Victorian Age

Berg, Maxine. The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy, 1815–1848. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982. A highly influential study of the emergence of machinery as a central social, political, and economic topic of debate in early- to mid-19th-century Britain. Focuses on the close interest of classical political economy in machinery and on related national commentary surrounding new relations of production.
Derry, T. K., and Trevor Williams. A Short History of Technology from the Earliest Times to A.D. 1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960. Part 2 provides an accessible technical description of the development of mechanical innovations in the 18th and 19th centuries. Includes a detailed account of the steam engine (pp. 311–342), from its early use for pumping mines to various low- and high-pressure forms, whether stationary, locomotive, or marine.
Landes, David. The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1969. A broad economic history of industrialism, with emphasis on machinery, machine tools, and metallurgy. Chapter 2 discusses the distinctive features of Britain that supported mechanical innovation and increased productivity, especially pp. 99–123.
Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. A pathbreaking history of the human body as an engine, as treated in both later-19th-century thermodynamics and the emerging science of work. Explores the discovery of energy, labor power, and, most importantly, fatigue in Victorian and 20th-century physiology, psychology, art, natural science, and industrial writing.
Samuel, Raphael. “Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in Mid-Victorian Britain.” History Workshop 3.1 (Spring 1977): 6–72. An illuminating social and economic history that surveys a wide variety of mechanized trades and manufactures, with emphasis on discontinuous and incremental change. Argues that resistance to machinery was an “endemic” feature of 19th-century industrial life and labor.
Sherwood, John M. “Engels, Marx, Malthus, and the Machine.” American Historical Review 90.4 (October 1985): 837–865. Challenges Marx and Engels’s “great machinery theory of history” (p. 850), which credits the machine with the creation of the British proletariat. Instead argues that incremental demographic and economic changes influenced labor conditions. Narrower in focus. DOI: 10.2307/1858842
Sussman, Herbert. “Machine Dreams: The Culture of Technology.” Victorian Literature and Culture 28.1 (2000): 197–204. A helpful bibliographic review essay on recent scholarship devoted to recovering forgotten forms of Victorian “machine beauty” (p. 198) and technological enthusiasm. Surveys new cultural histories of industrial “techno-tourism,” artificial intelligence, the body as engine, and the human as a cyborg-like hybrid of the organic and mechanical. DOI: 10.1017/S1060150300281114
Tunzelmann, G. N. von. Steam Power and British Industrialization to 1860. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. An influential economic history, which questions popular views of the Industrial Revolution as based on the massive buildup of steam power and Watt’s rotative engine. Argues for the continued significant impact of waterpower up to 1840. Helpful introductory chapter, although later chapters are more technical.
Bizup, Joseph. Manufacturing Culture: Vindications of Early Victorian Industry. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Important revisionist study of the explicitly cultural and aesthetic aims of early-Victorian “proindustrial rhetoric” and machine beauty, but does not extend these claims to Victorian fiction more generally. The second half of the book treats the anti-industrial views of Ruskin and Morris, who argue that mechanical labor dehumanizes and emasculates men.
Briggs, Asa. “The Imaginative Response of the Victorians to New Technology: The Case of the Railway.” In On the Move: Essays on Labour and Transportation History Presented to Philip Bagwell. Edited by Chris Wrigley and John Shepherd, 58–75. London: Hambledon, 1991. An accessible essay on the railway locomotive as a mechanical prototype for later complex human reactions to technology. Provides an informative survey of popular metaphors used for machinery, accidents, speed, and mechanical embodiment. Assesses the goals of cultural histories of technology. Daly, Nicholas. Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. An engaging literary and cultural study of the “mechanization of everyday life” (p. 3), with an emphasis on encounters between people and steam locomotives in railway melodramas and sensation fiction from the 1860s onward. Explores industrial ideas of time and space and the production of the modern nervous body.
Sussman, Herbert. Victorians and the Machine: The Literary Response to Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. The first book-length study of Victorian literature specifically in relation to the machine. Explores the “ambivalent” views of authors who both admired machinery and feared its destructive and alienating effects, especially as a symbol for “mechanistic modes of thought” (p. 8). A pioneering descriptive survey of literary attitudes.
Briggs, Asa. The Power of Steam: An Illustrated History of the World’s Steam Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. A classic popular introduction to the impact of steam on culture, art, and politics, with an emphasis largely on Britain. “The Gospel of Steam” (pp. 70–93) provides a cultural history of Victorian mechanization. Contains extensive picture sections on various inventions, ranging from ocean liners to traction engines. Lacks a substantial bibliography. Giedion, Sigfried. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. New York: Norton, 1948. An early cultural history of machines, with an encyclopedic and broadly collective focus on material culture and consumption. Emphasizes American innovations and the assembly line. Profusely illustrated, descriptive, and sometimes uneven, but still influential as an account of the deterministic human effects of mechanization.
Sussman, Herbert. Victorian Technology: Invention, Innovation, and the Rise of the Machine. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009. One of the few recent and accessible introductions to machinery devoted specifically to the Victorian period. Treats industrial production, Babbage’s calculating machine, the telegraph, the steamship, electricity, and new cultural approaches to the living human machine. Includes discussions of period literature and culture. Brief bibliography. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Provides an illuminating period-specific definition of the terms mechanical (pp. 167–169) and organic (pp. 189–192), noting their relatively recent divergence of meaning in the early 19th century.
Berg, Maxine, ed. Technology and Toil in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Documents. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979. An instructive collection of nonfictional period excerpts on the “Machinery Question” and factory automation. Includes detailed descriptions of machines used in a variety of trades. Especially substantial selections from working-class pamphlets and periodicals. Chew,
Kenneth, and Anthony Wilson. Victorian Science and Engineering Portrayed in the Illustrated London News. Phoenix Mill, UK: Alan Sutton, 1993. A substantial picture gallery of various inventions and technological processes, mostly from wood engravings. Emphasis on communications and transport technology, railway engineering, and railway accidents.
Flint, Kate, ed. The Victorian Novelist: Social Problems and Social Change. London: Croom Helm, 1987. Despite the title’s reference to fiction, this anthology consists primarily of nonfictional and journalistic portraits of the social relations and environments surrounding the mechanization of labor. Excerpts address London, the industrial north of England, and agricultural poverty, and include prominent accounts of machine accidents in Dickens’s weekly Household Words.
Freedgood, Elaine, ed. Factory Production in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Victorian Archives 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.  Includes succinct and carefully edited excerpts from nonfictional primary sources on innovations in textile machinery, mechanical labor, and management. See especially pp. 70–181. Provides biographies, helpful annotations, suggestions for further reading, and a timeline. Well suited for upper-level undergraduates. Jennings, Humphrey, ed. Pandaemonium 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers. London: André Deutsch, 1985. An ambitious, encyclopedic, and deeply influential anthology of excerpts describing machinery, drawn from a wide variety of literary, cultural, and scientific works. Jennings treats these passages as images and indexes them thematically and narratively as well as chronologically (e.g., “Man-Animal-Machine,” “Daemons at Work,” and “Industrial Man”).
Watkins, George. Stationary Steam Engines of Great Britain: The National Photographic Collection. 4 vols. Edited by A. P. Woolrich. Landmark Collector’s Library. Ashbourne, UK: Landmark, 2000–2001. An exhaustive photographic survey of British stationary steam engines, accompanied by captions and organized geographically. A work of descriptive, rather than analytical, industrial archaeology.
Freeman, Michael J., and Derek H. Aldcroft, eds. Transport in Victorian Britain. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1988. A major contribution to the history of Victorian transportation. Discusses railways and steam-powered transport, coastal shipping, and the persistence of sail, human, and animal power in internal transport systems. Introduction provides a helpful overview of the period’s economic, social, and technological context. Will also interest students of statistics and geography.
Henson, Louise, Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson, Richard Noakes, Sally Shuttleworth, and Jonathan R. Topham, eds. Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004. A wide-ranging collection on the cultural history of technology in the Victorian periodical press. Includes essays on railways and telegraphs in Punch, “proto-environmental confrontations” surrounding transportation and sanitation, the extension of electrical lighting, and industry and nationalism in the Dublin Penny Journal. Distinctive for its emphasis on periodicals.
