Anonymous Connections: The Body and Narratives of the Social in Victorian Britain

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Introduction Proliferating modes of social interaction, a seemingly ever-expanding range of others, both known and anonymous, to whom we might imagine ourselves connected—these phenomena have come to serve as defining features of our current moment. Our understanding of social participation, no longer limited to neighborhoods and workplaces, the circumference of suburb or city, has been transformed by reminders of the much broader reach of our interactions across space and time, whether enabled by the speed of long-distance travel, the ubiquity of virtual networks, the pervasiveness of economic globalization, or the transmission of diseases such as Ebola and influenza across and between continents. So, too, have these instances raised questions about the meaning and ethics of social belonging, about the unlikely intimacies produced even in conditions of anonymity, and about the responsibilities we bear toward distant and often nameless others. How do we—or should we—imagine ourselves in relation to the many individuals with whom we share countless possibilities for connection? Far from being new or particular to the present moment, however, these concerns—about the connective potential between persons and their implications for social understanding—were ones that writers, reformers, and readers negotiated throughout the nineteenth century, and the manifold means by which they did so constitutes the subject of this book. Critical examinations of social participation in Victorian literature have understandably tended to focus on the emotional landscape of social relations, the complex terrain of sympathetic feeling and intersubjective understanding at the center of novels like Jane Eyre and Middlemarch. Looking instead to forms of social participation that, like many of these twenty-first-century examples, were understood to be mediated by the body, my book asks: What happens when we foreground corporeal rather than affective social relations? Page 2 → Nineteenth-century Britons confronted their own seemingly cataclysmic changes, around which emerged multiple occasions for rethinking the nature of social relationships, especially those that defied the traditional boundaries of personal acquaintance, geographical distance, and social class. James Vernon contends that “the modern condition,” into which Britain entered between 1830 and 1880, was shaped by its citizens’ awareness of this “new society of strangers” (7), and others have traced the impact of expanding railway travel, the growth of trade, industry, and empire, as well as of emerging epidemiological methods on this cultural landscape.1 These were technologies that symbolized Victorian Britain’s achievements, both scientific and commercial, but they were also technologies of the social: they promoted and gave articulable shape to new forms of social interaction. Fiction and other forms of narrative brought the middle-class reader into emotional proximity with geographically and socially distant others, to be sure, but they also investigated the modes of physical interaction that might transform that “society of strangers” into one’s physiological intimates. Collectively, these writings—literary, medical, and journalistic—reimagined the boundaries of the body, describing its transmissibility, permeability, circulability, and divisibility; they multiplied the body’s potential effects, the modes of direct and indirect, voluntary and involuntary connection with others. Sanitary reformers loaded the filth of the slums and the stench of death with physiological significance for observers’ bodies, while journalists gleefully imagined the beggar’s rags transformed into the reader’s bread and beer. The neighbor’s excrement, the exhalations of the sick, the microbial agent: these were the means by which seemingly unrelated bodies made intimate, if unwitting and unwilling, contact with one another. Through such accounts, Victorians found themselves exploring the slippery divisions between self and other, and the delimitations separating individual from social seemed ever more elastic. Thus the condition that Anthony Giddens has assigned to late modernity, the “disembeddingВ .В .В . of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space” (21), also describes the way that many Victorian writers represented their own experience of social relations—indeed, we might say that this is what Victorian novels, in large part, are about. This book investigates how the period’s preoccupation with forms of bodily connection transformed the

social understandings represented in its fiction and journalism, as well as how this evolving sensibility at times reshaped narrative, by making new demands on traditional forms. For the space of the social posed questions that were at once ethical, epistemological, Page 3 →and representational. In a world transformed by urbanization and transportation, many Britons found themselves part of something less coherent than a community but more binding than a population, even as the emerging technologies of the age, from statistics to urban fiction, provided the tools for describing more complex relationships between one body and another. Throughout the century literary works, political journalism, and medical writing negotiated the shifting landscape of belonging, responsibility, and corporeal and emotional contact that lay between the two. By examining works of fiction by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Kingsley, Charles Dickens, and H. G. Wells, among others, as well as social reform and medical essays, this book reveals the layered processes by which such works represented social relations for their readers. What emerges from them is no fixed definition of sociality. By contrast, as these works explored forms of mediated and unmediated connection and their implications, they generated varied and sometimes competing accounts of the space of the social: realms of shared possibility or responsibility, systems of circulation or of concatenated connection. The novel, critics tell us, is the site where sociality has been most often and interestingly explored. As Dorothy Hale asserts, “the novel is the most social of literary forms,” a discursive space that not only represents relationships among its characters but also cultivates the sympathetic bonds between reader and narrative (4). Emerging from an Enlightenment tradition of inquiry into self, society, and subjectivity, the nineteenth-century novel in particular was a genre that foregrounded the exploration of relationships between persons, especially the possibility of intersubjective and affective relations. Critics have compellingly demonstrated the multiple ways in which fiction not only represented but also exercised the sympathetic faculties. Victorian fiction posited an expanded conception of self, a willing suspension of subjectivity’s boundaries that both questioned and reaffirmed identity. Entering into the emotional lives of others via the imagination became the route by which both characters and readers cultivated sympathy for others and reconsolidated their own middle-class subjectivities.2 In addition to these voluntarily entered emotional intimacies, Victorian novels, particularly those set in the city, invited readers to contemplate another kind of intersubjective relation, that of involuntary bodily proximity. The relationship to the masses would seem antithetical to the connections fostered in the safety of the novel’s domestic spaces; where the latter described feeling’s transmission from one individual to another, a different model of social relations was needed to represent the press of the crowd, the spread of degradation and disease, the anonymity of urban experience. Page 4 →Yet an established critical tradition investigating the sociality particular to urban literature, from scholars like Raymond Williams and Alexander Welsh to, more recently, John Plotz and Gage McWeeny, has shown that the city’s crowds, nameless, threatening, and unruly, could also serve as a positive force in the service of subject-formation. In Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s classic study, for example, urban excess allowed for the liberating possibility of transgression in an otherwise stratified symbolic order, while for McWeeny, the city’s anonymity provided, paradoxically, a receptive haven for the lyric self (“Crowd Management”). The urban social sphere has received the most sustained attention from scholars of Victorian social reform, a movement in which philanthropists, doctors, and members of Parliament asked how the problems of the city—the jostling bodies, the stink of its streets, the ubiquity of poverty—could best be understood and solved. The official response, as numerous critics and historians have shown, was to treat the social body as something to be managed and controlled. During the 1830s and ’40s in particular, a centralizing government passed legislation designed to regulate the lives of the poor (the New Poor Law, the Factory Acts, the Public Health Act) and established institutions where uniform and efficient management could take place (the workhouse, the hospital).3 As a strategic and necessary construct, the “social body” was a population aggregated by governmental or moral rhetoric, and often understood in terms of a shared working-class identity—and these discursive strategies and institutions, the application of these normalizing and homogenizing practices to Britain’s populace, have been the subject of numerous scholarly investigations in recent years.4 Notably, Mary Poovey’s Making a Social Body analyzes the discursive processes by which populations were transformed into “a giant body” to be diagnosed and cured (37); her work reveals the shifting definitions of

the social body as they were strategically revised to suit a variety of political and moral agendas. My study also owes a particular debt to the work of Pamela Gilbert and Erin O’Connor, whose attention to the materiality of the body in the nineteenth century lays the foundation for the investigations into the boundaries of and interstices between bodies that populate these pages as well.5 Their research shows how the convergences between medical and governmental constructions of the body, as well as the sociopolitical and professional motives behind the period’s sanitary and medical rhetoric, contributed to developing ideologies of nation, class, and race. What these critics uncover are the numerous ways in which the middle-class body took shape through the period’s discourse, and, by extension, how the institutional rhetoric wielded by government officials,Page 5 → clergymen, reformers, and medical professionals informed the public perceptions and policies that would be applied to a collective working-class population. But if these latter works ask what such representations of disease and deformity tell us about the period’s normalizing, individualizing discourses—how accounts of the cholera victim’s incontinence or the amputee’s prosthetics reified conceptions of bodily containment and coherence—my work asks what they reveal about understandings of a productive or disruptive sociality. In turning to the messy boundaries of the permeable, leaky, dispersive body, the analyses in Anonymous Connections redirect attention to the social as a space of interaction between and among individuals, to the uneasy, unforeseen, and often unwanted intimacies among individual bodies, rather than to the institutional rhetoric that was designed to contain individuals and control collective wholes. Underlying the Foucaultian “disciplinary mechanisms” that have been the focus of these other studies is, as Michel Foucault himself reminds us, “the haunting memory of вЂcontagions,’ of the plague,” where miscibility and contact were the dominant features of social participation (Discipline and Punish, 198). To this end I avoid the otherwise convenient term “social body,” which has come to denote a social aggregate in recent criticism, and focus instead on a sociality characterized by the potential for interpersonal interaction, for relationships extending beyond the self. With reference to this latter conception of the social, I ask what narratives, causalities, and subjectivities emerge from the charged spaces of interstitial possibility between one person and another. How might focusing on a sociality of the body inform our understanding of that “most social of literary forms”? These questions lead in turn to a somewhat different archive than scholars of sympathetic feeling have considered: to medical rather than moral essays, to city streets instead of the safety of the home, to Dickens more often than to George Eliot. But if, as Hale suggests, the “primary ideological work” of the novel is “the promotion of sympathy” (9), then an analysis of these corporeal concerns also invites us to return to and reconsider the novel’s account of social feeling by examining its role in a sphere of embodied relationships. How, for the Victorians, did an awareness of the body’s involuntary connections or of the quantity of generated waste reshape an understanding of social ethics, emotion, and responsibility? With its interest in the body, my work renews attention to the kinds of medical and sanitary materials that others have also examined at some length, such as Edwin Chadwick’s 1842 Sanitary Report, John Snow’s On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, and Hector Gavin’s contributions as a member Page 6 →of the Metropolitan Sanitary Commission, all texts that have assumed something of a canonical status in studies of Victorian public health and social reform. To be sure, with their encompassing claims and their use of normalizing technologies such as maps and population statistics, these works lend themselves to the kinds of analyses Poovey and Gilbert have so ably performed upon them. But because my focus is on the represented spaces of physiological intimacy and potential (on precisely those aspects of the body that normalizing discourses sought to contain or erase), I pose a different set of questions and elicit an alternate set of readings from these works: about the productive spaces between bodies, about imagined forms of involuntary, anonymous interaction, about the means and modes of contact. As a result, the chapters that follow also encompass a range of materials and voices that, having been excluded from the period’s major sanitary and governmental projects, have not been examined together elsewhere. Popular stories about bacteria, for example, or theories of contagion that questioned the science behind sanitary reform might reveal little about the public health measures the Victorians succeeded in implementing, but they provide insight into the ways in which popular audiences and dissenting medical professionals at times understood the body’s role in the social sphere. A tradition of literary criticism focused on the nineteenth-century medical and natural sciences, led by Gillian

