Victorian Discourse Research Articles

“It made her age hard to guess”: Narrating the dynamics of aging and gender through Victorian Gothic archetypes in Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black

Abstract Although Susan Hill has become a prolific writer of ghost narratives in the last decades, it was at a particularly momentous stage of her life as a woman writer that she published The Woman in Black (1983), which is considered her first ghost novel. Evoking the Victorian past, The Woman in Black engages intertextually with Victorian novels within the Gothic genre. The character of the Woman in Black comprises features pertaining to different Victorian Gothic archetypes, such as the ghost, the vampire, and the double. Some of the traits pertaining to these literary archetypes echoed Victorian anxieties about aging that are recovered and reinterpreted in Hill’s novel. Furthermore, in analogy with a Gothic romance, the encounter between the narrator as a young man, Arthur Kipps, and a spectral aging woman, the Woman in Black, unleashes the hero’s process of coming of age, which he recollects in his old age as he is writing his narrative. Narratological features pertaining to the Gothic genre, like the use of a frame narrative that blends past and present, underscore the dynamics of aging, since processes of interrupted aging and premature aging disrupt the boundaries that conventionally distinguish life stages. This article approaches Hill’s The Woman in Black as a contemporary ghost novel that evokes and subverts Victorian discourses of aging and gender, at the same time that, from a contemporary perspective, it vindicates the figure of the Victorian fallen woman as an aging mother.

Disabled Visions: Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Physical Disability, and Poetic Identity in the Later Victorian Imagination

Disabled Visions:Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Physical Disability, and Poetic Identity in the Later Victorian Imagination Heather Tilley (bio) In the 1860s–1870s, a curious phenomenon dubbed "railway spine" exposed ruptures in the mid-Victorian male psyche. Hundreds of people claimed debilitating illnesses resulting from shock experienced in railway accidents, with the phenomenon signaling the start of the medical injury compensation era as numerous litigations were brought against railway companies. As the name suggests, the site of illness was frequently the back, with a significant proportion of people displaying symptoms of progressive forms of paralysis. Medical debate raged around whether illnesses were caused by physical damage to the spine or emotional trauma, a question that had significant implications for compensation claims. John Erichsen, in his 1866 medico-legal treatise On Railway and Other Injuries of the Nervous System, established a highly influential framework for interpreting certain forms of degenerative diseases as resulting from concussion of the spine.1 In other words, he argued that the physical damage was real and sufferers should be compensated for their injuries. However, Erichsen was uncertain as to how railway injuries might cause longer-term damage to the spinal cord, noting only that "if the spine is badly jarred, shaken, or concussed by a blow or shock, … we find that the nervous force is to a certain extent shaken out of the man, and that he has in some way lost nervous power" (p. 95). Significantly, this illustrates how railway spine was framed as a loss of masculine vitality: it was a condition that affected professional men using the railways for work in particularly significant numbers. Erichsen described how the male sufferer of spinal injury frequently became depressed: "His friends remark, and he feels, that 'he is not the man he was.' He has lost bodily energy, mental capacity, business aptitude" (p. 97). Erichsen's theory of the physical causes of injury was used by sufferers to seek damages against railway companies, amounting to over £2 million paid [End Page 607] out in compensation for personal injuries in Britain. This led to a counteroffensive by railway companies, which engaged their own experts to investigate cases. Herbert Page, surgeon to the London and North Western Railway Company, for example, refuted the possibility that railway injuries could—other than very rarely—cause injury to the nerve elements of the spinal cord, noting instead "the temptation to exaggeration and imposture" that pecuniary compensation encouraged. He also suggested that the cases for "general nervous shock," or "functional" rather than "structural" disturbance of the nervous system, were far more numerous.2 Erichsen had robustly argued that railway spine was distinguishable from "hysteria," noting the latter's association with young women rather than "hard-headed, active, practical men of business" (p. 126). Erichsen was intent on identifying an underlying organic cause to these cases to avoid confronting the notion of a masculine self in crisis; he sought to define the loss of masculine qualities of vigor and action as a product of physiological illness rather than the cause of it. The debates that raged around railway spine illustrate anxieties generated by the intersection of masculinity with physical disability in the mid- to late Victorian period. Disability studies scholars have examined the way in which disability more widely was characterized by its relationship to the emotions in the Victorian period. Martha Stoddard Holmes's study of disability across a range of Victorian discourses—including literature, medicine, and sociology—establishes convincingly how "[t]he connection between emotion and impairment" becomes a kind of "cultural shorthand … to indicate or produce emotional excess, add [sic] disability."3 Holmes points to the ways in which Victorian discourses of disability are "melodramatic": not only do we repeatedly encounter disabled characters in that most popular of Victorian literary genres, the stage melodrama, but, more broadly, physical disability is habitually associated with emotional excess, producing a social identity for disabled people defined in emotional terms. Disabled characters and people were becoming defined by their perceived capacity for heightened sensitivity and affect, blurring traditional categories of gender. As Holmes points out, "The distinction between abled and disabled bodies in Victorian culture (and our own) was produced partly in terms of the...

