Fear of plot: Conspiracy and the British novel

This dissertation traces the rise and fall of conspiracy as a mode of explanation in Britain, and it documents the strong, reciprocal influences between conspiracy discourse and the nineteenth-century British novel.;Chapter 1 explores the intertwining legal and extra-legal histories of conspiracy. From its medieval origins as an obscure crime involving false accusation, conspiracy evolved into a powerful (though increasingly ill-defined) category, eventually serving as an important means for understanding injury, disaster and disruptive change.;The remainder of the dissertation investigates the relationship between conspiracy discourse and British novels, first from a theoretical perspective (Chapter 2), then in the fiction of Charles Dickens (Chapter 3) and George Eliot (Chapter 4). By 1800, novelists frequently deployed conspiracy as a norm for structuring relationships and for explaining change, though few of them exploited that norm as tirelessly as Charles Dickens. Dickens wrote at a time when conspiracy was still a potent legal category, but when extra-legal conspiracy belief was being scrutinized and debated more widely than ever before, and his novels (including Barnaby Rudge and Great Expectations) were an important forum for this debate.;Chapter 4 focuses on the slow demise of conspiracy belief during the nineteenth century, when the emerging social sciences supplanted the notion of historical conspiracy with abstractions such as ideology and class. George Eliot was keenly attuned to---and she intervened actively in---the public repudiation of conspiracy discourse in Britain. If Dickens found it almost impossible to depict change without recourse to the troubling but infinitely supple model of conspiracy, Eliot attempted to imagine alternatives, partly by virtue of her familiarity with the social sciences. More than any Victorian novelist, she tried to put conspiracy theories to rest in her novels (and particularly in Middlemarch) by containing them as forms of wrong belief, and by abjuring them in her plots. As a result of denying herself the narrative prop of malicious combination, Eliot fashioned a distinctive---yet unstable---model for the post-conspiratorial novel.