiction that concerned itself with the “moving picture” of contemporary life, publicness was irrevocably altered by the closely entwined emergence of a generalized fashion system and a modern notion of celebrity: both depend on a visually oriented consumer culture in which individuals signal their belonging to the social collective through a process of identification with available imagery. The print and visual media of the period as well as the mixed spaces of the metropolis made adaptability to new imagery and information and a consciousness of one’s own visibility integral to daily life for the famous and ordinary alike. Fashion’s integration with celebrity culture was part of the transformation of public consciousness in the period that, Ina Ferris argues, helped to supplant “the more limited, eighteenth-century ‘public sphere’ posited by Habermas” with a “wide and loose ‘public discourse’”: “in the aftermath of the French Revolution and in the context of domestic unrest and foreign war not only was there an acute sense of different ‘publics’ to be addressed but politics had converged with sentiment in new ways, and public debate increasingly became a matter less of discursive reasoning than of performance.”122 Fashion and celebrity culture brought the performativity and visibility of public life home to the individual, making public figures into objects for identification and affective engagement and abstracting them into the visual and textual signs by which they were known: a pose, a mien, a dress style, or a manner of expression.123 Those identifications became touchstones around which a sense of community, or a distinct public, might form. Together, fashion and celebrity helped to diffuse politics into the ether of style, entertainment, and consumption, and simultaneously lay bare the processes through which cultural discourse can coalesce into representative publics and politics.124 The consolidation of celebrity culture in the early nineteenth century took place by means of new print technologies, a burgeoning visual culture,

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and changing forms of audience engagement.125 Developing through the eighteenth century and intensifying in the 1810s and 1820s around the figure of Lord Byron, modern celebrity emerged in tandem with a print culture dynamic enough to report with an unprecedented degree of currency on new publications and performances and the comings and goings of well-known public figures; at the same time, the industrialization of visual culture allowed print media to render prominent figures instantly recognizable via the frequent reproduction of their portraits.126 Modern celebrity is about more, though, than the ubiquity of a well-known person’s image. Rather, as Clara Tuite explains, the engine of celebrity culture is powered by what people do with that image: the “appropriations and transformations [of the celebrity image] are not just side-effects of celebrity culture, but its active constituents as a communal culture of productive reception.”127 The widely reproduced celebrity image changes how people interact with public culture, and that interaction changes public culture in turn. Clifford Siskin and William Warner describe this circuit as a “feedback loop by which human bodies mediate the new technologies they become mediated by.”128 In the early nineteenth century, celebrity culture fostered a sense of intimacy with public figures while also holding them at a distance. A public that read Byron’s poetry, consumed news about his personal life, and saw his image everywhere, for instance, felt that they knew him intimately. Print mediated their knowledge, in the sense of enabling it, circumscribing it, and converting it into a kind of cultural currency.129 Byron is among the figures at the turn of the nineteenth century whom Braudy identifies as marked by a consciousness of “the increasingly visual form” of public life: by their “sincere willingness to stage themselves ­theatrically and premeditatively,” “to face the public in order to be recognized and identified with,” these individuals registered a profound shift in public culture.130 It soon became impossible to succeed on the public stage without an awareness of the publicity one received and the “face” one presented to the crowd. As Ferris suggests, public consciousness became as much a matter of “performance” and “sentiment” as debate or politics.131 The other side of this growing visibility, Braudy contends, was an affectively engaged audience that came to expect media access to their public figures and that “demand[ed] successful performance not as a special characteristic but as the birthright of a public man.”132 A celebrity’s specialness entitled them to publicity; publicity backed up by successful performance confirmed their specialness. Citing the OED’s expansion of the definition of “star” in 1824 to include a notion of celebrity,

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Tom Mole observes: “The lexical shifts acknowledge, define and help to shape the emergence of a specifically modern way to enter the public sphere. A new form of public life had appeared.”133 This modern publicness not only engendered new forms of affective engagement between celebrities and their audiences but also expanded possibilities for who might enter the public sphere and what kind of publicity they might enjoy. The portraiture and media attention that helped to establish Byron’s celebrity exemplify the temporality of fashion in two ways: first, in publicizing a distinctive contemporary style that individuals could adopt as their own in order to signify a certain mood or subjective pose – a Byronic melancholy, for instance – and second, in localizing the sensibilities and customs of an historical moment in a specific set of visual and material referents.134 Catherine Gore’s fictional dandy Cecil distinguishes a particular moment in the Regency period, for example, with the remark: “Fine sentiment was not the order of the day. The pallid muse of Byron … had not yet brought despair and anguish into fashion.”135 These instances point to a newly sharpened consciousness of the “spirit of the age,” to borrow Hazlitt’s phrase once again, as well as a collective sense of being in history. Campbell attributes that emergent consciousness directly to fashion: by the end of the eighteenth century, he argues, “fashionable dress increasingly offered to Britons the dependable synchronicity or ‘simultaneity’ that was necessary for imagining a nation moving together in history.”136 Not everyone would be equally up-to-date, but, as Gore’s novel suggests, the signs of Byronism would nonetheless signify a specific age and affective experience that would be widely recognized and interpretable in relation to a shared set of imagery, texts, and public discourse.137 One of the axioms of this study is that novelists demonstrated the broad import of this new culture of visibility by staging its constitutive force in the lives of ordinary people. I argue that Newgate fiction of the 1830s and 1840s in particular explored the possibility that common individuals might through extraordinary actions propel themselves onto the public stage; in the spotlight of a media organized around novelty and visual sensation, these individuals would find themselves talked about, identified with, and pursued, objects of pleasure and obsession that for a time at least would serve as a cultural touchstone. Articulating a model of demotic celebrity in which an insignificant individual emerges spectacularly from the crowd, these novels show how celebrity culture permeated everyday lives. They register the transformation of publicness in an age of visual culture: media and celebrity serve to synchronize public life with fashion’s temporality of continual change, its principles of novelty and obsolescence. These novels

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explore how publics might form around an otherwise ordinary individual and public opinion coalesce in relation to a figure rendered famous through print culture and popular discourse. The model of demotic celebrity they articulate has singular implications for the novel in the nineteenth century: we see its impact most forcibly, I contend, in the fiction of Charles Dickens. Reacting in his early fiction to the phenomenon of criminal celebrity associated with the Newgate school, Dickens rewrites that demotic celebrity in his mid-century fiction in order to claim it for the respectable gentleman of the middle orders. In his sustained reflection on the visuality of contemporary life and its implications for individual agency and the formation of publics, Dickens registers how a consciousness of visibility, publicity, and performance has been woven into the texture of contemporaneity and modern selfhood. Dickens shows that an attunement to the changing dynamics of the public sphere and the visual and performative processes by which one makes oneself present to one’s age has become a requisite part of modern life. While the “media ecology” of the nineteenth century is a long way from our own social media moment, we see in the fiction produced in this period a recognition of the transformative possibilities for publicness effected by a proto-mass media. These novels attest as well to the emergence of a cultural imperative with which we are well familiar: the pressure to stay current and attend to an ever-more eclectic array of voices, figures, and episodes in the public sphere in order to participate in the customary practices of everyday life.138

Remediation’s Fashions If, as I have argued, nineteenth-century novels turn to fashion to articulate an historical sense of currency and contemporaneity, they also draw from fashion’s citational practices a model for conceptualizing the present’s relationship with the past. On fashion’s account, history is not a progressive continuum of images whose meanings are static and transferrable. A skirt style from a previous era would not signify in exactly the same way if it were shown today. Rather, fashion regards history as a network of moments whose significance materializes in the provisional relations into which they are drawn. Walter Benjamin invokes fashion’s irreverent engagement of history when he figures history as a “tiger’s leap into the past”: “The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome returned. It cited ancient Rome the way fashion cites costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is the tiger’s leap into the past. The jump, however, takes place in the

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arena where the ruling class gives the commands.”139 Just as fashion dips into the past to pull out a particular line or colour that it recontextualizes in the present to make something new, Benjamin’s non-narrative model of history sees moments of past and present set into discrete, contingent relation with one another. These relations take the form of “an encounter of one text with another, of one language with another,” Ian Balfour suggests, where historical meaning is generated through acts of reading and interpretation that are perennially subject to revision and reframing.140 Taking up Benjamin’s modelling of history alternatively as “tiger’s leap” and labyrinth, Caroline Evans remarks the usefulness of these figures for theorizing fashion’s practice, suggesting that they “illuminate the way that the past can resonate in the present to articulate modern anxieties and experiences.”141 Each “leap” produces a different reading of the past and equally of the present in its relation to the past, thereby disabling a notion of history as continuous and homogenizing. Evans contends that fashion’s citational model of history “allows the juxtaposition of historical images with contemporary ones; as the labyrinth doubles back on itself what is most modern is revealed as also having a relation to what is most old. Distant points in time can become proximate at specific moments as their paths run close to each other.”142 This model allows for the unpredictability of history’s meanings and effects as past moments resonate in the present; it recognizes the variable temporalities in play in the present, moreover, as different points in time come into contact, some ancient, some holdovers from the recent past, others modern. To return to the novel with which I began, Jack Sheppard, we find in Ainsworth’s fictionalization of the prison-breaker’s achievements and Cruikshank’s theatricalization of his image a remediation of past forms that works to materialize the specific contours of the present. Jack Sheppard engages history on the model of fashionable citation, recontextualizing moments and figures from the past to make meaning in the present in new ways. As I have suggested, Ainsworth chose a figure for his Newgate novel whose story had been reprinted, adapted, and embellished innumerable times in the intervening century. Cruikshank drew models for some of his illustrations from Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness as well as the original images in Sheppard’s 1724 biography and a widely reproduced portrait.143 In each case, in text and illustration, Jack Sheppard’s contemporaneity is materialized by means of a juxtaposition of historical and current forms. At times the novel establishes a feeling of the contemporary by stressing the distance of the past from the present, using history comparatively to define a point of arrival; at other times, by contrast, the novel remarks the

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discontinuities that interrupt history’s smooth passage, or the “bits of the past” that persist in the present despite their incongruity with its dominant spirit and temporality.144 On Jack Sheppard’s model, historical movement and the consciousness it affords do not reliably line up with progress. As I will argue in Chapter 3, Ainsworth and Cruikshank produce a novel for their own age by mining from the past historical figures, customary practices, and older kinds of printed material like the broadside and the ballad and setting them into relation with contemporary issues and forms. They learn from Walter Scott’s Waverley novels narrative models for historicizing individual lives and plotting historical progress, and especially for charting the past along a path of cultural and political loss on its way to a nostalgic, nationally oriented, economically forward-looking present.145 They draw from Scott’s fiction as well, though, a less totalizing historical sense, one that attends to what Ferris and Campbell identify as the remainders of history which accrue outside of consolidating historical narratives, the residual figures and materials that are “exempt … from more enduring historical patterns.”146 Ainsworth and Cruikshank bring the historical novel firmly into a new era, though, by remarking the transformation that their own contemporary media culture effects in collective engagements with history. By taking up previous remediations of Jack Sheppard’s story and image, they explore how different media moments and narrative forms interact. By endowing their protagonist anachronistically with a sense of the visibility and publicness of quotidian life, moreover, they show how older forms might rematerialize and acquire new significance in the shifting social order and emergent mass media culture of the present, making uneven temporalities and incongruities between residual and emergent forms appear part of the fabric of modernity. To offer one example of the ways in which Jack Sheppard engages with the shifting temporalities and identifications that I identify with fashion’s idiom, Cruikshank’s illustration of Jack Sheppard’s portrait scene (Figure 1) demonstrates a self-consciousness about the remediation of past forms and the criminal’s anachronistic embrace of visibility in public life on which this novel turns. Shortly before the actual Sheppard’s execution, Sir James Thornhill, Sergeant-Painter to George I, visited the criminal in prison to take his portrait. In Ainsworth’s fictional rendering of the event, Thornhill is accompanied on the visit by his future son-in-law Hogarth, the playwright John Gay, and the famous eighteenth-century prize-fighter James Figg.147 Cruikshank’s illustration places Sheppard at the centre of the scene,

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Figure 1  George Cruikshank, “The Portrait.” In William Harrison Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard: A Romance. London: Richard Bentley, 1839.  Image courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

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seated with his heavy manacles secured to the floor and the visitors arrayed ­theatrically in a ­semi-circle around him. As in Thornhill’s original but in a pose that calls to mind some of Byron’s best-known portraits,148 Jack looks slightly left so that the illustration captures him in semi-profile; his left hand points across his body to his right, directing the viewer’s eye beyond the frame and perhaps toward the site of his next escape. Cruikshank places Thornhill in the front left of the image facing his model, with the portrait of Sheppard that was widely reproduced in the eighteenth century displayed on the easel in front of him.149 Hogarth stands before Jack in the front right, drawing the criminal’s bust in a pocket sketchbook that we are to infer would later serve as the source for the figure Tom Idle.150 Like Thornhill’s, Hogarth’s portrait is visible to the viewer of Cruikshank’s illustration, so that the plate contains three separate representations of the criminal, a feature that draws attention to the resonance of his image at ­different historical moments as well as its iterability in a contemporary media context. The mise-en-scène of the portrait scene makes clear that the remediation of those earlier images plays a crucial role in producing the fictional Sheppard’s celebrity status in the 1830s. As we have seen, modern celebrity culture coalesces by means of a surfeit of print imagery and an engaged public. Regarding the intersection of fashion and celebrity, Anne Hollander comments that it is “the thousand pictures of [the celebrity] in the media that bring to life and nourish the vogue for his looks. … And before the present [twentieth-century] media, the work of countless illuminators and portrait painters, commercial illustrators, engravers and advertising artists gave fashion its perpetual currency. This is a currency not just of images but of the mode of making them.” “Fashion,” she adds, “keeps shifting both what and how it illustrates.”151 Cruikshank’s illustration records a formal pictorial history stretching back four or five generations across several media that informs though it does not determine the meaning attached to each iteration of Sheppard’s image. Cruikshank calls attention to the complex relationship among these images by positioning the three portraits across the centre of the plate: the horizontal arrangement emphasizes how closely the second and third portraits are modelled on the first but acknowledges simultaneously the mutability of the figure’s signification. Cruikshank’s citation of these antecedents invokes the layering of meanings attached to the figure, produced in each case by the artist’s medium, style, and framing, as well as by audience reception, the visual and media technology of each era, and the labyrinthine encounters of different social-historical contexts. By including Gay and Figg in the prison

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visit scene, moreover, Ainsworth and Cruikshank remark the interaction across genres and media culture, especially among theatre, newspapers, print imagery, and popular culture, that further inflects the figure’s signification in their novel.152 Hogarth’s use of Sheppard’s figure, for example, departs sharply from the sensational interest and sympathy elicited by the original illustrations and biographical account of the criminal’s exploits. Consistent with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century criminal narratives which presented the condemned as a representative sinner whose dying confession embodied both universal moral truths and personal experience, Sheppard’s 1724 biography follows a conventional format that contains details of the criminal’s life, a catalogue of his misdeeds, and an account of his last dying speech. Hal Gladfelder argues, however, that “[d]espite a certain pressure to strip the criminal subject of any features that could not be absorbed into the universalizing patterns of myth,” eighteenth-century criminal biographies registered the particulars of the subject’s speech and actions with an individualizing “exhaustive[ness]” that tended to produce politically ambiguous if not openly “contestatory messages.”153 The original illustrations of Sheppard’s prison breaks would only have added to that ambiguity, given their emphasis on the extraordinariness of his actions. Criminal biographies were also integral to the public’s experience of hangings as a sensational media event: Pettitt suggests that the print text of the criminal’s last dying speech was “understood as part of the crowd’s experience of the event, rather than offering an accurate account of it after it had happened.”154 The sensationalism surrounding Sheppard’s career and hanging, which reportedly attracted a crowd of unparalleled size,155 was further reflected in the wide dissemination of Thornhill’s iconic portrait. The latter, taken during Sheppard’s final stay in Newgate Prison, was reportedly commissioned by a monarch curious about the famous prisonbreaker; the portrait’s engraving several years later ensured that Sheppard was one of the most recognizable criminals of the eighteenth century.156 A generation later, Hogarth’s allegorization of the criminal recasts this sensationalism as a story of depravity and woe. Eschewing the sympathy afforded the young miscreant, Industry and Idleness pairs the idle apprentice with an industrious counterpart to stress the consequences of delinquency and contrast the path that leads to the gallows with a social rise that rewards exemplary conduct. Hogarth’s reframing, however, did not supplant the earlier interpretation. When Ainsworth and Cruikshank entered the field almost a century later to reimagine Sheppard’s story anew, his figure carried with it shades of both the early sensationalism and Hogarth’s moral allegory.

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Hogarth’s series was revived and given newly sharpened class inflections, moreover, just five years before the publication of Jack Sheppard, when Charles Knight reprinted eight plates from Industry and Idleness in The Penny Magazine in 1834. Under the auspices of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), The Penny Magazine offered access to information, art, and entertainment aimed at the “moral improvement of the English worker.”157 In adapting Hogarth’s series for a new audience, The Penny Magazine added commentary to the images to ensure they would not be misread, doubling down on their moral. Interestingly, the commentary opens with an extended discussion of the difference in the dress, manners, and habits of apprentices in 1747 from those in 1605 (the date of the play to which The Penny Magazine suggests Hogarth was indebted for the series’ allegorical structure), and from those of the reader’s present.158 Sympathizing with the hardships of contemporary workers, the magazine uses this comparative historical analysis to explain that while the custom and status that had been accorded apprentices in earlier ages has been lost in the present day, the possibility for a “young man” to “rais[e] himself by his talents and good conduct from a very humble lot in life” remains tied to deference, obedience, and morality.159 The Penny Magazine resuscitates from the past the dignity associated with “gild,” or a “class of society which has ceased to exist as a separate body,” and realigns that class-based pride with individual conduct in order to deflect readers’ potential identification with a more current understanding of class, defined by the alienation of their labour.160 Patricia Anderson contends that in the context of the SDUK vehicle, Hogarth’s plates are framed as an “antidote” to “worker unrest and the potential threat to social stability of the radical press.”161 When Cruikshank takes up Hogarth’s series and sets it in relation with Thornhill’s portrait and the original illustrations for Sheppard’s biography, then, he juxtaposes an openly moralistic interpretation of the criminal’s story, itself recently remediated for a contemporary industrialized workforce, with the earlier representations which were not only sensationalized but also individualized, and thus lent themselves to a sympathetic reading of the criminal’s exploits. Cruikshank’s plate for the portrait scene in particular thwarts an attempt to read these antecedents on a linear model of historical progress: he presents Sheppard’s iconography as a media history which treats images indexically like the dress styles of earlier decades, remarking the interaction of their meanings without resolving the tensions among them. Cruikshank and Ainsworth seem to have anticipated that, while the negative moral example of the idle apprentice would continue to reverberate in the late 1830s especially amid the period’s legal and penal

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reforms, the figure of a humble young man who raises himself to public prominence by an enthusiastic embrace of performative visibility would likely invite other audience responses than fiery condemnation.162 By positioning Sheppard in the portrait scene as an object of fascination who has attracted a group of prominent public figures, Cruikshank stresses the ­magnitude and reach of the criminal’s fame. He represents Sheppard as a demotic celebrity for the current media-infused age, the criminal’s pictorial legacy confirming his entitlement to the mania he has inspired. The c­ontemporaneity of Sheppard’s celebrity is further emphasized by Cruikshank’s innovative pictorial style in the series. As Martin Meisel and Jonathan Hill have shown, Cruikshank develops in Jack Sheppard a new style known as “tableau illustration” by drawing on the contemporary “visual vocabulary of melodramatic acting.”163 Cruikshank uses what Hill describes as a pared down “linear clarity” to represent “moments of narrative climax in framed, static compositions,” thereby drawing the viewer’s eye consistently toward the most strongly defined figure in the frame – namely, Sheppard himself.164 The composition of the illustrations lent itself to stand-alone print imagery, moreover, at precisely the moment of the 1830s popular print revolution, a transformation fuelled by technological developments and reduced costs which Anderson suggests produced a “flood of cheap literature” and imagery.165 Booksellers and printers were quick to seize on the Jack Sheppard craze, displaying print copies of Cruikshank’s two dozen new images of the criminal for the ready consumption of passers-by.166 Pettitt argues that the 1820s and 1830s saw a “bewildering variety of print formats,” including an expanding newspaper market but also the persistence of much older forms “such as the broadside, the ballad, and the almanac.”167 Under the restrictive regime of the “taxes on knowledge” in the first half of the nineteenth century, she explains, new books were priced out of reach for most people and daily newspapers were unavailable in great swaths of Britain, leaving other print forms to fill the gap for a public hungry for currency in their reading material. The resulting hodgepodge of printed matter available for consumption, some of which, as with the Penny Magazine, remediated older imagery and narratives for a new public, “materially manifested a clash of conflicting and divergent temporalities made only more confusing with the intensification of urbanization and social mobility in the 1820s and 1830s.” “One result of these incommensurable media timescales,” Pettitt contends, “was to create delays and gaps which forced a new awareness of lived and historical time.”168

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Into this context Cruikshank and Ainsworth re-presented Jack Sheppard as a figure curiously in sync with these competing temporalities and the cultural forms allied with different audiences and eras. The conflicting significations that had developed around his image and story in the hundred years since his death allowed his fictional iteration in 1839 to speak powerfully to a public whose sense of being part of a social collectivity was increasingly taking shape in response to the visibility of public life, and whose sense of being together in history was tied to small-scale rather than cataclysmic change. Jack Sheppard shows how the obsolescence and upcycling of past forms are built into the semiotics of the present, and that it is in the play among these forms and their temporalities that we might best discern the currents of modern life. Matthew Buckley does not overstate, in my opinion, when he claims for Jack Sheppard “a scarcely recognized position of great significance” in the nineteenth century: the novel functions “as an exceptional mechanism of the period’s rapid shift in collective consciousness – driving, and not simply describing or reflecting, the crucial shift from political to perceptual modernity,” a shift he explains as the move from “revolutionary historical change … [to] the uncertain texture of momentary experience.”169 I would expand his claim to contend that Jack Sheppard is not alone in propelling nineteenth-century audiences toward a new understanding of temporal experience and social change. It is to the broad range of fiction keyed to the temporality of fashion that we must look to apprehend the nineteenth-century novel’s profound efforts to conceptualize in narrative form a sense of the present in a mediated, metropolitan age.

Outline This book tells the story of how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the British novel and its representations of social change and subjectivity across the nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1770s, the novel satirized fashion as the source of much folly and corruption in contemporary life, while also recognizing it as a harbinger of changes in social hierarchy and individual identity. The genre’s engagement of fashion continued through the turn of the nineteenth century as innumerable novels advertised themselves as tales of fashionable life, setting fairly conventional eighteenth-century plots in the elite homes and public spaces of high society. My story begins, though, with the genre of fiction that constitutes one of the first self-conscious efforts among British novelists to link narrative form and focus inextricably to fashion’s idiom of change: namely, the

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silver-fork novel of the 1820s and 1830s. Silver-fork novelists represented some of the key cultural currents of their age in a narrative form that itself embodied the temporality of the contemporary. Fashionable Fictions traces these narrative developments through the Newgate novel of the 1830s and 1840s, which takes up fashion’s temporality in the context of the spectacle and celebrity of the low-born criminal. I turn from Newgate to the fiction of Charles Dickens to examine his efforts to quell the popularity of Newgate novels while capitalizing on their narrative strategies for articulating the structures of celebrity in everyday life. Finally, I follow the novel’s engagement of novelty and currency through the pages of the sensation novel, showing how sensation novelists integrated temporal immediacy with the affective immersion increasingly required of nineteenth-century writing. The sensation novel embraces the conceptual instabilities that striate period conceptions of fashion and custom, by that means bringing into focus the affective incongruities of modern life. Fashionable Fictions is divided into three sections. In Part I, “The SilverFork Novel and the Transient World,” I examine the school of fiction that was tagged as such by Hazlitt’s scathing comment that fashionable novels tell us little more than where the rich buy their clothes and that “the quality eat fish with silver forks.”170 In Chapter 1, “‘All This Phantasmagoria’: Landon, Shelley, and the Texture of Contemporary Life,” I argue that the silver-fork school takes us across the surface of modern life in order to demonstrate that the “shifting scenes” of the “Pantomime,” as Lamb characterized nineteenth-century metropolitan culture, are in fact that society’s substance.171 Reading Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s novel Romance and Reality (1831) and Mary Shelley’s Lodore (1835), I show that the silver-fork novel gives narrative form to a spectral contemporary world, capturing in their topical depictions the quotidian spectacle of crowds and commodities, and the transformations of time, space, identity, and social place that were unfolding in a society permeated by the fashion system. These novels organize their narrative energies and plot lines, moreover, not on a diachronic model of social or individual development, but rather in synchrony with the pulse of their age. Their narratives follow the broad currents of public opinion, moving through panoramas of character sketches, conversational styles, topical issues and tastes, and among the shops and sights of metropolitan life, in an effort to model for their readers the acumen and understanding of contemporary manners essential to modern life. Chapter 2, “Picaresque Movements: Pelham, Cecil, and the Rejection of Bildung,” elaborates the generic implications of the silver-fork school’s intervention in the nineteenth-century novel’s development. I analyze the

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tendency among silver-fork novelists to resist the growing influence of the Bildungsroman and look instead to the older narrative form of the picaresque in order to keep their focus on an urban panorama in which individuals are accorded no greater priority than the social landscapes through which they move. Reading Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham (1828) and Catherine Gore’s Cecil (1841), I argue that silver-fork novelists use the picaresque to represent the chaotic surface of metropolitan life and stage the social as an “endless sequence of unrelated but contiguous scenes.”172 Into this fastchanging, diverse landscape, silver-fork novelists set a dandy protagonist who navigates it with aplomb. Observant and adaptive, he occupies a position analogous to that of the commodities with which his society teems: he functions as an object in circulation, defined less by internal traits than by the situations and sets of relations through which he moves. I suggest, moreover, that we identify the seemingly aimless narratives and impervious protagonists of the silver-fork school as signs of a deliberate return on the part of their authors to the eclipsed eighteenth-century form of the picaresque; read as citation and adaptation rather than regression, the silver-fork novel’s engagement of the picaresque offers further evidence to complicate conventional histories of the novel that plot its steady rise toward a maturation in high Victorian realism on the model of a Bildungsroman. Part II, “Demotic Celebrities,” analyzes the confluence of fashion’s temporality with an emergent celebrity culture. In Chapter 3, “Spectacular Objects: Criminal Celebrity and the Newgate School,” I argue 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. Seen at the time as the low-society counterpart to the high-society silver-fork novel, Newgate fiction of the 1830s and 1840s features a literal rogues’ gallery of criminal protagonists, some fictional and some historical, who are made objects of sympathy and even adulation. These novels examine how, in an emergent mass media culture, notorious figures and extraordinary actions might reverberate through the collective consciousness: developing a notion of demotic celebrity, the Newgate novel explores how the criminal’s talents and achievements might capture the public’s imagination and bring celebrity within reach of insignificant individuals. The signal contribution of Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard and Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830) in the history of the novel comes into focus when set alongside Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794): these texts each conceive of the criminal as a figure aware of his publicity and reception and conscious of how best to present himself to an audience. Reading these texts in relation to Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–38), I show that their interest in the

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criminal’s preoccupation with his own visibility and more generally in the production of celebrity reflects the permeation of fashion’s logics of contingency and spectacle into the quotidian experience of society’s outcasts and ordinary people alike. Chapter 4, “After Criminality: Dickens and the Celebrity of Everyday Life,” examines the means by which Dickens takes up the cultural formations of celebrity and urban spectatorship articulated in the Newgate novel and puts them in service of the sympathetic self-regard of the gentlemanin-training. Beginning with Barnaby Rudge (1841), a novel openly in conversation with the Newgate school, I examine Dickens’s efforts first to negate the criminal protagonist’s exclusive purchase on demotic celebrity, and secondly to claim for respectable characters the possibilities for celebrity and publicness that the earlier crime novels had made imaginable. From Barnaby Rudge I turn to David Copperfield (1849–50), a novel long read through a psychoanalytic or biographical lens, to argue that Dickens’s ongoing meditation on the formation of publics and public character comes clearly into view when we read this text in relation to the demotic celebrity that distinguishes both the Newgate school and his own earlier crime fiction. Setting David Copperfield in the context of an emergent nineteenth-century celebrity culture allows us to appreciate the extent to which the aspiring young man of the middle orders is conscious of himself as a figure to be seen, and that such a consciousness permeates his development from the novel’s earliest pages. Indeed, David Copperfield attests that by mid-century, an awareness of one’s own visibility has become an integral, openly acknowledged component of identity formation. Individuals who would participate in social life and especially those who would effect change must reckon with how they are seen. Dickens’s focus in both Barnaby Rudge and David Copperfield on the increasingly visual figure of the public man and the communal work of celebrity culture confirms the ongoing reverberations through British fiction of the temporality of fashion and its logics of currency, contingency, and spectacle. In its final section, Part III, “Hypercurrency and the Sensation Novel,” Fashionable Fictions considers the re-emergence and redeployment of fashion’s idiom of change in the subgenre that took the 1860s by storm, the sensation novel. Chapter 5, “Affective Distance and the Temporality of Sensation Fiction,” takes its cue from Henry Mansel’s observation that “no more immortality is dreamed of for [the sensation novel] than for the fashions of the current season.”173 Alert to the forms of change which fashion helped to materialize, the sensation novel, Nicholas Daly suggests, “aimed at … bringing the present to life.”174 Part of that project of animation, as has been well-remarked in the critical literature, turns on the genre’s

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“preaching to the nerves.”175 The feeling of the present that the sensation novel produces, however, is distinguished by more than galvanic experiences of stimulation and shock. Rather, sensation fiction conceives of the present as an “odd jumble of contradictions, of sympathies and antipathies.”176 Using Mark Salber Phillips’s concept of historical distance to defamiliarize our ideas about proximity in historical representation, this chapter opens up the sensation novel’s innovations with temporal and spatial immediacy to illuminate its rendering of modernity as rife with incongruous affects. Reading Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Aurora Floyd (1863), I show that the sensation novel and Braddon’s fiction in particular characterize the present in terms of affective excess, drawing into focus a perpetual tension between the forces of attraction and repellence, captivation and alienation in contemporary life. Moving beyond those readings that try to decide the question of her fiction’s subversion or reinforcement of social norms, I contend that Braddon keeps the affective incongruities of the heroine’s case in play not simply to preclude an easy resolution, but to articulate the extreme contradictions that characterize the forms of belonging governing contemporary experience. In taking up novels keyed to the temporality of fashion, this book examines the ways in which the internalization of principles of novelty and obsolescence into the structures of individual identity and social organization prompts the development of narrative forms commensurate with the fashion system’s spectacular, ephemeral significations. Nineteenth-century British novelists engage the contemporaneity of their world, I suggest, in ways that oblige us to recast the narratives by which we have explained the novel’s transformations across the period, and to interrogate further the forms of cultural work that conventional literary histories have ascribed to fiction.

Notes 1 Georg Simmel, “Fashion” (1904), On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 294–323, 303. 2 Kathryn Chittick, Dickens and the 1830s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 153–54. 3 On the details of the actual Jack Sheppard’s career, see Keith Hollingsworth, The Newgate Novel, 1830–1847: Bulwer, Ainsworth, Dickens, & Thackeray (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963), 132–34; Lucy Moore, The Thieves’ Opera: The Mesmerizing Story of Two Notorious Criminals in Eighteenth-Century London (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997), 158–70; and Horace Bleakley, Jack Sheppard (Edinburgh: William Hodge, 1933).

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4 On the attribution of Sheppard’s purportedly authorized biography to Defoe and on the latter’s acquaintance with the criminal, see Bleakley, Jack Sheppard, 51–53. 5 See Moore, The Thieves’ Opera, 229. 6 Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, 1790–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 164. 7 On the late-1830s Sheppard phenomenon, see Hollingsworth, The Newgate Novel, 139–40, and Anderson, The Printed Image, 159–66. 8 William Makepeace Thackeray, “Letter 145. To Mrs. Carmichael-Smyth,” 1–2 December 1839, The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Gordon Ray (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946), vol. 1, 395. 9 The intersection of older literary figures with new media in which I’m interested is equally the focus of Tom Mole’s What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). My concern in this study, though, is in how the nineteenth-century novel both remediates historical figures and embraces current social phenomena in a bid to render contemporaneity in narrative form. 10 William Hazlitt, “The Dandy School” (1827), The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1931–34), vol. 20, 143–49, 144. 11 Matthew Buckley, “Sensations of Celebrity: Jack Sheppard and the Mass Audience,” Victorian Studies (Spring 2002): 423–63, 436. 12 As I will suggest in the coming pages, William Hazlitt’s The Spirit of the Age: or, Contemporary Portraits (London: Colburn, 1825), which draws the zeitgeist into focus through a series of paired readings of contemporary writers, shares key premises and narrative methods with the novels I analyze. The similarity was of course not one that Hazlitt would have admitted insofar as his literarycritical project turned, as we will see, on a repudiation of the intertwined concepts of fashion and fame. 13 Catherine Gore, Cecil: or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb (1841), 2nd ed. (London: Bentley, 1843), 1: 223. 14 The canonical study of the eighteenth-century consumer revolution is Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); see especially McKendrick’s chapter on “The Commercialization of Fashion,” 34–99. On the centrality of an emergent eighteenth-century fashion system to the rise of historical consciousness, see Timothy Campbell’s excellent Historical Style: Fashion and the New Mode of History, 1740–1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). On the expansion of fashion consciousness in the period as well as the production and distribution mechanisms of a fully functional fashion system, see Christopher Breward, The Culture of Fashion: A New History of Fashionable Dress (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Beverly Lemire,

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Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Dress, Culture and Commerce: The English Clothing Trade before the Factory, 1660–1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); and “Developing Consumerism and the Ready-made Clothing Trade in Britain, 1750–1800,” Textile History 15.1 (1984): 21–44. 15 Paul Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 204. 16 Roy Porter, London: A Social History (London: Penguin, 2000), 180. 17 Ulrich Lehmann, Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), xvi, emphasis added. 18 Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress (New York: Knopf, 1994), 17, 27. 19 On fashion-consciousness in antiquity, see Anne Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Jeri DeBrohun, “Power Dressing in Ancient Greece and Rome,” History Today (February 2001): 18–25. 20 Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 15. See also Hollander, Sex and Suits, 23–24; Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, revised ed. (London: I.  B. Taurus, 2003), 3; and Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 5. 21 Lipovetsky, Empire of Fashion, 21. 22 Campbell, Historical Style, 2. 23 Lemire, “Developing Consumerism,” 24, 27. See also Campbell, Historical Style, 3–11, 63–67. 24 Campbell, Historical Style, 2. 25 McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, 13. See also Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Demand and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Lemire, Dress, Culture and Commerce. Although McKendrick has been faulted for overemphasizing the suddenness and consistency of changes in consumer demand, as well as the role of consumption (to the exclusion of production) in the commercialization of fashion, his account of the process by which “the pace of fashion changes accelerated ever more rapidly” in the eighteenth century remains foundational (“The Commercialization of Fashion,” 55). For alternative accounts of this process, see Ulrich Lehmann, Fashion and Materialism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018); John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); and Vivienne Richmond, Clothing the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 26 Bernard Mandeville, The Grumbling Hive (London, 1705), quoted in Erin Mackie, Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 37. Erin

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Mackie and James Noggle have both noted that early eighteenth-century commentators grudgingly conceded that fashion’s fickleness and insatiability had great economic potential for the nation: see Mackie, Market à la Mode; and James Noggle, The Temporality of Taste in Eighteenth-Century British Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 27 See Lemire, “Developing Consumerism” and Fashion’s Favourite; McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society; Breward, Culture of Fashion, especially ch. 4, “Eighteenth Century: Clothing and Commerce”; and Clifford Siskin and William Warner, This Is Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 28 Jonathan Lamb, The Things Things Say (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), xxi, emphasis original. 29 Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Vintage, 1997), 479. 30 Timothy Campbell, “Arts of Dress: Rancière and Fashion,” Critical Inquiry 44 (Summer 2018): 619–40, 624 n3. 31 Anne Hollander, “Without Looking,” London Review of Books 17.15 (3 August 1995): 18–19, 19. 32 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London, 1759), 371. 33 Ibid., 373–74. 34 Ibid., 374. 35 Ibid., 380, 382. 36 Ibid., 372. 37 Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 (Autumn 2001): 1–22, 13. In this passage, Brown discusses Benjamin’s recognition that it is precisely when objects become “outmoded” that we perceive the desires congealed around them which, for a time, have invested them with value (13). 38 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 372. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 373. 42 Noggle, Temporality of Taste, 158. On the “heroically slippery concept” of taste in a Georgian context, see Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 150. 43 Hollander, Sex and Suits, 23–24. 44 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 373. 45 Noggle, Temporality of Taste, 158. 46 See Christopher Breward’s documentation of fashion’s multidirectional influences in nineteenth-century Britain in: Fashion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life, 1860– 1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); and Culture of Fashion, ch. 5. 47 Styles, Dress of the People, 324. 48 Ibid., 322, 324. 49 Ibid., 325.

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50 Ibid., 324. 51 Thomas Carlyle was not the first to ascribe trendsetting power to the tailor or dressmaker rather than the fashionable individual, but he expanded this claim in his satire Sartor Resartus (1833–34) to credit the tailor with the formation of everything from individual identity to national polities: “looking away from individual cases, and how a Man is by the Tailor new-created into a Nobleman, and clothed not only with Wool but with Dignity and a Mystic Dominion, – is not the fair fabric of Society itself, with all its royal mantles and pontifical stoles, whereby, from nakedness and dismemberment, we are organized into Polities, into nations, and a whole co-operating Mankind, the creation, as has here been often irrefragably evinced, of the Tailor alone?” ((Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 219). For eighteenth-century antecedents of this attribution of identity-making power to the tailor, see Breward, Culture of Fashion, 131–32. 52 On the consolidation of ready-made garment production and the transformation of consumption patterns in the period, see Lemire, “Developing Consumerism” and Dress, Culture and Commerce; and Breward, Culture of Fashion. 53 Richmond, Clothing the Poor, 161. 54 Ibid., 125, 132. In the second quotation, Richmond quotes from Joanne Entwistle, “The Dressed Body,” Body Dressing, eds. Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wilson (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 33–58. 55 James Laver, Dandies (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), 10. 56 I invoke the language of slavery with reference to fashion in the historical sense in which it regularly appeared in eighteenth-century commentary, specifically to conceptualize fashion’s despotic power: William Warburton, for example, contends that “all ages, both Young and Old, groan under the slavery of Fashion” (Sermons and Discourses on Various Subjects and Occasions (London, 1767), vol. 3, 120); Mary Hays identifies “our slavery to fashion” as a widespread condition of the modern age (Letters and Essays, Moral, and Miscellaneous (London, 1793), 140); and Anna Letitia Barbauld describes fashion as a “slavery” that “we voluntarily impose upon ourselves” (“Fashion, a Vision” (1797), Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose, eds. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Craft (Peterborough: Broadview, 2001): 282–89, 283, 287). While the metaphorical invocation of slavery with reference to fashion may seem grossly inappropriate, its recurrent use in the period reflects at least in part the gravity with which commentators viewed its dehumanizing, commodifying power. 57 Joseph Warton, Fashion: An Epistolary Satire to a Friend (London, 1742), 17. 58 Mackie, Market à la Mode, 27. 59 Ibid. 60 John Burton, Lectures on Female Education and Manners (London, 1793), Vol. 1, Lecture X: 139–58, 155. 61 Lord Chesterfield, Lord Chesterfield’s Advice to His Son on Men and Manners, 2nd ed. (London, 1775), 44.

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62 The exception was satirical illustrations, which regularly seized on specific dress fashions: James Gillray and George Cruikshank, for example, produced myriad pictorial satires of individual outfits and styles between the 1790s and 1820s. See Campbell’s discussion of Cruikshank’s annualized parody of fashion, in Historical Style, 57–63. 63 Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, 248. 64 Timothy Campbell, “‘Style Description:/Provenance:/Period:’: Martin Margiela, Fashion Authorship, and Romantic Literary History,” in Fashion and Authorship: Literary Production and Cultural Style from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century, ed. Gerald Egan (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 321–40, 326, 329. 65 As I suggested above, Styles and Richmond challenge the idea that fashion’s permeation of the lower orders can be explained solely in terms of emulation – that is, that working people and the poor aped their betters in matters of dress and style and that fashion signified in the same way as it was passed down. They argue, by contrast, that while certain trends may have descended from the upper orders, fashion’s customary uses and associations were determined within local communities, and that these practices infused longstanding traditions with a new fashion consciousness: see Styles, Dress of the People, 324, and Richmond, Clothing the People, 46. 66 Campbell, Historical Style, 14–15. 67 Ina Ferris, “‘On the Borders of Oblivion’: Scott’s Historical Novel and the Modern Time of the Remnant,” Modern Language Quarterly 70.4 (2009): 473–94, 476. 68 Lipovetsky, Empire of Fashion, 134. 69 Ibid., 20, 134. 70 Simmel, “Fashion,” 303. 71 See Campbell’s discussion of the material remainder of outmoded fashions, in Historical Style, 2–3. 72 Lipovetsky, Empire of Fashion, 48–49. 73 Simmel, “Fashion,” 303. 74 Ibid. 75 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 261. 76 John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). 77 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, England and the English (1833), ed. Standish Meacham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 288. 78 Ibid., 289. 79 Hazlitt, “Dandy School,” vol. 20, 143–49, 144. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid., emphasis original. 83 Ibid., 144, 146.

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84 [William Maginn,] “The Dominie’s Legacy, and Fashionable Novels,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 1 (April 1830): 318–35, 321. This unattributed review is conventionally attributed to Maginn, though John Charles Olmsted suggests it may have been co-authored with J. A. Heraud. See Olmsted, ed., A Victorian Art of Fiction: Essays on the Novel in British Periodicals, 1830–1850 (New York: Garland, 1979; Routledge, 2016), 19. On Fraser’s Magazine’s “pervasive preoccupation” with “fashionable novels and other commentaries on fashion … during the 1830s and early 1840s,” see Richard Salmon, “Fraser’s Magazine and the Instability of Fashion,” in Fashion and Authorship, ed. Gerald Egan, 129–53, 132. 85 Maginn, “The Dominie’s Legacy,” 320. 86 Ibid., 321. 87 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London: Penguin, 1985), 55. 88 William Hazlitt, “On Fashion” (1818), in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 17: 52. 89 Simmel, “Fashion,” 303. 90 Hazlitt, “On Fashion,” 51–52. 91 Matthew Rosa, The Silver Fork School: Novels of Fashion Preceding Vanity Fair (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), 13. 92 Simmel, “Fashion,” 303. 93 Eva Badowska, “On the Track of Things: Sensation and Modernity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret,” Victorian Literature and Culture 37.1 (2009): 157–75, 158. 94 Lord Byron, Don Juan, in The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93), 5: 14.16. 95 Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 215. 96 Ibid., 296. 97 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), B1a,1. 98 Hollander, Sex and Suits, 28. 99 Ibid., 15. 100 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 373. 101 John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), xv–xvi. 102 Ibid., 143. In Customs in Common (New York: New Press, 1993), E.  P. Thompson remarks similarly: “If, along one path, ‘custom’ carried many of the meanings we now assign to ‘culture’, along another path custom had close affinities with the common law” (3). 103 See James Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 62–92. 104 Thompson, Customs in Common, 6. 105 Hazlitt, “Dandy School,” 144; Maginn, “The Dominie’s Legacy,” 321. 106 Richard Altick, The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994).

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107 Charles Baudelaire articulates an early, influential equation of fashion and modernity in “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne, 2nd ed. (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 1–41. On Baudelaire’s commentary on the consonances between la mode et la modernité, see Lehmann, Fashion and Materialism, 73–74. 108 Barthes, The Fashion System, 215. 109 Entwistle, “The Dressed Body,” 37. 110 Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, 6. 111 Ibid., 3. Fashion theory has focused almost exclusively on the West, arguing that the modern fashion system did not develop in other, “traditional” cultures. More recent scholars have recognized the Eurocentrism of this view, however, and advocated for a global lens on fashion and material culture. See Beverly Lemire, ed., The Force of Fashion in Politics and Society: Global Perspectives from Early Modern to Contemporary Times (New York: Routledge, 2016). 112 Among the important work on eighteenth-century fashion and an emergent sense of contemporaneity both within and outside the novel genre, see Campbell, Historical Style; Keen, Literature; Mackie, Market à la Mode; and J. Paul Hunter, “‘News, and New Things’: Contemporaneity and the Early English Novel,” Critical Inquiry 14.3 (1998): 493–515. 113 On the influential contribution of Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth to the fashion-focused novel of manners that would lead to the silver-fork school, see Francis Russell Hart, “The Regency Novel of Fashion,” From Smollett to James: Studies in the Novel and Other Essays, eds. Samuel Mintz, Alice Chandler, Christopher Mulvey (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981); and Edward Copeland, The Silver Fork Novel: Fashionable Fiction in the Age of Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) offers one of the earliest fictional denunciations of the fashion phenomenon in the form of Matthew Bramble’s reflections on fashionable society in Bath and London. 114 Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 139. Some exceptions to this disregard for the fiction of the 1820s through early 1840s include Copeland, The Silver Fork Novel; Hollingsworth, The Newgate Novel; Angela Esterhammer, Print and Performance in the 1820s: Improvisation, Speculation, Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Richard Cronin, Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824–1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); and Muireann O’Cinneide, Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 1832–1867 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008). 115 Hart, “The Regency Novel of Fashion,” 84–133, 85, 91. 116 Clare Pettitt, Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 26.

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117 Charles Lamb, “The Londoner,” Morning Post and Gazetteer (1 February 1802): 3. 118 Lord Normanby, The Contrast (London: Colburn & Bentley, 1832), 3: 32. On the urban aesthetic of 1820s and 1830s fiction, see Sambudha Sen, “Hogarth, Egan, Dickens, and the Making of an Urban Aesthetic,” Representations 103 (2008): 84–106. 119 Mary Shelley, Lodore, ed. Lisa Vargo (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1997), 173. 120 Evans, Fashion at the Edge, 289. See also Monica L. Miller on the commitment of fashionable individuals to “continually redefine themselves” in keeping with the stylistic and affective modulations of the age. Monica L. Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 8. 121 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised ed. (New York: Verso, 2006). 122 Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2–3; Ferris quotes from Paul Magnuson’s Reading Public Romanticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 123 Theatre played a vital role as well in the transformation of public consciousness by means of media and visual culture and its translation into an individual register. Unsurprisingly, novels focused on spectacle and celebrity engaged directly with the theatre, a point to which I will return later in this Introduction. On the impact of popular entertainment culture and the penny press on the period’s emergent sense of contemporaneity, see Pettitt, Serial Forms. On the importance of theatre to British publicness in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, see Daniel O’Quinn, Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) and Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 124 On the potent intersection of print, public opinion, and representative politics at the turn of the nineteenth century, see Andrew Franta, Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 125 On the consolidation in the Romantic period of a modern notion of celebrity, see Clara Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Tom Mole, ed., Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Braudy, Frenzy of Renown. On the emergence of celebrity in the long eighteenth century, see

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Julia Fawcett, Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696–1801 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016); Gerald Egan, Fashioning Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century: Stylish Books of Poetic Genius (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); and Gerald Egan, ed., Fashion and Authorship: Literary Production and Cultural Style from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan), 2020. 126 Mole points, for example, to the development of “steel plate engraving,” which allowed Byron’s portrait to be turned into “endlessly reproducible prints” (Byron’s Romantic Celebrity, 18). See also Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image, on the role of the print image in the transformation of popular culture across this period. 127 Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, 8. On celebrity culture as an example of Lauren Berlant’s notion of an “intimate public sphere,” see Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, 9. 128 Siskin and Warner, This Is Enlightenment, 26. 129 On the intimate, mediated relationship between Byron and his Romantic audience, see Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity; on the role of industrial print culture in Byron’s celebrity, see Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity. 130 Braudy, Frenzy of Renown, 399, 403. 131 Ferris, Romantic National Tale, 3. 132 Leo Braudy, “Knowing the Performer from the Performance: Fame, Celebrity, and Literary Studies,” PMLA 126.4 (2011): 1070–75, 1072. 133 Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity, xii. 134 See Egan’s detailed reading of Byron’s portraiture and its cultural connotations, in Fashioning Authorship, 165–204. 135 Catherine Gore, Cecil: or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb (1841), 2nd ed. (London: Bentley, 1843), 2: 17. 136 Campbell, Historical Style, 48. 137 On the variation in the period among different experiences of currency and contemporaneity, see Pettitt, Serial Forms, 12. On fashion’s ability to connect consumers across the nation and, at the same time, foster a degree of autonomous significance in local, especially plebian communities and among the poor, see Styles, Dress of the People, 324; Richmond, Clothing the People, 46. 138 Tom Mole uses the phrase “media ecology” in a nineteenth-century context to refer to the remediation of Romantic literary works in the Victorian period into diverse, “old” and “new” media (What the Victorians Made of Romanticism, 3). I invoke the media ecology represented in nineteenth-­ century fiction in the more general sense posited by Marshall McLuhan and elaborated by Neil Postman to refer to the role that communication media and technologies play in managing information and producing perceptual frameworks through which people make sense of the world. On the origins of the concept, see Thomas F. Gencarelli, “The Intellectual Roots of Media Ecology in the Work and Thought of Neil Postman,” The New Jersey Journal of Communication 8.1 (2000): 91–103, especially 93.

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139 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Concept of History,” quoted in and translated by Ian Balfour, “Reversal, Quotation (Benjamin’s History),” MLN 106 (1991): 622–47, 645–46. I use this translation of Benjamin’s famous “tiger’s leap” passage because it brings to the fore the citational practice that he identifies with fashion. On the pertinence of Benjamin’s concept of history for theories of fashion, see Evans, Fashion at the Edge; and Lehmann, Tigersprung. 140 Balfour, “Reversal, Quotation,” 647. 141 Evans, Fashion at the Edge, 9. 142 Ibid. 143 See Buckley’s analysis of these sources, “Sensations of Celebrity,” 432–37. 144 Ferris, “Borders of Oblivion,” 476. 145 I invoke Georg Lukács’s reading of the Waverley novels in The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962). On Scott’s authorization of national history, see Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 146 Campbell, Historical Style, 204; see also Ferris, “Borders of Oblivion.” 147 Hogarth may in fact have accompanied Thornhill, but the historical record is uncertain. See Moore, The Thieves’ Opera, 229. 148 See Egan on Byron’s portraiture: Fashioning Authorship, 165–204. 149 Ainsworth and Cruikshank represent Thornhill’s portrait as an oil ­painting – Cruikshank has Thornhill poised before his easel with several brushes in hand and a box of paints at his feet – but the two surviving portraits of Sheppard that have been attributed to Thornhill were done in chalk and pencil, and pen, ink, and wash, respectively. See “John (Jack) Sheppard,” by Philip Sugden, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 150 Idle is the delinquent apprentice in Hogarth’s 1747 series of engravings, Industry and Idleness, which traces the opposite careers of two young apprentices, Tom Idle and Francis Goodchild. Idle, as his name suggests, neglects his training, slides into a life of debauchery and crime, and ends his ignominious career at Tyburn. While Hogarth may not have been present at Thornhill’s visit to Newgate, he was certainly familiar with Thornhill’s portrait of Sheppard and with the criminal’s story; as Lucy Moore observes, “Tom’s life mirrors that of the real Jack” (The Thieves’ Opera, 229). 151 Hollander, Sex and Suits, 27–28. 152 On the interaction of theatre and newspapers in the late eighteenth century, see Daniel O’Quinn, Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770–1790 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 153 Hal Gladfelder, Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England: Beyond the Law (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 9–10. 154 Pettitt, Serial Forms, 50. 155 “Sheppard, John (Jack),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

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156 On the possible pretext for Thornhill’s visit, see Moore, The Thieves’ Opera. In the novel Ainsworth turns rumour into certainty by having the turnkey inform Jack Sheppard that the monarch has requested the criminal’s portrait be taken. I will return to this context in Chapter 3. 157 Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image, 54. See Anderson’s detailed analysis of The Penny Magazine, an illustrated weekly aimed at working people, and its reproduction of Hogarth’s work along with other historical art and imagery, 50–67. Anderson credits The Penny Magazine with spearheading the print revolution that rapidly expanded the popular publishing industry, dating the change to around the year 1832 when The Penny Magazine first appeared. This periodical, like so many others of the 1830s through 1860s, capitalized on new steam-driven papermaking and print technologies and the lowered taxes that significantly reduced production costs, thus participating in the consolidation of a “print-centred mass culture” (1–2). 158 “Hogarth and His Works. – No. II,” Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 3.138 (May 1834): 209–16, 209–10. 159 Ibid., 212. 160 Ibid., 209–10. 161 Anderson, The Printed Image, 53. 162 See Buckley, “Sensations of Celebrity,” on Jack Sheppard’s powerful appeal to the “young, ‘masterless’ men who constituted much of the city’s growing industrial labor force” and who would have encountered the figure of the renowned criminal apprentice in theatres, print shops, on playbills and posters, and in the popularization of the novel’s original songs (427–28). On fiction’s engagement with the period’s legal and penal reforms, see Hollingsworth, The Newgate Novel; John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 163 Jonathan Hill, “Cruikshank, Ainsworth, and Tableau Illustration,” Victorian Studies 23.4 (1980): 429–59, 452. On Cruikshank’s innovations in Jack Sheppard, see also Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 247–79; Buckley, “Sensations of Celebrity,” 432– 42; and Robert L. Patten, George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), vol. 2, 98–101. On Cruikshank’s amplification of the criminal’s heroism, see my “Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard and the Crimes of History,” SEL Studies in English Literature 1600–1900 49.4 (2009): 879–906, 887–90. 164 Hill, “Cruikshank,” 453, 430. 165 Anderson, The Printed Image, 1–2. 166 On the availability and appeal of Cruikshank’s illustrations to a lower-class audience that wouldn’t necessarily have had access to Ainsworth’s novel, see Buckley, “Sensations of Celebrity,” 437. 167 Pettitt, Serial Forms, 31, 37. 168 Ibid., 31.

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Buckley, “Sensations of Celebrity,” 425–26. Hazlitt, “Dandy School,” 146. Lamb, “The Londoner,” 3. Sen, “Hogarth,” 93. H. L. Mansel, “Sensation Novels,” The Quarterly Review 113.226 (April 1863): 481–514, 483. 174 Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 47. 175 Mansel, “Sensation Novels,” 482. 176 As I noted earlier, these are the terms in which Hazlitt describes fashion (Hazlitt, “On Fashion,” 51).

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Part I

The Silver-Fork Novel and the Transient World

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009296540.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009296540.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

chapter 1

“All This Phantasmagoria”

Landon, Shelley, and the Texture of Contemporary Life

I was born … in a crowd. This has begot in me an entire affection for that way of life, amounting to an almost insurmountable aversion from solitude and rural scenes. … This passion for crowds is no where feasted so full as in London. – Charles Lamb, “The Londoner” (1802)1

Fiction, Fashion, Currency William Hazlitt tagged novels of fashionable life with the epithet “silver fork” when he famously remarked in 1827 that they inform readers of very little other than that “the quality eat fish with silver forks.”2 Reviewing a spate of recent novels concerned with dandies, fashion, and “the topic of the day,” Hazlitt critiques their “narrow” focus. Instead of transporting readers to other times and places or into “the situations of others,” the new fiction takes readers “down Bond Street or … through the mazes of the dance at Almack’s,” and reduces the novel genre to “a collection of quack or fashionable advertisements.”3 Reading against Hazlitt’s impatience with their topicality, I argue that these novels took up the trends, customs, and cultural energies of the present not simply to document the manners – and tableware – of the elite, but to correlate the novel genre with the social phenomenon transforming British society: fashion. Permeating ever more facets of British society since the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century, fashion ushered in a temporality and historical consciousness keyed to a cycle of novelty and obsolescence.4 As I suggested in the Introduction, fashion worked in concert with commerce and an expanding visual culture to make “the transitory … one of the constitutive structures of modern life.”5 Nineteenth-century novelists found in fashion an idiom for articulating the ephemerality of contemporary experience and the penetration of visual culture into daily life and the foundations of individual and community identity. Novelists of fashionable 51

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life may have directed readers’ attention too narrowly for Hazlitt’s liking towards “the present moment and the present object,” but in the process they stitched fashion’s temporality into the fabric of the novel in a manner we are only beginning fully to grasp.6 Silver-fork novels owe much in form and content to a wide variety of print and visual media that was in circulation in the 1820s: Jane Austen’s fiction; Walter Scott’s Waverley novels; Lord Byron’s public persona and image as well as his poetry; Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1821–28), a series of pre-Dickensian illustrated narratives of high and low life; literary annuals; commonplace books; and the serial publication of both fashion plates and society columns.7 Early fashionable narratives like Theodore Hook’s Sayings and Doings (1824), R. P. Ward’s Tremaine (1825), and Benjamin Disraeli’s Vivian Grey (1826) fed modernity’s “taste for novelty” in part by offering the reading public a nineteenth-century version of the lifestyles of the rich and famous.8 Catherine Gore described her 1831 novel Pin Money, for example, as “an attempt to transfer the familiar narrative of Miss Austin [sic] to a higher sphere of society.”9 If the silver-fork school’s popularity turned in some measure on the appeal of setting an Austenian novel of manners in high society, Gore’s comment nonetheless underplays the genre’s innovations: in taking up the predominant visual and narrative forms of their moment, these novels engaged with novelty as an organizing principle of modern life. Silver-fork novelists correlated their narratives with what Richard Altick has termed “the presence of the present,” though I use that phrase and see it exemplified in silver-fork fiction in a manner that differs from the main premise of his study.10 In examining the ways that nineteenth-century novelists worked to “create the effect of contemporaneity” in narrative form, Altick focuses principally on the inclusion of “time-specific details” in realist fiction.11 I contend by contrast that a thematic concern with time is only part of the story. As we saw in the Introduction, novels that take up the temporality of fashion have long been considered both too historical and not historical enough: they are simultaneously too embedded in historical detail to speak to other times and too superficial to engage with meaningful historical change. Fashion’s mutable relationship to history, though – what I call its dual temporality – proved eminently useful for novelists interested in giving narrative form to the vicissitudes and contradictions of contemporary life. Unconcerned with history’s grand narratives of causality, silver-fork novels attend instead to the movements and textures that characterize the present, and to relations of past and present that do not necessarily cohere into an explanatory logic.

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As I will argue in Chapter 2 on the silver-fork school’s resistance to the Bildungsroman, many of these novels disrupt the developmental narrative models that were already ascendant by the 1820s.12 Eschewing the tightly crafted plots and privileging of interiority that we associate with fiction like Austen’s, silver-fork novelists instead favour narrative features that focus insistently on the surface: glittering social events at the most current, recherché venues in London; movement through fashionable shops, parks, clubs, and to the town residences and country seats of the wealthy and high-born; a staggering array of characters, most of whom make only fleeting appearances; a quantity of reported social conversation that verges in some novels on the non-narrative; and across all these scenes and situations, a panoramic observation of contemporary manners, styles, and related social codes. Some silver-fork novels, like Thomas Lister’s Granby (1826), build a dazzling world of fashionable venues and witty conversation over a familiar base of domestic fiction marriage plots and gothicized family secrets and inheritance schemes. Others, like Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s Romance and Reality (1831), dispense with plot almost entirely in preference for what one contemporary reviewer described as an experimental composite of “essays, criticisms, sketches of life, portraits living and dead, opinions on manners, [and] descriptions of feeling. … [Landon’s novel] must be read as a brilliant, and sometimes profound commentary on the life of this ‘century of crowds.’”13 Silver-fork fiction frequently turns away from narrative structures organized around a protagonist’s individual development in order to focus the novel’s energies instead on the textures and temporality of contemporary life for those privileged enough to move seamlessly through its manifold scenes.14 Silver-fork novels articulate the key currents of change in their society in a narrative form that itself embodies the temporality of the contemporary. They push against novelistic convention at a moment when, influenced in significant measure by the formal practices of Austen and Scott, the genre’s key structures and topoi were solidifying into the distinctive features with which we associate canonical Victorian fiction: namely, fiction that George Levine suggests “belongs, almost provincially, to a ‘middling’ condition and defines itself against the excesses, both stylistic and narrative, of various kinds of romantic, exotic, or sensational literature.”15 Silver-fork deviations from the models of earlier authors are not a failed attempt to imitate those examples or anticipate dominant novelistic trends to come. On the contrary, these authors synchronize their narratives with the temporality of fashion in an effort to conceptualize contemporary experience in a form that corresponds to the movements of modernity.

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With reference to Charles Baudelaire’s Parisian flâneur, Walter Benjamin articulates the intimate connection in nineteenth-century metropolitan life between the quotidian spectacles of consumer capitalism and the multitude of individuals who populate the cityscape: “He [the flâneur] seeks refuge in the crowd. … The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria – now a landscape, now a room. Both become elements of the department store, which makes use of flânerie itself to sell goods.”16 The modern city isn’t merely a site in which commodities abound, but becomes itself a visually saturated marketplace: both crowds and window displays figure as panoramas through which individuals move and in which they browse, at once anonymous persons in a multitude and shoppers with appetites to be formed.17 In the epigraph to this chapter, Charles Lamb avows his love of the city and of crowds, offering a polemical response to the preference for nature and solitude articulated by the Lake Poets. In his 1802 essay “The Londoner,” Lamb observes: I was born (as you have heard), bred, and passed most of my time, in a crowd. This has begot in me an entire affection for that way of life, amounting to an almost insurmountable aversion from solitude and rural scenes. … Often, when I have felt a weariness or distaste at home, have I rushed out into her [London’s] crowded Strand, and fed my humour, till tears have wetted my cheek for inutterable sympathies with the multitudinous moving picture, which she never fails to present at all hours, like the shifting scenes of a skilful Pantomime.18

The speaker is transported by this metropolitan landscape: he thrives amidst the bustle of the city’s crowded streets and, invigorated and joyful, finds himself moved by its ever-changing spectacles. The mobility of modern urban life is both spatial and affective. Even shopping meets with enthusiasm in Lamb’s account, for it represents a gratification of pleasure on all sides: “The endless succession of shops, where Fancy (­miscalled Folly) is supplied with perpetual new gauds and toys, excite in me no puritanical aversion. I gladly behold every appetite supplied with its proper food. The obliging customer, and the obliging tradesman … do not affect me with disgust. … I perceive nothing but urbanity.”19 On Lamb’s representation, the city offers its inhabitants anonymity and the visibility of public life simultaneously. Its “endless succession of shops” gratifies individual desire while also fuelling insatiable consumer appetites for novelty and pleasure. Novels correlated with the temporality of fashion embrace this modern reality of crowds and commodities, visual spectacle and urban scenes;

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they train their narrative energies on the “moving picture” of the city. The silver-fork novel takes us across the surface of modern life in order to demonstrate that the “shifting scenes” of the “Pantomime” are in fact that society’s substance. Ulrich Lehmann remarks that “[f]ashion, as an idea and as a system, prompted modern writers to find new forms of expression and to embrace change rather than eternal aesthetic values as guiding principles for their cultural production.”20 The novelists of the silver-fork school find in the ephemerality and spectacle of modernity’s teeming visual scene a form in which to conceptualize contemporaneity as such.

Contemporary Fiction and “the Pulse of [the] Age” In Romance and Reality, Landon has her hero, Edward Lorraine, reprise Austen’s defence of the novel in Northanger Abbey in terms that update the latter’s claims for the genre’s significance. In a conversation on the merits of new and older fiction, Edward remarks: Habit holds over the mind more than a despotic power; and hence I understand how it is possible for people to be blind to the great changes working around them. It is half curious, half ludicrous, to hear persons – ay, and critics too – talk of a novel as a pleasant hour’s amusement, and exhort the author gravely to turn his talents to higher account, wholly unconscious of the truth, that the novel is now the very highest effort – the popular vehicle for thought, feeling, and observation – the one used by our first-rate writers. Who, that reflects at all, can deny, that the novel is the literary Aaron’s rod that is rapidly swallowing all the rest. It has supplied the place of the drama – it has merged in its pages pamphlets, essays, and satires. Have we a theory – it is developed by means of a character; an opinion – it is set forth in dialogue; and satire is personified in a chapter, not a scene.21

Edward echoes Austen’s narrator in describing the novel as “now the very highest effort” in literature, and the genre best able to afford pleasure while also conveying “thought, feeling, and observation.” If readers and critics devalue literature that provides “a pleasant hour’s amusement,” he contends, it is because their judgment has been distorted by the “despotic power” of habit, which dulls thinking and clouds perception. To be heedless of changes in the literary field, though, is not merely to be inattentive or resistant: on Edward’s argument, it is to be disconnected from the world, “blind to the great changes working around them.” To be in step with the times, by contrast, is to recognize the novel as the vehicle most attuned to contemporaneity. Possessing unrivalled powers of representation and elasticity of form, the novel embodies the movements of modern

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life. Through Edward’s analysis, Landon thus recasts as a matter of currency and adaptability the critical prejudice that Austen addressed in terms of gender, or the reading habits of young women: namely, why are popularity and literary value so often held to be mutually exclusive? If Landon follows Austen in defending the genre “to the number of which [she herself is] adding,” as Northanger Abbey’s narrator might remark, Romance and Reality represents an instance of that genre that is largely unrecognizable when set against Austen’s example.22 As we will see shortly, Romance and Reality is no tale of “3 or 4 families in a country village.”23 Indeed, it deviates sharply from the carefully plotted, characterdriven model that would become the nineteenth-century British novel’s sine qua non. That deviation, though, stands at the heart of Edward’s claim that the innovative new fiction of the 1820s is, like a “literary Aaron’s rod[,] … rapidly swallowing all the rest.” The novel’s subsumption of those most socially oriented of literary forms – “drama,” “pamphlets, essays, and satires” – signifies not only its mutability, but equally its cultural and formal currency, its connection to both public opinion and the pace of social change. In an extended discussion of contemporary fiction in which Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s silver-fork and Newgate novels are singled out for particular praise, Landon’s characters argue that the best novels do not simply reflect the temper of the times; they shape it, giving it form and expression. One character observes that contemporary novels like Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham; or, The Adventures of a Gentleman (1828), to which we will turn in Chapter 2, have been “sufficiently original to create their own taste, [and] give their tone to the time” (1.199). Romance and Reality suggests that fashionable fiction like Pelham embodies a “new spirit” that “pour[s] fresh life into the novel” (1.198), thereby transforming the age, and the tenor and form of the novel itself. Edward’s defence of contemporary fiction associates the genre’s dynamic currency, moreover, with the mental agility that contemporary society demands of individuals, a plasticity which eschews the “despotic power” of habit. Silver-fork fiction demonstrates that to survive and thrive in the modern world, individuals must develop a mode of perception and thought, styled “keen observation” in Lord Normanby’s The Contrast (1832), that is active, attentive, and adaptable.24 “He who esteems trifles for themselves,” Bulwer-Lytton’s dandy Pelham remarks, “is a trifler – he who esteems them for the conclusions to be drawn from them, or the advantage to which they can be put, is a philosopher.”25 Silver-fork protagonists take their cue from a society permeated by the fashion system: attentive to ostensibly trivial details, they use their skills at observation

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and adaptability to navigate a society that has been indelibly marked by fashion’s principle of novelty and obsolescence and the visuality of public life. The silver-fork novel shows as well that the “openness to change” of fashion-conscious individuals is integral to the period’s new historical sensibility: individuals attuned to shifts in manners and commodity culture, transient spectacles and sensations, manifest an historical consciousness felt in quotidian change, rather than in the catastrophic events that populate history’s grand narratives of progress and decline.26 Gilles Lipovetsky credits the fashion system with developing the “new type of kinetic, open personality” that silver-fork novels advocate, and fostering the desire for change that enables democratic reform.27 He insists that “[its] irrationality and its apparent wastefulness aside, fashion  … ­socializes human beings to change and prepares them for perpetual recycling.” Fashion “is irreplaceable for a rapid adaptation to modernity, for the acceleration of transformations in progress, for the constitution of a society equipped to face the endlessly variable requirements of the future.”28 One needn’t share Lipovetsky’s optimism that the fashion system is a “globally positive power” in order to recognize that nineteenth-century consumers learned from fashion how to be modern.29 Fashion taught them to navigate a system of continuous change, reconceive of the contemporary as it was perpetually remade, and anticipate the emergence of new forms, energies, and opinions from among the hodgepodge of momentous and trivial preoccupations of the present. The silver-fork novel offended some of its critics by failing to distinguish adequately among contemporary issues – to differentiate, say, the importance of a franchise bill from that of a new dress fashion – but it nonetheless understood these phenomena as engaging the social collective in an analogous manner: through a logic of novelty and obsolescence, “perpetual recycling” and making new, and the feeling that one’s choice, however large or small, ushers in the future. “The system of consummate fashion puts civil society in a state of openness with respect to historical movement,” Lipovetsky contends; “it creates receptive mentalities characterized by fluidity that are inherently prepared for the voluntary adventure of the new.”30 Although the silver-fork school’s optimism about fashion’s transformative potential is ribboned with caustic satire, these novels represent a world organized by the fashion system as one open to new possibilities for reform. As we will see in the next chapter, silver-fork fiction links fashion to a renovation of the social order that brings together rank and merit, time-honoured custom and new energy, traditional hierarchies and fashionable innovation.

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Attuned to the currents of public opinion, silver-fork fiction introduced into the novel genre the most pressing political issues of the 1820s and 1830s, specifically in the years leading up to and following the First Reform Act of 1832. Edward Copeland argues, “Novels of fashionable life were novels about power, who has it and who doesn’t. Reform produced the issues that silver fork authors engaged, the renegotiation of traditional systems of power, including the shifts in social relationships and status that come along with such momentous change.”31 In one sense, the silver-fork novel’s engagement with the political and social issues of its day marks its difference from dress fashion proper: where dress fashion’s relationship to history is generally non-referential, silver-fork fiction responds consciously and in detail to its immediate historical context. In another sense, though, the silver-fork school’s engagement with Reform culture is precisely in line with its distinctive formal practice: the novels’ intensive focus on the contemporary lends priority to whatever currents are running through the social collective. Reform issues enter into the silver-fork novel not as the logical culmination of a long historical development, but rather as an eddy that has formed in the present out of the social and political movements of public life. Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Godolphin (1833), for example, a novel to which I will return in Chapter 2, goes so far as to suggest that the heroine, the savvy socialite Constance, Lady Erpingham, almost singlehandedly ensures the success of the Reform Bill by making it fashionable to be liberal. Fashion will not be pinned to a consistent politics, but it materializes with surprising accuracy the “spirit of the age.”32 Beyond matters of political reform, silver-fork novelists took the pulse of public opinion generally: they represented within their pages the latest phenomena, whether a new novel, a celebrated performer, a hot-button political issue, or a change in manners. They made the novel a vehicle for the talk of the town as well as contemporary social critique, thereby helping to forge new forms of entertainment and habits of consumption. Additionally, as we shall see, the leading publisher of the silver-fork school, Henry Colburn, exploited new print technologies and promotional techniques that allowed him to flood the book market with new volumes at an unprecedented rate and with unrivalled publicity. Not only did silver-fork fiction expand readership and increase sales, but it fed public appetites for the latest sensation, and, in the process, transformed the temporality of literary culture.33 Admittedly, the evidence of the silver-fork school’s intervention in both its contemporary culture and the history of the novel has largely receded from view amidst charges of its “excessive folly and insipidity,” as Hazlitt

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remarked in his essay on “The Dandy School.”34 Echoing this judgment a century later, Matthew Rosa observes in his 1936 study, The Silver Fork School, that “the fashionable novel, like any other weedy growth, bore in itself the causes of its decay.” Rosa claims that the pernicious values associated with the lives of the rich were “heightened in some degree by bad writing, for the reader [was] directly nauseated with the books, and indirectly with their subject.”35 Claudia Johnson has cautioned us, however, to reflect carefully on accusations of bad writing and narrative excess: authors dismissed as “misguided” for choosing “to indulge in ‘fugitive’ fads rather than to carry on the great realistic tradition of prose fiction” may offer us within their pages a basis for theorizing the cultural work that their narratives perform, and the representational possibilities engendered by their experimental deviations from generic norms.36 The silver-fork novel’s contemporary focus, innovative form, irreverent satire, and spectacular characters signify its engagement of the cultural ­energies of its moment, and its transformation of the novel genre in line with both the prospects and anxieties of a rapidly changing society. The school’s import lies not only in its engagement of social, political, and literary issues that we generally associate with more reputable nineteenth-century fiction, but equally in its interference in the generic norms taking shape in the days of the novel’s mounting cultural hegemony, and its status as a key cultural locus in which the possibilities and bounds of emerging subjective and social formations were explored. Silver-fork articulations of those formations demonstrate a capacity for representing the experience of a moment and the transience of the now, an innovation that, I will argue, makes itself felt in the novel in substantial ways through the nineteenth century and beyond. That said, we need not make claims for the underappreciated, weighty substance of the fashionable novel to justify reconsidering its literary and cultural significance and its place in our literary histories. Such a move, in fact, would distort what lies at the heart of the genre’s interest. The “light novelist,” Rosa observes, “has his fingers on the pulse of his age.”37 As this metaphor implies, the pulse to which the “light novelist” attends connects to powerful forces moving just beneath the surface. In the case of silverfork fiction, that pulse beats in time with fashion’s rhythms of change.

