'Whom do you take me for?': Imposture and narrative self-fashioning in the Victorian novel (William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens)

This project explores the opportunities that emergent economic practices and travel technologies offered Victorians for self-fashioning and the pressures they brought to bear upon the use value of personal narratives. These social and economic transitions gave rise to narrative proliferation and innovation and thus offer an uncommon vantage from which to investigate the problem of narrative identity that lies at the heart of the nineteenth-century. By restoring the novels in question to the historical contexts of the railway, gambling and investment manias that informed them, I discerned common practices in the ways all literary impostors actively solicit, play with and trade upon investments not of money but of confidence. Analyzing the factors that determine a confidence gamer's success reveals their educational function as role models for self-determination and case studies for cultivating wariness and self-protective capacities for interpreting others' personal narratives. The central premise of the study is the belief that impostors within Nineteenth-century literature served as mechanisms to manage social anxieties about the inability to verify identity claims: in a society that was growing physically and fiscally mobile at an unprecedented rate, the manipulation of personal narrative offered a radical and democratizing means of exercising agency.; Initially considered transgressive, self-fashioning was co-opted in the second half of the century as a requisite for social and business success until its proliferation made identity verification so unmanageable that it had to be shut down and internalized by century's end. I assert that the impostor paves the way for the social acceptance of aggressively managed self-representation that had developed by the 1890s and presages the psychic fragmentation traditionally considered a hallmark of modernism. Focusing on the agency afforded two famous literary impostors, Thackeray's Barry Lyndon and Dickens's John Harmon in Our Mutual Friend, permits an exploration of market forces brought to bear upon novels about confidence gamers; the role of the railway in expanding the practice of self-reinvention; uncomfortable similarities between gambling and investments in class and identity; the commodification of relationships and narratives; the growing need for identity verification; and the relationship between the self-help movement and the self-made man.