What are we to make of the Victorians’ fascination with collecting? What effect did their encounters with the curious, exotic and downright odd have on Victorian writers and their works? The essays in this collection take up these questions by examining the phenomenon of bric-à-brac in Victorian literature. The contributors to Literary Bric-à-Brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities explore sites of unusual concurrence (including museums, the home, art galleries, private collections) and the way in which bric-à-brac brought the alien into everyday settings, the past into the present and the wild into the domestic. Focusing on the representation of material culture in Victorian literature, the essays in this volume seek out miscellaneous and incongruous objects that take readers beyond the commonplace paradigms associated with commodity culture. Individual chapters analyse the work of writers as different as Edward Lear and John Henry Newman, Robert Browning and George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll. In so doing they shed light on a dizzying array of topics and objects that include class and capitalism, the occult and the sacraments, Darwinism and dandyism, umbrellas, textiles, the Philosopher’s Stone and even the household nail.

This collection of essays is concerned with the phenomenon of bric-a-brac in Victorian literature. Focusing on the representation of material culture in Victorian literature, the essays seek out miscellaneous and incongruous objects that take readers beyond the traditions of commodity culture.

The Victorian Novel On File argues that the nineteenth-century information explosion shapes the novel form. In a world teeming with data, the novel is a storage medium, cluttered with detail and accumulating more than it can use. The fictional things that have been read as insignificant should be seen instead as vessels of information, embedding the text with potential. This study weaves together a formal account of the novel with media and information studies as well as new materialist approaches to objects. Information took material form in the nineteenth century: in Victorian literature, data can be located in bric-a-brac, folded-up papers, semi-precious stones, and rubbish heaps. Yet this information may never be transmitted as knowledge. Instead, the novel offers indefinite storage, gesturing toward the future while holding action and accountability in abeyance. Fallen by the wayside of plot are documents left on file, containers left unopened, stock left on the shelf, and secrets left untold-enacting, this study argues, the Victorian novel's aesthetics of deferral. In readings of works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Rudyard Kipling, this study illustrates the formal effects of cultural questions about value and meaning, longevity and history, abundance and overwhelm, and keeping and discarding. It closes by showing how these same questions animate the twenty-first century's information culture as well.

Neo-Victorian Things: Re-Imagining Nineteenth-Century Material Cultures in Literature and Film is the first volume to focus solely on the replication, reconstruction, and re-presentation of Victorian things. It investigates the role of materiality in contemporary returns to the past as a means of assessing the function of things in remembering, revisioning, and/or reimagining the nineteenth century. Examining iterations of material culture in literature, film and popular television series, this volume offers a reconsideration of nineteenth-century things and the neo-Victorian cultural forms that they have inspired, animated, and even haunted. By turning to new and relatively underexplored strands of neo-Victorian materiality—including opium paraphernalia, slave ships, clothing, and biographical objects—and interrogating the critical role such objects play in reconstructing the past, this volume offers ways of thinking about how mis/apprehensions of material culture in the nineteenth century continue to shape our present understanding of things.

Robert Browning's pre-eminent status amongst Victorian poets has endured despite the recent broadening of the literary canon. He is the main practitioner of the period's most important poetic genre, the dramatic monologue, while his engagement with many aspects of nineteenth-century culture makes him a key figure in the wider field of Victorian studies. This stimulating introduction to Browning criticism provides an overview of the major responses to the poet's work over the last two hundred years. It offers an insightful guide to criticism from various theoretical perspectives, elucidating Browning's participation in Victorian debates about aesthetics, history, politics, religion, gender and psychology.

The Victorian Verse-Novel: Aspiring to Life considers the rise of a hybrid generic form, the verse-novel, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such poems combined epic length with novelistic plots in the attempt to capture not a heroic past but the quotidian present. Victorian verse-novels also tended to be rough-mixed, their narrative sections interspersed with shorter, lyrical verses in varied measures. In flouting the rules of contemporary genre theory, which saw poetry as the purview of the eternal and ideal and relegated the everyday to the domain of novelistic prose, verse-novels proved well suited to upsetting other hierarchies, as well, including those of gender and class. The genre's radical energies often emerge from the competition between lyric and narrative drives, between the desire for transcendence and the quest to find meaning in what happens next; the unusual marriage plots that structure such poems prove crucibles of these rival forces. Generic tensions also yield complex attitudes towards time and space: the book's first half considers the temporality of love, while its second looks at generic geography through the engagement of novels in verse with Europe and the form's transatlantic travels. Both well-known verse-novels (Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de Voyage, Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House) and lesser-known examples are read closely alongside a few nearly related works (Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book). An Afterword traces the verse-novel's substantial influence on the modernist novel.

From chatelaines to whale blubber, ice making machines to stained glass, this six-volume collection will be of interest to the scholar, student or general reader alike - anyone who has an urge to learn more about Victorian things. The set brings together a range of primary sources on Victorian material culture and discusses the most significant developments in material history from across the nineteenth century. The collection will demonstrate the significance of objects in the everyday lives of the Victorians and addresses important questions about how we classify and categorise nineteenth-century things. The fourth volume will look at raw materials that were handled and used by Victorians including blubber and coal.