Silver-Fork Fiction and Contemporaneous History Silver-fork fiction is insistently, almost obsessively, contemporary in form and focus. Some novels of fashion are set in the recent past, like Catherine Gore’s Cecil (1841), which offers a dandy’s retrospect on the Regency era

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from a narrative present written at the moment of Queen Victoria’s coronation. In the main, though, silver-fork novelists are, to invoke Richard Cronin’s resonant phrase, “the historians of the contemporary.”38 Sharing the nineteenth-century desire for engagement in historical accounts, an idea to which I will return in Chapter 5 in the context of the sensation novel, silver-fork novelists historicize their own moment, rather than an earlier age. They anticipate by some three decades Aurora Leigh’s quintessentially Victorian call for a poetic “double vision” that would refuse to “flinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce,” in order that poets might “see near things as comprehensibly / As if afar they took their point of sight.”39 Paradoxically, silver-fork novelists articulate this vision of the contemporary in narratives that in some instances bear a less obvious relation to the nineteenth-century novel, especially the Bildungsroman, than does Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s experimental “novel-poem.”40 In the process, nonetheless, these novelists innovate a new form of historical representation in the novel, a contemporaneous history steeped in the manners, styles, and opinions of the present, yet dissected and analyzed as if seen from a distance.41 The silver-fork school owes much for its historical consciousness to Walter Scott’s Waverley novels. As critics since Georg Lukács have argued, Scott’s fiction stages the collision of individual lives with world-historical forces, positing the “derivation of the individuality of characters from the historical peculiarity of their age” and developing a sense of each era’s “peculiarity” through comparative cultural analysis.42 The Waverley novels trace history through long causal lines, fashioning in the Scottish novels in particular a national historical romance that folds the cultural and political losses of earlier ages into a developmental narrative which ends with economic and social modernization in the reader’s present. The paradigmatic example for such an interpretation of Scott’s fiction is Waverley’s postscript, in which the narrator laments the passing of an earlier age with its traditional customs, hereditary principles, and colourful characters, while heralding the “gradual influx of wealth, and extension of commerce” that has served to civilize society and wean it of its violent, chivalric past.43 Katie Trumpener remarks that on Scott’s example the historical novel can be characterized by “its plot of loss and growth through historical change” and its focus on “the way one developmental stage collapses to make room for the next and cultures are transformed under the pressure of historical events.”44 On this understanding of Scott’s fiction, the Waverley novels promote a continuous model of history, where resistance, struggle, and cultural loss will eventually become a nostalgic point of origin against which progress

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can be measured and around which modern national identities can be forged. More recent analyses of Scott’s fiction, however, have identified a greater complexity in the texts’ rendering of historical process, one that connects in important ways to the contemporaneous history of the silverfork novel. Ina Ferris points to historical remnant-figures like the City Guard in The Heart of Midlothian, for example, an extinct corps that lingers dissonantly in the narrative present, in order to illuminate Scott’s interest in the lags and discontinuities that mark history’s passage. Ferris contends that the guardsmen, as remnants that have eluded consolidation into a cohesive historical narrative, “inhabit a quotidian temporality deprived of glamour or resonance, and in this everydayness lies their significance. Focusing attention on the problem of history as not simply particular but present passage (i.e., as ongoing movement), they bring into view an important but obscured dimension of the historical sense that shaped Scott’s groundbreaking novels.”45 The significance that Ferris locates in the remnant-figure’s discordant presence opens a window onto the novel’s transformation in Scott’s wake, one which doesn’t dismiss the fiction that follows as a desultory offshoot of the Waverley novels’ worldhistorical vision. A commonplace about the post-Regency era in British novel studies is that historical fiction as practised especially by Scott fell out of fashion, to be replaced eventually by the social and historical epics of Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, and George Eliot. Those novelists who persisted with historical fiction after Scott, the story goes, produced mostly knock-offs which focus on the customs and manners distinguishing the “historical peculiarity of [an] age,” to return to Lukács’s phrase, but which fail to account adequately for the continuum of history.46 Ian Duncan characterizes the post-Waverley historical novel, for example, as “a weaker lineage of literal imitation [of Scott] in the examples of Bulwer, Ainsworth, and G.P.R. James.”47 My contention, however, is that novelists after Scott did not lose interest in innovating with narrative form to articulate a meaningful historical consciousness for their age; rather, they conceived of history on a new model, one synchronous with the quotidian temporality transforming nineteenth-century Britain. Duncan has written subsequently of the Newgate novel that its “example … shows us what is missing” from an account of nineteenth-century fiction that privileges “a normative, middle-class kind of novel represented by Scott and Austen: radical, demotic, disruptive, even pathological styles and energies of narration, surfacing in these new, unrespectable genres from urban popular culture.”48 I argue that these “disruptive” genres

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articulate history not as a series of crises tethered together and made sense of by narratives of causality, but rather as a sequence of changes whose ordinariness may belie their transformative force. Critics who attend to those facets of the Waverley novels that lie outside a teleological historiography, moreover, provide an entry point for linking Scott’s fiction to the “new, unrespectable genres” and foregrounding the latter’s engagement with the uneven temporality of the present.49 In the silver-fork novel, we find a stubborn insistence on the spectrality of the present, an idea to which I will turn shortly and which coincides with Scott’s interest in the historical remnant; in the Newgate novel, as we will see in Chapter 3, the everydayness of change supplants a revolutionary model of history. The novelists of these schools seek out history in the ordinary and collapse the distinction between historical eventfulness and quotidian change; on their model, historical significance resides in the ephemeral and commonplace as well as the cataclysmic. They turn their attention to the surfaces and transient spectacles of contemporaneity to key the historical sense of their narratives to the temporality of the present age. I contend that these novelists adapt from Scott’s attention to periodspecific detail, particularly with regard to dress, manners, and customs, strategies for materializing the distinctiveness of an era. Where silver-fork novelists deviate sharply from Scott’s example is in dispensing with the nostalgia that usually accompanies the Waverley novels’ representation of the past. Eschewing the idea that the present is a product of what came before or that the past is best regarded with sentimentality, silver-fork novelists turn their shrewd, satirical gaze insistently on the complexities and contradictions of contemporaneity. They focus, not on “plot[s] of loss and growth,” but rather, on the myriad social codes, customs, and preoccupations that characterize Regency society and through which they materialize the present as such.50 Their fiction attends to the ephemerality and surface detail of their world in order to critique its shallowness and artifice, and, at the same time, substantiate the widely held impression in the period that metropolitan life might be summed up as “all this phantasmagoria,” as suggests the astute socialite Lady Gayland in Lord Normanby’s The Contrast.51

The “Shadows of a Phantasmagoria” The contradictory impulses of the silver-fork novel’s representation of the present are a defining feature of the genre. Silver-fork novels are frequently as committed to satirizing high society for its frivolity and

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caprice as they are to revelling in its excesses. More substantially, silverfork fiction shows that such contradictions are inherent in contemporary life: speed and boredom enter the discourses of metropolitan experience simultaneously; consumer capitalism’s endless attractions are represented as both delightful and grotesque; and fashion, despite tireless, thunderous criticism, comes to organize virtually all social spheres, once everything has been “tilt[ed] … into the orbit of the fashion form.”52 Elizabeth Wilson observes that “fashion is as much a part of the dream world of capitalism as of its economy.”53 As I argued in the Introduction, modern fashion webs together the individual and the social in an aesthetic regime that enables autonomous self-expression at the same time as it binds individual identity to imagery and ideas held in common. Anne Hollander suggests that fashion offers a visual medium with its own lexicon in which collective fantasies and desires for change take aesthetic form “before anyone articulates and reasons the need.”54 Silver-fork fiction embraces the complexity of the individual’s relation to social and public life, articulating the utterly modern idea that commodity culture’s insatiable appetite for novelty permeates even the interior realm of desire, leaving the individual perpetually unsatisfied. In an exclamation that W. M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–48) would later echo, Romance and Reality’s narrator comments on the constitutive structure of commodified desire, “Oh, Life! – the wearisome, the vexatious – whose pleasures are either placed beyond our reach, or within it when we no longer desire them” (2.44).55 Some silver-fork characters, like Bulwer’s Pelham and Normanby’s Lady Gayland, thrive amidst the ephemerality of fashionable life, much of which transpires in the metropolis; others experience it as artificial and alienating. While these opposed experiences are usually parcelled out among different characters, the silver-fork novel makes clear that neither on its own fully represents the scene: only together, in perpetual tension, do they adequately embody contemporary experience. In Mary Shelley’s Lodore (1835), for example, a novel to which I will turn shortly, the young ingénue Ethel Fitzhenry, recently arrived in London, sees in “the moving crowd of men and women now around her so many automata: she started when she heard them address each other, and express any feeling or intention that distinguished them from the shadows of a phantasmagoria.”56 In an analogous observation made outside the pages of fiction, Walter Scott commented in his journal, while in London in 1828, “In this phantasmagorical place the objects of the day come and depart like shadows.”57 In the

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metropolis, people and objects appear similarly spectral. Wilson remarks that “[w]hat struck those who dwelt in the new or transformed cities of burgeoning industrialism were the dreamlike anonymity of the crowds and the inhumanity of a new environment which both fascinated and alarmed.”58 In the early nineteenth century, that inhumanity pertained to the growing inequalities of industrialization, a topic with which silver-fork fiction is wholly unconcerned, but also to the anonymization of individual life and the evanescence of the object world. The silver-fork novel takes as its main point of focus the crowded, perpetually shifting scenes of the metropolis which render animate and inanimate matter seemingly indistinguishable: people and objects are equally transient and fungible. Romance and Reality’s Lady Alicia, sister to the hero Edward Lorraine, represents a different kind of automaton, one whose insentience initially seems less a comment on the spectrality of contemporary life than the vacuity of fashionable society in particular. The very day after her London “coming out,” a young Lady Alicia finds herself spirited away from town by a change in her father’s political fortunes (1.25). Entombed in the country, she occupies herself by cutting out silhouettes: “the mornings in summer were spent at a small table by the window, and in winter by the fire, putting in practice the only accomplishment that remained – like a ghost of the past – cutting out figures and landscapes in white paper, whose cold, colourless regularity were too much in sympathy with herself for her not to excel in the art” (1.25). Lady Alicia’s white paper cut-outs, now a “paper landscape,” now a “little paper poodle,” may be a “ghost” of the female accomplishments in which she had been trained for past sociability (1.26–27), but the novel shows that they simultaneously embody with telling precision the phantasmagoria of the world she has left behind. The silhouettes themselves represent the spectrality, the automated figures and movements, of metropolitan life. Lady Alicia’s return to town after her subsequent marriage confirms how accurately her cut-outs have captured this life: despite having “one of the most elegant” houses in town, being “one of the best-dressed women in London,” and “never spen[ding] an evening at home,” Lady Alicia possesses neither affect nor intellectual substance (1.16). The narrator comments sardonically, “Few women, indeed, think, but most feel; now Lady Alicia did neither” (1.24). A leading woman of fashion, Lady Alicia has no more animation than “a statue” and no more substance than her spectral cut-outs (1.32). On one level, Landon simply takes the figure of the vacuous lady of fashion to a parodic extreme: there are distinct echoes here of Northanger Abbey’s Mrs. Allen, which are amplified later in Romance and Reality when

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Lady Alicia becomes a negligent chaperone to the novel’s young heroine, newly arrived in the metropolis and unfamiliar with its customs. On another level, though, Lady Alicia’s cold, colourless silhouettes point to the spectralizing of contemporary society in an age newly conscious of the movements of crowds and the vagaries of public opinion. “[F]eeling and intention” are necessarily transformed, to return to Shelley’s terms in Lodore, when one can no longer “distinguish … [the individuals in a crowd] from the shadows of a phantasmagoria” (173). To the extent that these effects are specific to Lady Alicia’s rarefied circle, the novel’s reflection on them, like its satire of her insentience, participates in the period’s commonplace critique of patrician bloodlessness. At the same time, however, the novel suggests that these effects are generalizable to a fashionconscious, metropolitan world in which all are implicated. Indeed, Romance and Reality embodies this ephemeral structure in its narrative form, as it moves restlessly through myriad social scenes and eschews conventional novelistic substance and depth in its exposition of character and situation. On Landon’s representation, the ephemerality of the contemporary emerges in part through what Deidre Lynch describes, quoting J.  G.  A. Pocock, as the “trading classes’ desire … to create ‘a world of moving objects,’ to speed up the mechanisms of communication and commerce that set commodities travelling and set people off in pursuit of them.”59 The mobility of commodity culture, though, doesn’t fully account for the restless energy in which Landon’s novel steeps itself. Romance and Reality demonstrates that the ephemerality of contemporaneity is equally the product of a print and visual culture permeated with fashion’s principle of novelty and obsolescence. This culture gives form to the period’s heightened sense of the present, generating “a new communal solidarity” through shared experiences of reading and reimagining their relationship to the material and social world around them.60 Copeland remarks that, especially in the “ten years prior to the shock of September 1831, when Lord Grey actually introduced a bill for parliamentary reform,” a long stream of ephemeral productions – woodcuts, engravings, lithographs, city guides, newspapers, novels, magazines, journals, annuals – had been documenting the changing face of the nation with obsessive attention, particularly to material changes that readers could see in the streets. The effects of fashion threatened new attitudes to rank and station, with spruce new clothing in the lower ranks, and rafts of other observable things that were simply not as they used to be.61

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The fashionable novel gives narrative form to this shadowy, transient, contemporary world, capturing in its topical, detail-filled depictions the saturation of commodity culture, and the reconfigurations of identity, space, time, and social place that were being engendered by new forms of social mobility.

The Temporality of Publishing: Henry Colburn The ideal of perpetual currency that distinguishes the silver-fork novel pertains not only to its novelistic concerns, but equally to the conditions of its production. Although the immediacy possible in three-volume novels produced in the early days of stereotype and the steam-powered printing press may seem quaintly antiquated compared to that which succeeded within just a few years of the silver-fork school’s heyday, silver-fork fiction in fact stood at the vanguard of novel publishing in the transitional period of the 1820s and early 1830s. Indeed, the imprint of Henry Colburn, under which most silver-fork novels appeared, helped to transform fiction publishing and consolidate many of the industry norms that would persist through the remainder of the nineteenth century and beyond. In 1829, The Athenaeum savaged Colburn in a front-page satire entitled “An Hour at a Publisher’s.” Dubbing him Mr. Colophon, The Athenaeum opens its satire with the remark, “Mr. Colophon, as the public are aware, is one of the most eminent of London booksellers. He is overwhelmed with business; and gaining £10,000 a year, he cannot afford to keep half an hour a day to himself.”62 Colburn was at the time at the height of his power and influence in the London book trade: according to the Dictionary of National Biography, almost half of the new novels published in 1829 – the year the Athenaeum satire appeared – bore his imprint.63 He was widely denounced by his contemporaries as a “guttersnipe,” a “sneaking vagabond,” and a publishing “bawd.”64 His dealings with authors and business partners were frequently unethical, sometimes flagrantly dishonest. Rival publishers condemned him for finding no promotional tactic beneath him that might serve to increase book sales, and saturating the market with literature that they felt debased the public taste. It was in large measure because of his business practices, however, that Colburn became one of the most successful publishers of his generation, reportedly leaving an estate worth £35,000 at his death in 1855.65 The Athenaeum satire provides insight into the industry transformations that Colburn effected through the networks which he established among different print vehicles and the agents who controlled them. As the

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fictional narrator of the piece looks on, Mr. Colophon conducts business with a series of prospective and published authors, each of whom seeks to capitalize on his financial success. Among the most interesting of these exchanges is a conversation with one of Colophon’s fashionable novelists, the fictional Lady Amelia Aubrey, whom John Sutherland reads as a stand-in for the novelist Lady Charlotte Bury.66 Lady Aubrey suggests that Colophon could pay her more for the latest manuscript she’s promised him if only he would trade on her fashionable name to increase sales. He responds: O! undoubtedly, … your ladyship’s name will be of great service. As soon as the work is published, I will persuade my friend of the Morning Chronicle to attack the ladies of the aristocracy, for being so profligate as to write novels instead of codes of criminal law, and will make him add, in a note, as a piece of secret intelligence, that your ladyship is a flagrant delinquent.67

While the words attributed to the Colburn character are fictional, the tactics that the piece depicts were precisely those for which he was known. Colburn advertised new titles not by a straightforward announcement of their publication, but through advance hints, name-dropping, or, when a novel was to appear anonymously, speculation as to the identity of the author. Capitalizing on the rage for “named authors” that Tom Mole suggests transformed the literary market from the 1810s on,68 Colburn traded on the names of his aristocratic authors – Lady Bury, Lady Caroline Lamb, the Countess of Blessington, Lord Normanby, Lady Morgan – or hinted that a new novelist might hail from aristocratic circles even when that was not the case, as with Benjamin Disraeli. Beyond these controversial strategies, Colburn used other print media, most notably the newly influential literary periodicals, to pass off as “secret intelligence,” or insider information, what were essentially advertisements for his books.69 The Athenaeum’s allusion to Lady Charlotte Bury in this context underscores the important intersection of a generalized fashion system with celebrity culture in the early nineteenth century. Part of Colburn’s savvy was in feeding the public’s burgeoning appetite for a sense of intimacy with well-known figures and currency in their media and literary information. Bury was a perfect tool in this regard. Having served as lady-in-waiting to Queen Caroline in the 1810s, Bury capitalized on her experiences at court by writing romans à clefs that dished up the secrets of fashionable circles.70 She trafficked readily on her insider knowledge of high society and made a successful career for herself by fictionalizing the lives of those situated “at the centre of the fashionable intelligence, and at the top of the fashionable

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tree,” as the narrator of Bleak House would say.71 What the Athenaeum piece makes clear is that Colburn’s success as a publisher depended on an analogous traffic in information: he systematically secured the routes along which literary and cultural information travelled by establishing them inhouse, directly within his control. He built formal networks that linked his publishing house directly to the periodicals that reviewed new novels, the newspapers that noticed them, and the circulating libraries that purchased them in bulk. Much to his rivals’ disgust, Colburn made no effort to disguise this information network. Rather, he set it as the cornerstone of what effectively became known in the period as the Colburn brand. Central to his practice was the expansion of his publishing interests to include ownership in other print media. He set up literary magazines such as the New Monthly Magazine in 1814 and the Literary Gazette in 1817 that were not only successful in their own right, but more importantly for his interests, served as vehicles for hyping his books.72 He used the magazines to publish advance notice of forthcoming titles, and positive reviews of a book once it had appeared. Editors were not always as compliant with Colburn’s manipulation of their magazines, however, as he might have liked. When they resisted his interference, as the Gazette’s William Jerdan did in the 1820s, Colburn simply divested himself of one periodical and founded or purchased another. In the case of Jerdan’s defiance of the plan to use the Gazette as an advertising medium for Colburn’s books, the Dictionary of National Biography reports that “Colburn’s response was to purchase a half-share in The Athenaeum, which gingerly acknowledged his involvement in its first issue in 1828.”73 The industry condemnation of Colburn’s tactics did not turn simply on his interference with the autonomy of particular periodicals. More fundamentally, his contemporaries in publishing and reviewing alike took exception to what Fraser’s Magazine described in 1830 as Colburn’s penchant for “puffery.” In the words of the Fraser’s editor, Henry Colburn “has not only invented, but brought the present art and mystery of puff manufacture to its existing condition.”74 Puffing was the term widely used in the period for advertising and publicity, and Colburn reportedly spent enormous sums promoting his lists.75 Complaining of what were seen as unfair business practices, the Fraser’s editor comments: Does [Colburn] not keep clerks and writers whose exclusive employ is, as he says, ‘solely to look after the papers and advertisements?’ … He is proprietor of the Court Journal, of the New Monthly Magazine, of the Naval and Military Magazine, and of the Sunday Times – he has a share in the Literary Gazette, … and every newspaper opens its columns for [his] puffs

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and eulogies. … The higher circles in London are not aware of the existence of such intricate and hidden machinery – they only see the effect in the columns of the Morning Post, the Morning Chronicle, the Age; or the John Bull; and, trusting to the truth of public statements, … they send for the book to the circulating librarian.76

Sutherland contends that Colburn was “quicker than his contemporaries to understand the interdependence of various book-trade sectors.… His motives were low. But in this early form of diversified book-trade ­operation … Colburn anticipated what is now termed synergistic patterns of publishing.”77 While later nineteenth-century publishers would dispense with some of the less salubrious elements of Colburn’s operations, they would all soon recognize the value of the coordinated promotional strategies that he initiated and the sense of currency his novels embodied as a result. By mid-century, most of the seven main publishing houses that would dominate the Victorian market were spending analogous, if not greater, amounts on what Fraser’s Magazine had referred to derisively only two decades earlier as the “hidden machinery” of publicity – namely, a division of the business whose sole occupation was “to look after the [news]papers and advertisements.” The days of a good book selling itself were already over, if they ever existed. Of particular pertinence to the silver-fork school, Colburn was the single most prolific publisher of new fiction in this period, expanding his fiction list when no other publisher dared to.78 At key moments, especially in the wake of the Constable crash of 1826 and the years immediately surrounding the First Reform Act, most of the publishers who were willing to publish novels stuck with the safer option of reprinting older titles. In those difficult financial years, Mary Shelley, for one, declared herself grateful for Colburn’s commitment to new fiction. After Colburn had published The Last Man in 1826 and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck in 1830, Shelley advised her friend Edward Trelawny in 1831 to accept Colburn’s offer for the manuscript of Adventures of a Younger Son, explaining that, “occupied as England is by political questions and impoverished miserably[,] there are few [publishers] who have enterprise at this juncture to offer a price. … [My] father and myself would find it impossible to make any tolerable arrangement with any one except Colburn. … Believe my experience and that of those about me – you will not get a better offer from others.”79 In reply to Trelawny’s suggestion that he would prefer to place his manuscript with Byron’s friend and publisher John Murray, Shelley remarks, “I believe that if I sent your work to Murray, he would return it in two months unread – simply saying that he does not print novels.”80

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The range of literature carrying the Colburn imprint in the early nineteenth century was wide: he published everything from biography and memoirs to travel writing, John Burke’s Peerage, and the first edition of Samuel Pepys’s Diary. Reflecting his interest in authors who had their “fingers on the pulse of [the] age,”81 Colburn brought out William Hazlitt’s The Spirit of the Age: or, Contemporary Portraits in 1825, capitalizing on the fame that Hazlitt enjoyed following his popular Lectures on the English Poets (1818).82 That Colburn’s catalogue in the mid-1820s included both The Spirit of the Age and the fashionable novels that Hazlitt disdained points to the complex navigation of contemporaneity, publicity, and fashion that authors in the period undertook in conceptualizing the present. For Colburn, who had no qualms about following trends, any texts that contributed to public discourse about literature, culture, and social change were equally engaged with the “spirit of the age” and thus likely to sell. To Hazlitt, whose relationship to fame, publicity, and posterity was significantly more vexed, the distance between his own conception of the contemporary and that of silver-fork novelists would presumably have appeared wide.83 His attention in The Spirit of the Age to his authors’ consciousness of their publics and engagement with the issues of the day, however, shows how fully his conception of the literary field was immersed in a print and media culture that prioritized currency and visibility. Duncan Wu suggests, “Perhaps the most important development of his time, the creation of a mass media, is one … [on which] Hazlitt’s livelihood was dependent.”84 Like Shelley, Hazlitt recognized the benefit of working with a publisher who prioritized innovation and publicity. The breadth of Colburn’s catalogue notwithstanding, he made his name and much of his fortune publishing fiction. Rosa credits him with publishing “nine-tenths of the fashionable novels” of the 1820s.85 Colburn supplied the circulating libraries with the kinds of titles that proved most popular, and produced new titles as quickly, it seems, as he could find authors to write them. He approached literature like any other commodity made desirable by fashion’s principle of novelty and obsolescence, embracing the verdict that Henry Mansel would deliver three decades later against the sensation novel, that such texts were meant to last no longer than “the fashions of the current season.”86 If many of the fiction titles that Colburn published were the equivalent of what we would now call fast fashion, their material evanescence was wholly synchronous with the focus of their narratives: they were novels that represented the ephemerality of the age. The silver-fork fiction so closely allied with Colburn’s name embodies a mode of temporality defined by

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transience and up-to-dateness. It shows fashion’s temporality to be not just pertinent to, but constitutive of, the movements of modern life.

Lodore and Society’s “Vital Heat” Shelley’s own society novel Lodore exemplifies the complexity of the nineteenth-century novel’s engagement of fashion. Her penultimate novel was published in 1835, not by Colburn, but by his successor Richard Bentley, three years after their short-lived partnership had collapsed. Bentley may have prided himself on more respectable business practices, but he had nonetheless learned from his erstwhile partner the importance of a diversified list and the profit to be made from fashionable novels in particular. Even without Colburn’s imprint, the signs of the latter’s influence on 1830s fiction are everywhere apparent in Shelley’s one foray into the silver-fork genre. A novel of contemporary history, focused on the manners and opinions of the day, Lodore is subtitled “A Tale of the Present Times.” It follows the fortunes of an unhappily married couple, Lord and Lady Lodore, and their daughter Ethel as they alternately court fashionable society and struggle to understand its movements and resist its allure. Shelley’s novel differs from other silver-fork fiction principally in the severity of its critique: where most silver-fork novels take pleasure in the excesses of fashionable society even as they satirize them, Lodore excoriates this world, showing it to be shallow and capricious. Shelley shows the alternatives to fashion, however, to be far from viable, especially for women. The narrator suggests that a woman who follows fashion risks “dedicat[ing]” herself to “the vulgar worship of Mammon” and making herself “incapable of … feeling” (136). Those women who shun society and remove themselves from the world, however, fare little better. Lodore’s principled, unfashionable women prove to be either dependent and vulnerable in their devotion to husbands, fathers, and brothers, or torpid in their antisocial isolation. The embodiment of the novel’s ambivalence about fashion is Lady Lodore. The daughter of a woman who was the worst sort of worshipper of fashion, Lady Lodore received a bad education and “had not learned to feel with or for others.” “Her beauty and the admiration it acquired, sate [sic] her on the throne of the world, and, to her own imagination, she looked down like an eastern princess, upon slaves only” (134). The narrative relentlessly censures her imperiousness and self-importance, which it attributes directly to fashion’s influence. The narrator also acknowledges, however, that Lady Lodore is a model of beauty, grace, and sensibility,

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fiercely intelligent and resilient, and that she has honed these traits in the world. She ultimately proves herself, moreover, able to grow and change, and the novel makes clear that her adaptability is equally a product of her fashion-consciousness. The narrator remarks that Lady Lodore “was a woman who in Sparta had formed an heroine; who in periods of war and revolution, would unflinchingly have met calamity, sustaining and leading her own sex … but her mind was narrowed by the mode of her bringing up, and her loftiest ideas were centered in worldly advantages the most worthless and pitiable” (135). Had Lady Lodore lived in an age of “war and revolution,” the narrator suggests, when the prevailing experience of history was tied to violent action and cataclysmic change, she would have entered the historical record as a warrior and a “lead[er] [of] her own sex.” In the “present times,” however, history is felt in the everyday changes that distinguish the temporality of fashion. In this era, Lady Lodore exercises her intelligence and force of will not in the battlefield but in the drawing room, where her ambition quickly narrows to “worthless and pitiable” “advantages.” Shelley’s resolution of Lady Lodore’s plot line, however, qualifies this condemnation of society’s influence. Despite the novel’s censure of Lady Lodore for “enter[ing] into the very thickest maze of society,” it concedes that she ultimately improves under this influence. The narrator observes that, “from season to season she shone a bright star among many luminaries, improving in charms and grace, as knowledge of the world and the desire of pleasing were added to her natural attractions” (136). Shelley complicates Lodore’s critique of fashion by realizing within the narrative the benefits to be gained from “knowledge of the world” and an immersion in society’s currents. Sociability proves a life force for Lady Lodore, which the female characters who hold themselves outside society’s influence fail to enjoy. As a contrast to the woman of fashion, Shelley presents Lady Lodore’s daughter, Ethel Fitzhenry, a character aligned with an emergent nineteenthcentury domestic ideology. The novel praises Ethel for her simplicity and filial devotion, but shows her to be fragile, self-destructive, and lacking in the worldliness that fosters her mother’s adaptability. When Ethel’s father dies suddenly, for example, she is entrusted to the care of her maiden aunt Elizabeth, whom the narrator describes as an individual who “knew as much of the world as [Fielding’s] Parson Adams” (153). Although in childhood Ethel is at her happiest when alone with her father in nature, she later realizes the social and emotional cost of this retirement: following his death, she recognizes “that she and the worthy spinster [her aunt] were solitary wanderers on earth, cut off from human intercourse” (243). The novel represents society as a dynamic force; the individual who withdraws

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from its stimulus suffers mentally and physically. Indeed, Lodore inverts the usual alignment of health with country life: when Ethel begins to decline, the physician declares her “mind only to be sick” (172) and sends her to London to recover her health. London’s kaleidoscope of scenery and spectacle figures here, not as a site of danger for a young woman, but as a cure. The narrator remarks with reference to Ethel and her aunt, “all people who live in solitude become to a certain degree insane. Their views of things are not corrected by comparing them with those of others; and the strangest want of proportion always reigns in their ideas and sentiments” (427). On Lodore’s representation, the retirement of country life risks torpor, the evacuation of desire, even madness; women in particular suffer when they are “cut off from human intercourse.” Refusing finally to decide among the different modes of sociability its characters embody, Lodore remarks simply that fashion’s permeation of the contemporary is a reality to which all must accommodate themselves, for antisocial withdrawal leads only to insanity or death. Shelley’s novel condemns fashionable society for its excesses, yet simultaneously recognizes its sites of sociability as necessary to perspective and understanding, and its energy as vital to growth and change. Consistent with Ethel’s experience of the metropolis as cure, Shelley writes in her journal about society as a kind of life force: I like society — I beleive [sic] all persons of any talent (who are in good health) do — The soil that gives forth nothing may lie ever fallow — but that which produces — however humble its product — needs ­cultivation  — change of harvest — refreshing dews & refining sun — books do much — but the living intercourse is the vital heat, debarred from that how have I pined & died.87

A life that “gives forth nothing” may survive outside of the world’s influence, but it will only “lie … fallow.” By contrast, those individuals who would be dynamic and productive, who would “try what [their] powers are for the general good,” to invoke a formulation from Romance and Reality (1.170), must immerse themselves in society’s “living intercourse” and benefit from its “vital heat.”

Taste, Custom, and Fashion Time From its earliest pages, Landon’s Romance and Reality remarks fashion’s permeation of then-contemporary British society. The novel opens with a simple, fragmented description of the drawing room of Arundel Hall, the family seat of the heroine, Emily Arundel: “Such a room as must be at least

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a century’s remove from London, large, white, and wainscoted” (1.1). As the first in a long series of descriptors with no predicate to threaten action in this static space, the narrator’s comment figures the datedness of the room and its quiet, countrified inhabitants by measuring a matter of style in units of temporal distance: to be contemporary, to live in the present is to mark one’s proximity to the metropolis in terms of the currency of one’s taste and sensibility. This is the spatial, temporal, and affective configuration of contemporary life with which many silver-fork protagonists must contend: metropolitan taste and fashion time form the measures through which modernity itself is conceptualized. To young Emily, longing for change and a sphere of action, the sleepy stillness of Arundel Hall seems to exclude it from the movement of modern time, which, she correctly anticipates, is circuited through the metropolis. She soon discovers, though, that her family home is not outside of the reach of fashion’s temporal measure, but simply out of fashion, and that her own taste is similarly outmoded. Emily learns that to be removed from London by “at least a century” in an age when fashions change by the year, if not the month, is to find oneself significantly off the pace when, like Frances Burney’s Evelina, one makes one’s entrance into the world. The eponymous protagonist of Shelley’s Lodore similarly discovers that a self-imposed exile from London society fails to make him impervious to the temporal and affective registers of the metropolis: the world runs on fashion time, and its measures permeate every facet of contemporary existence, including subjective experience itself. After becoming disenchanted with fashionable society, Lord Lodore removes himself to America, where, with his daughter Ethel, he spends a dozen years contentedly in “the seclusion of the Illinois” (146). When he returns to the world, though, his perception of his American retreat is transformed: he now recognizes that the period of exile was characterized, not by the “calm enjoyment” he believed in, but by stagnancy and “monotonous loneliness” (146). On the silverfork novel’s account, to be modern is to be mobile – adaptable, dynamic, current – and to be in the world is necessarily to set one’s pace to fashion’s temporality. The silver-fork novel shows that, as with Ethel, the only alternative to fashion is antisocial withdrawal, an option that it casts as destructive and selfish. When Romance and Reality’s Emily makes her first trip to London, she quickly learns that the cultivation of taste depends upon an understanding of current dress fashion. “Shopping, true feminine felicity!” the narrator exclaims; “how rapidly it passed the morning away – how in a few short hours were Emily’s ideas expanded! Here she blushed for her sleeves,

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there for her flounces: how common seemed the memory of her red-rose wreath beside her newly acquired taste for golden oats!” (1.34). Awaiting the arrival of her new purchases, Emily must resign herself that evening to wearing an outmoded blue silk gown that she “had thought bleu céleste, at least in the country.” Reflecting on the heroine’s transformed perception, the narrator comments, “What a march does a woman’s intellect, i.e. taste, take in the streets of London!” (1.34–35). The narrator’s mockserious exclamations seem an unsubtle satire of the importance attached to such things as sleeves and flounces, or the idea that a woman’s intellectual development depends on retail therapy. The novel underscores its critique, moreover, with an explicit reference to the satirical “March of Intellect” prints of the late 1820s by artists William Heath and Robert Seymour. Responding warily to the optimism with which some in the period greeted Britain’s pace of change, the illustrations caricature the idea of social and technological progress by representing a modern Britain alternately awash in consumer goods and fantastical inventions such as flying machines and horseless carriages or destroyed by rampant urban sprawl and self-educated political protesters. Landon’s representation of Emily’s progress thus aligns fashion with a commodifying force that mistakes novelty for knowledge and currency for meaningful social change. Like Shelley’s ambivalent representation of fashionable society in Lodore, however, Landon’s satire of fashion stands alongside a robust engagement with its idiom. The satire of Emily’s enlightenment in fact signals the novel’s fashion-consciousness: the narrator’s to-the-moment invocation of the March of Intellect prints makes clear that to grasp the novel’s critique, readers need to know what’s in fashion. The narrator’s joke about women, shopping, and progress, that is, presupposes a contemporary reader who is up on the latest cultural phenomena, in this instance a recently published series of prints that present the forms and effects of technological, social, and political change as matters of pressing concern. While Romance and Reality mocks fashion, it simultaneously invites its readers to reflect on their collective implication in fashion’s organizing principles. The novel indicates that fashion consciousness supplies individuals with a cultural currency that has become essential for understanding and analyzing the present. Being in fashion becomes both the object and the means of social critique. This paradox runs throughout the silver-fork school: critiques of fashion are made in the most current idiom. Narrative condemnations of the worst excesses of fashion stand side-by-side with concessions to its inextricability from contemporary society. Silver-fork novelists show that cultural literacy and fashion consciousness, broadly understood, are prerequisites

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to participation in the social. They make clear, moreover, that individual identity and desire are similarly inexpressible outside of fashion’s idiom. With Emily’s shopping trip, Landon demonstrates that fashion’s principle of perpetual currency underlies the cultivation of taste and the modern processes of identification through which individuals express themselves and signal their belonging to the social collective. As I argued in the Introduction, the available imagery of a collective aesthetic regime structures in the realm of the social even our most intimate feelings about where beauty lies and what appeals to the senses. Lodore’s young hero Edward Villiers remarks, similarly, “according to the ideas of the society in which he [the individual] is bred, so are his desires fashioned” (283). Individual taste and desires are formed by the society in which one lives, rendering its imagery, codes, and customs inseparable from the feelings and judgments that we conventionally regard as definitive of individuality. The silver-fork novel takes as one of its central concerns the fashion system’s transformation of subjectivity and public life. In Romance and Reality, Landon confirms the ongoing relevance of Adam Smith’s fashion-inflected theory of taste and beauty, despite significant changes in the felt experience of custom and collectivity by the 1830s. As we saw in the Introduction, Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) dismantles the eighteenth-century philosophy of taste as rational, disinterested, and formed in relation to qualities inherent in objects themselves, arguing instead that our notions of taste and beauty are formed by the arbitrary, illusory “conjunction[s]” and “arrangements” with which custom familiarizes us.88 Romance and Reality updates Smith’s insight to expose fashion’s organization of all facets of the social, from an individual’s taste and self-understanding to the configuration of collective life. Discussing young women on the marriage market, for example, Landon’s narrator comments, “we all see with other people’s eyes, especially in matters of taste”: She [a young lady] may be rich – but an heiress, like a joint-stock company, requires to be properly advertised. She may be witty – but bon-mots require to be repeated rather than heard for a reputation; and who is to do this but a chaperone? – That being of delicate insinuations, of confidential whispers, of research in elder brothers, of exclusiveness in younger ones, she of praises and partners for her own protégé, of interruptions, ifs and buts, for others. (1.58–59)

The narrator contends that the associations with which communal discourse familiarizes us are constitutive of our sense of beauty as well as our desire for a beautiful object, whether the object is a new gown or, as here,

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a marriageable young woman. An attractive commodity on its own is not enough: value is accorded to an object only as it is seen through others’ eyes, through shared associations or “proper … advertis[ing].” The chaperone’s confidential whisper, like a periodical review’s “puffing” of the latest novel, helps to shape taste and engender desire. Admittedly, the narrator’s characteristic irony may appear to undercut the novel’s endorsement of a fashion-inflected theory of taste: young women compared to shares in a joint-stock company, or the hucksterism of chaperones described as “delicate”? Or if Romance and Reality does subscribe to such a theory, surely we are meant to understand it as ridiculous and lamentable. This passage reads as a scathing indictment of a world in which commodities and persons, especially female persons, circulate in the same system of exchange. As with the novel’s gesture to the March of Intellect prints, however, the narrator’s tone and commentary here produce a layering of meanings that belies the simplicity of the passage’s satire. The context for this particular set of observations is Emily Arundel’s first trip to London: the heroine is entrusted to the care of the fashionable automaton Lady Alicia, she of the white paper cut-outs. Receiving neither guidance nor proper advertising when she enters London society, Emily languishes on its sidelines, overlooked and undervalued. As I have suggested, Romance and Reality reprises the narrative topos of the negligent chaperone that Landon learns from Burney and Austen: like Evelina’s Mrs. Mirvan, who always seems to be playing cards at the moment of Evelina’s greatest distress, or Northanger Abbey’s Mrs. Allen, too indolent to advise Catherine Morland properly on her conduct, Lady Alicia is a woman illsuited to what the novel suggests is the fateful job of chaperonage. To adequately care for her young charge, the chaperone must possess a certain genius: “il faut un génie pour cela,” Landon’s narrator remarks, “and to that Lady Alicia made no pretensions” (1.59). In Landon’s hands, the harmful consequences of a negligent chaperone are farther-reaching than in either of her predecessor’s. Unprotected and unprepared for the world, Emily finds herself in a series of mishaps and displacements that leads, not to an unlikely union with an idealized object of desire as befalls Evelina and Catherine, but instead to a premature death. Emily’s tragic end is attributed to a range of causes – too little religious training, too much solitude, romantic delusions left too long unchecked – but on balance, the novel suggests that early female guidance has been wanting and proper social training has come too late. Given Emily’s demise, the fatefulness that the narrator earlier attributed to the chaperone’s role seems hardly so ironic. We are obliged to concede

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that, indeed, a young woman’s “destiny is in her [chaperone’s] hands,” that none “is so utterly dependent as a young lady on her chaperone,” and that, without the wise counsel of a competent guide to navigate society especially in matters of manners and taste, the heroine will be quite literally cast adrift (1.58). We may chalk up the narrator’s sardonic remarks to a censure of the machinations necessary to arrange a suitable marriage, or a critique of the commodification of women in Regency society. What we cannot conclude is that the narrator’s observations on fashion’s underpinnings of taste, allure, and sociability, even in the matter of a young woman’s education and marriage, are made simply in jest or disdain. Like Lodore, Romance and Reality constructs a vision of contemporary life that intertwines narrative contempt for the social realities it describes with delight in its own irreverence and innovation, bemusement at society’s absurdities, and subtending all, an acceptance of modern social forms. Much as, by the end of Vanity Fair (1847–48), Thackeray’s narrator comes grudgingly to counsel tolerance rather than censure and to defend the way of the world that he initially disenchanted so trenchantly, Romance and Reality’s narrator represents customs and manners as fundamental to individual identity and social belonging. Those customs may be regrettable or even ridiculous; individuals may lament the practices they must observe. The novel demonstrates, however, that deference to society is essential for one’s well-being and survival, and that ultimately it benefits both individual and community. Once the urbane Lady Mandeville has belatedly assumed chaperone duties for Emily Arundel, for example, she advises the neglected heroine, with regard to fashion, to “indulge in no vagrant creations of your own. What Pope said of fate is still truer of fashion – ‘Whatever is, is right’” (2.212). “Of all deferences,” Lady Mandeville counsels, “be most implicit in that you pay to opinion” (2.213). If the narrative tone once again invites suspicion as to the sincerity of such counsel, we may dispel our doubts by setting these observations alongside those that the narrator makes with regard to the importance of measuring our feelings and judgments against those of others: “The truth is,” the narrator remarks, “that general taste is always good; because, before it becomes general, it has been compared and corrected: but as for individual taste, the less we have of it the better” (2.333). Like good students of Smith’s theory of sympathetic judgment, ever measuring their response to suffering against that of their peers, Landon’s narrator invokes the social collective as a force for good, one that embodies the spirit of the age and that, when deferred to, checks errant passions and disruptive idiosyncrasies.

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Even Beatrice de los Zeridos – the young Spaniard who enters Romance and Reality only at the close of the second volume, becomes a replacement heroine for Emily in volume three, and ultimately marries the hero Edward Lorraine – must reconcile herself to the customs of fashionable British society when her husband embarks on a public career. Trained by hardship in her native Spain to exertion, self-discipline, and political and moral idealism, Beatrice embodies an alternative to the fashionable sociability exemplified by the novel’s other central female characters, most of whom are British. Strikingly, Beatrice is the least engaged with polite society of all the female characters and the most retiring when in public; though she possesses an innate bravery and daring that her British counterparts lack, these traits barely manifest outside her homeland. Her moral idealism and modesty bring her closest of all the female characters, paradoxically, to anticipating the figure of the Victorian domestic angel. The narrator reports that, once married, Beatrice devotes herself entirely to her husband: she “shrink[s] away from the many, to concentrate her whole existence on the one” (3.330). If Beatrice represents the kind of domestically minded heroine that would become ubiquitous in Victorian fiction, however, her moral probity and antisocial withdrawal seem to have no place in Romance and Reality’s contemporary world. As we will see in Chapter 2 with Gore’s Cecil, Landon’s novel remarks the advent of the new domestic ideal but declines to endorse it. Earlier in Edward and Beatrice’s courtship, for instance, the narrator comments on the importance of sociability in shaping individual character: “His [Edward’s] manners had that fine polish only to be given by society, and that of the best” (3.93). Edward’s social training has instilled in him a deep-seated commitment to the collective: it is in public life, he counsels his reclusive brother, that one may exert one’s “powers … for the general good” (1.170). The “many paths of utility” (1.167) that one might take in order to realize such powers can only be identified and pursued when individuals immerse themselves in society. “A whole life spent in society,” the narrator remarks, “inevitably refers its action to the general opinion. Beatrice, as yet, looked not beyond the action itself” (3.94). Even the air of privacy Beatrice maintains when she reluctantly enters the world in support of her husband’s political career becomes a readily identifiable pose in the eyes of fashionable society: “The world said that the beautiful Spaniard was cold as she was beautiful – too reserved and too proud for attraction” (3.330). Beatrice’s disdain for public display may preserve her from the vanity that fashion inspires, but her disengagement is simply a posture that disqualifies her from a more active sociability,

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relegating her to a passivity in public life that a socially astute character like Lady Mandeville does not share. The novel suggests that one must participate in the customs that define the age in order to contribute to society’s progress and benefit from its insights.

Fashion, Conversation, and Community Romance and Reality makes clear that whatever compromises might be required in order to “pay [deference] to opinion” (2.213), as Lady Mandeville recommends, the benefits to be accrued far outweigh the costs. We see that payoff depicted most vividly in the novel’s seemingly endless paean to the formative influence of good conversation. Picking up on the significance of conversation that, as Jon Mee has shown, permeated eighteenth-century thought where it was tied closely to commercial modernity, Romance and Reality suggests that it is in conversation that the opinions of the world are ascertained and the value of those social customs and principles most deserving of respect establishes itself.89 The novel specifies that deference is not to be paid willy-nilly to any opinion one happens to encounter, but rather, to those views and judgments that have been sifted, weighed, and finally held by general agreement to be worthy. In order to demonstrate how such worth is established and exactly which currents run through contemporary life, Landon organizes her novel to provide a survey of “the general opinion” and “general taste.” Romance and Reality’s experimental narrative form serves, that is, to foreground the energies and opinions of the social collective, rather than the psychic and emotional development of a single protagonist. The novel devotes scant energy, as I have suggested, to either plotting or sustained character development. After all, Beatrice does not appear until the third volume, Emily stands on the narrative sidelines as a “mere spectator of pleasure” (1.55) for most of the first volume, and Edward, like other silver-fork heroes, seems to come ready-made with irreproachable principles and well-honed critical acumen. The novel focuses not on the interiority or maturation of its central characters but, rather, on brief anecdotes of fashionable society and figures who only tangentially cross the protagonists’ plot lines in order to exemplify some facet of the contemporary scene. The novel privileges above all the current opinions and ideas “then swimming in the public consciousness.”90 To produce a composite sketch of contemporary life, Romance and Reality documents the manners, customs, and predilections that distinguish the age and the myriad sites and spaces through which its characters move.

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Landon shows the beating heart of this world to be conversation. Much like Shelley’s representation of the “living intercourse” of society as a “vital heat,” good conversation functions in Romance and Reality as a kind of life blood. Those skilled in conversation are able to satisfy basic needs for sympathetic connection and information and benefit from truths and insights to be gleaned only by engaging with the “general opinion.” When Emily is rescued from neglect by Lady Mandeville, in whose society the young heroine immediately revives, the narrator reports: “It had been so long since Emily had spoken to any one capable of even comprehending a single idea, much less of entering into a single feeling, that conversation was like a new sense of existence. How irksome, how wearying, to be doomed always to the society of those who are like people speaking different languages!” (2.83). Similarly, when Edward has met a celebrated author, Lady Mandeville asks of him, “Could he talk?” “Wonderfully!” Edward responds; “Singular opinions singularly maintained! A flow of words, very felicitous, and yet such as no one else would have used” (2.188). The originality of the author’s “discourse” (2.188), the opinions he holds, the way he supports his ideas, and the felicity of his expression are all traits that mark his exemplary character and value to society. Through many such character sketches and anecdotes, the novel provides a taxonomy of conversation: it catalogues the styles and qualities of different conversational modes, deems them felicitous or awkward, tedious or invigorating, and assesses their success in conveying both taste and feeling. Consistent with what I will argue in the next chapter is the silver-fork school’s substantial generic debt to eighteenth-century novelistic forms, Romance and Reality explores the social value of conversation in a manner that more closely resembles that of early eighteenth-century fiction and especially the picaresque, than the work of Landon’s more immediate predecessors such as Charlotte Smith, Maria Edgeworth, Austen, or Scott. Whereas in the work of Romantic novelists, especially Austen, conversation is increasingly put in service of characterization – Knightley assesses the “conversability” of “Emma’s bosom friends,” for example, to judge their character91 – Landon unmoors conversation from the individual moral development of her protagonists. In Romance and Reality, the novel focuses, not on its central characters’ moral tutelage through their performance in conversation such as Emma receives at Knightley’s hands after the Box Hill debacle, but rather on what I have suggested is the broadest possible survey of conversational modes as well as the topics of the day. In this, Landon reinvigorates eighteenthcentury efforts to depict conversation as “ensuring the circulation of ideas

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and information” by setting characters into as many different conversations with as wide an array of interlocutors as possible.92 She positions the novel, moreover, as the vehicle best able to facilitate and model this conversational “flow” of culture.93 This was a role, Mee argues, that early nineteenth-century writers like Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt claimed for the essay, positioning essays as the “water carriers of culture.”94 As is made clear in Romance and Reality’s defence of the novel, though, in which Edward Lorraine contends that the novel has swallowed up the essay, pamphlet, and satire, Landon claims the distinction of culture-disseminating conduit for the more mutable, capacious form of the novel. When Emily attends a literary salon at the home of her former governess, now a successful novelist, she overhears the conversation of a “cleverlooking” young gentleman and a young woman described as a “brilliant star in our brilliant galaxy of female writers” (1.140). The young gentleman, possessing “an animated manner, which gave additional attraction to a pointed and brilliant style of conversation,” discusses with his companion the personae that individuals perform when entering into society (1.142). Challenging the gentleman’s opinion that “we are the knights of conversation, and ought to go into its arena armed at all points, for a harsh and violent career,” the esteemed writer says that she does not “see that we are at all called upon to pay so costly a compliment to society, as to assume a character diametrically opposed to our real one.” Rather, she contends, “Genius ought every where to be true to itself, and … to its power, that of being a blessing; to its reward, that of being remembered” (1.141–42). In this discussion of the deference we are “called upon to pay” to society, even the speaker who holds for the greatest autonomy from society’s dictates nonetheless articulates a model of performative selfhood, here named “Genius,” that exerts its power through, and draws its reward from, its sociability. The point of the literary salon scene, however, seems less to decide whose understanding of self-fashioning and social deference is correct; neither the narrator nor Emily’s companion offers an opinion on the matter. Rather, the scene serves to introduce these ideas to Emily, and to us as her analogues in this unfamiliar fashionable world, and to demonstrate the power of conversation to cultivate understanding and shape public opinion. The salon scene also underscores the centrality of literature to the public circulation of ideas. To exemplify the celebrated writer’s positive influence on her, Emily’s companion notes: “I characterise her conversation by a fine line from Marlow, ‘A frosty night, when heaven is lined with stars.’ I recall a thousand such beautiful expressions” (1.142). The writer’s conversation,

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which enlightens through its beauty and taste, draws its particular strength from its engagement with literature. At every instance, the novel shows that sociability, exercised through felicitous conversation and shaped by reading, is fundamental to the formation of individual taste and desire. The narrator remarks, “Is it not Rochefoucault who says, ‘there are many who would never have fallen in love, had they not first heard it talked about?’ What he says of love may extend to a great variety of other propensities” (1.66). We learn to be feeling individuals, just as we learn to belong to the collective, through social interaction, and specifically the forms and associations with which the age familiarizes us. The conversation and brief character sketches with which Romance and Reality abounds make of this novel an experimental narrative composite in which the texture of contemporary life emerges through the novel’s social panorama. The subject matter on which Landon chooses to focus demands distinctive formal priorities: Romance and Reality produces, as I have suggested, a narrative kaleidoscope of the shifting scenes, figures, and ideas that characterize the landscape of the present age. This formal priority owes much, I will argue in the next chapter, to the picaresque, and demonstrates how some nineteenth-century novelists find in a residual narrative form a means to conceptualize the particular contours of contemporaneity. Silver-fork fiction operates obliquely in relation to the narrative models that have come to define our sense of what it is that novels should do, a sense that took shape in large measure through the affective attachments that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts helped to naturalize, as Deidre Lynch argues, making them prerequisite not only to the work that novels undertake, but to the work of those of us who study them.95 Romance and Reality, like many novels of the silver-fork school, is committed less to making its readers fall in love with its characters, than to modelling for readers a critical acumen that it posits as essential to modern life. It attributes this discerning, dynamic mode of engagement to a wide cast of characters, rather than embodying it in one exemplary individual. In its narrative focus and movement, the novel practises itself what silverfork characters deem “keen observation,”96 offering its readers the broadest possible survey of contemporary social phenomena to cultivate their cultural literacy. Recent scholarship on the periodical press in the early nineteenth century has familiarized us with the argument that, in the print culture of the period, ephemerality goes hand in hand with commercial modernity, and gives expression to the spirit of the age in the emergent forms of literary reviews, magazines, and newspapers.97 That argument does not usually

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extend to the novel: the early nineteenth-century novel is viewed as a genre of its age, yet somehow simultaneously above or beyond it. Novels worth their salt take us beyond our present moment, as Hazlitt assures us. As we saw in the Introduction, he insists that it is the “business of literature … to direct the mind’s eye beyond the present moment and the present object.”98 I have argued, however, that we need to read the historical embeddedness and relative plotlessness of a novel like Romance and Reality as driven by formal priorities different from those associated with the dominant narrative models of our literary history. A novel in which it would be relatively easy to contend that nothing happens begins to look like something other than a generic failure when we recognize its narrative commitments as turning on something other than individual formation. As I will argue in the next chapter, the silver-fork novel’s innovations come most clearly into focus when we understand it as a genre committed to fashioning something new out of both fresh and outdated narrative forms, which – integrated with the idiom of currency permeating the age – works to realize within the novel genre a sense of the present as such.

Notes 1 Charles Lamb, “The Londoner,” The Morning Post and Gazetteer (1 February 1802): 3, emphasis original. 2 William Hazlitt, “The Dandy School,” in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1931–34), vol. 20, 143– 49, 146. As has been well remarked, Hazlitt coined the term in impugning the author Theodore Hook for being so delighted to discover that “the quality eat fish with silver forks … he considers it a circumstance of no consequence if a whole nation starves” (146). 3 Ibid., 144. 4 On fashion’s production of a new historical consciousness in the eighteenth century, see Timothy Campbell’s excellent Historical Style: Fashion and the New Mode of History, 1740–1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 5 Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 21. 6 The past two decades have seen a growing critical interest in the silver-fork school, though its innovations still stand largely outside our accounts of the British novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See Edward Copeland, The Silver Fork Novel: Fashionable Fiction in the Age of Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Cheryl Wilson, Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012); and Tamara Wagner’s 2009 special issue of Women’s Writing devoted to the silver-fork

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school. See also Muireann O’Cinneide, Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 1832–1867 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008); Richard Cronin, Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824–1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); Clare Bainbridge, “‘Unwholesome Tissues of False Sentiment’: Jane Austen, the Silver-Fork Novel, and Fashions of Reading,” in Lisa Hopkins, ed., After Austen: Reinventions, Rewritings, Revisitings (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 19–42; Charlotte Boyce, “Food, Spaces of Consumption and the Exhibition of Taste in Catherine Gore’s Silver-Fork Fiction, 1830–1834,” The Yearbook of English Studies 48 (2018): 31–53; Abigail Boucher, “The Business Model of the Aristocracy: Class, Consumerism, and Commodification in the Silver Fork Novels,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 38.3 (2016): 171–81; Ellen Miller Casey, “‘The Aristocracy and Upholstery’: The Silver Fork Novel,” in A Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. Pamela K. Gilbert (Chichester: Wiley & Sons, 2011), 11–25; April Kendra, “Silver Forks, Stereotypes, and Regency Romance,” Studies in the Humanities 34.2 (2007): 142–63. Two earlier monographs on the silver-fork novel were Alison Adburgham’s social biography, Silver Fork Society: Fashionable Life and Literature from 1814 to 1840 (London: Constable, 1983), and Matthew Rosa’s The Silver Fork School: Novels of Fashion Preceding Vanity Fair (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936). 7 On Austen’s influence in the 1820s, see Copeland, The Silver Fork Novel; Bainbridge, “Unwholesome Tissues of False Sentiment”; F.  R. Hart, “The Regency Novel of Fashion,” From Smollett to James: Studies in the Novel and Other Essays, eds. Samuel Mintz, Alice Chandler, Christopher Mulvey (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981), 84–133. On the generic aftermath of Scott’s Waverley novels, see Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). On Byron, see Clara Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), and Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). On Pierce Egan’s influential representation of urban experience, see Angela Esterhammer, Print and Performance in the 1820s: Improvisation, Speculation, Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); and Sambudha Sen, “Hogarth, Egan, Dickens, and the Making of an Urban Aesthetic,” Representations 103.1 (2008): 84–106. On fashion plates and historical consciousness, see Campbell, Historical Style. 8 Lipovetsky argues that fashion creates the “taste for … novelty,” which is a defining feature of modernity (Empire of Fashion, 20). 9 Catherine Gore, Pin Money (London: Colburn & Bentley, 1831), iii. 10 Richard Altick, The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994). 11 Ibid., 2–3.

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12 On the narrative conception of psychological interiority developed by a novelist as infrequently connected to that term as Scott, see George Levine, The Realist Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), especially 98–103. 13 “Reviews: Romance and Reality,” The Athenaeum 215 (10 December 1831), 793. On Romance and Reality’s experimental form, see Danielle Barkley, “Crossing Borders: Geographic and Generic Expansiveness in Letitia Landon’s Romance and Reality,” European Romantic Review 27.2 (2016): 175–88. 14 While silver-fork protagonists do make occasional forays into the spaces of the rural poor and the criminal underworld, the social landscapes through which they move are almost exclusively privileged. It would be the Newgate novel of the 1830s, by contrast, to which I will turn in Chapter 3, that would correlate the temporality of fashion and the new culture of visibility in public life with social and political inequality and especially the disenfranchisement of the urban poor. 15 Levine, The Realist Imagination, 5. 16 Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (1935), in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 10. 17 On the emergence of “shopping” in the 1780s as a noun and an activity coincident with transformations in both retailing and a gendered public sphere, see Deidre Lynch, “Counter Publics: Shopping and Women’s Sociability,” in Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770– 1840, eds. Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 211–36. 18 Lamb, “The Londoner,” 3. 19 Ibid. 20 Ulrich Lehmann, Fashion and Materialism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 70. 21 Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.), Romance and Reality (London: Colburn & Bentley, 1831), 1: 197–98. Further citations will be referenced parenthetically in the text by volume and page number. 22 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 23. 23 Jane Austen famously advised her niece Anna that “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on” (“To Anna Austen,” 9 September 1814, Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), letter 107). The silver-fork novel’s deviation from the canonical models of Austen and Scott, among others, has long been the ground on which it has been deemed unsuited for serious critical study. See Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956). 24 Lord Normanby, The Contrast (London: Colburn & Bentley, 1832), 3: 131. 25 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Pelham; or, The Adventures of a Gentleman (Colburn, 1828), ed. Jerome McGann (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), 180. 26 Lipovetsky, Empire of Fashion, 149. 27 Ibid.

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28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 6. 30 Ibid., 149. 31 Copeland, The Silver Fork Novel, 2. 32 As I suggested in the Introduction, William Hazlitt’s The Spirit of the Age: or, Contemporary Portraits (London: Colburn, 1825) shares with the fiction I analyze key premises about the zeitgeist, or what is in fashion broadly understood. These are not similarities, though, that Hazlitt would likely have acknowledged. 33 On the figure behind silver-fork publishing and its industry-altering publicity techniques, see John Sutherland, “Henry Colburn, Publisher,” Publishing History 19 (1986): 59–84. I will take up Colburn’s promotional practices later in this chapter. 34 Hazlitt, “Dandy School,” 148. 35 Rosa, The Silver Fork School, 98. 36 Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 2. 37 Rosa, The Silver Fork School, 54. 38 Richard Cronin, “Bulwer, Carlyle, and the Fashionable Novel,” in The Subverting Vision of Bulwer Lytton: Bicentenary Reflections, ed. Allan Christensen (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 38–53, 39. 39 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, ed. Kerry McSweeney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), V.184, 208, 185–86. 40 In an 1845 letter to Robert Browning, Barrett Browning famously used the phrase “a sort of novel-poem” to describe her new poem, which she hoped would be “completely modern … rushing into drawing-rooms and the like,” The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1845–1846 (London: Smith, Elder, 1899), 1: 32, online ed., British and Irish Women’s Letters and Diaries, 1500 to 1950. 41 On the forms of distance deemed essential for historical narratives in the nineteenth century, see Mark Salber Phillips, On Historical Distance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), a text to which I will return in Chapter 5. 42 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (1955), trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (1962; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 19. Among key reconsiderations of Scott’s fiction after Lukács, see Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels: With New Essays on Scott (1963; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Jane Millgate, Walter Scott: The Making of a Novelist (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984); Ferris, Achievement of Literary Authority; Duncan, Modern Romance; Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Campbell, Historical Style; and Clare Pettitt, Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). On Scott’s comparative analytical method, see James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

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43 Sir Walter Scott, Waverley; Or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 340. 44 Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 131, 141. 45 Ina Ferris, “‘On the Borders of Oblivion’: Scott’s Historical Novel and the Modern Time of the Remnant,” Modern Language Quarterly 70.4 (2009): 473–94, 476. 46 See Duncan, Modern Romance; Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties; and Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970). 47 Duncan, Modern Romance, 18. 48 Ian Duncan, “The Victorian Novel Emerges, 1800–1840,” in A Companion to the Victorian Novel, eds. William Baker and Kenneth Womack (Westport: Greenwood, 2002), 3–13, 12. 49 On the profound implications of Scott’s attention to dress fashion for historical representation in the period, see Campbell, Historical Style, especially 203–37. On “Scott’s own interest in mediating the past through [the] material and popular culture” of the 1810s and 1820s, a focus that complicates arguments about the teleological historiography of his fiction, see Pettitt, Serial Forms, 71. 50 Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 131. 51 Normanby, The Contrast, 3: 32. 52 Lipovetsky, Empire of Fashion, 134. On fashion’s penetration of economics, commodity culture, and desire, see Paul Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 204. On the “speeded-up railway age” and related transformations of temporal experience in the nineteenth century, see Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 37. On boredom, see Elizabeth Goodstein, Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), in which she observes, “Boredom is coeval with the peculiarly modern experience of temporality that finds its absolute expression, as Georg Simmel would put it, in ‘the universal diffusion of pocket watches’” (124). 53 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, revised ed. (London: I. B. Taurus, 2003), 14. 54 Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits (New York: Knopf, 1994), 28. 55 On Vanity Fair’s final page, Thackeray’s narrator famously remarks, “Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?” (W.  M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 878). 56 Mary Shelley, Lodore, ed. Lisa Vargo (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1997), 173. Further in-text citations will be referenced parenthetically. 57 Walter Scott, 17 April 1828, The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. W.  E.  K. Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 459. 58 Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, 135.

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5 9 Lynch, “Counter Publics,” 219. 60 Ibid. Lynch uses the phrase to refer, not to silver-fork novels, but to Wordsworth’s poetic ambition in The Prelude. My re-attribution aims to demonstrate the commonalities among literary projects that most readers, Wordsworth perhaps foremost among them, would regard as discontinuous. 61 Copeland, The Silver Fork Novel, 10–11. 62 “An Hour at a Publisher’s,” The Athenaeum (1 July 1829), 401. 63 Peter Garside, “Colburn, Henry (1784/5–1855),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 64 Quoted in Sutherland, “Henry Colburn, Publisher,” 59–60. 65 “Henry Colburn, Esq.,” Gentleman’s Magazine (November 1855), 548. 66 Sutherland, “Henry Colburn, Publisher,” 61. 67 “An Hour at a Publisher’s,” 401. 68 Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity, 15. 69 On the recently established critical authority of the literary reviews, see Ferris, Achievement of Literary Authority. 70 Copeland, The Silver Fork Novel, 185. 71 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London: Penguin, 1985), 57. 72 “Colburn,” Oxford DNB. 73 Ibid. 74 [William Maginn,] “The Dominie’s Legacy; and Fashionable Novels,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 1 (April 1830), 319. 75 Sutherland, “Henry Colburn, Publisher,” 62. 76 Maginn, “The Dominie’s Legacy,” 319. 77 Sutherland, “Henry Colburn, Publisher,” 80. 78 Ibid., 69. 79 Mary Shelley, The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty Bennett, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 2: 131–32. 80 Ibid. 81 Rosa, The Silver Fork School, 54. 82 Duncan Wu, William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 238–40. 83 Hazlitt drew a firm line between authors who write for immediate fame and those who write for posterity: see “On Different Sorts of Fame,” The Round Table: A Collection of Essays on Literature, Men, and Manners (Edinburgh: Constable, 1817), 56–66; and “On the Living Poets,” Lectures on the English Poets: Delivered at the Surrey Institute (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1818), 283– 331. But see also Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Vintage, 1997), on the complication of this distinction in the period, apparent not least in Hazlitt’s own work. Braudy claims that in Hazlitt’s comparison of Scott and Byron in The Spirit of the Age, for example, literary analysis is inseparable from a critique of “the way [the authors] presented themselves to their immediate audiences.” By the 1820s, Braudy suggests, “fame has become inseparable from audience attention to one’s personal nature” (392). 84 Wu, William Hazlitt, xxii.

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85 Rosa, The Silver Fork School, vii. 86 H. L. Mansel, “Sensation Novels,” The Quarterly Review 113.226 (April 1863): 481–514, 483. I will return to Mansel’s critique in Chapter 5. 87 The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844, 2 vols., eds. Paula Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 2: 555–56. 88 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London, 1759), 380, 382. On the role of fashion in Smith’s theory, see James Noggle, The Temporality of Taste in Eighteenth-Century British Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 89 See, for example, Jon Mee’s invocation of a 1779 “Essay on Conversation” from the Weekly Miscellany that recommends, “conversation flourishes best … under the free conditions of a modern commercial society” (Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 19). 90 Cynthia Lawford contends that, as literature became consumed by politics in the wake of the changes of 1830, Landon “discovered the novel as a genre to be useful for addressing any idea then swimming in the public consciousness.” “Introduction,” Romance and Reality by Letitia Landon (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), xiv. 91 Robin Valenza, Literature, Language, and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 45. 92 Mee, Conversable Worlds, 20. 93 Ibid., 26. 94 Ibid., 20. 95 Deidre Lynch, Loving Literature: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 96 Normanby, The Contrast, 3: 131. 97 See Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity; also Paul Keen, The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Mark Parker, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 98 Hazlitt, “Dandy School,” 144.

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chapter 2

Picaresque Movements

Pelham, Cecil, and the Rejection of Bildung

“Away with such triflers!” cries the sage, flinging aside our pages into the depths of his gloomy library, as if the grubbers among the dry bones of history did more to expedite the progress of the times, than those fluttering butterflies who oppose, at least, no dead weight to the general impetus. The truth is, that, like a straw thrown up to determine the course of the wind, the triflers of any epoch are an invaluable evidence of the bent of the public mind. They are always floating on the surface, — always ostensible! — They are a mark for general observation. Statesmen and beaux are the only really public men. – Catherine Gore, Cecil (1841)1

In her pioneering article on the silver-fork genre, “Elegies for the Regency,” Winifred Hughes attributes the plotlessness of a novel like Catherine Gore’s Cecil: or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb (1841) to the class status of its characters: “aristocratic experience in itself could not generate the familiar novelistic structures of ‘mercantile comedy’ … or of middle-class success; it could not produce patterns of social and economic rise or movements from social exclusion to acceptance and assimilation. The dynamics of social mobility are simply irrelevant to Gore’s born aristocrats.”2 Novels like Cecil, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham; or, The Adventures of a Gentleman (1828), Letitia Landon’s Romance and Reality (1831), and Mary Shelley’s Lodore (1835) stand as alternatives to the developmental, Bildungsroman model that was becoming common in Britain in the 1820s and 30s and would soon dominate nineteenth-century fiction. If, as Hughes contends, the fashionable protagonist “begins in an apparently permanent condition of plotlessness and empowerment,” I argue that that plotlessness turns as much on the temporality of silver-fork novels and the narrative innovations keyed to their representation of modernity, as on the class status of their characters.3 It is not simply that silver-fork characters do not or cannot rise. Rather, their movements are part of a narrative 91

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structure that works to produce a sense of the transience and spectacle of urban modernity, rather than subsume that social context into a backdrop for the unfolding of an inner life. The silver-fork novel’s narrative priorities and achievements come into focus when we read for something other than the plot of individual formation. Deidre Lynch has prompted us “to rethink how, over the course of the eighteenth century, characterization – indeed, notions of what might count as a character – changed.”4 By investigating how novelistic character in the early eighteenth century operated on a different model than has been ascribed to it by the “familiar narratives … about the ‘rise of the novel’ and the rise of that individualism that ‘the novel’ is ostensibly tailormade to reflect,” Lynch reads this fiction as something other than a prepubescent antecedent of full-figured Victorian realism.5 Stephanie Insley Hershinow similarly challenges the assumption, which still has a good deal of traction in novel studies, that a character’s experience is de facto tied to psychological development over time: she argues that novel theory, taking “social expansiveness and psychological acuity … as the hallmarks of the realist novel,” “again and again, implicitly and e­ xplicitly, … [has] understood these commitments as brought into relation by the organizing principle of Bildung, wherein protagonists break out in psychology as if it were a side effect of their development.”6 Hershinow proposes that we investigate instead models of novelistic character that privilege something other than individual maturation. Focusing on the figure of the novice in eighteenth-century fiction, she explores what theoretical insight we might gain by recognizing the “irreconcilability of naïve vision and empirical reality,” and allowing ourselves to “linger in the possible worlds” that fiction creates when it refuses to accommodate characters to their surroundings.7 Following Lynch, Hershinow, and others who have debunked the idea that the novel’s incipient aim from the get-go was the representation of individual psychological development,8 I contend that we might sharpen our theorization of novelistic form by identifying in the nineteenthcentury novel’s sometimes erratic characterization an alternative conception of individuality and its tethering to the social. As I argued in the Introduction, nineteenth-century novelists found in the temporality of fashion a form in which to articulate the heightened sense of the present that seemed distinctive to modern experience. They wrote novels that conceptualized for readers a world characterized by ephemerality, immediacy, and a surfeit of visual imagery. Their narrative innovations fleshed out a range of formal and representational possibilities, among which the

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development of an inner life was of comparatively little importance. Their interest, by contrast, focused on conceptualizing contemporaneity as such, and to do so, I argue, they returned to outmoded eighteenth-century forms including the picaresque and a comparatively static model of character. In the context of the silver-fork novel, this character’s resistance to development arises not from inexperience, as in the eighteenth-century context that Hershinow studies, but from an innate savoir-faire that allows for keen social analysis and seamless movement through diverse spheres. To defamiliarize our assumptions about the narrative structures that are necessary for character and plot to be achieved in nineteenth-century fiction,9 we might reconsider those novels that fall outside the dominant models of domestic realism and the Bildungsroman. I would call our attention especially to novels that possess an historical sensibility reminiscent of Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, that use his attention to period-­specific details of dress, manners, and customs to materialize the sense of an era, and that eschew, as I suggested in the previous chapter, history’s grand narratives of progress and decline. In her classic study, Novels of the EighteenForties, for example, Kathleen Tillotson suggests that novels like those of the silver-fork and Newgate schools “show what expectations had been built up in the minds of readers and hence how far the great novelists could afford to defeat those expectations.” She contends that the scholarly interest of “novel-fashions” lies mainly in providing context for canonical fiction that followed and quickly overshadowed them.10 Tillotson’s assessment, like that premised by Ian Watt’s “rise” narrative with which Lynch and Hershinow take issue, reads the history of the novel itself on the model of a Bildungsroman: on this account, as Lynch describes it, the novel grows through experience and experiment across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, maturing into a “more adequate mimesis” that gives its characters “complexity and depth” and makes them “more like the real individuals who read them.”11 With the achievement of conceptual sophistication, the story goes, “the novel really [comes] into being” and the byroads it travels along the way matter only inasmuch as they help it chart a path to greater representational maturity.12 The fiction that silver-fork novelists produced looks, at times, like a veritable grab-bag of genres. Edward Copeland makes a compelling case for the silver-fork novel’s extensive debts to the domestic fiction of Jane Austen, Frances Burney, and Maria Edgeworth.13 Jerome McGann echoes Bulwer-Lytton’s own claims in categorizing Pelham as a Bildungsroman, directly influenced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre; Matthew Rosa qualifies this claim slightly by labelling Pelham

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part-Bildungsroman, part-picaresque, and one might make a similar claim of hybridity for novels such as Benjamin Disraeli’s Vivian Grey (1826) or The Young Duke (1831).14 Some critics have read the silver-fork novel in relation, not to other fiction, but to newspapers, and especially the quotidian movements of fashionable life reported in the Morning Post, a chronicle that Charles Dickens would later skewer in Bleak House as the parasitic “fashionable intelligence.”15 Other critics, such as the contemporary reviewer of Letitia Landon’s Romance and Reality whom we encountered in the previous chapter, identify silver-fork fiction as composites of “essays, criticisms, sketches of life, portraits living and dead, opinions on manners, [and] descriptions of feeling.’”16 The consistent thread through this taxonomical mishmash is the genre’s cultural currency: immediacy and topicality are paramount to its to-the-moment sensibility. The silverfork novel stitches together literary and non-literary forms that capture the contemporary imagination in order to correlate its narrative to what I have suggested is the school’s central focus: the texture and temporality of contemporary life. Of principal interest in this tailoring process is the silver-fork novel’s resistance to the growing cultural authority of the Bildungsroman. The unfolding of an inner life is comparatively irrelevant to the silver-fork school: these novels tend to accord their characters no greater priority in the narrative than the social landscapes through which they move. Silverfork fiction focuses less on its protagonists’ self-conscious maturation than on their interaction with the complex, rapidly changing social codes and customs that distinguish metropolitan culture. Even in those silverfork novels that draw on the apprenticeship model that Goethe formalized, the protagonist rarely undergoes the sort of spiritual transformation that would become so central to British fiction, beginning with Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833–34). On the contrary, silver-fork protagonists generally enter the world possessed of an uncanny ability to suss out a scene on the instant, capitalize on its salient features, and accommodate themselves to what comes next. Their position is much like that of the commodities with which their society teems: silver-fork protagonists function as objects in circulation, defined less by internal traits than by the situations, sets of relations, and conversational exchanges through which they pass. To grasp the significance of silver-fork novelists’ resistance to the Bildungsroman, which quickly gained popularity in Britain in the wake of Carlyle’s 1824 translation of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, we need to look to an older narrative model to which they largely turned instead, a domestic take on yet another Continental import: the picaresque.