Beer, George Levine, and Lawrence Rothfield, has delineated the continuities among disciplines, genres, and texts that are the foundation for my own cross-disciplinary methodologies and readings. But Anonymous Connections also frames its investigation as a form of historical epistemology, a mode of inquiry that, according to Lorraine Daston, produces a “history ofВ .В .В . competing forms of facticity—statistical, experimental, and other” (“Historical Epistemology,” 283), or as Poovey puts it, an examination of “what, at any given moment, constitutes вЂthe true’” (Making a Social Body, 3).6 Through its excavation of shifting understandings of the body, it uncovers the forms of knowledge by which the self and intersubjective space were understood within and across various contexts, genres, and historical moments. In some cases, my analysis joins works that have a clear thematic relationship: Kingsley’s Two Years Ago and contemporaneous sanitary and epidemiological writing, for example. But in other cases it pairs texts with no obvious causal or historical relationship, and reads them as participants in a common discursive conversation about the shape and meaning of social participation. This approach allows us to consider not just how the body’s treatment operates at a thematic level, but also how the representational demands of a corporeal sociality put productivePage 7 → pressure on the conventions of narrative. These chapters demonstrate that as much as literature made use of contemporaneous medical theories, scientific writing also borrowed from and expanded upon existing narrative strategies; they serve as an invitation to rethink the relationship between the medical and the literary, to consider these fields as narratologically innovative in often kindred ways. Although this conception of sociality rests on much more than just the representation of disease, epidemiological concerns necessarily play a prominent role in the period’s writings and, by extension, in my study. Anxieties about diseases such as cholera, plague, and typhus provided nineteenth-century Britons with particularly vivid occasions for imagining forms of often unconscious and unintended social connection; moreover, questions about their transmission persisted throughout the century, as the medical community, lacking coherent explanatory schemata until the 1880s and ’90s, engineered multiple theories of intercorporeal causation. Some argued that disease was caused by environmental miasmas, the noxious, uncontainable vapors found near cemeteries and sewers, while others asserted that disease spread through contagious contact, and still others identified specific agents of transmission, such as food or germs. The chapters that follow consider these medical theories themselves—how medical and public health officials and social reformers participated in the formation of sanitary knowledge, how they understood the body and the transmission of disease, and how they conveyed this expertise to popular audiences—as objects of historical and critical interest in their own right. But as these chapters also reveal, these medical accounts of a body at once susceptible and transmissible also made a new set of social connections legible and available for representation. Epidemics, in other words, did not transform social space, but rather writers’ and readers’ understanding of it; disease revealed the ways in which the social enjoined participation, however involuntary. Indeed, embedded within these narratives of shared breaths, leaking cesspools, contaminated mattresses, and bacterial agents were a set of deeply social questions and concerns—about the limits of the body, about the relationship between one body and another, about the lingering traces and possible effects of corporeal contact. These issues lie at the center of this book. Concerns about the transmission of disease were not specific to the Victorian period, of course. A longer tradition of plague literature, which includes, notably, Daniel Defoe’s 1722 A Journal of the Plague Year and Mary Shelley’s 1826 The Last Man, expressed a similar set of anxieties about epidemics. But these works implied that disengagement from social interaction Page 8 →was a viable solution, or as Defoe’s narrator, H. F., declared, “the best Physick against the Plague is to run away from it” (156). With their insistent focus on the individual, they posit that the threat represented by other people’s bodies could be cordoned off by quarantining the self.7 In Victorian popular and medical representations, by contrast, debates about disease maintained a nearly unrelenting emphasis on the social, and writers like Kingsley and Dickens drew on this conception of epidemia when envisioning the social relations that would populate their fictions. This book examines these literary accounts of disease—where the spread of cholera in Kingsley’s Two Years Ago and Esther Summerson’s fever in Dickens’s Bleak House, for example, reframe the relationships understood to exist among characters. But it also considers medical discourse’s conceptual contributions to narrative, even in the absence of its literal referent. For what Foucault called the “memoryВ .В .В . of the plague,” I suggest, informs representations of sociality, of the causal and connective structures binding people together, even

in works not explicitly about disease. In sensation fiction, for instance, or in Eliot’s Middlemarch, the transmission of causes and effects that move between bodies in an unwilled and unpredictable fashion adheres to this emerging logic of the social. What these narratives delineate, I argue, is an array of modes of physiological identification, relationship, and intimacy. Moreover, this conception of the social sphere functioned not just as a threat but also, more surprisingly, as an ideal. Indeed, the period’s accounts often remobilized visions of disease’s transmission, transforming them into new narratives of social cohesion and belonging, as a supplement to or substitute for more conventional forms of familiarity and proximity. Thomas Carlyle’s parable in Past and Present of the Irish widow, whose claims to sisterhood have failed to gain sympathy from her family, and who enforces a new “sisterhood” by spreading typhus to her neighbors, performs one version of this maneuver: here, moral connection and a revenge plot displace more traditional relationships built around familial or communal feeling. But for others, the social awareness to which disease gave rise could be positive, even redemptive. For Kingsley, disease’s concatenated relationships could generate new narratives of extended responsibility and moral duty, while for journalist Henry Mayhew, who documented London’s excremental economies, the city’s circulating waste could be transformed from a polluting to a productive connective force. Contact with others and their effects, then, functions in these examples not so much to reconsolidate the individual self, but rather to affirm the potential value—both moral and financial—of anonymous social connection. Page 9 → In these accounts, such moments of bodily contact and intersection do not function primarily as examples of the transgressive play that Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, had traced to preceding centuries, but neither do these readings fit comfortably within Foucault’s historical trajectory, which situates scenes of “bodies mingling together” through plague in opposition to the normalizing processes of subject-formation (Discipline and Punish, 197, 198). Rather, I argue, these medical and literary writers revived “memories” of the plague, whether in the form of principles of decay exhaled by one person and inhaled by another, excremental traces traveling through the city’s air, or limbs circulating in the marketplace, and redirected them to shape an alternate conception of the self as a social entity. Understood in this way, the sociality made visible by the body’s miscibility had its own place in the period’s project of individuation. Recent work by Gilbert, Lauren Goodlad, and Elaine Hadley, in drawing attention to the role of civic and social participation in mid-Victorian liberalism, has already complicated traditional understandings of the liberal subject. As Hadley and Gilbert have shown, the body’s strategic materialization, its emergence into discourses of cognition and self-containment, served the premises of an abstract, disembodied liberal identity. Like the “individualizing practices” through which the liberal subject regularly affirmed its own limits (Hadley, 64), the social sphere’s physiological entanglements, in the form of disease and risk, provided an alternate discursive arena for exploring the problematic of the liberal subject—the boundaries of the self, the demands of the social upon the individual—while often enabling the reaffirmation of a familiar set of social values: sympathy, duty, foresight. Finally, in asking how these accounts gave rise to new understandings of social relations, I consider how these different, often unintended intimacies—with strangers, with the remnants, by-products, and aftereffects of the individual—also had consequences for the shape of narrative. As writers both literary and medical recognized, traditional forms of linear narrative were often inadequate to the representational demands of these new social visions. They, in turn, reimagined what narrative could and should do, extending its focus beyond single protagonists to emphasize the relationships among individuals. To be sure, the bildungsroman, which centered on the development of the individual, remained an influential genre throughout the century, as works like Jane Eyre and Jude the Obscure demonstrate, but novels that represented the social sphere, such as Middlemarch, Vanity Fair, and much of Dickens’s oeuvre, also emerged as one of the period’s most popular and prominent forms. In studying elements of nineteenth-centuryPage 10 → narrative, its sprawling and intersecting plots, its ways of insisting upon closure, this book considers these varied representational strategies as formal reflections of changing understandings of the liberal individual and of social participation.

The chapters that follow investigate these shifting, labile conceptions of the body’s social potential in literary, medical, and journalistic works from the 1830s to the 1890s. The chronology of the major works discussed in each chapter corresponds, in a very rough way, to the sequence of chapters, but together they do not constitute a linear or continuous history. Their goal is not to provide a comprehensive or coherent account of Victorian social understanding, but rather a sense of the multiple strategies by which both fiction and medical writing represented forms of unexpected physiological participation during this period. Tracing the emerging language of statistical risk as it was applied to populations, chapter 1 argues that the new statistical sciences of the 1830s and ’40s framed the social as a sphere of involuntary inclusion. By employing numerical percentages and hypothetical populations of a hundred or a thousand, these works conceived of Britain as a space of bodily participation in shared risks for accident, disease, and death. The inclusiveness and anonymity of statistical risk as invoked in sanitary and social reform writing redefined the experience of social belonging in the period’s fiction as well. Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton engages with this new conception of the social, while also registering its discomfort with a world of involuntary relations and accidents; moral choice and moral action function as literary antagonists to the period’s emerging probabilistic perspective. A new genre of urban writing that emerged concomitantly in the 1830s and ’40s, in which self-styled urban explorers detailed the means by which both observers and inhabitants were brought into unwanted physiological contact with any number of anonymous others, is the focus of chapter 2. With their insistent attention to contaminated air, overflowing cesspools, and the constant stench of urban waste, they reimagined the city as a space of involuntary bodily intimacy, where the fact of the body’s permeability and transmissibility rendered such connections inevitable. In accounts by Poor Law reformer Chadwick, physician Thomas Southwood Smith, and others, this filth becomes uncontainable and all-encompassing. Moreover, by figuring the self as viscerally responsive to the incursions of other bodies, these sanitary accounts anticipated the physiologies of later sensation fictions, where such corporeal effects traveled among characters, threatening to traverse even the written page and enter the reader’s body. Page 11 → Chapter 3 examines accounts of contagion, and specifically the reports of cholera’s transmission that were debated within the medical and lay community. In describing a model of sociality in which persons were joined through distant bodily causes and effects over space and time, these medical accounts also promoted new forms of narrative adapted to representing these more complex social relations. As this chapter suggests, multiplot emerged as a formal strategy by which both medical and lay authors of the 1830s and ’40s represented the often overlooked connections between bodies—the seemingly inconsequential jostle in the street, the touching of unwashed laundry, the sharing of leftovers from a meal. By tracing the consequences of disease as they radiated from the body in multiple, unforeseen directions, they, like the era’s multiplot novels, generated accounts of converging narratives in which otherwise separate persons and plots might suddenly be joined in unanticipated ways. Chapter 4 demonstrates that the dangerous bodily effects thought to link individuals through disease also supplied a model for productive connection, in which engineered structures, whether in the form of sewers, novels, or social theories, could contain and recirculate the excesses of the body within a network as extensive as the city itself. Thus, for example, a sewerage system that proposed to connect urban waste back to an economics of production and consumption transformed the threatening logic of the city—the contamination of food and water with excrement, once the ultimate sign of urban degradation—into the anti-Malthusian promise of waste’s conversion into a bountiful harvest. Texts such as Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor and Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend achieve similar, recuperative gestures through narrative. Mayhew’s encyclopedic journalism comprehends the city’s excess bodies and bodily excesses by revealing their multiple connections to a productive social economy, and Dickens’s novel expresses a similar logic of reuse, linking causes to effects, past to present, beginnings to endings, circumscribing its proliferation of bodies and plots within a distinctly nineteenth-century conception of narrative closure. The rhetoric of anatomical dissection, which erupted with the Anatomy Act’s proposal to reuse the corpses of the poor for medical purposes, provides the focus for chapter 5. The popular, governmental, and medical debates