Kang, Minsoo, and Amy Woodson-Boulton, eds. Visions of the Industrial Age, 1830–1914: Modernity and the Anxiety of Representation in Europe. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. A recent interdisciplinary collection on visual culture and industrialism, treating the portrayal of industrial modernity in 19th- and early-20th-century Britain and France. Essays examine depictions of locomotives, transportation, and engineering, spiritual photography, microscopes, orreries, commodity culture, and the reproduction of new technology in French illustrated periodicals.
Lightman, Bernard, eds. Victorian Science in Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. A pathbreaking collection of essays, contributing to the “contextualist history of Victorian science” (p. 9), with emphasis on cultural and discursive (“externalist”) aspects of technology. Part 3 treats scientific practice, exploring how precision instruments, systems of measurement, cameras, and cable telegraphy influenced processes of scientific experiment, display, and persuasion.
Luckhurst, Roger, and Josephine McDonagh, eds. Transactions and Encounters: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002. A significant collection of essays in cultural history, addressing conflicts and negotiations between the “two cultures” of Victorian literature and science. Part 1 focuses on mediating visual and aural technologies, responding to Crary’s 1990 account of the automatization of vision with essays on microscopy, photography, and telephony. Price, Leah, and Pamela Thurschwell, eds. Literary
Secretaries/Secretarial Culture. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005. This collection of literary and cultural essays explores the human—and often female—workers who operate mechanical writing machines in their various forms, whether as stenographers, typists, telegraphists, or personal assistants. Addresses current debates surrounding labor, gender, textuality, and information and communications systems.
Spufford, Francis, and Jenny Uglow, eds. Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time, and Invention. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. An innovative, pathbreaking collection, organized around Babbage’s difference engine and devoted to recuperating “the elusive strains of genuine 19th-century technological feeling” (p. 288). Influenced by current neo-Victorian and cybernetic interests, essays analyze visual and information technology through playful speculative, cultural, and discursive approaches.
Stein, Richard L., ed. “Nineteenth-Century Photography: Contexts, Discourses, Legacies.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 22.4 (2001): 493–660. Features a variety of new approaches toward photography and literature, memory, poverty, ethnography, film, and the daguerreotype.
Channell, David F. The Vital Machine: A Study of Technology and Organic Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. A groundbreaking history of biology and engineering, which argues against outmoded distinctions between the organic and mechanical. See especially chapters 5 and 6 on the Victorian steam engine as a living, organized entity and the explicitly organic worldview of period engineers such as George Wilson (p. 81).
Ketabgian, Tamara. “‘Melancholy Mad Elephants’: Affect and the Animal Machine in Hard Times.” Victorian Studies 45.5 (Summer 2003): 649–676.Contesting views of the machine as dead and unfeeling, this revisionist essay explores metaphors of both organic living machines and mechanical human bodies in Hard Times and period culture. Treats the machine as a figure of powerful, threatening, and intensified feeling.
Musselman, Elizabeth Green. Nervous Conditions: Science and the Body Politic in Early Industrial Britain. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006.A suggestive cultural history of early Victorian science. Explores how scientists such as Charles Babbage and John Herschel imagined their own nervous illnesses, bodies, and societies as steam engines requiring efficient industrial management.
Otis, Laura. Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century. Studies in Literature and Science. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Examines telegraphy as metaphor for a human body composed of and connected to communications nets, webs, and machines. An impressive study of technology, physiology, and literature. Seltzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. New York: Routledge, 1992. A pathbreaking literary and cultural study of the modern “body-machine complex.” Despite its largely American subject matter, its theories of mechanical agency, embodiment, mass culture, and representation have crucially influenced approaches to Victorian machinery.
Gold, Barri. Thermopoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. A lively and learned account of the thermodynamic impulse—and its mechanical aims and effects—in Victorian literature and physics. Chapter 5 compares Bleak House, its social world, and its characters to steam engines that either waste energy or successfully produce order and work. Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. A groundbreaking synthesis of cultural and scientific discourses surrounding the body as a thermodynamic system and machine.
Sternberger, Dolf. “Natural/Artificial.” In Panorama of the Nineteenth Century. By Dolf Sternberger, 17–38. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Urizen, 1977. A highly significant cultural and metaphorical analysis of the steam engine in popular 19th-century representations. Explores the machine as an allegory of combined natural and artificial power, imagined as semihuman and semiorganic.
Marcus, Steven. Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class. New York: Random House, 1974. A classic study of literary attempts either to accommodate or bypass the “astonishing newness” (p. 49) and strangeness of technology and working-class machine culture in early Victorian Manchester. Although Marcus focuses primarily on Engels, his section on “The Town” (pp. 26–66) explores other responses to industrialism.
Waters, Catherine. Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods. The Nineteenth Century. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. Chapter 5, “Men Made by Machinery” (pp. 83–99), explores the portrayal of industrial labor and human-machine relations in journalism in Household Words by Henry Morley and Harriet Martineau. Highlights the ambivalent, transformative, and figuratively obscuring effects of these portraits. An illuminating study of commodity culture.
Zimmerman, Andrew. “The Ideology of the Machine and the Spirit of the Factory: Remarks on Babbage and Ure.” Cultural Critique 37 (Autumn 1997): 5–29.An analysis of the mystifying ideological functions of Victorian portraits of factories and machines. Emphasizes the subsuming “mechanical ontology” of the factory. A highly philosophical account.
Bronstein, Jamie L. Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Combines legal analysis and social detail to explore the cultural meanings of accidents in the mechanized Anglo-American workplace. See especially pp. 61–73. Includes detailed analysis of journalistic narratives.
Wosk, Julie. Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992. Examines the tragicomic experiences of people seeking to adapt to standardizing machines in 19th-century visual art and British and French representations of accidents and speed. See especially pp. 30–66.
Cardwell, D. S. L. From Watt to Clausius: The Rise of Thermodynamics in the Early Industrial Age. London: Heinemann, 1971. A landmark text on the influence of steam power engineering on theories of heat and, ultimately, classical thermodynamics. Argues that science owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine to science.
Derry, T. K., and Trevor Williams. A Short History of Technology from the Earliest Times to A.D. 1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960. Includes a detailed account of the steam engine (pp. 311–342).
Hills, Richard L. Power from Steam: A History of the Stationary Steam Engine. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.An accessible and authoritative technical history of the Victorian transformation of Watt’s original engine. A helpful source on the efforts of Cornish engineers to increase the engine’s efficiency. Concentrates on textile-mill engines and on the historical resistance to high-pressure steam and compound engines until the 1860s. Well illustrated.
Scaife, W. Garrett. From Galaxies to Turbines: Science, Technology, and the Parsons Family. Bristol, UK: Institutes of Physics, 2000.A useful source on the late-Victorian history of the turbo-generator. Chapters 8–13 (pp. 152–315) provide an extensive technical and biographical account of Parsons’ development of the steam turbine, including its application to electric power generation.
Carter, Ian. Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001. A lively cultural and literary study of the railway as a metaphor for modernity. Two chapters focus specifically on Victorian art and literature (Turner and Dickens). Asks why Britain possesses “no great railway novel.” Provocative, but sometimes uneven.
Daly, Nicholas. Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. While this study also treats machine culture more broadly, it concentrates on multiple variations of the railway rescue narrative, which restages anxieties about human-mechanical conflict in theatrical melodrama and sensation fiction.
Freeman, Michael J. Railways and the Victorian Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. A wide-ranging cultural study of the literary, artistic, and musical representations of the railway throughout the Victorian period. Contains excellent maps and images. Beautifully produced.
Kerr, Ian J. Engines of Change: The Railroads That Made India. Moving Through History. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007. A detailed social and technical history of the transfer of railway technology from Britain to colonial India. First half focuses on the period from the mid-19th century to 1905. Discusses labor and engineering challenges, cultural and national identity, imperial administration, and changing notions of geology.
McGowan, Christopher. Rail, Steam, and Speed: The “Rocket” and the Birth of Steam Locomotion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. A popular biographical and technical description of the challenges involved in Stephenson’s design and engineering of the Rocket locomotive for the 1829 Rainhill trials. Introduces the various personalities involved in popularizing steam locomotives and railway construction in the early and mid-Victorian years.