Elisions of Cholera and Class in David Copperfield

This study examines Charles Dickens’s novel David Copperfield (1850) in terms of cholera epidemics that dramatically shaped Victorian discourse on disease and responsibility. As a prominent public figure, Dickens participated in discussions of sanitation reform and legislation. However, he evaded specific discussion of disease within David Copperfield despite the novel’s publication amidst both the passing of the Public Health Act of 1848 and a second cholera outbreak in London. This article argues that Dickens presents disease as an “unspeakable subject” incommensurate with Victorian understandings of cleanliness, propriety, and maintaining the untouchability of the upper classes. Both Dickens and David cleanse all traces of disease to disavow a confrontation of equally uncomfortable subjects, predominately the class inequities and social determinants of health unearthed by the cholera epidemics. An analysis of two major characters demonstrate the unspoken presence of disease in the novel and a preserved prejudice against “filthy” lower-class people.

Catching the Invisible: Translating Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign: A Book of Appreciations

Abstract: This brief article concentrates on my personal experience in translating Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign: A Book of Appreciations (1897) into Italian. It provides a reflection on the role of the translator as a privileged reader, as the one able to access more easily, to use Raymond Williams’s words, the structure of feeling, a narrative which is not fully articulated on the page but is to be inferred by reading between the lines. It intends to show how WNQVR reveals, to a close reader, new formations of women’s thought struggling to emerge out of the dominant Victorian discourse while discussing the translation strategies which have been adopted, bearing in mind not only cultural and linguistic differences but also the historical distance that separates us from the original text.

Catching the Invisible: Translating Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign: A Book of Appreciations

Abstract: This brief article concentrates on my personal experience in translating Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign: A Book of Appreciations (1897) into Italian. It provides a reflection on the role of the translator as a privileged reader, as the one able to access more easily, to use Raymond Williams’s words, the structure of feeling, a narrative which is not fully articulated on the page but is to be inferred by reading between the lines. It intends to show how WNQVR reveals, to a close reader, new formations of women’s thought struggling to emerge out of the dominant Victorian discourse while discussing the translation strategies which have been adopted, bearing in mind not only cultural and linguistic differences but also the historical distance that separates us from the original text.