over the Act, which continued for decades after its passage, not only represented the body as fragmented but also figured its parts as exchangeable and circulable. If the body was a piecemeal entity, they seemed to suggest, whose apparent wholeness was only provisional, then it was also a social entity, a locus for the possibility of exchange with other bodies. Both journalistic and fictional representations, including novels such as Our Mutual Friend and A Page 12 →Tale of Two Cities, suggested that the body’s apparent coherence was a reconciliation between these dispersive rhetorics: as labor and anatomy offered to trade the body away part by part, an opposing narrative impulse to contain the self insisted on the discernible contours of identity. Chapter 6 investigates popular accounts of bacteriology from the 1880s and 1890s, which conjured an alternate model of sociality when they revealed that the human body might play unwitting host to numerous other, occupying bodies. In asserting that independent, living entities were both disease’s cause and its invisible means of transmission, germ theory transformed the intangible potential present in the spaces between bodies, an element common to earlier etiologies, into a personified organism with its own agency. The social intimacy implied in the language of contagion or risk was thus made material, even microscopically visible, in the figure of the germ. The narrative conventions of this popular genre—the language of political conflict, the contrast between diverging temporal and physical perspectives, the implied inversion of narrative frames—emerged in short stories with bacterial protagonists as well as in longer fictions like Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula, which mobilized the principles of popular germ narrative to suggest that a person’s life-history or indeed, all of human history, might be reimagined—even narrated—by germs. Thinking about the body in these ways—about its respiratory or excretory potential, its dismembered parts, the possibilities for mediation and transmission across surfaces and through orifices—contributed to a complex conception of social participation. Nineteenth-century Britons invented and reinvented narratives to describe the manifold ways in which one body might be anonymously joined to countless others, whether in the form of bacteria in popular fiction or in descriptions of accumulated human waste in their popular journals. At the same time, they also reveal something of our own concerns about sociality, as fears about bioterrorism and epidemics, for example, or debates over the ethical and legal implications attached to the donation or sale of bodily organs, reanimate the preoccupations expressed by our predecessors. These threats and possibilities have pressed us to reevaluate our understanding of national boundaries, of risk, and of the relationship between one body and another—and have also disrupted many of the individualizing narratives that we, too, have generated to manage our complex relationship to the social. As representations of a transforming epistemology of the social, the nineteenth-century accounts in the chapters that follow will undoubtedly seem at once unexpected and also strikingly familiar.

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One At Risk Statistical Participation and the Victorian City In his 1880 essay, “Fiction, Fair and Foul,” John Ruskin laments that Dickens’s novels provide “the thoroughly trained LondonerВ .В .В . no other excitement than that to which he has been accustomed.В .В .В . In the single novel of Bleak House there are nine deaths.В .В .В . And all this, observe, not in a tragic, adventurous, or military story, but merelyВ .В .В . as a properly representative average of the statistics of civilian mortality in the centre of London” (440–41). Pairing this complaint with a mock statistical table that enumerates these fictional deaths and their causes (“One by assassination,” “One by sorrow” [440]) Ruskin satirizes the statistical perspective of the age. But his words also contain a serious insight, both about the experience of reading Victorian novels and about what it means to be a “thoroughly trained Londoner.” According to Ruskin, Dickens’s fiction expresses—in spite of its author’s well-known condemnation of statistics in works like Hard Times—a certain statistical logic, such that readers come to expect a certain allotment of outcomes, such as deaths, over the course of a novel and within its finite population. But Ruskin also extends his claim to London as a lived space of statistical expectation about bodily risk, where any number of events might be seen as probable, and perhaps even inevitable, within its population. His complaint about Bleak House might have applied to any number of mid-Victorian novels, in which deaths, accidents, and illness seem an almost compulsory component of representations of the city. This chapter investigates how the novel—and the social spaces it described—came to be seen as such risky places. How did becoming “accustomed” to thinking about personally catastrophic events as statistically inevitable invite readers to reimagine the nature of social participation? Page 14 → An 1860 All the Year Round essay exemplifies a version of the statistical sensibility that would trouble Ruskin two decades later, its unnamed author declaring that “it concerns a man more to know his risks of the fifty illnesses that may throw him on his back, than the possible date of the one death that must come” (“Registration,” 228).1 The essayist not only recognizes the value of statistical knowledge (“to know one’s risks”) and even makes the case for the tabulation of more statistics, but remarkably, he also makes that claim in Dickens’s own journal.2 Dickens himself had famously caricatured and critiqued statistical studies in The Pickwick Papers and in Hard Times; the Mudfog Association’s self-important and pointlessly detailed statistical reports, whose object was the “Advancement of Everything,” and the unforgiving “facts” meted out like bitter doses by the utilitarian Gradgrind and the schoolmaster M’Choakumchild pointed to the emptiness of statistical inquiry in comparison with what Dickens’s novels typically celebrated: individuals, families, and domestic feeling. But I argue in this chapter that even as his and others’ novels disavowed such calculations, especially when applied to humans, they also inhabited and explored the risky statistical spaces between inevitability (the “death that must come”) and uncertainty (one’s “risks”) in their representations of the social. In these less determined forms, as probabilities rather than as facts, statistics came to occupy not only the pages of his novels but also the everyday vocabulary and imagination of average Victorians. Social belonging, statistics implied, was inherently risky, a space in which inclusion entailed a range of possible, unwilled events; what is more, those possibilities could only be understood with relation to a large number of other persons and bodies. In this sense, the condition of the individual conscripted into a statistical population resembled the more general problematic of the Victorian subject, a product of what Goodlad has described as liberalism’s “pervasive tensions and paradoxes,” where individual freedoms existed in an often uneasy equilibrium with the exigencies of citizenship and public identity, with the spaces of others’ rights and desires (viii). Analogously, in situating

the self within a realm of inevitable bodily participation, of births, deaths, accidents, and illnesses occurring with regular frequency, social statistics revealed his or her condition of physiological belonging. Statistical “risk, ” with its percentages and abstract populations, supplied a numerical account of what the self shared with others. An earlier definition of risk, outlined by Daston and Elaine Freedgood, referred to the voluntary activities of gamblers and adventurers, who weighed reward and hazard in their speculative undertakings (Classical Probability, Page 15 →140–72; Freedgood, 7–9). The “risk” in uncertain investment or even travel depended, at least to some extent, upon the individual’s own agency, a decision to “take a risk.” But with the rise of the statistical sciences at the start of the nineteenth century, another conception of “risk” emerged, describing not a condition entered voluntarily but rather one in which the urban environment enforced one’s participation, in which the individual found himself or herself involuntarily immersed.3 This understanding of risk, which anticipates what sociologist Ulrich Beck has termed our late-modern “risk society,” an inhabiting of the “unknown and unintended” forces that shape our fates (22), was—as both Ruskin and Dickens perceived—an element of the Victorian experience as well. According to the period’s writings, urban living in particular implied that one was subject to the threat of disease and violence, a threat that statistics represented as shared by a population. Indeed, statistics reduced the self to a body, an entity defined by the probability for accident, illness, or death, while its percentages also posited an arithmetic continuity between the individual and other bodies occupying the same space. What is more, the transformation of “risk” extended beyond contemplations about one’s own mortality such that, several decades later, Ruskin and others implicitly recognized that readers were importing that statistical sensibility into the realm of the novel as well. In transforming both the novel reader’s and city dweller’s expectations of what might take place within these spaces, the discourse of risk shaped a new vision of sociality.

William Farr and the Quantification of Uncertainty Knowing one’s risks, the All the Year Round essay reminded readers, demanded quantitative measures, and yet even numbers could not provide certainty, only a more specific form of uncertainty: the maladies that “may” affect one, the “possible date” of death. The condition of being at risk, between the poles of certainty and impossibility, was reflected in two quite visible facts of urban life: that on the one hand, the sources of disease were to be found everywhere—in the streets, cemeteries, cesspools, and public wells—and on the other, that not everyone succumbed to disease. How could one explain this apparent paradox, whereby some were afflicted while others remained healthy? An 1826 article attempting to come to some conclusion on precisely this point was, according to one account, what inspired a young William Farr to pursue a career first in medicine and later in the General Register Office,4 where he would help to transform that paradox into the language of Page 16 →probability. For while earlier sanitary and social reformers like James Phillips Kay had used numbers and tables as corroborating but incidental material in reports, the work of Farr and others in the late 1830s made statistical science integral to the project of public health and social reform, where tables of percentages and correlations would serve as primary forms of evidence. Until the 1830s, statistics remained undefined in terms of its methodology, and was understood as a specialized form of the social sciences, dedicated more generally to what the inaugural issue of the Journal of the Statistical Society of London called “the collection and comparison of Facts which illustrate the condition of mankind” (“Introduction,” 1). These “facts,” as early contributions to the Journal reveal, were frequently of a narrative, nonnumerical nature. Tables of rates and figures were more commonly found in actuarial texts, where they were used to estimate life expectancy for the purposes of calculating rates of insurance and annuity. But in the late 1830s and early 1840s, these two branches of science, the social statistical and the actuarial, converged in the published works of statistician Farr and social reformer Edwin Chadwick. Chadwick had assumed responsibility for the Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain in the late 1830s in his role as secretary to the Poor Law Commission; at that time the Report was intended for a parliamentary readership, as a modest project to investigate the problem of public “nuisances, ” or waste, whose removal was perceived as an added burden to poor relief. Yet a number of

