Victorian Writers Research Articles

Quality Improvement: origins, purpose and the future for veterinary practice

Introduction
 Providing the highest quality veterinary care can often be a delicate balancing act: the client/owner’s wishes, financial parameters and emotional needs have to be considered, whilst also meeting the animal’s clinical needs. But what actually defines quality care? It is a term frequently used in both the human and veterinary healthcare literature, but often has little explanation or definition attached to it. ‘Quality’ in relation to care delivered is not a static concept and will hold different meanings to different individuals within a healthcare service. John Ruskin, a Victorian writer and critic of art and society observed: ‘Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skilful execution’.
 

The Ideas of Dangerous Education: Modification of the Pedagogical Novel in <em>Oliver Twist</em> by Charles Dickens and “The Gemini” by Taras Shevchenko

The article deals with usage of the pedagogical genre in the novels Oliver Twist by Victorian writer Charles Dickens and the story “The Gemini” by Ukrainian writer Taras Shevchenko. It demonstrates that in the novel Oliver Twist by Dickens and the story “The Gemini” by Shevchenko there are some distinct genre features of the pedagogical novel: in both works, one can observe the development of authors’ experiments—the main heroes are placed in specific pedagogical circumstances. Unlike Shevchenko, Dickens promotes the idea of “noble” heredity, which is important for further formation of personality with high moral and ethical principles of the character that is able to resist the negative impact. Despite the external similarities with biblical motifs and themes, the plot of the novels is based on archaic components: the motif of the amazing rescue of the infant and dual organization of the myth about brothers (twins), where the first represents consistency of Good and the other Evil. In both works, antagonists are infantile individuals who revolt against their loving mothers. The writers construct images of wise mentors without whom ideal characters would not form successfully.

Listening to “the Squirrel's Heart Beat”

Listening to “the Squirrel's Heart Beat”

Thuggee in England: Tracing the Origin and Development of Fantasies of Thug-Invasion and Reverse Colonization in late nineteenth century British Fiction

A lot has been written on Thuggee and nineteenth century British operations against it. Instead of delving directly into either of these two well investigated areas of research, this paper seeks to chart how several nineteenth century British writings exhibit a curious fear of Thug infiltration. Keeping in their minds some actual instances, early British colonial officials worried about the Thugs joining government services under them to survive and sabotage the anti-Thuggee campaign. This paper argues that this apprehension gradually developed into the fantasy of being reverse colonized by the Thugs. Late Victorian writers of fiction fantasized the Thugs invading England, or, what must have been more unnerving to them, converting the Britons themselves to Thugs. Using unpublished official records and literary works as sources, this paper tries to map how colonial anxiety of ‘Thug infiltration’ originated and later grew into the fantasy of reverse colonization by the Thugs. It also tries to link this to specific historical developments in that period.

Eco-criticism(s) and Victorian Fiction: A Review Essay

ABSTRACT This article offers an overview of the now burgeoning field of Victorian ecocriticism. Ecocriticism (or environmental criticism) emerged as a distinct field of study in the 1990s, focused on reevaluating Romantic and nonfictional representations of nature as part of a green tradition of deep ecological thinking. As ecocriticism diversified, it took a more sociocentric (or social ecological) turn, and in so doing, it also took a more active interest in the Victorian period. As a new generation of ecocritics have emphasized, the Victorian period marked an epochal shift in the nature of lived existence, as a rural society was transformed into an industrialized, urbanized, and recognizably modern society, with recognizably modern environmental problems. In reacting to those problems, Victorian writers anticipated many of our own concerns, as recent ecocritical reconsiderations of Dickens's work underline. As the variety of those responses to Dickens's oeuvre also suggest, ecocriticism today encompasses a range of sometimes markedly different theoretical approaches and concerns. Those approaches are nevertheless united by a shared sense that a Victorian ecocriticism constitutes a distinct and worthwhile field of study, with the very real potential to illuminate the origins of the environmental crises bequeathed by the world's first industrial nation.