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. A pioneering cultural history of railways and industrialized consciousness in literature, art, architecture, journalism, and psychoanalysis. Discusses related transformations of time, space, social relations, and new concepts of industrial fatigue, shock, and trauma. Defines the railway as the consumer’s most direct encounter with new technological discipline. Accessible and extremely influential.
Simmons, Jack. The Victorian Railway. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991. An extensive compendium of Victorian visions of the railway, treating technical, social, literary, and cultural history. Explores the railway’s transformation of human consciousness and perspective, the technical details of its mechanism, and its effects on society and the environment. Addresses visual art, caricature, railway press, tourism, and theater.
Brodie, Bernard. Sea Power in the Machine Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941. A useful technical and historical introduction to naval innovations, starting from the 1840s. Treats the development of the marine steam engine, iron warships, armor, armaments, and submarine methods of war.
Buchanan, Angus. Brunel: The Life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. London: Hambledon and London, 2002. An accessible, thematically organized biographical history, which treats both steamships and railway locomotives. Chapter 8 discusses Brunel’s Great Eastern.
Fox, Stephen. Transatlantic: Samuel Cunard, Isambard Brunel, and the Great Atlantic Steamships. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. A popular narrative history of steamships. Celebrates the biographical achievement of Cunard and Brunel, from packet ships of the 1820s to the rise of steamship competition. Broadly accessible.
Scaife, W. Garrett. From Galaxies to Turbines: Science, Technology, and the Parsons Family. Bristol, UK: Institutes of Physics, 2000. A biographical and technical history. See especially Chapters 11 and 12 on the design of the ship Turbinia. Also discusses the future application of Parsons’ turbine engine to transoceanic liners and large warships.
Brown, Jonathan. Steam on the Farm: A History of Agricultural Steam Engines 1800 to 1950. Ramsbury, UK: Crowood, 2008. The most recent scholarly study of the technological development and adoption of steam machinery in British agriculture. Contains excellent archival photos and a bibliography.
Spence, Clark C. God Speed the Plow: The Coming of Steam Cultivation to Great Britain. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960. A classic and still-influential technological history of British agriculture, focusing on different stages of the application of steam plowing to farms. Assesses various applications of steam through the tractor/traction engine, rotary tiller/cultivator, and cable-drawn plow. Includes many illustrations and an extensive bibliography.
Tyler, Colin, and John Haining. Ploughing by Steam: A History of Steam Cultivation over the Years. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Model and Allied Publications, 1970. A descriptive survey of agricultural invention with extensive technical illustrations and reconstructions. Focuses on inventors, technical detail, and industrial archaeology rather than social or cultural history. Appendix lists existing steam plowing engines in Britain. Addressed to popular enthusiasts.
Whitehead, Robert A. The Age of the Traction Engine. London: Ian Allan, 1970. Useful for its many historic photographs of agricultural traction engines and operators at work threshing, baling hay, and clearing land. A work of industrial archaeology. Lacks bibliographic references.
Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Verso, 1983. Famous for its account of modernity as “a mode of vital experience” (p. 15), this much-cited (and much-critiqued) study of modernism is in fact mostly devoted to 19th-century writers of modernity, such as Marx and Baudelaire. Berman contends that mobility, upheaval, and turbulent movement were defining features of modernization in Europe in this period.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Despite the title, this book made a significant contribution to the study of pre-20th-century mobility and modernity through Harvey’s elaboration of the concept of “time-space compression” derived from new technologies of transport and communication in the 19th century
Keep, Christopher. “Technology and Information: Accelerating Developments.” In A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Edited by Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing, 137–154. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. A pithy overview of the impact of new technologies of transport and communication on literature and culture. Includes reference to a wide range of literary examples as well as recent relevant scholarly literature. An excellent starting point for this topic.
Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Rich in historical and cultural examples drawn from a range of European contexts, Kern’s study illuminates the changing experience of time and space as a result of new technologies. Of particular relevance to the topic of mobility are chapters on speed, distance, and direction.
Michie, Helena, and Ronald R. Thomas, eds. Nineteenth-Century Geographies: The Transformation of Space from the Victorian Age to the American Century. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. A diverse and relevant collection which includes chapters on Mary Kingsley’s travels; Victorian honeymoon tourism; Dickens, trauma, and railway disaster; and gender and mass transportation in urban culture.
Stein, Jeremy. “Reflections on Time, Time-Space Compression and Technology in the Nineteenth Century.” In Timespace: Geographies of Temporality. Edited by Jon May and Nigel Thrift, 106–119. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. A good example of recent critiques of the dominant account of modern mobility. Stein stresses the uneven experience of acceleration across different classes, genders, and locations and refuses the technological determinism of some earlier scholarship on the topic.
Keating, Peter, ed. Into Unknown England, 1866–1913: Selections from the Social Explorers. Glasgow: Fontana, 1976. Includes extracts from well-known social investigation texts by William Booth, James Greenwood, Andrew Mearns, Mary Higgs, and Jack London, among others. An important introduction to urban mobility linked to political activism, philanthropy, and journalism.
Ross, Ellen, ed. Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. A much-needed supplement to Keating’s earlier collection, this anthology collects a wide range of women’s writing on “urban exploration” in the poorest districts of London and includes journalism, fiction, and poetry.
Bailey, Peter. “Adventures in Space: Victorian Railway Erotics, or Taking Alienation for a Ride.” Journal of Victorian Culture 9.1 (2004): 1–21. Responding to earlier accounts of modernity that stress the alienation and detachment of the (usually male) subject who moves freely around urban spaces, Bailey contrasts the sensations—pleasant or otherwise—that resulted from the proximities of the railway compartment in order to argue that the Victorian “railway imaginary” was a complex amalgam of pleasures, dangers, and anxieties. DOI: 10.3366/jvc.2004.9.1.1
Beaumont, Matthew, and Michael Freeman, eds. The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space and the Machine Ensemble. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. A very useful essay collection that covers many of the recurring points of scholarly interest: the visual apparatus and rail travel; the train compartment as a site of crime and danger; the correlation between railway and early cinema; and the affective aspects of train travel, especially shock and trauma.
Carter, Ian. Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001. A lively and engaging contribution to the field, this book offers a cultural history of the railway through analyzing a wide range of representations by writers and visual artists, including Zola and Tolstoy as well as the more obvious Dickens.
Daly, Nicholas. Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Situates the railway in a broader consideration of the relation between modernization and culture in this period. Of most relevance is chapter 1 on representations of the railway in sensation novels and drama of the 1860s as emblematic of the affective impact of industrial modernity. Freeman, Michael. Railways and the Victorian Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Richly illustrated and full of historical incident and literary excerpts, this book examines the railway “as cultural metaphor” (p. 19) and is an indispensable resource for an overview of the significance of the railway in Victorian culture.
Matthews, Christopher. “Love at First Sight: The Velocity of Victorian Heterosexuality.” Victorian Studies 46.3 (2004): 425–454. A fascinating article, examining how the railway compartment—“the perfect location for high-speed desire” (p. 427)—is transformed into a libidinal space in representations of “love at first sight” in Victorian art and literature, further evidence of the way the railway fostered new forms of encounter and sensation. DOI: 10.2979/VIC.2004.46.3.425
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. All subsequent studies are indebted to this work. Schivelbusch examines the train’s “annihilation of space and time,” the panoramic vision afforded by rail travel, the semiotics and sociality of the rail compartment and the train station, and the pathologies of railway passengers (accident trauma, “railway spine,” and “railway shock”).
McLaughlin, James. Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000. Of particular relevance is chapter 4, “Colonizing the Urban Jungle” (79–103), examining the mobility of social investigators and their deployment of the discourse of colonial exploration and ethnography to describe their travels in the East End.
Nead, Lynda. Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2000. Focusing on the period 1855–1870, Nead’s rich overview is in part a critical response to Berman 1983 (cited under General Overviews), emphasizing instead the diversity and complexity of modernity as exemplified by the metropolis of London. Most relevant is Part 1 (“Mapping and Movement”) which examines ideas of mobility and circulation in the city, especially the movement of water, air, traffic, people, and commodities.
McLaughlin, James. Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000. Of particular relevance is chapter 4, “Colonizing the Urban Jungle” (79–103), examining the mobility of social investigators and their deployment of the discourse of colonial exploration and ethnography to describe their travels in the East End.