factors—Chadwick’s Benthamite training, his conviction that sanitary reform should be managed at a central rather than local level, and a personal ambition for which he was notorious—meant that the Report quickly exceeded the Commission’s directives and even eclipsed the Poor Law Commission’s own centrality to the project of Victorian social reform.5 Indeed, the resulting Report, published in 1842, was a sensational success, with an initial distribution reported to be between ten thousand and twenty thousand copies, and possibly more.6 The Bills of Mortality had itemized deaths in London since the seventeenth century, but Chadwick’s statistical methods went much further in drawing attention to the relationships among disease, mortality, and population.7 The revised tables of mortality that appeared at the very beginning of Chadwick’s lengthy report had been produced by Farr at the General Register Office, and signified, as M. W. Flinn puts it, “a major turning-point” (27). The 1839 table provided a systematic, detailed analysis of mortality by location and by cause, and the remainder of Chadwick’s report insistently integrated similar statistical tables throughout, showing life expectancy and Page 17 →rates of sickness and death for different age and occupational groups.8 By linking such data about disease, mortality, and life expectancy across Britain to firsthand testimony about living conditions from local inspectors and officials, the Report was both impressive and groundbreaking in its scope. While it subdivided Britain’s population by geography, occupation, age, and sex, it came to a number of encompassing conclusions, both statistical and narrative, about the continuities in rates of disease and premature death across disparate groups. For readers, this was a vision of unprecedented comprehensiveness—one that also anticipated the extent of Chadwick’s eventual plans for sanitary reform, an encompassing (and controversially centralizing) set of legislative, administrative, and infrastructural changes for the nation. That vision, as Poovey and Gilbert have shown, allowed for the making of a Victorian “social body,” an efficiently aggregated entity upon which medical and public health discourse might operate. At the same time, it invited individual readers to reimagine their relationship to that social whole. For Chadwick’s point, in documenting the rates of disease from one region to another or the dangerously unsanitary conditions from street to street in London, was not to reassure readers that they lived in comparative safety. Rather, it enjoined them to engage in a curious act of identification, one that the statistic performed for them—indeed, performed on them—to imagine that those percentages might also apply to themselves. Population statistics, in other words, promoted an account of the social that was not only comprehensive but also decidedly inclusive, defying the usual distinctions of local geography, social class, and gender. In addition, Farr’s statistics challenged the accuracy of the primary table in use at the time, the Northampton Table of Mortality, constructed by Richard Price in the eighteenth century and still heavily influential at the end of the 1830s. Numerous life assurance firms, such as the Alfred, the British Commercial, the Imperial, the Palladium, the Rock, the Royal Exchange, the Westminster, and the Scottish Equitable employed the Northampton Table as their primary reference for calculating life annuities and insurance rates,9 even as it had been publicly criticized in the decades before Farr’s investigation for seeming to overestimate rates of mortality, thereby resulting in considerable governmental and corporate financial losses through high annuity payouts. After painstaking attempts to reconstruct Price’s Table from historical birth and death records as well as from Price’s own imperfect records of his methods,10 Farr concluded that the Table was “erroneous to an extent that deprives it of all value” (“Letter” 277).11 Price assumed, among other things, Page 18 →that the population remained constant in Northampton between 1735 and 1780, and that the number of births recorded by Anglican parish registers accurately reflected the actual number of births—an assumption that was especially problematic, noted Farr, given Northampton’s large Dissenting population (“Letter,” 277); by undercounting the living population, Farr revealed, Price’s table displayed disproportionately high rates of mortality at every age. Yet assurance companies relied upon these eighteenth-century statistics as applicable to any nineteenth-century city in England or Scotland. In his revision, Farr reproduces a version of the Northampton table, showing the population still living at any given age. Farr places Price’s calculations and their nineteenth-century adjustments in the first two columns after “Age,” and labels them “False Tables”; these he compares with two sets of his own calculations, labeled the “True Northampton Life Table” in column 3 (fig. 1). The “false” and

“true” tables display noticeably different mortality rates, with the “false” tables indicating higher rates. But the more striking difference lies in their starting populations. Where Price’s original table begins with 11,650 persons, and its nineteenth-century equivalent with 11,855 persons, Farr calculates based upon a hypothetical starting population of 10,000 persons. For the early nineteenth-century reader (as for many a modernday counterpart), the indivisibility of Price’s starting population’s by 100 makes interpretation of the “false” tables a daunting task. For example, what percentage of the original population is still alive at age twenty? And does the rate of mortality increase or decrease once a person reaches his or her thirties? The Northampton Table offers figures that discourage such statistical thinking. Moreover, in describing his statistics as “the genuine Table of Observations for Northampton” (“Letter,” 283),12 Price implies that the 11,650 represented actual individuals from Northampton, rather than hypothetical ones. By contrast, Farr’s table implicitly encourages the reader’s engagement in hypothetical thinking. By normalizing its starting population to 10,000, his table not only makes the reader’s calculation of probabilities a relatively trivial task, but significantly, also tacitly announces that no such population ever existed, except in the imagination by agreement between the statistician and the reader. Indeed, Farr follows the table with what can only be described as an exercise in statistical thinking, with a series of questions directed to the reader about explicitly fictionalized individuals: “What annual premium should James Just, aged 30, pay to insure ВЈ10000 at his death?” “What sum paid down by John Jones, aged 20, will provide him a deferred annuity of ВЈ10 the first payment to be made, if he be alive, at the age of 61?” (“Letter,” 289).Page 19 → Fig. 1. Table III.—Northampton Tables of Mortality, Annual Report of the Registrar-General for England and Wales, vol. 8 (London, 1848), 318. (Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.) Page 20 → What is more, Farr was not alone in implementing hypothetical populations to describe rates and proportions. Rather, his tables seem to represent a broader shift through the 1840s in both professional and popular statistical thinking, away from “literal” forms of counting, in which numbers corresponded one-to-one to actual persons, and toward more abstract and hypothetical means of representing groups of people. In its early years, the statistical sciences managed no stable consensus regarding the appropriate content and form of its representations (Poovey, History, 308–9), and Kay’s well-known 1832 study of the relationship between disease, poverty, and vice among the working classes of Manchester made only occasional and inconsistent use of statistics. Likewise the introductory article in the inaugural issue of the Journal of the Statistical Society of London in 1838 omits any specific mention of numbers; statistics, it asserts, are simply “facts which are calculated to illustrate the condition and prospects of society” (“Introduction” 1). In fact, as a group, the early issues of the Journal are noteworthy for devoting more space to description and social argument than to figures and tables. But over the course of the 1840s, statistics moved away from observation, in which prose descriptions found minimal supporting evidence in numbers, to calculation, in which numerically dense analysis assumed a central role in arguments about correlation, prevention, disease, and reform. Furthermore, abstract numerical figures, such as rates, percentages, and proportions, began to displace whole numbers in importance, and allowed authors to make comparisons and suggest correlations in ways that were more readily accessible to readers. Thus while expressions of percentages and proportions did exist in other forms before the 1830s, Farr’s biographer, John M. Eyler, states that “[t]he rate of mortalityВ .В .В . had been used by his predecessors, but they had been neither consistent in the expression of the rate nor careful in its calculation.В .В .В . Farr helped make the standard expression of mortality вЂdeaths per thousand’” (Victorian Social Medicine, 69). Indeed, such percentages gained in relative importance and prominence, so that by midcentury such numbers came to stand for “statistics” in the popular imagination. A quick survey of articles from the Statistical Society of London illustrates this shift, from earlier studies where whole numbers correspond to single individuals, to later ones in which statistical figures appear primarily as rates and percentages within populations. Although a somewhat exceptional 1839 article about the laboring classes in Bristol, for instance, abstracts its subpopulations into percentages (92.9 percent of children are healthy; 7.1 percent are unhealthy) (Fripp, 373), other articles published around 1840 Page 21 →make only minimal use of such figures: of families in Marylebone in 1843, 131 are married without children, 83 are married with one child

(Rawson, 44); of prisoners at Newcastle in 1838, 243 men and 204 women were illiterate (Cargill, 359); of weavers receiving work from the Glasgow Relief Committee in 1837, 1,193 were married and 546 were single (Baird, 168). These works rarely if ever abstract such numbers into percentages or rates, and tables list figures as they correspond to “actual” individuals. By contrast, later articles rely heavily upon percentages and rates in making their arguments, and tables presenting such figures often mark the essay’s culmination. Unsurprisingly, Chadwick’s 1844 article about the causes of mortality in London, for instance, includes tables whose numbers reflect not only whole individuals but also abstractions of these numbers into averages and rates. Thus, comparing Marylebone (one death per annum for every 45 people) with Stepney (one death per annum for every 41 people) became a relatively simple matter for the reader (Chadwick, “On the Best Modes” 37). But the taste for what one might call the abstract statistics expressed by proportions and percentages extended beyond Chadwick.13 In contemporaneous articles, percentages and proportions constitute the foundation for argument, the basis for comparative analysis. For example, an article opposing Chadwick’s assertions about mortality rates nonetheless looked to statistical figures in formulating its claims: the author, F. G. P. Neison, offered rates of death by age group in tabular form, with a final statement below each table summarizing its conclusions in percentage form (“Mortality per Cent. annually” in Glasgow in 1821 was “3.25,” and in 1841 was “2.97”) (Neison, 49). Other publications of the period cite similar statistics: the 1848 percent mortality in Church Lane, 2.007, compares quite favorably with that in Lambeth, 2.33 (Sykes, Guy, and Neison, 22); the percentage rate of illness among scavengers, 10.5, suggests their relative health in comparison with brickmakers, whose percentage rate of illness was 46 (Sykes 47); Egleton’s housing conditions, with only 14 percent sleeping more than three to a bed, appeared quite luxurious compared to those in Bury, where 35 percent slept more than three to a bed (Guy, “Health,” 75); and in the village of Newton Ferrers, 2.5 percent of the population lived beyond the age of seventy, while in London the figure was only 0.78 percent (MacLaren, 119). Hence what distinguishes Chadwick’s 1842 Sanitary Report and these later articles in the Journal of the Statistical Society of London from, for example, Kay’s 1832 report on Manchester and from the Journal’s earlier publications, is the turn away from a statistical emphasis on whole numbers that correspond, one-to-one, to persons (10,187 people died in one year in East Page 22 →London), and toward an emphasis on percentages and proportions (260 of every 10,000 East Londoners died, or one death for every 38.53 East Londoners) (Chadwick, Report, 231). Indeed, by the late 1850s the typical statistical report casually assumed that the reader was fluent in such abstractions: “Of 1,000 people in London, ten died unnatural deaths annually; .В .В .В into the causes of four deaths no inquiry is now madeВ .В .В . threeВ are killed by the poisonous emanations from cesspools, closets, and sinks in dwelling houses, offices, and workshops, .В .В .В two die of diseases induced by the emanations from dirty streets or gullies, and one from the vapours arising from the Thames” (“MarriagesВ .В .В . Deaths for the Quarter Ended June, 1858,” 353; emphases in original). To be sure, the Registration Act of 1836 made more complete and current numbers concerning life and death in England and Wales available to reformers, statisticians, and journalists,14 but as these examples suggest, this greater availability of data was concomitant with changes in strategies for representing populations. Even nonspecialist journals reflected this difference, with such statistical figures noticeably absent from articles responding to the 1831–32 cholera epidemic15 yet frequently and conspicuously present in discussions of the 1847–48 outbreak. Lord Morpeth, in an 1848 speech in Parliament that would lead to the passage of the Public Health Act later that year, made a point of combining local narrative testimony with statistical data.16