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The Picaresque and the Temporality of Fashion Michael McKeon suggests that the “Spanish picaresque … bequeathed to seventeenth-century English writers an influential literary form that seemed peculiarly responsive to the crisis of status inconsistency that was felt in different ways throughout early modern Europe.”17 He defines this “crisis” as the emergent challenge to a traditional social hierarchy based on lineage and station, which enabled a “separating out [of] merit or virtue as independent variables whose association with elevated status was, strictly speaking, arbitrary”; for the individual this challenge enabled the reconception of “social identity as an amalgam of parts (power, wealth, status) rather than as a presumptive whole.”18 The picaresque, which G. S. Rousseau describes as a “loose, rambling form … [that] sprawled to wherever the hero went,” allowed authors to navigate the shifting grounds of status and identity by examining the particularity of an individual life in relation to, and often in conflict with, an “overarching pattern” of sometimes ambiguous forms of social and divine authority.19 Crucial to the earliest instances of the picaresque was the pícaro or rogue’s “self-sufficiency,” which McKeon contends bordered at times on a “dangerous autonomy.”20 Comparatively untethered to place and independent of patronage, the pícaro moves more or less freely through society, and through a seemingly limitless series of adventures that allows him to adapt himself over and over to altered geo-social circumstances. He enters into the employ of a wide range of superiors, scrutinizes authority and especially abuses of power, and engages in endless conversation with peers, knaves, and his social betters. Indeed, the picaresque narrative typically overflows with dialogue. The narrative form that organizes these encounters lends itself to broad social observation, since the pícaro’s peregrinations provide a logical means of taking the temperature of the times based on the widest possible survey of cultural forms and interpersonal relations, up and down the social ladder. Eighteenth-century British novelists found in this narrative form a useful structure for putting a self-possessed, spirited protagonist into contact with an endless array of character types, and throwing into narrative relief the folly, knavery, and hypocrisy that abound in the world. The pícaro’s encounters make him worldly-wise, but he himself remains largely unchanged. Even a frame narrative of criminal punishment or spiritual conversion, used in a text like Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) to neutralize the protagonist’s extraordinary account of her misdemeanours, tends to recede from view in the face of her sympathetic

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narration and engaging pluck. As McKeon observes, the “delinquent folk hero, whether Spanish pícaro or Tyburn Highwayman, is compelling enough in his pursuit of freedom to suggest that the common way of ‘error’ may in fact be the road of individual truth.”21 As she struggles to make her way in the world, an eighteenth-century pícaro like Moll may elicit the audience’s sympathies just as much as would the later Bildungsroman protagonist; the narrative thrust in the earlier form, though, turns less on the consolidation of the protagonist’s sense of self through that journey than on a documentation of the social topography that she surveys along the way. In an early eighteenth-century context that topography was largely moral – the character types the pícaro encountered were seen to embody the many forms of good and evil in the world – whereas in the silver-fork novel, the prevailing features of the social landscape would become the latest manners, opinions, cultural phenomena, and consumer practices in circulation in a society seemingly defined by restless, quotidian change. Equally important to eighteenth-century British picaresque narratives were the resources that the form provided for social critique. In the midcentury fiction of Tobias Smollett, for example, the picaresque’s loose episodic structure intersects with the more determinate landscape of satire to produce a wide-ranging social panorama whose critical gaze focuses on the corruption of authority and the hectic tumult and moral confusion of the city. Smollett uses satire to pin the pícaro’s escapades and ensuing social analysis to a series of localized sites, exposing the hypocrisies and injustices of a recognizably modern world while simultaneously producing a realist’s vision of the bustling movements of contemporary metropolitan life. In The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), for instance, though Matthew Bramble is hypochondriac rather than rogue, his rants are at their most feverish when he contemplates the fashionable scenes of Bath and London, the details of which are specific to the architectural developments and post-war economic expansion that transformed both cities in the two decades leading up to the novel’s publication. Similarly, in The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), the narrative “pace [is] so quick,” Rousseau observes, “that readers imagine they are hearing today’s news. Time and space are viewed from the perspective of the present.”22 The pícaro Roderick moves through a “global world” that “dwells on the making and losing of money” and on “forms of urban dissipation [that] are excessive, as is its crime.”23 Smollett’s picaresque novels critique the superficiality, excess, and hypocrisy of a “global world,” while embodying in their restless, peripatetic form the movements that the novelist represents as intrinsic to commercial modernity.

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Silver-fork novelists resurrect this form to keep their narrative attention on an urban panorama and their protagonists comparatively immune to the scenes through which they move. An important, fashion-conscious precursor to the silver-fork school, Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), similarly draws on the picaresque but does so as part of its adept bridging of that evanescent genre and the emergent novel of identity formation: the narrative ushers its protagonist through a series of metropolitan scenes in order to provide fodder for her inner struggles and growth.24 The silverfork novel, by contrast, upcycles what is by then the outmoded form of the picaresque to correlate its narrative with the “phantasmagoria” of the contemporary – that is, with the surfeit of commodities and spectacles, rapidly changing manners and styles, print cultural mediations, and organizations of collective life that characterized the 1820s and 1830s.25 As we saw in the previous chapter, the silver-fork school figures the modern landscape as a “multitudinous moving picture, … like the shifting scenes of a skilful Pantomime.”26 The protagonist moves through this spectacular, transient world with interest, cool detachment, and a critical eye. We can read in the relative lack of inner development that distinguishes most silver-fork protagonists an emphasis on the connections between people and things on the move. The chief difference that the silver-fork novel remarks between its fictional characters and their fashionable commodities is the self-consciousness with which the protagonist recognizes himself as a character in circulation whose social value depends significantly on the scenes through which he moves, the relations into which he enters, and the visibility he manages to secure for himself. Like the pícaro, silver-fork protagonists fashion themselves at will, as the situation requires, and remain largely invulnerable to society’s mercurial yet exacting customs and forms. The cluttered, meandering narrative structures and impervious protagonists of silver-fork fiction constitute a deliberate return on the part of their novelists to a genre and character model that were eclipsed by the Regency period. That these novelists looked back to the eighteenth century to correlate their fiction with the spirit of their own age adds further evidence to those histories of the novel that would complicate the conventional Bildungsroman plot of the novel’s steady rise toward its maturation in high Victorian realism. Rather than a sign of silver-fork novelists’ indifference to the privileging of individual development around which the novel ostensibly had been coalescing since the 1740s, their revival of an obsolete literary form instead represents a bid to fashion a new kind of narrative that would conceptualize contemporaneity as such. The outmoded narrative form they revitalized spoke to their own moment, not because

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the two historical periods and their respective forms existed in a progressive continuum, as if “in some grand narrative that [would] make sense of each moment,” to use Ian Balfour’s terms.27 On the contrary, silver-fork novelists’ citation of that earlier form invokes a different model of change than that associated with the long lines of progress and decline that typically structure the “grand narrative” of history. Identifying in fashion’s cycle of novelty and obsolescence the temporality that organizes the social, silver-fork novelists use this model to articulate an historical sense felt in quotidian change and discrete encounters among historical moments. As I argued in the Introduction, these novelists find in fashion’s irreverent engagement of history a model for setting distinct moments of past and present into contingent relation and keeping open the possible meanings that such encounters engender. Walter Benjamin invokes fashion’s citational practice in theorizing a non-linear understanding of history, suggesting that fashion’s “leap into the past” to pull out a particular form, cut, or colour that it recontextualizes in the present to make something new allows for the unpredictability of history’s significance and effects.28 On this model of history, the contemporary exists in an always dynamic relationship with the past; history’s meaning takes form through provisional readings of encounters among distinct moments in time. Fashion’s commitment to novelty is not premised on a wholesale repudiation of the past, as is often suggested, nor does a contemporary style make itself beholden to a past age and past associations when it cites a now obsolescent form.29 Rather, Anne Hollander explains that within fashion’s formal sequence of imagery, “Meaning is properly detachable from form, so that the revival of forms from earlier days need have nothing to do with any perception of earlier days; a new impulse makes them visually attractive again, and a new meaning is attached to them.”30 In the case of the picaresque, the silver-fork novel illustrates that an outdated form can be made fashionable again, and that, remediated for a new age, the form acquires meanings and associations distinct from those of the past. The silver-fork school dips into the past to upcycle a form that offers a new way of expressing the felt experience of the present, one that embodies  the  fashion-inflected historical consciousness constitutive of modernity.31 As an idiom of change, fashion enabled silver-fork novelists to demonstrate that minor historical changes, whether in dress styles, politics, or novels, can be as resonant in a future moment as major ones. Benjamin suggests that the “chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the

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following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.”32 In its paradigmatic engagement of the outmoded form of the picaresque and, as I will argue in the Coda, in its resonance with our own ephemeral, mediated age, the silver-fork school shows that narratives which attend to seemingly minor events in history are sometimes best able to materialize the contours of modern life.

Panoramas and Publics Silver-fork novelists revive the eighteenth-century picaresque to bring to life in their own moment the chaotic surface of contemporary life. Emphasizing the restless movements of the urban phantasmagoria, silverfork novelists use the panoramic form of the picaresque to represent the social as an “endless sequence of unrelated but contiguous scenes.”33 Their fashionable protagonists move through shops, balls, visits, and entertainment venues, from town house to countryside to the Continent and back, all propelled by a comparatively aimless yet insatiable narrative curiosity about contemporary manners, customs, and opinions. The social panoramas through which the characters move, moreover, serve as a broad canvas on which, as in the eighteenth-century picaresque, “realism is achieved primarily through situation and irony rather than character analysis.”34 Although silver-fork fiction has been criticized for focusing on a narrow, exclusive demographic – those “few select persons [who] eat fish with silver forks,” in William Hazlitt’s oft-cited words35 – the social privilege of most silver-fork characters allows them to move across the novel’s social canvas with ease. Indeed, their privilege gives them access to most spheres of life and to contemporary consumer culture, from whence they survey, analyze, and often satirize its many sights, splendours, novelties, and follies. To exemplify the deft navigation through society’s shifting customs and codes of which the individual must be capable, silver-fork novelists use the episodic structure of the picaresque to throw their protagonists into endless scenes of social mixing. Silver-fork characters are steeped in “fashionable sociability,” to borrow Gillian Russell’s term, at dinner parties, balls, shops, the opera, the theatre, and on visits to fashionable homes in order to survey the contemporary scene and underscore the importance of cultivating one’s manners and skills of observation in a fast-changing world.36 When Romance and Reality’s Emily Arundel finds herself unknown and neglected at the literary salon of a fashionable novelist, for example, she is rescued by a fellow spectator who offers “[her] services as catalogue to this exhibition of walking pictures.”37 As I argued in the previous chapter,

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Emily’s companion acts as an interpretive tour guide, helping her to analyze the curious assortment of characters and range of conversational skills on display. In positioning Emily as passive spectator to the scene, dependent on the glosses of a local to make sense of this unfamiliar world, Landon draws on a narrative structure well known from the Waverley novels as well as the earlier picaresque narratives that informed Scott’s fiction: the visitor’s tale or “stranger in a strange land” topos. To introduce readers to unfamiliar people, customs, cultures, and historical contexts, this narrative model typically sees the protagonist sent into a foreign land as outsider or tourist, accompanied by a local guide to translate and interpret. Like Edward Waverley on his errand north into Scotland, which introduces him to Jacobin politics under the dangerous tutelage of Fergus MacIvor, and Scottish national character through the sympathetic guidance of MacIvor’s sister Flora, the ingénue Emily is taught to recognize the characters and modes of discourse that distinguish fashionable 1820s society. In the process, the uninitiated reader of Landon’s novel is similarly introduced to this strange, intriguing metropolitan world. In Landon’s hands, though, unlike in Scott’s, the narrator offers little interpretive assistance to the reader. Indeed, Landon leaves us, like Emily, to puzzle through on our own the manners and opinions we encounter, or seek recourse to the occasional assistance of secondary characters – in Emily’s case, the new acquaintance at the literary salon. Whereas Waverley narrators typically align themselves with the reader in the narrative present and serve as principal interpreters of foreign or historical strangeness, Landon’s narrator largely recedes from view. Giving the scene over almost entirely to reported dialogue and thus resembling drama more than fiction, the narrator denies us the satisfaction of knowing what she thinks of the scene’s gallery of characters and their opinions. Like Emily, we must decide for ourselves the value and significance of what we encounter in this panorama. Romance and Reality’s scene at the literary salon underscores both the visuality and ephemerality of modern social life. The heroine must learn to read character and assess social standing and virtue quickly, and often she must do so on the slenderest of evidence. Each of the “walking pictures” she observes is little more than a walk-on part: Emily catches snippets of their opinions and manners before they move on. As is typical of silver-fork fiction – and as it learned from the picaresque – characters come and go in Landon’s novel with little pretext. Many are introduced simply to espouse an opinion, style, or current customary practice, never to reappear. Their abbreviated social dialogues, nevertheless, serve to catch

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the drift of popular thought and feeling, and demonstrate that identity in contemporary society is inextricably tied to visibility and the imagery and discourse held in common in the collective consciousness. As we saw in the Introduction, fashion enables individuals to differentiate themselves from the crowd and express their independence at the same time as it binds them to an aesthetic regime defined collectively. The silver-fork novel makes clear that to participate actively in contemporary society one must immerse oneself in the currents of public life. The distinction between public and private spheres, moreover, is shown here to be limited, if not irrelevant. Emily Arundel learns that the realm of hearth and home that would become so sacrosanct in later Victorian fiction is as much a sphere of visibility and performance as the most public of London venues. In this, the silver-fork novel looks back to models of sociability familiar from the mid-eighteenth century: Russell points, for example, to the prevalence of “activities” in Georgian London that complicated distinctions between public and private, insofar as they took place on the threshold between “the ‘conjugal family’s internal space’ and other elements of the authentic public sphere [which occurred] in the private realm.” At “balls, assemblies, masquerades, theatricals, dinners, card-parties, and general visiting,” she explains, “elite women in particular were able to claim a role for themselves in mid-eighteenth-century public culture.”38 The silver-fork novel revives this residual understanding of the public sphere as a “highly theatricalized and thoroughly feminized arena of social interaction” at precisely the moment that the class and gender inflections of publicness are being actively redefined.39 Dror Wahrman remarks that the period immediately around the Reform Act of 1832 “witnessed a significant reordering and redefinition of ‘public’ in antithesis to ‘private’, as a very particular construction of social reality, and moreover one with stringent prescriptive implications.”40 The silver-fork novel throws into the mix of this shifting public discourse a now anachronistic “construction of social reality” in order to emphasize that, irrespective of the stark reconceptualization of collective life underway, the “media ecology” of the period makes a consciousness of visibility unavoidable.41 The significance of the silver-fork school’s dissonant participation in this literary-historical moment is two-fold: first, as we will see with Dickens in Chapter 4, the fashionable novel’s embrace of the visuality of contemporary life and modern selfhood resurfaces in later Victorian fiction in ways that our histories of the novel have yet fully to explore. Secondly, as Gore demonstrates decisively in Cecil, to which I will turn in this chapter’s final section, the

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silver-fork novel’s return to outmoded eighteenth-century narrative forms and modes of sociability produces a caustic disenchantment of a Victorian domestic ideal and its promise of salutary social change almost before that ideal has found its feet. Silver-fork novels align the best prospects for social reform not with “domestic virtue, with religiosity, with an evangelical impulse, with social control,” as would an emergent middle-class ideology, but rather with social conversation as a vital conduit for materializing and measuring broad public opinion.42 That conversations in silver-fork fiction are at times trivial and precious can distract us from their larger importance: as I argued in the previous chapter, silver-fork novelists are fundamentally interested in what people are talking about. On the relationship of conversation to social reform in Romance and Reality, Cynthia Lawford suggests: “Landon would never have claimed (or perhaps admitted to herself) that she was interfering in politics, but evident throughout the novel is her recognition of the rising power of public opinion, which of course she was attempting to influence.”43 In the “conversable world” of polite society on which silver-fork novels focus, all current topics from the trivial to the momentous – from literature, celebrities, gossip, and shops to politics, religion, and global affairs – are deemed relevant to the texture and temper of the times and the articulation of a collective consciousness.44 As Gore’s dandy Cecil remarks in the epigraph with which this chapter opened, “the triflers of any epoch are an invaluable evidence of the bent of the public mind” (1: 223). In The Contrast (1832), Lord Normanby has his savvy woman of fashion, Lady Gayland, link the force of public opinion explicitly to contemporary political reform. In a conversation over the morning papers at a country house breakfast table, a fusty guest, Lord Stayinmore, pronounces that, to protect the “unparalleled blessings of our invaluable constitution,” it is every man’s duty to “arres[t] these erratic changes on the very threshold of their progress, … chok[e] and da[m] up, as I may say, this mischievous current of public opinion, even at its fountain head.”45 Lord Stayinmore’s invocation of the “blessings” of the constitution to defend the status quo aligns custom with tradition over against the “mischievous,” “erratic changes” that, we can presume, are allied with fashion. This opposition of custom to fashion premises an age-old, national, aristocratic tradition that is to be protected from the vagaries of commercial modernity as well as the political threat of the masses, here given form in “public opinion.” As we saw in the Introduction, though, the relationship of custom to fashion in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century discourse is itself erratic and unstable, and as The Contrast suggests, that

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connotative instability may well benefit those who recognize its potential to ­reconceptualize public life. Seizing on Lord Stayinmore’s apt metaphor which links both political change and public opinion to the force of rushing water, Lady Gayland replies that he and his “political bungs” will be drowned, “if whilst you think you have the power, you attempt to impede the natural flow of popular feeling.”46 The “majestic stream of public opinion, swollen on all sides by tributary springs,” she declares, “will flow resistlessly onward, bearing on its triumphant waves the united wishes of a liberal government and a grateful people.”47 Lady Gayland’s idealism about the “majestic stream of public opinion” should not be mistaken for advocacy of a deluge to swamp the social order: silver-fork fiction is usually as wary of the “people” as it is committed to political reform, and as invested in a notion of natural aristocracy as it is scathing in its exposure of aristocratic corruption.48 Her speech articulates the school’s embrace of “popular feeling,” nonetheless, as a powerful force of change that the governing party can neither suppress nor ignore. The silver-fork novel acknowledges that in the era of Catholic Emancipation and the First Reform Bill, the definition of “public” and the breadth of opinion represented therein have irrevocably changed. Ina Ferris observes, as we saw in the Introduction, that in the wake of the French Revolution and amidst the domestic unrest of the postwar years, “there [was] an acute sense of different ‘publics’ to be addressed” and a general consciousness that “politics had converged with sentiment in new ways, and public debate increasingly became a matter less of discursive reasoning than of performance.”49 As I have argued, the permeation of performance and visibility through public consciousness was bound up in the integration of the fashion system with celebrity culture and the ubiquity of print imagery in the early nineteenth century. Visual culture penetrated the domain of everyday life and the bases of individual and collective identity, requiring individuals to signal their belonging increasingly with reference to available imagery held in common. Tom Mole contends that, with the consolidation of celebrity and visual culture, this period witnessed “the emergence of a specifically modern way to enter the public sphere. A new form of public life had appeared.”50 The Newgate novel would fully explore the ramifications for ordinary people of the new media era and the “new form of public life” it engendered, as we will see in Chapter 3, but the silver-fork novel’s conception of “popular feeling” as a social force makes clear that it is similarly interested in contemporary transformations of publicness. Its representation of public opinion as indicative of collective consciousness participates in the period’s movement away from the

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notion of a rational public sphere and toward what Ferris describes as “the thick and interwoven realm of publication and publicity.”51 The Contrast suggests, moreover, that the novel genre has both the opportunity and responsibility to expand on the conversations taking place in newspapers, at breakfast tables and literary salons, in order to shape the direction in which contemporary currents flow. As we saw in the previous chapter, Romance and Reality insists that the novel is the literary genre best suited to articulate the “great changes working around [people]” in the present age for it “merge[s] in its pages pamphlets, essays, and satires” and uses character and dialogue to work out theories and opinions.52 Paramount among the novel’s distinctive features is its conception of public consciousness. Silver-fork fiction insists on the importance of conversation to represent a new political reality: change might be effected by everyone and no one in particular. In the collective conversation one finds the tenor and movement of public opinion. The novel genre must therefore correlate its narrative methods with the forms of conversation that presently characterize public life. In his post–Reform Act novel, Godolphin (1833), Bulwer-Lytton identifies the movements of public opinion with both political reform and the currents of fashion. Represented as not just a matter of style but an intricate social system, fashion is shown in this novel to open the ruling class to new people and new ideas, and establish a basis of power that is premised on something other than title or blood. Godolphin’s heroine Constance, Lady Erpingham, the ambitious, intelligent daughter of a commoner, marries into the nobility and uses her wealth and power to sow the seeds of social justice. Constance defends fashion as “set[ting] up a rank independent of titular rank” and offering a form of protection and justice to those individuals of merit who find themselves marginalized by what she calls the “insolence of rank.”53 The narrator credits her with helping to bring about political reform by shaping opinion in the fashionable circles over which she holds sway: “In her salons the measures of her party were discussed: in her boudoir (it was whispered that) they were arranged. … [D]ay by day it became more and more the fashion to be liberal.”54 In tracing the steps that led Britain to the Great Reform Act, Bulwer shows how power is exercised in polite society and identifies this sphere as a potent site where fashion, opinion, and politics intersect. Bulwer ultimately has Constance declare fashion’s power, however, to be of limited utility. She dismisses it as an ephemeral tool that serves for a time to popularize a spirit of liberality and collective-mindedness, but that cannot cultivate a larger, progressive social vision. And in this she is right:

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fashion’s formal autonomy from historical progress narratives and predetermined social meanings ensures it cannot be harnessed in any sustained way to serve a political cause. Hollander observes that fashion is a “visual medium” that was “invented to lead an independent imaginative life for the eye. … [Its] forms thus have their own way of changing, arising from unconscious collective fantasies, which are linked to visualisations in the pictorial arts. Social meaning gets attached to fashion usually after it shifts, and this meaning can change with changes in society.”55 Fashion’s wordless forms always begin in the visual realm but as I argued in the Introduction, they embody an idiom of currency that quickly permeates virtually every other social sphere. In its tireless bid for novelty, fashion necessarily moves on once its emergent forms have materialized for contemporaries a strong “feeling of the present,” that moment which Georg Simmel describes as perpetually poised on the “dividing-line between the past and the future.”56 On Bulwer’s representation, fashion’s engagement of reform in the days leading up to the Bill’s passage was an act of caprice, as arbitrary and unpredictable as any other style change. The idiom that Bulwer invokes in marking fashion’s passage, though, is not as easily cast off. In his social treatise England and the English (1833), which was published the same year as Godolphin, Bulwer announces the end of fashion and fashionable literature: “fashionable novels [were] a shrewd sign of the times; straws they were, but they showed the upgathering of the storm.”57 Proclaiming the end of a genre that he himself helped to popularize, Bulwer insists that fashion is no longer fashionable. The only caveat he offers is that novels concerned with fashion manifest a “shrewd” connection to contemporary culture and the currents of public opinion. That caveat, however, is worth pausing over. His own literary career indicates that fashion possesses an allure and analytical value that resonate beyond the brief heyday of the silver-fork school; Bulwer’s Newgate novels in particular illustrate that fashion’s idiom encompasses more than a narrative representation of the salons and boudoirs of polite society. Rather, as Bulwer’s own formulation in England and the English suggests, fashion’s power lies in its canny embodiment of “the times,” its articulation of the currents presently running through the public consciousness and “flow[ing] resistlessly onward,” to return to Lady Gayland’s metaphor. As I will argue in Chapter 3, fashion’s correlation with the everydayness of change and the integration of visual culture into public life and modern selfhood made its significatory power vital to novelistic articulations of contemporaneity even after the moment when, according to Bulwer, a “description of the mere frivolities of fashion [was] no longer coveted.”58

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Bulwer’s Pelham and the Resistance to Bildung Silver-fork novels suggest that to enter society not only with the intention of making one’s own way, but more ambitiously, in the hope of advocating for social and political reform, one must understand intimately society’s forms and customs. At the same time, though, individuals can only capitalize on such understanding if they keep themselves distinct from the social forms in which they traffic; they must maintain an autonomy of taste and thought to avoid vulgar imitation and atrophying thraldom. How are they to achieve the perfect balance? This dilemma stands at the heart of a “social dialectic” that, F. R. Hart contends, preoccupied novelists interested in fashion and manners from Burney, Edgeworth, and Austen through to the writers of the silver-fork school: namely, how is one to avoid the perils incumbent on entering the world, especially “a commitment to social role that atrophies the true nature,” without falling into the dangers encountered by retiring from society altogether? “Not to be educated in ‘the world,’” Hart explains, “is to remain either narrow or romantic in seclusion.”59 In his earlier silver-fork novel Pelham; or, The Adventures of a Gentleman (1828), Bulwer exemplifies the risks of failing to maintain this balance by setting as foils to his eponymous protagonist a pair of characters representing opposed, yet equally barren modes of subjectivity: Sir Lionel Garrett enthralls himself to the fashionable dictates of the beau monde, while Sir Reginald Glanville withdraws from the world in antisocial melancholy and remorse. Pelham explains that Sir Lionel has every reason to be contented with “the respectable” set of the aristocracy from which he originates, “consisting of old peers of an old school; country gentleman, who still disdain not to love their wine and to hate the French.” However, “[o]ne unfortunate evening Sir Lionel Garrett was introduced to the celebrated Duchess of D.”60 “From that moment,” Pelham observes, Sir Lionel’s “head was turned. … He cared not a straw that he was a man of fortune, of family, of consequence; he must be a man of ton; or he was an atom, a nonentity, a very worm, and no man” (10). Pelham regards Sir Lionel as representative of an “overflowing class of the English population,” whose only “end and aim” is to enter fashionable society (10). Opposed to this set, Bulwer posits Pelham’s dearest friend, the brooding, sensitive Sir Reginald Glanville. Marked from an early age “with a deep and impassioned melancholy,” Glanville is in no way improved by his entry into society (6). On the contrary, the pleasures of society only make him “more riveted to the monotony of self” (353). He is trustworthy

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and principled, but true to the period’s prevailing Byronic type, he is tortured by a guilty memory: having compromised the virtue of his lowerborn love, Glanville precipitates her suffering, madness, and death, and proves himself unable to move beyond his paralyzing guilt. Pelham is highly critical of what both he and Glanville represent as a ubiquitous character: “I cannot hope,” Glanville observes, “that I am a very uncommon character: I believe the present age has produced many such. Some time hence, it will be a curious inquiry to ascertain the causes of that acute and sensitive morbidity of mind, which has been, and still is, so epidemic a disease” (353). Glanville’s “morbidity of mind” is a product of his age, so common as to be measured in “epidemic” proportions. If his character is shaped by their historical moment, however, it is both a moment and a character type that Bulwer’s novel aims to move beyond. Pelham diagnoses this character as offering no resistance to history’s determining force: Glanville resigns himself to the disease with which the “present age” has infected him. In chastising Glanville for his morbid obsession with the past – an obsession that results in self-exile, a shirking of political responsibilities, and eventually, death – Pelham makes clear that he regards his friend’s renunciation of society as fundamentally selfish and unprincipled. “There is no situation in life,” Pelham insists, “which we cannot sweeten, or embitter, at will. If the past is gloomy, I do not see the necessity of dwelling upon it” (222). Several years before Carlyle’s Herr Teufelsdröckh would instruct his generation to “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe,” Bulwer was working to outmode a certain Byronic figure, here styled as morosely self-indulgent, in order to formalize in the novel instead a more playful, roguish gentleman-wanderer: the pícaro, as recently updated in Byron’s comic epic, Don Juan.61 If the perils of both social belonging and withdrawal are one of the fashionable novel’s defining concerns, silver-fork fiction reframes the dialectic around which this novelistic tradition turns by generally exempting its protagonists from the painful process of learning that neither extreme constitutes a viable option. Pelham is a case in point: from his earliest entry into the world, the protagonist is possessed of a preternatural knowledge of society and its pitfalls that enables him, for example, to diagnose Garrett’s and Glanville’s mistakes and steer well clear of them himself. Other silverfork protagonists share this self-command and social savvy. Romance and Reality’s Edward Lorraine, as we saw in Chapter 1, not only navigates every social scene with confidence and ease and graces fashionable parties with his witty, scintillating conversation, but possesses a clear vision from the novel’s outset of the “many paths of utility” one might follow in order to

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exert one’s “powers … for the general good.”62 Edward enters the novel with such a deep commitment to public life that he lectures his inwardly focused elder brother on the irresponsibility of the latter’s reclusiveness. In Thomas Lister’s Granby (1826), similarly, both the hero and heroine “posses[s] considerable quickness of perception”: Henry Granby and Caroline Jermyn prove themselves exceptionally skilled at reading character and navigating society despite the snares that present themselves, like those that befall many a Burney heroine, in the guise of the counsel and assistance of friends.63 The Contrast’s Lady Gayland is equally perceptive and self-sufficient, one of “those gifted individuals who unite acute sensibility with keen observation.”64 The narrator reports that she “spurn[s] the usual rules of drawing-room refinement,” yet her manners are so impeccable that it is “impossible … that under any circumstances she could ever be ungraceful.”65 Like Pelham, moreover, Lady Gayland possesses razor-sharp social acumen that allows her to diagnose the ills of others without ever making a misstep herself. She acts as self-appointed mentor to the novel’s low-born heroine, Lucy, helping her to navigate her entry into society, which Lady Gayland describes as “this bazaar of fashion,” and manage the expectations of her fashion-conscious husband.66 While silver-fork protagonists typically exploit their worldly experiences so that, like Smollett’s Roderick Random, they are “less liable to disappointment and imposition” because they “kn[ow] the world too well,” their authors rarely frame the process of experience-gathering as integral to their sense of self.67 As I have suggested, the comparative immunity of silver-fork protagonists to a structure of individual development marks a conscious upcycling on the part of their authors of an outmoded model of character stasis developed in early eighteenth-century fiction. Novel theory’s longstanding acceptance of maturation as the defining trait of characterization in nineteenth-century fiction, however, makes that upcycling-as-resistance difficult to see. Jerome McGann reads Pelham’s story, for example, as the narration “after the fact, [of] his own Bildungsroman,” which “despite its episodic nature, … portrays Pelham moving through a three-stage moral development.”68 I contend, by contrast, that to label this novel a Bildungsroman is to flatten out the generic hybridity that marks its substantial innovation.69 Pelham’s self-possessed entry into society and near faultless procession through it attest to his deviation from a Bildung model of character. The process that he undergoes in the narrative turns, not on moral growth nor an emergent self-understanding, but rather, on the conscious development of what he calls a “decided code of principles”; once formed, Pelham insists, “there had never … been a single moment in which I had

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transgressed  it”  (294). He maintains that he is “sterner and more inflexible in the tenets of my morality, such as they were, than even the most zealous worshipper of the letter, as well as the spirit of the law … would require” (294). This self-professed zealotry does not oblige him, however, to renounce his propensity for dandiacal self-fashioning and dissimulation. Pelham is not disabused, like a good Quixote figure, of his romance ­illusions – indeed, he has never had any – nor force-marched through a conversion experience into sincerity and industry as would be Teufelsdröckh, his Carlylean counterpart in Sartor Resartus, and later, any number of Dickensian young men from David Copperfield to Pip to Eugene Wrayburn. Even Pelham’s melodramatic climax does not represent the culmination of the hero’s maturation: when he descends into London’s criminal underworld to obtain evidence that clears Glanville of a wrongful murder charge, there is little at stake in this act of daring for Pelham himself. Personal growth and maturity lie, on his model, not in self-renunciation, but rather, in the careful honing of the political principles and aspirations that his dandiacal sociability has allowed him to craft. What is remarkable about the silver-fork school’s skilled, self-assured protagonists is that their social acumen is chalked up consistently to their attention to trifles. They pride themselves on grasping the importance of social ephemera: the idiosyncrasies, innovations, and misdemeanours that individually are of little consequence, but together reveal the landscape of contemporary manners and the customs essential to social belonging. “Careless and indifferent as I seem to all things,” Pelham declares, “nothing ever escapes me: the minutest erreur in a dish or a domestic, the most trifling peculiarity in a criticism or a coat, my glance detects in an instant, and transmits for ever to my recollection” (92). Narrative irony notwithstanding, Pelham’s attention to detail is far from superficial: training his critical eye as often on himself as on society, his close observation serves as the basis of his self-command and knowledge of manners, and informs his political principles.70 “No attention is too minute, no labour too exaggerated,” he explains, “which tends to perfect [manners]. He who enjoys their advantages in the highest degree, viz., he who can please, penetrate, persuade, as the object may require, possesses the subtlest secret of the diplomatist and the statesman, and wants nothing but opportunity to become ‘great’” (43). Pelham’s careful cultivation of manners allows him to move through the world with confidence and ease. Much like Byron’s great diplomatist Don Juan who “[w]as all things unto people of all sorts,” Pelham assumes postures as the situation requires without encountering the social perils that trip up less canny characters.71

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Robin Gilmour contends that Pelham’s manifesto for manners “is pure [Lord] Chesterfield, both in elevating the ‘ornamental’ above the ‘solid’ and in the nakedness of the social ambition.”72 Any similarity to the tenets of the notorious Lord Chesterfield may explain a good deal of the offence that Pelham gave to Carlyle and William Maginn, among others.73 Bulwer’s novel makes clear, however, that Pelham unequivocally opposes that separation of manners from morals with which Chesterfield’s name was synonymous in the nineteenth century.74 Pelham is an acutely principled character who recommends exploiting the mask of manners, not to promote his own interests at the expense of others, but rather to remain socially autonomous – literate in but independent of society’s forms and customs – and to preserve his true “nature,” “[b]uried deep beneath the surface,” from the characters that he determines “the object may require” (43). For Pelham, calculation need not be malevolently self-interested, as it was for an important novelistic precursor, the Waverley hero. Alexander Welsh explains that the Scottian “hero of civilization and refinement,” obliged to respect the social order at all costs, must eschew even “calculating prudence” because it smacks of cunning and self-interest.75 The narrative problem that Scott’s fiction engenders, Welsh suggests, is that a “prudent hero who cannot be deliberately prudent can have no active role. … He is wholly at the mercy of the forces that surround him, and thus acted upon rather than acting.”76 Pelham, by contrast, shares none of this diffident submission. Proximate to characters like Edward Waverley and Frank Osbaldistone in his preference for social observation over action, Pelham distances himself from them by means of his apology for calculation and his criticism of the passive resignation to history evidenced by his Byronic friend Glanville. Bulwer establishes for his protagonist a different relationship to custom and history from that typical of the Waverley hero by drawing on two related models: first, the eighteenth-century picaresque, which marshals its self-sufficient protagonists as witness-critics through diverse social panoramas, and secondly, Byron’s restyling of the picaresque in Don Juan, which amplifies the ambiguities of the pícaro’s interiority. As McKeon notes, the early Spanish picaresque worked a tension between two levels of narrative consciousness, that of the unregenerate pícaro and that of his moralizing narrator: “the sharp disjunction of the two voices creates a state of moral ambiguity or appears to require an ironic interpretation of narrative hypocrisy.”77 In Byron’s recasting of the form, the narrator is wary and cynical rather than moralizing, and the pícaro, while sexually rakish, is something of a cipher. Malleable and accommodating, Juan may as easily

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be naïf as rogue.78 The productive distance between narrator and protagonist, however, remains: Don Juan’s doubled narrative consciousness allows the worldly-wise narrator to foreground self-fashioning as a social necessity, while keeping the hero at a distance and leaving open the question of his interiority. In an ephemeral modern world in which “even/Change grows too changeable without being new,” Byron’s narrator advises Juan that social observation is key: “Be hypocritical, be cautious, be/Not what you seem, but always what you see.”79 The narrator advocates the kind of social perspicacity and adaptability that becomes the raison d’être of the silver-fork protagonist. Offering a prescient formulation of the mini-generational knowledge gaps that in our day separate the social media and technological savvy of those born a mere half-dozen years apart, Byron’s narrator radically truncates the temporal measure adequate to account for history’s movements: “Talk not of seventy years as age. In seven/I have seen more changes …/Than might suffice a moderate century through.”80 Don Juan underscores the “changeab[ility]” of “change” in a world structured by a sense of history keyed to quotidian rather than catastrophic change, where individuals keen to stay abreast of custom and the currents of public opinion must accommodate themselves to the evanescence of the contemporary. Change becomes at once captivating, alienating, and banal in the spectral phantasmagoria that, as we saw in the previous chapter, period writers identified with modern metropolitan life. Especially in the English cantos of Don Juan, whose novelism makes them something like the first silver-fork novel, the narrator elaborates the process of Juan’s self-fashioning, drawing a firm distinction between what the hero observes and what he reflects to his audience.81 “By nature soft, his whole address held off/Suspicion”: Juan was Observant of the foibles of the crowd, Yet ne’er betraying this in conversation, Proud with the proud, yet courteously proud So as to make them feel he knew his station And theirs …82

What remains unclear in this intimation of an interiority distinct from Juan’s polite sociability is whether his adept self-fashioning is born of hypocrisy or good manners. Is his mutability designed to deceive or is it politeness, a “for[m] of dissimulation” that Jenny Davidson suggests would have been praised in the eighteenth century for “serving to lubricate the machinery of political and domestic life”?83 Given Byron’s self-conscious

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return to the picaresque, the suggestion that he likewise rescues dissimulation from the dustheap of eighteenth-century forms seems wholly plausible. The key here, though, is that in much the same way that Landon cites an eighteenth-century model of publicness in Romance and Reality, Byron upcycles an obsolescent mode of sociability without a hint of nostalgia. With the ironic detachment of his narrator serving to deflect any suggestion of sentiment for a past age in which the question of interiority mattered less, Byron works to re-establish the codes of that earlier social order to make clear that the question of his hero’s motive is unanswerable and ultimately irrelevant. In the contemporary world, to be discreetly “[o]bservant of the foibles of the crowd” is to conduct oneself wisely, to seize on what Pelham calls trifles in order to accord oneself with the customs of the age and participate in social life. Of greater consequence than the substance of Juan’s interiority, Don Juan suggests, are his skills at code-switching: his ability to change with the customs of the day, to move among different audiences and shift with his narrator across genres, from modern epic to the comic bathos of ottava rima to the restless panoramas of fashionable fiction. As we will see in Chapter 3, Newgate fiction similarly endorses the value of code-switching in a rapidly changing world, but in the context of its low-born criminal protagonists, the stakes of adaptability and self-performance are significantly altered. Byron uses Juan’s social savvy to show that taste and the cultural capital it engenders are established, not through a fixed standard of discrimination, but rather through an openness to – indeed, a preference for – the eclectic heterogeneity and transience of commercial modernity. With Pelham, Bulwer adopts for his protagonist the art of manners practised so adroitly by Byron’s Juan, but works to move beyond both the ambiguity surrounding Juan’s adumbrated interiority and the passivity characteristic of the Waverley hero. Bulwer returns specifically to the narrative structure of a mid-eighteenth-century picaresque novel like Roderick Random by having Pelham narrate his own tale. Using the astute social observer as narrator and protagonist, Bulwer eschews the doubling of narrative consciousness typical of earlier picaresque narratives and collapses the epistemological gap that separates most early nineteenth-century protagonists from their narrators: for example, the ineffectual, historically distant heroes of the Waverley novels from their more enlightened, contemporary narrators; the opaque protagonist of Don Juan from his sardonic, incisive narrator; even the not always discerning heroines of Austen’s fiction from their ironic, knowing narrators. In contrast to these narrative antecedents, Bulwer’s narrating protagonist is himself situated

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proximate to the reader in the present day; he himself retains the power born of perspicuity in a society characterized by continuous change. He satirizes his own postures and performances as well as those of others in order to lay bare the mechanics of modern identity and the adaptability necessary to social belonging. With the move back to an eighteenth-century model of picaresque auto-narration, though, Bulwer simultaneously takes a formative step forward toward the cult of sincerity that would dominate Victorian literature until the late-century critiques of George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde among others would upend its by then hackneyed codes. Bulwer’s dandy novel might share the caustic sensibilities of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, but it exhibits at the same time a sobriety that would sit comfortably alongside the sincerest, most civically minded of Victorian narratives. In this, I see Pelham as evidencing the tension which Amanda Anderson identifies in Wilde’s society comedies and The Picture of Dorian Gray “between dandyism and sentimentality, and between aestheticism and moralism.”84 Pelham manifests a confidence, however, that that tension is fully within the dandy’s (and his author’s) control, and that the value of art lies in its service to an ethical political program rather than in aestheticism per se. The earnestness of Bulwer’s early fiction, more transparent in a Newgate novel like Paul Clifford than the ironic Pelham, as I will discuss in the following chapter, can be traced in part to the author’s youthful enthusiasm for the reformist principles of William Godwin’s fiction.85 Through his narration, Pelham makes clear that his dandyism may be a pleasure, but it is always also a tool: it allows him to proceed privately with his acute social observation and on that basis, refine the political and philosophical principles that inform his plans for social reform. At the conclusion of his narrative, for example, Pelham recounts that he has just learned of the death of his infant cousin, the heir apparent who stood between him and the family titles and estates. “Sincerely do I wish that [my uncle’s] loss may be supplied,” he declares with great simplicity; “I have already sufficient fortune for my wants, and sufficient hope for my desires” (444). Pelham dismisses out of hand the suggestion that his selffashioning and the pursuit of his “desires” might be driven by anything other than honourable motives. The only warrants he can offer for this lack of self-interest, however, are repeated protestations of sincerity and serious purpose and an implied immunity to ambition guaranteed by his august lineage and “sufficient fortune.” Bulwer works to free up space for a wideranging, disinterested analysis of current social forms and public opinion,

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oriented by a single perceiving consciousness but without the contaminating influence of private motive. As Bulwer’s contemporary Thomas Lister makes clear in Granby, however, any shibboleth on which the modern gentleman stakes his identity – on demonstrations of honesty, reserve, or savvy sociability – risks opening a new site of performative instability. As we will see with Gore’s Cecil, the dandy’s posture of self-sufficient autonomy ultimately proves a useless defence against a social order obsessed with mining and assaying motive. On Pelham’s example, the silver-fork novel focuses its narrative energies, not on a plot of inner growth, but on the spectacles and sensations of commodity culture and the reorganization of social power and authority taking place under the aegis of new forms of public consciousness and an expanding culture of visibility and mediation.86 In a society groping about for a ballast as it finds itself consumed by the “changeab[ility] of “change,” as Juan’s narrator suggests, silver-fork fiction explores the potential of a savvy subject well conversant with prevalent customs and codes who regards the ephemeral social landscape with dispassion and discernment. Such an individual recognizes contemporary society as a vital, contradictory force, or as Raymond Williams suggests, “a process that enter[s] lives, to shape or to deform; a process personally known but then again suddenly distant, complex, incomprehensible, overwhelming.”87 Beginning from the premise of its protagonist’s ability to traverse such incongruities in the same way the modern city dweller, at once anonymous and desiring, moves through a visual spectacle of crowds and shop windows, the silverfork novel shows how one might analyze the contemporary from within and simultaneously at a remove from its terms and forms. Bulwer’s iteration of this individual is firmly utopian in character: embracing the transience and visuality of public life, Pelham insists that fashion consciousness can serve as a valuable tool in the promotion of a progressive social order. He grounds his optimism in fashion’s cultivation of a readiness for and adaptability to continuous social change. Fashion “socializes human beings to change,” Gilles Lipovetsky argues, “and prepares them for perpetual recycling.”88 As we saw in the last chapter, Lipovetsky claims that “fashion puts civil society in a state of openness with respect to historical movement; it creates receptive mentalities characterized by fluidity that are inherently prepared for the voluntary adventure of the new.”89 On Pelham’s account, this “state of openness” has radical social and political potential: it makes change possible in a manner heretofore unimagined, through a system in which all are socialized. Pelham’s performativity, moreover, serves to expose the contradictions inherent

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in an emergent Victorian gentlemanly ideal. Set alongside Pelham’s selfconscious embrace of visibility, the gentleman’s ethic of self-renunciation appears a papering over, rather than purging, of the self-performance and public reception of that performance that such an ideal necessitates.90 To deny fashion’s formative mechanisms, Pelham suggests, is to neglect a vital opportunity to capitalize on the public’s capacity for transformation that fashion and its culture of change have wrought. As an early alternative to Bildung with momentous social potential, Bulwer offers the self-sufficiency and perspicacity of the pícaro, here restyled as a discerning dandy ­intimately attuned to the temporality of fashion and thus responsive to the ever-shifting demands of contemporary life.

Cecil ’s Corrosive Coda In what might be considered the final word on the silver-fork genre, Gore’s extraordinary dandy novel Cecil; or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb and its sequel Cecil, a Peer, both of which appeared in 1841, caustically disenchant the models of selfhood imagined in many earlier silver-fork novels, as well as those already emergent in the domestic fiction of the new Victorian age. Much like Pelham, Cecil Danby is a cynical, self-satisfied dandy who narrates his own story and places himself at the centre of every scene. His two-part fictional autobiography closes soon after he has become the 12th Lord Ormington and bedecked himself with a “considerable portion of ‘the invaluable casket of Ormington jewels’” for Queen Victoria’s coronation.91 From this position, Cecil looks back on the “gilded, not the golden age” of the Regency, an epoch that, like the dandy who emblematizes it, has been largely extinguished in the narrative present (1: 223). The licence that Gore allows herself in pushing her dandy to the farthest extremes of irreverence and irresponsibility seems justified by the fact that, as Cecil himself observes of dandyism, “the thing is obsolete” (1: 223). Like those of his silver-fork predecessors, Cecil’s narrative eschews the familiar developmental structures of the Bildungsroman, opting instead for the peripatetic movements of the picaresque and the comparative imperviousness of its rogue protagonist. Winifred Hughes suggests, “Although Cecil is constantly engaged in restless motion, he never really goes anywhere. At the end of the six volumes he continues to drift along in the same condition of indeterminacy in which he started out.”92 Like an exemplary pícaro, Cecil ranges widely both geographically and socially, moving from fashionable circles in London and continental adventures with a fictionalized Byron to the folksy companionship of street entertainers

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and a morally invigorating though ultimately catastrophic romance with a middle-class domestic angel. What sets Cecil apart from other silver-fork novels, though, is its thoroughgoing disenchantment of both the glittering, evanescent Regency period to which it turns in half-satirical, halfelegiac retrospection and the age of sincerity and sentiment that rises to supplant the earlier era. Gore takes an aimless, irreverent trifler with no interiority to speak of and no desire for self-improvement or political reform, and places him in a society defined by a drive to distinction presupposed by its own core doctrine of insatiable industry. Despite repeated protestations that he harbours no ambition at all, Cecil finds himself endlessly suspected of motives and designs he does not possess. Gore demonstrates decisively that the optimism of a novel like Pelham is utopian and futile: such protestations of artlessness and self-sufficiency do nothing to defuse the suspicions of a society anxious to keep unpredictable drives in check, and neutralize those individuals deemed most likely to manifest them. On the face of it, Gore acquiesces fully in the chastisements of earlier critics.93 She empties her dandy of the pesky ambition and political principle that made Pelham so abhorrent to his critics. Cecil, by contrast, as Hughes remarks, is “nothing more threatening than an unmitigated trifler.”94 If Gore allows her dandy the many pleasures of selfishness, frivolity, and high-living, however, she punishes him for them mercilessly: she lobs one fateful narrative mishap after another at him to reinforce both the extent to which he is incapable of reform and the literal threat he poses to the domestic peace and individual felicity of those who cross his path. The illegitimate issue of his mother’s affair with the dandiacal Sir Lionel Dashwood, Cecil figures in his father Lord Ormington’s eyes as a reprobate interloper who threatens to lay claim to a title and inheritance to which he has no right. Cecil is indirectly responsible for the death of his beloved nephew Arthur, heir of Cecil’s older brother John Danby and thus an obstacle to Cecil’s own accession to the peerage. Attached to his brother but unwilling to adopt John’s ethos of earnestness and probity, Cecil proves unassimilable to the Victorian regime of hearth, home, and self-improvement to which his aristocratic family works to submit him. Undergoing no personal redemption before becoming the next Lord Ormington, he realizes on every level his father’s worst fears. In his relationships with women, Cecil comes off no better: he brags of “a predisposition to womanslaughter,” but the humour of his fatal attraction turns macabre when we learn that the numerous women with whom he has been involved have all died or come to inauspicious ends because of their

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association with him (1: 28). Cecil’s family members and romantic interests are generally exemplars of goodness and sincerity, yet one by one, they are felled around him while he carries on haphazardly, ending his story much the same character he was at the outset. Gore posits Cecil and his brother John as representatives of two different social orders and models of selfhood: paradoxically, the younger brother embodies the spirit of the Regency, cast here as a superficial age that has been fully eclipsed in the narrative present; the elder by contrast is positioned as the prototype of a new era of sincerity, industry, and domestic affection. The elder brother exemplifies, moreover, the reformation of the aristocracy that, as Linda Colley has argued, enabled the ruling class to maintain its cultural influence much longer than middle-class critiques in the period have led us to believe.95 On Gore’s representation, however, the prospects for the emergent model that John Danby represents are surprisingly bleak. Although the dawn of Victoria’s reign should augur well for one of his disposition, John is dead before her coronation, undone by the disintegration of his domestic idyll. Predeceased by his wife and heirs and forsaken by his daughter, John proves unable to proceed in life once the domestic “bower of Eden” on which his strength depends gives way (2: 246). The model of prudent self-restraint in everything except perhaps his feelings for his family, John’s simple faith in the sanctity of the domestic affections seems to precipitate his demise. This dystopic truncation of the elder brother’s exemplarity does far more than allow the illegitimate younger son to assume the Ormington family titles. In the resolution of the brothers’ plot lines, Gore disassembles with uncanny prescience the domestic ideology that would carry such force in the British novel through the Victorian period, an age still in its infancy at the moment of Cecil’s publication. Through John’s tragic end and Cecil’s unassimilability to domestic life, Cecil suggests that hearth and home may not represent the salutary force for individual and nation with which an increasingly prominent cultural discourse equated them.96 Copeland attributes the sense of decline that permeates Cecil to the evanescence of the Whig party and the spirit of reform it ushered in: the Whigs’ defeat in the same year that Cecil appeared marked the “end of an era.”97 He suggests that in her dandy novel, “Mrs Gore mourns the loss of the cultural and political promise of the 1820s and 1830s, the great wave of high spirits that carried novels of fashionable life along with it.”98 While this political context is clearly central to the novel’s social vision, we might read Cecil’s disenchantment equally in relation to the novel genre itself and its residual and emergent forms. Gore dismantles a

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series of narrative possibilities made imaginable in earlier fiction, including the Bildungsroman maturation plot that we encounter in a text like Sartor Resartus as well as the anti-Bildung revival of the pícaro that, as we’ve seen, Bulwer pursues in Pelham to position his protagonist as a canny observer. Curiously, Teufelsdröckh’s faith that one can secure for oneself a principled if quixotic autonomy from social and economic constraint by correlating one’s “inward Talent” with the “outward Environment of Fortune,” the “new time” and “new conditions” of society, sounds strikingly similar to Pelham’s faith in his self-sufficiency.99 The protagonists arrive at their convictions via very different mechanisms, one involving a conversion experience and the other a preternatural understanding of performativity, but their views on the individual’s relationship to the social are surprisingly proximate. Read through Cecil’s lens, Pelham and Sartor Resartus appear equally idealistic: each premises an individual whose sovereign consciousness allows him to keep himself apart from society’s forms other than as they suit his purpose. His autonomy secure, he is not at risk of being read on terms other than his own or caught in the interstices of incompatible social and historical forces. Like Bulwer, Gore revives the pícaro as singularly well adapted for the phantasmagoria of contemporary life, but she refuses her protagonist the fantasy of perfect sociability and self-mastery that Bulwer accords Pelham. Cecil may survey the world with confidence and insight, but his reception in the spheres through which he moves, particularly those which are suspicious of his practice of detached observation, is far from guaranteed. He is able neither to absent himself from such spheres nor assimilate himself to modes of life alien to his being. His family’s demand that he espouse their philosophy of moral exemplarity and self-help, for example, proves intolerable given that the ideological contradictions inherent in their performed sincerity and selflessness are apparent to one acutely conscious of the mechanisms of self-fashioning. Gore dismisses as well the pretence that individuals might subject history to their own control by means of their canny management of the “new time.” Subscribing along with her fellow silver-fork novelists to a sense of history felt in the “uncertain texture of momentary experience,”100 she follows the implications of this historical model through to their logical conclusions. On her account, the individual’s synchrony with contemporaneity and the everydayness of change involves him as well in its affective incongruities. Cecil’s hyperscrutiny of current manners and opinions notwithstanding, he finds himself susceptible to the vicissitudes of pleasure and ambivalence, belonging and alienation, that characterize modern life.

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In a narrative thread that anticipates the nexus of concerns the sensation novel will take up, as we will see in Chapter 5, Cecil gestures to the contradictory affects that contribute to the uncertainties of the present and the individual’s often irreconcilable position in the social. Gore emphasizes the unpredictable force of history in the everyday by reworking a number of staple plot elements from the historical fiction and romance narratives of her predecessors, especially Scott. Most tellingly, Cecil finds himself, at the “instigation of a passionate impulse,” caught up in not one, but two different war efforts (2: 138). Although in the second campaign, he is felled at the outset by an embarrassing, Waverleylike injury, in the earlier Peninsular war, he fights valiantly and returns home a hero. Despite the import of these exertions, however, Cecil’s entry into the arena of world historical events has little impact on his character. War heroism itself in the Regency period, he suggests, was rather commonplace: “the trumpet of Fame was almost as familiar as the horn of a mail coach. As Byron used to say, the only distinction was to be a little undistinguished” (2: 144). In an age that is not only war weary but media conscious, when any action has the potential to make the news and bring fame and celebrity within reach of seemingly anyone, conventional heroism jostles for attention with other sensational feats and novelties. As I will argue in the next chapter, the new demotic culture of visibility that Cecil references here will become a centrepiece of Newgate novels as they explore the constitutive force of novelty and visual sensation in the lives of ordinary people. Under this new model of history to which both silverfork and Newgate novels subscribe, meaningful social change may coalesce in any given moment and historical significance emerge equally through major or minor events. The challenge of a non-teleological model of history for a would-be public actor, however, is that while a minor event may prove consequential, major events may amount to nothing, at least in conventional terms. In Cecil, the conscious deflection of historical significance from Cecil’s military actions allows Gore to lay greater stress on the impact of quotidian change experienced in collective but localized forms. She chooses to focus on the competing social orders, values, and sensibilities at play in the sphere of private life and domestic relations, a sphere under significant revision in the narrative present, as we have seen, and one to which Cecil is effectively alien. Like other silver-fork novelists, Gore locates history’s force in the immediate texture of the quotidian, but in a move that anticipates later Victorian novelists and especially Thackeray, she underscores the obstacles to Cecil’s autonomy that are posed by such mundane developments as his

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family’s reaction to his character and actions, and the normative exigencies of social formations that he disdains but to which he proves unable to adapt. Gore has her dandiacal pícaro attest, that is, to the impossibility of simply ridding oneself of the vesture of the contemporary at those moments when it fails to suit one’s taste or desires. She marks the limit of the idea that one might be infinitely adaptable to the spirit of the age and explores the difficulties an individual may encounter when the fashions of the day just don’t fit. How in that case does one signal one’s belonging to the social? Cecil offers an early articulation of the conviction which would become widespread in later realist fiction that the individual must come to recognize himself as such in terms laid out by a society that he has not made and in forms he cannot freely determine.101 The easy code-switching practised by Don Juan seems as utopian in this context as Pelham’s simple assurance that his designs are disinterested and honourable. What distinguishes Cecil from the Victorian protagonists who succeed him, though, is that his alienation from his family and their social ideology doesn’t serve to shore up his own integrity or the inner truth of his being – as does, say, Jane Eyre’s peripheral perch in gentry window seats – but rather, marks his extraneousness and non-belonging. In what appears retrospectively as a coda to the silver-fork school, Gore constructs Cecil as an urbane, irreverent, ultimately caustic elegy for the hopefulness that had been pinned to the school’s embrace of presentness and the structure of novelty and obsolescence that it rightly identified as integral to contemporary life. The silver-fork novel may have steeped itself in the contingency and surface detail that characterize a society organized by fashion’s temporality, but on Gore’s account, the school was simultaneously coming to recognize that the ephemera of the contemporary carries its own kind of weight, and that the scene of the novel’s transformations would inevitably be littered with the cast-offs and other time-stamped detritus of earlier narrative forms. The Newgate novel, to which we will turn next, offers an alternative formulation of the experiences of contemporaneity which silver-fork fiction framed through the lens of a canny observer dropped into the spectral panorama of urban life. Emerging in the 1830s as the silver-fork novel was on the wane, the Newgate school turns its attention instead to the public dynamics of visual culture and the modern recognition of the mutually generative relations of individuals and collectives in a media-conscious age. Skirting Cecil’s difficulty with spheres inhospitable to his mode of being, the Newgate criminal begins from a position of non-belonging. He has virtually nothing to lose and no illusion of social mastery to trip him

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up. Taking notorious actions that propel him onto the public stage, the Newgate protagonist revels in the possibilities for publicity to be gained from a willingness to play to the crowd and capitalize on the image of himself reflected back by a rapt audience. Newgate novels show how the intersection of celebrity culture with the temporality of fashion penetrates the quotidian experience of ordinary people and engenders a model of demotic celebrity that, as we will see, transforms conceptions of publics and public character in the Victorian fiction that follows in its wake.

Notes 1 Catherine Gore, Cecil: or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb (1841), 2nd ed. (London: Bentley, 1843), 1: 222–23. All subsequent quotations will be cited in the text by volume and page number. Quotations are drawn from this Cecil novel rather than its sequel, Cecil, a Peer, unless otherwise noted. 2 Winifred Hughes, “Elegies for the Regency: Catherine Gore’s Dandy Novels,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 50.2 (1995): 189–209, 206. 3 Ibid. 4 Deidre Shauna Lynch, “Personal Effects and Sentimental Fictions,” EighteenthCentury Fiction 12.2–3 (2000): 345–68, 348. 5 Ibid. 6 Stephanie Insley Hershinow, Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the Early Realist Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 3. 7 Ibid., 25. 8 See also Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); William Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Hershinow (Born Yesterday), also references Frances Ferguson’s important theorization of character and intention in “Rape and the Rise of the Novel,” Representations 20 (1987): 88–112. 9 Hershinow contends, for example, that when Bildung is taken as the necessary outcome of a character’s experiences over time, “characterization is [deemed] successful to the degree that maturation is achieved” (Born Yesterday, 22). 10 Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), 4, 139. 11 Lynch, “Personal Effects,” 348. 12 Ibid. 13 Edward Copeland, The Silver Fork Novel: Fashionable Fiction in the Age of Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 37–64. F.  R. Hart made an earlier case for silver-fork debts to late eighteenth-century and

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Romantic fiction by women, in “The Regency Novel of Fashion,” From Smollett to James: Studies in the Novel and Other Essays, eds. Samuel Mintz, Alice Chandler, Christopher Mulvey (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981), 84–133. 14 Jerome McGann, “Introduction,” Pelham, or The Adventures of a Gentleman, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), xvi. Erin Mackie makes a similar argument for Pelham as Bildungsroman in “Libertine Fiction, Forensic Fashion, and the Dandy’s Development in Edward Bulwer’s Pelham,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 27.2 (2014–15): 285–306. In The Silver Fork School (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), Matthew Rosa contends that the “problem of Goethean influence upon Pelham is puzzling,” suggesting that Pelham illustrates that the “line of distinction” between the “apprenticeship novel and the picaresque romance” cannot always be sharply drawn (The Silver Fork School, 78–79). 15 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London: Penguin, 1985), 57. As I argued in the Introduction, Dickens casts his critique of fashion in Bleak House in terms that William Maginn used in Fraser’s Magazine twenty years earlier to denounce silver-fork fiction as “entirely valueless” because it embodies the “fixed, invariable principles” of aristocratic life. [William Maginn], “The Dominie’s Legacy; and Fashionable Novels,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 1 (April 1830), 320–21. On the novel’s relationship to entertainment culture and a variety of print media in the 1820s and 1830s, see Clare Pettitt, Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 16 “Reviews: Romance and Reality,” The Athenaeum 215 (10 December 1831), 793. 17 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 238. 18 Ibid., xxii–xxxiii. 19 G.  S. Rousseau, “From Swift to Smollett: The Satirical Tradition in Prose Narrative,” in The Columbia History of the British Novel, ed. John Richetti (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 133; McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 96. 20 McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 97. 21 Ibid., 98. 22 Rousseau, “From Swift to Smollett,” 136. 23 Ibid. 24 For a reading of Evelina that disputes its indebtedness to the narrative structures of the Bildungsroman, see Hershinow, Born Yesterday. 25 Mary Shelley, Lodore, ed. Lisa Vargo (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1997), 173. As we saw in Chapter 1, “phantasmagoria” is used regularly by period novelists to describe contemporary urban life. 26 Charles Lamb, “The Londoner,” The Morning Post and Gazetteer (1 February 1802): 3. As we saw in Chapter 1, these are the terms that Lamb attributes, appreciatively, to a modern London. 27 Ian Balfour, “Reversal, Quotation (Benjamin’s History),” MLN 106 (1991): 622–47, 636.

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28 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 261. 29 See Anne Hollander, “Without Looking,” London Review of Books 17.15 (3 August 1995): 18–19. 30 Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits (New York: Knopf, 1994), 17. 31 See Ulrich Lehmann, Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), on fashion as “the obvious determinant of modernity,” rather than one of its by-products (xvi). 32 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 254. 33 The phrase is Sambudha Sen’s, which he uses to describe the urban aesthetic of Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1821), a text that directly influences the silverfork genre in its depiction of high and low life. Sambudha Sen, “Hogarth, Egan, Dickens, and the Making of an Urban Aesthetic,” Representations 103 (2008): 84–106, 93. 34 Rousseau, “From Swift to Smollett,” 135. 35 William Hazlitt, “The Dandy School,” in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1931–34), vol. 20, 146. 36 Gillian Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 10–11. Russell expands Peter Clark’s term “fashionable sociability” to acknowledge women’s presence and power in an eighteenth-century scene of public entertainment and polite conversation. 37 Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.), Romance and Reality (London: Colburn & Bentley, 1831), 1: 130. 38 Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre, 11. 39 Ibid., 10. See, though, Amanda Vickery’s critique of historical analyses that pin the emergence of “the modern gender system” to a single era in British history: Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 3. 40 Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 378. 41 Tom Mole, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 3. On the origins of “media ecology,” see Thomas F. Gencarelli, “The Intellectual Roots of Media Ecology in the Work and Thought of Neil Postman,” The New Jersey Journal of Communication 8.1 (2000): 91–103. 42 Ibid. 43 Cynthia Lawford, “Introduction,” Romance and Reality by Letitia Elizabeth Landon (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), xii. 44 Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762– 1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3. 45 Lord Normanby, The Contrast (London: Colburn & Bentley, 1832), 2: 29. 46 Ibid., 2: 31. 47 Ibid., 2: 31–32.

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48 Clara Tuite notes in Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), for example, that the “Whigs were devoted to liberty yet pre-democratic” (12). 49 Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3. 50 Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), xii. 51 Ferris, Romantic National Tale, 2. 52 Landon, Romance and Reality, 1: 197–98. 53 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Godolphin (London: Bentley, 1833), 1: 282, 297. 54 Ibid., 1: 285–86. 55 Hollander, “Without Looking,” 19. 56 Georg Simmel, “Fashion” (1904), in On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 294–323, 303. 57 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, England and the English (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 288. 58 Ibid., 289. 59 Hart, “The Regency Novel of Fashion,” 85, 115. 60 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Pelham; or, The Adventures of a Gentleman (1828), ed. Jerome McGann (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), 9–10. Further in-text citations will be referenced parenthetically. 61 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 146. 62 Landon, Romance and Reality, 1: 167, 170. 63 Thomas Lister, Granby (London: Colburn, 1826), 1: 47. 64 Normanby, The Contrast, 3: 131. 65 Ibid., 2: 17. 66 Ibid., 3: 34. 67 Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 235. 68 McGann, “Introduction,” xvi. 69 Interestingly, Mackie makes an argument analogous to my own about Pelham’s hybridity and especially its inheritance from the eighteenth century, but she reads the novel as integrating Restoration libertinism with the nineteenthcentury Bildungsroman: see “Libertine Fiction.” I argue, in distinction from McGann and Mackie, that Pelham’s insight into the world by novel’s end represents a continuation of his skills of keen social observation and analysis evident from the outset of his narrative, rather than the product of an inner journey of growth and development characteristic of the Bildungsroman. 70 Pelham’s narrative irony was lost on some of its early readers. Carlyle himself admitted that his searing critique of Bulwer’s novel in Sartor Resartus was based on a misreading, not having recognized Pelham as a satire. See Alison Adburgham, Silver Fork Society: Fashionable Life and Literature from 1814 to 1840 (London: Constable, 1983), 132–33.

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71 Lord Byron, Don Juan (1819–24), in The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980–93), vol. 5, 14.31. 72 Robin Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), 54. 73 On the Pelham controversy, see Rosa, The Silver Fork School, 82–88. 74 Gilmour reminds us that Chesterfield was not “the hypocritical villain that nineteenth-century mythology made him out to be” (Idea of the Gentleman, 18). Chesterfield’s nonchalance about the dissimulation of civilized behaviour, nonetheless, ensured his notoriety as a detached, shallow aristocrat in the eyes of a middle-class public. 75 Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels: With New Essays on Scott (1963; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 18. 76 Ibid. 77 McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 97. 78 In other words, Juan may be a reprobate or he may be passive and uncalculating. Kim Michasiw notes, for example, that, “Throughout his travels, Juan has been made, remade, and even made ‘maid’ by the desires of women” (“The Social Other: Don Juan and the Genesis of the Self,” Mosaic 22 (1989): 29–48, 39). 79 Byron, Don Juan, 11.82, 11.86. 80 Ibid., 11.82. 81 Michasiw remarks that the poem’s later cantos resemble “chapters in a novel of manners” rather than “picaresque episodes” (“The Social Other,” 45). In Don Juan in Context (London: John Murray, 1976), Jerome McGann similarly contends that the English cantos’ increasing “novelism” can be attributed to the expansion across the length of the poem of both the “field” for the poet’s “reflection and commentary” and the hero’s “inward reflectiveness” (129–30). 82 Byron, Don Juan, 15.14, 15. 83 Jenny Davidson, Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 147. 84 Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 148. 85 William Godwin was particularly impressed by Paul Clifford: see his comments, reproduced in The Life, Letters and Literary Remains of Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 2: 257–58. I will return to Paul Clifford in Chapter 3. 86 On the silver-fork school’s representation of reform politics, see Copeland, The Silver Fork Novel. 87 Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970), 13. 88 Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 149. 89 Ibid.

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90 See James Eli Adams’s astute reading of Sartor Resartus in which he argues that Carlyle’s “savagely witty attack on dandyism” inadvertently reveals the complicity of dandiacal self-spectacle in the ideal of ascetic, vigorous masculinity that Carlyle’s fashion-phobic fictional editor promotes (Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 21). On the generalization of the gentlemanly ideal in Victorian literature, see Gilmour, Idea of the Gentleman; Ina Ferris, “Thackeray and the Ideology of the Gentleman,” in The Columbia History of the British Novel, ed. John Richetti (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 407–28; and Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in MidVictorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 91 Catherine Gore, Cecil, a Peer (London: T. and W. Boone, 1841), 3: 281. 92 Hughes, “Elegies for the Regency,” 206. 93 On Gore’s revision of the silver-fork dandy in the wake of the virulent critiques of Bulwer’s Pelham, articulated most forcefully in Fraser’s Magazine and Sartor Resartus, see my “History Suits the Dandy: Catherine Gore’s Cecil Novels,” Women’s Writing 16.2 (2009): 218–36. 94 Hughes, “Elegies for the Regency,” 196. 95 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 147–93. 96 One might suggest, following George Levine, that Gore takes her cue on this point from Mary Shelley to the extent that Frankenstein intimates that undue faith in the sanctity and inviolability of the domestic is no better than – and finally, no different from – Victor’s violation of family and community values in his dogged pursuit of knowledge. See George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 31. 97 Copeland, The Silver Fork Novel, 97. 98 Ibid., 99. 99 Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 93. 100 Matthew Buckley, “Sensations of Celebrity: Jack Sheppard and the Mass Audience,” Victorian Studies (Spring 2002): 423–63, 425. 101 Levine identifies as the “characteristic realist’s subject” of nineteenth-century fiction the conflict between a “personal desire to be oneself, to be defined not socially but privately,” and the unavoidable “necessity to make one’s peace with a determining society” (The Realistic Imagination, 102).