Nead, Lynda. Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2000. Focusing on the period 1855–1870, Nead’s rich overview is in part a critical response to Berman 1983 (cited under General Overviews), emphasizing instead the diversity and complexity of modernity as exemplified by the metropolis of London. Most relevant is Part 1 (“Mapping and Movement”) which examines ideas of mobility and circulation in the city, especially the movement of water, air, traffic, people, and commodities.
Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze. 2d ed. London: SAGE, 2002. A landmark study of the development of mass tourism, from the 18th century to the present, the title has become a catchphrase to describe the visual economy of commodity tourism. Of particular relevance is Chapter 2, “Mass Tourism and the Rise and Fall of the Seaside Resort” (pp. 16–37), on the railway, class, and the democratization of travel in Victorian Britain.


Crossick, Geoffrey. “From Gentleman to the Residuum: Languages of Social Description in Victorian Britain.” In Language, History, and Class. Edited by Penelope Corfield, 150–178. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. A precise, clear, and wide-ranging consideration of the shifting terminologies of class distinctions in the 19th century.
Gagnier, Regenia. Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. A compelling work examining the articulation of class and subjectivity in a range of 19th-century narrative forms. Includes chapters on class and the body, the representation of the working class in 19th-century fictions, working-class autobiography, and school.
MATERIAL CULTURE
Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986. An important and influential collection of interdisciplinary essays demonstrating the role of material culture in social and cultural life.
Briggs, Asa. Victorian Things. London: B. T. Batsford, 1988. An early but still useful historical account of the plethora of manufactured objects in Victorian social life.
Mills, Victoria, ed. Special Issue: Victorian Fiction and the Material Imagination. Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 6 (2008). A special issue of the free online journal presenting a selection of interdisciplinary essays relating to 19th-century material culture. Offers a good introduction to the field of material cultural studies.
Steedman, Carolyn. Dust. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001. Contains eight chapters exploring historical approaches to the material world in relation to “archivization.” The chapter “What a Rag Rug Means” offers a useful example of using theory to approach Victorian material culture.
Freedgood. Elaine, ed. Factory Production in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. A well-presented, illustrated anthology of 19th-century writings on industry that includes extracts from Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris. The introduction by Freedgood offers a useful overview of the factory system and recent critical approaches to Victorian industry.
Klingender, F. D. Art and the Industrial Revolution. London: Evelyn, Adams, and Mackay, 1947. Written shortly after World War II, this remains a useful assessment of the relationship between art and technology in the Victorian period. A well-illustrated discussion that refers to literary texts.
Lesjak, Carolyn. Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Presents an analysis of the Victorian “labor novel” in a discussion of a range of fiction, including industrial novels. Argues that the relationship between work and pleasure was represented in complex ways throughout the period.
Poovey, Mary. Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. An interdisciplinary study of the cultural context of British industrial cities in the early and mid-Victorian periods.
Weiner, Martin. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Charts reactions to industrialization in the second half of the 19th century, arguing that cultural celebrations of a pre-industrial way of life undermined the “industrial spirit” of the early 19th century.
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. London: Penguin, 1971. Originally published in 1958, this book influenced later cultural studies approaches to modernity and urbanization. The first part, “A Nineteenth-Century Tradition,” is vital reading for scholars of Victorian literature, history, and culture.
de Vries, Jan. The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Detailed historical account of consumer practices, placing the Victorian period in the context of the rise of the bourgeoisie, capitalism, and industrial production. Also considers the legacy of industrialization and consumerism in the 20th century.
Breward, Christopher. The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion, and City Life, 1860–1914. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999. An important study of masculinity by a fashion historian. Argues that middle-class masculine identity was expressed via particular dress codes.
Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. A wide-ranging interdisciplinary study of the significance of glass in the Victorian period. Discusses the production and crafting of glass, the Crystal Palace, as well as literary references to glass.
Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. Focuses on the Great Exhibition as inaugurating commodity culture and shaping consumer practices.
Young, Paul. Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2009. Examines the exhibition as a turning point in British history, the formation of capitalism, and the development of globalization. Argues that Britain emerged at this time as a world leader, the exhibition being used to justify imperial expansion.
Hill, Kate. Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1845–1914. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005. Explores the social role of the museum in the 19th century.
Kriegel, Lara. Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. A well-researched interdisciplinary examination of exhibition culture in the Victorian period, with chapters on the Museum of Ornamental Art and the museums in South Kensington and Bethnal Green.
Chase, Malcolm. Chartism: A New History. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007. Important general study of Chartism, taking a broadly chronological approach but interspersing the narrative with biographical accounts of less well-known Chartist activists. Successfully highlights the disparate nature of Chartism while creating a clear narrative about the events and personalities involved. Excellent starting point.
Tholfsen, Trygve. Working-Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England. London: Croom Helm, 1976. Situates Chartism in relation to working-class radicalism more generally: pp. 83–108 are specifically on Chartism. Remains a useful study on the period, though some of its arguments have been qualified by more recent work.
Thompson, Dorothy. The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution. New York: Pantheon, 1984. Highly influential study of Chartism by one of its most important historians. The study sandwiches a middle section titled “Who Were the Chartists?”—which contains a particularly welcome early discussion of women in Chartism—between historical studies of the years 1838–1841 and 1842–1850.
Weisser, Henry. British Working-Class Movements and Europe, 1815–48. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1975. Contains two chapters titled “The Chartists and Europe, 1836–1844” and “The Chartists and Europe, 1844–8.” Useful study of Chartist connections with Europe and the strategic importance of European events in Chartist rhetoric and policy.
Haywood, Ian, ed. The Literature of Struggle: An Anthology of Chartist Fiction. Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1995. Reprints a variety of short stories and extracts from longer novels, arranged thematically, most of which were published in radical periodicals. Authors represented range from the leading lights of Chartist fiction (Ernest Jones, W. J. Linton) to more obscure writers. A helpful introduction sets these fictions in context.
Hollis, Patricia, ed. Class and Conflict in Nineteenth-Century England, 1815–1850. Birth of Modern Britain. London: Routledge, 1973. Just under a hundred pages of short extracts from a wide range of primary sources on aspects of the Chartist movement, with brief introductions and suggestions for further reading.
Kovalev, Y. V., ed. An Anthology of Chartist Literature. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956. Fascinating anthology compiled from a Marxist perspective, which offered the first compilation of Chartist literature and had considerable influence on its rehabilitation. The Russian introduction was published in an English translation by W. H. Chaloner, Victorian Studies 2 (1958): 117–138.
Mather, F. C., ed. Chartism and Society: An Anthology of Documents. London: Bell and Hyman, 1980. A good selection of extracts, briefly introduced and contextualized, with the focus on Chartism’s engagement with political, religious, and social affairs in the period.
Vincent, David, ed. Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working-Class Politicians, 1790–1885. London: Europa, 1977. Contains several memoirs by men involved in the Chartist movement—most important, John James Bezer’s Autobiography of One of the Chartist Rebels of 1848 and Benjamin Wilson’s The Struggles of an Old Chartist. Bezer’s unfinished memoir, published in serial form in the Christian Socialist in 1851 (and in part a riposte to another contributor, Charles Kingsley, and his Alton Locke), is particularly notable for its lively and informal style.
Carlyle, Thomas. Chartism. London: Fraser, 1840. Directed to middle-class readers, Carlyle is sympathetic if condescending to the working classes, arguing that Chartism is the expression of their misery and suffering. He warns that such movements are inevitable due to the neglect and incompetence of Parliament and the ruling classes and advises education and emigration as possible solutions. A typically impassioned essay, this should be read in conjunction with similar fictionalized accounts by Victorian novelists.
Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. Edited by David McLellan. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Classic study of the working classes based on Engels’s experiences in Manchester in the 1840s. First published in German in 1845 and translated into English in 1887. Contains a brief discussion of Chartism in the “Labour Movements” chapter.
Gammage, R. G. The History of the Chartist Movement, 1837–1854. 2d ed. Introduction by John Saville. London: Frank Cass, 1969. Gammage was a mid-rank propagandist, speaker, and organizer for the Chartist movement, who first published his recollections in parts in 1854–1855. Although clearly affected at the time by his bitterness and disillusion, Gammage’s detailed and readable history remains an essential Victorian account of Chartism, and it exercised a significant influence on Chartist historiography in the 20th century.
