Pressing subjects: Social economy and British literary form, 1831--1867 (John Cassell, Frederick Denison Maurice, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins)

Pressing Subjects situates the mutual development of literature and literary education in the context of nineteenth-century debates about philanthropic influence. The dissertation aims to revise current understandings of these developments as forms of social control. At a time when educators were increasingly subject to charges that their endeavors standardized private life, the writers I examine defended literature as a political mechanism for rendering differences intelligible rather than negligible. I argue that prominent Victorian publishers, educators, and authors defended literature neither as an ideological tool for diverting the working classes from political activity nor as a means to render a population more amenable to liberal government. They introduced new forms of literary education—the anthology and the seminar—and formal innovations in the long poem and the novel because they understood literary texts to motivate people in unforeseeable ways and they believed in the benefits of such incalculable effects.; In addition to examining institutional settings like the publishing industry and the classroom, I focus on formal innovations in literary texts by which authors sought to remodel literature's relationship to private life. I argue that publishers such as John Cassell valued the literary anthology not as a tool for inculcating endless self-work, but rather because its variety of extracts appealed to the diverse tastes of a mass readership. And while historians have generally seen F. D. Maurice as inculcating “disinterestedness” in the working classes, I show that Maurice turned to the seminar as a way to solicit the diverse—even partisan—“interests” of adults. I read Tennyson's Princess—generally taken as a conversion narrative whose message is conformity—as a critique of conversion. The interplay between ambiguous lyrics and verse-narrative reveals Tennyson's protest against the kind of standardization of private life epitomized by the conversion narrative. Similarly, Dickens and Collins broke with secular conversion narratives in order to defend the novel as an alternative to utilitarian self-help literature and evangelical tracts because it imagined political efficacy in terms of engaging rather than effacing differences between readers.