Historical Area Syllabus: Victorian Storage
Victorian Storage: How to Keep Things and/in Victorian Literature
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Lockets with hair. Canned goods. Lending libraries. Chemical embalming. Verse Memorization. The photograph.The Victorian era was a period fascinated by and committed to acts of preservation. Publications on geological time and evolutionary science like Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology and Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species made acutely palpable the threats of mortality and ephemerality. The rise of material culture, the expansion of the British Empire, and the importation of goods from around the globe meant that Victorians—well, wealthy Victorians—had more and more stuff to store. In this course, we will consider Victorian literature as intertwined with the nineteenth century’s many efforts at preservation.
We will begin by considering perhaps the most famous of Victorian storage spaces—the attic—in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. We will consider storage’s role in concealment and the implications of keeping things like mental illness and the sins of empire “tucked away.” Themes of Victorian education in Jane Eyre will provide a transition to our course’s next section on “brain storage,” memorization, and the Victorian schoolroom. We move then to Victorian antiquarianism and attempts at storing “dying” cultures, most specifically the oral culture and dialect of England’s Lancashire. Dialect poets’ attempted to capture the sounds and songs “of the people.” We will look at this attempt to store sound in our next unit as well, through our study of the phonograph and other nineteenth-century technologies designed to store sound and image. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, chock full of information storage technologies, will transition us into our course’s final unit on post-mortem embalming and corpses.
This course examines novels and poems—themselves storage technologies of a kind—as both examples and insights into what Jonathan Sterne calls the era’s “ethos of preservation.” I hope, however, that this capacious theme will allow us to explore many aspects of Victorian history and culture: imperialism, Victorian education, Chartism and the working classes, gender roles and expectations, religion and doubt, Victorian medievalism, and more. Our readings, assignments, essays, and discussions aim to scavenge the stores of Victorian history and culture and perhaps discover what we find still preserved in our lives and experiences.
REQUIRED COURSE TEXTS:
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. (Penguin Classics)Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown’s Schooldays. (Oxford World’s Classics)
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. (Penguin Classics)
Electronic copies of all other readings will be linked or distributed through our course website. You will be expected to print off and mark up all electronic copies or, if you really do prefer to read electronically, use a note-taking application.