Inheritance And Speculation In Victorian Fiction

This book investigates how Victorian fiction reconfigures the narrative and social conventions of inheritance by revealing its unsettling affinities with speculative forms. The book takes an interdisciplinary historical and formal approach, reading contemporary political and legal discussions alongside Brontë, Dickens, Collins, and Eliot.

Imagining Women's Property in Victorian Fiction reframes how we think about Victorian women's changing economic rights and their representation in nineteenth-century novels. The reform of married women's property law between 1856 and 1882 constituted one of the largest economic transformations England had ever seen, as well as one of its most significant challenges to family traditions. By the end of this period, women who had once lost their common-law property rights to their husbands reclaimed their own assets, regained economic agency, and forever altered the legal and theoretical nature of wedlock by doing so. Yet in literary accounts, reforms were neither as decisive as the law implied nor limited to marriage. Legal rights frequently clashed with other family claims, and the reallocation of wealth affected far more than spouses or the marital state. Competition between wives and children is just one of many ways in which Victorian fiction suggests the perceived benefits and threats of property reform. In nineteenth-century fiction, portrayals of women's claims to ownership provide insight into the social networks forged through property transactions and also offer a lens to examine a wide range of other social matters, including testamentary practices, wills, and copyright law; economic and evolutionary models of mutuality; the twin dangers of greed and generosity; inheritance and custody rights; the economic ramifications of loyalty and family obligation; and the legacy of nineteenth-century economic practices for women today. Understanding the reform of married women's property as both an ideologically and materially substantial redistribution of the nation's wealth as well as one complicated by competing cultural traditions, this book explores the widespread ways in which women's financial agency was imagined by fiction that engages with but also diverges from the law in accounts of economic choices and transactions. Repeatedly, narratives by Austen, Dickens, Gaskell, Trollope, Eliot, and Oliphant suggest both that the law is inadequate to account for the way that property enables and disrupts relationships, and that the form of the Victorian novel - in its ability to track intimate and intricate exchanges across generations - is better suited to such tasks.

The Companion to the Victorian Novel provides contextual and critical information about the entire range of British fiction published between 1837 and 1901. Provides contextual and critical information about the entire range of British fiction published during the Victorian period. Explains issues such as Victorian religions, class structure, and Darwinism to those who are unfamiliar with them. Comprises original, accessible chapters written by renowned and emerging scholars in the field of Victorian studies. Ideal for students and researchers seeking up-to-the-minute coverage of contexts and trends, or as a starting point for a survey course.

A dual-time novel set in Victorian and modern Guernsey. The story covers the relationship between Victor Hugo and his young copyist, Eugénie and the repercussions for her descendant, Tess, who inherits her house.

In 'Ralph the Heir', Anthony Trollope weaves a tale of a corrupt Parliamentary election based on his own experiences as a candidate. Ralph Newton is the spendthrift nephew of Squire Gregory Newton, who has an illegitimate son he loves dearly but cannot leave his estate to. In debt, Ralph must choose between raising money on his future interest in the estate or marrying a lower-class woman, both risky choices. Despite Trollope's negative assessment of his own work, readers have found 'Ralph the Heir' noteworthy for its portrayal of 19th-century society and politics.

How key changes to the married women's property laws contributed to new ways of viewing women in society are revealed in Deborah Wynne's study of literary representations of women and portable property during the period 1850 to 1900. While critical explorations of Victorian women's connections to the material world have tended to focus on their relationships to commodity culture, Wynne argues that modern paradigms of consumerism cannot be applied across the board to the Victorian period. Until the passing of the 1882 Married Women's Property Act, many women lacked full property rights; evidence suggests that, for women, objects often functioned not as disposable consumer products but as cherished personal property. Focusing particularly on representations of women and material culture in Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James, Wynne shows how novelists engaged with the vexed question of women's relationships to property. Suggesting that many of the apparently insignificant items that 'clutter' the Victorian realist novel take on new meaning when viewed through the lens of women's access to material culture and the vagaries of property law, her study opens up new possibilities for interpreting female characters in Victorian fiction and reveals the complex work of 'thing culture' in literary texts.

Since the 1980s, scholars have made the case for examining nineteenth-century culture — particularly literary output — through the lens of economics. In Culture and Money in the Nineteenth Century: Abstracting Economics, two luminaries in the field of Victorian studies, Daniel Bivona and Marlene Tromp, have collected contributions from leading thinkers that push New Economic Criticism in new and exciting directions. Spanning the Americas, India, England, and Scotland, this volume adopts an inclusive, global view of the cultural effects of economics and exchange. Contributors use the concept of abstraction to show how economic thought and concerns around money permeated all aspects of nineteenth-century culture, from the language of wills to arguments around the social purpose of art. The characteristics of investment and speculation; the fraught symbolic and practical meanings of paper money to the Victorians; the shifting value of goods, services, and ideas; the evolving legal conceptualizations of artistic ownership — all of these, contributors argue, are essential to understanding nineteenth-century culture in Britain and beyond. Contributors: Daniel Bivona, Suzanne Daly, Jennifer Hayward, Aeron Hunt, Roy Kreitner, Kathryn Pratt Russell, Cordelia Smith, and Marlene Tromp.