Literary Censorship and the Victorian Novel

Abstract

In 1891, Thomas Hardy wrote a letter to Henry Massingham in which he expressed a desire to demolish what he referred to as ‘the doll of English fiction’. Hardy’s use of the metaphor ‘doll’ echoes George Moore’s polemical pamphlet Literature at Nurse or Circulating Morals (1885). Here, Moore launched an attack on what he saw as the paternalistic control of literature by Mudie’s Select Library. He used the metaphor of a ‘doll’ to parody Mudie’s methods of marketing and display, in which novels appeared as upholders of moral virtue like dolls ‘packed in tin-cornered boxes and scattered through every drawing-room in the kingdom’. Although much scholarship emphasises the repressive effects of these subscription libraries, this thesis will focus on the ways they inadvertently facilitated innovation and reform within the literary community. I argue that the nineteenth-century novel was not more morally conservative because of censorship but developed as a socially subversive art form in response to it. The thesis also rethinks the anti-censorship polemics of Moore in the light of Ouida’s more nuanced attacks on the economic structures behind censorship. Through exploring the work of Geraldine Jewsbury, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, George Moore and Ouida, the thesis examines the extent to which the censorship of the libraries galvanised collaboration within the literary community, contributed to the professionalisation of women writers, and produced an aesthetic approach which challenged the conventional treatment of issues of sexuality, class, patriotism, and the concept of realism itself.