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Part II

Demotic Celebrities

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chapter 3

Spectacular Objects

Criminal Celebrity and the Newgate School

A tide of popular opinion has set against poetry; and in the literary world, as in the natural, the tide and the hour can scarcely be neglected, even by the hardiest adventurer. … But now when people think as well as feel, and the present is to them that matter of reference and consideration which the future was with their more dreaming forefathers – the fame that is only posthumous, has become to all, but to poets, a very frigid and impotent inducement. – Edward Bulwer-Lytton, “Dedicatory Epistle,” Paul Clifford (1830)1

In 1830, Edward Bulwer-Lytton took his then burgeoning literary career in a new direction: having had success with four earlier novels, including the silver-fork novel Pelham, he tried his hand at a Godwinian novel of ideas that would critique “things as they are.”2 Like William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Bulwer’s Paul Clifford focuses on the ruling class’s use of the law as an instrument of oppression that criminalizes the poor and socially marginalized. This would be a preoccupation in the British novel throughout the 1830s, most famously in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–38), and one that would later evolve in the fiction of Benjamin Disraeli and Elizabeth Gaskell among others to address industrial relations and the plight of the labouring classes. While Paul Clifford’s generic relevance to the Victorian political novel deserves further critical attention,3 the thread that I will trace in this chapter pertains instead to the ways in which the crime novel of the 1830s and 40s, beginning with Paul Clifford, engages with an emergent mass media culture. Specifically, the Newgate novel or “gallows school of literature,” as it was known in the period, explores the process through which notorious figures and extraordinary actions might capture the public’s imagination and bring celebrity within reach of the most insignificant individual.4 By focusing on the dashing highwaymen and plucky underdogs of London’s criminal underworld, 129

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these novels do more than simply romanticize crime: they stage the emergence of novelty, spectacle, and celebrity in the everyday lives of the humble and low-born, and in the process transform the novel’s conception of modern selfhood and public culture. To articulate the constitutive force of these structures in ­nineteenth-century life, Newgate novelists have recourse to an earlier historical moment in which new media produced a comparably heightened sense of contemporaneity: they look back to the early eighteenth century and its nascent communication formats, especially print imagery, news, advertisements, and criminal biography.5 Jonathan Lamb suggests, as we saw in the Introduction, that the “market uncertainties” of early commercial society altered individuals’ “ideas of identity and human agency, not to mention reality,” insofar as people “were forced to imagine who they were and how they related to things.”6 Their perception of those realities was affected not only by the “unintelligib[le]” laws of commercial society but equally by what Clifford Siskin and William Warner describe as the “proliferating” “number as well as … kinds of mediation” in the eighteenth century, including new communication infrastructure and protocols and print genres and formats.7 In this historical context, the figure of the brazen, canny criminal emerged with singular resonance. Responsive to the period’s “crisis of status inconsistency,” or the challenge to the equation of social identity with lineage and rank which, as I discussed in Chapter 2, lent particular import to the narrative form of the picaresque, the rogue enacted possibilities for fashioning one’s own position and identity.8 As much as he might be constrained by social, legal, and religious forms of authority, the eighteenth-century criminal also “embod[ied] and act[ed] on the impulses” that Hal Gladfelder contends were “encouraged by bourgeois individualism itself”– that is, impulses “for self-preservation at any cost, for status, property, sex, money, and revenge,” which were “fostered by a newly dominant ideology of the individual.”9 The criminal protagonist laid bare inherent conflicts between the enterprising individual and the social and legal mechanisms of commercial society which alternately cultivated innovation and worked to keep disruptive impulses in check. Sal Nicolazzo locates these contradictions at the eighteenth-century juncture between the social benefit of “economic self-interest,” which “made for rational actors whose behavior could be predicted,” and the “threat” of self-interest that produced “behaviors [which] cannot be reliably predicted or harnessed by the market.”10 Criminals belong to both camps: driven by nothing if not economic self-interest, they function as central agents in the circulation of goods and information, sustaining and

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undermining legitimate commercial enterprise at once.11 Criminals in ­eighteenth-century narrative served as well as a flashpoint for the intersection of emergent media with the kind of mobility of styles, goods, opinions, and individual identities that by the early nineteenth century, as I’ve suggested, would become a form of aesthetic and social change fully synchronized with the fashion system.12 Like silver-fork novelists’ restyling of the pícaro as discerning dandy, subjecting the visual spectacle of the modern city and its inhabitants to his scrutinizing gaze, Newgate authors upcycle the potent ­eighteenth-century figure of the low-born criminal in order to conceptualize for their own moment the individual’s relationship to the social in an age of new print media, a broad consciousness of visibility, and an intensified sense of the present. In a nineteenth-century context, this figure is largely distanced from the moral and religious frameworks of early e­ ighteenth-century crime narrative: even though many Newgate novels are set in the ­eighteenth century, they usually cast representatives of moral authority as ancillary, anachronistic, or complicit with systems of social injustice. Newgate criminals practice the kind of adaptability and perpetual restyling that a generalized fashion system universalizes: they demonstrate that the contingency of fashion’s “continual innovation” is a part of daily life in the nineteenth century and as pertinent to individuality as to commodity culture.13 The novels’ protagonists display a consciousness of their own visibility and public reception, moreover, that marks the permeation of fashion and visual culture through both the intimate and social dimensions of identity. Their spectacular presence, representation in print media, and the popular retailing of their exploits manifest the transformation of the possibilities available for self-making and social distinction. As I argued in the Introduction, fashion infiltrated virtually all social spheres by the turn of the nineteenth century as its formal expressions mediated people’s ways of signifying their individuality and belonging, and its principle of novelty and obsolescence organized everything from aesthetics and commodity culture to industry, economics, politics, and national identity. Fashion also constituted one of the few forms of commodity culture to which almost all individuals had access. For working people, clothing was an “area of consumption where relative abundance prevailed and the exercise of discrimination was a possibility,” enabling them “to participate in attractive forms of commercialized consumption.”14 Even among those whose slender means prohibited such participation, fashion’s saturation of the social ensured that its idiom of currency and change touched all lives. As Siskin and Warner explain with reference

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to the expansion of late eighteenth-century print production, the “saturation [of a given mediation] means that more people have more access to the technology,” yet it simultaneously “indicates that, strangely enough, direct access is not required – that even those lacking or refusing access are transformed by the ubiquitous presence of the technology.”15 Taking technology in the broad sense in which Siskin and Warner intend it, I contend that by the early nineteenth century fashion’s principle of novelty and obsolescence became an organizing technology in almost everyone’s life, and the primary mechanism by which individuals registered an experience of quotidian historical change and signalled their participation in the social. John Styles asserts that in this historical moment, fashion became “implicated in the fundamental temporal ordering of everyday life.”16 Although the virulent critical reaction that Newgate protagonists provoked turned largely on their elevation from disreputable origins to heroic status, they embody a mobility that has more to do with code-switching – adapting oneself to different milieus, customs, and rapidly changing circumstances – than social-climbing.17 That kind of cultural fluency and mutability had been associated since the late eighteenth century with a certain model of aristocratic sociability, exemplified notoriously by Lord Chesterfield and beguilingly by Lord Byron’s socially agile Don Juan, as well as Byron himself.18 The Newgate novel indicates that, by the 1830s, such mobility was no longer the exclusive purview of the ruling class, and in fact was quickly becoming requisite to a modern selfhood irreversibly altered by print and visual media and the socially mixed sites and spaces of metropolitan life. Newgate protagonists are often drawn from the eighteenth century, usually from the pages of The Newgate Calendar, yet the school’s interest in the emergence of spectacular public figures through the technologies of a proto-mass media and changing conceptions of publicness makes clear that it addresses itself as much to its present moment as to the laws and manners of an earlier age. At the heart of the Newgate school’s meditation on spectacle and public discourse lies the close interrelation between celebrity and fashion that was forged at the turn of the nineteenth century. As I argued in the Introduction, our modern notion of celebrity emerged in tandem with a generalized fashion system, as both depend on a visually oriented commercial culture in which individuals signal their belonging to the social collective through processes of identification with available imagery.19 Ubiquitous images of current styles and popular figures in the early nineteenth century furnished people with a pictorial language in which individual self-fashioning and a collective aesthetic sense could take form.

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Celebrity culture reflected as well the transformation of public life in the period, as audiences and public figures engaged with each other by means of print culture: audiences’ active reception of celebrities and the latter’s willingness to be seen produced a dynamic public sphere in which performance, sentiment, opinion, and politics interact. Ina Ferris suggests that “the thick and interwoven realm of publication and publicity … forms the matrix of ‘public cultural consciousness’ in the period.”20 What is striking about the Newgate school is its suggestion that any individual’s name and image might become objects of widespread interest, drawing to such persons the attention of a mass public and raising them to celebrity status. Clara Tuite’s and Tom Mole’s studies of Byron have familiarized us with the poet’s formative relationship to an emergent celebrity culture,21 but the Newgate novel offers a different perspective on celebrity in nineteenth-century Britain: it demonstrates that fashion’s principles of novelty and spectacle permeate quotidian experience across all stations, from highest to lowest, making celebrity imaginable to wider constituencies than ever before. Mole contends, as we saw in the previous chapter, that early nineteenth-century celebrity culture engendered “a specifically modern way to enter the public sphere. A new form of public life had appeared.”22 The Newgate novel conceptualizes that entry in the form of demotic celebrity: it stages the tantalizing possibility that individuals deemed insignificant by conventional measures – birth, station, wealth – might through their spirit and actions capture the public’s attention and mark out their difference from the crowd at the same time as they style themselves as someone with whom the public might identify. Old and new print imagery, repurposed popular narrative, and communal affects become material in circulation that criminal protagonists might cite, alter, and otherwise engage with as they perform themselves for their public. An ordinary person might have at best an outside chance at stardom, but the Newgate novel makes that fantastical outcome imaginable. It suggests as well that the rootless individual with few prospects for distinction has little to lose in trying, a fact that alarmed Newgate school critics, as we will see. It is not only would-be criminals, however, who might imagine themselves on the path to demotic celebrity that the Newgate novel charts. This fiction shows the criminal’s preoccupation with their own visibility to be a concern endemic to a society that makes public life inseparable from publicity, and fashion-consciousness, broadly defined, requisite to social participation. Like the silver-fork school, the Newgate novel makes clear that the skills of adaptability and self-fashioning at which criminals excel are precisely those which individuals in the contemporary world are wise

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to hone. The Newgate protagonist is in his own way the modern “fashionable being” whom Caroline Evans describes as “constantly in the process of re-imagining and re-creating him or herself in a rootless world. This process of self-fashioning may be simultaneously pleasurable and alienating.”23 Sharing with the silver-fork novel’s city-goer an ambivalence about the visual spectacle of modern life which both fascinates and estranges, the Newgate criminal thrills at and is repelled by the versions of himself that are reflected back by a captivated public. The Newgate novel transforms nineteenth-century fiction by articulating the demotic possibilities and attractions of celebrity and giving narrative form to emergent social and technological realities. Like the criminal protagonist, the novel draws on fashion’s practice of perpetual innovation by capitalizing on the materials at hand, including outmoded narrative and imagery that it plucks from the past and sets into new contexts in order to respond adroitly to the changing circumstances of the present. Newgate fiction’s concept of demotic celebrity constitutes a key challenge to our canonical understandings of the nineteenth-century novel: it demonstrates that an emergent mass media made public visibility imaginable and accessible to ordinary people, and that an “incessant preoccupation with being seen” was central to social life by the 1830s.24 As I will suggest in this and the following chapter on Dickens, the spectacular figure of the criminal protagonist makes evident that by mid-century, in Leo Braudy’s words, “the idea of fame without visibility seems like an unsupportable paradox.”25 Even for those who do not court celebrity but simply aspire to a place in public life, a consciousness of whether and how one is seen becomes unavoidable. Newgate novels invite us to reconsider the posture of humility and diffidence that we have taken as a synecdoche for the exemplary bourgeois subjectivity of Victorian fiction. The “flattening” of Victorian realism to a uniform bourgeois aesthetic has long since been challenged, most notably by Raymond Williams.26 I would contend, however, that we have not yet dislodged the notion that a recoil from self-display, whether born of modesty or a disdain for performance, is built into the ontology of the period’s model characters and lies at the heart of the Victorian novel’s vision for sober social change.27 Newgate fiction offers a different lens on the individual’s relationship to the social in the nineteenth-century novel: its protagonists embrace the opportunities for performance and publicity afforded by a society primed for novelty and sensation. The narrative homologies that connect Newgate fiction to the novels that follow in its wake, moreover, reveal that it is not an outlier in this regard. As I will argue in the next chapter, Newgate fiction draws into focus the extent to

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which a consciousness of visibility and public performance is written into even the most canonical of mid-century Victorian novels, not as a text’s buried secret, but rather as an openly acknowledged component of the protagonist’s formation.

Fame, Celebrity, and the Newgate Phenomenon To explain the Newgate novel’s particular appeal in the 1830s, Keith Hollingsworth points to the sanguine outlook generated by Reform-era legislative measures. He argues that sufficient legal and penal reforms had been enacted by this period that readers could regard the “crudest terrors of Newgate … as safely in the past,” and on that basis, take benign pleasure in the extravagant actions of a prison-breaker or highwayman.28 These larger-than-life characters and their violent deaths could be read as phenomena proper to less civilized eras. “Freedom and opportunity were in the air” in the early 1830s, he observes, allowing a broad public to congratulate itself on the passing of “old oppressions.”29 Capitalizing on narrative strategies for managing historical distance that they learned from Romantic-era historical fiction and especially Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, Newgate novelists regularly gesture to the boundaries that separate fictional outlaws from the reader’s present.30 In William Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839), for example, the narrator reassures his audience that the kind of criminals who were “flourishing in vast numbers” in Sheppard’s day, especially in poor neighbourhoods close to London’s transport artery, “recently, in a great measure, [have been] extirpated by the vigilance of the Thames Police.”31 By contrasting early eighteenth-century lawlessness with the improved policing of his readers’ own age, a change effected in significant measure by the 1829 creation of the Metropolitan Police, Ainsworth reassures his audience that a Jack Sheppard is virtually unimaginable in contemporary London.32 Similarly, Dickens’s narrator allows readers of Barnaby Rudge (1841) to congratulate themselves on the forward march of progress when he describes a rowdy “throng” participating in the 1780 Gordon riots as “composed for the most part of the very scum and refuse of London, whose growth was fostered by bad criminal laws, bad prison regulations, and the worst conceivable police.”33 I will return in the coming pages to the complex fictional historiography of these texts, but in these comments, their narrators rely on a firm boundary between the past and the present to mark the achievements of historical progress and justify sustained narrative attention to the “scum and refuse” of the metropolis.

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Where Hollingsworth offers a comparatively humanitarian explanation of the Newgate phenomenon, John Bender contends that the particular relish for criminal stories arose in the period from less altruistic sentiments. He argues that the gradual “withdrawal of these spectacles [of public execution] from the public eye” fuelled, not a complacency about social progress, but rather a craving for spectacular substitutes.34 When hangings were moved inside Newgate Prison and out of public view in the later nineteenth century, the “[m]obs that once would have witnessed an actual execution” thronged on execution days to Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors to view a wax simulacrum of the “murderer just hanged – joined of course by an image of the current executioner.”35 While public executions in London were discontinued only in 1868, Marie Tussaud opened her Chamber of Horrors in 1835, in the midst of the Newgate phenomenon, and from its inception, the museum displayed wax sculptures of well-known criminals.36 The feeling of benevolence that Hollingsworth identifies as the driving force behind the popularity of Newgate fiction is only part of the story: bound up with reassuring signs of progress was a taste for mediated spectacles of violence, fuelled by the penetration of such representations into everyday lives. This intertwining of a public appetite for violent spectacle with celebrations of individual and collective achievement relates directly to the phenomenon of celebrity culture, and helps to explain the emergence of a model of demotic celebrity within the Newgate school. Tuite insists that the consolidation of modern celebrity culture in the early nineteenth century was effected by the knitting together of an expanded print and visual culture, the visibility of public figures, and sensationalism in narrative, performance, and in the press. Advancing Bender’s argument, she contends that “the emergence of celebrity culture is intimately related to the historical transition from material to symbolic violence,” a transition that she aligns directly with the withdrawal of executions from public view. “In correlating the waning of public punishment with the emergence of celebrity culture,” she explains, “I suggest that celebrity culture creates virtual publics and affective arenas for staging rites of devotion and celebration, but also of violence and degradation. This assemblage of practices constitutes the rites of scandalous celebrity.”37 Tuite’s theorization of the affective rites that form the core of celebrity culture illuminates the latter’s ambivalent, sometimes contradictory dynamics as well as the transformation of public culture in the period that makes the willing visibility of well-known figures and a virtual public’s active reception mutually generative. Jacqueline Rose argues that “the

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pleasure we take in celebrity … [is] bound up with perversion, or with something we experience as perverse.”38 That is, our voracious consumption of imagery, narrative, and other media related to celebrities turns as much on the pleasure of intimate access as on the sadistic relish with which we watch them struggle or fail. Rose suggests that “[t]here is something murderous in our relation to celebrity,”39 and Tuite would maintain that that perversion has been a constitutive force in celebrity culture from the beginning. Tuite’s analysis sheds light as well on how celebrity culture expanded beyond aristocrats, actors, and authors to include criminals and others of less respectable standing. An audience craving pleasure, identification, and spectacle in its engagement with public figures would find ready material in the story of a plucky criminal whose astonishing acts bring him into the public eye but whose one feat too far ensures his violent demise. This narrative form proved readily adaptable, moreover, to more respectable but still ordinary contexts. The young man who styles himself for an audience, navigates the mercurial demands of the public gaze, and is rewarded with seemingly unbounded public interest might chart a demotic path to renown that ends somewhere other than Tyburn. Ultimately, as I will argue in the next chapter, the demotic celebrity conceptualized in the Newgate school would be sanitized of its more salacious elements and claimed for all. Braudy maintains that in “a society committed to progress, the seeking of fame, the climbing of the ladder of renown, expresses something essential in that society’s nature”: namely, “Everything (and everyone) that fails to progress is doomed to decay. What only kings could accomplish in the past is now available to aspirants of more modest means.”40 What kings could accomplish was a visibility and symbolic presence in their subjects’ lives which would have been inaccessible to everyone else. By the early nineteenth century, the generalization of the fashion system and emergence of a proto-mass media that brings news, ideas, and imagery into everyday lives substantially reconfigured access to the public sphere. The drive to distinguish oneself and promote one’s interests fuels individual self-styling as well as bids for recognition and publicity. Both are bound up with our need to mark our difference from others while having that difference made meaningful by systems of value held in common. The top rungs on the “ladder of renown” are reached by only a few, but a society that prioritizes individual distinction and visibility, and publicizes recognition via seemingly ubiquitous print and visual media, opens the door for seemingly anyone to enter public life.

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It is no accident that Braudy discusses modern fame in terms that closely relate to fashion, and specifically fashion’s mediation of individuals and collectives. “In part,” he suggests, “[fame] celebrates uniqueness, and in part it requires that uniqueness be exemplary and reproducible.”41 On Braudy’s argument, fame in the modern era operates on the model I have identified with the fashion system: like fashion, which kits us out with singularity and belonging at once, fame privileges those whose specialness sets them apart but whose familiarity makes them available for audiences to identify with and emulate.42 Braudy makes explicit fashion’s role in the transformation of fame, taking dandyism as an example of the impact of seemingly ephemeral cultural phenomena: “It is always difficult to discuss the metaphysics of a general phenomenon, like dandyism in the nineteenth century … because the great mass of dandies … were simply following the fashions of the time. Yet the implications of such trends are profound precisely because fame in the nineteenth century had become so interwoven with fashion.”43 The regular dissemination of fashion imagery put well-known individuals into virtual circulation along with changing styles, making fame a matter of visuality and currency and the famous those with whom aesthetic expression and its quotidian changes were often most closely associated. Like fashion, fame dates to ancient times, but their modern incarnations materialized in tandem at the turn of the nineteenth century, as I’ve suggested. Most period discussions of art, artists, and audiences treat celebrity as an offshoot of fame, a product of fame’s intersection with fashion, and differentiate the two forms of renown along temporal and commercial lines. In a series of essays beginning in the 1810s, for example, William Hazlitt anatomizes fame, distinguishing the fame achieved in posthumous recognition from the celebrity accorded to those who court publicity and acclaim in the present. He specifies that fame “is not popularity, the shout of the multitude, the idle buzz of fashion, the venal puff, the soothing flattery of favour or of friendship; but it is the spirit of a man surviving himself in the minds and thoughts of other men, undying and imperishable.”44 For Hazlitt, fame is “immortal,” and the true genius that person who can “wait patiently and calmly for the award of posterity.” Celebrity by contrast is fame measured in units of currency and visibility, and the would-be star one who would “mortgage [his immortality] for a newspaper puff.”45 Hazlitt insists that, inflected by the marketplace and a temporality of currency, celebrity can never surmount its superficiality and parasitic dependence on audience reception. “[I]ndelibly marked by its presentness,” celebrity forms in the perpetual renewal of contemporary imagery and cultural discourse.46

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Hazlitt’s early nineteenth-century defence of fame as timeless and autonomous itself relates to fashion: he makes his case at the same moment that celebrity offers a new point of entry to the public sphere and individual fashion consciousness becomes a matter of almost universal concern.47 Braudy contends that “‘true’ fame gets valorized when celebrity, thanks to the rise of mass media, becomes easier to achieve and more culturally prevalent.”48 The distinction of fame from celebrity exhibits the same conceptual slipperiness, however, that characterizes discourses of custom and fashion in the period. As I explained in the Introduction, custom is aligned in discussions of both culture and politics with time-honoured tradition, disinterestedness, and continuity, while a politics that promotes change or an aesthetics synchronized with the present is cast as mere fashion, transient, chaotic, and dangerous. Custom’s contradistinction from fashion, though, is complicated by its own bifurcation between connotations of long use and stability, on the one hand, and the local and transitory, on the other. Custom’s connotative instability opened it to perpetual repurposing to serve different arguments in the early nineteenth century, but whichever direction its signification turned, custom invariably took fashion as its conceptual polestar. As custom is haunted by its ephemeral other, so fame has difficulty shaking the consciousness of visibility that its defenders align exclusively with celebrity. For an author writing at the turn of the nineteenth century, Braudy suggests, “no aspiration, even the aspiration to be neglected (and thereby show one’s greater virtue) can escape the widespread selfconsciousness [an engaged] audience helps create.”49 Hazlitt’s own career and writing make the challenges clear. His Lectures on the English Poets delivered at the Surrey Institute in 1818, for example, made him famous. The Examiner reported that for the final lecture, the house was “crowded to the very ceiling.”50 As the series drew to a close, Hazlitt was busy “correcting proof” for the print edition so that his publishers could “cash in on his fame with all haste.”51 In The Spirit of the Age (1825), he shows by his sustained interest in authors’ self-presentation and engagement with their audiences that the value of a modern writer’s work is inextricable from that individual’s public persona. Hazlitt excoriates Scott, for instance, for using his fame and influence, not to effect progressive social change, but to preserve power in the hands of a corrupt few. Hazlitt asserts that at the height of the novelist’s fame, “Sir Walter stops the press to have a sneer at the people, and to put a spoke (as he thinks) in the wheel of upstart innovation!”52 A posture of reticence rather than self-promotion before the clamouring masses may be a sign of greater virtue, but Hazlitt indicates

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that even authors who would “wait patiently” for posterity cannot disregard their public profile and “the way they presen[t] themselves to their immediate audiences.”53 In the epigraph with which this chapter opened, Bulwer-Lytton uses the “Dedicatory Epistle” to his first Newgate novel Paul Clifford to address the value of posthumous fame. Contrasting what he sees as the fading fortunes of poetry with the vitality of the novel, Bulwer claims that “the fame that is only posthumous, has become to all, but to poets, a very frigid and impotent inducement” (ix). He discards the pretence of authorial selfrenunciation – of authors preferring fame as a “recompense not of the living, but of the dead,” as Hazlitt would insist54 – suggesting instead that literary value and a consciousness of one’s audience and reception can and must coexist. The transformation of fame, Bulwer asserts, results from a heightened consciousness of the present among contemporary readers and writers: “the present is to [people] that matter of reference and consideration which the future was with their more dreaming forefathers,” and in this context, authors must engage with the currents of their age (ix). “[In] the literary world, as in the natural,” he counsels, “the tide and the hour can scarcely be neglected, even by the hardiest adventurer” (viii). Bulwer’s frame for the novel that effectively launched the Newgate school self-consciously promotes the fictional project that I have aligned with the temporality of fashion. Rather than lament the turning of the “tide of popular opinion … against poetry” (viii) as a sign of a debased reading public, Bulwer takes it as confirmation that the novel is the genre best able to conceptualize the currents of the contemporary for an engaged public. Defending the novel in terms very similar to those that the protagonist in Letitia Landon’s silver-fork novel Romance and Reality uses in his Austenesque defence of the genre, as we saw in Chapter 1, Bulwer comments to his dedicatee, “I beg you to believe that I write novels, not because I cannot write anything else, but because novels are the best possible things to be written” (x). On Bulwer’s representation, neither literary value nor fame depends on a turning away from the contemporary and from public reception. On the contrary, authors must embrace the dynamics of the present in order not simply to reflect the temper of the times, but to shape it. As one of Landon’s characters remarks with reference to Bulwer’s dandy novel Pelham, the best contemporary novels are “sufficiently original to create their own taste, [and] give their tone to the time.”55 Newgate novelists immerse themselves in “the tide and the hour” of their age by exploring the forms of visibility, spectatorship, and surveillance that have been engendered by fashion’s principle of novelty and

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obsolescence and an abundance of contemporary visual forms. Those novels that turn their criminal protagonists into demotic celebrities tend to set performative fame at a remove by situating it, anachronistically, in the past; they imagine for their protagonists a kind of visual-consciousness and self-fashioning proper to the novelists’ own historical moment rather than that of their characters. As I have suggested, the Newgate novel’s juxtaposition of distinct historical eras with their different social systems and concepts of selfhood and publicness reflects its fashionable practice of giving form to contemporaneity by means of citation and remixing. Specifically, Newgate fiction patches together elements of the audacious, mobile criminal of early eighteenth-century crime narrative with the dark heroes and rogues of Romantic narrative and the contemporary celebrity modelled by Byron. This is not to suggest, however, that the forms and figures drawn from these different historical moments exist in a line of continuity stretching neatly from one century to the next. Rather, as Caroline Evans explains, “the possibility of return [in fashion] depends on difference.”56 As we saw in the Introduction, Evans draws on Walter Benjamin’s concept of a noncontinuous history to theorize fashion’s citational practice, or its preference for plucking a form out of the past and setting it into provisional, generative relation with new shapes and contexts in the present. In the Newgate school, fashion’s citational practice informs the genre’s return to particular eighteenth-century forms that it revives in order to articulate distinctive contemporary experiences. The Newgate novel demonstrates how, on the one hand, “the past is activated by injecting the present into it,” and on the other, “the present is haunted by a past to which it no longer corresponds, which is not the same and does not quite fit, for all its similarities.”57 That this historical conjunction is slightly askew is precisely the point: in the Newgate school, as in fashion, repurposed fragments of the past embody what Evans describes as the paradigmatically modern experience of “time … out of joint.”58 Byron’s ambivalent engagement of his own celebrity proves particularly resonant in this context, for his public persona and literary reception arose in part from his active participation in early nineteenth-century transformations of literary and visual culture, as well as from his conscious return to an eighteenth-century predecessor like Alexander Pope to articulate an aesthetic vision of the contemporary that differentiates him from his Romantic peers.59 Tuite maintains that Byron helped to consolidate the phenomenon of celebrity that persists today, one predicated on publicity, scandal, and a paradoxical sense of public intimacy.60 Byron is a figure,

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then, of particular relevance to the Newgate school, not simply because of the notoriety surrounding his personal life and his “willingness to stage [himself] theatrically and premeditatively” for an anonymous public, albeit often with a sense of resentment or a mistrust of the gaze directed toward him.61 His significance for novelists of the 1820s and 1830s also turns on the performative, troublemaking personae who populate his verse. Byron’s social outlaws like Conrad and Lara embody a criminal heroism that Newgate novelists were quick to take up. Ostensibly driven to crime by his interactions with a corrupt society, Conrad indulges his own and his readers’ fantasies that a man of sensibility might, upon provocation from a hostile, unfeeling world, unleash a bold, rebellious spirit. This model recurs frequently in the Newgate school: a high-spirited, talented young man, finding himself prey to his passions and betrayed by an unjust social order, embraces the criminal identity others have marked out for him and abandons himself to his fate. As evidenced by playful, performative characters such as Paul Clifford, the Artful Dodger, and Jack Sheppard, Newgate novelists also draw from the example of Byron’s later rogue, the charming, careless Don Juan. The roving adventurer himself provides a connection to the eighteenth century, as Byron self-consciously models his protagonist on the figure of the pícaro. As I discussed in Chapter 2, Byron pulls the picaresque form from its dusty shelf to set its panoramic critique of custom, manners, and character into relation with contemporary sensibilities and aesthetics. Newgate novelists adopt the spirit and self-styling of Byron’s rogues for their protagonists, but the class status of most Newgate school criminals immediately underscores their difference from their Romantic counterparts. A property-less, uninhibited orphan or apprentice let loose on the fictional streets of London strikes a very different chord in the cultural imaginary than the gentlemen and nobles roaming exotic soil who are typical of Scott’s and Byron’s outlaws. Newgate novelists turn instead, as I have suggested, to the low-born criminal of early eighteenth-century narrative, a figure whose cultural resonance and signification shifts in the 1830s context of an industrialized workforce. Jack Sheppard turns to crime, for example, when the circumscribed opportunities afforded him as a carpenter’s apprentice fail to accord with his energy and ambition. With an instinct for fame entirely unbefitting his 1720s context, Jack senses that he can do better by retooling himself for sensational renown. Similarly, Paul Clifford resorts to crime only after his poverty and disreputable associates have subjected him to the law’s arbitrary authority. As we will see shortly, Bulwer infuses the

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eighteenth-century figure of the dashing highwayman with a distinctly nineteenth-century sense of political injustice and a flair for making himself the talk of the town. Dickens works to rewrite this model with Oliver Twist, the orphan who personifies “the principle of Good” despite associating with criminals and finding himself accused of crime.62 Dickens’s realistic representations of crime and vice fail, though, to check the charm of the Newgate rogue. Oliver’s would-be tutors in felony, the Artful Dodger, whose precocious self-possession makes him a master of his trade, and his sidekick Charley Bates, who finds thieving a lark, may be ill-shod and vulgar, but they provide comic relief from the novel’s violence. Dickens imbues these low-born thieves with a charisma that made them instantly popular with audiences and prompted critics to sound the alarm that Newgate fiction represents a life of crime as one filled with capers. If the intrepid criminal is lucky, moreover, those capers might turn him into a star. When the Dodger is arrested for nicking a “common twopenny-halfpenny sneeze-box,” after all, Charley’s greatest concern is that this petty crime will fail to bring him into the public eye: “How will he stand in the Newgate Calendar? P’raps not be there at all. Oh, my eye, my eye, wot a blow it is!” (362–63). That the Dodger treats his court appearance as a stage from which to delight the audience and “establish … for himself a glorious reputation” as an “outand-out young wagabond” (368–69) offers Charley some consolation for the unrealized potential of a greater stardom.

Roguery, Sympathy, and Public Culture Much eighteenth-century and Romantic fiction had dealt with crime, and some authors devoted significantly more narrative attention to the pleasure their protagonists enjoyed in transgressing than the punishment or repentance accorded them at novel’s end: one thinks, for example, of Moll Flanders, Ferdinand Count Fathom, or The Monk’s Ambrosio. That pleasure is writ large in the Newgate school, but what distinguishes Newgate fiction sharply from earlier novels is the centrality of sympathy to its narratives. The sympathy it affords especially to low-born and wayward characters links it closely, and unexpectedly, to mid-Victorian social realism. Hollingsworth remarks that, among 1830s reviewers, a novel was unlikely to be “damned with the accusing name [of Newgate] unless it seemed to arouse an unfitting sympathy for the criminal.”63 Offering an early analysis of the social determinants of crime, Newgate fiction frequently attends to the circumstances in which its characters live and the systemic

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injustices to which they are subject. Some novelists interweave adventure with their social critique, foregrounding the escapades that an individual with sharply circumscribed prospects might embark on. Others, such as Bulwer’s Eugene Aram (1832) and Lucretia (1846), the latter of which anticipates the 1860s sensation novel, soberly explore the psychology of the criminal: what leads an otherwise honest person to crime and what effect does transgression have on individual formation? Delving into the motives that drive criminals and the conflicts with which they struggle, Newgate authors regularly invite readers to sympathize with the errant and disenfranchised, a narrative structure that we conventionally identify with later realist fiction like George Eliot’s Adam Bede or Dickens’s Bleak House. In the case of Oliver Twist, Dickens contends that such sympathy is necessary to help readers differentiate poverty from crime and vice. When Oliver begs along the London road, he is regarded as an “idle young dog” or a “strange boy” who has likely “come to steal something” (59). Having been “badged and ticketed” a parish child from infancy by his shabby workhouse rags (5), Oliver’s poverty criminalizes him in the eyes of all but a compassionate few. It is not only the innocent orphan who receives the narrative’s sympathy, however. As has been well remarked, Dickens urges readers in the Introduction to the Third Edition to eschew the romancing of vice so that we might understand “the miserable reality” of a criminal’s “every-day existence,” and from there, learn to distinguish poverty from character and morality – to separate Nancy’s “cheap shawl” and “dirty stockings,” for example, from her capacity for goodness, as evidenced by her kindness to Oliver and devotion to Sikes.64 Dickens defends her by insisting that the “poor wretch” may contain “contradiction[s]”: there may be a “last fair drop of water at the bottom of the dried-up weedchoked well.”65 The novel even suggests that, having begun life on the streets, Nancy had few alternatives to crime and prostitution. She reminds Fagin that he first put her to work thieving when she was “not half as old as [Oliver].” The “cold, wet, dirty streets are my home,” she cries, and “you’re the wretch that drove me to them long ago” (133). With greater coherence than the narrative offers in constructing its protagonist as a paragon of goodness, Oliver Twist’s representation of the complexities of Nancy’s character and the circumstances that led her to a disreputable “living” works to elicit sympathy for one of London’s most marginalized (133). Dickens was confident that the moral objectives of Oliver Twist more than justified its focus, and that the realism of his representation set his text apart from the common variety of crime fiction, which dresses vice up in “green velvet” or “short petticoats and a fancy dress.”66 His fervent

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defence of Nancy and her underworld associates, however, did not mollify his critics. W.  M. Thackeray, for one, was emphatic in his condemnation of the “Newgate part” of Oliver Twist, along with Jack Sheppard, for “familiaris[ing] the public with notions of crime” and eliciting readerly sympathy for thieves and prostitutes. No man has read that remarkable tale of Oliver Twist without being interested in poor Nancy and her murderer; and especially amused and tickled by the gambols of the Artful Dodger and his companions. … And what came of Oliver Twist? The public wanted something more extravagant still, more sympathy for thieves, and so Jack Sheppard makes his appearance. … [In] the sorrows of Nancy and the exploits of Sheppard, … we are asked for downright sympathy in the one case, and are called on in the second to admire the gallantry of a thief. … [In] the name of common sense, let us not expend our sympathies on cutthroats, and other such prodigies of evil!67

Dickens proclaims that his novel provides “a service to society” by giving readers insight into the lives of the disenfranchised.68 Thackeray’s concern that the novel’s sympathies would soften readers’ attitudes toward crime and vice, however, points to sympathy’s unpredictable alliances and effects.69 This unpredictability eventually becomes a concern for Dickens as well: he takes it up directly in Barnaby Rudge, a novel to which I will turn in the next chapter, but in Oliver Twist, he still expresses faith in the possibility of turning public opinion firmly toward “the purest good.”70 At issue with newly sympathetic representations of criminality was the threat of readerly identification. Not only might impressionable readers be led astray, but critics worried that Newgate fiction would foster a sense of community born of the public’s positive reception of the criminal celebrity.71 Circulated in print and visible in theatres and print shops all over town, the Newgate criminal and his outsized personality might give form to a distinct public. With reference to the production of a notion of community through the mechanisms of print culture, Andrew Franta observes that, “even as a positive conception of public opinion was taking shape over the second half of the eighteenth century, so too was a profound anxiety that public opinion was necessarily subject to manipulation.” “The threat,” he explains, was “that any opinion, simply by virtue of appearing and circulating in print, might come to look representative.”72 As I argued in the context of the silver-fork school, this threat only intensified in the years leading up to and immediately following the First Reform Act. Critics and novelists alike worried about what kinds of publics might be made, and what newly mobile identifications and collective actions such publics might foster.

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Always alert to the dilatory influence of high or low fiction, Fraser’s Magazine warned its readers in 1840: there is no doubt that the popular exhibition of Jack Sheppard, metamorphosed from a vulgar ruffian into a melodramatic hero, with all the melodramatic virtues and splendours about him, in Mr. Ainsworth’s novel, and its manifold theatrical adaptations, will tend to fill many a juvenile aspirant for riot and notoriety with ideas highly conducive to the progress of so ennobling a profession as that of housebreaking.73

The problem, on this account, is not only that crime fiction familiarizes readers with illicit acts and immoral characters. More gravely, Newgate novels, their songs, theatrical adaptations, and widely available print illustrations represent “vulgar ruffian[s]” as heroic and sympathetic. That the Newgate criminal and his audience revel in the splendours of his position and publicity became almost more of a concern to his critics than the crimes themselves. Presented as a spectacular figure whom audiences might admire and identify with, the Newgate protagonist stood poised for fame and glory. Matthew Buckley suggests that the mania for a Newgate character like Jack Sheppard seemed to produce “a specific, defining impulse among the city’s most dislocated, volatile population to ‘be another Jack Sheppard,’ to mime his actions ‘in real arnest’ and, in a distinctly modern sense, take on his identity as the model of one’s own.”74 Newgate fiction shows that the low-born criminal can become a celebrity: his name and image enter into “the coinage of everyday speech” and his exploits make him an object of ongoing speculation in the press and in casual conversation.75 Godwin suggested as early as 1794 with Caleb Williams, an example to which I will turn shortly, that the notorious criminal was a figure around whom publics could form, whether in celebration or censure. Indeed, the popular Newgate criminal belonged to an intimate public, in Lauren Berlant’s sense of the term, a public created through an audience’s feelings of social dislocation shared in common with the protagonist; the audience recognized in the criminal’s public visibility a spectacle to consume and enjoy, and a performance over which they might assert ownership through claims of intimate familiarity.76 Readers identifying with the criminal’s humble origins could share his sense of dissatisfaction with his limited prospects. They could learn from the acts that set him apart from his peers, moreover – daring crimes, masterful evasions, feats of bravado and skill – a mechanism for rising above the throng. The identifications that the Newgate protagonist may have inspired among a disenfranchised populace, though, do not fully account for the

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figure’s broad appeal: the Newgate school was popular with a wide readership, not only the “dislocated [and] volatile.” As Thackeray’s reaction to Newgate fiction makes clear, critics’ anxieties turned on the school’s appeal to respectable readers as much as rootless young men. Hollingsworth confirms that, while characters like “[Dick] Turpin and Jack Sheppard … were the folk heroes of poor city boys in the middle of the nineteenth century,” their “stories did not stir ragged boys only; the affairs of bloody criminals entered also into reverie and dream in comfortable homes.”77 Hollingsworth would hold, as we’ve seen, that readers of the respectable classes could take pleasure in the exploits of a roguish protagonist because his transgressions were a product of an unjust system since overthrown by legislative and penal reforms. With their analyses of public rites of violence and degradation, however, Bender and Tuite make clear that such faith in the alignment of popular cultural forms with the achievements of social progress oversimplifies the function of spectacle in a new media age. Cast in the form of a spirited agent whose unpredictable actions hold the potential to captivate an audience, the figure of the demotic celebrity reaches across ranks via an array of print and visual media and theatrical performance to serve as a touchstone for public discourse. Virtual publics begin to form in the early nineteenth century in relation to what Tuite describes as an “ambivalent circuit of attractions and repulsions that informs reading as a newly mobile activity of affective identification.”78 Tuite comments here specifically on Byron’s “scandalous celebrity,” but her formulation applies generally to the constitution of publics in a nineteenth-century media age.79 I argue that crime novelists of the 1830s make use of the “newly mobile” identifications that reading enables in order to bring celebrity within imaginative reach of a broader constituency. Like Byron, Newgate protagonists embody the contradictions endemic to modern celebrity: gallant, spectacular, and ­self-performative, the criminal seems to wear an heroic mantle with ease. Fraser’s represents the criminal’s heroism, in fact, in the terms of a new fashion: in the Newgate novel, the criminal is “metamorphosed from a vulgar ruffian into a melodramatic hero, with all the melodramatic virtues and splendours about him.” The criminal receives a narrative makeover that adorns him with virtue and splendour. At the same time, the criminal’s defiance of authority and disruption of the social order consistently put him on the wrong side of the law and open him to charges of antisociality and dishonour. As we will see with Paul Clifford and Jack Sheppard, the criminal is defined by his mobility, a concept that encompasses his transgression of physical limits, his ability

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to move freely through all communities and ranks, and his susceptibility to sentimental appeals.80 This mutability constitutes him as both daring adventurer and man of feeling. The Newgate protagonist is at once a social outcast and a public man, a much-maligned member of the underclass, a rogue, villain, and the embodiment of a dynamic contemporary sociability. His tendency to betray domestic ties along with the occasional excesses of his crimes introduce contradictions into his character that only add to his allure. The stories told about him, the images in circulation, and his alternation between elusiveness and intimacy, defiance and charm, work together to captivate contemporary audiences keen to read and hear about spectacular figures whose adaptability and self-styling fit them for the contingency of the contemporary world.

Mediated Criminality; or, The Case of Kit Williams The Newgate protagonist embodies within his narrative and without, in the print culture in which his novel circulates, the currency that the celebrity culture and fashion consciousness of the nineteenth century engender. Stories of his escapades are in everyone’s mouth; people traffic in assertions of an intimate knowledge of his character; discussions abound of his acts of bravery, scandalous betrayals, or the collateral damage of his crimes; and authoritative sightings serve to localize a figure whose allure – and by necessity his success as a criminal – are secured by his elusiveness. As I argued in the Introduction, the figure of the demotic celebrity is a communal construct: it takes form in the mutually productive interactions between an affectively engaged virtual public and a willingly visible figure who, though hailing from the ranks of the unknown, propels himself through his remarkable feats onto the public stage. Organized around a protagonist who thrives on the attention he draws to himself, Newgate novelists work out the modern dynamics of visibility and spectatorship and its transformation of public culture. They help to consolidate a model of publicness in which all can participate, whether by appropriating a celebrity figure for one’s own psychic needs, joining with others in fandom or outrage, or experiencing contemporaneity in the form of a buzzy cultural phenomenon. The concept of demotic celebrity – the idea that ordinary people might step into the limelight and fix the public’s gaze – depends, moreover, on the popular print revolution that Patricia Anderson locates in the 1830s and attributes to the technological developments and reduced costs that allowed for the production of a “flood of cheap literature” and imagery aimed at working people.81 It is in media that spans a range of

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price points, that is, that a demotic celebrity might emerge who engages a broad public and elicits their active reception. William Godwin produces a kind of fashion mash-up in Things As They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) which takes up matters of visibility and self-fashioning in an analogous form to that of the Newgate novel. Writing before the technological and commercial transformations and the consolidation of celebrity culture that distinguish the 1820s and 1830s, Godwin demonstrates a commitment held in common with later nineteenth-century novelists to explore the dynamic, ambivalent mediation of individuals and collectives that modern fashion helped to generalize.82 In Caleb Williams, he brings together the early eighteenth-century Newgate narrative with the public visibility and visual consciousness characteristic of a later historical moment, when an as yet pupate mass media would allow an individual to identify with the public persona attributed to him and perform himself for an audience. Exploring the cultural phenomenon of a demotic celebrity avant la lettre, Caleb Williams conceptualizes the individual’s relation to the social in new terms. Although the protagonist Caleb is deeply disturbed by the criminal character with which he is identified after he has been falsely accused of a crime by his former employer, he is nonetheless acutely conscious that his name, image, and stories of his exploits circulate widely; this knowledge of his own visibility, whether real or imagined, inflects his actions and self-presentation. I will argue that the mechanisms by which Caleb’s identity circulates, seemingly to the farthest corners of the kingdom, go hand in hand with his reflections on how best to fashion himself for the narrative in which he wants to star. In the non-continuous genre history that I’m tracing, Godwin offers a vital, early example of the function of public visibility and a dynamic public discourse in people’s self-expression and sense of individuality and in the changing relations of individuals and collectives. Caleb Williams shows that, on one hand, the generalization of fashion makes self-styling and a kind of renown accessible to almost everyone, and on the other, the individual who would participate in the social cannot, in a world of hypervisibility, escape an “incessant preoccupation with being seen.”83 When Caleb Williams flees the gang of robbers in the novel’s third volume, he encounters for the first time the public versions of himself that have begun to circulate since his escape from prison. Initially struck with terror when he hears himself styled as the infamous housebreaker Kit Williams, Caleb begins “inwardly to exult” once he realizes that his disguise as a beggar protects him from detection. “My soul seemed to

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expand,” he recounts; “I felt a pride in the self-possession and lightness of heart with which I could listen to the scene; and I determined to prolong and heighten the enjoyment.”84 He asks the hostess of the public house in which he stops to rest, “what sort of a man this Kit Williams might be? She replied that, as she was informed, he was as handsome, likely a lad, as any in four counties round; and that she loved him for his cleverness, by which he outwitted all the keepers they could set over him, and made his way through stone walls as if they were so many cobwebs” (332). Caleb thrills to hear himself turned in popular opinion into a legendary outlaw who is rumoured to have broken out of prison “no less than five times” (331). When the hostess suggests that “she wished the curse of God might light on them that betrayed so noble a fellow to an ignominious end,” Caleb reports that “the sincere and generous warmth with which she interested herself in my behalf gave me considerable pleasure” (332). Caleb uses the language of pleasure and enjoyment to describe being the object of an anonymous public’s regard, a scandalous figure who is “loved” and in whom the public takes an active “interest” with “sincere and generous warmth.” Tuite contends that “turning the stranger into an intimate is one of the primary affective rituals of celebrity culture.”85 Although the media through which Caleb’s celebrity emerges is not fully ­industrialized – and indeed we can assume that much of his renown is generated through word of mouth and irregular news reports – this public visibility directly affects his self-conception and subsequent actions.86 In this proto-industrial media moment, Godwin imagines a model of demotic celebrity in which publicity serves to transform an ordinary individual into a well-known public figure, and contemporaneity is felt in the dynamic public discourse that circulates around him. When Caleb subsequently encounters the public versions of his story that have spread through the country via pamphlets and broadsides, he seems himself to have stepped into one of the criminal adventure tales that he read in his youth. Styled as Kit Williams in the print texts, Caleb is cast as one of the infamous rogues who filled the pages of the Newgate narratives in which he steeped himself in childhood. The older demotic forms of oral and print culture that help to turn Caleb into a renowned figure mark the long tradition of rogue literature in Britain from which Godwin draws. When these older media of “speech, script and print” contribute in the novel to the modern modes of “social regulation and control” that ensure Caleb will never elude his pursuers, however, it becomes clear that Godwin is remodelling the early eighteenth-century criminal figure by recontextualizing it in a contemporary narrative of publicity and

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visual consciousness.87 Godwin articulates the transformations of public consciousness and the public figure emergent at the turn of the nineteenth century that Michael Warner describes in terms of publics and counterpublics: namely, the phenomenon of a collective group of strangers, “mediated by print, theater, diffuse networks of talk, commerce, and the like,” that is capable of imagining itself as “being addressed in discourse” and occupying a “place in public media [that] is one of consuming, witnessing, griping, or gossiping rather than one of full participation or fame.”88 The modern criminal who enjoys his own visibility and would write himself, like Caleb, into an adventure tale in which he emerges as the hero, needs an audience who conceives of itself as such through its consumption of media relating to his name, image, and story. Caleb’s understanding of himself in relation to the mediated figure Kit Williams marks a signal instance of the novel genre’s representations of criminality. This significance makes itself felt especially in Godwin’s juxtaposition of the predominant media formats and stock figures of criminality that characterized early eighteenth-century narrative with the institutional mechanisms of law and the informal networks of communication at the turn of the nineteenth century. Harriet Guest suggests that “notions of spying and surveillance are understood to have become [by the 1790s] a part of the fabric of a complex society in which actions are no longer transparent, [and] in which suspicion and misrepresentation are perceived to be necessary to social interaction, or its evasion.”89 Caleb finds himself fully entangled in that fabric, to the point that the narrative he writes to clear his name is shaped in significant measure by the criminal discourses through which he is seen and identified and with which he comes to identify himself. What results in Godwin’s novel is an autobiographical narrative in which the protagonist’s identity is forged through his criminal celebrity and his encounters with public and private versions of his own history. As I will argue in the next chapter in relation to David Copperfield, the individual’s fashioning of himself for an intimate public that he posits as fit to receive his personal story becomes a defining narrative structure through which the mid-nineteenth-century novel articulates the visuality of contemporary selfhood. To underscore the significance of Godwin’s formulation of criminality, I want to begin by examining Caleb’s criminal escapades and their relationship to the crime narratives he read in his youth. Once he has detected his employer Falkland’s secret – that Falkland is guilty of murder and has allowed an innocent tenant farmer and his son to hang for the crime – Caleb finds himself falsely accused of theft as Falkland contrives to protect

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his own reputation. Branded a thief and thrown into prison, Caleb decides that he must take action to save himself since the institutional resources of justice are all on Falkland’s side. Caleb recounts that he restores his mental acuity by “task[ing] the stores of my memory, and my powers of invention. I amused myself with recollecting the history of my life” (271). Intertwining “Memory” and “invention” in his acts of auto-fiction, Caleb moves on from narrating his own story to creating “imaginary adventures” for himself: “I figured to myself every situation in which I could be placed, and conceived the conduct to be observed in each. Thus scenes of insult and danger, of tenderness and oppression, became familiar to me” (272). He composes in his mind the tales in which he would like to figure as protagonist and works out the actions and affects involved in each scenario. Caleb soon decides to synthesize these autobiographical and fictional narratives in order to write himself into a narrative of his own devising: he determines to cast his personal history as a prelude to adventure by mining his memories of childhood reading for information that might enable him to break out of prison. “My reading, in early youth,” he explains, had been extremely miscellaneous. I had read of housebreakers to whom locks and bolts were a jest, and who, vain of their art, exhibited the experiment of entering a house the most strongly barricaded, with as little noise, and almost as little trouble, as other men would lift up a latch. There is nothing so interesting to the juvenile mind, as the wonderful; there is no power that it so eagerly covets, as that of astonishing spectators by its miraculous exertions. … Why should it be in the power of man to overtake and hold me by violence? Why, when I choose to withdraw myself, should I not be capable of eluding the most vigilant search? (274)

Caleb puts his early literacy in crime fiction into service and taps into a youthful desire to “astonis[h] spectators” with “miraculous exertions,” including a dramatic evasion of the law. When he later speaks with the public-house hostess, he learns that, to captivate an audience, he need not perform directly before them. They need not witness his actions to be “astonish[ed].” Indeed, his renown as Kit Williams is fed more effectively by the mediation of public discourse and print accounts of his spectacular feats. We might frame Caleb’s repurposing of narratives that were originally published as morality tales within the broad purview of Michel de Certeau’s discussion of consumers “find[ing] ways of using the constraining order of the place or of the language” to their own ends.90 With reference to Vladimir Propp’s analysis of folk tales, de Certeau remarks that the “formality of everyday practices is indicated in these tales, which frequently reverse the relationships of power and, like the stories of miracles, ensure

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the victory of the unfortunate in a fabulous, utopian space. … [These] ‘fabulous’ stories offer their audience a repertory of tactics for future use.”91 While the Newgate narrative that ends with a trip to Tyburn is hardly utopian, it nonetheless opens a provisional space for disruptive, even spectacular action and sometimes enduring fame. As Charlie Bates remarks with respect to the Artful Dodger, the remarkable stories of the Newgate Calendar assure the lowly criminal a kind of “victory” in the form of renown and a place in history. When Caleb finds himself powerless in the face of Falkland’s formidable resources, his recycling of the stories read in his youth equips him with a “repertory of tactics” that proves materially useful. Like the historical prison-breaker Jack Sheppard, Caleb crafts an escape plan and gathers the tools that will allow him, he suggests, “once more [to] take possession of the sweets of liberty” (282). The comparison of Caleb with the prison-breaker Jack Sheppard is not arbitrary: the connections between the two figures are numerous and striking. As I suggested in the Introduction, Sheppard was well known in his own day, having escaped from prison four times including two legendary escapes from Newgate Prison before being hanged at Tyburn in 1724. He was the subject of at least one narrative attributed to Daniel Defoe and countless tales, plays, and portraits. He was also one of the most popular figures in the Newgate Calendar, which Godwin footnotes in Caleb Williams and invokes again in the 1832 Preface that he wrote to accompany the Bentley’s “Standard Novels” edition of his later novel Fleetwood. Godwin states in the Preface, “When I had determined on the main purpose of my story [Caleb Williams], it was ever my method to get about me any productions of former authors that seemed to bear on my subject. … I read other authors that I might see what they had done, … I and my predecessors travelling in some sense to the same goal, at the same time that I struck out a path of my own.”92 One of the texts that Godwin names as occupying him during the composition of Caleb Williams was the Newgate Calendar, with which he was “extremely conversant.”93 Godwin’s remediation of the “productions” of his predecessors becomes apparent specifically in Caleb’s engagement with his criminal persona. The episode in which Caleb overhears himself discussed as Kit Williams, for example, is an elaboration of a short scene from Defoe’s 1724 text, A Narrative of all the Robberies, Escapes, &c. of John Sheppard. The key elements of the episodes are identical. Like Caleb, Defoe’s Jack disguises himself as a beggar, overhears himself the topic of animated conversation among pub-goers and ballad-mongers, and discusses the likely fate of the celebrated prison-breaker with an ardent hostess, who wishes a curse upon

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those who would betray him. The connections between Caleb and Jack, moreover, extend beyond this one scene. Both young men show extraordinary ingenuity in effecting their escapes from prison, and both are driven to their remarkable feats at least in part by a rivalry with a formidable opponent: in Jack’s case, that foe is the notorious thief-taker Jonathan Wild; in Caleb’s, the principal opponent is Falkland, but he also attracts the enmity of the thief-taker Gines along the way. Jack’s and Caleb’s criminal exploits make each the talk of the town; both inspire a considerable following, including loyal admirers and sworn enemies. In the effects of the criminals’ celebrity, however, we see one of the places in which Godwin departs from earlier narratives and strikes out, as he suggests, on “a path of [his] own.” Hal Gladfelder argues that juxtaposing Caleb Williams and the historical Jack Sheppard draws into focus the profound changes in the role and mechanisms of the law in Britain across the eighteenth century: The jails from which Sheppard escapes, like the whole system of law he continually evades, are relatively unmonitored: he is able not only to wrench open locks and break away walls in the successive rooms of Newgate his escape leads him through but also to make his way, still fettered, past night watchmen and through diverse quarters of the city without attracting particular notice. But in the world Godwin describes, in which the mechanisms of repression have been articulated through all the domains of private and public life, no real escape is possible. Even when Caleb later reaches a place that seems beyond the range of pursuit, an idyllic retreat in rural Wales, he is run to ground by the same halfpenny pamphlet, a sign of his pursuers’ power to control not only legal institutions but also the networks of authorship, publication, and bookselling.94

Gladfelder compares Jack Sheppard and Caleb Williams in order to talk about the law’s gradual incursions into “all the domains of private and public life.” Building on Gladfelder’s argument, I invoke this comparison to draw into focus the intersection of crime narrative with a new consciousness of visibility at the turn of the nineteenth century and the role of print networks and publicity in the emergence of a demotic celebrity. Contrasting the criminal celebrity of Caleb Williams with the fame that accompanies Jack Sheppard in Defoe’s 1724 narrative, as well as the remediation of Sheppard’s celebrity in Ainsworth’s 1839 novel, to which I will turn shortly, allows us to identify the changing dynamics of individual and collective in a society increasingly organized by novelty, self-styling, and the visuality of public life. One of the most interesting features that Gladfelder’s comparison highlights is the relative visibility of each criminal in his respective society. Where

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Defoe’s Jack can move through Newgate Prison and the community at large “without attracting particular notice,” Caleb finds himself in what Jane Austen’s Henry Tilney would call a few years later a “neighbourhood of voluntary spies.”95 After he first hears the extraordinary story of Kit Williams, Caleb realizes that his fame makes him peculiarly visible and precedes him wherever he goes. He exclaims, “I could almost have imagined that I was the sole subject of general attention, and that the whole world was in arms to exterminate me. The very idea tingled through every fibre of my frame” (333). Convinced of his own hypervisibility, about which he is ultimately not wrong, he conceives of the public as unified by their attention to him. Caleb eventually makes his way to London, where he hopes to bury himself in obscurity, but even there, he fears a network of “voluntary spies” is active and ubiquitous. “In every human countenance I feared to find the countenance of an enemy. I shrunk from the vigilance of every human eye. … I was shut up, a deserted, solitary wretch, in the midst of my species” (353). Although some of the individuals whom Caleb meets are keen to help him, such as the unfortunate Mrs. Marney who is thrown into Newgate for her efforts, his paranoid fears prove to be well founded. He is betrayed by a fellow lodger, Mr. Spurrel, who cried over Caleb as the “very picture of [his lost son]” (367), before recognizing him as the Kit Williams of the halfpenny handbill and turning him in for a reward of a hundred guineas. While the public fascination with the criminal exploits of Caleb Williams and Jack Sheppard makes both young men famous, the reach of their fame is differently circumscribed. Defoe’s Jack Sheppard never leaves London. His prison-breaks and other crimes are the subject of much talk about town, but his renown translates from oral into print culture only at the end of his short life. For the length of his criminal career, he is the lion of his neighbourhood, as it were, but his fame manifests itself principally in the thousands of spectators who gather for his execution. Caleb discovers, by contrast, that the fame he has gained as an “active and enterprising villain” (374) follows him to every corner of the kingdom. The handbill describing “the Most Wonderful and Surprising History and Miraculous Adventures of Caleb Williams” (368) finds its way to every community in which he seeks refuge, presumably by means of the extensive distribution networks of chapbooks and ballads that were in place by the end of the century, and were one of the tools at the ready disposal of the law.96 In the mediation of his criminality, Caleb comes face to face with the “branding of the individual’s identity” and the “retool[ing of] earlier kinds of distinction for a modern media-saturated age” that Mole identifies with the emergence of celebrity culture at the turn of the nineteenth century.97

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Erin Mackie contends that Caleb’s identity is produced through the criminal discourses in which he is implicated and which he, as an author, later produces: “it is as a criminal whose life is circulated publicly through popular discourse that Williams achieves his fullest sense of selfaffirmation. … Williams’s relation to this public character of himself is at once thrilling and terrifying, sustaining and potentially annihilating.”98 Caleb’s identification as a criminal, that is, brings about his identification with the criminal. From there, as we’ve seen, Caleb mines his literary resources to save himself through evasion and disguise. The personae he needs to assume to elude punishment, though, don’t always line up with the dashing figure of Kit Williams that has given him such pleasure. Dorothea von Mücke remarks that Caleb “identifies with a stock character, the daring criminal who makes it into oral legends and ballads. … [He] seems to be aware merely of the heroic status attached to the outlaw’s subject position.”99 Given his attachment to this fantasy, it should not surprise us that, as Von Mücke observes, he “despises his disguises as an Irish beggar and as a poor Jew.” “Clearly, he would prefer to fancy himself somebody more glamorous.”100 It is Caleb’s use of the criminal stratagems that he has learned from his reading, moreover, that gives him resolution and purpose. “I know not whether from my youth I was destined for a hero,” he comments to Falkland in their penultimate encounter, “but I may thank you for having taught me a lesson of insurmountable fortitude” (385). “[Y]ou have communicated to me volumes of experience in a very short period,” he explains; “I am no longer irresolute and pliable” (384). Caleb suggests that he has developed focus and self-command through the persecution that he has suffered at his employer’s hands. But he has developed more than that. From the first time he hears of Kit Williams, Caleb identifies himself consistently in relation to the criminal identities that are projected onto him. Admittedly, he often makes these identifications under duress, but through this persona, Caleb articulates his sense of self on the model of a daring criminal, and fashions a version of his own history that has him starring in a narrative of extraordinary feats and untold adventures. When we turn to Newgate novels of the 1830s, we find an articulation of individual subjectivity in relation to popular criminal discourse along lines very similar to those that Godwin traces in Caleb Williams. Like Caleb, the Newgate school protagonist often comes to an identity of his own by engaging with the criminal identities others map onto him. Godwin makes clear that Kit Williams is a stock figure, utterly typical of eighteenth-century criminal narratives. He makes that figure available to his protagonist, nonetheless, as a tool in Caleb’s identity-formation,

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of use insofar as it contributes to a communal process of image-making. Godwin’s remediation of the eighteenth-century criminal narrative throws into relief the far-reaching repercussions of the generalization of fashion for an emergent nineteenth-century public culture: fashion has bred a consciousness of visibility that permeates public life and alters the bases on which individuals perceive their relation to the collective. And, through its intersection with visual culture, fashion has outfitted ordinary individuals like Caleb with a capacity for self-styling and performance that, to return to Mole’s words, makes possible “a specifically modern way to enter the public sphere.”101

Mobility and Code-Switching in Paul Clifford When Bulwer and Ainsworth wrote Paul Clifford and Jack Sheppard, respectively, at either end of the 1830s, they each critiqued the social determinants of crime and the corruption endemic to systems of law and order: both Paul and Jack are born into adverse circumstances, and from their first entry into the world, are marked by the stigma of poverty and low associates which ensures their interpellation as criminal subjects. Of the two, Paul Clifford models itself most closely on Caleb Williams, offering a sustained critique of social inequality and the criminalization of poverty along lines similar to Godwin’s as well as those Dickens would later take up in Oliver Twist. Eschewing Caleb Williams’s famously ambivalent ending, Paul Clifford closes with the hero’s escape and relocation to America, where he finds a welcome alternative to Britain’s systemic injustice: “‘Circumstances make guilt,’ [Paul] was wont to say: ‘let us endeavour to correct the circumstances, before we rail against the guilt!’” (3.328, emphasis original).102 These novels share with Godwin on one side, and the industrial novelists of the 1840s on the other, a concern about the long-term effects of social inequality and the severely limited prospects of the lower orders. They differ from those novels, though, in their historical setting: Bulwer and Ainsworth set their stories among the thieves and prison-breakers of the early eighteenth century. As I will argue, their historically distant settings stand in productive tension with their sustained engagement of the contemporary. Bulwer and Ainsworth reinvigorate spectacular characters of another time, juxtaposing the rudimentary surveillance, communication, and transportation networks of an earlier age with the performativity of public life and consciousness of audience proper to their modern era. Paul Clifford’s relish for public attention and astute critique of a distinctly nineteenth-century social order are among the anachronisms that

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Bulwer’s contemporary reviewers were quick to notice. The Spectator remarks, “Paul Clifford, it is true, is a character of other times, and of other times are a few of his adventures; but the far greater part of the persons, incidents, allusions, and indeed the conduct of the whole work is of no older a date than yesterday.”103 In its review of the novel, The Monthly Magazine comments similarly that Bulwer’s “range of subjects [is] especially attractive and adapted to the age. No man catches better the tone of the day.”104 Paul’s profession as a highwayman roots him firmly in the eighteenth century, before turnpikes and high-speed conveyances revolutionized transportation across Britain, making travel safer, disseminating news, imagery, and goods, and contributing to consumers’ sense of themselves as part of “a nation moving together in history.”105 The social context through which the hero moves, however, is thoroughly ribboned with the novel’s present. Bulwer accords his protagonist the freedom of the road, a space for outlawry and adventure, but attributes to him a form of  social permeation and critique imaginable only in a contemporary ­nineteenth-century landscape.106 The Spectator singles out for notice, for example, the character of William Brandon, a forbidding, unscrupulous lawyer and later judge who is ultimately revealed to be Paul’s father. Brandon orchestrates Paul’s first conviction for theft, fully aware the young boy is innocent, and at novel’s end, he is the judge who sentences Paul to execution for his crimes; once he has learned Paul is his son, Brandon manoeuvres to commute the sentence to transportation. Taking the portrait of Brandon as an emblem of the novel’s contemporaneity and its “war against things as they are,” The Spectator suggests that the character reflects the author’s “deep knowledge of human nature,” born of looking “not [at] the men of history or the men of poetry, but the men of reality, who live the life, who strive and struggle, speak, write, lecture, wheedle, time-serve, trim, barter, smile, assert, retract, deny; but still push on, deceiving and deceived, to their greatest end – power or wealth – on the arena of this our most vicious, most glorious metropolis.”107 On this account, Bulwer uses Brandon’s character to illuminate the social mechanisms of the present, especially the forces in play in the “vicious, … glorious metropoli[tan]” world that orients contemporary life. Neither crime nor injustice can be explained solely in terms of morality or the failings of an individual; both must be analyzed as products of systemic injustice in the current social order. In Paul Clifford, the powerful man drawn from contemporary “reality” is father to the highwayman of an earlier age, bringing together in one fictional family distinct historical moments that inflect each other and that,

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in their juxtaposition, the author uses as “tools to map the modern.”108 The Spectator attributes Paul Clifford’s mash-up of historical moments and sensibilities to Bulwer’s decision to organize his political satire around an heroic figure: “the author has been led into the anachronism by the necessity of elevating a history of crime and a satire upon society by the introduction of a romantic criminal; and alas! crime and romance no longer go hand in hand.”109 The reviewer aligns the figure of the “romantic criminal” with narratives “of other times”: Paul Clifford is a “gallant young highwayman, of those glorious days when gentlemen in laced jackets [took to] … the road, and robbed with good humour and politeness.”110 The narrative terrain of the open road allows Bulwer to invest his protagonist with gentlemanly style and autonomy while distancing him from the aristocracy’s stranglehold on power in the novelist’s pre-Reform present. The Literary Gazette identifies another fold in Bulwer’s historical pleating by framing the dashing eighteenth-century highwayman as a retake on the knight errant of yet an earlier era: “the hero is one of those picturesque cavaliers … who, like younger brothers, have the great fault or misfortune of being born too late; for, after all, a highwayman is but a knight divested of white plume and silver shield, delivered over to the balladmonger instead of the minstrel, and with the Newgate Calendar instead of Froissart to chronicle his feats.”111 The Gazette’s reviewer reads Paul Clifford’s easy confidence and readiness for adventure as signs of an innate chivalry proper to the knight errant, here bedecked in new colours and trim. The reversion to an earlier heroic model bears some examination, however, because it translates the figure of the highwayman from its early eighteenth-century narrative context to a less date-stamped though no less resonant past. The reviewer’s plumed knight reads as a figure from Britain’s storied past, that is, a primal figure out of medieval romance that might be called up in the nineteenth century to invest the present with a gallantry that, as the novel’s portrait of William Brandon suggests, it does not obviously possess. This chivalric inflection sweeps up the plucky orphan turned highwayman from the gritty reality of poverty and crime to infuse him with the spirit of an heroic, archaic past. The updated knight errant is then offered to a nineteenth-century readership as a future-­oriented fantasy, a hero who is simultaneously belated, “being born too late,” and projected into the future as an idealized alternative to present realities. The limitation of the Gazette’s reading, though, is that Paul Clifford doesn’t only romance its highwayman. Rather, Bulwer sets his dashing outlaw into relation with a specific eighteenth-century literary past, the popular mediations of that figure in street literature, theatre, and imagery,

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and a detailed engagement with the contemporary. The novel does not resolve these distinct historical texts and contexts into a single continuous narrative; it allows their different temporalities to jostle alongside one another, intermingling and discordant at once. It uses present forms to invest moments from the past with new meaning, and illuminates the ways in which past eras and figures resonate in the present. With reference to early nineteenth-century print culture and the older print formats that get repackaged in the present, Clare Pettitt remarks that “the remediation of what has been ‘always there’ to a new reading public makes it not quite the same as it was before, and therefore this is less a process of ‘recuperation’ than of re-presentation and re-formation.”112 Those re-formations, Pettitt argues, create something new out of the “always there,” feeding a modern desire for novelty in part by turning back to past forms to kit them out in new attire and invest them with new meaning. In his discussion of the Paris arcades and the new forms of iron construction that made them imaginable, Walter Benjamin observes: “Corresponding to the form of the new means of production, which in the beginning is still ruled by the form of the old … are images in the collective consciousness in which the new is permeated with the old.”113 We might use Benjamin’s formulation to understand the Newgate novel’s recourse to archaic figures, from both the previous century and a “primal past,” in its engagement with the new technologies, temporalities, and public discourse of the nineteenth century.114 The social collective, Benjamin suggests, works in the present to distance itself from the past, but does so principally by turning away from “the recent past.” The desire “to distance oneself from all that is antiquated – which includes, however, the recent past,” he remarks, works to “deflect the imagination (which is given impetus by the new) back upon the primal past. In the dream in which each epoch entertains images of its successor, the latter appears wedded to elements of primal history … that is, to elements of a classless society.”115 The fashion system plays a central role in articulating the utopian dreams of this social mechanism by offering images that give form to the “unconscious collective fantasies” that permeate the present.116 Fashion exploits new means of production, new images and ideas, not to dispense with traditional forms altogether nor to offer “a direct visual mirror of [current] cultural facts,” but rather to interweave elements of past and present and by that means materialize the contours of the contemporary.117 Fashion pulls its new looks out of its own history, upcycling and reinterpreting the old in order to articulate something new for a new age.

