Jan-Melissa Schramm

‘[A] common and not a divided interest’: Literature and the Labour of Representation

Memories of the French Revolution cast a long shadow over British efforts to imagine a newly inclusive constitution in the course of the nineteenth century. Writers including William Godwin, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell perfected a distinctive sub-genre of the novel, which was profoundly attentive to the ethics of representation. The literary ‘labour’ of reform in the nineteenth century was imaginative, conceptual, and discursive, but it was not understood solely in metaphorical terms as a work without physical cost: instead, its impact was registered in the language of bodily exertion, privation, and daily acts of self-sacrifice. Novelists pondered the impact of their narrative experiments on the mood of the nation, whilst acutely aware of the ways in which their expanding readership could be mapped onto the ideal contours of the political franchise.

Towards a Poetics of (Wrongful) Accusation: Innocence and Working-Class Voice in Mid-Victorian Fiction

Many mid-Victorian novels are sprinkled liberally with trial scenes. That the genre is impressed deeply with the rhetoric of accusation, defence and judgement is now something of a critical commonplace, but consensus is rarely reached as to the epistemological value of such episodes. Over the course of the last thirty years, interdisciplinary scholars have debated the significance of the court hearings represented in the fiction of (amongst others) Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell and Anthony Trollope. Critical responses to Dickens’s work offer us an example of the disagreements which can arise in any attempt to interpret an author’s recourse to legal adjudication to resolve or perhaps complicate narrative development. In Dickens and the 1830s, Kathryn Chittick describes the resolution of Bardell v. Pickwick in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836) as effected by a retreat to the ‘pseudo- parliamentary linguistic formula that Dickens is prone to co-opt when invention dwindles’:1 for Sally Ledger, writing in Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination, Dickens’s trial scenes are often merely ‘set-pieces’, revealing his indebtedness to his melodramatic inheritance:2 for Hilary Schor, they are ‘show-trials’ with a certain structural predictability.3 And there is substance to these assessment