The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century

Disrupting the common assumption that the Victorians regarded their eighteenth-century predecessors with little interest or with disdain, this volume re-examines these relationships, exposing some of the significant and complex ways in which key aspects and texts of the eighteenth century were situated, read, and transacted with during the post-Romantic nineteenth century. The contributors challenge long-held assumptions about Victorian uses of the past, and offer new insights into how the literature and culture of the eighteenth century helped shape the culture and identity of the nineteenth. This collection of essays by an impressive array of scholars, with a Preface by David Fairer, offers a sharply new assessment of the energizing place of eighteenth-century literature and culture in the nineteenth century. While obviously of great interest to students of eighteenth-century and Victorian literature, the collection will also appeal to readers broadly concerned questions of literary influence, periodization, and historiography.

Contents: Preface, David Fairer; Introduction, Francis O'Gorman and Katherine Turner; The debt to society: Dickens, Fielding, and the genealogy of independence, Helen Small; George Eliot, Rousseau, and the discipline of natural consequences, Simon Dentith; 'The dreams of thy youth': Bucks, Belles and half-way men in Victorian fiction, Carolyn D. Williams; The 'high priest of an age of prose and reason'? Alexander Pope and the Victorians, Francis O'Gorman; The cultural politics of 18th-century representation in Victorian literary histories, Elisabeth Jay; The 'link of transition': Samuel Johnson and the Victorians, Katherine Turner; Departures and returns: writing the English dictionary in the 18th and 19th centuries, Lynda Mugglestone; Ruskin's revised 18th century, Dinah Birch; Sincerity in every department? Masks, masculinity, and market forces in 18th-century English Men of Letters, David Amigoni; 'I am nothing': a typology of the forger from Chatterton to Wilde, Nick Groom; Regarding the 18th century: Vernon Lee and Emilia Dilke construct a period, Hilary Fraser; Bibliography; Index.