Probabilistic Knowledge Farr’s efforts were one element in a longer history of epistemological transformation, a shift Daston traces from an eighteenth-century understanding of probability that “turned upon the psychology of rational choice” to a nineteenth-century discipline in which “social theorists sought macroscopic regularities of a more sociological kind” (“Rational Individuals,” 295). Where eighteenth-century theorists, that is, based definitions of probability on an event’s likelihood as judged by a rational individual, nineteenth-century conceptions of probability depended upon the laws of frequencies and rates observable in large groups. Ian Hacking situates the decisive break between an eighteenth-century Enlightenment faith in rationality and a

nineteenth-century focus on social inevitability in the publication of A. A. Cournot’s 1843 treatise distinguishing between “probability” and “chance” (96). Probability, according to Cournot and his contemporary, SimГ©on-DГ©nis Poisson, Page 23 →designated believability, the perceived likelihood of an event’s occurrence, and was thus conceptually grounded in the individual’s capacity to reach accurate conclusions through reason. In turning away from “subjective” understandings of probability, or what Theodore Porter calls “degrees of belief,” these authors invoked another term, “chance,” an “objective” form of probability that signified the measurable possibility of an event’s occurrence, a property independent of individual judgment and derived rather from observation of populations (72). The latter, what Poisson called the “law of large numbers,” held that the frequencies of events like births, illnesses, and deaths in large populations would remain largely stable over time (Hacking, 95). While based on the enumeration of past events, the law often appeared to lend a deterministic quality to the future, such that actions and events sometimes came to seem statistically inevitable. In these intellectual histories of statistics, the Continental tradition, a product of the French Revolution and its philosophical configurations of the rational self, was at the forefront of the transition from rational, individual belief to the certainty and inevitability of phenomenal occurrences within populations. But where this historical trajectory focuses on theoretical developments, these changes also had important ramifications for the applied sciences. Joseph Fourier’s work, for example, which employed new statistical methods to elucidate “mass social phenomena,” was, according to Hacking, “largely new and in certain ways changed the feel of what one was doing” (Hacking, 96–97). Like the Continental Fourier, Farr was interested in translating statistics’ new philosophical stance into the practice of statistical application. But with his limited mathematical training, the British Farr has remained a somewhat marginal figure in a statistical history dominated by French theoreticians like Adolphe Quetelet and Poisson.17 Indeed, Theodore Porter observes that France’s leadership in theoretical statistics went largely unchallenged, while early nineteenth-century Britons directed their efforts instead to applications in the social and actuarial sciences (74). These practical uses, however, introduced statistics into the everyday lives of Britons, inviting journalists, social reformers, and novelists to consider the implications of this new system of knowledge. The “law of large numbers” proved particularly unsettling to European conceptions of free will and personal responsibility throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, but nowhere was statistics’ apparent determinism more troubling than in Britain, Theodore Porter argues, where figures like John Stuart Mill insisted on the power of “subjective” probability, on the possibility of judgment based on individual knowledge and observation; even mathematiciansPage 24 → Augustus De Morgan and W. F. Donkin, struggling to reconcile individual belief to the law of large numbers, proposed that individual knowledge might expand to the point of encompassing mass phenomena within its infinite vision (Hacking, 115–21; Daston, Classical Probability, 186–87).18 Statistics, then, intersected with an emerging tradition of British liberalism in uncomfortable ways. It drew attention to the disjunctions between the particularities of individual judgment and abstract modes of quantification, between agency and inevitability. To be sure, the unease attendant in using numbers to represent persons was evident before the rise of the statistical sciences. Works like Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven” explored what Frances Ferguson calls the “fundamental conflict between the individual and collection” that Britain’s first census in 1800 exemplified, when older systems of referentiality based in a one-to-one correspondence between name and number gave way to a more troubling practice of counting without naming (168). Statistics, with abstractions like percentages and proportions, only extended the move away from the individual. Indeed, while the whole number as collection (10,187 East Londoners) at least preserved the integrity of the individual, albeit as a member of a set, such that the nearly unmarked distinction between, for example, individual 10,131 and individual 10,132 might have unsettled the citizens Ferguson describes, each number might still be said to correspond to a name, to be traceable to an originary individual. By contrast, the percentage (260 for every 10,000) abstracts the relationship between individual and number completely, thus rendering the particular individual altogether untraceable. Statistics, no longer dependent upon a strictly retrospective, referential correspondence between number and dead individual, projected the reader into a condition of futurity. For not only did these figures enumerate the frequency

of past events but they also encouraged readers to predict the allotment of occurrences to come. The life insurance industry, for example, an important vehicle for the popularization of statistics, urged readers to consider the inevitability of risk, against which an insurance policy could serve as a form of security. By translating dense actuarial statistics into the more accessible language of terms, premiums, and payouts, life insurance exercised readers’ risk literacy, as it were, and helped to make probabilistic knowledge a part of everyday life. These companies gained a new respectability at the end of the eighteenth century, Daston explains, precisely by cultivating a middle-class consumer for whom the future was an investment; this individual, she tells us, was “haunted by the fear of a big loss of comparably small probability,” a fear stoked by many an insurance company Page 25 →prospectus (Classical Probability, 185).19 As the rapid growth and financial success of the insurance industry during this period attests, this ability—and desire—to evaluate future risks came to represent one of the cornerstones of middle-class identity. But the move to abstract statistics also reshaped social understanding. Farr’s and Chadwick’s figures necessarily included the reader within its comprehensive embrace; like someone identifying his or her location on a map for the first time, the reader of the 1842 Report could find his or her own statistical “place” within its tables of illness and mortality, and within the populations numerically represented there. The language of percentages and hypothetical populations of one hundred or one thousand, which Farr helped to popularize, was an implicitly inclusive one. By referring not to any one individual or another, statistics helped to redefine the relationship between social belonging and bodily experience, such that one’s life and death could be understood as elements of a social whole. Farr’s percentages, in other words, invited readers to imagine themselves as social beings, drawn into a kind of loose, unwilled affiliation. For the law of large numbers asked readers to maintain two apparently contradictory understandings at the same time: the uncertainty of one’s chances at the level of the individual, and the inevitability of specified events at the level of the social. To learn, for example, that as an inhabitant of Manchester one has a 20 percent chance of succumbing to cholera, one implicitly accepts one’s continuity with a nameless, faceless population of others who are equivalently situated. Those figures—one in five, twenty in a hundred—invite a form of contact, albeit virtual and hypothetical, with the other Mancunians—the four, the nineteen, the ninety-nine—who partake in one’s imagined allotment of statistical risk. Hacking gets at the strange sociality that statistics engenders by way of a personal anecdote: “I am slightly unnerved in a strange city when I go out to buy the morning’s newspaper. The vendor or dispenser has a paper waiting just for me. When I return home I ask at the kiosk if there was a spare unsold paper a couple of days ago. There never was. Someone else was there to buy mine” (117).20 Hacking’s unease with the inevitability of populations is evident here; for like the statistic indicating that, for example, eleven people die by drowning in the Thames every year, the stock of newspapers points to the inexorability of certain outcomes, irrespective of individual will or desire. The agency that Hacking feels he exerts in purchasing a newspaper, at home or in a “strange city,” is unsettled by the apparent exchangeability of persons in this example. “Someone else” purchases the paper if Hacking does not, Page 26 →just as in the “strange city” Hacking becomes that “someone else.” Like the newspaper, the statistic reduces the individual to a figure in this account, but it also reveals the social continuities and identifications that join “someone” and “someone else.” Indeed, Hacking’s example suggests that to consider one’s risks is necessarily to invoke a hypothetical population of spectral others, to which one also involuntarily belongs. The inevitabilities implicit in the law of large numbers demands that socially inclusive vision: To be sure, someone will drown in the Thames this year, but will it be “someone else,” or will it be me? This social continuity does not exist because of the newspaper, but is rendered visible and calculable by it, and so, too, statistical risk merely renders the conception of one’s social inclusion numerically available for the reader’s contemplation. Risk, these examples imply, entails its own uncanny model of social participation.

Fictions of Risk Novels like Bleak House, as Ruskin recognized, are probabilistic spaces, fields of potential that establish the geographical and temporal conditions of possibility in their opening pages and their foreclosure in their final sequences. Put another way, these novels engage what Gilles Deleuze, in his reformulation of Friedrich