Hardy, Conrad and the Senses by Hugh Epstein

Reviewed by: Hardy, Conrad and the Senses by Hugh Epstein Yael Levin Hugh Epstein, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 312 pp. Hugh Epstein’s Hardy, Conrad and the Senses brings together an impressive array of known and lesser-known Victorian scientists, philosophers, and psychologists to stage a defamiliarizing return to Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad. Testing assumptions of historical periodization that have traditionally separated critical approaches to their work, the book shows that the labels Modernism and Victorian have muffled significant connections between the two authors’ representation of sensory impressions. Epstein uses this new focus to reframe the comparative analysis beyond the critical tendency to read the two authors [End Page 374] together through their shared pessimistic vision of a human existence bereft of providence. A book of criticism can offer no greater reward than allowing us to see works we know and love in a new light. Reading these novels alongside a historically informed conceptualization of the senses, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses does precisely this. The book proceeds as an interrogation of the work of the senses, a preoccupation that Victorian art shared with the physical sciences. Epstein asks that we view what has been deemed a uniquely modernist preoccupation through Victorian discourse and ideas. This is a theoretically simple yet original move. Distinguishing between the literary impressionism associated with modernism and the work of the authors in question, Epstein shows that the focus here is not on the consciousness of the focalizer. Unlike Henry James, Walter Pater, and Virginia Woolf, Hardy and Conrad look to the “vibrations in the ether,” “the relations between things” that we associate with atmosphere. Conrad’s sensationism, he writes, “conceives of receptiveness and understanding as a continual process of exchange rather than as a raid whose haul is secreted within imprisoning walls; and the action of each novel is to disallow their desire to remain onlookers in an unassailed subjectivity” (42). The drama unfolds as a tension between the “vivifying receptiveness of the senses” that threaten “to absorb one into the present moment” and the need to “maintain the self-possession which enables one to negotiate the world” (19). It shuttles from mind to mood, from interiority to exteriority, a “physical involvement in a scenic moment that is also active in producing consciousness” (49). This is a recording of the present that contains consciousness rather than being contained by it. Epstein terms this literary method scenic realism. It is the particular form which marks the contribution of Hardy and Conrad to the swelling of novelistic description in the age of the observation of phenomena. It asks for a responsiveness to atmospheres and vibrations, a bodily cosmic awareness, such that the components of a scene as a whole, including human consciousness, infuse the rendering of moments as they pass. The written scene that results thus belongs neither entirely to a personal inner conception, nor entirely to a visible external social or physical reality, but to the moment in which those two coalesce to realise themselves as an event. (70) Such literary exploration proves significant against the backdrop of a conceptualization of subjectivity that is seen as inherently passive. American historian and diplomat Henry Adams (1903) describes the subject as “a conscious ball of vibrating motions, traversed in every direction by infinite lines of rotations or vibration” (qtd. in Epstein 50). It is precisely the anxiety owing to this passivity that generates the need to re-establish one’s sense of identity and individuality. This is an important qualification to a conceptualization of a passive subjectivity, as current insights on the same speak to the way one becomes with the world [End Page 375] rather than as a separate entity. Epstein compares the two conceptualizations to suggest that though contemporary ideas might recall the scientific and literary Victorian experiments, they cannot be squared with Victorian thought. The immanent conception of self as it is viewed today is often associated with moral development rather than with a threat to our place in the world. Though he highlights this important distinction, Epstein also persuasively shows how Hardy and Conrad anticipate this new way of thinking. ________ While the title suggests an...

METANARRATIVE FUNCTION OF ENTOMOLOGY IN ANTONIA SUSAN BYATT’S MORPHO EUGENIA

Antonia Susan Byatt, described by the reviewers as a “postmodern Victorian” (Levenson, 1993) or a “Victorian Iris Murdoch” (Butler, 1992) has proved that her writing skill has become something irreplaceable in the postmodern literary world. Her Possession has accomplished something that Hutcheon (1988: 20) in her A Poetics of Postmodernism called “the actual reception of postmodernism”, not sociologically limited to mostly academic readers. While in the Possession Byatt makes parodies of scholars giving a fair amount of critique of poststructuralist and postmodern attitudes through different narrative perspectives; paradox, ambiguity and self-reflexibility (Hansson, 1999), in Angels and Insects she makes a parody of the Victorians or through them, of our own time, fusing conventional and postmodern narrative strategies. Conventional, because she basically tells a story about Victorian naturalists and their fashionable activities at the time. All the rest is postmodernism; the metanarrative usage of entomology, the intertextuality which expands narrative possibilities, the self-reflexibility. The questions this paper deals with are several. Why are the intertexts of entomology metanarratives in the novella Morpho Eugenia so profuse to the point of interference? Is it because the insect allegory is an allegory in itself or simply the allegory is so rightfully used that it can go on and on? And finally, is the reader here a literary gourmet or a student listening to the lecture considering that the novella is a mixture of exquisite Victorian setting narratives and metanarrative entomology discourses?<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0948/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Representing the Poor: Interwar Documentary Film, Mass Observation, and Victor Gollancz Ltd.

This article explores the emergence of a new mode of representing the poor that became dominant in Britain in the early twentieth century—a mode in which the “point of view” of impoverished people themselves was increasingly foregrounded. Focusing on examples drawn from documentary film, Mass Observation, and the publications of Victor Gollancz Ltd., the article considers how, while marking a kind of formal shift away from a late Victorian discourse of poverty, this development maintains that earlier discourse’s disciplinary agenda. In examining three case studies—John Taylor, Arthur Elton, Edgar Anstey, and Ruby Grierson’s Housing Problems; Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge’s Mass Observation Day Survey; and H. Beales and R. Lambert’s Memoirs of the Unemployed—it argues that the new point of view mode marked a continuation in the twentieth century of the outlook that shaped representations of poverty in the late Victorian era.