Lovett, William, and John Collins.. Chartism: A New Organisation of the People. Introduction by Asa Briggs. Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1960. Written and published in 1840 while Lovett and Collins were in Warwick Gaol, this pamphlet argues that Chartism has been “grossly misrepresented” (p. 17) as a violent and intemperate movement. It lays out a plan for the formation of the National Association for Promoting the Political and Social Improvement of the People and extols the benefits of education, devoting considerable space to Lovett’s plan for educational reform.
Burn, James Dawson. Autobiography of a Beggar Boy. Edited by David Vincent. London: Europa, 1978. One of the best-known Victorian working-class autobiographies of its day, Burn’s account went through several editions after publication in 1855. Burn was involved with Chartism in Glasgow in the 1830s, though his vehement objection to the proposal for a universal strike in the summer of 1839 led to his abandonment of the cause. See pp. 138–152 on the events of this decade.
Cooper, Thomas. The Life of Thomas Cooper: Written by Himself. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1872. Well-written account of Cooper’s life, with detailed discussion of his involvement in Chartism and a particular focus on his development as a poet. An essential Chartist autobiography.
Davenport, Allen. The Life and Literary Pursuits of Allen Davenport, with a Further Selection of the Author’s Work. Edited by Martin Chase. Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1994. Davenport published his autobiography in 1845 and it attracted considerable interest in Chartist circles. As the editor notes, it is intriguingly reserved on his extensive involvement in Chartism. The edition includes selected poems.
Harrison, Brian and Patricia Hollis, eds. Robert Lowery: Radical and Chartist. London: Europa, 1979. Contains Robert Lowery’s memoir, published as articles in the Weekly Record, 1856–1857, together with a selection of his other writings. Although their publication in a temperance magazine necessarily affected Lowery’s accounts, he gives a vivid picture of Chartist agitations, including eyewitness accounts of many key events.
Holyoake, George Jacob. Sixty Years of an Agitator’s Life. 2 vols. 3d ed. London: Fisher Unwin, 1893. Holyoake (b. 1817–d. 1906) was one of Victorian Britain’s best-known freethinkers and active in the cause of secularism and cooperation. While not specifically identified with Chartism, he was a friend of many leading Chartists, and his diffuse, humorous recollections provide important insights into early-to-mid-Victorian radicalism.
Leno, John Bedford. Aftermath: With the Autobiography of the Author. London: Reeves and Turner, 1892. Leno (b. 1826–d. 1894) was a working-class printer who converted to Chartism, founded several branches, and edited and produced radical newspapers such as The Spirit of Freedom, with Gerald Massey. His long life meant that he was active in the post-Chartist decades, particularly in agitating for reform in 1867. His entertaining autobiography also includes a selection of his poems, including political verse and songs that were very well known in his day.
Lovett, William. The Life and Struggles of William Lovett. London: McGibbon and Kee, 1967. First published in 1876, this 1967 shortened edition provides an account of Lovett’s upbringing and career as the leader of working-class politics in London, emphasizing his internationalism and plans for reform through education. Later parts mainly consist of the texts of the addresses and letters Lovett wrote and circulated. His bias against O’Connor and “physical force” Chartism is evident throughout.
Place, Francis. The Autobiography of Francis Place, 1771–1854. Edited by Mary Thale. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972. Primarily useful in providing background to the reforming efforts of the Victorian period, rather than as a document of Chartism. Largely written in the 1820s, Place’s autobiography was unpublished until this edition and is consequently engagingly unpolished.
Ashton, Owen, and Paul A. Pickering. Friends of the People: Uneasy Radicals in the Age of the Chartists. Chartist Study Series. London: Merlin, 2002. Provides six case studies of lesser-known Chartist lives, covering people who “did not look like Chartists” (p. 2): three ministers, a doctor, a leisured gentleman, and a newspaper magnate. Helpful in extending our understanding of Chartism’s broad appeal.
Epstein, James. The Lion of Freedom: Feargus O'Connor and the Chartist Movement, 1832–1842. London: Croom Helm, 1982. Important reassessment of O’Connor’s career, contradicting earlier, largely negative, portrayals of his leadership and impact on the movement. Primarily considers him as organizer and publisher.
Plummer, Alfred. Bronterre: A Political Biography of Bronterre O’Brien, 1804–1864. London: Allen and Unwin, 1971. Bronterre O’Brien, like O’Connor, born and educated in Ireland, gave up a career in law for radical politics and became a leading Chartist editor, journalist, and orator. Allied with Julian Harney and, until a bitter break in 1842, with O’Connor, he was at the heart of Chartist events in the 1830s. Plummer’s detailed, engaging account is worth reading as a general study of Chartism as well as a biography.
Schoyen, A. R. The Chartist Challenge: A Portrait of George Julian Harney. London: Heinemann, 1958. Schoyen’s early biography was a substantial contribution to reassessments of Chartism and provides a readable and balanced account of Harney’s career. As a radical proponent of armed revolution and strong supporter of O’Connor, subeditor and then editor of the Northern Star and other radical newspapers, friend of Engels and first publisher of The Communist Manifesto, Harney exerted considerable influence on Victorian Chartism prior to his emigration in 1855.
Shaw, David. Gerald Massey: Chartist, Poet, Radical and Freethinker. London: Buckland, 1995. Massey, employed at a silk mill from age 8, came to the Chartist movement late, in 1848, but was prominent in the field of later Chartist periodicals and became a respected poet. He edited journals with Leno and Harney, among others. Shaw provides a well-researched and sympathetic account of his life.
Smith, Francis Barrymore. Radical Artisan: William James Linton, 1812–97. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1973. Sympathetic account of Linton—poet, journalist, publisher, wood-engraver, and London radical—who maintained an active involvement with leading Chartists (especially William Lovell) and their affairs without ever fully subscribing to the cause.
Taylor, Miles. Ernest Jones, Chartism, and the Romance of Politics, 1819–1869. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. The first modern biography of Jones, one of the upper-class Chartist leaders, who became prominent in the cause after 1848 and was known for his literary works as well as political activism. Taylor moves away from earlier biographical accounts in viewing Jones’s literary activities as an essential part of his political endeavors. Good reading.
Wiener, Joel. William Lovett. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1989. Complicates the traditional view of Lovett as a pacifist moderate. Emphasizes his quiet leadership and reassesses the importance of his National Association. A balanced study that avoids making large claims for its subject.
Reynolds, G. M. W. The Seamstress; or, the White Slave of England. London: John Dicks, 1853. Originally published in one of Reynolds’s periodicals, Reynolds’ Miscellany, in 1851. The story of the beautiful, impoverished Virginia Mordaunt, who turns out to be the illegitimate daughter of a duchess, is typical of Reynolds’s popular fiction: sensational in its entangled plots but also offering impassioned critiques of the labor market in mid-Victorian Britain and the harsh economic circumstances of female workers. The 1853 edition is available online.
Finn, Margot. After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Reexamines the thesis that Chartism “failed” in 1848 and that working-class political engagement entered a period of decline. A convincing reassessment of the influence of Chartism on succeeding decades
Goodway, David. London Chartism, 1838–1848. Past and Present. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Careful and scholarly account of Chartism in London, containing particularly useful statistical tables showing the involvement of various trades in Chartism.
Hall, Robert Gaston. Voices of the People: Democracy and Chartist Political Identity, 1830–1870. London: Merlin, 2007. Via the microhistory of one midsized town, Ashton-under-Lyne, Hall investigates the construction of Chartist political identity and the rise of the movement from below. Good use of detailed local history to interrogate wider perspectives on the movement.
Jones, Gareth Stedman. Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983. “Rethinking Chartism,” chapter 3 of this study, was highly influential in the so-called linguistic turn in Chartist studies. Jones argues that rather than constructing Chartism in terms of class consciousness, historians should pay attention to the linguistic forms used by Chartists themselves, which might present a different take on Chartists’ self-construction and aims.
