"Each age has its own characteristic depravity": The depiction of evil in early Victorian Gothic.

Abstract

This thesis will explore a range of inter-connected propositions that defined early Victorian attitudes towards the characterisation of evil, the definition of morality, and the cultural values inherent in “Britishness”. I will discuss why, during the formative years in the reign of Queen Victoria, established customs and socially accepted practices, such as opium-eating, transatlantic slavery, and child labour, became associated for the first time with a demonstrably Gothic language that depicted them as inherently evil. In my investigations, I will grapple with a fundamental premise, that postcolonial scholars such as Edward Said have identified as central to the development of Occidental character in the nineteenth century, and, hence, the emerging values attributed to Britishness during the determinative stages of Empire — that the perceived dominance of the West was defined by an essentialist approach to “Oriental” stereotypes, who were condemned as depraved, infantile, and ‘a kind of cultural and international proletariat’. I will argue that this “Orientalist” perspective that aligns a Westernised ideology of moral supremacy with the condemnation of the moral inertia of the East is too simplistic when it is applied to the early Victorian age, during which the perceived convergence of “foreign otherness” and “domestic monstrosity” was an essential element in the development of the rhetoric associated with British national character. Between the 1830s and 1850s, there was a mirroring in Gothic literature and Gothicised political discourse of the innate “savagery” that was viewed as characterising, inter alia, the indigenous peoples of India, China, and Africa, with the abject “barbarism” attributed to the British working poor: the wandering tribes of predators, criminals, opium addicts, factory “slaves”, and “fallen women”, who were feared to be festering in the urban swamps of the new industrial conurbations and threatening the sanctity of bourgeois domestic life. I will illustrate that this reciprocal demonisation of the colonial and the urban “other” has been largely disregarded in a modern critical scholarship on early Victorian literature, which has tended to overlook the significance of highly influential and widely-read Gothic novelists of this period who articulated the trope of convergence, including the writings of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Philip Meadows Taylor, Frances Trollope, and George W. M. Reynolds.