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As we saw in the Introduction, Timothy Campbell illuminates fashion’s role in producing a new kind of historical consciousness in the late eighteenth century. He suggests that the rapid piling up of fashion’s cast offs in the period’s print culture produced a consciousness of the “precise ways in which [the] culture had changed over time,” but equally of “the artifice and intentionality that produce the coherence of ‘the times,’” where “a general idea of the historical specificity of culture [is extrapolated] from the intently felt present of commercial modernity.”118 The artifice lies in taking the fashions of an era as synecdoche for the era itself, as if all the complexity of an historical moment could be bodied forth in distinctive dress styles. This contradiction, though, lies at the heart of fashion’s social, historical power. Fashion embodies the spirit of the age while at the same time exposing the arbitrariness of its own relation to history.119 When we recognize fashion’s role in articulating the dream consciousness of the collective while “becoming a model for history,” we understand the function of past forms and figures in fashion’s relentless drive to style something new.120 Both Benjamin’s and Campbell’s theorizations of modern historicism pertain to the work that I argue the novel undertakes in the nineteenth century. The Newgate school reveals the nineteenth-century novel’s implication in the cycle of novelty and obsolescence that organizes modern life: a novel like Paul Clifford produces a sense of contemporaneity for its readers by recontextualizing the detritus of narrative forms and figures of past ages, including fragments of archaic history, into a patchwork that sports a distinctly modern look. As we will see especially with Jack Sheppard and its afterlife in the mid-century Victorian novel, the Newgate novel articulates fantasies of a spectacular rise out of ordinary existence, a nineteenth-century version of unfettered mobility and public visibility, in a narrative form that plaits together elements of romance, eighteenthcentury crime narrative, nineteenth-century realism, and, as I will argue, theatrical melodrama. Like Oliver Twist, the orphaned Paul Clifford is born into poverty, falls into bad company, and is accused of a crime he didn’t commit. Lacking a Mr. Brownlow to believe in his innocence, however, Paul is sent to prison. William Brandon is the victim of the theft of which Paul is wrongly accused, and the lawyer declares that the young man “had perfectly the Old-Baileycut of countenance” (1.146). When he has succeeded in seeing Paul convicted, Brandon takes comfort from the knowledge that “he had sent the boy to a place where, let him be ever so innocent at present, he was certain to come out as much inclined to be guilty, as his friends could desire” (1.146). From this experience, Paul determines that the ruling class is no more honest

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than the thieves who plague the roads, so he abandons his “daring ambition” (1.155) to raise himself into respectability and opts instead to “acquire the graces and the reputation of the accomplished and perfect appropriator of other men’s possessions” (1.224). Paul becomes a highwayman. Paul Clifford is one of the only Newgate novels that spares its protagonist an inevitable trip to the gallows, a generic anomaly that is tied directly to the novel’s satire. Not only does Bulwer use his criminal protagonist to expose the hypocrisy of the respectable classes, but he depicts Paul as more honest and honourable than the majority of his social betters. Paul reflects that, “the more I see of men, and of the callings of social life – the more I, an open knave, sicken at the glossed and covert dishonesties around” (2.146). Bulwer adds a rare footnote to this section to remind readers of the author’s distance from his character’s opinions, but the novel’s sustained critique of the “depravities of that social state wherein characters are formed” seems to belie the authorial gloss (3.81). Committed to a Godwinian critique of injustice, Bulwer’s novel departs from Caleb Williams’s example by romanticizing the character who exposes social corruption. Paul Clifford is the unimpeachable censor of Britain’s ruling class and advocate of a meritocracy that the novel identifies with the New World. If Paul lacks Caleb’s ambivalence about criminality and social authority, what he possesses – and shares with later Newgate protagonists – is a remarkable facility with all forms of mobility. Although Paul exhibits the confidence and roguishness of the eighteenth-century pícaro, his narrative does not marshal him through a broad social panorama nor introduce him into diverse conversations about contemporary issues; unlike the silver-fork school with its Teflon dandies, Paul’s plot line owes more to the Romantic novel of development than the picaresque. Nonetheless, Paul shares with his dandy brethren an ability to move seamlessly from low society to high and back again.121 His social literacy and adaptability provide the fodder for his critique of the contemporary social and political landscape. Both the Newgate and silver-fork schools invest in the fantasy of a figure who might stand apart from the social order, at once flâneur and adventurer, engaged and autonomous, an acute social observer and dynamic public figure willing to play to audiences while maintaining a critical distance from popular opinion. Much like Oliver Twist’s innate goodness, Paul possesses an innate gentility that survives low company and allows him to move through polite society with ease. This is one of the narrative features with which contemporary reviewers took particular issue. The reviewer for The Athenaeum (who was unlikely to be sympathetic given Paul Clifford’s trenchant satire of that

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magazine) remarks: “A highwayman hero, who, almost without education, and entirely without decent society, turns out the most refined of men in manner, language, and feeling, is too much for any novel-reader’s credulity.”122 Implausibility notwithstanding, Paul’s “natural and inborn gentility, [and] quick turn for observation” (2.189) equip him with the know-how to navigate the customs and manners of seemingly any community. The highwayman proves particularly adept at using his self-display to command an audience. Paul makes a splash when he enters fashionable society in the guise of a respectable gentleman, becoming within three weeks of his arrival “the most admired man in Bath” (2.139). With public displays of his bravery and political savvy, he similarly establishes his qualification to lead the band of criminals who understand themselves, Robin-Hood-like, as merry gentlemen and equalizers of wealth. Like the silver-fork dandy, Bulwer’s highwayman exhibits the character traits and social disposition that Caroline Evans associates with modern fashion: “The kinetic, open personality of fashion is the personality which a society in the process of rapid transformation most needs.” Fashion “thus has an important role to play, not merely in adorning the body but also in fashioning a modern, reflexive self.”123 As we saw in the previous chapter, Gilles Lipovetsky similarly credits the fashion system with producing the kind of mutability that Paul Clifford shows to be requisite to modern life: “fashion puts civil society in a state of openness with respect to historical movement; it creates receptive mentalities characterized by fluidity that are inherently prepared for the voluntary adventure of the new.”124 Newgate protagonists consistently manifest this fluidity and embrace the currents of change running through the contemporary. Even when marked by deep ambivalence as with the proto-Newgate protagonist Caleb Williams, the criminal hero seeks out opportunities for self-styling and visibility, and shows a willingness to engage with his own public. To borrow from linguistics and communication systems a concept that refers to the fluent movement between different languages or signals, Paul is an exceptional code-switcher.125 Code-switching has broadened in application beyond linguistic facility to refer to discursive adaptability – one’s ability to adopt different discourses and rhetorical styles as a situation requires – and more generally, to manners, conduct, and other matters of sociability. As I argued with respect to the silver-fork dandy, the codeswitcher must quickly grasp the manners, discourse, and other social codes proper to different milieus in order to move fluidly through each. In our own historical moment, cultural theorists often attribute this ability to the institutional norms that teach certain individuals, particularly those

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identified with non-dominant groups, that social belonging requires the assimilation of dominant forms of language and behaviour. Vershawn Ashanti Young argues, for example, that code-switching represents an institutionalized “method of teaching African Americans to adopt a double set of behaviors, Englishes, and rhetorical styles, one for blacks and another for whites.”126 In these contexts, code-switching refers to a discriminatory activity enforced for non-dominant peoples only. In historical examples such as Lord Chesterfield’s letters or Byron’s Don Juan, by contrast, code-switching represents an asset of the privileged who use their cultivated manners and social know-how to adapt themselves to the discourses and desires of different audiences. In the case of Paul Clifford, though, code-switching begins to relocate from the exclusive purview of the privileged: it figures as a skill of the underclassed who would assimilate themselves into good society either with an aim to social mobility or as part of a scheme or tactic. Although the Newgate novel does not connect such adaptability to the issues of race then current especially in the context of abolition, its unmooring of code-switching from the ruling class marks an important way-station between code-switching’s affiliation with the privileged to its contemporary inflection as a practice imposed principally on non-dominant peoples. The complicated racial and class history of code-switching connects as well to the “kinetic, open personality” that Evans aligns with the subject of modern fashion. In her history of Black dandyism in the Atlantic world, for example, Monica Miller examines “the pleasures and dangers of the styling of blackness and self-fashioning” across the “four centuries from the beginning of the slave trade.”127 Attentive to how clothing historically has been imposed on or denied to people as a tool of oppression, Miller is also interested in how Black people “use clothing and dress to define their identity in different and changing political and cultural contexts.”128 She argues that the individual who embraces sartorial savvy, like the Black dandies on whom she focuses, “visualizes an awareness of the way in which all identities are styled and manipulated, let out or hemmed in.” The history that Miller maps shows how “Africans dispersed across and around the Atlantic in the slave trade – once slaves to fashion – make fashion their slave.”129 Fashion’s coercion and contradictions persist, but its significance as a “visible and visual ideal,” one that she contends is of “utmost importance in combatting the injustices of the present,” has driven its historical transformation and ensured its ongoing resonance.130 The early stage of Miller’s history is one to which the Newgate novel stands adjacent and with which it shares important premises about

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fashion’s role in the negotiation and performativity of identity. Newgate fiction provides an important historical referent for our more recent conversations about the fashion system’s potential benefits and hazards for non-dominant peoples. Like silver-fork fiction, the Newgate novel associates a talent for savvy self-fashioning and code-switching with the modern individual who “unite[s] acute sensibility with keen observation,” a facility that, on this model, characterizes savoir-faire or clever subversion, and sometimes both.131 Rather than a product of the low-born protagonist’s duplicity, social fluency marks the performativity of identity that that character embraces in response to the criminality others read into his obscure birth and low station. In a narrative formulation that, I will argue, Ainsworth elaborates and formalizes in Jack Sheppard, the Newgate protagonist over-identifies with the criminal identity others have projected on to him in order to become a more remarkable criminal than even his severest critics could have foretold. Paul Clifford’s “quick turn for observation” (2.189), similar to the penchant for trifles that distinguishes his dandiacal counterpart Henry Pelham, makes him adept at suiting himself to different audiences, idioms, and contexts. What marks Paul’s difference from his silver-fork and Byronic brethren, though, is his station: as we have seen, until the late revelation of his genteel birth, he believes himself to be low-born and is consistently marked by others as belonging to a class that destines him to criminality. His remarkable adaptability may be a fantasy of the possibilities for selfmaking available to a young man without connections, but it is a fantasy driven by the period’s individuating doctrine of work and talent, as well as the mobility made imaginable by an industrialized print and visual media. When Paul Clifford is finally arrested, the narrator reports that the “newspapers were not slow in recording the singular capture of the notorious Lovett [one of Paul’s aliases]” (3.146). His bold sacrifice of himself to rescue his comrades, which leaves him seriously injured, “caused a very considerable ferment and excitation in the popular mind; and to feed the impulse, the journalists were little slothful in retailing every anecdote, true or false, which they could recollect, touching the past adventures of the daring highwayman” (3.146). The media reports fuel popular opinion that the highwayman is charming and “mirthful” rather than “cruel” or boorish; although not everyone is captivated by Paul’s charisma, most “felt it rather a sin to be severe with a man of so merry a disposition” (3.147). The narrator remarks on the newspapers’ role in rendering the outlaw a media spectacle in his own right and drawing an immense crowd to his trial. The crowd outside the courthouse reportedly moved as “one living

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mass,” a “murmuring and heaving sea of mortality” (3.259–60). Quoting from a lengthy description of the trial from “one of the journals of that day,” the narrator notes that the prisoner “‘breathed thick and hard when the various aliases he had assumed … were read; but smiled, with an unaccountable expression, when the list was completed, as if exulting at the varieties of his ingenuity’” (3.266). Paul takes pleasure in hearing his selfstyling cast as “ingenuity.” This public confirmation of his talent and savvy belies the early predictions of his fate, which consigned him to not only an ignominious but an unremarkable end, the kind of historical insignificance that Charley Bates fears for the Artful Dodger. Having made himself the talk of the town, Paul relishes the scene: as the highwayman stands to address the court, the narrator reports that “a glow of excitement spread itself gradually over [his] features … and lighted [his] eye” (3.276). While the novel ultimately shores up the status quo by justifying its hero’s gentility through a respectable birth – as Brandon’s legitimate son, he belongs to an ancient English family – Paul enjoys this moment of greatest visibility convinced that his achievements and fame are attributable to nothing but his own skill. His sense of what he might have been, had the law not made him a criminal, remains grounded in a belief in the possibilities available to even the humblest of individuals. On Paul’s model, the “visible knownness” that Leo Braudy aligns with fame and the transformation of public culture at the turn of the nineteenth century may be within reach of virtually everyone.132 One of the elements of Bulwer’s novel that draws it into close relation with Jack Sheppard and pins both to the contemporaneity of the 1830s is its engagement with the narrative and theatrical mechanisms of melodrama. Bulwer intersperses with the novel’s sober class critique, for example, numerous original songs that celebrate roguery and invest the highwayman with “all the melodramatic virtues and splendours” that Fraser’s Magazine would later decry. The protagonist sings a song entitled “The Love of our Profession; or, the Robber’s Life,” which includes the lines, “Oh! there never was life like the Robber’s – so/Jolly, and bold, and free;/ And it’s end? – why, a cheer from the crowd below,/And a leap from the leafless tree!” (1.261). Paul Clifford remains too consistently buoyant and playful to qualify formally as melodramatic, but like the theatrical genre that dominated the London stage by the 1820s, it juxtaposes the violence of urban modernity with moments of immersive sympathy, comedic relief, and a devil-may-care embrace of notoriety. It turns roguery into an adventure that promises the protagonist freedom and fame. Set in relation to the novel’s carefully developed social critique, though, that promise figures

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not only as fantasy but as a mobility otherwise denied a member of the underclass. Paul Clifford suggests that the “cheer from the crowd below” might be ample justification for crime when the alternatives are so bleak. Matthew Buckley contends that British theatrical melodrama changes by the 1820s from its early immersion in the affective shock of revolutionary violence to something more quotidian and domestic: it develops a “new capacity to map the emotional experience of melodrama onto the everyday, to find it … within the ordinary and not simply the extreme circumstances of life.”133 The ordinary has itself transformed, however, under “the rhythms and pace of the industrial urban world.”134 Buckley argues that melodrama’s singular contribution to – and indeed, formation of – modern mass culture and consciousness turns on its “capability to produce affective and emotional sensations of great intensity.”135 Melodrama’s embodiment of contemporaneity results from its capacity to elicit an intense affective response calibrated to the “heightened, concentrated reality” that constitutes quotidian lived experience in the nineteenth century. Melodrama produces this effect, Buckley maintains, by means of its formal oscillation “between absorptive, introverted moments of sympathetic identification and highly spectacular, extroverted scenes of shocking violence.”136 While Jack Sheppard ’s formal engagement with melodrama is more extensive than Paul Clifford ’s, as we will see shortly, Bulwer’s novel situates itself within the new affective register in which a figure like the eighteenth-century highwayman inevitably resonates. With reference to Bulwer’s melodramas, which were staged at London’s patent theatres, Buckley comments that “legitimate theatre by the 1830s” had absorbed the popular genre of melodrama by integrating the “literariness of legitimate tragedy” with “melodrama’s ‘intrigue, sensation, idealism, and domestic sentiment.’”137 In his fiction, Bulwer produces a similar remix, fusing ideological critique with the mobility of eighteenth-century criminality, the public consciousness of contemporary visual culture, and the idealism, sentiment, and sensation of stage melodrama.138 Paul Clifford was published in volume form and thus written principally for readers of means, but Bulwer’s inclusion of original songs and melodramatic plotting reflects his priming of his novel for theatrical adaptation and awareness of its likely appeal to a broad, diverse audience. Bulwer’s integration into his novel of theatrical conventions proper to the most popular stage genre of the 1810s and 1820s tells us something important about Newgate fiction, specifically in terms of its synchronization with the temporality of fashion. This is not necessarily how Bulwer’s nineteenth-century critics interpreted his currency. The Athenaeum asserts,

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for example, that “the whole constitution of [Bulwer’s] mind seems altered by the last author he has studied; and having quite talent enough to remould and embellish the opinions of his temporary favourite, he quite foregoes personal identity.”139 The accusation here is that Bulwer hops on the latest trend, imitating others and eschewing an aesthetic vision of his own. I propose, by contrast, that we recognize his penchant for “remould[ing]” and “embellish[ing]” as a deliberate strategy to produce an aesthetic form keyed to the felt experience of the present. The currency of Bulwer’s fiction reflects its conscious engagement with the movements of “the tide and the hour,” as he suggests in Paul Clifford’s dedication, and thus the permeation of fashion’s logics of contingency and spectacle into the quotidian experience of society’s outcasts and ordinary people alike.

Jack Sheppard’s Demotic Celebrity In his 1839 fictionalization of Jack Sheppard’s story, Ainsworth allows his protagonist to enjoy his moment of greatest publicity not in the courtroom, but in the streets surrounded by a massive crowd gathered to watch his procession to the gallows. As he is led from Newgate Prison to Tyburn, Jack contemplates the immense, supportive crowd that fills every window and roof and presses in around the cavalcade. The singular object of this spectacle, Jack flourishes under the ravenous gaze of his audience. The narrator reports, “He looked around, and as he heard that deafening shout – as he felt the influence of those thousand eyes fixed upon him – as he listened to the cheers, all his misgivings – if he had any – vanished, and he felt more as if he were marching to a triumph, than proceeding to a shameful death” (3.294–95). The moment of Jack’s greatest exultation occurs when he is most publicly displayed. He thrives precisely because he has been made the object of a grand spectacle – because he can feel “those thousand eyes fixed upon him.” It is worth pausing over George Cruikshank’s rendering of this scene in the novel, and its important reworking of William Hogarth’s analogous plate in his 1747 print series, Industry and Idleness. As I discussed in the Introduction, Cruikshank’s original illustrations for Jack Sheppard contributed materially to the novel’s success and immediate theatrical adaptation. In the case of Jack’s execution, Cruikshank devotes two triptychs to the procession to Tyburn (Figures 2 and 3). Framed from a distance, Jack Sheppard is visible in all the images, either at the centre of the scene addressing the crowd or the object of their attention as they battle to save him. Most scenes are orderly, drawn in crisp,

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Figure 2  George Cruikshank, “The Procession of Jack Sheppard from Newgate to Tyburn.” In William Harrison Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard: A Romance. London: Richard Bentley, 1839. Image courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

clear lines, with prison officials, soldiers, and spectators organized around the prisoner; in the frames depicting disorder, such as the crowd’s seizure of Jack’s body from the gallows, he remains visible and the focus of the action. In Hogarth’s plate, “The Idle ‘Prentice Executed at Tyburn” (Figure 4), by contrast, the crowd scene is disparately focused. There is no one object in the scene that attracts and unifies the crowd’s gaze, including the condemned prisoner heading for the gallows. Among the prominent figures in the scene is a woman in the foreground with her back to the gallows, hawking a handbill containing the prisoner’s last dying speech and confession. Around her, a fight has broken out, a fruit cart has been overturned, the vendor’s pocket is about to be picked, and a pair of young boys watch the melee with glee. While many people in the scene watch the procession, the crowd seems generally indifferent to the prisoner’s fate and the moral lesson his execution is intended to teach.

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Figure 3  George Cruikshank, “The Last Scene.” In William Harrison Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard: A Romance. London: Richard Bentley, 1839. Image courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

Cruikshank uses the same Tyburn sequence to realize a profound transformation in public culture, collectivity, and celebrity: Jack Sheppard is the star of the show, and his performance has a galvanizing effect on the audience. Cruikshank shows Jack playing to the crowd, toasting his admirers, and enjoying the spectacle of his own fame. Even the sober final frames depicting the execution make the criminal an object of sympathy and care as his body is cut down and carried away on the crowd’s shoulders. Cruikshank represents Jack as a figure whose visibility and self-presence serve to transform the crowd from a mob into a public: the spectators unite in their collective interest in his person and he flourishes as the object of their gaze. Unlike in Hogarth’s Tyburn image, where the crowd’s distraction from the main event is part of the illustration’s message – namely, that spectacular punishment fails in its moral purpose – Cruikshank stages Jack’s procession as the culmination of the young man’s career as a demotic celebrity. Cruikshank’s twenty-seven plates for Jack Sheppard had such a notable impact that Thackeray remarked in the Westminster Review, “it seems to us

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Figure 4  William Hogarth, “The Idle ‘Prentice Executed at Tyburn.” Plate XI, Industry and Idleness. Designed and engraved by William Hogarth, 1747. Image courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

that Mr Cruikshank really created the tale, and that Mr Ainsworth, as it were, only put words to it.”140 Jonathan Hill and Martin Meisel have documented in detail the creative innovations that distinguish Cruikshank’s contribution to the novel.141 As I discussed in the Introduction, Hill suggests that it was in Jack Sheppard “that Cruikshank first employed a particular illustrative style,” tableau illustration, which “depicts moments of narrative climax in framed, static compositions, deriv[ing] its compositional characteristics from the widely used theatrical device of the dramatic tableau.”142 Distinct from the “vignette” style of illustration that Cruikshank used elsewhere, most notably in the illustrations for Oliver Twist which ran concurrently with Jack Sheppard for four months in Bentley’s Miscellany, the artist’s stylistic innovation in Ainsworth’s novel takes up the “visual vocabulary of melodramatic acting.”143 Drawing directly from contemporary theatrical practice, the illustrations signify even more decisively than does the narrative the heroism of its protagonist, and the oscillation between intense affects that characterizes early nineteenth-century melodrama. The Athenaeum impugns the novel as a “bad book … got up for a bad public,” but singles out for notice the visceral pull of Cruikshank’s illustrations: “In

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these graphic representations are embodied all the … unnatural excitement, which a public, too prudish to relish humour, and too blasé to endure true pathos, requires to keep alive attention and to awaken a sensation.”144 As we will see with the sensation novel, the popular reception of Jack Sheppard signalled to critics that its author and illustrator were “mere caterer[s] for the public appetite,” and that what the public craved was affective intensity.145 That was enough to secure the novel’s condemnation in many quarters, but the verdict simultaneously indicates that Jack Sheppard engaged its audiences in a new way. The novel is “one of those literary peculiarities,” The Athenaeum concludes, “which we consider to be signs of the times.”146 The narrative and illustrations together depict Jack Sheppard as a young man who challenges authority, defies constraint, and pushes himself to new feats, yet who continuously finds himself prey to the machinations of others and his own worst impulses. He is mobile in both literal and figurative terms, whether escaping from prison or moved by his mother’s plaintive entreaties to reform. Through the novel’s sometimes abrupt lurching from romping adventure to lachrymose sentiment to shocking violence, Jack Sheppard offers its audience a figure in relation to whom they might experience the kind of affective intensity that characterizes “the rites of scandalous celebrity” as well as then-contemporary melodrama.147 At the novel’s conclusion, when Cruikshank positions Jack as the object of both a massive crowd’s fascination and a ritualistic spectacle of violence, the artist rounds off the demotic celebrity that the entire text has worked to identify with its protagonist. The novel’s third volume stages a remarkable scene with accompanying illustration that I analyzed in detail in the Introduction: Ainsworth fictionalizes a visit that the historical Jack Sheppard received in Newgate Prison from Sir James Thornhill, Sergeant-Painter to George I, who sketched Sheppard’s portrait in chalk and pencil. Ainsworth adds to the scene William Hogarth, John Gay, and the prizewinning boxer James Figg, who like Sheppard enjoyed a popular renown in the 1720s. The scene attests to the breadth of Jack’s fame and suggests that news of his adventures has reached far beyond the housemaids, smiths, and other working people captivated by his story. When the turnkey informs Jack that he is to be honoured with a visit from an august group of gentlemen, one of whom has come to paint his portrait “[by] desire of his Majesty,” Jack exclaims, “And have my escapes really made so much noise as to reach the ear of royalty?” “I have done nothing,” he continues, “nothing to what I could do – to what I will do!” (3.128–29). The suggestion that he is an object of public interest fuels his ambition and spurs him to generate even more “noise” than he has to date.

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If the portrait scene intimates that Jack has taken all of England by storm, it also points to the critical role of the visual in solidifying his celebrity. The turnkey explains that the King requested Jack’s portrait because “He has heard of your wonderful escapes, and wishes to see what you’re like” (3.128). Jack fascinates as much by his person as by the stories of his adventures. His visibility, the image that attaches to his name and achievements, plays a key role in solidifying his fame. With reference to the permeation of a celebrity’s “complete figural image,” Hollander remarks that “[i]t is not the singer himself, but the thousand pictures of him in the media that bring to life and nourish the vogue for his looks.” “And before the present media,” she adds, “the work of countless illuminators and portrait painters, commercial illustrators, engravers and advertising artists gave fashion its perpetual currency. This is a currency not just of images but of the mode of making them.”148 Jack’s criminal artistry, if we can call it that, may set the fashion for him, but it is Thornhill’s portrait, Hogarth’s engravings, Cruikshank’s illustrations, and Ainsworth’s narrative, along with countless citations, imitations, and adaptations of these, that keep his figure in circulation and cast it as an index to contemporaneity. In developing its protagonist’s demotic celebrity, Jack Sheppard reproduces many of the staple elements of Newgate fiction that we’ve seen in Paul Clifford. Jack is born into a criminal community, determines to use his skills to make something more of himself than anyone expects, and achieves fame through his exploits before learning late in the narrative that he is in fact of gentle birth. Like Paul Clifford, Jack Sheppard was known for its original songs as well as its use of flash, or criminal slang. Flash had been popularized in the 1820s by such texts as the Flash Dictionary (1821) and Pierce Egan’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1823). Flash appears throughout Newgate fiction, most familiar to us now from the dialogue of the Artful Dodger and Charley Bates. Attentive to current tastes, Ainsworth filled Jack Sheppard with flash dialogue and songs that made the novel readily adaptable to theatrical performance and complemented Cruikshank’s tableau visual style. Hollingsworth reports that, of the numerous theatrical productions running concurrently in London in 1839–40, J.  B. Buckstone incorporated into the play a song from Ainsworth’s earlier novel, Rookwood. The catchy “Nix My Dolly, Pals, Fake Away” helped make Buckstone’s Sheppard adaptation a hit: in the words of one contemporary commentator, “[the song] was whistled by every dirty guttersnipe; and chanted in drawing rooms by fair lips, little knowing the meaning of the words they sang.”149

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Ainsworth departs from Bulwer’s model, though, in key ways that serve to reformulate the Newgate school’s conception of celebrity. Specifically, in collaboration with Cruikshank, Ainsworth amplifies the s­ elf-consciousness with which the criminal protagonist adapts himself to circumstance in order to capitalize on every opportunity that might capture the public’s attention and make him famous. The novel makes celebrity culture relevant and imaginable to a constituency wide enough to include a contemporary urban underclass. With its numerous concurrent theatrical adaptations substantially extending its accessibility and cultural relevance, Jack Sheppard stages a model of public visibility that promises fame and historical recognition to what Buckley calls “a broad working-class audience, … [especially] the young, ‘masterless’ men who constituted much of the city’s growing industrial labor force.”150 A satirical 1839 illustration of the Jack Sheppard craze puts the significance of the criminal’s celebrity into the mouth of just one such lad: “Only see how such coves are handled down to posterity, I think it’s call’d, by means of books, and plays, and pictures !”151 One of Ainsworth’s most striking departures from the crime fiction of his contemporaries is to forego any pretence to the protagonist’s innocence. This is to return the Newgate narrative to its eighteenth-century roots in the Ordinary’s broadsheet, an historical grounding necessitated by the author’s choice of a real historical figure as protagonist. Unlike Caleb Williams, Paul Clifford, or Oliver Twist, all of whose introductions to the criminal underworld stem from wrongful convictions, Jack relishes criminality from an early age. Indeed, as a young apprentice, he commits his first significant theft against his own master. Although he occasionally expresses remorse for betraying family and friends, Jack pursues his criminal career with gusto and takes unmitigated pleasure in his illicit achievements. He is the most active, effective agent in the story, becoming by novel’s end the hero who saves the day for everyone else and enables his upstanding cousin and fellow apprentice Thames Darrell to reap the conventional rewards of romance. Other than remaining virtuous, Thames does little to earn them himself. Ainsworth thus distances his protagonist from social or political satire – what critique the novel articulates is partial and abbreviated – since the hero’s criminality is not cast solely as the product of social inequality or a corrupt justice system. On the contrary, Ainsworth makes the most of the daring, defiant Jack Sheppard of popular legend. Ainsworth lets his protagonist be as roguishly bad as he can be, while kitting him out with the ambition, performativity, and awareness of audience that make his character consonant with a nineteenth-century visual and print cultural context.

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If Jack Sheppard gives comparatively little air time to political critique, it expends a great deal of narrative energy exploring the determinants of its protagonist’s criminality. Jack is born in Newgate Prison to an erstwhile prostitute and a criminal hanged on the day of his son’s birth. He is marked as well by a pair of ominous birthmarks: he has a mole in the shape of a coffin on his neck and a line in the shape of a noose on his thumb. Given these unpropitious signs, Jack spends most of his short life convinced that in order to descend into a life of crime, he need not sink terribly far. From infancy, he is haunted by his unfortunate lineage, hampered by a wily visage that earns him little trust, and constrained to an uninspiring range of future prospects. The staggering weight of these social determinants occasions, nevertheless, one of the novel’s most interesting formulations: Jack’s transgressions become signs less of a wholesale challenge to civil order than a defiance of the predetermination of his identity. The novel transforms its criminal into an enterprising hero of romance, yet refuses to release him from the full current of mediation that threatens at every turn to swamp his identity. Jack Sheppard denies its protagonist the fantasy of autonomy enjoyed by the gentlemen-heroes of Romantic narratives, whose birth alone promised them a social legitimacy unimaginable to a carpenter’s apprentice, and reminds him instead of the structures of poverty, status, and constraint in which his identity is inextricably enmeshed. In the process, Ainsworth meditates on the mediation of individuality in a context in which fashion and visual culture have made participation in the social and even celebrity accessible to almost everyone. Through the length of its protagonist’s adventures, the novel questions repeatedly the origin of Jack’s criminality and the source of his plucky, independent spirit. From his birth to the moment of his hanging, his destiny and character – the motivations that drive his actions – are objects of ongoing speculation for almost every character in the novel, including Jack himself. The many explanations entertained along the way, ranging from genetic determinism to environment to the wrong kind of friends, remain indeterminate at the novel’s close. The text’s production of a surfeit of contradictory narratives of origin gives rise, nonetheless, to the process by which Jack forges for himself an identity distinct from that to which he is ostensibly predestined. The novel offers numerous explanations of its protagonist’s character and unfortunate fate, only a few of which need to be rehearsed here. From childhood, Jack is told that he absolutely must not – but certainly will – become a criminal. In addition to the ominous birthmarks, his

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ignominious parentage, and his birth in Newgate Prison, Jack’s physiognomy tells against him. He is not only the very image of his father the criminal, but possesses the features of a Spanish picaroon: he has one of those faces, we are told, “that almost make one in love with roguery, they seem so full of vivacity and enjoyment. There was all the knavery, and more than all the drollery, of a Spanish picaroon in the laughing eyes of the English apprentice; and, with a little more warmth and sunniness of skin on the side of the latter, the resemblance between them would have been complete” (1.154–55). Like the pícaro of eighteenth-century British fiction and the upcycling of that figure in the silver-fork school, Jack Sheppard uses his quick wit and adaptability to move through society with comparative freedom and make the most of the opportunities for mischief and distinction that present themselves. The narrator suggests, on other occasions, that Jack’s fate has been determined by a variety of deleterious influences: he suffers repeated abuse at the hands of his master’s wife, for example, and has been initiated early in life into the debauchery of London’s criminal neighbourhood, the Mint. In a decidedly gothic turn, the novel simultaneously pins the source of Jack’s criminality on the text’s most formidable villain, Jonathan Wild. The thief-taker declares himself the mastermind of all the evil that befalls Jack as well as his parents. In a speech to his co-conspirator, Sir Rowland Trenchard, Wild explains his intricate plot: I have suffered him to be brought up decently – honestly; because I would make his fall the greater, and deepen the wound I meant to inflict upon his mother. … [When] I have steeped him to the lips in vice and depravity; when I have led him to the commission of every crime; … then – but not till then – I will consign him to the fate to which I consigned his father. (2.55–56)

Much like the birthmarks that inscribe Jack’s fate on his body, Wild suggests that his mark is on the young criminal from the outset. Insisting that he is the origin of Jack’s criminal drive, even his individuality, Wild maintains that he has made Jack all that he is. With Wild’s speech, Ainsworth resuscitates the conventional moment of horrific revelation, familiar from texts like Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and P. B. Shelley’s The Cenci, when the protagonist learns that their actions have been invisibly corrupted, their very being authored, by an evil agent.152 Ainsworth engages this gothic pattern, but importantly, does not let it stand as the decisive explanation of the hero’s criminality. The text as a whole gives no greater credence to Wild’s account than any of the other factors that it keeps in circulation.

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The sheer number of explanations of Jack’s criminality signals that these accounts necessarily exceed the object they attempt to capture in narrative form. None of these stories decisively accounts for, nor renders fully present, the identity that Jack assumes for himself. In order to make sense of the process through which his identity takes form, we must consider Jack’s selfstyling through crime. When we encounter our hero in his adolescence, he is apprenticed to the carpenter, has proven himself to possess the skills of a “first-rate workman,” but shows signs of the delinquency to which he will soon abandon himself (1.163). Caught neglecting his tasks in order to play cards and sing flash songs, Jack replies that the work assigned to him is too easy. His fellow apprentice Thames Darrell agrees: “You trusted too much to your own skill, Jack,” he remarks. “If I could work as fast as you, I might afford to be as idle” (1.166). Thames suggests that, because Jack’s capabilities exceed the tasks set for him, he casts about to find other interests to engage him; the legitimate outlets to his energy provide Jack with little challenge. Thames entreats his friend, though, to avoid further trouble by completing the assigned task with dispatch: “‘if you really wish to oblige me, you’ll get that packing-case finished by six o’clock. You can do it, if you will.’ ‘And I will, if I can, depend upon it,’ answered Sheppard with a laugh” (1.171, emphases original). The narrative emphases here are significant. Thames intimates that Jack’s ability to complete the task is certain; it is the latter’s will to apply himself that remains in doubt. Jack’s reply, by contrast, reverses the implied judgment: faced with a challenge to which he can rise, he will do it, invariably. For Jack, it is not his will that is in question; he has will to burn. Rather, it is the appropriate circumstances in which to exercise his talents and ambition that elude him. The narrative construct of a young hero unable to find a suitable outlet for his talents immediately calls to mind Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833–34): much of Herr Teufelsdröckh’s unease in the middle chapters of Sartor Resartus arises from his inability to correlate what the narrator calls the young man’s “inward … Capability” with the “outward Environment of Fortune,” the “new time” and “new conditions” of the society in which he finds himself.153 A “young man of high talent, and high though still temper,” Teufelsdröckh “breaks off [the] neck-halter” that would yoke him to “the grand corn-mill … of Economic Society” – that is, he casts off the profession for which he has trained – to make his way on his own terms.154 Although the narrator acknowledges that this show of independence may promise greatness, it also leaves the young Teufelsdröckh without direction. The lesson that he must learn, famously, is to “Know what thou canst work at.”155

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Like Teufelsdröckh, Jack determines early in life that to follow the path to social respectability which his apprenticeship offers will exact from him too high a cost. There will be no self-satisfaction gained from works that fail to cultivate his “inward Talent.”156 Instead, Jack directs his energies toward something at which he can excel. He casts off the legitimate but circumscribed opportunities that have been generously offered to a youth “without connexions” and devotes himself to the work of mischief and transgression.157 Jack’s self-realization through crime thus presents itself as a perverse embrace of Carlyle’s doctrine of work as a means to selfhood. Once Jack is armed with the resolve to style himself through his crimes and the public renown they produce, the many identities that others map onto him become disparate signifiers that he stitches together to form a spectacular surface on which to perform himself for his public. Like the dandy of the silver-fork novel, Jack fashions the positive content of his identity out of his own visibility and that which he is for others. Thriving on the speculations about his destiny and the surveillance to which, as an object of suspicion, he is endlessly subjected, Jack uses the force of the specular exchange that transacts around him to perform himself to excess. He over-identifies with the signs of his fate in order to establish for himself a modicum of agency on his own terms, according to his own fashioning of his talents, desires, and public persona. From the moment that Jack identifies Jonathan Wild as possessing a mind as clever and calculating as his own, the hero’s energies find their focus and his exceptional skills manifest themselves. The thief-taker serves as an important spur to Jack’s ambitious drive, but that function is not filled by Wild alone: any obstacle, any challenge that presents itself becomes an opportunity for Jack to test and refine his skills. As he moves from robbery to prison-breaking, it becomes clear that it is specifically the pleasure he takes from transgressing prescribed limits and surpassing his own achievements that fuels his ambitious drive. During his final, remarkable escape from Newgate Prison, the “inexhaustible energy of his character” (3.220) takes on a different inflection: it manifests as a desire to set himself apart from others and from that which others would make him. Jack reflects consciously in this scene on the fame that his accomplishments will garner him. As he turns his attention to the first stage of his escape, he comments, “And now … for an achievement, compared with which all I have yet done shall be as nothing!” (3.150). “My name will only be remembered as that of a robber,” he muses, “but it shall be remembered as that of a bold one; and this night’s achievement, if it does nothing else, shall prevent me from being classed with the common herd of depredators” (3.155). Far

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from refuting the fate to which he has been predestined – the certainty of his criminality that the novel over-explains – Jack readily assumes the identity that this fate prescribes. He will be remembered as a criminal, and a bold one at that. At the same time, he actively seeks out ways to exceed the negative prophecies to which he is perpetually subjected. It is precisely in becoming a more extraordinary criminal than his naysayers predicted that Jack is able to work over the images of selfhood that have been projected onto him. There is no daily news media in Jack Sheppard to spin a narrative of the hero’s feats and character. Ainsworth sets his prison-breaker in a media context largely appropriate to the early eighteenth century, in which Jack’s story and image are hawked by penny street vendors, much as are Caleb Williams’s. In detailing how Jack’s consciousness of his visibility affects his actions and sense of self, however, and how community comes together around the spectacle of his performance, Ainsworth opens up for consideration the concept of demotic celebrity that his novel presents to readers, anachronistically, as an integral part of the public culture of its fictional world. The narrative walks us through the steps by which a seemingly ordinary individual capable of extraordinary actions might achieve celebrity status. Jack capitalizes on the means that his skills and savvy provide to distinguish himself from the crowd. That self-distinction produces a public out of the many who keep abreast of and traffic in news of his actions, and, in their turn, make Jack a celebrity. Jack Sheppard’s consciousness of himself as a figure to be seen points the way, moreover, to the mid-century Victorian novel’s internalization of the visual spectacle that I’ve shown to be characteristic of the dandies and criminals of silver-fork and Newgate fiction. As I will argue in the next chapter, Ainsworth’s novel makes plain the resolute visuality of modern subjectivity and the self-performance requisite to public life that novels of gentlemanly formation a decade later will have fully naturalized. When Jack is on the run after his final prison break, he encounters his own story in broadsheet and ballad form, and, just like Kit Williams, hears people in the street discussing him in intimate terms. One woman expresses a desire to assist him, exclaiming, “Poor fellow! I’m glad he has escaped” (3.224). Another runs from her master’s house to buy a paper because, she explains, “Master and missis have been talking all day long about Jack Sheppard, and I’m dying to read his life” (3.224). The novel presents these common exchanges as evidence of the public’s familiarity with Jack’s story. Like Caleb, Jack is the “stranger [turned] … intimate.”158 They indicate as well the way his story circulates through the community

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by means of both print and oral communication, creating a space for identification and belonging in public discourse. The novel details the process by which Jack’s name and image become “the coin of the realm”: Jack becomes a highly visible figure whose fame makes him part of the common language of everyday life.159 Possessing none of the aristocratic glamour of a Lord Byron, Jack attracts and fascinates instead because he embodies a shared fantasy of the spectacular arising out of the everyday. Jack Sheppard represents the possibility, Buckley observes, “that anonymity might suddenly become celebrity, [and] solitude would be replaced by fame.”160 Kathryn Chittick remarks, as we saw in the Introduction, that “Jack Sheppard may now be a forgotten book, but in 1839 it inspired a mania that went beyond the literary pages of the newspapers.”161 It provoked “a flood of controversial reviews,” she continues, which “led to editorials on nothing less than the contemporary state of literature and morality in England.”162 I’ve argued that the controversy surrounding the novel arose from its heroization of its criminal and from the diffusion of his story and figure in print illustrations, theatrical adaptations, and advertisements. “It is quite certain that the working classes did not buy Jack Sheppard as it appeared in Bentley’s Miscellany at 1s a month,” Chittick suggests. Rather, it “was through the visual media – Cruikshank’s etchings and the romance’s dramatization at the minor theatres – that Jack Sheppard became a phenomenon of mass consumption.”163 From earliest childhood, Jack is cautioned to avoid the kind of behaviour to which, he is repeatedly reminded, he is destined. Constantly under suspicion and therefore the object of endless surveillance, Jack learns to flourish under these restrictive, specularizing conditions. He openly defies those who would warn him away from an identity defined by crime, for he seems to recognize that the personal and historical legacies that inevitably mark his life leave him little possibility for agency along a legitimate path. This spectacle allows Jack to fashion himself as he will, out of the materials – the material conditions, the circumstances, the signs of his identity – with which society would delimit the identity of a lowborn young man with an inauspicious future. Jack Sheppard suggests that enterprising self-spectacle and performance constitute a viable response to such conditions, and one available to anyone who embraces the opportunities for publicity that present themselves in a society organized by fashion and visual culture. Newgate fiction demonstrates that the individual equipped for keen observation and code-switching who recognizes himself as an object of public fascination and plays to that visibility, possesses “the personality which a society in the process of rapid transformation most

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needs”: namely, as Evans suggests, the “kinetic, open personality of fashion.”164 With its upcycled narrative form and self-styling protagonists, the Newgate school shows how fashion’s practice of endless recycling permeates both the individual’s relation to the social and the techniques that the nineteenth-century novel develops for conceptualizing the felt experience of contemporaneity.

Notes 1 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1830), viii–ix. Further references will be noted parenthetically in text by volume and page number. 2 The original title of William Godwin’s novel was Things As They Are; Or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams. 3 On Bulwer’s fiction, see David Huckvale, A Dark and Stormy Oeuvre: Crime, Magic, and Power in the Novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton (Jefferson: McFarland, 2016); Allan Christensen, ed., The Subverting Vision of Bulwer Lytton: Bicentenary Reflections (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004); Richard Cronin, Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824–1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); Michael Sadleir, Bulwer: A Panorama (London: Constable, 1931). Catherine Gallagher’s The Industrial Revolution of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) remains the classic study of the industrial novel. 4 [Anon.], “William Ainsworth and Jack Sheppard,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 21 (February 1840): 227–45, 227. 5 On the import of criminal narrative in the eighteenth century, see Hal Gladfelder, Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England: Beyond the Law (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). On new forms of mediation in the early eighteenth century, see Clifford Siskin and William Warner, This Is Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); and Jonathan Lamb, The Things Things Say (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). On an emergent sense of contemporaneity through fashion in eighteenth-century Britain, see Timothy Campbell, Historical Style: Fashion and the New Mode of History, 1740–1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Erin Mackie, Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Paul Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Gerald Egan, Fashioning Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century: Stylish Books of Poetic Genius (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 6 Lamb, The Things Things Say, xxi, emphasis original. 7 Ibid.; Siskin and Warner, This Is Enlightenment, 11, emphasis original. 8 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 238.

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9 Gladfelder, Criminality and Narrative, 7, 9. 10 Sal Nicolazzo, Vagrant Figures: Law, Literature, and the Origins of the Police (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 11–12. 11 As I will discuss at more length later in the chapter, Lamb describes the ­eighteenth-century crime boss Jonathan Wild, for example, as a “great innovator … in the market” who used new communication networks to expand his commercial markets and fuel consumer desire (36). 12 On the important role that fashion-conscious publications played in producing “an ‘imaginative order’ [that would] make sense of the realm of exchange” and manage the unruly forces unleashed by fashion and commodity culture, see Mackie, Market à la Mode, 61. 13 Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 104. 14 John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 322, 324. As I explained in the Introduction, Styles argues that fashion was as powerful a social and temporal force for working people as for the ruling class in the late eighteenth century. 15 Siskin and Warner, This Is Enlightenment, 19. 16 Styles, Dress of the People, 325. 17 On the critical reception of Newgate fiction, see Keith Hollingsworth, The Newgate Novel, 1830–1847: Bulwer, Ainsworth, Dickens, & Thackeray (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963). 18 See Clara Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 2. Regarding Lord Chesterfield’s infamous treatise on dissimulation, see Jenny Davidson, Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 57–65. 19 As we saw in the Introduction, the classic study of eighteenth-century commerce and fashion remains Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). See also Keen, Literature. 20 Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2. 21 See Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity; Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Tom Mole, ed., Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). See also Leo Braudy, “Knowing the Performer from the Performance: Fame, Celebrity, and Literary Studies,” PMLA 126.4 (2011): 1070–75, and The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Vintage, 1997). On the emergent relationship of celebrity and fashion in the eighteenth century, see Egan, Fashioning Authorship; and Julia Fawcett, Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696–1801 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016).

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22 Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity, xii. 23 Evans, Fashion at the Edge, 289. 24 Braudy, “Knowing the Performer,” 1072. 25 Ibid. 26 Raymond Williams, “Forms of English Fiction in 1848,” Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1983), 150–65, 151. See also Lauren Goodlad, The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 27 See Joseph Litvak’s argument in Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), a point to which I will return in the following chapter on Dickens. 28 Hollingsworth, The Newgate Novel, 141. 29 Ibid. 30 On the importance of the temporality of fashion to Scott’s fiction, see Campbell, Historical Style, 203–37. See also Georg Lukács’s influential reading of Scott’s historicization of character in The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962); and Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), on Scott’s formalization of a fictional historiography. “The spirit of the age” is a phrase most immediately associated in the period with William Hazlitt’s comparative study of contemporary British authors, The Spirit of the Age: or, Contemporary Portraits (London: Colburn, 1825). 31 William Harrison Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard: A Romance (London: Richard Bentley, 1839), vol. 2, 73. Further references will be noted parenthetically in the text by volume and page number. 32 On the impact of the creation of the Metropolitan Police on crime narrative in nineteenth-century Britain, see Heather Worthington, “From The Newgate Calendar to Sherlock Holmes,” A Companion to Crime Fiction, eds. Charles Rzepka and Lee Horsley (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 13–27. 33 Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge; A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty (London: Penguin, 1986), 453. 34 John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 231. 35 Ibid., 232. 36 See Pauline Chapman, Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors: Two Hundred Years of Crime (London: Constable, 1984); and V. A. C. Gattrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 37 Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, 10. 38 Jacqueline Rose, “The Cult of Celebrity,” London Review of Books 20.16 (August 1998): 10–13, 10. 39 Ibid., 11. 40 Braudy, Frenzy of Renown, 5.

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41 Ibid. 42 On fashion’s mediation of the individual’s relationship to social collectives, see my discussion in the Introduction of Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, revised ed. (London: I. B. Taurus, 2003); and Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 43 Braudy, Frenzy of Renown, 479. 44 William Hazlitt, “On the Living Poets,” Lectures on the English Poets: Delivered at the Surrey Institute (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1818), 283–331, 283. See also William Hazlitt, “On Different Sorts of Fame,” The Round Table: A Collection of Essays on Literature, Men, and Manners (Edinburgh: Constable, 1817), vol. 2, 56–66; and “On Posthumous Fame: Whether Shakespeare was influenced by a love of it?” The Round Table (Edinburgh: Constable, 1817), vol. 1, 71–78. 45 Hazlitt, “On the Living Poets,” 285. 46 Braudy, “Knowing the Performer,” 1071. 47 Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity, xii. 48 Braudy, “Knowing the Performer,” 1072. 49 Braudy, Frenzy of Renown, 393. 50 “Mr Hazlitt’s Lectures on Poetry,” The Examiner, 8 March 1818, 154, quoted in Duncan Wu, William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 239. 51 Wu, William Hazlitt, 240. 52 Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age, 151, emphasis original. 53 Braudy, Frenzy of Renown, 392. 54 Hazlitt, “On the Living Poets,” 283. 55 Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Romance and Reality (London: Colburn & Bentley, 1831), 1: 199. The project of authors creating a taste in their contemporary reading public is one that Romantic poets participated in as well, most notably Wordsworth. See Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). 56 Evans, Fashion at the Edge, 300. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. See also Ina Ferris’s work on the historical remnant in The Romantic National Tale, and in “‘On the Borders of Oblivion’: Scott’s Historical Novel and the Modern Time of the Remnant,” Modern Language Quarterly 70.4 (2009): 473–94. 59 Byron voices his dedication to Pope in his early satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) as well as in the splenetic public exchange of the 1820s that James Chandler analyzes in “The Pope Controversy: Romantic Poets and the English Canon,” Critical Inquiry 10.3 (1984): 481–509. 60 Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, especially 9–14. 61 Braudy, Frenzy of Renown, 403. 62 Charles Dickens, “The Author’s Introduction to the Third Edition (1841),” Oliver Twist, or, The Parish Boy’s Progress, ed. Philip Horne (London: Penguin,

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2002), Appendix A: 457. Further references to the novel will be cited parenthetically in the text. 63 Hollingsworth, The Newgate Novel, 15. 64 Dickens, “Author’s Introduction,” 457–58. On the novel’s sympathies, see Kathryn Chittick, Dickens and the 1830s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Cates Baldridge, “The Instabilities of Inheritance in Oliver Twist,” Studies in the Novel 25 (1993): 184–95; and Stephen Marcus, Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965). 65 Dickens, “Author’s Introduction,” 460. 66 Ibid., 458. 67 W. M. Thackeray, Catherine: A Story, ed. Sheldon F. Goldfarb (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 132–33. 68 Dickens, “Author’s Introduction,” 457. 69 See Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). On the formal work of sympathy in nineteenth-century fiction, see Rae Greiner, Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). 70 Dickens, “Author’s Introduction,” 456. 71 On critics’ persistent anxiety about the influence of Newgate fiction, see Hollingsworth, The Newgate Novel. The perceived threat of novel reading was of course a matter of concern long before the Newgate school. See Ferris on women, romance, and reading in Achievement of Literary Authority; and Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 72 Andrew Franta, Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 10. 73 “William Ainsworth and Jack Sheppard,” 228. 74 Matthew Buckley, “Sensations of Celebrity: Jack Sheppard and the Mass Audience,” Victorian Studies (Spring 2002): 423–63, 427. 75 Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, 8. 76 Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 2. 77 Hollingsworth, The Newgate Novel, 6–7. 78 Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, 3. 79 Ibid. 80 I adapt this multivalent concept of “mobility” from Tuite, who uses it to describe Byron’s “excessive susceptibility of immediate impressions,” on one hand, and on the other, the “shuttling of [his] work and life” between seemingly opposed milieus, namely the “gaiety of the ball-room, and the gloom of the scaffold” (Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, 2). 81 Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, 1790–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 1–2. 82 Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits (New York: Knopf, 1994), 27. 83 Braudy, “Knowing the Performer,” 1072.

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84 William Godwin, Caleb Williams (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2000), 332. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 85 Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, 13. 86 As Clare Pettitt argues, much of what presented itself as “news” in the early nineteenth century was neither in newspaper format nor, for that matter, new: “anyone walking around the London streets during this period would have been immediately struck by the bewildering variety of print formats available, many of which made claims to carry ‘news’ without being ‘newspapers’ as such” (Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 31). 87 Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6; Harriet Guest, “Suspicious Minds: Spies and Surveillance in Charlotte Smith’s Novels of the 1790s,” Land, Nation and Culture, 1740–1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste, eds. Peter de Bolla, Nigel Leask, and David Simpson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 169–87, 171. 88 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone, 2005), 56–57, 70. 89 Guest, “Suspicious Minds,” 172. 90 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 30, emphasis original. 91 Ibid., 23. 92 William Godwin, Fleetwood: or, The New Man of Feeling (London: Bentley, 1832), xi. 93 Ibid., xii. 94 Gladfelder, Criminality and Narrative, x. 95 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1817; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 145. That Austen completed Northanger Abbey within a decade of Caleb Williams’s publication makes proximate the historical referents the two novels likely invoke in their respective conceptions of surveillance. 96 On the law and print cultural networks, see Gladfelder, Criminality and Narrative, x. 97 Mole, “Introduction,” Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 6. 98 Erin Mackie, Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates: The Making of the Modern Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 189. 99 Dorothea von Mücke, “‘To Love a Murderer’ – Fantasy, Sexuality, and the Political Novel,” in Cultural Institutions of the Novel, eds. Deidre Lynch and William Warner (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 306–34, 315. 100 Ibid. 101 Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity, xii. 102 On Godwin’s reworking of the ending of Caleb Williams, see Gary Handwerk, “Of Caleb’s Guilt and Godwin’s Truth: Ideology and Ethics in Caleb Williams,” ELH 60.4 (1993): 939–60. 103 “Paul Clifford,” The Spectator 3.98 (15 May 1830): 311–12, 311. 104 “Paul Clifford,” Monthly Magazine 9.54 (June 1830): 712–13, 712.

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105 Campbell, Historical Style, 48. 106 See Hollingsworth’s discussion of the novel as roman à clef inThe Newgate Novel, 73–78. 107 “Paul Clifford,” The Spectator, 311. 108 Evans, Fashion at the Edge, 10. 109 Ibid. 110 Ibid. 111 “Review of New Books,” The Literary Gazette 693 (1 May 1830): 281–84, 281. 112 Pettitt, Serial Forms, 47. 113 Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (1935), The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 4. 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid. 116 Anne Hollander, “Without Looking,” London Review of Books 17.15 (3 August 1995): 18–19, 19. 117 Hollander, Sex and Suits, 16. 118 Ibid., 11, 22. 119 Ibid., 22. 120 Ibid., 24. 121 This social adaptability shares much with the mobility that Tuite identifies in Byron’s public personae and practice of celebrity: see Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, 2. 122 “Paul Clifford,” The Athenaeum 133 (15 May 1830): 289–91, 290. 123 Evans, Fashion at the Edge, 6. 124 Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 149. 125 The term, to which I will return shortly, came into use in linguistics in the 1940s and 50s; in the context of communication systems, it dates back to telegraphy. 126 Vershawn Ashanti Young, “Straight Black Queer: Obama, Code-Switching, and the Gender Anxiety of African American Men,” PMLA 129.3 (2014): 464–70, 465. 127 Monica L. Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 5–6. 128 Ibid., 1. 129 Ibid., 1, 7. 130 Ibid., 18. 131 Lord Normanby, The Contrast (London: Colburn & Bentley, 1832), 3.131. 132 Braudy, “Knowing the Performer,” 1071. 133 Matthew Buckley, “The Formation of Melodrama,” The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 457–74, 470. 134 Matthew Buckley, “Refugee Theatre: Melodrama and Modernity’s Loss,” Theatre Journal 61 (2009): 175–90, 182.

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135 Ibid., 181. 136 Ibid., 181–82. 137 Buckley, “Formation of Melodrama,” 473, quoting Michael Booth, English Melodrama (1965). 138 On the relation of theatrical melodrama to the novel, see Marcie Frank, The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2020). 139 “Paul Clifford,” The Athenaeum, 289. 140 W. M. Thackeray, “George Cruikshank,” Westminster Review 34 (June 1840): 53–54. 141 See Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Jonathan Hill, “Cruikshank, Ainsworth, and Tableau Illustration,” Victorian Studies 23.4 (1980): 429–59. See also Buckley, “Sensations of Celebrity,” 432–42. 142 Hill, “Cruikshank, Ainsworth, and Tableau Illustration,” 429–30. 143 Ibid., 452. On the influence of the dramatic tableau vivant on the Jack Sheppard illustrations, see Hill, “Cruikshank, Ainsworth, and Tableau Illustration,” 430–46. On differences between Cruikshank’s collaborations with Ainsworth as compared with Dickens, see Meisel, Realizations, 247–71, and Robert L. Patten, George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art, 2 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), vol. 2, 98–101. 144 “Jack Sheppard: A Romance,” The Athenaeum 626 (26 October 1839): 803–5, 803. 145 Ibid. 146 Ibid. 147 Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, 10. 148 Hollander, Sex and Suits, 27. 149 Quoted in Hollingsworth, The Newgate Novel, 139–40. Gattrell translates the song title as “Never mind, pals, keep stealing” (The Hanging Tree, 146). 150 Buckley, “Sensations of Celebrity,” 427. 151 Quoted from The Penny Satirist in Buckley, “Sensations of Celebrity,” 427. 152 See Ian Duncan’s reading of The Monk’s Matilda as a figurative “serpentin-the-garden” (Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 34), and James Chandler’s argument that the logics by which Beatrice Cenci resolves herself to parricide bear all the marks of her father’s monstrosity (England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 498–515). 153 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 93. 154 Ibid., 94. 155 Ibid., 126 (emphasis original). 156 Ibid., 93. 157 Ibid., 95. 158 Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, 13.

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Braudy, “Knowing the Performer,” 1072. Buckley, “Sensations of Celebrity,” 436. Chittick, Dickens and the 1830s, 153–54. Ibid., 154. Ibid., 157–58. Evans, Fashion at the Edge, 6.

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chapter 4

After Criminality

Dickens and the Celebrity of Everyday Life

In Barnaby Rudge (1841), Charles Dickens offers a point-by-point repudiation of the model of demotic celebrity that the Newgate school developed through the 1830s. In a far more sustained, far-reaching program than that articulated in his April 1841 Author’s Introduction to Oliver Twist (1837–38), in which he refutes charges of having romanticized criminals, Dickens uses Barnaby Rudge to dismantle the heroization of the low-born criminal for which the Newgate novel, and William Harrison Ainsworth’s wildly popular Jack Sheppard (1839) in particular, was known. As W. M. Thackeray had tried with Catherine (1839) and would attempt again with Barry Lyndon (1844), Dickens worked in his new novel to eviscerate the taste for criminal romance in order to align readers’ sympathies firmly with the virtuous middle classes. Barnaby Rudge has long been read as the first of Dickens’s two historical novels, and the one more directly indebted to Walter Scott.1 Without disputing the significance of that referent, I want to read Barnaby Rudge instead as Dickens’s second Newgate novel after Oliver Twist, positioning it in relation to a different set of generic conventions that will allow us to recognize it as the hinge that links the demotic celebrity of the Newgate school to Victorian realist fiction and the sincere bourgeois subject that stands at its heart. As I argued in the previous chapter, Newgate novelists drew liberally from Scott’s work as well as Lord Byron’s, but those Romantic models constituted only some of the structures they took up and adapted in order to articulate new conceptions of history, publicity, and subjectivity for the nineteenth-century novel. Barnaby Rudge plays a key role in translating those innovations from the spectacular criminality on which they depend in the Newgate school to a model of respectable selfhood that is similarly predicated on public visibility and self-performance. The pivotal position that I attribute to Barnaby Rudge in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction has important implications for our histories of the novel, for it reorients our sense of the genre’s engagement with 190

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an emergent mass media culture and the new forms of spectacle, publicity, and social collectivity that arise along with it. To emphasize Barnaby Rudge’s engagement with the Newgate school is not simply to excavate a different generic lineage for this text than that of Scott’s historical fiction. More importantly, I want to claim for Barnaby Rudge a key place in Dickens’s career as well as in our histories of the novel on the grounds of its detailed meditation on the figure of the public man, the possibilities for and function of celebrity, and the complex relationship of individuals and collectives, the domestic and the public, that subtends them. Barnaby Rudge’s significance in this regard comes clearly into view when we read this understudied novel in relationship to the Newgate fiction to which it directly responds. Building on the significance that I attribute to Barnaby Rudge, my broader argument turns on the formative role that Dickens’s early crime novels play in his subsequent fictional articulations of these issues. I focus specifically on his mid-century novel of gentlemanly formation, David Copperfield (1849–50), for it is here that we see in detail his elaboration of the narrative strategies developed in the earlier fiction to link the public man and the formation of communities that this figure enables to the more fundamental structures of visuality and spectacle that characterize modern subjectivity in an image-saturated culture. Newgate fiction articulated a model of visibility and celebrity accessible to individuals with no entitlement through birth or station to a public role; though the prerequisite of crime attached a ruinous price tag to such visibility, Newgate novels nonetheless pointed the way to the mechanisms that would make celebrity on such terms imaginable. As I argued in the previous chapter, Newgate fiction demonstrated how the contingent structure of spectacle in a new media age might propel seemingly insignificant individuals into the public eye and, through a communal process of image-making, turn them into widely known, even celebrated figures. My aim in this chapter is to document the means by which Dickens takes up the cultural formations of celebrity and urban spectatorship articulated in the earlier fiction and, in an autoethnographic turn, puts them in service of the sympathetic self-regard of the gentleman-in-training.2 Analyzing Dickens’s close relationship to the Newgate school draws into focus how he adapts for the respectable middle classes his contemporaries’ strategies for staging the emergence of novelty, spectacle, and celebrity in the everyday lives of ordinary, insignificant people. These are narrative structures fully identified with the crime novel of the 1830s. This is nowhere more evident than in the consciousness of visual spectacle and public performance that distinguishes the eponymous hero of David Copperfield.

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Despite the rich field of recent work on Victorian media and visual cultures and Romantic celebrity, conventional symptomatic readings of this novel remain largely untouched: such readings take the hero’s self-regard and ambition as the text’s central ideological conflict, the disavowed truth of the narrative buried beneath its surface.3 This interpretation is part of a broader, still unquestioned commonplace about the nineteenth-century novel, in which a posture of humility and diffidence is taken as synecdoche for the exemplary bourgeois subjectivity of Victorian realism. When we read David Copperfield in the context of an emergent nineteenth-century celebrity culture that the fashion system helped to consolidate, by contrast, we can recognize the extent to which the aspiring young man of the middle orders is conscious of himself as a figure to be seen, and that such a consciousness permeates his narrative from the novel’s earliest pages. I argue that that consciousness emerges specifically through the mediated concept of demotic celebrity explored in the crime fiction of the Newgate school, and taken up in Dickens’s own fictional responses to it. This constellation of novels contributes materially, moreover, to what James Chandler describes as “the history of media and media ­transformations”:4 the Newgate novel imagines a low-born individual turned spectacular figure whose “visible knownness,” to invoke Leo Braudy’s term, depends on the technologies of an emergent mass media and the collective consciousness of readers and spectators who respond to its address.5 Dickens in turn domesticates the modes of visibility and spectatorship this demotic celebrity entails to render them suitable for the ordinary, honourable man who would enter the public sphere and make his mark. Translating the crimes of the Newgate protagonist into the follies and mistakes of the youthful hero, Dickens adopts in David Copperfield the models of ­self-performance and the solicitation of the gaze of others that were developed in the earlier school; he takes up these models to establish his protagonist as an object of collective interest, an ordinary individual who fashions himself as deserving of regard and, ultimately, fame. David Copperfield comes to seem intimately known through the extended duration of his story’s serial publication: subject to the ­audience’s affective identifications and appropriations, his character as an author and later a celebrity is formed as much through this process of collective ­image-making as by the story in which he stars. The technologies of celebrity culture, or what Clara Tuite calls the “communal culture of productive reception,” work to ensure that the personal story of the hero’s coming-to-celebrity seems simply a confirmation of his innate extraordinariness. David’s public renown becomes little more than a birthright.6

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Dickens affirms, in short, the resolute visuality of modern subjectivity. He shows that the self-performance requisite to a public life is rooted in the “system of looking at lookers looking” that Chandler identifies with the sentimental mode as it circulates in moments of media transformation – “even, or especially when all this looking is taking place in the virtual space of the printed page.”7 That consciousness of visibility, of the “network or relay of regard” that underlies both individual sympathetic exchange and the public-making of celebrity culture, is in David Copperfield one of the defining marks of the hero’s individuality and the precondition to his fame.8 This chapter uses the lines of connection that link the Newgate novel and, at a remove, the silver-fork school to Dickens’s fiction in order to argue that a preoccupation with visibility has become requisite by midcentury for the individual who would star as the “hero of [his] own life,” as David famously muses, and draw to himself the regard of others.9

Restyling Jack Sheppard: Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge To call Barnaby Rudge a rewriting of Jack Sheppard is hardly to exaggerate Dickens’s sustained engagement with Ainsworth’s novel. Natalie Schroeder is one of the few critics to comment on the texts’ striking similarities: she contends that the “many parallels between Jack Sheppard and Barnaby Rudge strongly suggest that Dickens was indeed indebted to Ainsworth,” and that “[b]ecause Ainsworth’s influence on Dickens was stronger than Scott’s, it deserves more notice.”10 Still, she uses the parallels to account for Barnaby Rudge’s subordinate position in Dickens’s oeuvre: “it remains one of Dickens’s lesser novels – maybe because of its Ainsworthian undertones.”11 Schroeder enumerates the many signs of Dickens’s debt, some of which it would be fair to call pilferings – including characters, plot lines, and settings – and others that serve instead to satirize the earlier novel with cheeky irony or searing critique.12 The debts are less interesting, though, than the significance of the ends to which Dickens takes up the Newgate genre, and the ways we might situate his reworking in relation to what Matthew Buckley describes as the “complicated formal, institutional, and aesthetic problems posed by the period’s rapid changes in media, audience, and politics.”13 Phillip Collins suggests that by 1840 Dickens desired to “dissociate himself from Ainsworth as far as was decent” because of what he regarded as Oliver Twist’s unjust association with the Newgate school.14 Nevertheless, Dickens returned to the Newgate novel’s signature issues of criminality, media, and visual spectacle the following year with Barnaby Rudge. In

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his second Newgate novel, Dickens broadens the principal objective that defined the first, which in the “Author’s Introduction” to Oliver Twist he identified as a desire to correct the audience’s preference for “criminal characters … in delicate disguise.”15 In Barnaby Rudge, he works to “profit by … [the] example [of] the ‘No Popery’ riots of Seventeen Hundred and Eighty” to show that “what we falsely call a religious cry is easily raised by men who have no religion, and who in their daily practice set at nought the commonest principles of right and wrong.”16 Describing the throng following Lord George Gordon as “composed for the most part of the very scum and refuse of London” (453), Barnaby Rudge’s narrator turns his sharpest critical gaze on those who would use the rallying cry of religion or national sentiment as a cover for their criminal, anarchical acts. In the process, Dickens examines the means by which publics form in response to such an address, and events and figures capture the public imagination. Effectively disenchanting the figure of the criminal hero, he simultaneously shows that the structures of visuality, spectatorship, and collective consciousness that the Newgate novel tied to a mediated criminality are broadly generalizable to individual subjectivity in an age of demotic celebrity. As I will suggest, these structures inform the relationship of individuals to the social collective to which they signal their belonging, and perhaps more surprisingly, make possible the domestic felicity that Barnaby Rudge presents as a fitting end to the tumults of public history. Of the “scum and refuse” who populate his novel, Dickens parcels out the signature traits of Newgate criminals between two central characters: the locksmith’s apprentice and would-be criminal mastermind, Simon Tappertit, and the illiterate, brutish stable hand, Hugh. One possessing the ambition of a Jack Sheppard, the other the reckless, destructive impulse of a Bill Sikes, these characters serve to demystify the Newgate protagonist and strip him of his sympathetic appeal. Dickens’s deft satire of criminal celebrity through the character of Sim Tappertit is ­self-consciously tied to Ainsworth’s novel: whether Dickens saw in Sim a recasting of Jack Sheppard or a representative of the caste of young men who may have been inspired by the famous prison-breaker, the diminutive apprentice hews closely to Sheppard’s model. In Sim’s case, though, the outsized ambition that motivates him to distinguish himself from what he calls the “vulgar herd” is the product of comical self-delusion (116). “[In] the small body of Mr Tappertit,” the narrator reports, “there was locked up an ambitious and aspiring soul” (80). Possessed of a ­self-importance in no way justified by his abilities, Sim fancies himself on the cusp of greatness:

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“If I had been born a corsair or a pirate, a brigand, gen-teel highwayman or patriot – and they’re the same thing,” thought Mr Tappertit, … “I should have been all right. But to drag out a ignoble existence unbeknown to mankind in general – patience! I will be famous yet. A voice within me keeps on whispering Greatness. I shall burst out one of these days, and when I do, what power can keep me down?” (116–17)

Although he has no particular qualification for the role of Byron’s dashing corsair or Bulwer’s “gen-teel highwayman,” Sim does not let the circumstances of birth or character dim his prospects: he assumes the manner “of a ruffling, swaggering, roving blade, who would rather kill a man than otherwise” (108). Unsurprisingly, his bravado materializes only when there is nothing at stake. Sim is convinced of his own prowess, the “power of his eye” to subdue a foe or beauty, and the significance of his figure, though he is “little more than five feet high” and possessed of “legs … [that] were perfect curiosities of littleness” (79). Comments on Jack Sheppard’s diminutive size featured regularly in eighteenth-century street literature, as they do in Ainsworth’s novel, with contemporary observers speculating that his astonishing prison escapes could only have been possible because of his stature. Sim is built on the same scale but with no similar agility; instead, much to the amusement of his confederates, he makes a show of tempering his strength when dealing with a man twice his size. With impressive economy and a good deal of humour, Dickens punctures the pretensions to greatness of the little man, ridicules the class politics on which he would ground his celebrity, and disenchants the fantasy that the extraordinary might emerge out of the common existence of an individual who fails to recognize his own insignificance. With the “centaur” Hugh (243), who like Bleak House’s Jo has no surname, Dickens opts for a different form of disenchantment: he emphasizes the coarseness and brutality of a young man who becomes known publicly through his violent acts. Unlike Sim who has at least pretensions to respectability, Hugh “has never had much to do with anything but animals,” according to his employer, the innkeeper John Willet, “and has never lived in any way but like the animals he has lived among, [and] is a animal” (140, emphasis original). The novel seems to posit an inviolable, even species-based divide between the illiterate hostler and the respectable tradesmen and gentry whom he serves. The narrative’s acknowledgement of Hugh’s early destitution – his mother was hanged when he was a child, leaving him to fend for himself – opens the possibility for sympathy, as does his manipulation at the hands of Sir John Chester, the duplicitous aristocrat later revealed to be his father. Hugh’s propensity for violence, though, regularly checks any lasting feeling of sympathy for his case. There

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is “something fierce and sullen in his features” (138), and he proves a menace especially to women. His barely averted assault on the locksmith’s daughter, Dolly Varden, and the more nefarious designs that appear to motivate his kidnapping of her during the riots reveal a predatory appetite that threatens significant harm. Despite his violence, though, and a similar signature attachment to a dog, Hugh is no Bill Sikes. He threatens, but also captivates: “muscular and handsome,” with “a hale athletic figure, and a giant’s strength, [his] sunburnt face and swarthy throat, overgrown with jet black hair, might have served a painter for a model” (138). Despite his ostensible animallike insentience, Hugh possesses canny insight into other characters. He finds Sim’s delusions of grandeur uproariously funny, for example, and takes great pleasure in deferring to the apprentice’s haughty condescension. Hugh’s perspicuity positions him alongside the narrator as one of the most discerning and wry of the novel’s central figures. Hugh also befriends Barnaby Rudge, the novel’s naïf, and protects him from the predations of other rioters. In the novel’s denouement, moreover, Dickens attributes to Hugh a dignity that complicates the novel’s disenchantment of his heroic potential. The narrator even describes him, in the scene preceding his execution, as a “savage prophet whom the near approach of Death had filled with inspiration” (695). Evoking a Carlylean prophet figure, the social outsider as spiritual guide and social critic, this characterization serves to invest the lowly hostler with a capacity for vision and truth-telling.17 Shortly before Hugh is cast in these terms, he has reproved the Newgate Ordinary for his hypocrisy in advising the prisoner to check his “indecent mirth” in preparation for the gallows: aware that the Ordinary hosts a celebratory breakfast every execution day, Hugh observes to him, “You make a merry-making of this, every month; let me be merry, too” (692). The juxtaposition of these comments in the novel suggests that if spiritual insight is to be found in this grim scene, the “savage prophet” is likelier to produce it than the religious authority. It is in his “savage prophet” role that Hugh offers something approaching a coherent political critique, cursing the society that has proved a “hardened, cruel, unrelenting place” to a neglected, impoverished young man, and has taught him neither “faith” nor “mercy” (695). It is here too that the narrator identifies in Hugh “something kind, and even tender, struggling in his fierce aspect,” as the hostler looks at his condemned companion Barnaby whom he has enticed to join the riots without anticipating “what harm would come of it” (695). “[L]ooking firmly round” to the assembled Newgate authorities as he takes responsibility for his actions, Hugh

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remarks, “if I had ten lives to lose … I’d lay them all down … to save this one. This one … that will be lost through me” (695). He even suggests that Barnaby’s fate has inspired in him a kind of faith: “You see what I am – more brute than man, as I have been often told – but I had faith enough to believe … as strongly as any of you gentlemen can believe anything, that this one life would be spared” (695). Hugh equates justice not with society’s blind adherence to the law, but with its ability to differentiate perpetrators from victims of circumstance and deal accordingly with each. “[L]ike a biblical prophet,” Jon Mee suggests, “Hugh is granted a vision of a deeper sense of justice unknown to the legal codes of society.”18 Although Barnaby is ultimately pardoned, the narrative tempers optimism for the realization of Hugh’s “deeper sense of justice” by pointing to other unfortunate individuals who have no champions to save them from the indifferent workings of justice. That the law neither spares nor protects those like Barnaby who are positioned on the social margins confirms Hugh’s critique of society’s unrelenting cruelty and the injustice of its institutions. The description of Hugh as a “savage prophet” also casts a new inflection on the catchphrase with which earlier in the novel he signalled the terms of his participation in the riots: when Hugh adds his name to the Protestant Association’s roster, he repeats their motto “No Popery” with a key alteration – “No Property” – but whether his call to anarchy is said in jest, in earnest, or in error the narrator does not specify (359). The narrator’s later ascription to Hugh of an integrity and acuity that distinguish him from most other characters in the novel, though, seems retroactively to invest the anarchic slogan with political significance and Hugh himself with a public character. He has been read as an anachronistic figuration of Chartism,19 though Kim Michasiw suggests that his cry should be taken more broadly as that of “the dispossessed,” articulating the novel’s only “authentic political program, however terrifying it might be.”20 This is not to say that the novel endorses that program, but rather that it exploits Hugh’s position as transgressive outsider to have him articulate a social critique to which it does subscribe. Taken together, his final prophetic curse and insurrectionary challenge to the very foundation of civil society position him closer than we might expect to those Newgate protagonists who offer Godwinian critiques of a society that shows at best little concern for, and more often a marked prejudice against, individuals of their station. Hugh may be one of the most complex criminal figures in the Newgate school. If Sim Tappertit is the figure most closely modelled on Jack Sheppard in terms of stature and ambition, Hugh is ultimately the character who comes closest to Jack’s indomitability and public significance.