Messner, Andrew. “Land, Leadership, Culture, and Emigration: Some Problems in Chartist Historiography.” Historical Journal 42.4 (December 1999): 1093–1109. Responds to Taylor 1996, qualifying his take on Chartist historiography, and through a discussion of Chartism in Victoria, Australia, argues that one area worth exploring is Chartism in the colonies. Helpful and balanced in tracing developments in research up to the 21st century. DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X99008663
Saville, John. 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987. In-depth reexamination of the events of 1848, countering earlier assumptions that they proved a “fiasco.” Notable for Saville’s emphasis on the relations between Chartism and the powers of the state, and his location of British revolutionary impulses in relation to France and Ireland.
Ashton, Owen, and Frederick Stephen Roberts. The Victorian Working-Class Writer. New York: Mansell, 1999. Case studies of eight authors, including three with strong Chartist sympathies: John Bedford Leno, Ben Brierley, and John Leatherland. Focuses on how and why they became poets, rather than on the poetry itself, though a selection of poems is included in the appendices.
Vicinus, Martha. The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British Working-Class Literature. Croom Helm Social History Series. London: Croom Helm, 1974. Early and seminal study of working-class literature, highly influential on later writers. Contains one chapter specifically on Chartist poetry and fiction.
Plotz, John. “Crowd Power: Chartism, Carlyle, and the Victorian Public Sphere.” Representations 70 (2000): 87–114. Argues that Chartism invented the mass demonstration as a new form of speech-act, in which the presence of a crowd conveyed its demands. The second part of the essay analyzes Carlyle’s essay as a response to this shift, arguing that “Chartism” is reactionary in stripping the crowd of language and presenting it as a voiceless body. DOI: 10.1525/rep.2000.70.1.01p007
Keating, Peter. The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction. London: Routledge, 1971. With this the foundational study of the literary representation of the working classes, Keating ranges from the “condition of England” fiction of the 1840s to the end of the period. But his particular strengths and interests lie in analyzing works of the 1880s and 1890s, chiefly those of George Gissing, Arthur Morrison, and Walter Besant. This remains well-informed and a mine of detail on near forgotten works of the period.
Poovey, Mary. Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. A wide-ranging study that encompasses the category of class as part of its investigation of the formation of ideas of the “social” in the mid-19th century. Particularly useful in its consideration of class formation in Chadwick’s 1842 Sanitary Report. A strong example of analysis of the discourses of class in both literary and nonliterary texts.
Flint, Kate, ed. The Victorian Novelist: Social Problems and Social Change. London: Croom Helm, 1987. Despite its title, this is an anthology of extracts from contemporary journalism, social investigation, and Royal Commission reports from the 1840s and 1850s. With the work specifically geared toward students and scholars of canonical social-problem fiction, Flint introduces three sections, each focused on a different location of poverty and social distress: first, the industrial North and Midlands; then London; finally, the rural poor.
Hollis, Patricia, ed. Class and Conflict in Nineteenth-Century England, 1815–1850. London: Routledge, 1973. A compendium of short extracts from contemporary reports and newspapers on this crucial period of class formation. Includes sections on different analyses of the economic and social context of the period, including old radical attacks on corruption and the emergence of a critique of capitalism; cooperation; Chartism; the emergence of a language of class; unions and political unionism.
Keating, Peter. Into Unknown England, 1866–1913: Selections from the Social Explorers. Glasgow: Fontana, 1976. Although wider in scope than the fin de siècle, this remains a very useful resource for accessing the work of social explorers such as Charles Booth and William Booth of the Salvation Army and working with texts that fed fears of social degeneration during the period.
Morris, R. J., and Richard Rodger, eds. The Victorian City: A Reader in British Urban History, 1820–1914. London: Longman, 1993. A really useful collection that reprints the leading works on urban studies addressing the place of the various classes in the Victorian city. A strong introduction defines the field.
Clark, Anna. The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. In the light of feminist critiques of the work of E. P. Thompson and others, Clark revisits the period 1780–1850 to address the part played by gender in the emergence of the working class. Clark’s richly detailed study shows how competition and tensions between men and women shaped the rhetoric of class.
Fox, Pamela. Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890–1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. Although Fox’s study starts at the very end of the period under consideration here, her argument that shame is a crucial part of the formation of working-class subjectivity is persuasive and intelligent, and worth reflecting back on for studies of earlier literature and classed subjectivity. Fox studies working-class fiction produced during the zenith of working-class consciousness in the early 20th century.
Joyce, Patrick. Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991. An explicit attempt to revise Marxist historical accounts of proletarianization and working-class formation in the light of poststructuralism. Joyce attempts to map other social categories and languages of common experience, including, most significantly here, that of populism and appeals to “the people” in the 19th century. Joyce’s attention to language and representation gives a wide field of engagement to literary scholars.
Stedman Jones, Gareth. Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983. A significant work of revisionist history that, in the wake of the Conservative electoral successes of the 1980s, challenged any comfortable Marxist notion of working-class formation.
Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Gollancz, 1963. Essential reading for any consideration of the 19th-century working class—and indeed what class means more generally. Thompson argues that class is not a set hierarchy but something continually remade within the parameters of the economic structure of society. Thompson’s model of narrating “history from below”—case studies of often forgotten figures—also makes it a winning read for those from literary backgrounds.
Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. An ambitious and important study that draws on the work of David Vincent and other scholars of working-class autobiography to trace a history of working-class reading and intellectual culture.
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. London: Chatto and Windus, 1958. This remains a study of extraordinary range and insight. In many ways a response to Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1867–1868), Williams’s work led the way to what now seems the norm—studies of 19th-century literary culture in relation to developments in society and politics.
Burnett, John, ed. Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s. London: Routledge, 1994. An anthology of extracts from autobiographies of men and women, divided into three categories: laboring classes, servants, and skilled workers. Burnett provides a useful introduction discussing the relations between autobiography and history. Originally published in 1974 (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin).
Ashton, Owen, and Stephen Roberts. The Victorian Working-Class Writer. London: Mansell, 1999. Despite its broad title, this is a careful consideration of the lives, survival strategies, and journeys into a writerly career of a select group of male artisan writers drawing on records of the Royal Literary Fund. Also includes examples from the works of each of the writers under discussion.
Haywood, Ian. The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics, and the People 1790–1860. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Haywood argues for the emergence of a radical counter-public sphere of plebeian literature in the period he examines. Unlike James 1963, Haywood perceives popular print culture as a means to articulate radical politics. Includes considerations of Chartist literature, the unstamped press of the 1830s, and the phenomenal work of G. W. M. Reynolds.
Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life, with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957. Although Hoggart’s study reflects on working-class culture and literature in the 20th century, it provides an indispensable reflection on the debates on working-class literacy, literary value, and the emergence of a market-driven mass culture that appeared initially in the Victorian period. Rich in autobiographical reflection on the position of the working-class “scholarship boy.”
Burnett, John, David Vincent, and David Mayall, eds. The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated, Critical Bibliography. 3 vols. New York: New York University Press, 1984–1989. The essential reference resource for any scholar interested in mapping out further research drawing on this material, much of which stems from the Burnett archives of working-class autobiographies now held at Brunel University. Volume 1 covers the period from 1790 to 1900; Volume 2 covers the early 20th century; and Volume 3 supplements both with further material.
Joyce, Patrick. Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Case studies of working-class Edwin Waugh and the middle-class John Bright that attempt to map the language in which these subjects wrote and thought about class and identity. Also includes a section on narrative and collective identity in the 19th century.
Stanley, Liz, ed. The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick: Victorian Maidservant. London: Virago, 1984. Stanley provides a well-researched and trenchant introduction to an extraordinary text documenting the contested relations between a female servant and her “master,” the dilettante poet Arthur Munby. Cullwick’s memoir and diary written at Munby’s behest is unforgettable and has stimulated much subsequent scholarship on the relations between class, race, and gender.
Steedman, Carolyn, ed. The Radical Soldier’s Tale: John Pearman, 1819–1908. London: Routledge, 1988. The narrative of this foot soldier of the empire who later became a policeman, while also remaining a radical republican, provides rich scope for Steedman’s interest in the conflicted working-class subject and self-narration. Steedman’s introduction teases out the tensions of the narrative and demonstrates through close reading how his self is constructed in dialogue with standard English.