Nietzsche’s proposition, has called the space between “chance” and “necessity,” wherein the dice determining outcome, “thrown once are the affirmation of chance, the combination which they form on falling is the affirmation of necessity” (Deleuze, 26; emphasis his).21 With its circumscribed social space and its finite population, mid-Victorian fiction offers both a reflection of and an exercise in statistical thinking, not unlike Hacking’s newsstand. By presenting readers with an uncertain and contingent space between the “throw” and the “fall,” they invite speculation about a population, for whom any number of typical events—marriage, disgrace, disease, and death—exist within the realm of chance, and by the conclusion will have assumed a quality of inevitability. Recent critical work examining the relationship between probability theory and the history of the novel has tended to explore what Daston characterizes as an Enlightenment conception of probability rather than a nineteenthcentury one. Robert Newsom, for example, considers this earlier conception of probability in his recasting of Ian Watt’s history of the novel; according to Newsom, the practice of novel-reading necessitates an acceptance of the novel’s fictional status at the same time that it encourages the Page 27 →asking of “real-world” questions about likelihood and probable outcomes. For Leland Monk, probability theory’s scientific insistence upon the “unrestricted play of chance” productively challenged a Victorian reliance upon an almost fatalistic providentialism; but in fiction, instances of chance (coincidence, accident) read as lapses in realism (60, 67). Probability, or what is at stake when the novel-reader weighs a particular character’s or scene’s likelihood, in both cases takes the form of believability. Reading nineteenth-century narrative with attention to the law of large numbers, however, highlights the productive distinctions between belief and inevitability, between individual experience and social certainty. From this alternate perspective, the novel invites the reader to evaluate not an event’s believability but its allotment, to consider how certain events or outcomes will, in probability, be distributed among the population of characters occupying the space of the novel. Hence, when a mid-nineteenth-century novel like Bleak House introduces its multitude of characters, we—like the Victorians—have been “trained,” even “accustomed,” as Ruskin put it, to speculate about how an already anticipated range of outcomes, like death and marriage, might be apportioned by the novel’s end. At the same time, however, the “objective” law of large numbers would seem to apply poorly to nineteenth-century genres like the novel, whose rhetoric usually depends upon particularity and emotional investment, where the distinctions between “someone” and “someone else” are usually matters of deep importance.22 Where any number of fictions of the period illustrate this tension, such as Ruskin’s selection, Bleak House, the final pages of this chapter focus on Gaskell’s 1848 condition-of-England novel, Mary Barton. If, following recent accounts, we look to the deep fissures—generic, political, formal—at the center of the novel as a focal point for critical investigation,23 then this chapter’s closing pages identify another rupture at the novel’s core, between emotional and statistical modes of representation. More specifically, Mary Barton promulgates representations of statistical inevitability even as it activates a conspicuous narrative machinery that functions, to borrow Freedgood’s words, as a “strateg[y] of containment” (2). Although Gaskell’s novel lacks the explicit statistical thematics of a work like Dickens’s Hard Times, it nonetheless expresses a statistical logic characteristic of the social reform literature about Manchester that was its nonfictional counterpart. Indeed, as Paul Fyfe puts it, Mary Barton provides “a dedicated domain in which problems of risk can be considered”; contextualizing the fire at the Carsons’ mill with respect to the period’s emerging insurance industry, Fyfe draws attention to the characters’ efforts to explain—and Page 28 →to manage—industrial risks and accidents (330). That the fire can be understood as an accident means that this part of the novel is “less interested in causation than in risk” (333), and this insight invites an examination of the work’s treatment of other categories of accident. The representation of mortality in Mary Barton reveals a shifting causal landscape, where caused and uncaused events exist in an uneasy tension in the world of the characters. According to Catherine Gallagher, “Gaskell’s ambivalence” toward these questions of causation engenders multiple “contradictions”—formal, generic, and causal disjunctions—and an elusiveness of meaning; the result is a novel that is at once melodrama and political commentary (Industrial Reformation, 67). But that ambivalence is, for Gallagher, most evident in the novel’s account of John Barton’s responsibility for the murder he

commits; endeavoring to reclaim some measure of dignity and agency for him as a working-class man, Gaskell seeks at the same time to assign responsibility to the exploitative conditions that have determined his character (67). If we frame that central event not with respect to the morally weighted category of murder but with reference to the more neutral (and recurrent) one of mortality, the novel reveals its ambivalence not just around questions of personal responsibility but also around what Fyfe encourages us to examine, the relationship between caused and uncaused events. Such a reframing also clarifies the importance of the novel’s distinction between retrospective, retributive behaviors, and anticipatory, potentially redemptive ones. Throughout the novel, deaths occur and are forgotten with a casual regularity that both conditions and demands readers accustomed to accident and death. Within its first half, we learn of the deaths of Mrs. Barton, her son Tom, the Wilsons’ infant twins, Mr. Davenport, Margaret’s mother and father, and George Wilson—and this, to borrow Ruskin’s words, not in any “tragic, adventurous, or military story,” but in an account of workaday Manchester. These deaths, all of which might count as “premature” in statistical terms, do not pass unnoticed or unmourned. To be sure, Tom’s suffering and Mrs. Barton’s death have a lasting, detrimental impact on John Barton, and significantly, he readily assigns blame in both cases: the former on his employers and the latter on Esther’s abandonment of her sister’s family. But at the same time, the narrative does not endorse John’s easy allocation of responsibility; we might sympathize with his reasoning, the novel suggests, but we also understand that it is misguided, a product of his own overactive political imagination as opposed to a methodical tracing of causalities. As with the possible origins of the fire at the mill that Fyfe enumerates—old Page 29 →equipment, tired workers, Jem Wilson’s actions—the novel allows for this generative imagining of causes, but refuses to accredit any one of them. Indeed, in its representation of this and the numerous other casualties and catastrophes that occur, the novel suggests that casualty is a recurrent and inexorable part of the characters’ lives. John Barton might expend energy identifying culprits, but other characters have accepted similar events, have grown accustomed to them as an inescapable part of working-class life. Margaret’s growing blindness, the fire at the Carsons’ mill, and Jane Wilson’s maiming by a cart wheel just before her marriage: these are three among the many incursions of chance and accident into the lives of this population. If the novel is ambivalent around the question of John’s responsibility, as Gallagher suggests, the novel is similarly undecided about causality more generally. It suggests that the middle classes might bear responsibility for their cities and their workers in some general way, while it also depicts a world of uncaused events and a population that greets them with what is largely a sense of resignation. This ambivalence reflects the period’s new discourse of accident; as historian Judith Green observes, it was during this period, the 1830s and 1840s, that a separate category to designate an event without “discernable moral content” emerged within the fields of social science and philosophy (46–49). Gaskell’s novel asks readers to consider the place of such accidents both in Victorian society and also in the world of Victorian fiction. What would it mean to accept the possibility of accident, of an event without “discernable moral content”? The response, Mary Barton suggests, requires an epistemological shift, in which characters and readers acknowledge at once an event’s social inevitability and individual uncertainty. An understanding of casualty as an “expected event” within populations, historians Roger Cooter and Bill Luckin tell us, took hold during this period (3), and the residents of Gaskell’s Manchester, who look not to the past but to the future, exemplify this stance. In having insured the mill that burns down in chapter 5, the Carsons have guarded themselves against catastrophe; the fire is unexpected, but at the same time the Carsons have prepared for its possibility, however seemingly remote. Yet in spite of popular assumptions that only middle-class individuals were capable of such foresight, Gaskell shows us that working-class characters, too, can anticipate the possibility of catastrophe. Thus Jem Wilson guards against the possibility of his own death or injury by purchasing an “income” for his mother and Alice Wilson, providing them with the security of fixed capital and regular annuity payments, and transforming them (as Mrs. Wilson proudly puts it) into “ladies o’ property” (192). Even the impoverishedPage 30 → Davenports, who live in a cellar dwelling beneath a pigsty, belong to a “burial club,” which allowed working-class members to make small, regular contributions in exchange for a decent funeral upon death (111). This sense of expectation, of anticipation associated with risk thus directs

attention away from the past—and from a retributive thinking that fixes blame and demands payment retroactively—and looks instead toward the future, where one pays in advance—whether in the form of insurance premiums or in the kinds of social reforms that the elder Mr. Carson enacts in the years to come, ones that serve as a preventive against revolution. Moreover, the working classes, Gaskell suggests, are as willing—perhaps even more willing—than their wealthier counterparts to plan in this way. Jem’s investment and the Davenports’ modest planning (albeit with a few missed payments in his final weeks) represent their capacity for forethought in a world otherwise out of control, where one is always at risk. Harry Carson’s death, however, is different. It falls outside the novel’s understanding of risk, of what can be anticipated or insured against, and is treated—by both the characters and the narrative itself—as something more than just another death. No longer “someone else,” this death has happened to “someone,” and however flimsy he may be as a character or a man, his death bears disproportionate moral, emotional, and narrative weight in the world of the novel. Perhaps Gaskell meant to satisfy her readers’ class interests by suggesting that a handsome heir’s death deserves more attention than was devoted to those of the novel’s less fortunate characters. But Harry’s death, more significantly, marks the shift from the new probabilistic calculus that shapes the first half of Mary Barton to a more traditional moral one that dominates its second half. For his death arises not from the apparent fluctuations of chance within a population, but from a series of bad moral choices. Unlike the causal uncertainty that Fyfe has identified with relation to the fire, or the weak causality assigned by John Barton to events like his wife’s death or the Davenports’ misery, Harry’s death has a determinable culprit and victim, and results from a series of identifiable, morally charged causes, from Harry’s own cruel lampooning of the workers’ suffering, to the trade union’s vow to avenge this insult, to John Barton’s decision to act on that vow. Indeed, it signals a shift in the novel’s representational strategy: where the first half reflected a world of risk and chance, largely out of one’s control, the second half reveals a world driven by and under the control of moral action and decision. The transition between the two takes place in chapter 16 when, at a union meeting, John Barton draws the fateful slip of paper that assigns him the Page 31 →deadly task: “A number of pieces of paper (the identical letter on which the caricature had been drawn that very morning) were torn up, and one was marked. Then all were folded up again, looking exactly alike” (241, emphasis in original). Fyfe frames Carson’s death as the result of a number of chance events, and indeed, the scene alludes to the role of chance—the recovery of the discarded cartoon, the identical pieces of paper, the anonymity of the marked slip and the randomness of its allotment—but the novel also surrounds his death with the machinery of moral cause. In the end, the novel implies, both Barton and the younger Carson are responsible for what happens. That the paper used for the first drawing (Harry’s caricature) is the same as the paper used for the second drawing (the union’s allotment of its task) reflects the causal link between the two, as it also reminds us that one is but the moral extension of the other. Chance provides the apparatus for what happens, but moral choice enables its execution. This representational shift means that by the second half of the novel, Gaskell’s city becomes one in which coherence of social experience is achieved less by a shared sense of risk, in which the chance of John Barton losing his son is somehow equivalent to the chance of the elder Carson losing his, but through shared sentiment and sympathy, in which the equivalence exists at the level of feeling. To be sure, Gaskell’s narrator works to elicit sympathetic feeling in her readers throughout, and their introduction to the hazards and unpredictable sufferings of the working classes is one way in which she effects this. But that more general lesson in sympathy is sealed only by the brotherhood of suffering joining Barton and Carson near the novel’s end, a lesson that marks the novel’s culmination and the solution to its social problems. The inequalities that exist between the hazardous conditions of working-class lives and the relative comfort and security of middle-class ones, and between the way in which the novel itself treats its numerous working-class deaths and its handling of this one middle-class death, are resolved through the equalizing quality of emotional experience. In other words, in Gaskell’s moral universe the indifference of chance gives way to the power of individual feeling. In Gallagher’s words, “John Barton’s decline” is made to “seem inevitable” in this section of the novel (Industrial Reformation, 66), and significantly, that inevitability is not statistical—a sense that all are encompassed by a probabilistic law of frequencies—but rather moral, where action is framed by the logic of

reward and punishment. The other events that take place in the novel’s second half reflect this shift as well. The deaths that occur—not only Harry’s, but also Alice’s and Esther’s, where the former is rewarded Page 32 →with visions of an elysian childhood and the latter haunted by her own misdeeds—are loaded with moral significance in a way that earlier events—the twins’ deaths, Margaret’s blindness, the fire—were not. The latter might have been losses worthy of the characters’ and readers’ sympathy, but their distribution within the novel’s population reflects the indifference of urban risk. By contrast, the supposed accidents of fate that do take place in the novel’s second half, from Mary’s lucky interception of Will Wilson’s ship to Margaret’s regained vision, are not presented as accidents in this statistical sense; they are framed rather as manifestations of individual characters’ fortitude as the novel moves toward closure, and reflect the guiding hand of both providence and the novel’s author in granting them these rewards. What begins as a condition-of-England novel, where that “condition” was one of risk, is superseded by a plot in which moral agency has the power to overcome the city’s unknowable dangers and obstacles. In offering these two contrasting models for understanding the early Victorian social body, Mary Barton presents them in sequence, as if to suggest that they cannot coexist. In this fashion, the novel negotiates the Deleuzian space between “chance” and “necessity,” between the “throw” and the “fall,” by effectively redirecting itself generically. The sense of probabilistic possibility that pervades the first half of the book leads not to statistical certainty, but to a sense of moral inevitability and providential unity in its final chapters. Uncomfortable in the end with an anonymous, indifferent sociality in which “someone” and “someone else” share a sense of urban risk, the novel reaffirms the more familiar sociality of an emotion at once shared and individualizing, a social space rendered coherent through the bonds of sympathy.

