KATHERINE BYRNE, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination.

Abstract

‘IN the Victorian era’, Katherine Byrne points out at the beginning of this study, ‘consumption killed more people than cholera and smallpox combined, and was equaled only by syphilis in the extent of its effect upon the contemporary political and literary imagination’ (1). It is that effect that Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination traces, engaging the representation of the disease in medical tracts, Pre-Raphaelite art, and a series of novels by authors ranging from Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskill to Mrs Humphrey Ward, Bram Stoker, and Henry James. A suggestive epilogue extends the analysis to twentieth-century works, particularly the sanatorium novel and the literature of the two World Wars. Byrne compellingly demonstrates that the evocative Victorian associations of tuberculosis defied any simplistic categorization, a fact which probably enhanced its literary and artistic resonance; ‘the disease has been associated, often simultaneously though not always congruously’, she argues, ‘with youth and purity, with genius, with heightened sensibility and with increased sexual appetites’ (3). Consumptives were, occasionally paradoxically, linked both to sexual transgression and to saintlike chastity, both to physical weakness and to emotional dominance, both to wasting and to angelic beauty, both to disease and to a glamourous romanticism. While early Victorian texts aligned what would come to be called tuberculosis with social class and the conditions of industrialism, later representations highlighted its relationship to ideologies of sex and gender; ‘the disease afflicted men and women equally’, Byrne notes, and yet—intriguingly—‘this statistical reality seemed to be discounted by the medical profession and popular culture alike’, both of which strongly linked consumption with femininity in a way that neither earlier nor later periods did (150).