Regulating the Floods of Literature: Literate and Material Practices in Valuing the Victorian Novel

This dissertation investigates the complex and often contradictory actions through which Victorian novels have been valued. Chapter One, “Disciplining and Disinfecting Working-Class Readers in the Victorian Public Library,” looks at the Free Libraries Movement, in which efforts to establish public libraries were intertwined with debates about working-class reading. This study details the ways that libraries defined the proper functions of reading on the basis of class by examining the debate on the necessity of libraries and reading rooms, and the enforcement of library policies. Chapter Two, “Trafficking in Literary Authority: Mudie's Select Library and the Commodification of the Victorian Novel,” traces the path a novel followed from its initial purchase to its eventual demise in the catacombs beneath the Mudie's Library. The practices of this commercial library attenuated the novel's commodity status, and thereby multiplied the ways in which three-volume novels could be valued. Chapter Three, “‘The Production of a Female Hand’: Domestic Literacy and the Career of Geraldine Jewsbury,” looks at the author, reviewer, and publisher's reader Geraldine Jewsbury. In providing an economic outlet for women's labor, novel-writing revealed the interdependency of domesticity and the marketplace. While Jewsbury's writings fervently commented on the ambiguous position of professional women writers, her own career demonstrated that literary value often obscured the labors which created literary texts. Chapter Four, “Valuing the Victorian Mystery: Eerily at Home in the Nineteenth-Century,” examines how Victorian novels are now perceived as an identifiable category, within popular and academic cultures, by focusing on contemporary mystery novels set in Victorian England. The claims these novels make for authenticity and the ways in which they are marketed and reviewed illustrate how canonical hierarchies and historical narratives reconfigure popular notions of the Victorian novel. “Regulating the Floods of Literature” closes by reflecting on how divisions between academic and popular discourses might work against our goals as literary historians, critics, and teachers