Democracy, Terror, and Utopia in Dickens'sA Tale of Two Cities

This essay reads Charles Dickens'sA Tale of Two Cities(1859) as a previously unrecognized contribution to Victorian discourses around democracy. Approaching the novel through the parliamentary reform debate of the late 1850s and through Dickens's earlier writings about American democracy, I argue that this historical narrative of the French Revolution elaborates Victorian liberals’ fears that democracy will, on one hand, devalue individuality and produce a world of sameness or, on the other, overvalue individual sovereignty, giving way to isolating difference and social fragmentation. Despite his deep ambivalence about democratic reform, Dickens uses the novel to imagine alternative forms of political representation. The motif of “echoing footsteps” is one key example of the utopian democratic fantasy that the novel develops. In the “echoing footsteps” passages, Dickens appropriates the theories of Charles Babbage for political purposes, proposing that the earth's atmosphere is a medium that contains a complete democratic record of all the sounds made by every individual in existence. In this respect, the novel anticipates a concept of democracy as individual expression that today increasingly threatens democratic institutions.

A Lesson Plan on Ibsen’s A Doll’s House: Revisiting the Victorian Myth of Home and Woman through Re-writings, Parodies, and Sequels

This paper proposes a lesson plan for four sessions on Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, specifically designed to teach English-major undergraduates. Through the proposed four sessions, students will practice how to do a close-reading of literary texts and a contextual analysis. In the first session, students will examine socio-political context of the 19th-century England with intense focus on the period’s obsession with myth of home and woman. Students will discuss the emergence of the New Woman and women’s struggle to gain the right to education, property, and vote. In the second session, students will examine the myth of home and woman as a backlash to the feminist movement and conflicting anxieties deeply embedded in the Victorian discourse of gender. In the third session, students will practice a close reading of A Doll’s House and identify how the contemporary gender discourse is reflected in the play. In the fourth session, students will be introduced to diverse re-writings, parodies and sequels to the original play. When A Doll’s House was premiered, many popular playwrights revised the ending to assure a happy reconciliation of the couple or Nora’s repentance, which intellectuals or feminist writers ridiculed in their parody works. As a final activity, students will write either alternative ending or sequel to the play that would please conservative audience. The fact that the play continues to be re-interpreted in the 21st century demonstrates how a literary text can be reproduced with ever-renewed political significance.

Typological features of Victorian discourse concepts

Typological features of Victorian discourse concepts

Speech traditions of communicative culture of Victorian discourse

Speech traditions of communicative culture of Victorian discourse

The ‘most Sacred of Duties’1: Maternal Ideals and Discourses of Authority in Victorian Breastfeeding Advice

Abstract The maternal role and its associated practices were subject to much scrutiny throughout the Victorian period. Whilst motherhood was seen as the natural destiny of the (respectable) woman, mothers were nonetheless deemed in need of strict guidance on how best to raise their offspring. This was offered in an extensive range of advice and conduct books, via newspapers, journals, and fiction, and from medical practitioners, and covered pregnancy, childbirth, and all aspects of care for babies and young children. This article considers Victorian advice on infant feeding, focusing in particular on the various strategies deployed to encourage mothers to breastfeed. Advice literature for mothers frequently invoked patriarchal – religious, medical, and (pseudo-) scientific – authority, in line with broader Victorian discourses on femininity. Much of this advice was produced by, or drew on, the authority of (male) medical practitioners, whilst comparatively little emphasis was placed on maternal experience as a source of expertise. Set within the wider historical context of shifting trends in infant feeding, this article analyses the various persuasive techniques employed by the authors of advice literature, which ultimately served as an attempt to control women’s maternal behaviours and to suppress their own maternal authority.