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Where Jack’s celebrity turns largely on his solo acts – he commits most of his crimes alone, and within the novel trails only fans, not followers – Hugh becomes a self-appointed leader of men. He is one of the chief actors in the riots, and with Barnaby by his side, the most visible. The two men lead the charge into the House of Commons, and afterward are visually identified by the other rioters and authorities alike. He directs the mob’s actions at key moments, and when Lord Gordon’s cause seems lost, it is Hugh, flanked by Barnaby and Dennis the hangman, who reappears in public to urge the crowd to renewed action. He is spurred on behind the scenes, importantly, by shadowy agents of power, namely Sir John Chester and Mr. Gashford, Lord Gordon’s secretary, whom the novel holds principally responsible for instigating and inflaming public violence. By this means Dickens works to reorient the novel away from what William Maginn called a decade earlier the “mutual lawlessness” of the “lowest and highest” classes, and toward the “self-denial” and “generous devotion” of the law-abiding middle classes.21 If, on the novel’s representation, this combined lawlessness provokes the riots, it is nonetheless Hugh more than any other character who becomes the face and guiding figure of the mob. After Newgate Prison has been razed and the riot gains momentum, Hugh presents himself at the forefront of every attack on property: though the fellow at their [the rioters’] head was marked and singled out by all, and was a conspicuous object as the only rioter on horseback, not a man could hit him. So surely as the smoke cleared away, so surely there was he … dashing on as though he bore a charmed life, and was proof against ball and powder. This man was Hugh; and in every part of the riot, he was seen. He … was here, and there, and everywhere – always foremost – always active – striking at the soldiers, cheering on the crowd … but never hurt or stopped. Turn him at one place, and he made a new struggle in another; force him to retreat at this point, and he advanced on that, directly. (607)

Distinct in a vast crowd and “seen” “in every part” of it, Hugh exhibits almost superhuman abilities that make him a spectacular figure of such significance that the soldiers stay their hand before him. “[P]erhaps” they are astounded by his “extreme audacity,” the narrator suggests, and perhaps “desire to take him alive,” but the fact remains that Hugh strives in all his actions to “make himself the more conspicuous to his party,” yet “not a man could hit him” (607–608). Barnaby Rudge underscores the crucial role that visibility plays in the formation and movement of a mass public and the c­ ommunity-building work of public character. Where the mob initially comes together through the old-fashioned mechanisms of rumour and intrigue, fuelled by mysterious

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handbills and secret invitations, Dickens transforms it by novel’s end into a distinctly nineteenth-century public. In a key scene to which I will turn shortly, the mob that Dickens initially depicts in eighteenth-century terms as an undifferentiated mass has become a crowd of modern celebrity hunters whose boisterous celebrations are virtually indistinguishable from their destructive violence. As part of this adaptation, Dickens translates the discourse of fame that circulates through earlier Newgate fiction into a figure that Barnaby Rudge repeatedly calls “public character” and that proves central to both the formation of publics and the emergence of celebrity culture. The novel uses “public character” to refer to an individual in public office such as the Lord Mayor or to someone like Hugh drawn into the spotlight by means of a demotic publicity. The capaciousness of the term expands the potential for celebrity beyond the bounds of notoriety and reveals that all instantiations of public character are similarly formed through visibility and conscious performance. Barnaby Rudge shows, moreover, that the forms of spectacle associated with public figures have been wholly transformed from earlier historical eras – from what Scott suggests in Kenilworth, for example, is the carefully cultivated selfspectacle that underpins the monarch’s authority – to become one of the defining features of a demotic model of celebrity.22

“What a Thing It Is to Be a Public Character!” Dickens explores several iterations of public character in Barnaby Rudge, some satirical, some sincere, which together serve to recast the cultural formations of celebrity and urban spectatorship made available in the Newgate novel, and establish their applicability to modern subjectivity tout court. The concept first appears in the novel when the riots are well underway and the question arises of whether an authoritative individual might step up to quell the masses: the narrative points to the chief magistrate of London as uniquely positioned to do so. Unsurprisingly, given Dickens’s career-long suspicion of representatives of public office, the Lord Mayor is incapable of the successful self-performance requisite to public life. When a Catholic gentleman appeals to him for protection from the mob, which has promised to pull down his house, the chief magistrate deflects the appeal to his authority, crying, “I’m sure I don’t know what’s to be done. – There are great people at the bottom of these riots. – Oh dear me, what a thing it is to be a public character!” (554). The gentleman suggests that the Lord Mayor can avert the violence “if the chief magistrate’s a man, and not a dummy” (554). The taunt proves ineffectual, though, against the force of

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the Lord Mayor’s fear and haplessness. While the literary figure of a man unfit for his office has a long history, Dickens gives it a nineteenth-century inflection by tying it to the much-contested category of the gentleman and anxieties surrounding the gendered performance of authority.23 By associating the role of public character not only with political figures but equally with individuals of humble station, Barnaby Rudge suggests that this is a position available to any man. Sim Tappertit claims such authority for himself when he declares to Dolly, “You behold in me, not a private individual, but a public character; not a mender of locks, but a healer of the wounds of his unhappy country” (543). Consistent with the novel’s satire of his ambition, Sim’s assertions of public significance have no substance: he has no audience, convinces no one of his performance as a public man, and effects no national healing. Hugh by contrast makes no claims for his own significance, yet occupies the preeminent position in the riots, and as we have seen offers the defining speech of its denouement, when like a prophet he is “filled with inspiration” (695). In Hablot Browne’s illustration of the “savage prophet” scene (Figure 5), most eyes in the crowded jail room are trained on Hugh, who assumes a posture of defiance in the image’s foreground, fist aloft and eyes cast upward. Barnaby stands to the rear of the scene near the door to the gallows where he will shortly be led, pausing momentarily to look back. Those figures in the scene who do not look at the savage prophet are the implacable prison officials who seem as unlikely to be filled with inspiration as the Ordinary who awaits his lobster breakfast. Immediately behind Hugh are the two smiths who have recently removed his fetters, which lie on the floor at his feet; the juxtaposition of the broken chains with the figure of the self-possessed prisoner confirms the suggestion of strength and rebellion conveyed by his posture. This association is shored up by what seems a direct citation of a similar illustration in Jack Sheppard in which an analogous crowd of Newgate officials stands at the perimeter of the jail room, watching as the hero’s irons are knocked off; Jack too is the locus of the onlookers’ gaze, standing in a defiant posture with hand aloft (Figure 6). Although Barnaby Rudge’s illustrations generally do not have the visual impact of Cruikshank’s drawings for Jack Sheppard, Browne’s illustration of Hugh’s moment of prophetic inspiration is striking in its visualization of this scene, which reinforces the criminal’s implicit claim to recognition and authority. Another misplaced son of the aristocracy, Hugh resembles his fictional Newgate predecessors to the extent that he faces death not with fear nor contrition but with fortitude. Hugh exits the story fully inhabiting the visible role that crime has afforded him.

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Figure 5  Hablot Browne, “Hugh’s Curse.” In Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge. Master Humphrey’s Clock, Vol. 3. London: Chapman and Hall, 1841. Image courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

As I have suggested, though, Dickens is careful not to heroize Hugh: while the narrative offers some tentative grounds for sympathy with him, it does not wrap this criminal in the mantle of sentiment that clothed his predecessors Paul Clifford and Jack Sheppard. To grasp the significance of Dickens’s reformulation of demotic celebrity, we need to attend to his management of Hugh’s death. Importantly, Dickens does not allow us to witness the execution of the riot’s key agents: Barnaby is ultimately spared, and the deaths of Hugh and Dennis take place offstage. The pre-execution scene closes with the latter two criminals passing through the door to the gallows outside the prison; thence, the narrator reports, “the crowd beheld the rest” (697). By omitting the scene of their deaths from his narrative, Dickens defuses its spectacular charge. He clearly writes here against Jack Sheppard’s example: Ainsworth by contrast amplifies the spectacle of violence when he narrates in detail Sheppard’s triumphant procession from Newgate to Tyburn and the mob’s attempt to save him. Cruikshank intensifies this further with the pair of triptychs that I discussed in the previous

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Figure 6  George Cruikshank, “Jack Sheppard’s Irons Knocked Off in the Stone Hall at Newgate.” In William Harrison Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard: A Romance. London: Richard Bentley, 1839. Image courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

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chapter, each panel of which offers a different wide shot of the criminal’s momentous journey before a massive crowd gathered to cheer him on and attempt his rescue. Dickens short-circuits the identificatory possibilities of such a scene by refusing to position his readers alongside the crowd and muting the sentiment attached to the law’s most prominent victim. Interestingly, Dickens opts to include some execution scenes in the narrative. After Hugh’s hanging has happened offstage, the narrative accompanies Barnaby as he begins his journey for his own execution; before Barnaby’s cart arrives at its destination, though, the narrator pulls back to reflect on other hangings, and more generally on the material violence of the law’s enforcement. In place of Hugh’s execution, we are told of the hanging of “[t]wo cripples – both mere boys – … [whose] misery is protracted” when they are repositioned on the scaffold in order to die facing the property “they had assisted to despoil” (698). The narrator relates the cases of other minor participants in the riots, namely women, children, and paupers, before concluding, “In a word, those who suffered as rioters were, for the most part, the weakest, meanest, and most miserable among them” (698). The narrator suggests that the law inflicts the spectacle of its violence on those most vulnerable to its power and least responsible for its overthrow. Barnaby Rudge presents the public hangings as grotesque forms of the “retributive justice” that Tuite suggests was motivated by “a vindictive desire for spectacle.”24 The narrator unequivocally condemns the mob’s violence throughout the riots, but his tone and perspective shift when faced with the spectacle of public violence that takes place belatedly in the name of law and order. Reflecting on the “sad sight” of Barnaby’s procession to the gallows – “all the show, and strength, and glitter, assembled round one helpless creature” – the narrator observes, there had been many such sights since the riots were over – some so moving in their nature, and so repulsive too, that they were far more calculated to awaken pity for the sufferers, than respect for the law whose strong arm seemed in more than one case to be as wantonly stretched forth now that all was safe, as it had been basely paralysed in time of danger. (698)

Echoing Hugh’s conviction that the law should differentiate among its victims and that it will inevitably fail to do so, the narrator redirects his sympathies from the victims of the mob’s violence to the sufferers of the law’s enforcement. By placing before us only anonymous sufferers, Barnaby Rudge throws into relief the law’s barbarism and inequity, a perspective reinforced by the absence from this scene of a sympathetic criminal figure whose fascination would stand in tension with our knowledge of his crimes.

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Indeed, Dickens withdraws the novel’s most visible criminal from our gaze at precisely the moment of his sacrifice. Without denying the known criminal’s significance as a public figure and perhaps even a hero to the other rioters, the novel keeps Hugh from achieving heroic status beyond this limited circle, as I have suggested, by tempering his sentimental appeal and excluding readers from the public that witnesses his execution. In place of the spectacle of material violence that earlier Newgate novelists exploited as a catalyst for the public-making work of celebrity culture, Dickens offers his readers a multifaceted alternative: first, he renders pitiable rather than sensational the public executions he does represent. This adaptation participates in the “historical transition from material to symbolic violence, most clearly seen in the waning of public punishment” which, Tuite argues, “correlate[es] … with the emergence of celebrity culture.”25 Secondly, Dickens uses the capacious category of public character to suggest that print media’s mechanisms for visible publicity might set to work on a respectable individual, and enable him, rather than an outlaw, to capture the collective imagination. Barnaby Rudge redefines the qualification for such distinction beyond criminal acts – though not, I will contend, beyond violence. Finally, Dickens reformulates the Newgate model of celebrity culture to orient its community-building work toward the intimate public of middlebrow fiction rather than the “young, ‘masterless’ men who constituted much of the … growing industrial labor force” and who, as we saw in the previous chapter, galvanized around Ainsworth’s celebrated housebreaker.26 As I will argue with respect to David Copperfield, this alternative model is the first step in Dickens’s retrofit of the demotic celebrity from the Newgate school to put it in service of the young man of the middle orders who would make of himself not only a gentleman, but a public figure of distinction. The format of the serialized novel is crucial to Dickens’s reconception of demotic celebrity in Barnaby Rudge: having learned from his own earlier fiction and more recently from the runaway success of Ainsworth and Cruikshank’s collaboration which kept the criminal hero in the public eye for more than a year, Dickens capitalizes on the sustained audience engagement that serialization affords. That engagement, moreover, can be nourished through pictorial as well as textual means. As a writer whose work from the outset of his career was “saturated with the developed visual culture of his moment,” Dickens knew well the role that visual media played in making stories and especially characters accessible for mass consumption.27 Through the length of Barnaby Rudge’s serialization Dickens builds with his readers an “affective arena” in which to map the vicissitudes

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of the characters’ visibility, actions, and aspirations, and cultivate readers’ attachment to the closing model of domestic felicity that the novel presents, significantly, as the realization of their pre-existing desires.28 The novel invites its readers to bear witness to a domestic model that it simultaneously offers as the expression of values held in common; readers’ identification with this model becomes a form of currency with which to participate in a collective cultural experience and understand themselves as part of a public. The link that the novel forges between familial intimacy and public violence, though, manifests the complex interchange between public and private at play in Barnaby Rudge, and in particular, I will argue, the dependence of the domestic affections on the tumult and violence of the public sphere, a dependence that the novel openly acknowledges.

Mobs, Crowds, and Public Culture When Hugh quietly exits the narrative, Dickens swaps in for his prospective celebrity that of the honest locksmith, Gabriel Varden, Sim Tappertit’s long-suffering master. Gabriel too gets caught up in the riots but as hostage rather than perpetrator; though he is innocent of any crime, his implication in the mob’s violence propels him into the public eye and makes him famous. As a public character, Gabriel emerges as the figure around whom the crowd galvanizes in the riot’s aftermath when it transforms from a rampaging mob into an ardent throng of celebrity hunters. Dickens’s redirection of the mob’s focus – and ours – from the criminal Hugh to the respectable tradesman Gabriel underscores that Barnaby Rudge makes public character equivalent not to celebrity, but rather to public visibility. The novel shows that celebrity emerges only through the contingent interaction of media, audience, and public figures. In its interest in the difference between public character, fame, and celebrity, and the unpredictable means by which the last of these materializes, Barnaby Rudge reflects on the complex relationship between individuals and social collectives in modern life. It shows this relationship as turning on the function of visual display and on celebrity culture’s “rites of devotion and … degradation.”29 Gabriel is an unlikely candidate for celebrity insofar as he is “at peace with himself, and evidently disposed to be so with all the world,” “a chirping, healthy, honest-hearted fellow, who made the best of everything, and felt kindly towards everybody” (63, 381). He is thus unmarked by the selfalienation and ambivalence about publicity that, as we saw in the previous chapter, are part and parcel of celebrity culture.30 Once Gabriel has found himself embroiled with the mob, though, he becomes a visible figure

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whose fame depends on the mechanisms of a print media whose audience is anonymous and vast. Straining at points against its historical context, Barnaby Rudge positions Gabriel at the intersection of an older model of public, in which a consciousness of collectivity arises from coexistence in shared physical space, and the virtual public that, as Benedict Anderson has taught us, emerges through the technologies of print and pictorial media.31 When the mob plans to break open the great door of Newgate Prison to free Barnaby and the other rioters, they kidnap Gabriel and try to compel him to pick the lock that he helped make. Although they threaten him with all manner of violence, the locksmith refuses to assist them. The mob enters the prison by other means, Gabriel is rescued, and after the lead rioters have been arrested, he testifies at one of their trials. The story of Gabriel’s escapades with the mob makes it into the papers, and makes of him, Sir John Chester exclaims, “quite a public character” (675). Chester observes to him, “you … live in all men’s thoughts most deservedly. Nothing can exceed the interest with which I read your testimony, and remembered that I had the pleasure of a slight acquaintance with you. – I hope we shall have your portrait published?” (675–76). Chester’s speech is too thoroughly sardonic ever to be taken at face value, but in this instance his assertion of Gabriel’s renown is confirmed by later plot events, and the “pleasure” derived from however “slight [an] acquaintance” the public may have with the locksmith becomes a driving force in the crowd’s final actions. Dickens places a “respectable tradesman” (577) at the heart of the riots in order to have one individual – notably not a criminal – propelled by the mob’s violence out of the disorder and into the media. As the hangman Dennis has remarked at an earlier moment in the novel, acts of public violence “read uncommon well in the newspapers. … The public … think[s] a great deal more on” those who emerge into the media spotlight (499). Dickens may eschew the figure of the criminal hero on which other Newgate novelists capitalized, but he does not dispense entirely with the celebrity of the everyday that this character made imaginable; rather, he works to constitute it otherwise, without the underpinnings of criminality. This project begins in Barnaby Rudge, but as I will suggest, its full realization emerges only in David Copperfield. Whether Gabriel’s portrait is ever published remains unclear, but the public’s recognition of him constitutes a key turning point in the narrative’s conception of the modern crowd. After Barnaby’s friends have secured his pardon, having taken their case all the way “to the a­ nte-chamber of the King himself,” Gabriel is entrusted with “the grateful task of bringing [Barnaby] home” (711–12). Although Gabriel claims, “I didn’t want

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to make a triumph of it,” their journey away from the site of execution immediately becomes a triumphal procession on the exact model of Jack Sheppard’s cart-ride to Tyburn, but in the reverse direction and with the opposite outcome.32 Gabriel explains to his friends how he and Barnaby became the focal point for the renewed enthusiasm of the mob: “‘directly we got into the street we were known, and this hubbub began. Of the two,’ he added, as he wiped his crimson face, ‘and after experience of both, I think I’d rather be taken out of my house by a crowd of enemies than escorted home by a mob of friends” (712). The narrator qualifies this last comment with the observation that “[it] was plain enough … that this was mere talk on Gabriel’s part, and that the whole proceeding afforded him the keenest delight” (712). The “hubbub began,” Gabriel explains, as soon as he and Barnaby were spotted in the street: the crowd coalesced once again, but this time as a pack of celebrity hunters whose enthusiasm for the two visibly known figures and pleasure in having unexpected access to them threatened the very objects of their passion. Although he has “really [been] in a fair way to be torn to pieces in the general enthusiasm” (711), Gabriel takes such decided pleasure in the crowd’s riotous reception and the instant fame it bestows on him that soon after his arrival home he again presents himself to their gaze: the people continuing to make a great noise without, … he sent upstairs for Grip [Barnaby’s raven] … and with the bird upon his arm presented himself at the first-floor window, and waved his hat again until it dangled by a shred, between his finger and thumb. This demonstration having been received with appropriate shouts, … he thanked them for their sympathy; and … proposed that they should give three cheers for King George, three more for Old England, and three more for nothing particular, as a closing ceremony. The crowd assenting, substituted Gabriel Varden for the nothing particular; and giving him one over, for good measure, dispersed in high good-humour. (712)

Accessorized with the raven that is Barnaby’s constant companion and thus a visual signifier of the individual who has received the King’s pardon, Gabriel offers himself as a figure around whom the crowd might consolidate its enthusiasm. If the King and the nation are two possible loci of collective identification, the most potent here seems to be the third: the honest locksmith whom the mob apprehends as an extraordinary figure. Distinct in a vast crowd, just like Hugh, Gabriel emerges as the final and most significant of the novel’s public characters. His appearance in print as well as in the street and at the window marks the currency and accessibility of

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his publicity. His visibility accords him authority with the crowd to serve as the voice that articulates its desires; that authority makes him a public figure of perhaps greater significance in this moment than the monarch, if we can take the additional cheer Gabriel receives from the crowd as any indication. He is in one sense a “nothing particular” – an ordinary tradesman whose story culminates in his return to an anonymous and happy hearth – but insofar as the crowd “substitute[s] Gabriel Varden for the nothing particular” that he has invited them to cheer, he becomes something quite particular indeed: the expression of their collective identity, and a striking instance of the extraordinary emerging out of the everyday. Notably, Dickens uses precisely the same language in describing the rampaging mob of the riots and the “dense mob of persons” that carries Gabriel and Barnaby home from the gallows (710). In both instances, the crowd is figured as a choppy, unpredictable sea: in the triumphant procession homeward from the scene of Barnaby’s pardon, Gabriel is “band[ied] from hand to hand,” “beating about as though he were struggling with a rough sea” (710–11). In the midst of the earlier violence of the riots, the narrator describes the mob as “a creature of very mysterious existence, particularly in a large city. … Assembling and dispersing with equal suddenness, it is as difficult to follow to its various sources as the sea itself; nor does the parallel stop there, for the ocean is not more fickle and uncertain, more terrible when roused, more unreasonable, or more cruel” (475). The analogous language in the passages stresses the consistency across the two contexts of the caprice and opacity of the crowd’s movements. In both cases, the mass of people operates according to a logic and rhythm that have no definable source. The crowd’s fervour, moreover, expresses itself in a similar form in both instances, so that the “general enthusiasm” (711) of the triumphant procession reminds the reader, Mee suggests, “of other sorts of enthusiasm that sustained the violent crowd scenes earlier in the novel.”33 Where the unpredictability of the mob’s actions is consistent, though, there is an important difference in the novel’s account of how each crowd forms. The plot of Barnaby Rudge suggests that the violent mob is, like Hugh, manipulated by a coterie of powerful agents, notably men of higher station than the rioters themselves: there would be no riot without the plotting and politics of self-interested agents like Gashford and Chester. “There are great people at the bottom of these riots,” as the Lord Mayor cries when refusing to act (554). This figuration of the crowd harkens back to an earlier era, when an authoritative leader might send out a mob to execute his justice. The “mob of friends” that carries Gabriel and Barnaby home (712), by contrast, forms through no such external agency. The two

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men are visually known figures who capture the public’s attention and become the locus of its collective energies. Gabriel’s harrowing experience in the thick of the riots turns into a sensational narrative publicized in the newspapers, and thus like the extraordinary tales of Caleb Williams’s and Jack Sheppard’s prison breaks, becomes the substance of a shared discourse. His story and figure serve both within the novel and outside it as a cultural currency in which the audience – both fictional and virtual – can trade and in so doing position themselves as part of a collective. If Dickens swaps in Gabriel’s moment of public spectacle for the demotic celebrity that he denies his “savage prophet,” however, the locksmith lacks the whiff of scandal that drives an audience’s affective engagement with celebrity. Jacqueline Rose asks, “How far is pleasure – the pleasure we take in celebrity, for example – bound up with perversion, or with something we experience as perverse? Is that the bonus which distinguishes celebrity from fame?”34 As I suggested in relation to the Newgate school criminal, the pleasure we take from watching a star’s ascendancy is intertwined with our fascinated consumption of their failures and humiliations. “There is something murderous in our relation to celebrity,” Rose suggests.35 Tuite contends that in the case of an aristocratic figure like Byron, nineteenthcentury “readers are drawn to the vice that [he] models” as much as the intimacies he shares in “vendible print.”36 I would argue that low-born criminal characters like Jack Sheppard function analogously: in staging the criminals’ roguery and thrilling escapades, their authors offer them up for remediation in a broad consumer culture of print illustration, theatrical spectacle, and merchandise. In a comment that might be applied to any of the fictional criminals that I’ve discussed, Rose remarks of Harry Houdini, “His daring always kept his audience on a knife-edge of sadistic relish: ‘Maybe this time he won’t escape.’”37 As Godwin shows with particular acerbity in Caleb Williams, the public’s attraction to criminal celebrity is fuelled simultaneously by the pleasure of witnessing the protagonist’s remarkable upending of law and order and by a perverse curiosity about his inevitable downfall, punishment, and death. In Barnaby Rudge, importantly, the perverse underbelly of celebrity culture seems to be missing. The happy, hearty Gabriel Varden offers no basis for “sadistic relish” to either the London mob or Dickens’s readers. Far from breaking laws or scandalizing his audience, Gabriel is good to a fault, even enduring without complaint – like many a minor Dickensian patriarch before and after him – perpetual domestic unrest at the hands of a company of malcontents, namely, a wife of “uncertain temper,” a “shrewish” domestic servant, and a recalcitrant apprentice (102–3). Gabriel stands

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proximate to violence in the narrative, even seeming to draw energy from his involvement with the mob both during the riots and in the triumphant procession afterward; he also consciously uses the spectacle of his own fame, as we’ve seen, to channel the crowd’s unruly energies into appropriate expressions of enthusiasm. If he captures their attention, though, the honest locksmith cannot carry the burden of his audience’s curiosity and desire for identification and spectacle. Gabriel may be a substitute for the potentially dangerous celebrity of the criminal Hugh, but he does not possess the complexity to develop into a demotic celebrity. He is not a figure around whom rites of degradation and celebration can coalesce. Where an analogous complexity does emerge in Barnaby Rudge is in the relationship of the violence of the riots to Gabriel’s family circle and specifically the idyllic image of domesticity with which the novel closes. Dickens inflects this relationship with the ambivalence and contradiction that, within the context of modern celebrity culture, typically characterize an audience’s affective attachment to a renowned public figure. It is here, I contend, that we see the implications of Dickens’s not yet fully realized effort to re-make demotic celebrity by distancing it from criminality in order to render it suitable for the middle orders. It will take until David Copperfield’s confessional narrative, where Dickens reinjects the spectacle of humiliation and failure into the visible individual’s performance and appeal, for the author to succeed in this task. David’s narration demonstrates how celebrity can become the birthright of the gentleman – the ordinary, honest man – who establishes himself as an object of public interest and curiosity. With Dickens’s intervention, the criminal no longer has exclusive purchase on demotic celebrity in the nineteenth-century novel. In Barnaby Rudge, Dickens disrupts the constitutive relationship that the Newgate novel had posited between transgression and demotic celebrity. The energy and affective charge that Newgate novelists identified with the criminal’s transgressions, however, do not disappear from the novel. As numerous critics have remarked, that energy emerges in Dickens’s narrative rendering of the mob and its violence. Dickens “write[s] with a relish about the energy of the mob,” Mee observes, “seem[ing] to go beyond any simple rational understanding of the social causes of popular unrest and deeper into a desire to participate in the destructive energy of the crowd itself.”38 Mee’s comment points to the novel’s ambivalence about the irresistible fascination of the mob’s violence, which stands in tension with the narrator’s condemnation of its devastation. We sense ambivalence as well in the narrator’s about-face when he is confronted with the spectacle of the rioters’ sacrifice to the law’s material violence.

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What I would like to focus on here, though, is the ambivalence that inflects the domestic circle with which the novel ends. This sphere is offered up to us as an unambiguous ideal: the narrator closes the story of the Varden family circle with the observation, “there sat the locksmith among all and every these delights [of his adoring, reformed family], the sun that shone upon them all: the centre of the system: the source of light, heat, life, and frank enjoyment in the bright household world” (714). This “bright household world” seems in every way the opposite of public violence. The achieved state of its brightness, however, is only part of the story the novel tells about this world. Dickens distances Gabriel from criminality as part of his disenchantment of Newgate celebrity, but he aligns transgression closely with the locksmith’s domestic felicity. Idealized domesticity in Barnaby Rudge depends as much on the workings of public violence and upheaval as do Sim’s ambition and Hugh’s anarchy. Indeed, the novel shows that domestic intimacy is constituted by public violence at the same time that it is opposed to it. Posited as the fitting end to the extreme violence of the riots, the Vardens’ happy household exists only because that violence has transformed it. In discussing the mutual “relish” with which Dickens and Carlyle “write … about the energy of the mob” in Barnaby Rudge and The French Revolution respectively, Mee observes further: “Where Dickens would seem to differ from Carlyle is by searching for a secure private and domestic space beyond these dramatic conflicts” of riot and revolution.39 Read in this way, Dickens is seen to stand alongside Scott in seeking recourse in the domestic sphere for a respite from public conflict. Domesticity is the horizon into which the hero fades as he retreats from his dalliance with public life: Edward Waverley retires from a thrilling, terrifying adventure with Fergus and Flora MacIvor, for example, by making peace with his unsensational life and finding solace for its disappointments in conjugal felicity with Rose Bradwardine. This is a narrative structure with which our histories of nineteenth-century fiction have long made us familiar. Victorian fiction is seen to reproduce with great fidelity this figuration of the domestic as a space beyond the conflicts of public life. There are of course important variations: in Mary Barton, for example, Gaskell presents family harmony and stability not as an escape from such conflicts, but as the instrument through which class violence is averted and public order restored; in Vanity Fair, Thackeray punctures the very idea of domestic felicity, showing it to be a chimera irrespective of public violence or peace. On my reading, though, Dickens does something different again. The domestic in Barnaby Rudge is not a space beyond public conflict. Its

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felicity and smooth functioning are made possible by the brute violence that literally and figuratively penetrates to its very heart. The novel shows across several plot lines that idealized domesticity is achieved only because of riot and revolution. I will contend, moreover, that Dickens’s conception of the interpenetration of domestic and public life in Barnaby Rudge makes possible the reformulation of celebrity he subsequently undertakes in David Copperfield.

Public Violence and Private Life Barnaby Rudge lays bare the intimate relationship between the domestic affections on which the novel’s faith for the future depends and the demotic forces, especially the workings of public violence, that make that domestic felicity possible. This is not a buried structure in the novel that suspicious readers must uncover; on the contrary, the narrator addresses head on the constitutive role that public violence plays in creating the domestic idyll with which the novel closes. Gabriel’s wife, for example, whose moods are as capricious as is “tolerably certain to make everybody more or less uncomfortable” (102), is sufficiently chastened by the spectacle of the riots’ unchained violence to become quite a new woman, contented and charming enough to serve as a fitting reward for the ever-faithful locksmith. Having contributed financially to the Protestant Association’s incendiary cause, Mrs. Varden is “impressed with a secret misgiving that she had done wrong, that she had, to the utmost of her small means, aided and abetted the growth of disturbances, the end of which it was impossible to foresee; [and] that she had led remotely to the scene which had just passed” – namely, Sim’s violent defiance of his master’s order not to join the rioters (473). In the wake of the riots, Mrs. Varden’s transformation is complete: “Mrs V. herself had grown quite young, and stood there in a gown of red and white … laughing in face and mood, in all respects delicious to behold” (714). She is “quite an altered woman,” the narrator reports, “for the riots had done that good” (648). It takes the spectacle of monstrous, contagious violence to compel Mrs. Varden to forgo her capricious performance of overwrought sensibility and become the “delicious” matron of a happy household. The novel stages two other analogous transformations, both directly attributed to the violence of public life. Gabriel’s daughter Dolly, having apparently learned the gendered power of caprice from her mother and used it facetiously to spurn her lover Joe Willet, comes to recognize the error of her ways only when her lover returns, “maimed and crippled,”

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from fighting in the American Revolutionary War (700). Joe enlisted because he could no longer bear Dolly’s carelessness or his father’s domestic tyranny. When he returns home, having lost an arm in battle, Dolly admits herself “humbled,” declaring to him, “you owe your sufferings and pain to my caprice” (702). The physical marks of revolutionary violence that Joe bears have had their effect on “the little coquette of five years ago,” the narrator observes: “She had found her heart at last” (652). Dolly and Joe join with her parents in concluding that the end of the riots was also “the happiest hour in all their lives; consequently that everything must have occurred for the best, and nothing could be suggested which would have made it better” (716). Matthew Buckley suggests of early nineteenthcentury melodrama that “the safety of the home is guaranteed only by unremitting acts of war.”40 In Barnaby Rudge, by contrast, public violence does not protect a pre-existent domestic ideal, but creates it. Joe’s father, the innkeeper John Willet, is similarly transformed: his domestic revolution is effected by the revolutionary violence that is written on Joe’s body and equally by the violence of the London mob, which literally pierces John’s sanctum by driving the maypole, emblem of his hostelry, through the inn window. Rather than being remade by this violence into a paragon of domestic happiness as are Dolly and Mrs. Varden, John Willet is stunned into virtual insensibility: when he is “left alone in his dismantled bar” after the rioters have wreaked their havoc, he “sit[s] staring about him; awake as to his eyes, certainly, but with all his powers of reason and reflection in a sound and dreamless sleep” (500). John’s stupefaction only intensifies when Joe returns from war, and the father must make sense of “his son’s bodily disfigurement, which,” the narrator reports, “he had never yet got himself thoroughly to believe, or comprehend” (649). The confusion is finally dispelled when John grasps enough of the circumstances to utter, falteringly, “My son’s arm – was took off – at the defence of the – Salwanners [Savannah] – in America – where the war is” (650). This moment of enlightenment in no way restores John to his senses, though, which were not especially sharp to begin with: “He never recovered the surprise the Rioters had given him,” the narrator observes, “and remained in the same mental condition down to the last moment of his life” (736). If John’s insensibility prevents him from contributing materially to his family’s happiness, it ensures the end of his despotism over his son and clears a path for Joe to create with a reformed Dolly the domestic felicity he has never known. On Barnaby Rudge’s evidence, public violence resolves family dysfunction and removes the domestic impediments to a better life that the novel’s

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historical model promises. Unlike in the Waverley novels, where, Kim Michasiw suggests, “historical conflicts grind down extremes resulting in a new but immobile order,” Dickens represents the past as something that must be overthrown in order for the present to emerge.41 Almost all of Barnaby Rudge’s sons rebel against their fathers: the younger generation must throw off the static, repressive past with which their fathers are aligned in order to make space for themselves in the present. Michasiw aptly describes Barnaby Rudge as a novel “obsessed with the violence done by fathers to sons, [and] by the past to the present.”42 Yet this too is only part of the story. The domestic affections for which the younger generation yearns and to which the future is bound must be remade before a dynamic present becomes possible. As I have argued, the novel’s harmonious resolutions are not simply a product of individual rebellion nor are they created by individual force of will; rather, the achievement of domestic harmony depends on the interference of public violence in private life. On the novel’s account, the domestic requires a violent encounter with the public in order to take its ideal form. This confrontation serves to create and at the same time satisfy the desire for such an idealized model that the novel presents as communal, as generally shared and pre-existent. The complex interaction between domestic and public that Barnaby Rudge stages is analogous, I contend, to that which characterizes the relationship of individuals and social collectives in a modern mediated culture. What connects the domestic and public, on the one hand, and the individual and collective, on the other, is an analogous structure of publicmaking in which a visible figure, whether individual or spatial, is offered to the public gaze as expressive of what an audience is presumed already to desire. This figure ushers onto the public stage imagery in relation to which audience members might understand themselves and articulate a sense of belonging. Such a visible figure needs – and indeed creates – a public that understands itself as addressed by the experiences and values that the figure represents; the figure’s dependence on what lies outside it for its currency and meaning becomes the mechanism of its cultural circulation. This dependence, however, ensures its volatility. Visible figures are idealized only insofar as they are available for the audience’s “appropriations and transformations.”43 The concurrent process of idealization and alienation at the hands of a rapt, potentially violent public, Rose suggests, forms the foundational structure of modern celebrity: “Can you have public life without idealisation?” she asks. “And then: can you have idealisation without sadism?”44 On Barnaby Rudge’s model, this interactive, communal structure defines the individual celebrity and

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equally the exemplary social formations that the novel presents as the “stuff” of an “intimate public sphere,” what Lauren Berlant describes as the “narratives and things [that] are deemed expressive of [‘a commonly lived’] history while also shaping its conventions of belonging.”45 Berlant’s analysis focuses on the “commodified genres of intimacy” proper to women’s culture beginning in the nineteenth century,46 but as my reading of Barnaby Rudge makes clear, the intimate domestic relations that the novel idealizes function analogously. The idyllic domestic sphere, like the renowned public figure, exists only insofar as it becomes the property of a collectivity: an entity that the public to whom it addresses itself bears witness to, invests in, and makes their own. This visible figure – often an individual, sometimes a cultural phenomenon, or as I have suggested, a particular organization of social life – is built out of the affectively charged, often vexed process of image-making, code-sharing, and other collective work that takes place among readers, authors, texts, and the figures those texts offer up for consumption. The public makes the image that it desires at the same time as that image presents itself as the realization of desires already in circulation. As Barnaby Rudge’s representation of the domestic sphere makes clear, though, that communal work subjects the figure around which an audience forms to the violence of the public sphere – whether in the form of the penetration of revolutionary violence into a “bright household world,” or the appropriations and alienation effected by the public’s gaze. In each case, outside participation in the formation of the idealized figure necessitates subjugation to forces beyond that figure’s control. It involves, Braudy suggests, a “compromised surrender to a sordid public gaze.”47 This complex, ambivalent process of image-making is as violent as it is celebratory. On Barnaby Rudge’s representation, the visual spectacles of collective life in a mediated culture never stray far from the potent mix of transgression and publicity that defined the demotic celebrity of the Newgate school.

Seeing David Copperfield It is a critical commonplace to read David Copperfield – and David Copperfield – symptomatically. Critics have consistently “register[ed] something incomplete about David Copperfield as a character,” Audrey Jaffe observes, “namely, that what would make him a character can be found more substantially elsewhere: in other characters.”48 Mary Poovey diagnoses this vacuity as the self-protective detachment of “responsibility from action” produced formally by the separation of narrator from

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protagonist. A division that later in the nineteenth century would be classified as the conscious and unconscious mind, the internal differences that characterize the protagonist “do not even remain within David but reappear outside him,” Poovey suggests, “as if the entire landscape of the novel were a series of mirrors, each of which reflects some ‘unconscious part’ of David Copperfield. Thus Heep is David’s selfishness, Steerforth his feckless sexuality, and Micawber his foolishness.”49 D. A. Miller similarly reads what has “often been considered an artistic flaw in Dickens’s novel” – “David’s rather matte and colorless personality” – instead as “the psychological desideratum of one whose ambition, from the time he first impersonated his favorite characters in his father’s books, has always been to be vicarious.”50 In these now canonical analyses, the hero’s ambition and self-regard are taken as the text’s buried – though, according to Miller, always “open” – secret, the truth that it intimates but perpetually disavows.51 David is a cypher, either bound unwittingly in service of the disciplinary regimes of “Western liberal culture”52 or negated by the “displaced system of class and economic issues” that his “psychological narrative of individual development” works to paper over.53 That papering-over explains as well, Poovey suggests, the novel’s oftremarked reticence about the details of David’s literary career: “In marked contrast to … other representations of work in this novel … the work involved in writing is explicitly effaced.”54 The apparent excision of the writer’s labour from a narrative about his emergence on the world stage as an “eminent author” (850), to quote Mr. Micawber, serves to distance David’s vocation, the story goes, from the taint of either self-promotion or the structural inequalities of a market economy. The invisible labour of writing looks like no labour at all, and worldly success simply what David himself suggests is the fortuitous result of “nature and accident” (671) coupled with “a patient and continuous energy” (590). David Copperfield provides ample evidence to support such readings. But it tells another story as well about David’s development and identity as a writer, one that the critical tradition has generally overlooked. The story of David Copperfield that I want to tell, and that I argue the novel has been telling us quite plainly all along, turns on the relationship of David’s “com[ing] out” as an “author” (611) to his consciousness of himself as a figure to be seen. This awareness distinguishes his character from the earliest pages of his history. David’s preoccupation with visuality – with observation, eyes, sight lines, specularity, theatricality, performance, public image, and what Mr. Micawber calls “ocular” relations among individuals (850) – calls us over and over again to attend to Dickens’s management of the

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novel’s “visual field.”55 I want to pull these terms away, though, from the psychoanalytic register in which they have almost exclusively sounded in order to think about them instead in relationship to the new model of celebrity that David’s character and his narrative instantiate. A film theory-inflected psychoanalytic model helps us grasp the function of the gaze in the individual’s assumption of subjectivity,56 but David’s picturing of himself pertains to a broader notion of audience and public image than this analysis registers. I invoke the hero’s perennial consciousness of visibility, by contrast, to suggest that David Copperfield explores the process through which the contingent structure of spectacle in a mediated culture might propel a seemingly ordinary individual into the public eye and, through a communal process of affective attachment and imagemaking, bring both a celebrity and a public into being.57 We might expand on the notion of the pictured self that the novel develops: insofar as David offers his personal history proto-cinematically as a life in pictures, what he later describes as a “shining transparency, through which I saw my earlier life moving along” (280), he circulates in the public sphere an image of himself that is available for identification and appropriation, and that in the world of the novel signifies the accession to celebrity authorship that his story documents. Dickens takes up the cultural formations of celebrity and spectatorship articulated in the Newgate school, including his own earlier crime novels, and transforms them in David Copperfield into phenomena of visual spectacle and public performance that punctuate the eponymous hero’s self-presentation. This autoethnographic recasting of the demotic celebrity of the Newgate novel appropriates for the respectable protagonist of the middle orders the criminal’s self-fashioning – his conscious styling of himself and his feats for a real or imagined audience.58 At the same time, Dickens renders the consciousness of visibility and performance a seemingly natural, inevitable part of the public man’s effort “to bring [himself] to the attention of others,” as if that were something closer to duty than self-promotion.59 David’s pronouncements of disdain for what he refers to as “self-laudation” (590) or “flourish[ing] [one]self before the faces of other people” (671) do not nullify self-promotion but instead function as part of the code of celebrity culture: Rose observes, “Celebrities who insist … that they do not court publicity … are never functioning so appropriately as celebrities, never displaying so perfectly the tension on which celebrity thrives, as in the moments when they make that non or antiperformative claim.”60 Braudy remarks similarly that “to trumpet one’s disdain for fame … necessarily follows in the track of fame itself.”61 This is

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wholly consistent, as we saw in the context of the silver-fork school, with the earliest distinctions between self-denying fame and a tawdry celebrity that courts “the shout of the multitude, [and] the idle buzz of fashion.”62 Domesticating and elevating socially the figure of the demotic Newgate celebrity, Dickens writes for him a confessional narrative that reads as if it were a celebrity memoir – not Dickens’s own, though that claim has been made regularly since the publication of John Forster’s biography,63 but that of the eminent author David Copperfield. At the moment of writing his life story, David Copperfield the author enjoys a “fame and fortune” (826) that have made his books as well as his own “lineaments,” according to Micawber, “familiar to the imaginations of a considerable portion of the civilised world” (850). Dickens marks for us the inseparability of the celebrity from both the image with which his name and writing are identified and the intimate public sphere in which that image circulates. Far from excising the details of David’s literary career from the narrative, Dickens everywhere maps the steps by which the fictional author elaborates a version of himself – his personal story, his image – for a public that has formed specifically in response to his writing and the character by which he is known. Admittedly we recognize that mapping only once we have finished reading, once we know the outcome of the protagonist’s aspirations, but the premise that the novel finally reveals holds that David is, as he says, “very successful” as a writer (671) and that he receives “bushels of letters” from his readers (823). The clear implication is that his fictional audience laps up his books as soon as he writes them, and that his celebrity depends on both his readers’ desire for a more intimate connection and his own willingness to provide them access. The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account) is precisely that intimate access, mediated and offered up to “the imaginations of a considerable portion of the civilised world.” David Copperfield thus operates from the premise that, within the novel, the fictional author’s virtual public is well familiar with his writing, and that his personal history works to cultivate intimacies and feed the curiosity of his fan base. The narrative suggests, moreover, that readers equate David with his books – or he presumes they do – as his comment that his books will speak for themselves and for him makes explicit: “I do not enter on the aspirations, the delights, anxieties, and triumphs, of my art,” he explains. “That I truly devoted myself to it with my strongest earnestness, and bestowed upon it every energy of my soul, I have already said. If the books I have written be of any worth, they will supply the rest”

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(823). Outside Dickens’s novel, David’s narrative functions analogously, working to cultivate a Victorian public’s attachment to the novel and the author whose work they have been reading for more than a dozen years, and draw them into a seemingly more intimate relationship with the man who, in his Preface to David Copperfield, personifies his public affectionately as “the reader whom I love” (xxvii). Not only does Dickens stage for us the process of David’s coming-tocelebrity, presenting the protagonist’s fame as the birthright of an ordinary yet special individual, he also underscores the intricate entanglement of the celebrity author with his public and by implication the inseparability of the renowned figure from the audience he addresses and to which he belongs. David Copperfield demonstrates that by the mid-point of the nineteenth century, celebrity culture has so entwined the visible individual and his public that neither can be said to have caused nor preceded the other. Recognizing Dickens’s novel as bound up with a Newgate concept of demotic celebrity helps us to grasp the far-reaching repercussions of the concern with visibility, audience, and public recognition that David expresses from the very outset of his narrative, and the substantial insight he provides into celebrity culture in an intimate public sphere. Dickens’s focus in both Barnaby Rudge and David Copperfield on the increasingly visual figure of the public man and the communal work of celebrity culture confirms these as further reverberations of the temporality of fashion and its logics of contingency, currency, and spectacle that, as I have argued throughout this study, permeate British fiction from the turn of the century on. The “increasingly visual form taken by the power and assertion of [public figures] of the postrevolutionary period,” Braudy contends, “was presented as a new sincerity, a willingness to face the public in order to be recognized and to be identified with.”64 We have long focused on the Victorian protagonist’s assertions of sincerity and selflessness and the novel’s intimation that social change in the nineteenth century, should it be possible, will be effected only through that individual’s agency. That focus, however, has precluded a sustained consideration of the genre’s interest in a less oppositional structure of individual and collective, sincerity and spectacle.65 In the novels that this chapter draws together, renowned individuals and the public that observes them necessarily emerge together, in tandem, through the diffusion of images, ideas, and affects, and the identifications and more perverse attachments that that circulation engenders. David Copperfield elaborates the suppositions posited in the Newgate school, first, that public visibility is available to even the humblest individual, and second,

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that a man who imagines for himself a public presence, who would enjoy public recognition of his distinction, must “lure allegiance through the eye as much as through the mind.”66 Dickens’s novel also confirms the extent to which, as I argued in the previous chapter, a consciousness of visibility and spectacle has become an openly acknowledged component of the protagonist’s formation as an individual who desires fame, an individual who, as Jack Sheppard desires, would have his “name … remembered” and his “achievement … classed [above] the common herd.”67 David Copperfield shows us that such distinction requires the public man to possess an awareness of himself as others see him and as he sees himself being seen.

David Copperfield’s “Optic Drama” David Copperfield offers one of the most sustained considerations in nineteenth-century fiction of the impact of an emergent mass media on visibility and publicness. As I have suggested, its exploration of these issues comes clearly into focus when we read David Copperfield as part of a novelistic tradition that stages the emergence of novelty, spectacle, and celebrity in everyday lives. That focus helps us recognize as well the significance of David’s acute consciousness from a young age of what Chandler calls the “network or relay of regard” that underlies individual sympathetic exchange and the public-making of celebrity culture.68 Armed with this insight, we can situate David’s consciousness of “ocular” relations, to invoke Micawber again, in relationship to the renown the protagonist enjoys by novel’s end. David acknowledges that as a “child of close observation” (13) he early developed the habits that would lead to his future career as a writer. The performative aspects of his looking, however, and especially his “looking at lookers looking” at him,69 opens up another facet of his penchant for close observation that turns on his staging of himself as a figure to be seen. The early years of David’s personal history are strongly marked by his preoccupation with observation. Indeed, the novel’s second chapter, entitled “I Observe,” tracks the child’s progress as watcher from his recollection of the “first objects that assume a distinct presence before me” (12) to his childlike scrutiny of the “gentleman with beautiful black hair and whiskers” (17) who begins to pay visits to David’s widowed mother. In a capsule reading of the early chapters, Chandler comments on the singularity of “Dickens’s handling of the visual field” which manifests in David’s “multiply mediated” images of familiar objects – house, churchyard, clergyman – as seen not only through his own eyes but as he sees others looking

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at them and “looking back at him or looking at other things.” Chandler remarks, “The optic drama can become quite intense.”70 Admonished to look at the clergyman in church, David protests internally, “But I can’t always look at him. … I am afraid of his wondering why I stare so, and perhaps stopping the service to enquire” (14). His concern with the way he is perceived extends even to the poultry in the yard: “There is one cock who … seems to take particular notice of me as I look at him through the kitchen-window, who makes me shiver, he is so fierce” (13). The adult narrator’s sardonic framing of these scenes points to the narcissism of childhood, but David’s early perceptions, where the clergyman and the cock may equally be taken with the spectacle of the young protagonist looking, lay a foundation for the persistent consciousness of others’ notice of him that becomes one of the defining marks of his character. While David’s dedicated practice of watching frequently turns in his youth on anticipated punishment, its driving force is as often the pleasure he derives from being seen. Critics have made us well familiar with the passages detailing his involuntary attraction to the foreboding eye, first of his stepfather Mr. Murdstone, and subsequently the schoolmaster Mr. Creakle. The child David seems irresistibly drawn to the gaze that embodies what Miller calls “the discipline of stepfathers and their institutional extensions.”71 Informing his stepson of the severe consequences of disobedience, Murdstone “looked steadily into my eyes,” David reports. “I felt my own attracted, no less steadily, to his” (43). Murdstone and his equally cruel sister exert an influence over David that he suggests is “like the fascination of two snakes on a wretched young bird” (52). He cannot help but watch them, even as watching reduces him to virtual insensibility. Similarly, Creakle’s sadistic rule operates as much through the power of the gaze as through brute violence. “Here I sit at the desk again,” David recalls, watching his eye. … I don’t watch his eye in idleness, but because I am morbidly attracted to it, in a dread desire to know what he will do next. … A lane of small boys beyond me, with the same interest in his eye, watch it too. I think he knows it, though he pretends he don’t. … [N]ow he throws his eye sideways down our lane, and we all droop over our books and tremble. A moment afterwards we are eyeing him again. (86)

As the unanimity of the boys’ “eyeing” indicates, David is not alone in receiving Creakle’s attention: “On the contrary, a large majority of the boys … were visited with similar instances of notice” (85). David’s morbid attraction to the schoolmaster’s eye, which exercises in an institutional setting the predatory surveillance to which he has been subject at home,

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entrenches the obsessive practice of watching that distinguishes David’s later responses to equally forbidding figures: Uriah Heep, Rosa Dartle, and even in less malevolent terms, his aunt Betsey when he awaits her reply to his appeal for shelter and protection. Jaffe notes that “victimization” in David Copperfield “is identified with being closely watched,” and that “David’s response … is to become a watcher himself.”72 “[P]ersonified narrators” such as David and Esther Summerson “betray their own anxiety about being watched,” she suggests, “attempting to neutralize or naturalize their own watching by directing attention away from themselves.”73 On this reading, to be watched is to be subjected to what Jaffe calls “the structuring gazes of others.” David avoids such constraint by serving as narrator, “representing himself representing others.”74 Insofar as David finds himself caught in the sightlines of Murdstone and Creakle, Jaffe’s argument is wholly persuasive. It’s less clear, though, that David’s response to objectification is always the same. Objectification seems to be a mixed bag: it can entail being seen as worthless, akin to an object that might be “easily thrown away” (149) as David is by the Murdstones, but it may also refer to being rendered an object of others’ gazes, and that may or may not be an unwelcome experience. I would contend, in fact, that David is not always anxious about being watched and that his awareness of others’ gazes and their notice of him is not consistently morbid. Indeed, away from the petty despots mentioned above, he often actively solicits the gaze of others and takes distinct pleasure in being an object of their regard. To consider the significance of that pleasure, we need first to take a step back from the presupposition that objectification is invariably violent and degrading. Why, we might ask, does a consciousness of the attention of others, almost always figured in this novel in visual terms, necessarily equate with a loss of selfhood? That we arrive at such a conclusion, despite the fact that it is not an equation that David Copperfield consistently makes, is a holdover of the Romantic denigration of celebrity, sensation, and what William Hazlitt calls a servile “consciousness of the approbation of others” that continues to inform our reading practice.75 Subjection to another’s gaze quickly aligns in our analyses not only with objectification, but with the posture of a cheapened publicity that Hazlitt repudiates in preference for a transcendent fame. The Romantic disdain for a consciousness of audience, cast as an objectification of oneself and one’s art for others’ demands, lives on in our readings of Victorian fiction and its attitude toward performance and visibility – though not necessarily, I maintain, in Victorian fiction itself.76 Dickens himself prompts us to interrogate such a presupposition: in his effort to

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appropriate a celebrity of everyday life for the aspiring young man of the middle orders, Dickens throws into question the stark opposition between reticence and ostentation, retirement and publicity on which Romantic notions of literary character and literary value depend. When we reduce David’s consciousness of being an object of others’ gazes to the encounters with Murdstone and Creakle, we overlook the novel’s singular meditation on the changing nature of visibility and publicness. The scene of David’s self-conscious grieving for his mother embodies succinctly the productive tensions around feeling, performance, and audience that Dickens explores in this novel. Having learned of his mother’s passing while he is away at school, David becomes aware of his emotions and their signification as he awaits his return home for the funeral. “I stood on a chair when I was left alone,” he recalls, “and looked into the glass to see how red my eyes were, and how sorrowful my face” (118). Interested in the bodily signs of grief, he is equally conscious of how his grieving body might be read by his classmates, and how his experience marks him out for distinction. I am sensible of having felt that a dignity attached to me among the rest of the boys, and that I was important in my affliction. If ever child were stricken with sincere grief, I was. But I remember that this importance was a kind of satisfaction to me, when I walked in the playground that afternoon while the boys were in school. When I saw them glancing at me out of the windows, as they went up to their classes, I felt distinguished, and looked more melancholy, and walked slower. (118)

Jaffe reads David’s performance as self-protective: “Conscious of his ability to manipulate appearance, David feels not so much his own grief as the desire to present an appearance of grief to others. To have others see him truly grieving would involve the danger of objectification, but to present an appearance of grief is to avert that danger.”77 On this reading, selfconscious performance prevents objectification by enabling David to keep his real self hidden behind a façade. Surely we must take the narrator at his word, though, that his grief and his satisfaction were equally present and equally real in that moment. We are unduly suspicious, I contend, if we see a contradiction in David’s sincere sorrow and the self-consciousness with which he performs himself as grief-stricken for his classmates. His grief is sincere, as he suggests, but so is the sense of importance that he feels because the other boys single him out as special. He sees them seeing him as different and takes pleasure in being the object of their visual regard. The scene distinguishes between feeling and performance not in

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order to show them to be mutually negating, but rather to underscore the possibility of their coexistence. It formalizes the structuring consciousness of audience and self-fashioning and develops further the “optic drama” in which David has actively participated from earliest childhood.78 David’s role as storyteller at Mr. Creakle’s school, Salem House, similarly fosters his sense of the distinction to be gained from performing himself and holding others’ regard. His aristocratic friend Steerforth appoints him to this role, an honour that David views with equal parts “pride and satisfaction” and a sense of its “inconvenience” when he must resume a story despite feeling indisposed (88). Profiting from the imaginative resources of his childhood reading, much as Caleb Williams mines his own, David rehearses the stories that he read in his father’s library where he sought refuge from the Murdstones’ violence. Drawing on a cache of mostly eighteenth-century novels – Roderick Random, Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones – David regales the small audience of his school friends with stories in which “[he] had a profound faith,” and that he told in what he describes as a “simple, earnest manner of narrating … and these qualities went a long way” (88). He learns to entertain by means of the resources of his imagination spun into a particular narrative style, a skill that he continues to hone at various stages of his history. As he suggests in remarking later that “some main points in the character I shall unconsciously develop … in writing my life, were gradually forming all this while” (163), his facility with narrative would lead directly to his future career as an author. There is more to the Salem House performance, though, than simply the cultivation of the skills that would make him a writer. As with his multifaceted experience of grief, much of the satisfaction he draws from this episode turns on the reception he receives from his audience. He first frames that response solely in relation to Steerforth: explaining his reason for persisting in the role even when it felt tiresome, David remarks, “I was moved by no interested or selfish motive, nor … by fear of him. I admired and loved him, and his approval was return enough” (89). At first blush this comment simply reflects David’s deep love of Steerforth, which makes him pliable and devoted. It attests to the substantial and, as Agnes will later suggest, “dangerous” sway (358) that Steerforth holds over his ingenuous friend. David’s subsequent elaboration of the pleasure he takes from his storytelling role, though, opens up another facet of the experience, indicating that his desire for approval and awareness of audience are not limited to the response of this one influential friend: “But the being cherished as a kind of plaything in my room, and the consciousness that this accomplishment

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of mine was bruited about among the boys, and attracted a good deal of notice to me though I was the youngest there, stimulated me to exertion” (90). Of particular importance in this formulation is David’s awareness of himself as an object of regard and his knowledge that his accomplishment is widely discussed. He does not simply entertain; he builds with his audience affective bonds that galvanize the group, “cement … intimac[ies]” among them, and spur him on to further effort (88). Affect moves through this small collective in complex ways: David is objectified but treasured, stimulated by their notice to perform successfully, and grateful for their attention even though at times he feels inconvenienced. Sometimes their demands prove “rather hard work” (88). His storytelling gives him cultural capital “though [he] was the youngest there,” and benefits the others as well. The storytelling becomes a kind of currency among the group, focusing their attention on him and giving them something to talk about and celebrate – no small feat in a school, as David suggests, “carried on by sheer cruelty” (90). Dickens’s choice of the word “bruit” to describe the boys’ discussion of David’s accomplishment is significant here: the OED defines it in this context as “to proclaim widely, spread abroad; to make famous, to celebrate.”79 The site of David’s early celebrity is of course only among a group of boys in a second-rate school; there is no larger public in which his image might circulate, no virtual audience to acclaim his uniqueness and make him an object of their sustained regard. Dickens depicts David’s delight in the attention he receives in sufficient detail, though, to make clear that the organization of affective reception that distinguishes this early experience shares much with the celebrity culture that will develop around the protagonist when he later presents himself on the public stage as an author. David’s storytelling skills once again single him out when he later puts them to use “to entertain [his workmates], over [their] work, with some results of the old readings” (157). This performance, however, takes place under a cloud of degradation and despair: he draws on the fictions that were “fast perishing out of [his] remembrance” (157) after he has been sent by the Murdstones to work as a “little laboring hind” in Murdstone and Grinby’s bottling warehouse (149). This episode in David Copperfield has received substantial critical attention given its resemblance to Dickens’s own experience, documented in the autobiographical fragment that Forster published in his biography.80 In the context of David’s emergence as a celebrity, though, it possesses a special significance for its delineation of the performer’s relationship to his audience and the possibility for affective attachment and identification.

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Despite the “shame [he] felt in [his] position” at the warehouse and his “agony [in] … s[inking] into this companionship” (150), David learns to be “as expeditious and as skilful” at his work as the other boys and is “perfectly familiar with them” (157). He demonstrates an ability to be that which his position makes him and to engage familiarly with his workmates, but maintains at the same time an acute consciousness of the degradation he suffers. His storytelling, combined with his “conduct and manner [which] were different enough from [the others’] to place a space between us” (157), serves to reinforce the disparity that he feels from his companions. His workmates in turn reflect back his sense of his own difference by speaking of him as “the little gent” (157). There is no pleasure to be found in this difference, though, nor in this audience; they offer no praise of his accomplishment, and his effort to entertain does not apparently make him an object of collective interest. Indeed, the narrator makes no comment on the workmates’ reception of David’s stories. David knows they are conscious that he “held some station” among them (157), but that station is so low in his opinion as to be valueless. “[I] felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man,” he recalls, “crushed in my bosom” (150). The ambition for distinction and visibility that his earlier experience at Salem House had fed is quickly extinguished. For the duration of his tenure at the warehouse, there is no communal culture developed, no intimacies fostered among “the same common companions, and with the same ceaseless sense of unmerited degradation” (161–62). David finds in this venue no public ready to affirm and be valued in turn, on however small and proximate a scale that might be, and no stage on which he might emerge as a figure to be seen.

David Copperfield’s Demotic Celebrity The warehouse experience establishes that David requires an affective connection in order to value an audience’s regard, and that he must see among them an appreciation of his distinction. Much as Kit Williams and Jack Sheppard take pleasure in overhearing their remarkable achievements trumpeted among strangers, David thrives on the affirmation of an audience, though at this early stage his performance is limited to his immediate circle. Like those earlier protagonists, David too will soon hear himself “bruited about,” celebrated as a “stranger [turned] into an intimate,”81 once his accomplishments have ushered him onto the world stage. The circle at Murdstone and Grinby’s fails, by contrast, to provide even an embryonic form of this intimate public.

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Alongside their recognition of his difference, the audience must also see him as familiar enough not to be incomprehensible or threatening. In the terms of modern celebrity culture, the renowned figure must appear sufficiently similar to their audience to be recognizable as having emerged from the crowd. “Stars,” Us Magazine assures us every week: “They’re Just Like Us!”82 If as in Byron’s case, the celebrity’s birth or rank puts him out of the reach of most, his affective singularity must make him legible and desirable. Byron’s poetry, Andrew Elfenbein suggests, “offered … a ‘real’ man’s subjectivity,” what his readers perceived as “the authentic depths of a ‘real’ human psyche.”83 The renowned individual embodies the potential for an analogous spectacular emergence from among the quotidian ranks of the audience. It is a fine balance to maintain. “In part [fame] celebrates uniqueness,” Braudy observes, “and in part it requires that uniqueness be exemplary and reproducible.”84 Read in the context of celebrity culture and the media history of which that is a part – and I should add, read as an early episode in the personal history of a character whose life is refracted through the lens of his already established celebrity – David’s experience at the warehouse attains new significance: beyond a profound childhood trauma, beyond its resemblance to Dickens’s own experience, beyond its role in forming the diligent, deeply feeling character that David suggests made him an author, the warehouse episode stages the precarity of his visibility and distinction. This in and of itself is not revelatory insofar as the threat of permanent obscurity and degradation is writ large in fiction of the period: Jane Eyre risks remaining a labouring drudge for the rest of her existence, Esther Summerson might forever remain a victim to her aunt’s vindictive morality, David might never escape the Murdstones to attain a gentleman’s attire and education at Dover. What comes to the fore, by contrast, when we situate the warehouse experience in relationship to the novel’s conception of celebrity culture is the episode’s function as a key instance in the series of humiliations and triumphs, degradations and pleasures that structures the celebrity memoir of the eminent author David Copperfield. David will rise – he will become the celebrated author whom much of the civilized world is talking about – but his narrative shows us that he might have fallen farther. The threat that lies behind his relegation to a demeaned station is that, like an orphaned Paul Clifford or the hostler Hugh, David could easily sink the small distance from “laboring hind” (149) to become, as he suggests, “a little robber or a little vagabond” (157). Part of the risk that Dickens materializes in juxtaposing the Salem House triumph with the shame of Murdstone and Grinby’s turns on obscurity: the possibility

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that the promising young person will never emerge from the crowd to find assembled around him an appreciative public. The individual who fails to attract a public, as Charley Bates worries of the Artful Dodger, risks “go[ing] out … like a common prig, without no honour nor glory!”85 The greater threat that the episode reveals, insofar as it occupies so prominent a position in David’s memoir, is that contingency and risk have become integral parts of the spectacle of public life. Languishing in obscurity pales in fact by comparison with the potential sadism to which the individual exposes himself when he courts the public gaze. Not only may the celebrity fall, but he may be obliged to witness a public enjoying the spectacle of his shame. David’s detailed account of his degradation stands as a centrepiece in Dickens’s effort to direct into appropriate channels readers’ attachment to and curiosity about the life of the celebrity. In David Copperfield, Dickens works to manage the public’s perverse desire to know, the “sadistic relish,” as Rose terms it, with which an audience follows a star’s ascent.86 Dickens incorporates into the confessional narrative a series of follies and humiliations: David’s intimacies and achievements are punctuated by the spectacle of his suffering, shame, and the sometimes devastating mistakes of his youth. Crucial to the transformation that Dickens effects is his domestication of celebrity culture’s “cycle of transgression and forgiveness.”87 He works to neutralize the violence of the audience’s attachment by internalizing that violence within the narrative, realizing it as localized humiliations and failings, and making it part of the backstory of the hero’s entitlement to celebrity status. Dickens acknowledges that both forms of affective attachment – a shared joy in the hero’s feats and a seemingly insatiable curiosity about his misfortunes and the risk associated with them – together constitute the intimate bond that turns a visible individual into a celebrity. He attempts to deflect readers’ potentially perverse appetites, however, by satiating their curiosity and desire for intimate access before the celebrity has even emerged onto the public stage. That David presents a life punctuated by scenes of affective violence, triumphs, and pleasures, appears retroactively like confirmation of the renown he finally enjoys, and his narrative like the inevitable memoir the much beloved celebrity offers to his public. By means of his most intimate novel to date, capitalizing on an affective connection nurtured over the many months of serial publication and built on the premise of secrets shared and humiliations confided, Dickens recalibrates in David Copperfield the mechanisms of the celebrity of everyday life that the Newgate novel made imaginable. As I have argued, he wrests the spectacular emergence of the ordinary individual away from the domain of the low-born and criminal in order to present in its place

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an honest protagonist, one who like the criminal celebrity comes into the world armed with no special entitlement nor privileges of birth, who is similarly subject to the vagaries of socio-economic circumstance, and who aspires to distinguish himself from the crowd. This new celebrity figure also shares with his predecessors the kind of complexity and ambivalence that Barnaby Rudge made clear are now requisite to the sustained captivation of an intimate public. Dickens does more, though, than elevate and render virtuous the demotic Newgate celebrity. With David Copperfield he demonstrates that the public visibility and celebrity that Byron cultivated and Hazlitt disdained have been transformed anew; the transformations the novel registers are in fact ones that Dickens himself worked to effect. Celebrity culture on Dickens’s representation looks like a new form of p ­ ublic-making, one that appropriates structures of visibility and spectatorship for the ordinary individual who would be known. Those changes are ones that, I have argued, the Newgate school helped to effect, but in Dickens’s mid-century novel they come into focus most clearly in the distinction between the literary celebrity that David models and that of his real-life predecessor Byron.88 Cultivating intimacy with his readers by means of a confessional style with which Byron was associated, David remains unmarked by what Hazlitt calls disparagingly in The Spirit of the Age the “double privilege” of the “Noble Poet”: namely, he who possesses “all the pride of birth and genius,” “a seat in the House of Lords, [and] a niche in the Temple of Fame.”89 As we saw in the previous chapter, Byron played an integral role in the emergence of modern celebrity culture: he capitalized on the new possibilities for publicity made available by the Romantic era’s print cultural revolutions, signalling his allegiance to a new media age and the social transformations that accompanied it.90 Regardless, as Hazlitt contends, the privilege of Byron’s birth meant that on the noble poet’s example, celebrity remained firmly within the purview of the traditional ruling class. Like his Newgate contemporaries, Dickens obviates that problem by choosing for his celebrity an individual from among the ranks of the humble and insignificant. More importantly, though, Dickens inaugurates a model of celebrity that allows for the same active solicitation of audience and the same consciousness of visibility and self-fashioning for which Byron was known, without incurring the same charge of “­self-conceit.”91 To evade such an accusation Dickens sets up a public character who is defined by his “[d]eep, downright, faithful earnestness” (489) – or, as Oscar Wilde would later rephrase it, by the importance he attaches to being earnest.

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In the character of his protagonist, Dickens attests to the suggestion that “the contrast between reticent fame and ostentatious celebrity has been so trumped by the incessant preoccupation with being seen that the idea of fame without visibility seems like an unsupportable paradox.”92 Demonstrating concern for how one is seen and how one’s character is read becomes less an act of naked self-promotion – though it can always be that – than an acknowledged consciousness of reception in an era when public life is increasingly visible and mass-mediated. Disdain for ­self-promotion is itself integrated into this new media system. As we have seen, in modern celebrity culture the denunciation of fame and publicity “necessarily follows in the track of fame itself.”93 Even these premises, though, Dickens takes further: through the fictional construct of the earnest, modest, yet prodigiously successful literary celebrity he casts the hero’s pleasure in seeing himself being seen as less a sign of vanity than a mark of social conscience. The eminent author’s determination to engage his contemporary audience and earn their approval is not, on the novel’s representation, a crass bid for popularity but rather the logical extension of a life of “close observation” and earnest engagement with the world. His watching and being watched having paid off, David’s success enables him to use his public visibility and currency in service of social progress and the greater good. Confirming the permeation of contemporaneity in all facets of nineteenth-century fiction, and the awareness that, as I suggested in the context of the silver-fork school, public opinion embodies the pulse of social change, David asserts the necessity of audience approval to confirm the social impact of his writing. Once he has met with success as an author and has had “praise … sound[ing] in [his] ears,” he observes: Having some foundation for believing, by this time, that nature and accident had made me an author, I pursued my vocation with confidence. Without such assurance I should certainly have left it alone, and bestowed my energy on some other endeavour. I should have tried to find out what nature and accident really had made me, and to be that, and nothing else. (671)

David’s emphasis on the contingent forces that have made him an author echoes Teufelsdröckh’s consciousness in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833–34) of the historical age in which he finds himself, a construct that is itself, it is worth noting, an underappreciated echo of the engagement of contemporaneity and historical contingency exemplified in the silver-fork and Newgate schools. Essential to Teufelsdröckh’s ability to correlate what Carlyle calls his “inward Capability” with the “outward Environment of Fortune,” the “new time” and “new conditions” of the society in which

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he finds himself, the “young man of high talent” must learn, famously, to “Know what thou canst work at.”94 Negating Jack Sheppard’s perverse assumption of Carlyle’s mantra, David takes it straight. He too frames the work he is suited for as contingent on a confluence of capability and circumstance that is necessarily refracted through the lens of the age, society’s “new time” and “new conditions.” Reiterating Carlyle’s conception of individual spiritual purpose as a duly selfless, historically engaged form of work, Dickens has Agnes exclaim, in response to David’s musing on the possibility of leaving England for further travels, “Your growing reputation and success enlarge your power of doing good; and if I could spare my brother … perhaps the time could not” (821).95 Alongside the quasi-spiritual inflection of his sense of vocation, though, David acknowledges that worldly success and the “encouragement” he receives from the “general voice” (836) are necessary to his ongoing commitment to this pursuit. The author depends on the public for its “assurance” of the value of his “endeavour.” Thus, while David Copperfield represents the protagonist’s self-conscious engagement of his readers and concern with public notice as motivated by a higher sense of purpose, it simultaneously admits – and does so openly, as I have suggested – that he enjoys staging himself for an audience and in fact regards the public’s reception of his work and persona as a crucial motive to his performance. Fame matters. This acknowledgement confirms Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s contention in the dedication to Paul Clifford (1830) that the currents of contemporary culture and the opinion of one’s immediate public hold more value than the immortal fame that Hazlitt championed little more than a decade earlier. As we saw in Chapter 3, Bulwer asserts that, “in the literary world, as in the natural, the tide and the hour can scarcely be neglected, even by the hardiest adventurer. … [N]ow when … the present is to [people] that matter of reference and consideration which the future was with their more dreaming forefathers – the fame that is only posthumous, has become to all, but to poets, a very frigid and impotent inducement.”96 Bulwer figures fame as the synchronic movements of contemporaneity: the tide embodies the present – this very “hour” – and the currents of public discourse through which the present age is discerned. On David Copperfield’s representation, the “hard[y] adventurer” takes as a “matter of reference” the public circulation of ideas and cultural forms that define the present moment, and equally, the communally formed image of his works and character. To have his finger on the pulse of the age doesn’t require him to present himself as a visible figure; to position himself as a cultural authority, though, does. To “enlarge [his] power of doing good,” as Agnes counsels, he must solicit the

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public gaze and submit himself to the appropriations and identifications of his audience. The fact that he may draw pleasure from such visibility in no way nullifies the potential sincerity of his address. In this way, Dickens fashions a new model of celebrity hero for a massmediated age, one that dispenses with the vice and scandal of both Byronic and Newgate celebrity, represents as duty rather than self-conceit a conscious embrace of spectacle and public performance, and explodes the Romantic conflict between what Hazlitt deemed “immortal … fame” and “popularity.”97 Dickens breaks down the oppositions between sincerity and performance, reticence and publicity that previously structured discussions of fame and cultural value in order to demonstrate instead the sincerity of the celebrity’s solicitation of the public gaze and consciousness of his audience’s approval and attachment. As I have argued, David acknowledges throughout his history that he desires to see himself being seen and distinguished. There is nothing buried about his ambition to become a public man. The publicness of his fame goes hand in hand with the “optic drama” of his personal history. Hearing “tidings of [his] growing reputation” from the Continent and as far afield as the Antipodes (796), the mechanisms of print culture and publicity having given him currency and made him present to the widest possible audience, David offers to his virtual public the intimate story of his coming to celebrity. David Copperfield – and David Copperfield – demonstrate for us the profound media transformations that mark the public figure in the nineteenth century, and the newly imagined celebrity available to the humblest individual who would see himself on the public stage.

Notes 1 See, for example, John Bowen, Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971); Steven Marcus, Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965); Kim Ian Michasiw, “Barnaby Rudge: The Since of the Fathers,” ELH 56 (1989): 571–92; Alison Case, “Against Scott: The Antihistory of Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge,” CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 19.2 (1990): 127–45. 2 I draw the term “autoethnography” from James Buzard’s Disorienting Fictions: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), which offers an important theorization of relations of perception and observation in the nineteenth-century novel to which I will return.

