The naturalist imagination: Novel forms of British natural history, 1830--1890

"The Naturalist Imagination" argues that a wide range of Victorian novelists drew on the language and logic of natural history to represent the working-class communities, rural spaces, and colonial territories of Britain in their novels. In so doing, this project seeks to recover the interconnections between natural history and novel writing that have been overlooked by subsequent scholarship, but which were nevertheless recognized by Victorian writers as sources of fruitful literary experimentation. After examining debates that erupted over the question of aesthetics in naturalist periodicals published in Britain during the 1830s, I study the relationship between natural history and the aesthetic advanced by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Richard Jefferies---each of whom studied natural history, composed their own naturalist writings, or read extensively about naturalist practices. Natural history's unique combination of empirical observation and aesthetic representation, I argue, provided a set of strategies British novelists could use to enhance both the romance and realism of their fiction.;By studying novelists who practiced natural history as amateurs or were interested in amateur practice, I aim to complicate standard critical narratives that have focused exclusively on Darwin and the influence of professional naturalist discourses on literature of the Victorian period. Gaskell, Bronte, Eliot, and Jefferies each experimented with the representational possibilities they found in natural history and contributed to the production of a "naturalist aesthetic" in their novels. This aesthetic, I argue, usually begins with intricate descriptions of natural objects and extends to human life, yielding innovative narrative modes that resonated with period readers. Building on the notion that the Victorian novel functioned as a "Natural History of British life," as one critic claimed in 1859, my dissertation examines the works of these novelists as products of diverse naturalist imaginations struggling to describe seemingly alien or obscure communities for a broad, middle-class readership. While Bronte and Jefferies experimented freely with the adaptation of natural history to the representation of human life, I argue, Gaskell and Eliot produced works that illustrate the limitations of natural history's applicability to human subjects.