The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension: Higher Spatial Thinking in the Fin de Siècle, by Mark Blacklock, Algebraic Art: Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture, by Andrea K. Henderson

Reviewed by: The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension: Higher Spatial Thinking in the Fin de Siècle by Mark Blacklock, and: Algebraic Art: Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture by Andrea K. Henderson Deanna K. Kreisel (bio) The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension: Higher Spatial Thinking in the Fin de Siècle, by Mark Blacklock; pp. vi + 233. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018, $82.00, £61.00. Algebraic Art: Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture, by Andrea K. Henderson; pp. xii + 218. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018, $67.00, £49.99. The development of higher-dimensional and non-Euclidean geometries in the latter half of the nineteenth century called into question the intuitive correspondence between geometric description and the natural world. If mathematicians can produce coherent theorems and proofs treating four-dimensional or curved space, then what does that imply about the spaces they describe? Do these spaces really exist, and if so, does that mean that the flat, Euclidean space we feel ourselves to occupy is a fiction? While this representational crisis can arguably be traced back to René Descartes's invention of analytic geometry, which translates the axioms of Euclidean space into abstract algebraic formulas, it was the exotic new Victorian mathematics that brought these questions to the forefront of popular consciousness. Two recent books trace the development of new mathematical models in the Victorian period: Mark Blacklock's The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension: Higher Spatial Thinking in the Fin de Siècle, and Andrea K. Henderson's Algebraic Art: Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture. Blacklock's book is an erudite and exhaustively researched history that crosshatches back and forth, in alternating chapters, between broader cultural responses to the development of n-dimensional Euclidean geometries and literary treatments of higher space. He lays the groundwork for the larger themes of the study with a deep dive into the philosophical pre-history of spatial thought in Immanuel Kant and in debates among Victorian science writers about the status of Kantian space, to which the development of n-dimensional geometries posed conceptual challenges. The book then turns to a discussion of spiritualism and the impact that n-dimensional geometries had on psychical research (and vice versa). As some spiritualists speculated, supernatural phenomena could be explained as the interventions of beings from higher dimensions into our three-dimensional world. Think of how shocked the two-dimensional narrator of Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland (1884) is when a sphere suddenly seems to appear out of nowhere when it intersects with his planar world by moving downward from the third dimension. Such intersections with four-dimensional beings, some spiritualists believed, [End Page 147] might explain the appearance of ghosts and other seemingly supernatural phenomena in our own world. Their case is bolstered by the work of German astrophysicist-cum-spiritualist Johann Carl Friedrich Zöllner, who undertook a series of knot experiments with the medium Henry Slade that supposedly proved Slade's thesis that intelligent beings from higher dimensions intervene in our 3-D world. Subsequent chapters of Blacklock's book analyze Flatland at length; discuss the work of mathematician, fiction writer, and higher-dimension popularizer Charles Howard Hinton; consider the relationship between n-dimensional geometries and Theosophy; and examine treatments of higher space in late-Victorian and Edwardian fiction. Blacklock's elegant study is at its best when diving into the voluminous and internecine debates between Victorian writers and researchers on seemingly abstruse geometrical questions (my brief chapter summaries do not do justice to the complexity and thoroughness of his discussions), and when drawing out the philosophical implications and broader cultural impact of the new geometrical theories. The final chapter on fiction will be of particular interest to literary scholars: it not only discusses the appearance of higher space as a fictional theme, but also speculates about the impact of n-dimensional thinking on the development of narrative technique and literary form at the fin de siècle. The chapters on spiritualism, Theosophy, and Hinton are fascinating and relatively autonomous studies that expand and complicate previous scholarship in the former two cases, and redress a relative dearth of scholarship in the latter. Surprisingly, the chapter on Abbott...

Review

Review

Lady Audley’s Secret and the Portrayal of a Criminal Mind

Lady Audley’s Secret is a novel first published in 1862 by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a Victorian writer. It is the story of a young lady who, in her attempt to climb the social ladder, commits several crimes. Her behaviour was considered abnormal and improper in a society in which women had to be obedient and docile. The originality of this work is the representation of a woman whose behaviour was not considered as insane rather intentional and calculated but, despite this, she was confined to an asylum. Psychiatry was an emerging medical specialty during the Victorian period and the diagnosis of psychiatric conditions was not sophisticated and precise as today. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that Lady Audley was likely affected by antisocial personality disorder according to the medical assessment criteria of the present time.