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3 The most influential versions of this argument are D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), and Mary Poovey’s Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 4 James Chandler, An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 16. 5 Leo Braudy, “Knowing the Performer from the Performance: Fame, Celebrity, and Literary Studies,” PMLA 126.4 (2011): 1070–75, 1071. 6 Clara Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 8. 7 Chandler, Archaeology of Sympathy, 12. 8 Ibid. 9 David opens his memoir with the observation, “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show” (Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1). Further references to the novel will be noted parenthetically in the text. 10 Natalie Schroeder, “Jack Sheppard and Barnaby Rudge: Yet More ‘Humbug’ from a ‘Jolter Head,’” Studies in the Novel 18.1 (1986): 27–35, 34, 28. Other critics who remark the parallels between the two novels include Keith Hollingsworth, The Newgate Novel, 1830–1847: Bulwer, Ainsworth, Dickens, & Thackeray (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963), and Sylvère Monod, Dickens the Novelist (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968). 11 Schroeder, “Jack Sheppard and Barnaby Rudge,” 34. 12 See Schroeder, “Jack Sheppard and Barnaby Rudge,” 28–33, for an account of the novels’ many similarities. These include the fact that Barnaby Rudge uses the same central pairing as Jack Sheppard of the honest master/idle apprenticeturned-criminal, and endows key characters with analogous positions, relationships, and traits, such as the master’s shrewish wife who gets caught up in the violence, the apprentice’s romantic interest in his master’s daughter, the master’s intimacy with a mother closely associated with the central crimes, and the apprentice’s ambition to make a name for himself through his crimes. 13 Matthew Buckley, “Sensations of Celebrity: Jack Sheppard and the Mass Audience,” Victorian Studies (Spring 2002): 423–63, 426. 14 Phillip Collins, Dickens and Crime (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 258. 15 Charles Dickens, “The Author’s Introduction to the Third Edition (1841),” Oliver Twist, or, The Parish Boy’s Progress (London: Penguin, 2002), 456. 16 Charles Dickens, “Preface,” Barnaby Rudge (London: Penguin, 1986), 40. Further references to the novel will be noted parenthetically in the text. 17 Carlyle developed this model in Sartor Resartus and expanded it, subsequent to Barnaby Rudge’s publication, in On Heroes and Hero-Worship. Michasiw reads the scene of Hugh “assum[ing] … the robes of prophecy” as explicitly Carlylean, and more specifically as reflecting Dickens’s use of Carlyle “to fight his way past the past,” namely Scott’s historical fiction (“Barnaby Rudge,” 588).

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18 Jon Mee, “Barnaby Rudge,” in A Companion to Charles Dickens, ed. David Paroissien (Somerset, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2008), 338–47, 345. 19 See, for example, Simon Joyce, “Resisting Arrest/Arresting Resistance: Crime Fiction, Cultural Studies, and the ‘Turn to History,’” Criticism 37 (1995): 309–35; Thomas J. Rice, “The Politics of Barnaby Rudge,” The Changing World of Charles Dickens, ed. Robert Giddings (London: Vision Press, 1983), 51–74. 20 Michasiw, “Barnaby Rudge,” 587. 21 [William Maginn], “Mr. Edward Lytton Bulwer’s Novels; and Remarks on NovelWriting,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 1 (June 1830): 509–32, 515. 22 On the historical consciousness of Scott’s Kenilworth and its pageantry, see Timothy Campbell, Historical Style: Fashion and the New Mode of History, 1740–1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 213–22. 23 Amid the wealth of scholarship on Victorian gender ideologies, of particular relevance here is Ina Ferris’s discussion of Victorian contestations of the category of the gentleman, in “Thackeray and the Ideology of the Gentleman,” The Columbia History of the British Novel, ed. John Richetti (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 407–28, and her study of the gendering of Scott’s authorship, in The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). See also James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). 24 Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, 10, paraphrasing Jeremy Bentham. 25 Ibid. 26 Buckley, “Sensations of Celebrity,” 427. 27 Chandler, Archaeology of Sympathy, 13. 28 Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, 10. 29 Ibid. 30 Tuite comments that “Byron’s celebrity is not ultimately about Byron’s vanity or intention. … In fact, celebrity is more aptly identified with the paradigmatically alienated self” (Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, 8). As I argued in Chapter 3, protagonists such as Caleb Williams and Jack Sheppard embody a demotic inflection of this structure to the extent that they find themselves alienated from the image that is repeatedly projected on to them, and subject to the making and remaking of an audience. 31 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised ed. (New York: Verso, 2006). 32 In both processional scenes, the authors describe the irresistible movement of the mob in terms of the sea, using strikingly similar language. See Schroeder’s discussion of the “mob-sea metaphor” in the two novels (“Jack Sheppard and Barnaby Rudge,” 31). 33 Mee, “Barnaby Rudge,” 345. 34 Jacqueline Rose, “The Cult of Celebrity,” London Review of Books 20.16 (August 1998): 10–13, 10. 35 Ibid., 11. 36 Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, 3.

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3 7 Rose, “The Cult of Celebrity,” 13. 38 Mee, “Barnaby Rudge,” 340. See also Michasiw, “Barnaby Rudge,” 582. 39 Mee, “Barnaby Rudge,” 340. 40 Matthew Buckley, “Refugee Theatre: Melodrama and Modernity’s Loss,” Theatre Journal 61 (2009): 175–90, 186. 41 Michasiw, “Barnaby Rudge,” 578. 42 Ibid., 577. 43 Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, 8. 44 Rose, “The Cult of Celebrity,” 13. 45 Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), viii. 46 Ibid., x. 47 Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Vintage, 1997), 515. 48 Audrey Jaffe, Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 113. 49 Poovey, Uneven Developments, 119. 50 Miller, The Novel and the Police, 215. 51 Ibid., 207. 52 Ibid., viii. 53 Poovey, Uneven Developments, 91, 89. 54 Ibid., 100. 55 The term is Chandler’s, referring here to Dickens’s “handling” in David Copperfield of point of view, visual framing, and spectatorship that together confirm why Dickens’s novels have long been credited with anticipating the technologies of early cinema. See Chandler, Archaeology of Sympathy, 13–14. 56 See, for example, Jaffe’s reading of David’s quasi-omniscient narration as distancing and self-protective: “as narrator, David is always detached from the self he pictures, by virtue of picturing it” (Vanishing Points, 121). 57 Juliet John in Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 174, gestures in this direction in invoking the “relationship between the conscious performer of self and his audience,” but in her reading of David Copperfield, that performance is attributed to the “Byronic deviant” Steerforth, rather than David. 58 I draw the term “autoethnography” once again from Buzard, Disorienting Fictions. 59 Braudy, Frenzy of Renown, 3. 60 Rose, “The Cult of Celebrity,” 10–11. 61 Braudy, Frenzy of Renown, 8. 62 William Hazlitt, “On the Living Poets,” Lectures on the English Poets: Delivered at the Surrey Institute (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1818), 283–331, 283. 63 As is well known, John Forster first published Dickens’s autobiographical fragment in The Life of Charles Dickens, which he prefaced by emphasizing the similarity of David Copperfield’s difficult boyhood experiences with those of his author: “For, the poor little lad … was indeed himself.” See John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, vol. 1 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1872), 28.

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64 Braudy, Frenzy of Renown, 399. 6 5 My point here is similar to Joseph Litvak’s argument in Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), but whereas Litvak takes the protagonist’s ­self-performance as the text’s buried secret, on the model of the ideology critiques to which I referred above, I argue that the protagonist’s open desire to be seen and recognized – a desire almost always accompanied by protestations of sincerity and humility – indicates that we have not yet fully grasped the Victorian novel’s account of visibility, performance, and selfhood. 66 Braudy, Frenzy of Renown, 399. 67 William Harrison Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard: A Romance (London: Bentley, 1839), vol. 3, 155. I discuss Hazlitt’s essays on fame in Chapter 3. 68 Chandler, Archaeology of Sympathy, 12. Chandler refers to the “system of looking” – especially “looking at lookers looking” – that organizes the sentimental mode which, he argues, emerges in the context of eighteenth-century print culture (11–12). Chandler focuses on the personal and intersubjective rather than the public and performative, but we might extend his analysis to the collective consciousness and specularity of celebrity culture, given the complex “relay of regard” that organizes it. 69 Ibid., 12. 70 Ibid., 14. 71 Miller, The Novel and the Police, 219. 72 Jaffe, Vanishing Points, 116. 73 Ibid., 19. 74 Ibid., 117. 75 William Hazlitt, “On Different Sorts of Fame,” The Round Table: A Collection of Essays on Literature, Men, and Manners (Edinburgh: Constable, 1817): 56–66, 57. 76 Jon Klancher debunks the myth of the Romantics’ wholesale disregard of audience in his influential The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), but I would contend that the premise underlying that myth – that subjective autonomy and literary value cannot coexist with self-fashioning and a bid for popularity – persists in our critical analyses of nineteenth-century fiction. 77 Jaffe, Vanishing Points, 120. 78 Chandler, Archaeology of Sympathy, 14. 79 “bruit, v.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2018. 80 See Forster, Life of Charles Dickens, 30–50. On the relationship of David Copperfield to Dickens’s autobiographical fragment, see Alexander Welsh, From Copyright to Copperfield: The Identity of Dickens (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 81 Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, 13. 82 Us Magazine Online, August 2018. 83 Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 48, 14.

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84 Braudy, Frenzy of Renown, 5. 85 Dickens, Oliver Twist, 364. 86 Rose, “The Cult of Celebrity,” 13. 87 Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity, 10. 88 It is no coincidence that the Byronic character Steerforth attracts a good deal of the novel’s animus: Dickens attempts here to sever the public’s attachment to the figure of the socially savvy aristocrat, and equally, I argue, to outmode the model of celebrity aligned with Byron himself. On Steerforth’s association with Byron, see John, Dickens’s Villains; David Simpson, Fetishism and Imagination: Dickens, Melville, Conrad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); William Harvey, “Charles Dickens and the Byronic Hero,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 24.3 (1969): 305–16; Mario Praz, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, trans. Angus Davidson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956). On Byronism as a phase that David as aspiring author must outgrow, see Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians. 89 William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age: or, Contemporary Portraits (London: Colburn, 1825), 177–78. 90 See Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity; Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Tom Mole, ed., Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). On the period’s print cultural transformations, see Paul Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). 91 Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, 166. 92 Braudy, “Knowing the Performer,” 1072. 93 Braudy, Frenzy of Renown, 8. 94 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 93, 94, 126 (emphasis original). 95 As Gwendolyn Needham suggests in “The Undisciplined Heart of David Copperfield,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 9.2 (1954): 81–107, David’s period of self-exile following the death of his young wife resembles Teufelsdrokh’s spiritual crisis in Sartor Resartus: “Dickens has his hero undergo a period of despair and searching somewhat comparable to Carlyle’s ‘Everlasting Nay’ and ‘Everlasting Yea’ in Sartor Resartus” (103). 96 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1830), viii–ix (emphasis original). 97 Hazlitt, “On the Living Poets,” 283.

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Part III

Hypercurrency and the Sensation Novel

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chapter 5

Affective Distance and the Temporality of Sensation Fiction

For a time our rage after criminal heroines owned certain bounds. It began with a frenzy for supercilious or violent damsels, rampagious young women whose waywardness and perversity, that is their selfishness, folly, and slightly-veiled coarseness came to be harped upon as their chief attractions. We have long passed these respectable bounds. Falseness, dishonesty, murder even, are rapidly claiming our most intense sympathies. It is the old Jack Sheppard mania, with female Jack Sheppards. – H. K., “A Word of Remonstrance with Some Novelists” (1863)1

William Makepeace Thackeray’s death in December 1863 occurred at the height of the sensation novel mania, a coincidence that would be unremarkable, save that one reviewer used the occasion to link him to the latest literary phenomenon. The critic’s objective was not to suggest, as we might expect, that Thackeray’s iconic social climber and poisoner, Becky Sharp, inspired the criminal heroines of the sensation school; on the contrary, the reviewer invokes the late novelist to “poin[t] out the marked contrast between a writer like Thackeray, and the Eliots, Braddons, Collinses, and other favourites of the circulating library.”2 Writing for the London Quarterly Review, the reviewer laments Thackeray’s death in particular because the novelist might have been able to cure the current “epidemic” in fiction-writing: We fear that we shall find that the loss of Thackeray is specially to be deplored, because of the rise of a school formed after an entirely different model, and inculcating very opposite lessons from those which it was his constant study to enforce. His course as a novelist began with efforts to counteract the morbid tendencies of such books as Bulwer’s Eugene Aram and Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard; both of which, though very dissimilar in some respects, were alike objectionable as serving to throw a romantic interest round vice. An epidemic of the same character has recently 241

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Fashionable Fictions broken out with even increased violence; and we know no one who could have done more to restore the diseased appetite of the reading public to a more healthy tone.3

Thackeray’s early career was indeed forged in reaction against the Newgate school, but whether he succeeded in “restor[ing]” the public’s “diseased appetite” is less certain. Despite Thackeray’s intention to disenchant the Newgate model with his novel Catherine (1839–40), for example, by writing a story so violent and repellant that readers would lose their taste for criminal romance, he confessed to developing a “‘sneaking kindness’ for his heroine,” a murderer.4 Sheldon Goldfarb suggests that Thackeray depicted Catherine “almost affectionately.”5 Similarly, we might propose that Becky Sharp, who by the end of Vanity Fair (1847–48) has escaped punishment and re-established herself in society with her irrepressible fascination barely attenuated, possesses something of the scandalous allure that Thackeray vehemently denounced in Newgate criminals, as we saw in Chapter 3.6 The analogy that the London Quarterly Review posits between Newgate and sensation fiction, with Thackeray serving as the hinge that articulates them, invites us to reflect on how each school served in its historical moment to materialize the “appetite of the reading public,” and thus the currents running through the contemporary. The reviewer’s comment brings into focus as well the spectacularized violence that both schools stage as emerging from the everyday. As I suggested in the Introduction, this fiction develops narrative forms that embody what Matthew Buckley calls the “powerfully modern feeling” that the “extraordinary [might] emerge  … from the fabric of the mundane.”7 In the sensation novel, the “mundane” is transposed from its location in the Newgate school, namely, the milieus of the poor and disenfranchised, to inhabit another kind of space. In a review of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s fiction, Henry James uses a communal “our” to remark that the new site of ordinariness out of which the spectacular might emerge is immediately before us: the sensation novel has “introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors.”8 I will argue that the immediacy that James figures spatially and temporally, a nearness both here and now, alerts us to the sensation novel’s return to the formal innovations of earlier fiction of contemporaneity, and specifically its engagement with the principle of currency that the early nineteenth-century novel conceptualizes by means of fashion. I will contend, moreover, that the sensation novel’s revival of an intense commitment to rendering contemporaneity in narrative goes

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hand-in-hand with its probing of the affective states associated with proximity and relations of distance more generally. The sensation novel integrates with narrative forms for rendering currency and obsolescence, that is, an exploration of what Mark Salber Phillips terms historical distance and the modes of affective engagement produced in and by the present.9 My aim in this final chapter is to elaborate the insight we might gain into the history of the novel and its transformations across the nineteenth century when we examine the collective significance of fiction that mobilized fashion’s idiom of change to figure the vicissitudes of contemporary life. At key moments in the century, novelists embraced, rather than circumvented, the phantasmagoria of their modern world, exploring the narrative possibilities to be generated out of a newly sharpened experience of evanescence and spectacle. By drawing into focus the homologies among novels that worked to conceptualize the “presence of the present,”10 manifest in the currents of change running through the social collective and the chaotic energies of everyday life, this study charts a different path for the history of the novel than those with which we’ve long been familiar: it attends to the development of narrative forms commensurate with what many individuals experienced as the spectacular, ephemeral significations of their modern world. Fashion materialized an idiom of change in the nineteenth century which novelists used to articulate an aesthetic of contemporary life as vibrant, spectral, and mediated through a vastly expanded print cultural market. In this context, as I have argued, a consciousness of publicness became increasingly visual and performative. Plotting the sensation novel into this story allows us to recognize its insistence on narrative immediacy as a commitment shared with other nineteenth-century schools; it expands our understanding of the stakes and methods of the sensation novel’s conceptualization of the present. Critical scholarship has been virtually unanimous in concluding that the sensation novel “encapsulated the experience of modernity” in its age, which Jenny Bourne Taylor describes as “the sense of continuous and rapid change, of shocks, thrills, intensity, excitement.”11 Nicholas Daly contends similarly that “what [sensation] novels aimed at was bringing the present to life.”12 As has been well remarked, part of the sensation novel’s project of animation turned on what Henry Mansel famously termed its “preaching to the nerves.”13 Mansel accuses sensation novelists of appealing to “the cravings of a diseased appetite,”14 stimulating readers’ visceral responses by bringing electrifying stories to “[their] own doors,” as James suggests. What I will argue, though, is that the present that the sensation novel animates is far from homogeneous in its effects or affects: it is striated by an “odd jumble

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of contradictions, of sympathies and antipathies,” a mishmash of attractions and repulsions that, in a different context, William Hazlitt associated with fashion.15 Sensation fiction renders the felt experience of contemporaneity as something more inconsistent and disordered than a mere galvanic experience of stimulation and shock. The Lady Audleys, Count Foscos, and Aurora Floyds of the sensation school do more than thrill us with their crimes and secrets. As characters, they tap into the circuit of “pleasure” and “perversion” that Jacqueline Rose identifies with celebrity culture,16 and that as I argued in relation to Charles Dickens, comes by mid-century to organize public life and the relation of individuals and collectives. Sensation fiction stitches back into the novel genre the tantalizing spectacle of crime and violence from the Newgate school, juxtaposing it with the affective absorption that fiction like Dickens’s had taught readers to associate with identification and sympathy. The mash-up that the sensation novel produces serves to expose the contradictory attractions and allegiances that underpin the social collective; it draws our attention to the unevenness of the customary associations and imagery held in common that materialize our place in the social. The sensation novel revisits the narrative models of earlier schools to open up for investigation the dimensions of distance that structure our relationship to history, even when the historical moment in question is the present and the distances figured are immediacy and proximity. Like silverfork novelists, authors of the sensation school are “historians of the contemporary,” to borrow Richard Cronin’s phrase once again; they turn the historian’s lens on their own moment rather than an earlier age.17 The sensation novel’s distinction from earlier fiction of contemporaneity emerges in its articulation of the dynamics of affective experience characterizing the present. Exemplifying Phillips’s concept of “the plasticity of distance,” as well as the “fundamental ambivalence” that Amanda Anderson identifies in “mid- and late-Victorian approaches to detachment,” the sensation novel does not foreclose on the possible affective responses that the present might elicit.18 In fact, on the sensation novel’s representation, it is not possible to do so. Sensation fiction underscores the ideological contradictions that inhere in contemporary forms of belonging to the social collective, and the planes of affective experience and material connectedness that those forms simultaneously occlude and make visible. Taking Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd as my principal examples, both of which were published in 1862, I argue that Braddon represents modernity as rife with incongruous affects that her fiction explores but does not resolve. She aligns the present with affective

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excess and underscores the perpetual tension between identification with and alienation from the practices that contemporary life simultaneously offers and prescribes. Moving beyond those critical readings that try to decide the question of her fiction’s subversion or reinforcement of social norms, I contend that Braddon keeps the affective incongruities of the protagonist’s case in play. Her novels do not simply forestall a tidy resolution but articulate the extreme contradictions that characterize the forms of belonging governing contemporary experience. Setting her fiction into the generic context that I have mapped out in this study allows us to read her ambiguous plots and characters as part of an affective structure that she represents as irreconcilable. Such a reframing, moreover, points out the futility of our critical efforts to uncover the buried truths of her fiction in order to decide their political import: her novels make those contradictions their motive force and explicit content, using them to point to the larger material forces engendering the available states of being in the present age.

Sensation Fiction’s Dual Temporality The sensation novel is a genre at once up-to-date and recycled, modern and regressive. Its dual temporality emerges along very much the same lines as those I identify with the early nineteenth-century novel of fashion: the sensation novel is seen, on the one hand, to be steeped in contemporaneity, date-stamped by its attention to concerns of the moment, and on the other, to be too insubstantial to engage history meaningfully and illuminate its broad movements. The sensation novel is at once too current and too inflexible, meant to last no longer than “the fashions of the current season,”19 as Mansel insists, yet simultaneously stagnated by its moribund salvaging from obsolete genres and its fascination with the narrow spectacle of upper-middle-class life. Eva Badowska suggests that the genre’s self-conscious currency made it appear to its critics “repulsively modern and inevitably ephemeral.”20 At the same time, though, many nineteenth-century reviewers deemed it a throwback that merely recycled earlier fiction instead of offering something new. Richard Nemesvari and Lisa Surridge maintain that the sensation novel was viewed by many in the period as “a regression, a degrading step backwards which undermined the hard-earned respectability of the Victorian novel. The kind of romanticism it seemed to encourage ran counter to the serious exploration of society which realism held out as both its justification and its artistic goal.”21 Reviewing the sensation phenomenon in 1870, for example, Alfred Austin remarks that the “Sensational School of to-day

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(of which so much has been said) is no novel phenomenon, but only the continuation of a school which has existed from time immemorial.”22 Tracing its ancestry from classical and medieval romance through gothic and Newgate fiction, Austin concludes that the sensation school is little more than a knock-off. Its only innovation, he suggests, is its immersion in proximate rather than far-flung regions of romance. Nineteenth-century reviewers took exception as well to the genre’s crossgendered criminal protagonists. In the epigraph with which this chapter opens, novelist Henrietta Keddie expresses dismay about the reading public’s “frenzy for … violent damsels, [and] rampagious young women,” which the sensation novel has exacerbated by turning its protagonists into “female Jack Sheppards.”23 The prevalence of female criminals in sensation fiction was taken by many reviewers as a sign of the decline of the English novel and the corruption of “British virtue [and] … the future of the British home.”24 “No novel is now complete,” one critic remarks, “without a specimen of a bad woman of a peculiar kind.”25 That Keddie’s dismay turns on the unruly passions of female protagonists signals for us another form of recycling that arises in relation to the sensation school, this time in the familiar terms of its critical reception. In sounding the alarm about the deleterious influence of sensation fiction, that is, reviewers rehearsed a well-worn eighteenth-century line of argument about the dangers of novelreading, especially for young women.26 Anxiety about the destabilization of gender norms that novel-reading would effect demonstrates the persistence well into the nineteenth century of the highly charged association of “[w]omen, novels and reading.”27 If sensation fiction seemed to some of its detractors like a mere retread of earlier genres, then, its defenders might complain that the critical response was scarcely different. At the same time that sensation novels were seen to offer nothing new, however, they were singled out by detractors and supporters alike for their utter contemporaneity: the school’s currency and proximity to the reader were among its trademark features. Austin observes, for example, that “in the novels of the time which are called sensational, … [the] story is always laid in the present day. They are invariably supposed to depict contemporary incidents and contemporary manners.”28 To exemplify the genre’s currency, Austin offers an hypothetical case: If the novel is printed about 1860, care is taken to inform us, early in its pages, that ‘three days after this, the 14th of June, 1856,’ such an event occurred to the heroine; and then, to bring us still nearer, we are informed, a little further on, that it is late in the August of 1857. The reader may thus well hope to reach 1860 before the end of the third volume.29

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On Austin’s account, the sensation novel’s contemporaneity is almost asymptotic, coming as close to the reader’s present as possible. Sensation fiction, like the Newgate novel but unlike silver-fork fiction, was typically serialized in monthly or weekly journals; serialization allowed novelists to articulate the presentness of the present on a measure more finely calibrated than that of silver-fork fiction, which, though its heyday was only a generation or two earlier, was published almost exclusively in threevolume format.30 In the sensation school, the result is a narrative hypercurrency that renders the novel genre as to-the-moment and in sync with readers’ “feeling of the present” as print technologies allow.31

Aurora Floyd ’s Fashion Time In sensation fiction, narrative events are usually specified to the exact date, the time span between events is carefully noted and often crucial to the plot, and the action set in the immediate present.32 Daly suggests that the genre’s “highlighting of clock time, location, and motion is not incidental to the suspense for which these novels are famous, but its precondition.”33 “What the sensation novel was preaching,” he contends, “was a new timediscipline: to be immersed in the plot of a sensation novel, to have one’s nerves quiver with those of the hero or heroine, was to be wired into a new mode of temporality.”34 Daly’s notion of “time-discipline,” which he attributes in part to the mid-century standardization of railway time,35 bears the hallmarks of the idiom of fashion that, as I have suggested, permeates novelists’ articulation of contemporaneity from the early nineteenth century onward. One might suggest that the mid-century technologies which enable temporal synchronization across the nation in the form of, say, a Bradshaw’s railway schedule or a telegraphic message, simply elaborated the new historical consciousness that individuals had already internalized by means of the fashion system. As we saw in the Introduction, Timothy Campbell argues that the late eighteenth-century fashion system “increased [Britons’] sensitivity” to the annual “cycles of [dress] fashion,” producing a consciousness of the “now-familiar dynamics of currency and obsolescence in everyday commercial life.”36 The sensation novel’s attention to duration and the temporal interval between quotidian moments ties it closely to fashion’s cyclical rhythms and the shared sense of a collective movement together in history that Campbell attributes to fashion time.37 The sensation novel regularly articulates time-consciousness in an idiom of fashion. Dress fashion is indeed a pervasive signifier in sensation fiction, most obviously with reference to the instabilities of class and social

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identity that Bleak House’s Sir Leicester Dedlock, for one, would attribute to a levelling society. Tabitha Sparks remarks, for example, that sensation fiction shows “how modern fashion could obscure (if not unambiguously transform) the status of a servant-girl.”38 Braddon’s Lady Audley is the epitome of dress fashion’s power to transform identity: she inhabits her luxurious silks and furs with an ease that belies her humble origins and, more importantly, her other identity as the wife of a penniless dragoon turned colonial prospector. Lady Audley exemplifies Elizabeth Wilson’s observation that, by the nineteenth century, “[d]ress could act as display or mask – or both.”39 Sparks ties the “unreliability and ambiguity of social significations such as finery” to the shifting hierarchies of commercial modernity. “Confusing appearances in sensation novels often express what is terrifying about these fictions: the moral chaos effected by this class confusion.”40 That confusion pertains, moreover, to mobility down as well as up the social ladder. Lady Isabel Vane and Richard Hare of Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861), for example, both plummet in status when they disguise themselves as governess and stable hand, respectively. As Wood illustrates with Richard, however, downward self-fashioning is more easily atoned for than that which elevates: once his name has been cleared of a wrongful murder charge, Richard resumes his gentry status as effortlessly as he doffs his working-class attire. Fashion’s performativity thus often “makes it smack of inauthenticity,” especially in relation to identity; fashion seems to function, Anne Hollander observes, “just to make people tell lies, to conceal or display things for bad reasons.”41 This association with artifice and trickery, though, obscures the temporal and customary bases of fashion that underlie individual desire and organize social collectives. As we saw in the Introduction, Adam Smith contends in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) that the “principles [of] custom and fashion … extend their dominion over our judgments concerning beauty of every kind.”42 Our perception of that which attracts and pleases takes form by means of the “conjunction[s]” with which custom familiarizes us and which it imbues with “the idea of something genteel and magnificent.”43 On Smith’s theory, fashion organizes the individual’s relationship to the social as well as their own experience of taste and desire. He shows, moreover, that all shifts in taste are products of fashion’s movements, making fashionable change integral to community consciousness and a shared conception of the spirit of the age. The sensation novel actively engages with both fashion’s social and temporal dimensions. Fashion figures in sensation fiction, much as it did in the silver-fork school, as a showroom of contemporary styles and a medium

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of self-styling, but more importantly, as the signifier of the present. Even those novels that lay their emphasis on fashion’s potential for duplicity indicate that its dual temporality – fashion’s conflicted affiliation with both transience and intransigence – stands at the heart of the social instabilities on which they focus. The fantasy of fashion’s transformative power operates, that is, by means of status-inflected customary associations that Smith shows to be as arbitrary as they are irresistible.44 Fashion is contingent and capricious, but its authority is intractable. In the sensation novel, fashion’s ideal of “perpetual currency” infuses not only the aspirational dreams of servants, but as we will see, the affects of contemporary life.45 In Aurora Floyd, Braddon substantiates the constitutive relationship among fashion, custom, and time by linking the celebrity-like allure of her eponymous heroine with the modern temporality that the character embodies. The daughter of a wealthy Scottish banker and a second-rate Lancashire actress, and thus the product of mercantile savvy crossed with lower-class pluck, Aurora displays a self-possession and command that set her apart from her better-born peers. Her ascendancy in the novel, though, works less to displace the scions of a stultified aristocracy than to suggest the irrelevance of such conventional status distinctions in the face of a figure whose fascination and verve resemble that of the modern celebrity: Her beauty was of that luxuriant and splendid order which has always most effect upon the masses, and the fascination of her manner, was almost akin to sorcery in its power over simple people. … Surely the secret of her power to charm must have been the wonderful vitality of her nature, by virtue of which she carried life and animal spirits about with her as an atmosphere, till dull people grew merry by reason of her contagious presence.46

Aurora’s luxuriant beauty and bewitching manner exert an affective force like that of magnetic attraction, making her a constant object of everyone’s gaze and a galvanizing figure in her community. The narrator here restricts Aurora’s “power” to an effect “over simple people,” but the novel shows it to extend to individuals of all ranks. The heroine proves herself, moreover, quite comfortable in her role as adored and captivating object, receiving the attentions of her suitors with a quiet dignity, and the admiration of her better-born female friends (and sometime rivals) “with a superb yet affectionate condescension, such as Cleopatra may have had for her handmaidens” (340). Although the narrator muses that the true source of Aurora’s charm may be her “childlike and exquisite unconsciousness of self” and a nature that is “acutely sensible of all sorrow in others,” the heroine’s sensibility goes hand-in-hand with a far more “vital” presence

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capable of acting directly upon those around her like a kind of “sorcery” (187). It is the combination of these qualities and especially their incongruities – making Aurora seem at once vulnerable and powerful, innocent and perilous, accessible and elusive – that imbues her with a “certain kind of secular magic.”47 If Aurora manifests the complexity, fascination, and self-presence of demotic celebrity, offering a hat-tip as it were to Dickens’s reformulation of this model in David Copperfield, Braddon emphasizes the close connection of the heroine’s self-performance to the novel’s hypercurrency, a temporality with which Aurora herself is aligned. Aurora is described numerous times as “fast,” a term that contemporary reviewers seized on when they deplored her as one of the “‘fast’ ladies whom [Braddon] selects for heroines.”48 The reviewers’ use of the term, which implies Aurora’s impropriety and unfeminine conduct, echoes perceptions of the heroine within the novel as well. On his first acquaintance with her, for example, Talbot Bulstrode, one of her eventual suitors, impugns Aurora’s character by associating her with “fast men”: “I dare say this Miss Floyd is a good, generous-hearted creature, – the sort of person fast men would call a glorious girl, – but as well read in the ‘Racing Calendar’ and ‘Ruff’s Guide’ as other ladies in Miss Yonge’s novels. I’m really sorry for her” (95). While “fast” in this context signifies a blemish on the virtue of a young woman who should have no knowledge of gambling or horse flesh, Braddon offers another connotation for the term that complicates conventional – and the novel suggests, out-of-date – readings of the heroine’s character: the narrator uses a rhetoric of velocity to figure Aurora’s currency. The pacing associated with her character, that is, marks her as a figure fully in sync with the temporality of her age. On one occasion, the narrator informs us that Aurora was seen riding across the country “wearing a hat which provoked considerable criticism, – a hat which was no other than the now universal turban, or pork-pie, but which was new to the world in the autumn of fifty-eight” (184). The scene establishes the currency of both the novel and its heroine: the comment on Aurora’s fashion-sense registers the proximity of Autumn 1858 to April 1862, when the number in which this passage appears was published, a temporal distance marked here by the passing of a fashion in little over three years from cutting-edge to commonplace. The distance that Braddon remarks is that which, as we saw in the Introduction, Hazlitt invokes when he contends that fashion has “no other foundation or authority than that it is the prevailing distinction of the moment, which was yesterday ridiculous from its being new, and tomorrow will be odious from

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its being common.”49 Hazlitt would likely not have appreciated Aurora’s “distinction of the moment” any more than do her fictional friends and neighbours, but her style places her firmly within the temporal dynamic he describes, on the cusp of the future that promises soon to be the past. Braddon here describes fashion’s cycle of novelty and obsolescence that, as we’ve seen, organizes everyday life in commercial modernity. Braddon marks her heroine’s sensibility as in sync, moreover, not with that of her own contemporaries three years earlier, but rather with that of the reader’s present. We infer that Aurora would be wearing something different today, now that the pork-pie hat has become “universal,” and find ourselves invited to smile indulgently at the vulgarity of those who could not appreciate Aurora’s fashion-forwardness. The historical distance that separates us from them is short, but the narrative’s retrospective posture infuses the present with a hypercurrency measurable by means of fashion’s cycles. Aurora is stylishly avant-garde not because she is a model of consumerism – on the contrary, she holds herself aloof from the trendy consumption in which other characters participate – but rather, because she fashions herself with unselfconscious ease, making herself “for ever a new creature” (187).50 Aurora’s allure depends upon its continual renewal, but the novel makes clear that the heroine’s affective force emerges from the liveliness and effortlessness of her self-presentation rather than from ambition or ostentation. She has “no taste for display,” the narrator contends (340). Invoking the reverence others pay to her, the narrator remarks, “I verily believe that … if [Aurora] had been a street-sweeper dressed in rags, and begging for halfpence, people would have feared her and made way for her, and bated their breath when she was angry” (72). It’s not what Aurora wears but how she styles herself that matters. She possesses the “kinetic, open personality of fashion,” which Caroline Evans suggests, as we saw in the context of the silver-fork school, a “society in the process of rapid transformation most needs.”51 The novel’s first numbers include a veritable catalogue of the best shops and most fashionable merchants in London’s West End, hearkening back to Hazlitt’s complaint of the silver-fork school that “[y]ou dip into … a Novel, and may fancy yourself reading a collection of quack or fashionable advertisements.”52 Aurora is not at home in this commercial milieu, however, and shopping is clearly not a frequent pastime. The narrator observes that she is “sadly out of place in a milliner’s showroom” (69). With the panache of a fashion insider, nonetheless, Aurora lends to the forms she chooses “the idea of something genteel and magnificent,” a significatory power with which Smith credits the great.53 Braddon’s narrator reports

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that, despite the heroine’s inexperience with West End shopping, she “had that rapid judgment as to colour, and that perfect taste in form, which bespeak the soul of an artist”: “after one brief glance at the bright parterres of painted cambric,” Aurora chooses instead a “garland of vivid scarlet berries” exquisitely suited to her “black eyes and blue-black hair” (68–69). Aurora’s style, and specifically her seemingly symbiotic relationship with the objects that come into her presence, make her a visual figure of unrivalled allure whose power flows out from her like an electric current. If she lacks the “pride of birth” that distinguishes other characters in the novel (74), she possesses the “soul of an artist” and a bewitching “fascination of … manner” (187) that fuel her capacity for captivation. There is a “palpable superiority of force and vitality in [her] nature,” the narrator suggests, “which seemed to set her above her fellows” (72). I contend that the particular formulation of Aurora’s power reflects a transformation of fashion’s idiom that we can trace to fashion’s integration with the performativity and visuality of modern celebrity culture. Aurora Floyd makes clear that birth and station are contributors to but no longer determinants of an individual’s cultural capital and the affective force of her presence, the potential for her “fascination” to bewitch the “masses” (187). The currency of Aurora’s fashion-sense extends equally to the temporality of her affect. She is quick-witted, impulsive, and utterly of her moment. Referencing her intensity, the narrator comments, “With these impetuous and impressionable people, who live quickly, a year is sometimes as twenty years” (205). Aurora lives fully in the present: where most characters in the novel are unchanging in style, ethos, and attachment, she possesses a mobility that reflects not only her mercuriality and penchant for commotion but also her ability to be moved, a capacity for responsiveness that Clara Tuite defines, with reference to Lord Byron, as “an excessive susceptibility of immediate impressions.”54 Braddon adopts this model of mobility for her heroine, figuring it in Aurora’s openness to the immediacy of affective experience, in her bewitching, almost visceral power over those who come into contact with her, and in her palpable connectedness to the non-human beings and things that seem to impress themselves upon her and simultaneously extend the sphere of her energy. On the evening that will see her meet her first husband, whom she mistakenly believed to be dead, at a secret moonlit rendezvous where she intends to pay him off and banish him, Aurora appears in the drawing room “with her hair plaited in a diadem upon her head, and fastened with three diamond stars … which were cunningly fixed upon wire springs, which caused them to vibrate with every chance movement of her beautiful

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head” (339). The enchanting effect of her diamond diadem reflects on one level the “cunning” hand of a skilful milliner, calling to mind fashion’s associations with fakery and display and thus signifying the heroine’s scandalous secrets. At the same time, though, Aurora’s headdress possesses a quivering vitality, a liveliness of its own that exceeds the significations of the woman who wears it. The “restless” diamonds (343) vibrate above her like antennae, conduits for the force that radiates outward as if to expand her interface with the world, as well as that which moves inward from the lively matter with which she comes into contact.55 Aurora’s “style” functions “as an agent in its own right,” communicating non-discursively a singularity and allure associated with but not contained by the captivating woman whose presence it modifies.56 The heroine’s vitality, of which her fashionability is a key part, constitutes an affective force whose contagion materializes her presence and opens for our consideration the relations of immediacy and proximity that connect her to the world, both within the novel and outside it. On Braddon’s representation, though, the affects produced in and elicited by the present prove resistant to coordination or resolution. The novel posits what Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg call “the world’s apparent intractability,” its “obstinacies and rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations,”57 as a constitutive structure of modern life. The individual and more materially, her body are perennially immersed in this confluence of intensity but are not reliably compliant nor compatible with it. Indeed, the superfluity of affective encounters comprise what the novel suggests is one of the distinguishing features of the contemporary age. The novel shows that the forms of belonging to social collectives that characterize modern life stymie as much as they demand individual receptivity and attachment. This affective structure is apparent not least, I will argue, in the contradictory associations Aurora generates for other characters and narrator alike, and, we may assume, for readers as well. Braddon represents the contemporary as a time and space rife with forces that act on us – that entice, repel, pain, and enchant at once – and that disrupt the dominant historical models through which we might attempt to understand the contemporary.

Proximity and Affective Distance Sensation fiction renovates the role of the sensorium, transforming it from its familiar functions in the eighteenth-century novel. The figure of the quivering body, alive to the possibility of stimulus or threat, takes us

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back to the gothic and before that the novel of sensibility which fi ­ gured a character’s virtue on her body, in her sensory receptiveness to her environment. In the sensation novel, though, the individual’s capacity to be moved is unplaited from moral character: the body’s sensorium is detached from questions of virtue, meaning characters need not be virtuous to be affected nor to serve as a conduit of forces that extend beyond them. One thinks for example of Sir Percival Glyde’s nervous tics and fidgets in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White or Lady Audley’s restless twisting of the black ribbon around her neck. Mansel is perhaps the originator of the now-commonplace equation of sensation fiction with an overloading of sensory circuits, a charge he locates among readers though it runs through characters too: “a tale which aims at electrifying the nerves of the reader is never thoroughly effective,” he insists, “unless the scene be laid in our own days and among the people we are in the habit of meeting.”58 Underpinning these comments is the assumption, first, that temporal and spatial proximity engages readers differently than do the normative relations of distance that govern fiction and history-writing in the mid-nineteenth century, and secondly, that distance and specifically the passage of time are necessary to produce meaningful knowledge, understanding, and aesthetic pleasure. In his review of the sensation school, Alfred Austin concludes that unlike romance writers of “various past ages,” sensation novelists “despise that distance which not only lends enchantment to the view, but which justifies both writer and reader for accepting as likely the grossly improbable.”59 A critic like Hazlitt, as I suggested in the Introduction, held that literature could not “enlarge the bounds of knowledge and feeling” unless it transported us beyond the present, the immediate, and the local.60 For nineteenth-century critics, proximity in narrative is necessarily univocal and static in its effects: either it fails to move us, as Hazlitt would contend, or it moves us only in our extremities and nether regions. The sensation novel was viewed by its critics either as “address[ing] itself primarily to the sympathetic nervous system,” as D.  A. Miller argues, or, in Pamela Gilbert’s terms, as “appealing to the ‘lower’ tastes” and “feeding the lower mouths/openings of the body.”61 What Braddon’s fiction makes clear, though, is that temporal and spatial proximity intersects with affect in dynamic, unpredictable ways, and that our understanding of the present as a distinct moment depends on our recognition of the complex mediations of what I will call affective distance. Like the silver-fork novel, sensation fiction eschews the construction of distance that commentators in the nineteenth century regarded as requisite

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to true historical understanding and, as Hazlitt insists, literary value. “[As] the term is generally used,” Mark Phillips explains, “historical distance” assumes a strong analogy between time and space, both of which are conceived as open to objective measurement. Such thinking is doubly reductive, since it simplifies the ways we experience time while focusing on temporality to the exclusion of other engagements that mediate our relations with the past.62

Approaching historical representation as “an issue of mediation and distance,” rather than simply a product of the “growing clarity that comes with the passage of time,” Phillips focuses on the “wider set of engagements that mediate our relations to the past, as well as … the full spectrum of distance-positions from near to far.”63 He encourages us to recognize the “plasticity of distance” that, in historical representation, registers the mediating effects of affect along with other “forms of engagement,” each of which shapes our understanding of an historical moment.64 Phillips’s framing of historical distance as a construction of mediating relations offers a valuable “heuristic” for opening up the particular articulation of distance that sensation fiction produces.65 His framework complements as well Anderson’s analysis of the “distanced relation toward one’s self, one’s community, or those objects that one chooses to study” which Victorian authors explored under the aegis of detachment.66 I contend that the sensation novel registers distance’s “plasticity” in its conception of the present, emphasizing the entanglements of affect and temporality in the modern age, and indeed, suggesting the impossibility of thinking one without the other. The sensation novel shows the present to be possessed of a tactility, a density of affect. Directing us toward and away from particular objects and experiences, affect inflects the atmosphere in which persons and things circulate with resonances and intensities – an atmosphere which is affected in turn by those same circulations – and, as Sara Ahmed suggests, orients the “unfolding of bodies into worlds.”67 Affective distance, as I define it, signifies the mediating relations of affect – the relations of captivation and repellence, attraction and resistance into which one is drawn – which, in sensation fiction, intersect with the temporal and spatial dimensions of immediacy, or the felt experience of contemporaneity. On the sensation novel’s representation, these distance relations are neither homogeneous nor stable, and the fact of being proximate does not prescribe the affects one might encounter. In Phillips’s analysis, affective engagement refers to the posture a text adopts with respect to its subject and readers: it is the difference, he

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suggests, between a close-up, immersive description of an historical figure which prompts sympathy and identification, and one that shocks and repels.68 My interest, though, is not simply in a text’s emotional tenor nor the feelings it may elicit from readers, but rather in its conception of the affective forces that structure encounters between bodies and worlds. The sensation novel represents such encounters as historically situated – they help to shape the distance effects of a text and its age – and as forming an integral part, moreover, of the mediating relations that govern individuals’ experience of and commensurability (or non-commensurability) with social collectives.

Aurora Floyd’s Affective Resonances Running alongside Braddon’s representation of the “life and animal spirits” that Aurora Floyd carries “about with her as an atmosphere” (187), the novel points to a series of conventional gendered figures with which the heroine is associated and through which we are invited to read and interpret her character. She is said to possess, as we’ve seen, a “childlike and exquisite unconsciousness of self” that makes her “acutely sensible of all sorrow in others.” We are also told that she delights in simple pleasures, being of “a nature originally joyous in the extreme” (187). This figuration of her childlikeness is elaborated in the account of her ill-advised, secret first marriage to her father’s groom, a mistake attributed to “the trusting folly of an innocent girl” (485). Her former lover Talbot Bulstrode, who called off their engagement because of her secrecy, comes to pity her for having been the dupe of “an unscrupulous schemer” (432). Innocent and trusting, naïve and impetuous, Aurora is cast here in the role of the wouldbe virtuous young woman who seeks to do right, whose heart is pure, but whose path in life has been “crooked” (477). The narrator suggests that her fate has been “always to take the wrong step, … and to choose the longest, and crookedest, and hardest way towards the goal she sought to reach” (476). The novel’s rendering of Aurora’s youthful errors as a sign of her innocence rather than immorality works on readers both within and outside the novel in particular ways: read as a child, Aurora’s figure calls on those around her to pity and protect her, to sympathize with her plight and compassionate her “folly.” For those inside the text, her power is neutralized when she can be positioned as a fragile object in need of care. For those of us outside, Aurora’s character mobilizes reading expectations and affective responses fuelled by the figures we have encountered in other

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texts; pleasure arises in being moved by the suffering and humiliation of a character articulated in familiar ways. Even if we as contemporary readers view this figuration of her character as less captivating than the descriptions that emphasize her forcefulness and vitality, the representation of her childlikeness nonetheless carries with it associations that direct, if they do not determine, our impression. Whether we resist or fully subscribe to the narrative framing of Aurora as a child, the associations that this figure calls up render her character an affective “conversion point,” to invoke Ahmed’s phrase. When “[g]ood and bad feelings accumulate ‘around’ objects,” Ahmed explains, those objects become “sticky” with a saturation of affect.69 Braddon brings such feelings into play insofar as the narrative enables us to change our perception of Aurora, but whether and how characters’ and readers’ feelings change is unpredictable. The movement of affects around and in relation to objects is open to mutation and even perversion.70 All that is certain in Aurora’s case is that her character possesses or is possessed by multivalent affective resonances. The contingency of those resonances comes sharply into focus when we consider the other principal figure through which the heroine is characterized: starkly contrasted with the figuration of her girl-child innocence, the novel figures Aurora as a classical siren. When her husband John comes upon her asleep in her dressing room, for example, he finds Aurora “lying upon the sofa, wrapped in a loose white dressing-gown, her masses of ebon hair uncoiled and falling about her shoulders in serpentine tresses, that looked like shining blue-black snakes released from poor Medusa’s head to make their escape amid the folds of her garments” (337). Similarly, on the evening that she wears the diamond diadem and escapes from the house to meet her first husband in the woods, the narrator reports: Aurora took up a shawl that she had flung upon the sofa, and threw it lightly over her head, veiling herself with a cloud of black lace, through which the restless, shivering diamonds shone out like stars in a midnight sky. She looked like Hecate, as she stood on the threshold of the French window lingering for a moment with a deep-laid purpose in her heart, and a resolute light in her eyes. (343–44)

A woman of the moonlit “midnight sky,” associated with beauty and death, witchcraft and magic, and thus with mysterious, uncontainable powers, Aurora exhibits the captivating allure of a sorceress, bewitching men to their peril. Her luxurious dress, here veiling her in a cloud of lace pierced by gleams of light from her diadem, intensifies rather than masks the “restless, shivering” liveliness of her beauty. Her enchanting power

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ripples outward like the dangerous, “serpentine tresses” that look to “make their escape” from her body while she sleeps. As we have seen, she is at other moments fully conscious of the atmospheric effect of her beauty and fashionability; this passage suggests that those effects also operate independently of her agency or intention. Notwithstanding the speed with which this heroine followed on the heels of Braddon’s other notorious bigamist-protagonist, Lady Audley, their stories overlapping in different magazines through most of 1862, Aurora is granted a wholly different ending.71 Having been wrongfully accused of the murder of her first husband, a crime that brings her name into the public eye by means of the national papers, Aurora is eventually cleared and her domestic felicity restored when the actual murderer is apprehended. The problem of her bigamy removed and her marriage to her faithful second husband resolemnized, Aurora retires into the horizon of domesticity, where we leave her “bending over the cradle of her firstborn” (549). The narrator remarks that she is “a little changed, a shade less defiantly bright, perhaps, but unspeakably beautiful and tender” (549). Curiously, though, the novel’s ending does not resolve the contradictions between the conventional gendered personae with which Aurora is associated over the course of her narrative. The attributes of her childlike innocence and pure heart do not supplant nor contain the galvanizing effect of her presence, nor is her ineffable beauty recast as an embodiment of feminine virtue rather than a material power. Her “bright[ness]” may be dimmed, but only by a shade and presumably with some “defian[ce]” left intact. One feminine figure does not replace the other; rather, they are left to jostle against one another, neither seemingly altered by their coexistence.72 They continue to signal in incompatible ways, stimulating imaginative associations and conjunctions that, as Smith might suggest, serve to arrange our ideas and curate our perceptions and taste; here, though, those forms and their values work on us in inconsistent ways, or rather, the associations each figure generates fix in our minds a conception of the heroine that is subject to further transformation. The diverse images and attributes through which we read her character remain simultaneously in play despite their incongruity. This persistent contradiction corresponds in important ways with the equivocal gender politics of Braddon’s fiction that has been the subject of much critical attention among feminist scholars, a point to which I will return shortly. Braddon’s novels are famously ambiguous in their representation of female characters. Gilbert suggests, for example, that they “blu[r] the boundaries between passive heroine and active villainess.”73

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For novels that are as attentive as Braddon’s, though, to the materiality of her characters’ bodies and worlds, and that mark that materiality as intricately linked to the temporality of the contemporary, their exposure of the illogic of Victorian gender ideology seems an opening, rather than the conclusion, of a story. Without contesting the astute feminist critiques of Braddon’s fiction, we might look again at the ambivalent affect that accumulates around her heroines to consider whether its irresolution has something to teach us about the “odd jumble of contradictions, of sympathies and antipathies” that Hazlitt attributed to fashion, and that in the sensation novel characterizes the affective resonances of the present.74 To attend to the sensation novel’s conception of affective distance enables us to recognize the particular temporal idiom this genre mobilizes, one which disrupts the positivist model of history that underlies our assessment of the genre’s modernity.

The Fascinating Matter of Lady Audley The many resemblances between Braddon’s two most famous heroines have been well-remarked by critics in her day and our own.75 Lady Audley shares Aurora’s childlike innocence and goodness: she is said to possess a “childishness [that] had a charm which few could resist”; her lovely, delicate features “all contributed to preserve to her beauty the character of extreme youth and freshness.”76 Lady Audley also enjoys Aurora’s lively interface with the persons and things around her, similarly manifest in a vitality of fashion that seems to quiver with an energy connected to but independent of the heroine herself. Her husband’s nephew Robert Audley, who will subsequently become the novel’s amateur detective investigating her suspected crimes, enthuses after first meeting her: “Such blue eyes, such ringlets, such a ravishing smile, such a fairy-like bonnet – all of a tremble with heartsease and dewy spangles, shining out of a cloud of gauze” (94). Like Aurora’s, Lady Audley’s “ravishing” beauty co-mingles with fashionable objects to flow out from her body as a “trembl[ing]” energy that impresses itself on those around her. Her ringlets are said to frame her face in such a way as to signify her purity: her first husband comments that “her hair falls about her face like the pale golden halo you see round the head of a Madonna in an Italian picture” (278). Her infectious beauty even infuses itself into her handwriting. On glancing at a note she has written, Robert remarks to his cousin, “if I had never seen your aunt, I should know what she was like by this slip of paper. Yes, here it all is – the feathery, gold-shot, flaxen curls, the pencilled eyebrows, the tiny straight nose, the winning

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childish smile, all to be guessed in these few graceful up-strokes and downstrokes” (101). Her charms and attributes are “all” “here,” made present by a few marks on the paper. Lady Audley lacks Aurora’s imperiousness and grandeur; her captivation arises more consistently from her aura of girlish purity and simplicity. When she is still known as Lucy Graham, the young governess with whom Sir Michael Audley becomes infatuated, the narrator reports that she “was blessed with that magic power of fascination by which a woman can charm with a word or intoxicate with a smile. Every one loved, admired, and praised her” (47). Lady Audley’s allure thus attaches to different feminine features than Aurora’s, but they share the same “magic power of fascination” that renders them seemingly irresistible and deeply affective. One of the most remarkable passages elaborating Lady Audley’s “fairy-like” power turns on the simple act of serving tea: She looked very pretty and innocent, seated behind the graceful group of delicate opal china and glittering silver. Surely a pretty woman never looks prettier than when making tea. The most feminine and most domestic of all occupations imparts a magic harmony to her every movement, a witchery to her every glance. The floating mists from the boiling liquid in which she infuses the soothing herbs, whose secrets are known to her alone, envelop her in a cloud of scented vapour, through which she seems a social fairy, weaving potent spells with Gunpowder and Bohea. At the tea-table she reigns omnipotent, unapproachable. (242–43)

Critics have read this scene as touching directly on the novel’s ­critique of Victorian gender ideology and domestic ideals. Jill Matus takes it to suggest, for example, that if women “are always supposed to present an agreeable and pleasant prospect” in the domestic sphere, the only “arena in which [they] find power,” “then they may be forced to engage in deceptive and manipulative practices.”77 Linking the passage to the text’s concern with Lady Audley’s “self-production,” Katherine Montwieler argues similarly, “[t]he angel in the house, Braddon shows her readers, is an elaborate theatrical performance.”78 Attentive to the significance attached to domestic ritual, the narrator seems to invite suspicion of the art involved in producing the grace and harmony of the scene. Is every virtuous angel at bottom a skilled actress, bewitching men with her potent mix of domestic artistry and ethereal beauty? Or is her fascination, as Ann Cvetkovich suggests, “the product of a masculine fantasy about women’s hidden powers”?79 The novel’s interest in matters of gender, performance, and power cannot be separated, however, from its attention to matters of matter. On the

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one hand, as Montwieler contends, “Lady Audley is an active decorative object,”80 a beautiful woman whose objectification makes her functionally indistinguishable from the luxurious surroundings and costly objects amongst which she is placed. The narrator remarks this as well, describing the heroine as “the most beautiful object in [her] enchanted chamber” (308). On the other hand, though, the tea-table scene calls us to attend to the workings of affect that exist around and through her interface with the material world: the “social fairy” draws her power from her fluid interaction with “mists,” “liquid,” “vapour,” and “scent,” not to mention “delicate … china” and “glittering silver.” The sparkling tableware, moreover, blends its effects with the “starry diamond upon [Lady Audley’s] white fingers [which] flashed hither and thither amongst the tea-things” (243). Here as in other passages that situate the heroine in a minutely described scene of opulence and splendour, we are invited to consider the reverb effect of a beautiful woman whose fascination is intensified by her sumptuous atmosphere, which is itself enchanted by her presence. She is “[b]eautiful in herself,” the narrator remarks, “but made bewilderingly beautiful by the gorgeous surroundings which adorn the shrine of her loveliness” (308).81 Lady Audley’s Secret seems to ask us: in the case of a woman possessed of a “certain kind of secular magic,”82 to invoke Nigel Thrift’s phrase once again, how does gender ideology relate to the material force of affect at work in the world? For that matter, where do affect and its effects begin? The novel shows us, further, that the heroine’s “magic power of fascination” is far from the only material, visceral force in play. Indeed, Braddon significantly broadens the affective field under consideration in Lady Audley’s Secret from that which we examined in Aurora Floyd, focusing here on the accumulating “intensities and resonances” in which not only the heroine but also her eventual adversary, Robert Audley, are enmeshed.83 The novel shows this affective register to extend to nonhuman as much as human matter. In a meditation on madness to which I will return, the narrator invokes the disorienting effect of encounters with an intractable world, suggesting that we must all have come up, in an “unreasoning rage,” against the “mute propriety” and “hopeless persistency” of material objects (226–27). If Braddon foregrounds seemingly irresolvable tensions in this novel that turn in particular on the heroine’s allure and the precarity of the central characters’ mental balance, I contend that she does so in order to draw into focus the mediations of affective distance in encounters between bodies and worlds, mediations that the novel aligns with the uncertain dynamics of contemporary life. The novel shows us that the promise of a better life and social belonging which attaches to

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both objects and identities depends on an affective structure that works on individuals in incongruous ways and makes commensurability with the social collective difficult if not impossible to achieve. I have suggested that Lady Audley’s allure, like Aurora Floyd’s, turns on the multivalent figures through which her character is read: she is both girl-child and sensual siren, beatified Madonna and unapproachable sorceress working magic with her domestic arts. The narrator i­ndicates, though, that these figures are not coexistent, at least not past the early stages of the novel. Once Robert’s uneasiness about Lady Audley has turned into suspicion and then conviction of her criminality, the narrator declares that she cannot be read as the blameless victim who erred in youthful impulsiveness or folly. She “was no longer innocent,” the narrator observes, for “she had strayed far away into a desolate labyrinth of guilt and treachery, terror and crime” (309). As critics from Braddon’s day to our own have concluded, Lady Audley’s beatified appearance must therefore be read solely as an “outward effect” of which she makes ample use, a mere cover for the deception and violence of which she proves herself capable (312). On this argument, Lady Audley figures differently than Aurora: she is not read through multiple incongruous feminine figures simultaneously, but rather the “beautiful fiend” (107) fully supplants the childish beauty who has so charmed everyone around her. If the appearance of purity remains, the narrator suggests that it no longer resonates nor produces pleasure. By the second volume, Sir Michael is the only character who remains susceptible to what Robert dismisses as Lady Audley’s “useless … artifices” (237). Although the narrator gives us every reason to conclude, then, that the “freshness” of Lady Audley’s beauty has been nullified and her affective force narrowed to a single register, the novel complicates that resolution by introducing in its final volume the matter of the heroine’s confession and the uncertain role and effect of her madness. “The readers’ view of normal, sane femininity is … challenged,” Pykett argues, “by their changing emotional investments in the character, which are engineered by the narrator’s constantly shifting point of view.”84 The novel reopens the question of the work of affect with which Lady Audley is associated by enabling us, in the wake of the heroine’s own account of her history, to consider anew her vital interface with the world and the multitude of associations – attachments and alienations, pleasures and antipathies – that form in relation to her. Once the novel has raised the possibility of madness as the underlying force driving her actions, and has layered on top of this the suggestion that she has been pushed to deception, if not crime, by “the awful necessity of

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her life” (312), it obliges us to reread its heroine once again and address the apparent incongruity of the affects that accumulate around her. It invites us, moreover, to connect her experience of affect with that of others in the novel who feel themselves enmeshed in encounters of belonging and nonbelonging simultaneously with no certain path to harmonization or forward movement. The question of Lady Audley’s madness and its effects has attracted by far the lion’s share of attention in contemporary criticism on the novel. Critics tend to split over whether the heroine is in fact sane, with her family history of madness serving as a convenient excuse for locking her away, or whether Braddon leaves the diagnosis and its implications ambiguous. In an early effort to reclaim the novel for critical consideration, for example, Elaine Showalter argues that “Lady Audley’s real secret is that she is sane and, moreover, representative.”85 The heroine embodies Victorian women’s “dislike of their roles as daughters, wives, and mothers,” Showalter contends, and their “fantasies of protest and escape.”86 Eschewing this second-wave celebration of the novel’s subversiveness, Jill Matus arrives nonetheless at a similar conclusion in arguing that Braddon uses Lady Audley’s diagnosis to demonstrate that Victorian “society would rather accept an explanation of madness than confront the implications of female transgression and deviance.”87 The heroine’s alleged madness therefore “functions in significant ways more as ‘cover-up’ than disclosure.”88 On the other side of the fence, Lyn Pykett answers the fundamental question, “[i]s she mad or is she just bad?” with the observation, “[t]he novel blurs the issue.”89 D. A. Miller determines similarly that the novel’s eponymous secret “is not … that Lady Audley is a madwoman but rather that, whether she is one or not, she must be treated as such.”90 It is tempting to agree with those critics who moot the question of Lady Audley’s sanity and focus on the diagnosis as cover-up, not least because the narrative enables us to do so: the chapter that narrates her confinement in a Belgian asylum, for instance, is entitled “Buried Alive.” That Braddon uses exactly the same phrase in her later novel The Doctor’s Wife (1864) to refer to the dull fate that awaits her young heroine seems retroactively to confirm our inclination.91 I wonder, though, how much our eagerness to embrace this interpretation turns on our own desire, similar to Showalter’s, to find a way out of the novel’s ideological contradictions? Our greater attention to historical context, to the role of narrative form and genre, technologies of sensation, the work of masculine as well as feminine gender ideals, and intersectional economic and class issues does not finally change the fact that it is heartening to identify in this novel a

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trenchant critique of the nineteenth-century gender ideology with which, as contemporary critics, we continue to struggle. When we take the bait, resolving the various questions circling around the heroine and her narrative, and identifying in the novel’s critique a hopefulness attached to the future, we presume the text’s investment in an historical model of civilizing progress, which holds that present contradictions and inequities must give way to a more enlightened future. To follow this path, though, we must disregard the many indications in the novel that such certainty is illusory and that it is precisely the undecidability of the heroine, her affects, and their effects in which the text is interested. Badowska suggests that even the novel’s ending, which sees Lady Audley dead after a long illness in the asylum and Robert, his new wife, and his long-lost best friend ensconced together happily in a rustic “fairy cottage” (445) where all is peace and domestic harmony, “betrays a self-consciousness about recycling these nostalgic visions as pure simulacra.”92 Badowska contends that “Lady Audley’s Secret has previously taught us not to fall for precisely such apparitions as that presented at the end.”93 The novel is quite willing to offer us pleasurable “apparitions,” but these are subject to a dynamic of contingency that leaves them perpetually open to rereading and resignification. As Kate Flint has argued with respect to Braddon’s fiction and women’s sensation novels more generally, “what these novels share is a posing of moral questions, rather than a dictating of the answers.”94 I would expand Flint’s assessment to suggest that it is not only morality that these novels question, but also the forms of belonging, the appeals and repellences, the intimacies and estrangements that run through contemporary existence and engage individuals in affective relations that prove resistant to coherence or reconciliation. Resolution is precisely what these texts resist. If their plot-driven narratives line up with the purposiveness of teleology, their equally rigorous attention to the contingency of the present and the unpredictability of the future suggests that, in analyzing their conception of modernity, we must look to a temporal model that operates apart from history’s logic of causality and positive futurity. Lady Audley’s Secret presents us with an historical model, Badowska argues, that “moves in an arbitrary fashion, with no plan or progress in view. … [The] final outcome is entirely unpredictable.”95 Indeed, Badowska suggests that the temporality of “novelty” and “rapid obsoleteness” that permeates Braddon’s fiction “speaks to an anxious feeling of uncertainty about the reality of apparent progress and the meaning of the present moment.”96 We might add to this the novels’ uncertainty about the mediations of affect in order to conclude that Braddon’s novels

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articulate for us the many force-relations of contemporary life but refuses to anticipate their outcome. To be clear, I’m not arguing that her novels preclude the possibility of progress, nor am I denying the existence of a political and ideological critique in their representational schema. Rather, I would insist that her novels regard a negative outcome from such a critique, a regressive futurity, as likely as a progressive one. Were the atmosphere in which her characters find themselves enmeshed to be adjusted in order to address its incongruities, the novels indicate that there is no guarantee the result would be an improvement. As Lauren Berlant observes, “shifts in affective atmosphere are not equal to changing the world.”97 Lady Audley’s Secret encourages us to recognize how our affective responses are kept perennially active, open to conversion, and stubbornly irresolvable. This is evident first in the transformation of Robert’s reactions to his uncle’s wife which, as we have seen, swing violently from enchantment to resistance and repulsion; we see it subsequently in the rereading of the heroine that ensues from her first-person account of her history and self-declared madness. As numerous critics have remarked, the novel generalizes its reflections on madness by demonstrating their pertinence to Robert specifically and the public generally. “Who has not been, or is not to be, mad in some lonely hour of life?” the narrator inquires; “Who is quite safe from the trembling of the balance?” (408). Cvetkovich observes that the “novel is extremely sensitive to the normalcy of madness, to how excesses of emotion can be produced by constraints that impinge on all individuals.”98 Those constraints, the novel shows, may include social norms, the constructs of ideology, but may refer equally to human and nonhuman interactions and to forces that subtend, precede, or otherwise move autonomously of conscious thought and the social. The precarity of mental balance arises in the novel in relation to characters’ extreme susceptibility to circumstance and impression, a state that itself seems to result from either the shock of unexpected sensations or the slow grind of what the narrator calls “all the dreary mechanism of life” (226). Troubled and enervated by his investigation of his uncle’s wife, for example, Robert pulls away from “his old friends” and “familiar haunts” and shuts himself up alone, “until he had grown as nervous as habitual solitude will eventually make the strongest and the wisest man, however he may vaunt himself of his strength and wisdom” (407). Robert’s detective work makes sociability impossible, leaving him “unfit” for the company of others (407); at the same time, isolation inures and incapacitates, rendering the attachments of community both necessary and intolerable. Driven by and suspended between these incompatible alternatives, Robert

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“trembl[es]” on the “delicate, … fragile, … invisible balance” between madness and sanity (407). Most notably, Lady Audley’s Secret identifies the forces that fray nerves not only in the “shocks, thrills, intensity, [and] excitement”99 that critics have associated with the sensation novel’s conception of modernity, but equally in what Braddon’s narrator describes as “the unflinching regularity in the smaller wheels and meaner mechanism of the human machine” (226). It may be, that is, that our receptivity to sense-impressions is made manifest as much by “the mute propriety of chairs and tables, the stiff squareness of Turkey carpets, the unbending obstinacy of the outward apparatus of existence” (226), as by the shocks and sensations of modern life. Where earlier novels of the contemporary focused on the temporal currents of urban modernity, the spectacular, phantasmagoric, marketdriven mediations that define the social in the nineteenth century, the sensation novel introduces into this scene affective currents that intersect with, participate in, but ultimately function independently of the social. On the sensation novel’s representation, the texture of everyday life in commercial modernity has become interwoven with the density of affect. The diverse force-relations to which Lady Audley’s Secret attends, their layering and accretions, constitute the complex mediations of affective distance that Braddon’s novels represent as the distinguishing feature of the present. Rather than deciding among them as to which has the most decisive impact on the individual, Lady Audley’s Secret presents them as collectively present and active. It shows, moreover, that affects move not only inward from the atmosphere to permeate the individual, but simultaneously out, extending the individual’s vitality past the ostensible limits of corporeality to the things and persons beyond. The surfeit of affects that circulate in Braddon’s novels brings into focus the concurrent, incongruous states of being and modes of engagement that both make up and make incommensurable the realities of the contemporary. Braddon’s fiction reveals that our susceptibility to the “affective atmosphere” is part of a larger material structure that includes but is not limited to the technologies of ideology.100 Her novels thus open up for our further consideration the dimensions of proximity that make up our “feeling of the present.”101 Contemporaneity impresses itself upon us, as we’ve seen, through a heightened sensitivity to temporal movement and duration, a sense that I have aligned with the nineteenth century’s experience of fashion. Braddon’s novels expand our understanding of the mediations through which that sense takes form by examining the intersection of affect and temporality in contemporary life and demonstrating that the

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“here and now” of proximity can no longer be taken as solely a temporal and spatial concept. Her fiction attests to the fact that the currents of change running through the contemporary make themselves felt as much through the immediacy of affective encounters as through the spectacular significations of a mediated modernity. Braddon’s transformation of narrative contemporaneity in the nineteenth century invites us to reflect on the dynamic array of forces that nineteenth-century novelists engage in their commitment to bring the present to life.

Notes 1 H. K. [Henrietta Keddie], “A Word of Remonstrance with Some Novelists. By a Novelist,” Good Words 4 (July 1863): 524–26, 524–25. 2 “Thackeray and Modern Fiction,” London Quarterly Review 22 (July 1864): 375–408, 378. George Eliot’s name is not usually associated with sensation fiction or the circulating library any more than is Thackeray’s, but the London Quarterly Review was not the only periodical in the period to make the connection. The LQR reviewer explains: “Miss Evans does not belong to the ‘sensation’ school, but certainly her tales are open to these moral objections [to sensation fiction]” insofar as her “carefully-drawn pictures” of vice “ten[d] to abate the sentiment of horror with which any approach to it should be regarded” (405). 3 Ibid., 378. 4 Quoted in Sheldon F. Goldfarb, “Historical Commentary,” Catherine: A Story, by William Makepeace Thackeray (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 135–48, 144. 5 Ibid. 6 As I discussed in Chapter 3, Thackeray uses the conclusion to Catherine to censure Oliver Twist and Jack Sheppard for encouraging us to “expend our sympathies on cutthroats, and other such prodigies of evil” (W. M. Thackeray, Catherine: A Story, ed. Sheldon F. Goldfarb (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 132–33). 7 Matthew Buckley, “Sensations of Celebrity: Jack Sheppard and the Mass Audience,” Victorian Studies (Spring 2002): 423–63, 436. 8 Henry James, “Miss M. E. Braddon,” The Nation (9 November 1865): 593–95, 593. 9 Mark Salber Phillips, On Historical Distance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 10 Richard Altick, The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994), i. As I suggested in Chapter 1, my sense of how that “presence” materializes in nineteenth-century fiction differs substantially from Altick’s. 11 Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (London: Routledge, 1988), 3.

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12 Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 47. 13 H. L. Mansel, “Sensation Novels,” The Quarterly Review 113.226 (April 1863): 481–514, 482. On sensation fiction’s nerve appeal, see Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home; Daly, Literature, Technology, and Modernity; Nicholas Daly, Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and Lyn Pykett, The Nineteenth-Century Sensation Novel, 2nd ed. (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2011). 14 Mansel, “Sensation Novels,” 483. 15 As I discussed in the Introduction, these are the terms in which Hazlitt describes fashion. William Hazlitt, “On Fashion” (1818), in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1931–34), vol. 17, 51–56, 51. 16 Jacqueline Rose, “The Cult of Celebrity,” London Review of Books 20.16 (August 1998): 10–13, 10. 17 Richard Cronin, “Bulwer, Carlyle, and the Fashionable Novel,” in The Subverting Vision of Bulwer Lytton: Bicentenary Reflections, ed. Allan Christensen (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 38–53, 39. Cronin uses this phrase with reference to silver-fork novelists. 18 Phillips, On Historical Distance, 6; Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 147. 19 Mansel, “Sensation Novels,” 483. 20 Eva Badowska, “On the Track of Things: Sensation and Modernity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret,” Victorian Literature and Culture 37.1 (2009): 157–75, 158. 21 Richard Nemesvari and Lisa Surridge, “Introduction,” Aurora Floyd by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1998): 7–31, 12–13. 22 [Alfred Austin], “Our Novels. The Sensational School,” Temple Bar 29 (June 1870): 410–24, 412. 23 Keddie, “A Word of Remonstrance,” 524–25. 24 The quotation, from George Sala’s defence of sensation fiction, is meant to illustrate the opinions of his opponents, the anti-sensation critics: George Augustus Sala, “The Cant of Modern Criticism,” Belgravia 4 (November 1867): 45–55, 54. 25 “Tigresses in Literature,” Spectator 39 (10 March 1866): 274–75, reprinted in Varieties of Women’s Sensation Fiction: 1855–1890, ed. Andrew Maunder (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004), vol. 1, 140–44, 140. 26 See Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) on the persistence into the nineteenth century of an eighteenth-century anti-romance discourse; and Clifford Siskin on eighteenth-century anxieties about changes in readership and reading matter, and the capacity of writing itself “to produce that change” (The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830

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(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 3). See also Barbara Leckie, Culture and Adultery: The Novel, The Newspaper, and the Law, 1857– 1914 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), on the language of reading, gender, and disease in Victorian reviews of sensation fiction; and Patrick Brantlinger on the integration of class anxieties into an anti-novel discourse (The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998)). 27 Ferris, Achievement of Literary Authority, 35. 28 Austin, “Our Novels,” 412. 29 Ibid. 30 See Clare Pettitt, Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Graham Law, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000); and Linda Hughes and Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991). 31 Georg Simmel, “Fashion” (1904), On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 294–323, 303. I discuss Simmel’s theory of fashion in the Introduction. 32 Then-contemporary reviewers in The Times and The Guardian, for example, noted certain errors in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White that disrupted the precise chronology on which the plot hinged. See Walter Kendrick, “The Sensationalism of The Woman in White,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 32.1 (1977): 18–35. 33 Daly, Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 49. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 46–48. 36 Timothy Campbell, Historical Style: Fashion and the New Mode of History, 1740–1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 2. 37 Ibid., 48. 38 Tabitha Sparks, “Fiction Becomes Her: Representations of Female Character in Mary Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife,” in Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context, eds. Marlene Tromp, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Aeron Haynie (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 197–209, 199. 39 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, revised ed. (London: I. B. Taurus, 2003), 156. 40 Sparks, “Fiction Becomes Her,” 200. See also Jonathan Loesberg’s take on this “class confusion” in “The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction,” Representations 13 (1986): 115–38. 41 Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress (New York: Knopf, 1994), 20–21. 42 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London, 1759), 371. 43 Ibid., 372–73. 44 On the arbitrariness of fashion’s association with the great, see James Noggle’s astute analysis in The Temporality of Taste in Eighteenth-Century British Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), which I discussed in the Introduction.