Vincent, David. Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography. London: Europa, 1981. A comprehensive study that discusses a wide range of autobiographies under a series of thematic headings, including the family and “useful knowledge.”
Ying, Lee. Masculinity and the English Working Class: Studies in Victorian Autobiography and Fiction. London: Routledge, 2007. Intelligent work that constructs a convincing dialogue between working-class autobiography and contemporary Victorian fiction, drawing on work by both social historians and literary critics. Includes considerations of the Pickwick Papers, Mary Barton, and Alton Locke alongside nonfiction memoirs.
Maltz, Diana. British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870–1900: Beauty for the People. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Maltz directs attention to what she, following Ian Fletcher, terms “missionary aestheticism” and the social engagement of the movement in the late 19th century: bringing beauty to slum dwellers. Maltz is attentive to the tensions between upper-middle-class aesthetes and their working-class subjects in a variety of contexts in later-19th-century London, including Octavia Hill’s housing schemes.
Stedman Jones, Gareth. Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between the Classes in Victorian Society. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971. An outstanding work of social history that did much to draw attention to the specific shifts in representations of the city at the fin de siècle—though Jones’s interests, at this time, were more those of class formation than cultural or linguistic representation.
Mangan, James A., and James Walvin, eds. Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1987. The twelve articles in this edited collection offer an expansive view at the key recurring themes in this field, as manifested in this article. Articles discuss sport and the body, the family, adolescence, affect, romance and sexuality, play, education, imperialism, scouting, and military history. Essays alternate between Britain and America.
Tosh, John. A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. One of the most cited works within Victorian masculinity studies and a benchmark in the field. Influential in its archival, case-study approach to social history and in its attempts to dismantle literature-based stereotypes about fatherhood and masculinity.
Roper, Michael, and JohnTosh. Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800. New York: Routledge, 1991. Essay collection that presents British masculinity from Carlyle to the modern “Company Man.” For Victorianists: Norma Clarke’s essay on Carlyle, Pamela Walker’s overview of masculinity and the Salvation Army, John Tosh’s discussion of middle-class masculinity, and Keith McClelland’s essay about the mid- to late-19th-century artisan.
Shannon, Brent Alan. The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860–1914. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006. As with Garber 1991 (cited under Feminist and Queer Theory) Shannon’s social history emphasizes dress as a part of constructing middle-class masculinity. Because, he argues, Victorian fictional narratives de-emphasize dress, he supplements his reading of Trollope, Wells, and others through periodical culture, advertisements, and other extra-literary artifacts of consumer culture.
Adams, James Eli. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Adams connects masculinity with “intellectual vocations” (p. 2), using the works of Pater, Wilde, Tennyson, and others. Carlyle is an important starting point and touchstone. Adams presents alternatives to the paternal body within domestic narrative and illuminates the importance of discipline in both real and fictional performances of masculinity.
Wheeler, Michael. English Fiction of the Victorian Period 1830–1890. 2d ed. London and New York: Longman, 1994. Subsections on early and mid-century social-problem novels in chapters 1 and 2. This work is aimed at students in higher education and contains several useful appendices, including brief author biographies; a chronology depicting other contemporaneously published works and historical events; and general bibliographies on various topics.
Freedgood, Elaine, ed. Factory Production in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. A wide-ranging selection of contemporaneous documents about factories and the factory system in 19th-century Britain. The selection includes canonical and more obscure writings and a useful editorial introduction and chronology.
Simmons, James R., ed. Factory Lives: Four Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Autobiographies. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2007. Very useful resource that contains four working-class autobiographies giving accounts of 19th-century factory working conditions. It also contains a diverse selection of contemporary documents, including responses to the autobiographies, testimony to parliamentary committees, views on factory life, and on factory legislation and literary excerpts.
Cazamian, Louis. The Social Novel in England, 1830–1850: Dickens, Disraeli, Mrs Gaskell, Kingsley. Translated by Martin Fido. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. Pioneering early study of “the social novel with a purpose” that set the parameters for future work. Focuses principally on Dickens, Disraeli, Gaskell, and Kingsley but includes brief consideration of Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–1834), Trollope’s Michael Armstrong (1840), and Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood (1841) as influential forerunners.
Tillotson, Kathleen. Novels of the 1840s. Oxford: Clarendon, 1954. Good general introduction that discusses the emergence of social-problem fiction in the context of other contemporary sub-genres such as “silver-fork” and “Newgate” novels followed by chapter on Mary Barton as an “outstanding example” of its type. Notable for detail on the overlapping category of “religious problem” novels, in which it includes Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood (1841).
Bivona, Daniel, and Roger B.Henkle. The Imagination of Class; Masculinity and the Victorian Urban Poor. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. This book’s interest in middle-class “tourism” to lower-class urban centers recalls Koven 2004. Bivona and Henkle discuss the limits of strong sympathetic connections between individuals of different classes, and the implications for studies of masculinity. This work was completed by Daniel Bivona after Roger Henkle’s death.
Black, Barbara. A Room of His Own: A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012. Engages with life writing, periodical culture, and novels to discuss the creation of masculine spaces within and outside of the Victorian home. Such spaces became sites of self-fashioning and a reaction against urban anonymity. Black asks what the creation and utilization of clubs suggest about Victorian theories of separate spheres.








MIDDLE CLASSES
Crossick, Geoffrey, ed. The Lower Middle Class in Britain, 1870–1914. London: Croom Helm, 1977. An authoritative collection of essays by a leading group of social historians. Chapters include considerations of religion and class, jingoism and patriotism, and the figure of the clerk.
Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall, eds. Family Fortunes. Rev. ed. London: Routledge, 2002. An influential study that sustained the analysis that an increasing separation of spheres of activity for men and women was fundamental to the emergence of a distinct middle-class identity in the early part of the century. Fascinating, rich material on changing family life in the industrializing midlands.
Gay, Peter. The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. Vols. 1–2. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984–1988. The most significant volumes of Gay’s extraordinary five-volume psycho-history of the Anglo-European middle-class attempts to track the intimate interior life of the bourgeoisie. Gay is invested in overturning any notion of the Victorian bourgeoisie as prudish or sexually repressed, especially in Volume 1, The Education of the Senses and Volume 2, The Tender Passion.
Morris, R. J. Class, Sect, and Party: The Making of the Middle Class in Leeds, 1820–1850. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990. A detailed social history of the formation of the middle class in Leeds underpinned by extensive quantitative research. Morris places the role of voluntary organizations at the heart of his analysis of middle-class identity and pays little attention to more private forms of life.
Perkin, Harold. The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880. London: Routledge, 1989. A significant study that argues for the increasing displacement of class antagonism and the dissemination of an ideal of professional identity throughout the 20th century. Contains important case studies of the reshaping of the middle class by the hierarchies of professionalism from the later 19th century. Argues that at the zenith of class society in the 1880s a new, fourth class of professional emerged to challenge and break down the existing hierarchies.
Prewitt Brown, Julia. The Bourgeois Interior: How the Middle-Class Imagines Itself in Literature and Film. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. A wide-ranging study of the middle-class domestic interior in Europe and North America that uses canonical 19th- and 20th-century literary examples to make an argument about things, interiors, and bourgeois subjectivity. Thought-provoking in its engagement with the works of Walter Benjamin and an instructive read alongside and against works on similar subjects by social historians with a more empirical bent.
Collini, Stefan. Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. Illuminating intellectual history that examines the sense of the social and emergent ideals of culture in the works and lives of leading male “public moralists” or sage figures during the period in question.
Gunn, Simon. The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority and the English Industrial City, 1840–1914. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000. A detailed social history of the engagement of the newly wealthy industrial middle classes in the sphere of civic culture. Examines the role of music and the spatial politics of the city in an unusually theoretically reflective study.
Hill, Kate. Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850–1914. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005. An informative and valuable study of the emergence of the public museum in the 19th century and its role as mediator of culture from the perspective of art history and museology
Danahay, Martin. Gender at Work in Victorian Culture: Literature, Art, and Masculinity. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005. A useful survey of the ideological constructions of gender in a variety of visual and literary media. Danahay’s study makes clear that despite the ideal type of the gentleman, all sorts of cross-class, and cross-gender identifications flourished outside it around the crux of work and leisure.