Vodenica na Flosi - kritika koncepta obrazovanja u viktorijanskoj Velikoj Britaniji

George Eliot was not only a significant Victorian writer, but primarily an intellectual. She thought that literature had an important role in the reform of society, the moral and educational function. Eliot interwove her views on the direction in which the society should move in her works, so that the analysis of her opus cannot be separated from the social circumstances in Victorian Great Britain. The aim of this work is to imply at the fact that by means of The Mill on the Floss George Eliot indirectly criticized the official concept of education of the Victorian era. The starting point of our research is an overview of the state of society, followed up by George Eliot's attitudes towards the question of education, which can be found in her essays and letters. The Mill on the Floss is a picturesque illustration of George Eliot's beliefs that education should be reformed, as well as of the need of a different approach to this extremely important question. The implication of this novel is that education needs to be appropriate to the requisites and competences of the student, but also that education mustn't be reduced to a commodity, so that we should raise the awareness that education has a much more important and wider role than mere acquisition of a degree and means that will faciliate easier employment.

Laboring in a Place of Rest: Reconsidering Victorian Domestic Work and Its Narratives

Victorian domesticity may have traditionally been acknowledged as a—if not the—definitional value of nineteenth-century British culture, but actual domestic labor has received comparatively little critical attention. What precisely this labor constituted and to what extent it should be invisible according to an ideology that was premised on its cultural significance informed debates at the time, while its depiction in popular culture ranged from class-conscious negotiations of hands-on housework to tragicomical evocations of failed domestic management as a personal crisis. Arguing for the pressing importance of recalibrating the critical investigation of domestic labor, this article explores how Victorian writers continually recrafted the ongoing cultural obsession with the well-maintained home and the question of what might constitute its most apt representation. A critical reassessment of the resulting ambiguities and complexities hence also makes an important contribution to current discussions of emotional labor, caretaking, and the experience of mundane emotions, such as boredom, as an essential part of the everyday of modernity.

Theme of happiness in Ch. Brontè’s novel ‘Jane Eyre’

The purpose of the study is to trace the development of the theme of happiness in relation to the development of the protagonist in the novel “Jane Eyre” by the English Victorian writer Charlotte Brontè. It is discovered that the pursuit of happiness becomes an internal impetus driving the plot of the novel, ensuring the development of the protagonist’s image and promoting such leitmotifs as creativity, love, freedom, naturalness, and fight for one’s life. Particular emphasis is placed on the search for individual components of the internal and external life that comprise the plotline of the protagonist’s pursuit of personal happiness. At the same time, it is noted that the heroine’s ideas of happiness, while essentially remaining unchanged, obtain different undertones at various stages of growing up. It is also noted that the protagonist’s ideas of happiness sharply differ from some other characters’ ideas of happiness (for example, Helen Burns). It is argued that the protagonist in Charlotte Brontè’s novel is led along the arduous journey to happiness by her natural tenacity and the model of the responsible and naturally creative behavior based on the feeling of love which is formed in the protagonist – with the development of her character – already in her childhood. The academic prerequisites for the study are numerous works on the image of the protagonist, the features of psychologism and realism in Charlotte Brontè’s work, on the one hand, and the increased interest in the problem of happiness in academia, on the other hand. The study of the image of childhood and the place that the pursuit of happiness holds in it carried out by the authors in a previous work is also an important prerequisite for this study. The novelty of this work consists in analyzing the content features of the theme of happiness in Charlotte Brontè’s famous novel.

Painful Subjects

Painful Subjects

Germanic Nominations of British Titles and Their Functioning in the 19th Century Fiction Texts

The article concerns identification of semantic potential of lexical units with a Germanic origin joined into thematic group "English titles of nobility", and actualization of their meanings in the literary texts of the 19 th century. The sources of language material were the works of early Victorian period writers. The undertaken semantic and functional analysis of lexemes earl, knight, lord / lady enabled the author to conclude that when they indicate social status of the character depicted in the work of art or are used as an etiquette form of address, they implement direct meaning. It has been noted that alongside with lord / lady, the French loanwords sir / madame are used as forms of polite address in dialogues between the characters. The lexemes-titles can function in figurative meaning, i.e. knight maybe used to indicate valour as one of the main qualities of a noble person of high social status, Lord is used to denote the Creator, lady – to speak about any woman, as well as a wife, a mistress. The analysis of the data obtained resulted in deduction that in literary texts of the 19 th century the meanings of lexemes-titles, comprising thematic group English Nobility Titles, can express the following: the noble origin in the name of a person, a polite form of address in communication, nomination of a social status as well as some commonly shared character traits inherent to an aristocratic class representative; nomination of people in accordance with a family status or gender.