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45 Hollander, Sex and Suits, 27. 46 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1998), 187. Subsequent references will be noted parenthetically in the text. 47 Nigel Thrift uses the term in a discussion of aesthetic pleasure and allure, in “The Material Practices of Glamour,” in Journal of Cultural Economy 1.1 (March 2008): 9–23, 9. 48 “Thackeray and Modern Fiction,” 406. 49 Hazlitt, “On Fashion,” 52. 50 In The Nineteenth-Century Sensation Novel, Pykett aligns Aurora with Eliza Lynn Linton’s infamous “Girl of the Period” (86), but in terms of Aurora’s fashion sense, the characterization is an ill fit. Aurora is never immodest in her dress nor does she devote herself to fashion, whereas the “main endeavour” of the Girl of the Period, Linton insists, “is to outvie her neighbours in the extravagance of fashion” (Eliza Lynn Linton, “The Girl of the Period,” The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays (London: Bentley, 1883), 1–9, 2–3). 51 Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 6. 52 William Hazlitt, “The Dandy School,” The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.  P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: J.  M. Dent & Sons, 1931–34), vol. 20: 143–49, 144. 53 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 372–73. 54 Clara Tuite, Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 2. 55 See Jane Bennett on the liveliness of matter that exceeds human agency and perception, in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Thrift, “The Material Practices of Glamour,” 11. 56 Thrift, “The Material Practices of Glamour,” 14. 57 Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–25, 1. 58 Mansel, “Sensation Novels,” 488–89. See Miller, The Novel and the Police, who contends that sensation fiction’s “nervous state” “affects all the principal characters” in The Woman in White (149). See also Mario Ortiz-Robles, “Figure and Affect in Collins,” Textual Practice 24.5 (2010): 841–61. 59 Austin, “Our Novels,” 421. 60 Hazlitt, “Dandy School,” 144. 61 Miller, The Novel and the Police, 146; Pamela K. Gilbert, Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 78. 62 Phillips, On Historical Distance, 4. 63 Ibid., xii, 1, 14. 64 Ibid., 3. Along with affect, Phillips points to form and rhetoric, ideology, and intelligibility as the fundamental dimensions of historical distance that mediate our relationship to the past (6).

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65 Ibid., 6. 66 Anderson, Powers of Distance, 4. 67 Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 22. 68 See Phillips, On Historical Distance, 3. 69 Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 44. 70 Ibid. 71 The serial publications of Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd ran concurrently for the whole of 1862, with Aurora Floyd concluding one month later in January 1863. Lady Audley’s Secret had been partially serialized in the summer of 1861, however, until the journal in which it was appearing ceased publication, so the character of Lady Audley had been before the public a full six months prior to Aurora’s appearance. When Braddon resumed Lady Audley’s Secret in a different magazine in January 1862, she reintroduced her protagonist to readers by republishing the novel’s first 18 chapters, before working the story through to its conclusion. 72 In The “Improper” Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (London: Routledge, 1995), Lyn Pykett suggests that Aurora, like Lady Audley, embodies “the contradictory discourse on woman … in which woman is figured as either a demon or an angel” (88). My point, though, is that Braddon’s heroine is represented as both these figures at once, and that the novel does not resolve the contradiction. 73 Gilbert, Disease, Desire and the Body, 79. 74 Hazlitt, “On Fashion,” 51. 75 Given the virtual simultaneity of the novels’ publication, many Victorian periodicals reviewed them together. Mansel remarked, for example, that Aurora “is inferior to Lady Audley, as a pickpocket is inferior to a thug” (“Sensation Novels,” 492). As we’ve seen, both also fall under the category of Braddon’s “‘fast’ ladies” (“Thackeray and Modern Fiction,” 406). Among contemporary critics, see Andrew Mangham, Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine, and Victorian Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Natalie Schroeder and Ronald Schroeder, From Sensation to Society: Representations of Marriage in the Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006); Pykett, The “Improper” Feminine; Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels in the 1860s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); and Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 76 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1998), 90. Subsequent references will be noted parenthetically in the text. 77 Jill Matus, “Disclosure as ‘Cover-up’: The Discourse of Madness in Lady Audley’s Secret,” University of Toronto Quarterly 62.3 (1993): 334–55, 347. 78 Katherine Montwieler, “Marketing Sensation: Lady Audley’s Secret and Consumer Culture,” in Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context, eds. Marlene Tromp, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Aeron Haynie (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 43–61, 51.

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79 Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 48. 80 Montwieler, “Marketing Sensation,” 51. 81 Badowska analyzes this passage along similar lines to mine, dismissing simple readings of Lady Audley’s commodification to argue instead that Braddon “seems more interested in moments when the peaceful coexistence of persons and things breaks down” (“On the Track of Things,” 169). 82 Thrift, “The Material Practices of Glamour,” 9. 83 Seigworth and Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” 2. 84 Pykett, The “Improper” Feminine, 94. 85 Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, 167 (emphasis original). 86 Ibid., 158–59. 87 Jill Matus, Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 191. 88 Ibid., 192. 89 Pykett, The Nineteenth-Century Sensation Novel, 81. 90 Miller, The Novel and the Police, 170 (emphasis original). 91 In The Doctor’s Wife, the heroine’s employer reflects on her future as the wife of a stolid country doctor, and imagines her “as if she were some fair young nun, foredoomed to be buried alive by and by” (Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 83). 92 Badowska, “On the Track of Things,” 164. 93 Ibid. 94 Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 293. 95 Badowska, “On the Track of Things,” 162. 96 Ibid., 157, 165. 97 Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 17.3 (2006): 20–36, 35. 98 Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings, 66. 99 Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home, 3. 100 Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,” 35. 101 Simmel, “Fashion,” 303.

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Coda

Fiction and Fashion Now

To talk about fiction today is immediately to come up against the ­phenomenon of the Twitter-novel. Within just a few years of the launch of the microblogging and social networking platform, the term “Twitterature” emerged to describe literature’s encounter with social media, not only for promotional purposes but increasingly as a mode of cultural production.1 Numerous authors, already well known for publishing in conventional formats, have tried their hand at tweeting short fiction: American novelist Jennifer Egan tweeted the story “Black Box” from The New Yorker’s Twitter account over nine days in 2012; Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole issued “Hafiz” through a series of retweets in 2014, having asked friends and followers to tweet random fragments of text which he then reposted sequentially.2 Many more writers have published fiction that mimics Twitter’s pacing or format. Some, like Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021), divide their prose into bite-sized sections of text that are set off epigrammatically or tethered together into threads. Others reproduce in composition and prose style the “headlong” pace of social media: a reviewer commented about Olivia Laing’s novel Crudo (2018), for example, which the British author wrote in seven weeks, that the writer’s “exuberance shows in the novel’s sentences, which rush by, fleet and frenetic, nearly tripping over the speed bump of their own commas.” Describing this as fiction that aims to “capture the sentiments of the immediate present,” the reviewer observes, “There is no sense of slowing the mad dash of the present to make it more comprehensible to some hypothetical future reader.”3 Still others, like American writer Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (2009), render the fragmentary structure of social media as an updated lyric sequence, a loosely connected, jewel-like series of “propositions,” as the author terms them.4 In each instance, what we encounter is a mediation of fiction that, by its very currency, risks “radical obsolescence,” as one reviewer remarks of No One Is Talking About This.5 The temporality of contemporary fiction 273

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runs at odds with the values of timelessness and historical transcendence in which the novel genre has been steeped since the nineteenth century. Even the paradoxical notion of the “instant classic” presumes a text’s ability to speak to other times. With reference to Lockwood’s and Laing’s texts, a critic for The Spectator comments that “the two novels share a seriously short read-by date and a blithe disregard for those not ‘in the know.’”6 The New Yorker’s reviewer suggests of Laing’s novel, “‘Crudo’ could turn out to be a novel that we pick up years from now to remind ourselves how these times felt, should we have the stomach for that.”7 Many commentators remark the timeliness of Twitter-fiction’s narrative innovations, only to return to the matter of its best-before date. These novels are timely but not timeless, too historical and not historical enough. They are deeply immersed in the media and sensibilities of their moment, and as such, marked by the “sheer friability of the material.”8 To return to William Hazlitt’s now 200-year-old critique of fashionable novels, this fiction’s emphasis on immediacy leaves it unable “to direct the mind’s eye beyond the present moment and the present object.”9 It’s easy to dismiss this fiction as merely trendy. In a 2014 review essay, journalist Laurie Penny observes that “some writers have yet again begun to lament the demise of the Great English-Language Novel … worry[ing] that the internet is killing fiction with a thousand tweets.”10 Pronouncements abound about the contemporary reader’s pitiful attention span and the impossibility of writing something meaningful in a few hundred characters. In response to these changes, Penny explains, “Some serious male novelists … allege that the modern novel has become frivolous and fluffy, a lightweight accessory for lightweight thinkers.”11 It is hardly surprising that fiction engaged with social media would be met with scorn. It is worth remembering, however, that the charge of frivolity and fluff comes with a history of its own, and that that history points us to the novel’s substantial innovations with narrative temporality. Having been trotted out against women novelists in Britain in the late eighteenth century for not being serious enough, as Jane Austen wryly observes in Northanger Abbey, the charge of frivolousness rears its head again at the key moments in the nineteenth century that this book has studied.12 Cast in the idiom of fashion, the accusation is used to dismiss fiction deemed too ephemeral, trivial, and commercial. It denotes fiction meant to last no longer than “the fashions of the current season,” as Henry Mansel remarked of the sensation novel, or as Penny’s serious writers would have it, fiction with the aesthetic value of a handbag, a “lightweight accessory for lightweight thinkers.”13

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Reframed in relation to our own moment, nineteenth-century novels that were engaged with fashion help us to recognize in Twitter-fiction’s hypercurrency and media immersion an effort to conceptualize the temporality and textures of the contemporary. This nineteenth-century connection is not in fact random, but one that twenty-first-century creators have flagged. In a 2012 interview about “Black Box,” for example, Egan remarks, “I love the thought of trying to use it [Twitter] as a delivery system for fiction, and I’m interested in the way that some nineteenth-century fiction was constructed around its serialization.”14 Drawing a direct line from Twitter-fiction to the nineteenth century, Egan demonstrates how a return to an earlier moment and its singular narrative technologies might offer a formal vocabulary for articulating new experiences of being in history and new forms of individual and collective identification in the present. As Egan’s comment suggests, digital platforms offer new “delivery system[s]” for fiction, but they also enable fiction to be constructed differently – “around its serialization,” in this instance – and, by means of the formal transformations that effects, to develop new narrative models for conceptualizing the present. The invocation of serialization in this context pertains to contemporary fiction with duration in publication time – the nine daily instalments of Egan’s New Yorker story, for example – as well as fiction that takes up in its typographical layout or dispersed narrative focus Twitter’s tethering of discrete observations into a series of loosely connected strands. The narrator in Lauren Oyler’s 2021 novel Fake Accounts observes archly, “What’s amazing about this structure is that you can just dump any material you have in here and leave it up to the reader to connect it to the rest of the work.”15 The requirement that readers posit interpretive connections across disparate material directs us back once again to the nineteenth century. In her study of the emergence of seriality as an organizing temporal principle, Clare Pettitt argues that “in the early nineteenth century, seriality becomes a kind of knowledge, a knowledge that is political, bodily and historical: a knowledge about being in time.”16 In a development that built on the eighteenth-century shifts in historical consciousness that, as we saw in the Introduction, Timothy Campbell attributes to the seriality of fashion and its accelerating rhythms of novelty and obsolescence, individuals in the nineteenth century felt the movements of history increasingly in their daily lives rather than in punctuating, catastrophic events.17 Pettitt suggests that the “gradually embedding seriality of [people’s] daily practices create[d] … a more pliant, plastic, and permeable idea of history as a forming and formative process in which they could participate.”18 She insists,

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moreover, that the “virtual world of serial print and performance” was crucial to the transformation of historical consciousness in the nineteenth century, helping to “fashion a new ‘structure of feeling’, in Raymond Williams’s famous phrase, ‘a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material but … in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate.’”19 Taking Pettitt’s notion of seriality in the broad temporal and epistemological terms in which she defines it, rather than in the more specific sense of serialization in print, we can recognize in contemporary fiction’s experiments with seriality and hypercurrency an upcycling of narrative forms developed in analogous moments of profound change in the nineteenth century. Quoting David Foster Wallace, Penny contends that fiction “is ‘about what it is to be a fucking human being.’ And in the digital age, what it is to be human is changing, too.”20 Fiction of the digital age draws from the novel’s formal history in order to innovate new ways of articulating the present. Twitter-fiction explores how we might think the relation of parts and wholes, of individuals and collectivities, in an historical moment when digital mediation enables new configurations of publicness, when virtual self-expression is the medium less of identity than main character energy, and when the timeframe of the quotidian has become an inadequate measure of the experience of historical change. In this context, the visuality that emerged as a constitutive form of selfhood in the nineteenth century, as we saw with the Newgate novel and Dickens, permeates the individual in wholly new ways, turning inside out the idea of depth and privacy that formerly defined the boundary between the individual and the public. In Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, the narrator, who refers to the internet as the “portal,” asks, “Why did the portal feel so private, when you only entered it when you needed to be everywhere?”21 Michaela Coel’s TV series, I May Destroy You (2020), shows how our contemporary moment renders obsolete the boundary between individual and public that the nineteenth century defined by means of the fashion system and visual culture. I May Destroy You focuses on a Twitter-famous author, Arabella, who’s in the process of writing her second Twitternarrative after the first, Chronicles of a Fed-Up Millennial, went viral. In the pilot, we see Arabella writing through the night to meet her publisher’s deadline, working late after an evening out with friends where, unbeknownst to her, her drink was spiked and she was sexually assaulted. In an interview with Vulture magazine, Coel explains that she “felt it was important to imagine what [Arabella] would have written [in this scene], even if the viewer never sees it,” so she wrote a passage for Arabella’s manuscript

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that the audience doesn’t hear. In Coel’s imagined text, Arabella writes, “We became the generation interested in ourselves. … We are the generation that decided we should be looked at. No more to documentaries of undiscovered worlds, of undercover investigations, of unreported people. We are the generation that decided, if you won’t look at us, we’ll look at ourselves.”22 Rather than sorting out how to navigate the publicity and visibility that fashion and visual culture have made inescapable for anyone entering the public sphere, as David Copperfield learns in forming himself for celebrity authorship, the millennial generation for which Arabella serves as spokesperson moves publicity inside – or rather, they turn themselves outward and invite the public to look. I have argued that the nineteenth-century novel shows us how a generalized fashion system comes to organize the movements of everyday life and the forms of self-expression and belonging that tie the individual to the social. The Twitter-novel takes that hinge, the form of mediation that fashion offers and imposes, and pushes it to the breaking point. It turns a spotlight on the idea of individuals moving together in time by means of a shared aesthetic and material idiom, and prises it apart, questioning its very premise. Lockwood’s narrator, for example, connects the Internet’s continuous, relentless flow of information to a shared consciousness of immediacy, even simultaneity. In one of the novel’s observations about people in the “portal,” the narrator comments: Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate. Sometimes the subject was a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole. It was not so much the hatred she was interested in as the swift attenuation, as if their collective blood had made a decision. As if they were a species that released puffs of poison, or black ink in a cloud on the ocean floor.23

What is this new species of public that can make a decision instantaneously, that tumbles together the mundane and the incendiary, the absurd and the catastrophic, with little concern for context or continuity? What is the “collective blood” that connects it, what the narrator elsewhere calls “the bloodstream of the now”? Is this collectivity social, or even human? And how, she asks further, does one keep oneself in it? “If you were gone from [the portal] for a little while and then returned and no longer belonged,” she muses, “what was it? A brain, a language, a place, a time? Oh my information! Oh my everything I never knew I needed to know!”24 To look away from the portal for a moment is to allow oneself to drift out

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of the currents of contemporaneity. This is in many ways the temporality of fashion that we know from the nineteenth century: staying abreast of changes in manners, customs, and style allows one to participate in the social. In this context, however, how does one stay in the perpetual state of simultaneity that enables belonging? And to what, for that matter, does one belong? The Twitter-novel picks apart the notion that “the kinetic, open personality of fashion is the personality which a society in the process of rapid transformation most needs.”25 This is not to suggest the outmoding of fashion’s conceptual tools and organizational logic; on the contrary, it is to argue that contemporary fiction dismantles and remakes the concepts of currency, identity, and collectivity on which our understanding of fashion’s social and temporal work depends. The Twitter-novel points us back to the nineteenth century in order to remediate fashion’s social identity, to “fashion a new ‘structure of feeling’” suited to a digital sphere in which, as Lockwood’s narrator reflects, “she had no idea where she ended and the rest of the crowd began.”26 The return to fashion’s formative terms is a practice of historical citation by which, as we’ve learned, “the traces of the past can be woven into the fabric of a new story to illuminate the present.”27 *** Finally, the nineteenth-century novel’s engagement of fashion has something else to teach us, outside the bounds of the history of the novel or fiction in the digital age. As scholars, we tend to eschew fashion’s allure. Gilles Lipovetsky suggests that the “denunciation of … fashion has taken on its most virulent tones in the domain of the life of the mind.”28 Despite some signs of change, especially among scholars of material culture who focus on fashion’s unique situation at the border of the body and the object world beyond, fashion’s critical fortunes haven’t improved much.29 If fashion still seems too frivolous to be taken seriously outside of style and design history, though, an anecdote that Bill Brown recounts in his ground-breaking article “Thing Theory” offers us a reason to pause. Brown tells of an exchange with a colleague that left him worrying that his work was seen as outmoded, after the colleague described his project on “things” as “the topic of the 1990s the way it was of the 1920s.” He explains that this “felt like an unwitting accusation of belatedness (in the year 2000), and it did so because the academic psyche has internalized the fashion system (a system meant to accelerate the obsolescence of things).”30 That is, fashion’s principle of novelty and obsolescence informs the very structure of our critical practice. We signal our intellectual savvy and belonging by our

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ability to stay abreast of changes in critical taste and sensibility and get out ahead of the next trend. No one wants to be “accus[ed] of belatedness.” To point out the embeddedness of our methods in the fashion system, however, is neither to impugn our critical practice nor advocate a move elsewhere, as if there were a place we might stand outside fashion’s reach. Rather, we might learn from the nineteenth-century novel the value of better understanding fashion’s principles and mechanisms, and find in the literary detritus that litters this period a sustained reflection on the process by which a system “structured by evanescence and aesthetic fantasy managed to take root” and reorganize society in a form that is with us still.31

Notes 1 Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin, authors of Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less (New York: Penguin Books, 2009) take credit for coining the term, though their book adapts classic works for Twitter, whereas “Twitterature” now usually refers to literature published on the social networking program or written in its format. 2 Audrey Golden, “Teju Cole and the Art of the Twitter Novel,” Books Tell You Why (28 February 2018). 3 Alexandra Schwartz, “Olivia Laing’s ‘Crudo’ Is Made from the Raw Material of the Present,” The New Yorker (10 September 2018). 4 Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Seattle: Wave Books, 2009), 27. 5 Hillary Kelly, “Review: Can a Novel Wrestle Twitter and Win? Super-tweeter Patricia Lockwood Tries,” LA Times (9 February 2021). 6 Claire Lowdon, “Reality and Online Life Clash: No One Is Talking About This, Reviewed,” The Spectator (20 February 2021). 7 Schwartz, “Olivia Laing’s ‘Crudo.’” 8 Lowdon, “Reality and Online Life Clash.” 9 William Hazlitt, “The Dandy School” (1827), The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1931–34), vol. 20, 143–49, 144. 10 Laurie Penny, “The Great English Novel Is Dead. Long Live the Unruly, Upstart Fiction that’s Flourishing Online,” The New Statesman (24 July 2014), n.p. 11 Ibid. 12 See Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), on the gender-based critique of the novel at the turn of the nineteenth century. 13 H. L. Mansel, “Sensation Novels,” The Quarterly Review 113.226 (April 1863): 481–514, 483. 14 Deborah Treisman, “This Week in Fiction: Jennifer Egan,” The New Yorker (25 May 2012). 15 Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts (New York: Catapult, 2021), 180.

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16 Clare Pettitt, Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 6. 17 See Timothy Campbell, Historical Style: Fashion and the New Mode of History, 1740–1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 18 Pettitt, Serial Forms, 26. 19 Ibid., 26–27, quoting Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” Literature and Marxism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 20 Penny, “The Great English Novel Is Dead,” n.p. 21 Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This (New York: Riverhead Books, 2021), 3. 22 Quoted in E. Alex Jung, “Michaela the Destroyer: How a Young Talent from East London Went from Open-mic Nights to Making the Most Sublimely Unsettling Show of the Year,” Vulture (6 July 2020). 23 Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This, 9. 24 Ibid., 164–65. 25 Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 6. 26 Pettitt, Serial Forms, 27; Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This, 11. 27 Evans, Fashion at the Edge, 13. 28 Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 8. 29 On fashion and material culture, see Timothy Campbell, “Soft Materiality: Dress and Material Fiction in T. S. Surr’s A Winter in London,” EighteenthCentury Fiction 31.2 (2019): 295–316; Campbell, Historical Style; Ulrich Lehmann, Fashion and Materialism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018). Among recent studies of fashion and literature, see Chloe Wigston Smith, Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Jennie Batchelor, Dress, Distress and Desire: Clothing and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). On fashion’s pertinence to the history of ideas, see Timothy Campbell, “Arts of Dress: Rancière and Fashion,” Critical Inquiry 44 (Summer 2018): 619–40; Ulrich Lehmann, Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). The journal Fashion Theory, started in 1997, also addresses the gap between fashion studies and other intellectual fields. While there has been an uptick since the turn of this century in work that pursues fashion beyond the bounds of design and dress history, fashion’s broad cultural, historical, and philosophical significance remains underexplored. 30 Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 (Autumn 2001): 1–22, 13. 31 Lipovetsky, Empire of Fashion, 4.

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Index

Adams, James Eli, 126 The Adventures of Roderick Random (Smollett), 96, 112, 124 Advice to his Son on Men and Manners (Lord Chesterfield), 9 affect affective attachment in celebrity culture, 228 affective distance, 254–56, 259, 261 affective resonances, 256–59 in Aurora Floyd, 249–53, 256–59 and gender ideology, 261 and the individual, 262, 266 interface with material world, 261 in Lady Audley’s Secret, 261, 263, 265 and madness, 263 in sensation novels, 244, 254–56, 259, 266 and the social, 262, 266 and temporality, 255, 266 Ahmed, Sara, 255, 257 Ainsworth, William Harrison. See also Jack Sheppard (Ainsworth) conception of celebrity, 174, 179 conception of crime fiction, 173–76 influence on Dickens, 193, 194 novels’ adaptability for the stage, 173 remediation of history, 24–28, 31 Rookwood, 1, 173 spectacle of violence, 201 Altick, Richard, 52 Anderson, Amanda, 113, 244, 255 Anderson, Benedict, 20, 206 Anderson, Patricia, 1, 29, 148 The Athenaeum, 66–68, 162, 167, 171 audience for Caleb Williams, 209 and celebrity culture, 21, 205, 218–19 and class status, 174 consciousness of, 139, 140, 157, 174 engagement with Jack Sheppard, 172 identification with protagonists, 145–46, 203, 204

for Newgate novels, 146, 167, 174, 204 for Paul Clifford, 167 and performance, 224, 225 protagonists’ awareness of, 152, 172–73, 217, 224, 231 and serialized novel format, 204 spectatorship, 148, 192 temporal and spatial proximity, 254 Aurora Floyd (Braddon), 247–53, 256–59 affective resonances, 256–59 Aurora’s affective force, 249–53 Aurora character, 256–59 Aurora’s demotic celebrity, 249–50 commercial culture, 251 domesticity in, 258 fashion, custom, and time, 249–53 hypercurrency, 251 representation of modernity, 244 self-performance and temporality, 250 Austen, Jane, 55, 186 Austin, Alfred, 245, 246, 254 Badowska, Eva, 13, 245, 264, 272 Balfour, Ian, 24, 98 Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 39 Barnaby Rudge (Dickens), 190–215 ambivalence over the domestic, 211–12 and celebrity culture, 190, 209, 219 crowds in, 199, 208–210 illustrations of, 200 individuals and social collectives, 205 and Jack Sheppard, 193–95, 197, 200–203, 207, 209, 220 as Newgate novel, 190, 193 political critique in, 196–97 and public character, 199–200, 205 public violence and private life, 212–15 relationship to the past, 135, 214 reorientation toward the middle classes, 198 visibility, 198–99 Barrell, John, 15

299

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300

Index

Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 60 Barry Lyndon (Thackeray), 190 Barthes, Roland, 14, 17 Baudelaire, Charles, 42, 54 The Beggar’s Opera (Gay), 1 Bender, John, 136, 147 Benjamin, Walter on Baudelaire’s Parisian flâneur, 54 fashion and history, 14, 23 fashion’s citational practice, 5, 98 on history, 23, 98, 141, 160 and modernity, 3, 10 Bentley, Richard, 71 Bentley’s Miscellany, 2 Berlant, Lauren, 146, 215, 265 Bildungsroman as model for novel’s development, 93, 97, 108 Pelham as, 93, 108–109 silver-fork novels as alternatives to, 53, 91, 115 “Black Box” (Egan), 273, 275 Bleak House (Dickens), 12 Bluets (Nelson), 273 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. See also Lady Audley’s Secret (Braddon); Aurora Floyd (Braddon) contemporaneity in, 266 The Doctor’s Wife, 263 gender politics, 258 novelty and obsolescence in, 264 reading historical progress into, 263–65 representation of modernity, 244, 265–66 serialized format of novels, 271 Braudy, Leo, 5, 21, 89, 134, 137–39, 166, 215, 217 Brown, Bill, 278 Browne, Hablot, 200 Buckley, Matthew, 31, 146, 167, 174, 180, 193, 213, 242 Buckstone, J.B., 173 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. See also Paul Clifford (Bulwer-Lytton); Pelham; or, the Adventures of a Gentleman (Bulwer-Lytton) Byron’s influence, 110–13 criticism and praise of, 56, 167 engagement with picaresque, 110–13 England and the English, 11, 105 Eugene Aram, 144, 241 Godolphin, 58, 104 Godwin’s influence, 113 Lucretia, 144 melodrama in, 167 and social reform, 11, 104–105 Burney, Frances, 18, 74, 97 Burton, John, 9 Bury, Lady Charlotte, 67 Buzard, James, 232

Byron, George Gordon, Lord celebrity of, 21–22, 141, 209 code-switching, 132 compared to David Copperfield, 229 criminal protagonists in, 142 Don Juan, 14, 110–12, 132, 142, 164 emergence of celebrity culture, 21, 229 influence on Newgate school, 142 restyling of picaresque, 110, 142 Caleb Williams (Godwin), 148–57 autobiographical narrative in, 151–53 Caleb and Jack Sheppard, 153–55 demotic celebrity, 148–50 identity and criminal discourses, 156 Kit Williams, 149–50 publics forming around criminals, 146 self-fashioning identity, 149, 156–57 Campbell, Timothy, 3, 5, 9, 22, 25, 88, 161, 247, 275 Carlyle, Thomas criticism of Pelham, 110, 124 The French Revolution, 211 the prophet figure, 196 Sartor Resartus, 39, 94, 109, 177, 230 Catherine (Thackeray), 190, 242 Cecil, a Peer (Gore), 115 Cecil: or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb (Gore), 115–20 character of Cecil, 115 disenchantment with Victorian domestic ideal, 101 models of selfhood, 115 picaresque narrative structure, 115 plotlessness and class status, 91 relationship to history, 118–19 celebrity culture. See also visual culture; performance; demotic celebrity; fame and affective attachment, 228 and audience, 21, 219 audience relationship, 21, 205, 218–19 Byron’s celebrity, 21–22, 141, 209 and David Copperfield, 191–92, 210, 218, 219, 228 development of, 19–23, 137, 174, 191, 229 and fashion, 20, 22, 67, 132, 133, 252 and Jack Sheppard, 169–70, 172–74, 179–80 for a mass-mediated age, 232 and media, 205 new form of public life, 133 in Newgate novels, 129 perversion of consuming, 137, 209 pleasure and, 225 print culture, 5, 21, 27, 133, 154 public sphere, 137, 218

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Index publicity, 154, 230 rites of, 136, 150, 172, 205 Romantic denigration of, 222 satire of, 194–97 spectacle’s role, 5, 136, 217 and violence, 136, 204 visibility, 5, 193, 199 Chandler, James, 15, 188, 192, 193, 220 character and characterization. See also criminal protagonists audience identification with protagonists, 192, 203, 204 awareness of audience, 217, 224, 231 Bulwer-Lytton’s narrating protagonist, 112 changes in early eighteenth century, 92 the chaperone, 77–78 code-switching ability, 163 consciousness of visibility and spectacle, 220 the dandy, 113, 115, 131 Don Juan’s interiority, 111–12 gender and interpretation, 256–58 innocence and folly, 256–60, 262 mobility, 252 the novice, 92 pícaros (rogues), 95–97, 110 the prophet figure, 196 self-performance and self-production, 250, 260 in silver-fork novels, 93, 108, 109 the siren, 257–58, 262 social acumen, 109 temporality, 250 Tyburn Highwayman, 96 Chesterfield, Lord, 9, 110, 125, 132, 164 Chittick, Kathryn, 1, 180 Clark, Peter, 123 class. See status and class Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (Egan), 173 code-switching, 112, 132, 163–65, 180 Coel, Michaela, 276 Colburn, Henry, 66–71 the Colburn brand, 68–69 criticism of, 66, 68–69 flooding of book market, 58 literary magazines, 68 promotional tactics, 67 publishing silver-fork novels, 66 range of literature published, 69–71 satirized in The Athenaeum, 66–67 Cole, Teju, 273 Colley, Linda, 116 Collins, Phillip, 193 Collins, Wilkie, 254 commerce and commercial culture

301

appetite for novelty, 63 consumer capitalism’s contradictions, 63 and fashion, 51, 131 market uncertainties and identity, 130, 248 revolution in consumption, 4–5 in sensation novels, 251 shopping, 54 contemporaneity. See also temporality; modernity; fashion in Braddon, 266 creating effect of, 52 ephemerality of, 10, 65 felt experience of, 181, 255 and Jack Sheppard’s image, 173 and melodrama, 166–67 and new media, 130 of Paul Clifford, 158–60, 161 phantasmagoria of, 97, 117 problem of, 17 and sensation novels, 242, 244–47, 255 silver-fork school, 55, 59–62 temporal movement, 266 time-discipline, 247 contemporary fiction, 273–78 The Contrast (Lord Normanby), 56, 62, 102–104, 108 conversation and commercial modernity, 80 and public opinion, 82 in Romance and Reality, 80–82 shaping silver-fork novel protagonists, 80, 94 and social reform, 102, 104 Copeland, Edward, 58, 65, 93, 116 criminal biographies, 28 criminal protagonists. See also character and characterization adaptation to circumstance, 174 audience, 145–46, 152, 172–73, 204, 209, 217 in Byron, 142 class status and criminality, 165–66, 175–77 code-switching ability, 163 consciousness of visibility and reception, 131, 172–73, 179, 207–208 crowds, 165, 168–70, 172 defined by mobility, 147, 162 demotic celebrity, 172 determinants of criminality, 175–77 Dickens’s dismantling of heroization of, 190, 194–96, 201, 204, 206 female criminals as protagonists, 246, 258–59 and identity, 151, 156, 165, 166, 177–78, 209 innocence and folly, 256–258, 262 low-born nature of, 142–43 and madness, 262–63 as modern fashionable beings, 134, 163

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302

Index

criminal protagonists (cont.) new media and fashion system, 131 pleasure in transgression, 178 print imagery, 133 psychology of, 144 romanticization of, 162 as savage prophets, 196–98, 200 search for fame, 142, 143 self-fashioning, 134, 217, 260 spectacle via public visibility, 146, 165–66, 168, 172 tension between individual and commercial society, 130, 175 visibility, 134, 166, 172–73 Cronin, Richard, 60, 244 crowds in Barnaby Rudge, 199, 208–210 and celebrity, 199, 207 Hogarth’s rendering of, 169–70 from mob to public, 170, 199 modernity and urban life, 54–55, 64 and phantasmagoria, 19, 63, 65 spectacle of the criminal protagonist, 165–66, 168–70, 172, 179 visual rendering of, 168–70 Crudo (Laing), 273–74 Cruikshank, George Jack Sheppard illustrations, 1, 24–30, 168–73, 200 Oliver Twist illustrations, 171 remediation of history, 24–31 rendering of crowds, 168–70 tableau illustration, 30 custom, 15–16, 78, 102, 139 Cvetkovich, Ann, 260, 265 Daly, Nicholas, 243, 247 dandies. See character and characterization; silver-fork novels dandy novels. See silver-fork novels “The Dandy School” (Hazlitt), 11, 59 David Copperfield (Dickens), 215–32 adaptation of Newgate school, 192 celebrity and public-making, 229–32 as celebrity memoir, 218, 228 communal work of celebrity, 219 critical readings of, 215–16 David Copperfield vs Byron, 229 degradation and shame, 228 demotic celebrity, 226–32 new model of celebrity, 192, 217, 228–30 objectification, 222–25 optic drama, 232 performativity in, 217, 223–24 pleasure of being seen, 221–24 preoccupation with visuality, 216–17

sense of vocation, 230–31 spectacle, 191, 217 visibility, 193, 223, 227 Davidson, Jenny, 111 De Certeau, Michel, 152 Defoe, Daniel, 1, 28, 95, 153–55 demotic celebrity. See also visual culture; performance; celebrity culture; David Copperfield (Dickens); fame in Aurora Floyd, 249–50 in Caleb Williams, 148–49 celebrity for the ordinary individual, 228–29 as communal construct, 148 contemporaneity, 150 in Dickens’s fiction, 23, 190, 212 domestication of, 204, 206, 210, 218, 228–29, 250 elevation of, 226–29 heroization of criminal dismantled, 201 integral to public culture, 179 in Jack Sheppard, 30, 172, 179 new model of, 120, 217 in Newgate novels, 22, 133, 134, 137 and the novel (genre), 2, 134, 204 permeation of celebrity culture, 22 and public culture, 23, 229–32 Dickens, Charles. See also David Copperfield (Dickens); Barnaby Rudge (Dickens) Ainsworth’s influence on, 193, 194 audience, 204 Bleak House, 12 celebrity and the gentleman-in-training, 23, 191–92 celebrity domesticated, 192, 212, 250 criminal protagonist as Good, 143 criminalization of poor and marginalized, 129, 145 critics of, 144 critique of fashion, 122 dismantling heroization of criminal protagonist, 190, 194–96, 201, 204, 206 objectives in Newgate novels, 194 Oliver Twist, 129, 143–45, 171, 193 relationship to the past, 214 religion as cover for criminality, 194 role of sympathy, 144 social commentary of, 195 visuality of modern subjectivity, 193 Disraeli, Benjamin, 94, 129 The Doctor’s Wife (Braddon), 263 Don Juan (Byron), 14, 110–12, 132, 142, 164 Duncan, Ian, 61, 188 East Lynne (Wood), 248 Edgeworth, Maria, 18

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009296540.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index Egan, Jennifer, 273, 275 Egan, Pierce, 123, 173 Elfenbein, Andrew, 227 Eliot, George, 267 England and the English (Bulwer-Lytton), 11, 105 Entwistle, Joanne, 17 Eugene Aram (Bulwer-Lytton), 144, 241 Evans, Caroline, 19, 24, 134, 141, 163, 164, 181, 251 Evelina (Burney), 77, 97 The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (Smollett), 96 Fake Accounts (Oyler), 275 fame. See also criminal protagonists; performance; celebrity culture; demotic celebrity; visibility access to the public sphere, 137–38 in Caleb Williams, 155 vs celebrity, 138, 140, 230 and fashion, 138 and identity, 178 of Jack Sheppard, 155, 172–73 and print media, 206 as public character, 199 search for, 142, 143 set in the past, 141 visibility, 134, 155, 166, 172–73, 230 fashion. See also temporality; contemporaneity; modernity; identity; celebrity culture; silver-fork novels accessibility of, 131, 149 centrality of, 3 citational practice of, 98, 141 criticism of, 11 vs custom, 15–16, 102, 139 dual temporality, 12–16, 52, 249 ephemerality, 4, 65 Eurocentrism in fashion theory, 42 fashion system, 4, 20 fashion time, 14, 74, 247–49 idiom of change, 17, 243 inauthenticity, 248, 253 innovation, 57, 131 language of slavery, 39 as locus for satire, 18 materializes the spirit of the age, 58 and modernity, 4, 57 novelty and obsolescence, 4, 10, 13, 57, 98, 105, 131, 251, 278 openness of, 114, 163, 251 as an organizing technology, 132 politics, 58 principle of currency, 242

303

and public consciousness, 22, 103 revolution in consumption, 4 scholarly denunciation of, 278 sense of community, 6, 8 signifier of the present, 10, 13, 248 tension between materiality and immateriality, 9 as transforming the novel, 16–19 unconscious collective fantasies, 63, 160–61 vacuity of fashionable society, 64–65 fashionable novels. See silver-fork novels Ferris, Ina, 9, 20, 21, 25, 61, 103, 133 Figg, James, 172 First Reform Act (1832), 11, 58 flash (criminal slang), 173 Flash Dictionary, 173 Fleetwood (Godwin), 153 Flint, Kate, 264 Forster, John, 235 Frankenstein (Shelley), 126 Franta, Andrew, 145 Fraser’s Magazine, 12, 68, 122, 146, 147, 166 The French Revolution (Carlyle), 211 gallows school of literature. See Newgate novels Gaskell, Elizabeth, 129, 211 Gay, John, 1, 172 gender. See also private sphere; sensation novels; criminal protagonists; character and characterization category of the gentleman, 200 destabilizing gender norms, 246 female criminal protagonists, 246, 258–59 interpreting character, 256–60 Lady Audley as gender protest, 263–64 and madness, 262–63, 265–66 novel-reading’s dangers for women, 246 public sphere, 101 Victorian gender ideology, 260, 263–64 Gilbert, Pamela, 254, 258 Gilmour, Robin, 110, 125 Gladfelder, Hal, 28, 130, 154–55 Godolphin (Bulwer-Lytton), 58, 104 Godwin, William. See also Caleb Williams (Godwin) familiarity with Newgate Calendar, 153 Fleetwood, 153 influence on Bulwer-Lytton, 113 representations of criminality, 151 sources and inspirations for Caleb Williams, 153 tradition of rogue literature, 150 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 93 Goldfarb, Sheldon, 242 Goodstein, Elizabeth, 88

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304

Index

Gore, Catherine. See also Cecil: or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb (Gore) Byron’s influence, 22 disenchantment of Victorian domestic ideal, 101, 116 elegy for silver-fork schools’ hopefulness, 119 historical model of, 117–19 ideas of selfhood in Cecil novels, 116 Pin Money, 52 Granby (Lister), 53, 108, 114 Gregg, Melissa, 253 Guest, Harriet, 151 Habermas, Jürgen, 20 Hart, F.R., 106 Hazlitt, William on Byron, 229 criticism of fashion, 12–13 criticism of fashionable novels, 2, 11–12, 51, 58, 251 custom and fashion, 16 “The Dandy School”, 11, 59 fame vs celebrity, 138–39, 222 “On Fashion”, 12 on fashion’s authority, 250 Hazlitt’s own fame, 139 Lectures on the English Poets, 70, 139 literature’s need for distance, 254 published by Colburn, 70 on Scott, 139 The Spirit of the Age: or, Contemporary Portraits, 70, 139, 229 Heath, William, 75 Hershinow, Stephanie Insley, 92, 121 highwaymen. See criminal protagonists Hill, Jonathan, 30, 171 historical fiction, 60–62 history and the past. See also temporality; contemporaneity; modernity Benjamin on, 14, 23, 98, 141 in Bulwer-Lytton, 110–11, 157–60 contemporaneous history, 59–62 in Dickens, 135, 214 and fashion, 3, 13–15, 22–24, 52, 98, 105, 160–61 in Gore, 117–19 historical consciousness, 3, 51, 57, 161, 247 historical progress, 263–65 modern historicism, 160 in Newgate novels, 118, 135, 141, 160 in print culture, 27–30, 276 remediation of history in Jack Sheppard, 24–31, 135 in Scott, 60–61 in sensation novels, 243, 244, 254–56 in silver-fork novels, 58–62, 98–99, 118

Hogarth, William, 1, 28–29, 168–70, 172 Hollander, Anne, 3, 5, 6, 14, 27, 63, 98, 105, 248 Hollingsworth, Keith, 135, 143, 147, 173 Hook, Theodore, 84 Houdini, Harry, 209 “An Hour at a Publisher’s” (The Athenaeum), 66–67 Hughes, Winifred, 91, 115 Hunt, Leigh, 82 I May Destroy You (Coel), 276 identity. See also individuality and the individual; selfhood; performance celebrity as identity formation, 130, 151, 166, 217, 260 and commercial society, 130, 248 and criminal discourses, 156, 177–78, 209 customs and manners fundamental to, 78 and fashion, 17, 131, 163, 165, 248 and performativity, 114, 165, 178, 217 in the picaresque, 95 self-fashioning of, 130, 134, 149, 156–57, 163, 217 self-styling, 248, 251 visibility, 101, 178, 208 and visual culture, 4, 103, 131, 157, 178 The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde), 113 individuality and the individual. See also selfhood; identity; performance; visibility Ainsworth on, 175 boundary of the self, 17, 276 Bulwer-Lytton’s utopian individuality, 114 and the collective, 101, 157, 194, 205, 214, 256 and fashion, 101, 131, 138, 175, 248 fashion and the social, 5, 63, 181, 248 individual taste, 78 public visibility, 149, 205 self-fashioning, 132 and the social, 17, 19, 92, 117, 119, 131, 134, 175 and spectatorship, 194 and structures of visuality, 194 Industry and Idleness (Hogarth), 1, 28–29, 168 Jack Sheppard (Ainsworth), 168–81. See also criminal protagonists; Sheppard, Jack adaptability to theatrical performance, 173 audience engagement, 146, 172 class status and criminality, 175–77 comparison with Paul Clifford, 173 contemporary reception, 1, 145, 146, 171, 180, 241 crowds and spectacle, 168–70, 172 Cruikshank’s illustrations, 1, 25–30, 168–73, 200 demotic celebrity, 172, 179

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Index

305

heroization of the criminal, 180 identity formation through crime, 177–78 melodrama, 166, 167 model of public visibility, 174 pleasure in transgression, 178 proto-mass media culture, 180 relationship with the past, 24–28, 31, 135 social critique, 174 status and criminality, 173 use of flash (criminal slang), 173 Jaffe, Audrey, 215, 222, 223 James, Henry, 242 Jerdan, William, 68 John, Juliet, 235 Johnson, Claudia, 59

Lister, Thomas, 53, 108, 114 Literary Gazette, 68, 159 Litvak, Joseph, 236 Lockwood, Patricia, 273–74, 276–78 Lodore (Shelley) crowds and phantasmagoria, 19, 63, 65 and fashion, 71–73 fashion time, the city, and modernity, 74 individual taste shaped by society, 76 society as dynamic force, 72–73 London Quarterly Review, 241 “The Londoner” (Lamb), 54 Lucretia (Bulwer-Lytton), 144 Lukács, Georg, 60, 61, 183 Lynch, Deidre, 65, 83, 92

Keddie, Henrietta, 246 Keen, Paul, 3 Kenilworth (Scott), 199 Klancher, Jon, 236 Knight, Charles, 29

Mackie, Erin, 8, 124, 156 Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, 136 Maginn, William, 12, 16, 110, 122, 198 Mandeville, Bernard, 4 Mansel, Henry, 70, 243, 245, 254, 271, 274 “March of Intellect” prints, 75 Marx, Karl, 5 Mary Barton (Gaskell), 211 mass media. See also visual culture; print culture mass media culture, 129, 180 public sphere, 22, 137, 220, 276 and self-promotion, 230 visibility, 220 Matus, Jill, 260, 263 McGann, Jerome, 93, 108, 125 McKendrick, Neil, 37 McKeon, Michael, 95–96, 110 media ecology, 23, 101 Mee, Jon, 80, 82, 197, 208, 210, 211 Meisel, Martin, 30, 171 melodrama, 166–68, 171–72, 213 metropolitan life crowds, 54–55, 64 and fashion, 74 fashion time and modernity, 73 mobility of urban life, 54–55 as multitudinous moving picture, 19 as phantasmagoria, 63–65, 111 society as dynamic force, 73 violence of, 166 visually-saturated marketplaces, 54 Michasiw, Kim Ian, 125, 197, 214 Miller, D.A., 216, 254, 263, 270 Miller, Monica, 164 modernity. See also temporality; history and the past; contemporaneity; fashion Benjamin on, 3, 10 in Braddon, 244 commercial modernity, 4–5, 80, 96

Lady Audley’s Secret (Braddon), 259–67 affective field of, 261, 263, 265–67 gender in, 259–60 Lady Audley and Aurora Floyd, 259–60 Lady Audley’s character, 259–60, 262 madness and gender, 262–63, 265–66 representation of modernity, 244 vitality of fashion, 259 Laing, Olivia, 273–74 Lake Poets, 54 Lamb, Charles, 19, 54 Lamb, Jonathan, 4, 130 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth. See also Romance and Reality (Landon) on conversation, 81 on customs and manners, 78 ephemerality of contemporaneity, 65 fashion-inflected theory of taste, 76–77 fashion time, the city, and modernity, 73 negligent chaperone tropes, 77–78 on popularity vs literary value, 55–56 Laver, James, 8 law, 129, 154, 203, 210 Lawford, Cynthia, 90, 102 Lectures on Female Education and Manners (Burton), 9 Lectures on the English Poets (Hazlitt), 70, 139 Lehmann, Ulrich, 3, 55 Leigh, Aurora, 60 Levine, George, 53, 126 Lewis, Matthew, 176 Life in London (Egan), 123 Lipovetsky, Gilles, 4, 10, 57, 114, 163, 278

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306

Index

modernity (cont.) crowds and the metropolis, 54–55, 64 experience of, 243 and fashion, 3, 10, 13, 57 historical consciousness of, 98 and madness, 265–66 metropolitan taste and fashion time, 74 new historical sensibility, 57 print culture, 20 taste for novelty, 52, 57, 160 Mole, Tom, 21, 36, 67, 103, 133, 155, 157 Moll Flanders (Defoe), 95 The Monk (Lewis), 176 The Monthly Magazine, 158 Montwieler, Katherine, 260, 261 Morning Post, 94 Murray, John, 69 A Narrative of all the Robberies, Escapes, &c. of John Sheppard (Defoe), 1, 28, 153–55 Nelson, Maggie, 273 Nemesvari, Richard, 245 New Monthly Magazine, 68 The Newgate Calendar, 1, 132, 143, 153 Newgate novels. See also criminal protagonists; Jack Sheppard (Ainsworth); Barnaby Rudge (Dickens); Paul Clifford (Bulwer-Lytton) Ainsworth’s conception of crime fiction, 173–76 appeal of, 135–36, 147 audience, 146, 167, 174, 204 celebrity culture, 129, 132, 191 centrality of sympathy, 143–45 code-switching, 112, 132, 163, 165, 180 criticism of, 143, 145–147 demotic celebrity, 22, 133, 134, 137, 148 Eugene Aram, 144, 241 individual subjectivity and criminal discourse, 156 individual’s relationship to society, 131, 134 influence of Byron, 141–42, 190 influence of Romantic models, 190 influence of Scott’s Waverley novels, 25, 135 interrelation of celebrity and fashion, 120, 132 and mass media culture, 129 melodrama in, 166 modern historicism, 161 new consciousness of visibility, 154 new model of history, 118 new model of publicness, 148 performative fame, 141 presentness and the contemporary, 140, 157 public consciousness, 103, 145, 179 relationship between transgression and celebrity, 210

relationship to eighteenth-century crime narratives, 131 relationship to the past, 135, 141, 160 rise of, 119 role of keen observation, 165, 180 and sensation novels, 242 as social critique, 143 social inequality, 143, 157 synchronization with the temporality of fashion, 167 Thackeray’s reaction against, 145, 242 use of flash (criminal slang), 173 Nicolazzo, Sal, 130 No One Is Talking About This (2021) (Lockwood), 273–74, 276–78 Noggle, James, 6, 7 Normanby, Constantine Phipps, Lord, 56, 62, 102–104, 108 Northanger Abbey (Austen), 55 novel (genre). See also print culture; sensation novels; criminal protagonists; character and characterization; audience; Newgate novels; picaresque; silver-fork novels; Bildungsroman Bildungsroman as model for, 93, 97, 108 charge of trendiness and frivolity, 11, 18, 51, 58–59, 274 conception of public consciousness, 104 and the contemporary, 2, 3, 17, 31, 93 dangers of novel-reading, 246 defense of, 55, 82, 104, 140 and demotic celebrity, 2, 134, 204 engagement with proto-mass media culture, 190 Hazlitt’s criticism, 2, 11–12, 51, 58, 251 history and temporality, 2, 18 literature’s need for distance, 254 and modernity, 2 novelty and obsolescence, 161 representations of criminality, 2, 151 responsibility to shape public discourse, 104 serialized format, 204, 247, 271, 274–76 Twitter-novel and public sphere, 276–78 Twitter-novel, overview, 273–74 Twitter-novel’s serialization, 274–76 Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (Tillotson), 93 Oliver Twist (Dickens), 129, 143–45, 171, 193 “On Fashion” (Hazlitt), 12 Oyler, Lauren, 275 Paul Clifford (Bulwer-Lytton), 157–68. See also criminal protagonists code-switching, 163 comparison with Jack Sheppard, 173

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Index contemporaneity, 158–61 criticism of, 162 critique of social order, 157, 158 highwayman as knight errant, 159 melodrama, 166–68 modeled on Caleb Williams, 157 relationship with the past, 157–60 satire and social critique, 161–62 Pelham; or, the Adventures of a Gentleman (Bulwer-Lytton), 106–15 as Bildungsroman, 93, 108–109 criticism of, 110, 124 and fashion, 109, 114–15 manifesto for manners, 109–10, 112 relationship to the past, 110–11 role of keen observation, 109–10 self-fashioning, 111–13 as shaping contemporary society, 56 and sincerity, 113 social engagement vs withdrawal, 106–108 on trifling, 56 Penny, Laurie, 274 The Penny Magazine, 29 performance. See also individuality and the individual; selfhood; criminal protagonists; identity; celebrity culture; spectacle; fame; visibility and David Copperfield, 224, 225, 232 and fashion, 248, 252 performativity of identity, 165, 217, 223–24 in the private and public spheres, 20, 21, 101, 157 and selfhood, 23, 179, 250, 260 and temporality, 250 Pettitt, Clare, 19, 28, 30, 160, 186, 275 phantasmagoria, 19, 63–65, 97, 111, 117 Phillips, Mark Salber, 243, 244, 255 picaresque in Bulwer-Lytton, 94, 110–13 defined, 95 in Defoe, 95 exploration of status and identity, 95 Gore’s engagement with, 117 movement and commercial modernity, 96 narrative structure, 110, 112, 115 pícaro’s (rogue’s) self-sufficiency, 95–96, 110 restyled in Don Juan, 110, 142 self-fashioning identity, 130 silver-fork novels’ engagement with, 93, 97–99 in Smollett, 96 and social critique, 96 Spanish picaresque and English writers, 95 temporality in, 95–96 tension between pícaro and narrator, 110

307

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde), 113 Pin Money (Gore), 52 Pocock, J.G.A., 65 Poovey, Mary, 215, 216 Porter, Roy, 3 print culture. See also visual culture; mass media; novel (genre); Colburn, Henry celebrity culture, 5, 21, 27, 133, 154 fame, 206 modernity, 20 new visual forms, 5, 21, 30 print imagery, 103, 133 print revolution of 1830s, 148 publishing, 66, 68–69 seriality and historical consciousness, 276 private sphere domesticity, 78–80, 102, 116, 211–12, 258 domesticity and intimate publics, 215 new conceptions of privacy, 276 and public sphere, 101–102, 205 and public violence, 212–15 Propp, Vladimir, 152 public character in Barnaby Rudge, 199–200, 203–205 earnestness of David Copperfield, 229 fame as, 203–205 media transformations and, 204, 232 as public visibility, 205 self-awareness and visibility, 220 public life centrality of visibility, 20, 133, 134 inseparable from publicity, 133 performativity of, 20, 157, 179 print culture, 5 visuality of modern subjectivity, 179 public opinion conversation’s role in, 82 demotic celebrity, 23 and fashion, 104–105 and social reform, 102–105, 230 virtual publics, 147 public sphere access via fashion system, 137 access via proto-mass media, 137 audience and public consciousness, 21 celebrity culture, 133, 218 changes to, 22, 103 and criminals, 146 demotic celebrity, 179 fame, 137–38 new model of publicness, 148, 206 performance, 21 and private sphere, 101–102, 205 public consciousness, 20, 21, 133, 145 publicity, 23, 230

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308

Index

public sphere (cont.) selfhood and public culture, 130 visual culture and fashion, 157 visual media, 206 visuality and performativity, 243 Pykett, Lyn, 263, 270, 271 religion, 194 Richmond, Vivienne, 8 Romance and Reality (Landon), 73–84 conversation’s significance, 80–82, 102 defense of the novel, 82, 104, 140 ephemerality of contemporaneity, 65 fashion-inflected theory of taste, 76–77 fashion time, the city, and modernity, 73 gender ideology, 79–80 narrative form, 53 narrator’s limited role, 99–100 negligent chaperone trope, 77–78 popularity vs literary value, 55–56 role of keen observation, 99–100 and the social collective, 78, 80–81 Rookwood (Ainsworth), 1, 173 Rosa, Matthew, 13, 59, 70, 93 Rose, Jacqueline, 136, 209, 214, 217, 228, 244 Rousseau, G.S., 95, 96 Russell, Gillian, 99, 101, 123 Sartor Resartus (Carlyle), 39, 94, 109, 177, 230 Schroeder, Natalie, 193 Scott, Walter Hazlitt’s criticism of, 139 influence of Waverley novels on Newgate school, 25, 135 influence of Waverley novels on silver-fork school, 60, 62, 100, 110, 118 Kenilworth, 199 London as phantasmagoria, 63 temporality of fashion, 183 Seigworth, Gregory, 253 selfhood. See also individuality and the individual; identity; performance code-switching and mobility, 132 and fashion, 5, 17, 163 performance, 23, 250 and public culture, 130 self-fashioning, 5, 19, 111–12, 156–57, 248 visibility, 23, 190 visuality of, 151, 276 Sen, Sambudha, 123 sensation novels. See also Lady Audley’s Secret (Braddon); criminal protagonists; character and characterization; Aurora Floyd (Braddon) affect and the social, 264, 266

affective distance, 254–56, 259 class and status instability, 247 and contemporaneity, 242, 244–47, 255 criticism of, 245, 274 dual temporality of, 245–47 entanglement of affect and temporality, 255 and fashion, 242, 247 history of the contemporary, 244 madness of modern life, 266 narrative hypercurrency, 247, 251 and Newgate novels, 242 principle of currency, 242 proximity and distance, 243, 244, 253–56 relationship to history, 243, 244, 254–56 serialized form of, 247 Seymour, Robert, 75 Shelley, Mary. See also Lodore (Shelley) ambivalence about fashion, 71–73 and Colburn, 69 crowds and phantasmagoria, 19, 63, 65 disenchantment of Victorian domestic ideal, 126 fashion time, the city, and modernity, 74 Frankenstein, 126 society as dynamic force, 72–73 Shelley, P.B., 176 Sheppard (Buckstone), 173 Sheppard, Jack compared to Caleb Williams, 153–55 contemporaneity of, 173 Defoe’s 1724 biography of, 1, 28, 153–55 fame of, 1–2, 155, 172–73 historical overview, 153 Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness, 28–29 shopping, 54. See also commerce and commercial culture Showalter, Elaine, 263 silver-fork novelists, 59–62, 98–99, 117 silver-fork novels. See also picaresque; Romance and Reality (Landon); Pelham; or, the Adventures of a Gentleman (BulwerLytton); Cecil: or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb (Gore); conversation; Lodore (Shelley) Bildungsroman alternative, 53, 91, 94, 115 and contemporaneity, 55, 97 contemporaneous history, 59–62 The Contrast, 56, 62, 102–103, 108 criticism of, 2, 11–12, 51, 58, 122, 251 crowds and the metropolis, 54, 64 cultural currency of, 94 the dandy, 113, 115, 131 defense of the genre, 55–56 Disraeli, 94 engagement with picaresque, 93, 97–98, 115

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Index and fashion, 51–52, 57, 70 genre innovations, 52, 59, 60 Godolphin, 104 Granby, 53, 108 influence of Scott’s Waverley novels, 60, 62, 100, 110, 118 Pin Money, 52 plotlessness of, 91 and publishing industry, 66 readership and sales, 58 Reform culture, 58 relationship to the aristocracy, 103 relationship to history, 58, 60, 98–99, 118 relationship to newspapers, 94 role of keen observation, 56, 83, 99, 109–10 social acumen, 109 social participation, 75, 94, 97, 101, 109, 119 and social reform, 102 social withdrawal, 72, 74 temporality and time, 52, 53, 58, 94 The Silver Fork School (Rosa), 59 Simmel, Georg, 3, 10, 13, 105 Siskin, Clifford, 21, 130, 131 Smith, Adam, 5–7, 15, 76, 248 Smollett, Tobias, 18, 96, 112, 124 social reform in Bulwer-Lytton, 11, 58, 104–105 and conversation, 102, 104 and fashion, 10, 14, 63, 104–105, 114, 181, 248 First Reform Act, 11, 58 political reform, 104–105 public opinion, 102–105, 230 in silver-fork novels, 102 society and affect, 262, 266 commercial society, 4–5, 130, 175 and the individual, 17, 76, 119, 130, 248 social organization and fashion, 4–9, 17, 75, 131, 133 and taste, 76 songs, 166, 173 Sparks, Tabitha, 248 spectacle. See also visual culture; performance; visibility appeal of, 147 celebrity culture, 5, 136, 217 crowds and the criminal protagonist, 165–66, 168–70, 172, 179 demotic celebrity, 199 of law and order, 203 and print culture, 5 and the public man, 191 spectatorship, 148, 192, 194 via public visibility, 146, 165–66, 168, 172 of violence, 136, 172, 201, 242

309

The Spectator, 158, 159 The Spirit of the Age: or, Contemporary Portraits (Hazlitt), 70, 139, 229 status and class celebrity and the gentleman, 23, 191–92, 210, 219 criminality, 129, 145, 165–66, 174–77 crisis of status inconsistency, 95, 130 explored in the picaresque, 95 and fashion, 6–9, 11, 12, 14, 65, 104, 248 fashion’s class associations, 11, 14 instability of, 247 social inequality, 157 Styles, John, 7–8 Surridge, Lisa, 245 Sutherland, John, 67, 69 taste conveyed through conversation, 81 and fashion, 76, 78, 248 Landon’s theory of, 76–77 Smith’s theory of, 5–7, 76 society’s influence on, 76 Taylor, Jenny Bourne, 243 temporality. See also history and the past; contemporaneity; modernity; fashion and affect, 255, 266 constitutive of modern life, 71, 92 of contemporary fiction, 273 dual temporality, 245–47, 249 of fashion, 4, 11, 22, 51, 92, 95–99, 219, 278 fashion time, 14 in fiction, 51–55, 58 Thackeray, W. M. Barry Lyndon, 190 Catherine, 190, 242 criticism of Dickens, 145, 267 on Cruikshank’s illustrations, 170 on popularity of Jack Sheppard, 2 reaction against Newgate school, 242, 267 Vanity Fair, 63, 78, 211 The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 5–6, 76, 248 Things As They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams (Godwin). See Caleb Williams (Godwin) Thompson, E. P., 16 Thornhill, Sir James, 27, 28 Thrift, Nigel, 261 Tillotson, Kathleen, 18, 93 Trelawny, Edward, 69 Trumpener, Katie, 60 Tuite, Clara, 21, 124, 133, 136, 141, 147, 150, 192, 203, 204, 209, 252

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310

Index

Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 63, 78, 211 Vickery, Amanda, 123 Victorian novels consciousness of visibility and performance, 135 domestic angel prefigured, 78–80 domestic space, 126, 211, 260 links to Newgate school, 143, 190 spectacle, 179 violence and domesticity, 211, 212–15 of the law, 203, 210 and melodrama, 166–68 private life and public violence, 212–15 rites of, 147 spectacle of, 136, 172, 201, 242 transition from material to symbolic, 204 of urban modernity, 166 visibility. See also visual culture; performance; spectacle in Caleb Williams, 149–50 celebrity culture, 5, 193, 199 consciousness of, 131, 135, 157, 172–73, 179, 207–208, 220 for criminal protagonists, 134, 166, 172–73 in Dickens, 192, 193, 220–26 and fame, 134, 155, 166, 172–73, 230 and identity formation, 178, 208 inseparable from publicness, 20 in Jack Sheppard, 174 of modern subjectivity, 179, 193 pleasure of being seen, 221–24 and print culture, 5 private sphere, 101 public sphere, 133, 179, 198–99, 208, 220, 227 transformation of public culture, 148

visual culture. See also print culture; spectacle; visibility boundary of public and individual, 276 and demotic celebrity, 30 and fashion, 4, 51, 57, 157 and identity, 4, 101, 103, 157, 178 and public consciousness, 103, 157, 178 visual media and the public sphere, 243 visuality, 151, 194, 276–77 Vivian Grey (Disraeli), 94 Von Mücke, Dorothea, 156 Wahrman, Dror, 101 Warburton, William, 39 Warner, Michael, 151 Warner, William, 21, 130, 131 Watt, Ian, 93 Waverley novels (Scott) influence on Newgate novels, 25, 135 influence on silver-fork school, 60, 62, 100, 110, 118 model of history, 60–61 wealth, 162–63. See also status and class Welsh, Alexander, 110 Wild, Jonathan, 182 Wilde, Oscar, 113 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Goethe), 93 Williams, Raymond, 114, 134 Wilson, Elizabeth, 9, 17, 63, 64, 248 The Woman in White (Collins), 254 Wood, Ellen, 248 Wu, Duncan, 70 The Young Duke (Disraeli), 94 Young, Vershawn Ashanti, 164

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C a mbr idge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Liter atur e a nd Cultur e GENERAL EDITORS Kate Flint, University of Southern California Clare Pettitt, King’s College London Titles published 1. The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill Miriam Bailin, Washington University 2. Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age edited by Donald E. Hall, California State University, Northridge 3. Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art Herbert Sussman, Northeastern University, Boston 4. Byron and the Victorians Andrew Elfenbein, University of Minnesota 5. Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and the Circulation of Books edited by John O. Jordan, University of California, Santa Cruz and Robert L. Patten, Rice University, Houston 6. Victorian Photography, Painting and and Poetry Lindsay Smith, University of Sussex 7. Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology Sally Shuttleworth, University of Sheffield 8. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle Kelly Hurley, University of Colorado at Boulder 9. Rereading Walter Pater William F. Shuter, Eastern Michigan University 10. Remaking Queen Victoria edited by Margaret Homans, Yale University and Adrienne Munich, State University of New York, Stony Brook 11. Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels Pamela K. Gilbert, University of Florida 12. Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature Alison Byerly, Middlebury College, Vermont 13. Literary Culture and the Pacific Vanessa Smith, University of Sydney 14. Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home Monica F. Cohen 15. Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation Suzanne Keen, Washington and Lee University, Virginia 16. Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth Gail Marshall, University of Leeds

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17. Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origin Carolyn Dever, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee 18. Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy Sophie Gilmartin, Royal Holloway, University of London 19. Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre Deborah Vlock 20. After Dickens: Reading, Adaptation and Performance John Glavin, Georgetown University, Washington D C 21. Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question edited by Nicola Diane Thompson, Kingston University, London 22. Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry Matthew Campbell, University of Sheffield 23. Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War Paula M. Krebs, Wheaton College, Massachusetts 24. Ruskin’s God Michael Wheeler, University of Southampton 25. Dickens and the Daughter of the House Hilary M. Schor, University of Southern California 26. Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science Ronald R. Thomas, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut 27. Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology Jan-Melissa Schramm, Trinity Hall, Cambridge 28. Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World Elaine Freedgood, University of Pennsylvania 29. Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture Lucy Hartley, University of Southampton 30. The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study Thad Logan, Rice University, Houston 31. Aestheticism and Sexual Parody 1840–1940 Dennis Denisoff, Ryerson University, Toronto 32. Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 Pamela Thurschwell, University College London 33. Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature Nicola Bown, Birkbeck, University of London 34. George Eliot and the British Empire Nancy Henry The State University of New York, Binghamton 35. Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture Cynthia Scheinberg, Mills College, California 36. Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body Anna Krugovoy Silver, Mercer University, Georgia 37. Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust Ann Gaylin, Yale University

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38. Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 Anna Johnston, University of Tasmania 39. London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 Matt Cook, Keele University 40. Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland Gordon Bigelow, Rhodes College, Tennessee 41. Gender and the Victorian Periodical Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck, University of London judith johnston and Stephanie Green, University of Western Australia 42. The Victorian Supernatural edited by Nicola Bown, Birkbeck College, London carolyn burdett, London Metropolitan University and pamela thurschwell, University College London 43. The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination Gautam Chakravarty, University of Delhi 44. The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People Ian Haywood, Roehampton University of Surrey 45. Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature Geoffrey Cantor, University of Leeds gowan dawson, University of Leicester graeme gooday, University of Leeds richard noakes, University of Cambridge sally shuttleworth, University of Sheffield and jonathan r. topham, University of Leeds 46. Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain from Mary Shelley to George Eliot Janis McLarren Caldwell, Wake Forest University 47. The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf edited by Christine Alexander, University of New South Wales and Juliet McMaster, University of Alberta 48. From Dickens to Dracula: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction Gail Turley Houston, University of New Mexico 49. Voice and the Victorian Storyteller Ivan Kreilkamp, University of Indiana 50. Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture Jonathan Smith, University of Michigan-Dearborn 51. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture Patrick R. O’Malley, Georgetown University 52. Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain Simon Dentith, University of Gloucestershire 53. Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal Helena Michie, Rice University 54. The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture Nadia Valman, University of Southampton 55. Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature Julia Wright, Dalhousie University 56. Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination Sally Ledger, Birkbeck, University of London

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57. Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability Gowan Dawson, University of Leicester 58. ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle Marion Thain, University of Birmingham 59. Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Writing David Amigoni, Keele University 60. Realism, Photography and Nineteenth-Century Fiction Daniel A. Novak, Lousiana State University 61. Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–1870 Tim Watson, University of Miami 62. The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History Michael Sanders, University of Manchester 63. Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Jane Austen to the New Woman Cheryl Wilson, Indiana University 64. Shakespeare and Victorian Women Gail Marshall, Oxford Brookes University 65. The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood Valerie Sanders, University of Hull 66. Darwin and the Memory of the Human: Evolution, Savages, and South America Cannon Schmitt, University of Toronto 67. From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction Amanpal Garcha, Ohio State University 68. The Crimean War and the British Imagination Stefanie Markovits, Yale University 69. Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction Jill L. Matus, University of Toronto 70. Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s Nicholas Daly, University College Dublin 71. Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science Srdjan Smajić, Furman University 72. Satire in an Age of Realism Aaron Matz, Scripps College, California 73. Thinking About Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing Adela Pinch, University of Michigan 74. Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination Katherine Byrne, University of Ulster, Coleraine 75. Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World Tanya Agathocleous, Hunter College, City University of New York 76. Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England’s Disciples of Flora, 1780–1870 Judith W. Page, University of Florida elise l. smith, Millsaps College, Mississippi

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77. Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society Sue Zemka, University of Colorado 78. Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century Anne Stiles, Washington State University 79. Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain Janice Carlisle, Yale University 80. Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative Jan-Melissa Schramm, University of Cambridge 81. The Silver Fork Novel: Fashionable Fiction in the Age of Reform Edward Copeland, Pomona College, California 82. Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece Iain Ross, Colchester Royal Grammar School 83. The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense Daniel Brown, University of Southampton 84. Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel Anne DeWitt, Princeton Writing Program 85. China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined Ross G. Forman, University of Warwick 86. Dickens’s Style edited by Daniel Tyler, University of Oxford 87. The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession Richard Salmon, University of Leeds 88. Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press Fionnuala Dillane, University College Dublin 89. The Victorian Novel and the Space of Art: Fictional Form on Display Dehn Gilmore, California Institute of Technology 90. George Eliot and Money: Economics, Ethics and Literature Dermot Coleman, Independent Scholar 91. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914 Bradley Deane, University of Minnesota 92. Evolution and Victorian Culture edited by Bernard Lightman, York University, Toronto and bennett zon, University of Durham 93. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination Allen MacDuffie, University of Texas, Austin 94. Popular Literature, Authorship and the Occult in Late Victorian Britain Andrew McCann, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire 95. Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century: Looking Like a Woman Hilary Fraser Birkbeck, University of London 96. Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture Deborah Lutz, Long Island University, C. W. Post Campus 97. The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York Nicholas Daly, University College Dublin

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98. Dickens and the Business of Death Claire Wood, University of York 99. Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry Annmarie Drury, Queens College, City University of New York 100. The Bigamy Plot: Sensation and Convention in the Victorian Novel Maia McAleavey, Boston College, Massachusetts 101. English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, 1850–1914 Will Abberley, University of Oxford 102. The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination Aviva Briefel, Bowdoin College, Maine 103. Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children’s Literature Jessica Straley, University of Utah 104. Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration Adriana Craciun, University of California, Riverside 105. Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press Will Tattersdill, University of Birmingham 106. Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Art and the Politics of Public Life Lucy Hartley, University of Michigan 107. Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain Jonathan Farina, Seton Hall University, New Jersey 108. Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Poetry of Religious Experience Martin Dubois, Newcastle University 109. Blindness and Writing: From Wordsworth to Gissing Heather Tilley, Birkbeck College, University of London 110. An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel Gregory Vargo, New York University 111. Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology Linda M. Austin, Oklahoma State University 112. Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900 Richard Adelman, University of Sussex 113. Poetry, Media, and the Material Body: Autopoetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain Ashley Miller, Albion College, Michigan 114. Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire Jessica Howell, Texas A&M University 115. The Brontës and the Idea of the Human: Science, Ethics, and the Victorian Imagination edited by Alexandra Lewis, University of Aberdeen 116. The Political Lives of Victorian Animals: Liberal Creatures in Literature and Culture Anna Feuerstein, University of Hawai'i-Manoa 117. The Divine in the Commonplace: Recent Natural Histories and the Novel in Britain Amy King, St John’s University, New York

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118. Plagiarizing the Victorian Novel: Imitation, Parody, Aftertext Adam Abraham, Virginia Commonwealth University 119. Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880-1900: Many Inventions Richard Menke, University of Georgia 120. Aging, Duration, and the English Novel: Growing Old from Dickens to Woolf Jacob Jewusiak, Newcastle University 121. Autobiography, Sensation, and the Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Life upon the Exchange Sean Grass, Rochester Institute of Technology 122. Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire Phillip Steer, Massey University, Auckland 123. Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture: Nature, Science and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination Will Abberley, University of Sussex 124. Victorian Women and Wayward Reading: Crises of Identification Marisa Palacios Knox, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley 125. The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century Charles LaPorte, University of Washington 126. Children’s Literature and the Rise of ‘Mind Cure’: Positive Thinking and Pseudo-Science at the Fin de Siècle Anne Stiles, Saint Louis University, Missouri 127. Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Fictional Experience Timothy Gao, Nanyang Technological University 128. Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination Leila Neti, Occidental College, Los Angeles 129. Convalescence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel: The Afterlife of Victorian Illness Hosanna Krienke, University of Wyoming 130. Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction: Form, Ethics and the Novel Matthew Sussman, The University of Sydney 131. Scottish Women’s Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century: The Romance of Everyday Life Juliet Shields, University of Washington 132. Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: How the ‘Terrible Lizard’ Became a Transatlantic Cultural Icon Richard Fallon, The University of Birmingham 133. Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860–1910: Decay, Desire, and the Pagan Revival Dennis Denisoff, University of Tulsa 134. Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture Alistair Robinson, New College of the Humanities

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009296540.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

135. Collaborative Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century: Sympathetic Partnerships and Artistic Creation Heather Bozant Witcher, Auburn University, Montgomery 136. Visual Culture and Arctic Voyages: Personal and Public Art and Literature of the Franklin Search Expeditions Eavan O’Dochartaigh, Umeå Universitet, Sweden 137. Music and the Queer Body in English Literature at the Fin de Siècle Fraser Riddell, University of Durham 138. Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity Linda K. Hughes, Texas Christian University 139. Conversing in Verse: Conversation in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry Elizabeth Helsinger, University of Chicago 140. Birdsong, Speech and Poetry: The Art of Composition in the Long Nineteenth Century Francesca Mackenney, University of Leeds 141. The Art of the Reprint: Nineteenth-Century Novels in Twentieth-Century Editions Rosalind Parry, Independent scholar 142. Sexual Restraint and Aesthetic Experience in Victorian Literary Decadence Sarah Green, University of Oxford 143. Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel Lauren Gillingham, University of Ottawa

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009296540.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press