Gilmour, Robin. The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel. London: Allen and Unwin, 1981. A thorough and well-informed consideration of gentlemanly identity in the 19th century, tracing its evolution from 18th-century notions of politeness. Includes chapters on Thackeray, Dickens, and Trollope.
Hancock, Stephen. The Romantic Sublime and Middle-Class Subjectivity in the Victorian Novel. New York: Routledge, 2005. An ambitious, if rather uneven, study that attempts to argue for the emergence of middle-class (masculine) subjectivity in response to a feminine, post-Romantic sublime. Includes chapters on Eliot, Thackeray, Dickens, and Hardy. Engages with a wide range of critical theory and an interesting counterbalance to historicist work.
Robson, Catherine. Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Although its primary focus is on the investment of middle-class men in the figure of the girl child, Robson’s astute study does much to illuminate the education and subjectivity of the 19th-century gentleman. Includes chapters on Lewis Carroll and John Ruskin.
Tosh, John. A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. A rich and useful social history of male domesticity and middle-class formation during the period in question. Lavish illustrations give shape to a culture that celebrated the home as a place for the gentleman.
Waters, Karen Volland. The Perfect Gentleman: Masculine Control in Victorian Men’s Fiction, 1870–1901. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. Returns to the subject of Gilmour 1981 and extends it by examining the self-controlled gentleman in the fiction of the later 19th century. Includes studies of the figure of the gentleman in works by Stevenson, Gissing, Kipling, and Wilkie Collins.
Young, Arlene. Culture, Class, and Gender in the Victorian Novel: Gentleman, Gents, and Working Women. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1999. Young examines the evolving literary representation of the gentleman from the 18th century to the emergence of the later-19th-century lower-middle-class gent in the course of discussing works by Mullock Craik, Dickens, Wells, and Gissing. Also includes chapters on middle-class working women. Clear and wide-ranging work.
Corbett, Mary Jean. Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women’s Autobiographies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Although this is a very selective and slightly uneven study, Corbett provides a serviceable introduction to ideologies of the lady and self-sacrificial femininity as they surface in middle-class women’s autobiographies from the early period, through to the suffragettes.
Langland, Elizabeth. Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. A study of Victorian ideals of domesticity in fiction written during the period. Intelligent readings of Dickens, Oliphant, Eliot, Gissing, and others, though Langland’s Foucauldian emphasis on discursive formation and middle-class control now seems a little clunky and dated.
Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Highly influential study that examines the ideals of feminine propriety established in conduct literature and elsewhere from the late 18th century onward. Poovey perceives the ideology of the “proper lady” as a means to combat fears of female sexual profligacy and overconsumption, and analyzes how this ideology works through and against the style of her chosen authors.
Zakreski, Patricia. Representing Female Artistic Labour, 1848–1890: Refining Work for the Middle-Class Woman. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006. Intelligent and well-informed analysis of the tensions between the ideal of the lady and the necessity of paid work for some in the middle classes. Zakreski argues that an increasing range of occupations relating to high culture were remarked as “refining” professions for women, including authorship, seamstressing, and performance.
Humpherys, Anne. Travels into the Poor Man’s Country: The Work of Henry Mayhew. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1977. A detailed study of the life and works of the journalist Henry Mayhew, whose series of articles for the Morning Chronicle, republished as London Labour and the London Poor, still forms an essential resource for reading about urban workers in Victorian London.
Joyce, Simon. Capital Offenses: Geographies of Class and Crime in Victorian London. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Brings together archival research on social investigation and crime in the city with readings of popular fiction of the period to map a “literary geography” of late Victorian London. Particularly thoughtful readings of Wilde’s writings as a rejection of the quasi-naturalist fiction that emerged in response to the “discovery” of the East End slums.
Whelan, Lara Baker. Class, Culture, and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era. New York: Routledge, 2010. Although a bit thin and traveling through some familiar materials, Whelan provides an effective introduction to the tensions around the shifting grounds of suburbia, middle-class culture, and the incursion of the working classes in the later 19th century.









ARTISANS
Crossick, Geoffrey. An Artisan Elite in Victorian Society: Kentish London, 1840–1880. London: Croom Helm, 1978. A classic work of social history that confirms the emergence of a distinct identity of upper-working-class artisans—an aristocracy of labor—during the period in question. Crossick’s meticulous study of lives in Kentish (southeast) London traces the experiences that shaped this common identity from within and confirms the significance of “respectability” as a core part of it.
Gray, Robert. The Labour Aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976. Like Crossick 1978, Gray’s detailed study of the skilled artisans of 19th-century Edinburgh should be an invitation to literary scholars to become more discerning in the use of the term “working class” and generalizations about working-class culture in the period.
Roderick, Anne Baltz. “The Importance of Being an Earnest Improver: Class, Caste, and Self-Help in Mid-Victorian England.” Victorian Literature and Culture 29 (2001): 39–50.A useful examination of the language of self-improvement and Smiles’s Self-Help among artisans and mechanics. DOI: 10.1017/S1060150301291037






ARISTOCRACY
Cannadine, David. Lords and Landlords: The Aristocracy and the Towns, 1774–1967. Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1980. An eye-opening case study of the role of two aristocratic families, Calthorpe and Devonshire, in the development of two 19th-century towns: Birmingham and Eastbourne. Includes a useful historiographic chapter evaluating the impact of the aristocracy in the shaping of growing cities in the 19th century.
Cannadine, David. The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. A pleasure to read and a mine of information, this study, despite its title, does much to demonstrate the continued reach and influence of the aristocracy into the later 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly in Parliament and the upper echelons of the civil service.
Hobsbawn, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Canto ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. An outstanding collection of essays by leading social historians, including one by Cannadine on the British monarchy from the Victorian period. Argues that much of the seemingly historic “national” traditions of the United Kingdom stemmed from the Victorian period as a conscious effort to promote patriotic unity in the demise of a visible aristocracy.
Adburgham, Alison. Silver Fork Society: Fashionable Life and Literature from 1814–1840. London: Constable, 1983. A good introduction to this flourishing Victorian subgenre of novels of aristocratic and fashionable high life, often set in the Regency period, and mercilessly satirized by Thackeray.
O’Cinnéide, Muireann. Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 1832–1867. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. A timely study analyzing the role of aristocratic women writers in shaping debates on national identity in the mid-19th century. Includes chapters on the authors of silver fork fiction, aristocratic memoir, and the salon politics of female influence.
Platt, Len. Aristocracies of Fiction: The Idea of Aristocracy in Late-Nineteenth-Century and Early-Twentieth-Century Literary Culture. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001. Platt tracks the reemergence of the aristocratic ideal amid the group of European early modernist thinkers and writers inspired by Nietzsche. Includes considerations of Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and H. G. Wells.




SERVANTS
Fernandez, Jean. Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy. London: Routledge, 2010. A useful conspectus that includes analyses of Wuthering Heights, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, The Moonstone, and Dr Jeykll and Mr Hyde as well as servant memoirs, including those of Hannah Cullwick. Oddly uncertain as to whether it discusses bourgeois representation or working-class historical actors in places and doesn’t engage with Steedman’s influential work on the subject.
Hughes, Kathryn. The Victorian Governess. London: Hambledon, 1993. A well-informed study, drawing on a rich range of memoirs and primary research that provides an excellent counterweight to fictional representations of this figure during the period. Maps out the social uncertainty and unstable class identity of the governess.
Robbins, Bruce. The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. A seminal study that reorients our understanding of canonical 19th-century fiction by reading for the presence of the servant. Wide-ranging, compelling work that highlights the limited repertoire of servant roles in literature—such as impertinence—in order to bring to the open critical questions of bourgeois subjectivity.
Steedman, Carolyn. Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. An exceptional work of social and cultural history that uses a case study of the relationship between a clergyman and his pregnant maid to reexamine the narrative of the making of the working class generated by E. P. Thompson. Also includes a chapter on the servant narrator of Wuthering Heights, Nelly Dean.
Steedman, Carolyn. Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. A rich and absorbing examination of the subjectivity and emergent social relations of servants in the early 19th century. Steedman’s methodology—reading archival traces as narrative, fusing psychoanalytically informed reflections with standard narratives of social history—is as important for literary critics as her material here.