The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature ed. by Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer

Reviewed by: The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature ed. by Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer Kaylee N. Henderson (bio) Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer, eds., The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature (New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. xii + 540, $224 hardcover. This extensive collection, carefully compiled by Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer, provides an ample overview of the theoretical frameworks and topics pertaining to the study of Victorian literature. The companion's forty-five chapters are organized into six themed sections: "Genres and Movements," "Media Histories," "Victorian Discourses," "Formulations of Identity," "Science and Spirit," and "Spatiality and Environment." Each section contains chapters written by top scholars from around the globe, often the very scholars who wrote the foundational texts for their subjects. Each chapter provides a thorough overview of the topic, discussing both [End Page 462] pioneering texts and the most recent scholarship. Additionally, each chapter details the current challenges facing scholars and outlines directions for future research, often in relation to other topics and disciplines. Denisoff explains in the introduction, "We asked our authors not to write encyclopedic summaries of their subject but instead to use their own voices and styles to consider what somebody new to a field should know about the history of scholarship on the particular subject" (7). The authors represented in this collection clearly were mindful of this request, and despite the many voices, it never feels disjointed. Rather, the companion is an accessible and invaluable tool for scholars of Victorian literature. Denisoff notes the driving questions behind this collection: "What does Victorian studies engage with today, and how is it doing so?" (7). While he admits there are myriad responses to these compelling queries, the editors have worked to ensure that "in addition to addressing nineteenth-century values and concerns, it is a collection of twenty-first-century issues, critically positioning Victorian studies within the current social and political climate" (8). For example, in "Victorian Digital Humanities," Karen Bourrier explains that "new technologies were often first developed as aids to the disabled, only afterward finding broader use among the general population" (129). She notes that "the exchange also worked in reverse, with technologies for the able-bodied being adapted by the disabled," highlighting the influence of disability studies on the digital humanities through a shared goal of accessibility (129). Lynn Voskuil, in "Why Victorian Ecocriticism Matters," draws on the Victorian garden to introduce prevalent issues in Victorian ecocriticism, including "the role of empire in prompting both ecological innovation and environmental degradation; the acceleration of anthropogenic climate change during the nineteenth century; and the emergence of global perspectives to grasp the planetary scale of the ecological legacy we inherited from our Victorian forebears and the challenges we continue to share with them" (506). Linda K. Hughes's chapter on "Periodical Studies," the only one to focus solely on Victorian periodicals, details three major phases of periodical studies and the ongoing evolution of research methods and challenges within the subject. However, nearly every chapter in the collection touches on periodical studies and print culture in some way. For example, in "Short Forms: Serialization and Short Fiction," Susan David Bernstein proposes that "studying excerpts and abridged editions of long Victorian novels, to evaluate the experience of reading and design of writing short formats, even if one form—the serial installment or a chapter—is part of a larger text," can help us to avoid fetishizing wholeness and lead to "a theory and practice of Victorian short forms" (43). In "Feminism and the Canon," Talia Schaffer details the decades-long dominance of the canon wars and feminist criticism and their subsequent absence in work on Victorian [End Page 463] literary studies. She posits that "the feminist/noncanonical victory meant that its precepts could be taken for granted, its core assumptions remaining stubbornly unarticulated" (278). Arguing that critics must move beyond recovery work focused on biological females to instead "aim for feminist goals that benefit everyone regardless of their relation to female identity," Schaffer asserts, "'Feminism' ought to name our method, not our objects" (281). She explicitly points to the ways we can apply this "feminist strategy for reading" to areas like digital humanities and periodical studies. Andrew M. Stauffer...

Conceptual space of Victorian discourse

Conceptual space of Victorian discourse

The (Un)deserving adult: Examining British Columbia’s adult basic education policy

In 2015, the Government of British Columbia (BC), Canada, reversed a long-standing mandate to provide tuition-free Adult Basic Education (ABE) to all adults. Drawing upon internal government policy documents and inter- and intra-ministerial communications obtained through Freedom of Information (FOI) tools, key policy documents, social media commentary, and documentation from protest events, the authors adopt an interpretive stance to re-tell this policy moment. Through their analysis, the authors observe struggles on behalf of government actors to adopt a coherent ‘policy story’ to legitimise the withdrawal of state resources for the education of marginalised citizens, falling back upon a Victorian era desert-based discourse. The study provides insights into the durability of deservingness discourses and the improvisational nature of neoliberal policy making.