George Henry Lewes: Some Documents

ABSTRACT This article transcribes and places in their context seven documents, all but one being unpublished, relating to George Henry Lewes (1817–1878) the eminent Victorian writer and partner of George Eliot. Six of the documents are hitherto unpublished and five are in Lewes’s hand. Four are letters written by Lewes to different correspondents, and one is a dramatic fragment written by him. The first of the other two documents is a scientific note from Lewes on the subject of the experiments of von Recklingshausen with the blood and republished for the first time since 1879. The second is a note in the hand of John Walter Cross on the back of a calling card written to Lewes and George Eliot: Cross subsequently married Eliot on 6 May 1880.

The Sick Heroine in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The yellow Wallpaper

This study attempts to put Charlotte Perkins Gilman‘s The yellow wallpaper in the context of contemporary theory of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s psycho-feminist scholarship The Madwoman in the Attic: The Women Writers and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (2000). The two critics focus on the image of the imprisoned mad women in the attic like Bertha Mason, the mentally ill wife of Mr. Edward Rochester, in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847). The image of the sick woman forced into domestic confinement of colors, shapes and wallpapers in an entire seclusion continued right into the twentieth century into the literary product of some of the women writers. According to Gilbert and Gubar, some of those women Victorian writers tried to give voice to those women descending into sickness and mental diseases throughout their endeavor to oppress their awareness of the inner creative power which comes as a part of their desire to accept the limited social role they are trapped in.

Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture, by Wendy Parkins

Reviewed by: Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture by Wendy Parkins Fredrik Albritton Jonsson (bio) Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture, by Wendy Parkins; pp. vi + 238. London and New York: Routledge, 2018, £110.00, £36.99 paper, $155.00, $47.95 paper. At first blush, the topic of Victorian sustainability may strike some readers as wildly anachronistic. After all, the term sustainable development entered into widespread circulation with Gro Harlem Brundtland's 1987 UN report "Our Common Future," that warned of long-term challenges to global and intergenerational equity, including deforestation, desertification, fossil fuel exhaustion, climate change, population pressure, and decline in biodiversity. These concerns were plainly products of a specific historical moment. And yet it would be a grave mistake to assume that worries about environmental degradation have surfaced only in recent decades. Historians and literary scholars have for some time now explored the deep roots of sustainability, preservationism, Malthusianism, and environmental utopianism. Wendy Parkins's Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture offers a wide-ranging and stimulating exploration of the problem of environmental degradation and its remedies during the nineteenth century. Major themes include discourses of urban pollution and sprawl; affective and spiritual bonds with animals and with the wider natural world; debates about agricultural chemistry and soil fertility; experiments in post-growth economies and simple living; and the Victorian science of climate change. According to Parkins, the Victorians were the first to contemplate "the widespread environmental despoliation wrought by industrialization" on a national and planetary scale (1). Victorian writers challenged the "instrumentalist view of the natural world" in literature "as well as in the fields of politics, economics, philosophy and agriculture" [End Page 322] (Gillen D'Arcy Wood qtd. in Parkins 2). This critique also had a constructive side, aimed at conceiving social "alternatives beyond the imaginative horizons of industrial capitalism" (33). Victorian forms of sustainability thus ranged beyond the ecological and technological realms into psychology and everyday practice. John Parham opens the anthology with an exciting essay on John Stuart Mill, which rightly stresses the radical character of Mill's famous chapter on the stationary state in Principles of Political Economy (1848). Parham places Mill's call for voluntary limits to growth in the context of his exchanges with French utopian thought, especially Auguste Comte's sociology and Joseph Fourier's communitarianism. He then traces the evolution of Mill's views forward to the 1860s, connecting stationary state economics with his interest in the Common Preservations Society and the Land Tenure Reform Association. Subsequent chapters by John Holmes, Peter Adkins, Emma Mason, Roslyn Jolly, and Mary L. Shannon explore a series of parallel projects in sustainability, springing from the same context as Mill's environmental sensibility. Holmes looks at William Morris's sprawling narrative poem "The Earthly Paradise" (1868–70), while Adkins examines the intellectual roots of Edward Carpenter's socialist experiment in simple living. Mason turns to theology to uncover what she calls the "ecology of grace" in Christina Rossetti's poetry (69). On her reading, Rossetti's The Face of the Deep (1892) articulated a radical promise of multi-species community and spiritual kinship with the nonhuman. Jolly's essay uncovers in early Victorian travelogues an ideal and practice of "slow travel" intended to counter the "speed and artificiality of modern life" (103). Shannon investigates the many meanings of the Thames in Charles Dickens's writings. She shows how the river linked country and city both as a pastoral idyll and as a conduit of pollution and waste. The second half of the volume includes contributions by Lesley Kingsley, Matthew Ingleby, Michael Shaw, Paul Young, and Dennis Denisoff, with an afterword by Gillen D'Arcy Wood. Kingsley explores the many cultural meanings of guano from high farming and popular chemistry to sanitation and social theory. Ingleby tackles incipient concerns with suburban growth through a genealogy of the term sprawl. Shaw's piece carries on the theme of urban planning by looking at Patrick Geddes's social theory from an aesthetic point of view. Young considers W. H. Hudson's The Purple Land That England Lost (1885) as an eco-romance about the environmental consequences of British global meat markets. Young also demonstrates how...