Page 33 →

Two Miasmatic Texts The Body’s Excesses and Effects Describing England’s population not in his usual way—numerically—but in words, Farr turned to the language of miasma, the “atmosphere of organic matter” that “hangs over cities like a light cloud, slowly spreading, driven about, fallingВ .В .В . to connect by a subtle, sickly, deadly medium the people agglomerated in narrow streets and courts” (quoted in Gavin, Habitations, 61). The idea of social belonging, which had been more loosely, abstractly visualized by inclusive statistical terms like percentages and proportions, was in this formulation a material, almost palpable, connective “medium”—a “cloud” with the power to join urban inhabitants. Miasma, as the medical community and social and sanitary reformers referred to this “medium,” was a noxious vapor, an atmospheric element thought to convey disease-bearing principles from decaying organic remnants, whether in the form of rotting food, excrement, corpses, or even the exhalations of others, to otherwise healthy bodies. In the preceding century, medical practitioners had sometimes attributed disease to what they more broadly called an “impurity of the air.”1 But the emergence of sanitary reform in the 1830s and ’40s, with its insistent focus on cesspools and sewers, urban cemeteries and crowded lodgings, transformed miasma theory into the dominant epidemiological discourse of the period, the profession’s favored explanation for the means by which diseases such as cholera and typhus spread through populations. Linking etiology to infrastructural reform, miasma theory provided an arena in which medical practitioners might influence public policy and regulation, a role that lent its supporters an even more powerful voice during these decades. Indeed, in spite of the existence of competing medical theories, which posited contagious causes Page 34 →or waterborne transmission, miasmatic explanations remained both popular and influential for much of the Victorian period. What is more, miasma theory reimagined the body: its contours, its boundaries, and its putative integrity. Its emphasis on the act of respiration, and particularly on olfaction, unsettled Hunterian conceptions of a physiologically coherent self (Bynum, 13–16). Smells, at once “pervasive and invisible,” entered the circumscribed space of the self, “invade[d] the privatized body” (Stallybrass and White, 139): they figured the human body as permeable, a site upon which odorous excesses might encroach with usually deleterious effect. Moreover, the body in miasmatic accounts, constantly exuding its own odors and excreta, was an infinitely transmissible entity. By focusing attention on the potentially dangerous aftereffects of the body—its effluvia, exhalations, and waste products—miasma theory envisioned the body as necessarily incoherent, as something that could disperse and circulate like the contents of a leaky cesspool or a volatile compound. No longer operating as boundaries that delineate or define the self, the apparent outlines of the body became interfaces through which the possibility for connection might be realized. This reconceptualization of the body promoted its own form of sociality by focusing attention on the uncomfortable, involuntary intimacies between bodies. The gases and liquids emanating from one body and spreading to the next, according to these accounts, meant that a single inhalation might be a form of social participation, one breath an act of connection with innumerable others. This model had clear implications for the traditional distinctions between the social classes. Alain Corbin, writing about early nineteenth-century France, asserts that smell’s significance underwent a “shift from the biological to the social,” wherein the excremental “stench” of the city became, for middle-class observers, perceptible “traits of the masses” (230); likewise in Victorian Britain, Janice Carlisle tells us, smell was the most visceral and instinctual of the senses, the means by which social class was most decidedly encoded. But I would argue that for nineteenth-century Britons, smells were more than “traits” associated with other bodies—rather, as the period’s medical theories suggested, they were other bodies. Miasma was thus not merely an offense to genteel noses, but the means by which middle-class inhabitants and passersby might find themselves suddenly susceptible to the bodily effluvia of—indeed, corporeally joined to—residents of

adjacent, poorer neighborhoods, as well as to each other. The power of these miasmatic vapors was memorably evoked in Bleak House, where the “cubic inch of any pestilential gas in which [Tom] lives,” the vitiated air that originates Page 35 →in the slums, is always threatening to exceed its geographical boundaries (710). But miasma was also transgressive in ways that extended beyond class. Its uncontainable sociality was encompassing, moving across the boundaries understood to distinguish observer and observed, and sanitary and medical writings even insinuated that miasma’s bodily effects could be conveyed through the page, from the observed scene and through the observer’s words, into the body of the reader, the vicariousness of whose experience came to verge on the visceral. Miasma was regularly featured in the literature of urban investigation, a genre that flourished during the first half of the nineteenth century in response to the dramatic urbanization of London and Edinburgh, as well as of northern industrial towns like Manchester. These works, written by popular journalists, medical men, and sanitary and social reformers, sought to investigate urban horrors and unveil the city’s poverty and filth for a primarily middle-class readership. But rather than reassuring urban readers of their distance, geographically and textually, from the observed scenes, they often provided reminders of the ubiquity of filth and of the inclusiveness of miasma—elements of city life that were themselves proxies for the countless other bodies encroaching upon the reader’s own. The city, and London in particular, had in earlier centuries enjoyed the reputation of offering unique possibilities for individual action and of providing a particularly rich stage for social interaction. But early nineteenth-century accounts often emphasized its role as a problem and a focus for social concern. Popular, medical, and parliamentary works about urban poverty, filth, and crowding came to define a distinctly Victorian literature of urban exploration, in which the city’s streets constituted the primary object of voyeuristic investigation. By cataloguing the living conditions of the poor—the filth, the crowded rooms, the lack of furnishing—social observers, reformers, and medical investigators provided specific, detailed reports of individual families and homes. Moving with unwavering attention from house to neighboring house, from room to adjacent room, they implied that each scene in its apparent particularity was representative of countless others. The inclusion of corroborating testimony from local parish or neighborhood authorities added further support to the implication that these documented observations reflected a more general truth about urban life across Britain. According to Patrick Brantlinger, the popularity of these works, which often emphasized personal and philanthropic involvement in reforming social conditions, peaked in the 1830s to the 1850s, when an earlier tradition of Romantic radicalism gave way to a general sense of disillusionment Page 36 →with broadly based political solutions (11–33). Other critics have helped to contextualize this growth of interest in urban conditions with relation to a number of historical factors: a strengthening Christian social reform movement, the very real prevalence of diseases like cholera and typhus in urban areas, and the restless politics in the period following the 1832 Reform Act.2 Critical approaches to these narratives have generally focused on the disjunctive quality of the described experience, on the often uneasy encounter between the middle-class observer and working-class poverty and filth. F. S. Schwarzbach has argued that this rupture was a result of demographic changes that made middle-class inhabitants, who often styled themselves as colonial explorers describing a “terra incognita” for the first time, largely ignorant of lower-class living conditions (“вЂTerra Incognita,’” 61–4). More recent scholarship, informed by a Foucaultian history of surveillance and normalization, has examined the social and political agendas motivating these middle-class representations. For Joseph Childers and Deborah Epstein Nord these works enact a form of containment on potentially unruly populations (Childers, chap. 5; Nord, chap. 2), and Poovey reveals the discursive homogenization of these classes of people into a “passive aggregate,” a legible, controllable, and curable entity (Making a Social Body, 73–88). These reports, Gilbert proposes, performed a similar function as the medical maps that allowed the city to be seen and managed as a whole (Mapping, 60). Others have argued that the language of miasma and disease lent itself to the rhetoric of class conflict and moral retribution, particularly as the timing of early cholera outbreaks in Europe often coincided with periods of intense political transformation, just before the passage of the first Reform Bill, for example, and during periods of Chartist activism in the 1830s and ’40s.3 A. Susan Williams posits that such accounts emphasized

disease’s working-class origins and figured its contaminatory threat as a form of retribution against a morally neglectful middle class (50–54). This argument finds its most familiar illustration in Carlyle’s anecdote of the Irish widow who, denied a sympathetic “sisterhood” by her uncaring neighbors in Edinburgh, instead “proves her sisterhood” by infecting them with typhus (Carlyle, 151), but in other examples, too, transmissible disease came to be associated with transgressive working-class bodies.4 This sustained attention to the class dynamics of urban exploration sheds light on the contributions of medical and sanitary writings to the period’s political and social objectives—to the management of the poor (if not always of poverty) and to the eventual implementation of overarching public health initiatives. This political context informs the readings that follow,Page 37 → but this chapter is less concerned with populations than with bodies, and specifically, with these texts’ reconceptualization of the body—whether that of the middle-class observer or the impoverished observed—with the potential for a sociality understood to reside in its orifices and interfaces. In enumerating the possibilities for physical connection, from the sick to the healthy, from excrement to food, from the dead to the living, these narratives suggested the transmissibility of symptom to symptom, sensation to sensation, between one body and another. In this sense, my treatment aligns more closely with William Cohen’s investigation of the “fluid exchange between surface and depth, inside and outside” in Victorian novels, where “the organs of ingestion, excretion, and sensationВ .В .В . perform the flow of matter and information between subject and world” (Embodied, xii). How, I ask, did sanitary and social reform narratives help to shape an account of this more fluid, more permeable and transmissible physiology? In other words, this chapter considers the ways in which the body’s uncontainment enables not just the normative, governmental practices Gilbert investigates, but also a kind of physiological intersubjectivity, an alternative to sympathy as a mode of social connection. These accounts of miasma, I suggest, provide a particularly potent example of urban theorist Marc Guillaume’s claim that “[i]f we rid the notion of epidemia of all its pathos, what remains is an abstract model or, more precisely, a series of models. Epi-demos: upon the people.В .В .В . Epidemia, then, works on the social bond” (59). The language of miasma offered a way of describing the social relations, both troubling and productive, made possible and even probable by urban living conditions. Enabling, even enforcing physiological intimacy between unlikely partners—the middle-class observer and his working-class subject, the corpse and his living relation—miasma theory implied that across the page and through the senses, even readers might find themselves participating in its vision of sociality.