Athletic Antagonism in Wilkie Collins’s Man and Wife

ABSTRACTWilkie Collins’s Man and Wife (1870) has notoriously been criticised by both Victorian and contemporary reviewers for its seeming oversimplified antagonism toward athleticism and sport. However, Man and Wife provides profound insights into the debates and anxieties of the time regarding the cultivation of physical prowess in conjunction with British imperialism. Collins’s antagonism represents a view into Victorian discourse on the unprecedented vogue of athleticism, which made England the first modern sporting nation. This essay argues that Collins became a representative antagonist against athleticism due to his concerns about the decline of intelligence, morality, and even health combined with a concern about the popularity of amateur sports, which served as a means to segregate class. Collins’s controversial portrayal of an aristocrat’s excellence in sports was a warning against elite athleticism, which went against the Victorian current of class mobility. Analysing discourses on athleticism in Victorian periodicals and magazines, this essay offers insights into the shifting contours of sporting ethos and class identity in mid- to late Victorian society and into British endeavours to strengthen its economic and national power by adopting an innovative practice of athleticism.

Евфемістична лексикалізація табуйованих концептів вікторіанства у лінгвокогнітивному аспекті (на матеріалі вікторіанського художнього дискурсу)

Евфемістична лексикалізація табуйованих концептів вікторіанства у лінгвокогнітивному аспекті (на матеріалі вікторіанського художнього дискурсу)

Representing the Racial Hand from a Female Imperial Perspective

My article discusses Travels in West Africa (1897), a travel narrative by the British woman writer Mary Henrietta Kingsley. In her depiction of her adventure in the West African land, Kingsley offers vivid portrayals of how Africans use their hands. Her observation of the hand reflects Victorians’ growing interest in reading human hands. Noticeable about Victorian discourses of the hand is that they differentiate white hands from non-white ones, reducing the latter into an empty sign that does not project any evidence of human-specific potential for achieving high civilization of the kind that Europeans have. This perception is present in Kingsley’s text as well, but a distinguishing feature of her writing is that she interprets the non-white hand as a symbol of its non-white subject’s humanness. Evident in the text is that she persistently highlights how empathetically she embraces a wide variety of racial and cultural differences visualized through the hand. However, the focus of this article does not lie on how smoothly she adopts cultural relativism in her account of the non-white hand. Instead, the article looks at how her empathetic reading of the African hand in effect unfolds in ways that silence its non-white subject and allow her to bring to light her own adaptability to other cultures, which she perceives as an essentially feminine trait―something male imperial agents cannot have. The article therefore problematizes several moments of Kingsley’s discovery of the African-specific bodily agency and revisits the process whereby she establishes her authorial position at the expense of Africans as a womanly woman imperialist to claim her place within the British Empire.

Fit and Counterfeit: The Volatile Values of Epilepsy in Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch

Abstract This paper explores Victorian culture’s persistent associations between epilepsy and bodily expenditure to locate the place of the epileptic body within the Victorian ‘libidinal economy’. It centres on a reading of Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872) as a highly original meditation on the implications of disability and visibility. In this novel, a reclusive silversmith named Oscar Dubourg curbs his post-traumatic seizures with silver nitrate, a remedy that causes a dark-blue discoloration of the skin. Behind the narrative necessity of this device, I locate an epistemological desire to render the condition of epilepsy visibly evident by saturating (and implicitly racializing) Oscar so that the inside shows through. The sporadic visibility of epilepsy confers a radically unstable identity upon its sufferer, one represented by the fluidity and anonymity of the unshaped silver and gold plates that Oscar moulds in his workshop. These plates inspire rumours throughout the community that Oscar is a counterfeiter. Oscar’s valuable metals, along with his health, are stolen in one fell swoop; the thieves brutally attack him, precipitating his traumatic epilepsy. The silver does not disappear, then, but is transmuted into Oscar’s affliction; these shifting metaphorical values of silver can be productively read in light of Victorian discourses of pathology, not least the widespread concern about malingerers ‘counterfeiting’ epilepsy. Can an afflicted body ‘pass’ as healthy? Can healthy bodies perform affliction? These are questions that Oscar’s story raises, with the help of a twin brother who exchanges identities with him in order to retain his fiancée’s affections. Collins’s sensational marriage plot, peopled with a cast of ‘problem bodies’, pulls the novel into critical conversation with a nexus of nineteenth-century medical and eugenic discourses dedicated to the surveilling of physical difference and the ‘policing’ of legitimate and illegitimate disabilities.