British Hymn Books for Children, 1800-1900: Re-Tuning the History of Childhood, by Alisa Clapp-Itnyre

Reviewed by: British Hymn Books for Children, 1800–1900: Re-Tuning the History of Childhood by Alisa Clapp-Itnyre Naomi Wood (bio) British Hymn Books for Children, 1800–1900: Re-Tuning the History of Childhood, by Alisa Clapp-Itnyre; pp. xviii + 306. London and New York: Routledge, 2016, £120.00, £36.99 paper, $175.00, $48.87 paper. Standard histories of children's literature conventionally have omitted or downplayed overtly religious texts on the grounds that work written to instruct does not meet the definition of literature as a pleasurable leisure occupation. This is the case, or example, in widely circulated and reissued books like F. J. Harvey Darton's Children's Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life (1932), John Rowe Townsend's Written for Children: An Outline of English-Language Children's Literature (1965), and Patricia Demers's From Instruction to Delight: An Anthology of Children's Literature to 1850 (1982). Accounts of children's religious [End Page 336] texts may mention the episode featuring a rotting gibbeted corpse in Mary Sherwood's The History of the Fairchild Family (1818–47), or footnote Lewis Carroll's parody of Isaac Watts in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). But serious consideration of the aesthetic, intellectual, or cultural work of religion in children's texts has been limited, with some exceptions, such as J. S. Bratton's study of Evangelical writing in The Impact of Victorian Children's Fiction (1981). In recent years, however, a growing body of scholars has recognized that children are not simply objects to be shaped by their reading, but may embrace didactic literature as pleasurable and as offering opportunities for agency. Marah Gubar's Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children's Literature (2009) and Victoria Ford Smith's Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children's Literature (2017), to take two recent examples, trace the ways in which golden-age children's literature emerges out of collaborative relationships between adults and children. Mark Knight and Emma Mason in Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature (2006) have demonstrated how religion informs Victorian writers of all stripes and that understanding religious positions, tropes, and debates is therefore critical to our understanding of Victorian literature and culture. It is no longer sufficient to focus on the five or so of the century's most subversive or radical writers for children to trace the contours of childhood's culture and history, or to repeat unthinkingly the canard that modernity has so disenchanted the world that religion and faith are impossible and therefore irrelevant. Alisa Clapp-Itnyre's British Hymn Books for Children, 1800–1900: Re-Tuning the History of Childhood contributes to this ongoing conversation with an extensively researched study of children's hymns and hymnody as a combination of textual, musical, and performative practices with shifting meanings. The book studies the evolution of children's hymnody alongside the complex relationship between musical form and textual content, and between adult guides and child performers. Attentive to the distinctions made by Victorian editors and compilers between classes, confessional allegiances, and genders, Clapp-Itnyre examines not only the text but also hymnbooks' hymn selections, production values, and uses. She recounts as well contemporary responses by adults and children to children's private and public performance. Her primary thesis is that "nineteenth-century hymns created an empowered child singer," thus extending our understanding of children's culture and ideology during the period (10). As both a pleasurable leisure occupation and a religious practice, hymns and hymn-singing bring into focus the broad area between Romantic ideals and Puritan-Evangelical notions of childhood. The book's six chapters treat (1) the class-based differences between different hymn-books, and what their hymn selections reveal about the implied child readers; (2) the role of religious poetry and hymns in the history of children's literature; (3) the overlap between adult and children's hymnbooks; (4) the representation of childhood through performance and in illustrations to children's hymnbooks; (5) hymns associated with children's reforming organizations (Missionary, Bands of Hope, and Bands of Mercy); (6) and the depiction of death and deathbeds in children's hymns. Most chapters show...

Afterword

This essay reminds readers of the nineteenth-century origins of the disciplinary divide between scientific, formal-theoretical knowledge on the one hand and particularizing, creaturely knowledge on the other, arguing that we literary critics have tended to reify this divide even when we have sought to be more “scientific” in our methods. Logic falls on the far side of this divide; because we typically regard it as a consummately scientific and formalized practice, we presume that it is antithetical to our own. The essays in this collection amply demonstrate that this is not the case, and that logic can and has been set in a productive dialogue with both literature and literary criticism. Indeed, during the nineteenth century itself, disciplinary and methodological distinctions, although under construction, had not yet calcified, and so prompted self-conscious explorations of method rather than dictating its norms. Citing the extraordinary methodological flexibility of Victorian scientists and writers Lewis Carroll and James Clerk Maxwell, this essay reminds us that our relation to science and theoretical abstraction need not be a zero-sum game.

“One Wave in a Total Atlantic”: The Crowd and the Mob in De Quincey’s London

ABSTRACTIn his descriptions of industrial-era London and its rapidly growing crowds, Thomas De Quincey employs a common nineteenth-century metaphor: that of the crowd as human ocean, stream, or tide. In this sense, at least, his treatment of the topic is superficially similar to that of other writers of the period, from his mentor, William Wordsworth, to later Victorian writers like Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew, whose closely-detailed accounts of city life De Quincey anticipates in many ways. Past critics examining De Quincey’s interest in crowds have tended to focus on the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, De Quincey’s 1821 autobiography and by far his most famous text. However, a lesser-known piece from 1834, “The Nation of London,” may be shown to be equally if not more important in this regard, particularly as concerns the motif of the oceanic crowd. “The Nation of London” takes a closer look at city life and what De Quincey calls the “maelstrom” of London economic activity, as centripetal forces draw Britons inward from the provinces to the urban center—adding daily to an ever-expanding population and, by implication, to an expanding readership and literary market.

Моделювання жіночої наративної ідентичності в контексті етосу Вікторіанської епохи

The paper is devoted to applying semiotic methodology in modeling a female narrative identity of the Victorian epoch in cultural and historical context. Before modeling a female narrative identity, signs of feminine identity have been defined in the proper narrative. They are considered as the ways of self-identification, self-manifestation, and self-expression. For the analysis of the ethical qualities of the female narrative identity, the research was focused on the identification of semiotic codes of Victorian culture, with placing a moral code in its organizing center. The objective of the paper lies in finding the way how fictional narrative engages with the reader, and how written narrative discourse facilitates or inhibits the formation of narrative identity. The methodological framework for analyzing narrative identity constituted the works on identity theory, constructivist philosophy; the findings in cultural psychology in defining «self» and «identity». Semiotic modeling was applied to unveil some common tendencies in approaches towards the notions of «identity» and «self» in the Victorian novel by considering it an emergent entity, which appears during the interaction of the individual with the narrative on the way to construct the possible world as a probable state of facts. The ethical code of conduct and moral in the novels under consideration is combined with the techniques of the realistic method, which presupposed detailed and deep insights into the psychology of the main female characters, prompted by the systemic accentuation of the prominent psychological traits of women. In such a fashion, Victorian writers (Anne Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, and William Thackeray) developed mastery in psychological writing by widening the spectrum of narrative techniques concerning character’s psychology, different psychological traits of the characters, and their ethos. Therefore, Agnes Grey’s prominent character-forming center lies in her juvenile maximalism and engaging optimism, on the contrary to her mother, who is moved by a dominating desire of self-sacrifice for the sake of the well-being of the family and love to her husband. Rebecca Sharp in her turn has a central characteristic expressed by charming bright green eyes, which signify her readiness and determination for success to be wealthy. It has been stated, that Anne Bronte’s realistic modeling of the female destiny is based on the nuanced perception of the materiality of the reader, who in phenomenological way focuses on one aspect of the object and re-constructs the remaining aspects by his consciousness. This observation is consonant with the radical philosophy of enactivism and global semiotics in their attempt to correlate noetic and noematic levels of perception. Perspectives of further research are connected with research of this enactive process of world creation in the process of interaction with the narrative in the light of phenomenology and global semiotics.