Urban Excesses: Bodies and Texts Like Kay’s 1832 The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester, these later reports made little distinction between sanitary threats and moral ones. For early sanitary reformers like Kay and Chadwick, that blurring of boundaries was strategic, a means of suggesting that the poor, with their intemperate and immoral behaviors, were to blame for their own physical sufferings.5 But in linking Page 38 →the moral to the physical, these accounts also revealed the underlying anxiety common to these paired concerns: that associated with the mixing of bodies. Whether in the form of a bed shared among strangers or cesspools in proximity to a well, these descriptions draw attention to the dangerous potentialities that reside in the spaces between one body and another—between surfaces in intimate juxtaposition, between the processes of excretion and consumption, even between life and death. These anxieties about bodily connection assume their most visible form in the scenes of sexual contact that serve, predictably, as the rhetorical centerpiece in many of these reports, and whose relevance to a discussion of sanitary conditions passes unquestioned and unexplained.6 In his 1842 Report, for example, Chadwick turns from a treatment of sewage and ventilation to the following litany of extramarital mixing from a sanitary investigator at Hull: [One woman] stated that she had lodged with a married sister, and slept in the same bed with her and her husband; that improper intercourse took place.В .В .В . Another female of this description admitted that her first false step was in consequence of her sleeping in the same room with a married couple. In the instance I have mentioned of the two single women sleeping in the same room with the married people, I have good authority for believing that they were common to the men. In the case

which I have mentioned of the two daughters and the woman where I found the sailors [all in a single room], I learned, from the mother’s admission, that they were common to the lodgers. (Chadwick, Report, 193)7

At once inviting and repelling the investigator’s and reader’s voyeuristic gaze, this passage details working-class bodies intersecting in ways—promiscuous, indiscriminate, incestuous—that would also have seemed unsurprising, if unsavory, to middle-class audiences. The close spaces of the slum, where whole families might live in a single room, serve here as mere preconditions to what Chadwick and his collaborator describe as a working-class proclivity for immoral behavior. But mixing of a sexual nature was only one of many forms of corporeal mingling described in these works, which included the less titillating though equally troubling juxtapositions between healthy bodies and corpses. The expense of funeral arrangements, the Catholic tradition of holding wakes, even a strong attachment to the deceased could lead to the delay of burial, Page 39 →these reports informed readers, and urban living conditions often brought the living, the diseased, and the dead into close proximity. In an essay on urban interments written as a supplement to his Sanitary Report, Chadwick quotes an undertaker in Whitechapel: “I have known them [the deceased] to be kept three weeks: we every week see them kept until the bodies are nearly putrid: sometimes they have run away almost through the coffin, and the poor people, women and children, are living and sleeping in the same room at the same time” (Supplementary Report, 39). In this instance, not only do the poor fail to distinguish between the appropriate spaces for living, sleeping, and burial, but even the liquefying dead body refuses to respect the boundary provided by the coffin.8 These seemingly separate concerns—about promiscuity, rotting corpses, and sanitary conditions—converge in a third report, coauthored by one of Chadwick’s supporters in the medical community and the founder of the Health of Towns Association, William Guy: The Committee took a general view of the street [Church Lane], and found it strewed from end to end with night soil, sweepings of houses, decayed vegetables, &cВ .В .В . opposite the doors of the dwelling-houses, the inhabitants ease themselves night and day, and on this spot all kind of filth is thrown, the accumulations not being removed.В .В .В . In these wretched dwellings all ages and both sexes, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, grown up brothers and sisters, stranger-adult males and females, and swarms of children, the sick, the dying, and the dead, are herded together. (Sykes, Guy, and Neison, 16–17) Guy and his coauthors trace a steady progression here, from the loss of boundaries between clean and dirty, to the lack of distinction between public and private, and finally to the mixing of generations, sexes, family members, and strangers. But the juxtaposition of these examples also illuminates what these varied observations have in common: the multiple points of connection possible among urban inhabitants. The voluntary intersections that take place in common beds or even on floors are merely visible reminders of the kinds of invisible mixing taking place elsewhere, in cesspools, cemeteries, and streets, where the excesses of other bodies—urine, excrement, effluvia—make inexorable contact. Just as even buried bodies, local officials argued, were packed with insufficient space between coffins or at an insufficient depth, resulting in noxious gases and “putrid effluvia” overflowing into clean supplies of air and water for the living (Chadwick, Supplementary Page 40 →Report, 138),9 the night soil and other waste in the streets were sources of deadly miasmas, bearers of organic decay that could afflict otherwise healthy bodies through inhalation or ingestion. These descriptions of sexual promiscuity might have elicited prurient interest, but they also invited the middleclass reader’s judgment; by depicting the working classes as objects of almost anthropological study, they were also scenes from which the reader could safely distance himself or herself. However, as these accounts of miasma suggested, other forms of bodily mixing were not so easily refused. Observers at the scene—and even, as some of these reports imply, readers at home—were included as participants in a shared physiological space of urban effluvia and exhalations.

Indeed, according to writers like George Godwin and Hector Gavin, the excesses found in working-class neighborhoods, the mixtures of vegetable, animal, and human, the overflowing waste, were not apparent only to the eyes. With their olfactory, sensory immediacy, middle-class observers, too, felt their effects. In one London street, for example, architectural reformer Godwin witnessed houses without drainage, without ventilation, without water-supply, except of the worst description, ditches presenting an evaporating surface of the foulest kind, and the roads a mass of mud and filth; the whole being a marsh seven feet below high-water mark. In Vicarage-terrace the only drain available is a sink under the pump, into which they habitually empty all the slops of their houses! The sink communicates with the well, and the people have no other water to drink! (Town Swamps, 58; emphases in the original) This catalog of blurred surfaces and boundaries, between the surface of the flooded ditch and the contaminated atmosphere above it, and between the road and the sodden mud, presented a nightmarish vision of excess and indistinctness. Godwin’s account culminates in his distressed realization that even the cesspool fluids and the drinking-water supply are mixed, and that this seemingly endless and inescapable circuit of excretion and consumption does not limit itself to a single individual, but instead represents an uncontrolled sharing of bodily fluids among individuals. What is more, the observed uncontainment encroaches upon the viewer as well, as Godwin’s outrage spills from the written page, his italicized words and exclamation points conveying a sense of the immediacy of his repulsion. For physician Gavin, secretary to the Metropolitan Sanitary Commission Page 41 →and a member of the Health of Towns Association, the observed conditions could be felt even more perceptibly upon the body. As one of his contributors, a police officer visiting working-class homes in Wales, recounted, all lodgers lie on the ground or floor.В .В .В . Each party had with them all their stock, consisting of heaps of rags, bones, salt fish, rotten potatoes, and other things. The stench arising from this crowded house was hardly endurable. There were only two stump bedsteads in the house. The yard at the back was unpaved; there was stagnant water in the yard, and the privy was running over, and was covered with filth of the most disgusting description, and the stench was everywhere sickening. (Gavin, Habitations, 55) In a passage that reveals as much about the living conditions of the poor as about the standards and expectations of middle-class observers, the officer’s (and by extension, Gavin’s) judgment is clear. People should lie on a bed, rather than on the floor; yards should be clean, dry, and paved; the contents of a privy should be contained and, as its name implies, kept “private,” rather than overflowing beneath the eyes and noses of residents and visitors alike. Rather than any single offense, it emphasizes the general loss of boundaries, of appropriate places and uses in daily life. But the lack of distinctions in this home—between food and waste, between one lodger and another—extends beyond the scene itself, as the officer’s reference to his own bodily reaction reveals. What he sees is “disgusting” to his moral sensibilities, as he positions himself as a privileged observer, but that “disgust” is also palpably physical.10 The “stench” to which he twice refers, as well as his characterization of what he sees as “hardly endurable” and “everywhere sickening,” indicate not only his presence at but also his own physiological response to the scene. In addition to an immediate olfactory response and attendant nausea, the officer’s words point to the effects of miasma, the gases believed to emanate from the sick, as well as from waste products and decaying matter.11 Indeed, even after John Snow’s famous demonstration in 1849 that cholera was spread through a water supply contaminated with human waste, miasma theory remained influential in both medical and popular discourse until the rise of bacteriology in the 1870s and ’80s (Wohl, Endangered, 87, 124–25).12 According to the theory, of which Gavin and many others in the medical community were adherents, the officer’s inhalations of the filth and rottenness before him would have been “sickening” indeed, the means by which the principles of disease could be transmitted to his own body. To be Page 42 →in the presence of—and crucially, to smell—other bodies and their excesses meant that one was a physiological participant in their decay.

What these accounts describe, then, are the multiple incursions of other bodies into the observer’s own. Miasma’s connective agency was uncontainable, threatening to dissolve and exceed the boundaries of the room or street under observation; it joined not only the working-class subjects of these reports with one another, but also the middle-class observer with any number of anonymous individuals present only as the remnants of bodily processes—as the exhalations of the sick, the vitiated bodily fluids in a cesspool, or the decaying corpse lying nearby. The act of observation thus entailed its own form of promiscuous relations. What is more, while these accounts necessarily emphasize the physiological susceptibility of their traditionally privileged middle-class authors, the etiology they both promote and exemplify suggests that exposure to miasma—regardless of class—had the power to draw anyone into an unwanted intimacy with innumerable other bodies both visible and invisible at the scene. Hence the simple act of inhaling, as Gavin explained, meant drawing in air “loaded with the most unhealthy emanations from the lungs and persons of the occupants,—from the foecal remains which are commonly retained in the rooms,—and from the accumulations of decomposing refuse which nearly universally abound”; indeed, he concluded that “to breathe it was to inhale a dangerous, perhaps fatal, poison” (Sanitary Ramblings, 69).13 Investigators frequently commented on miasma’s power of involuntary inclusion. Gavin himself, for example, curtails his description of the filth surrounding one house, writing that it “emits the most disgusting and sickening odours. I could not remain to make notes of this place, so overpowering was the abominable stench, ” while at another point he writes that, “On endeavouring to examine the state of this place, I was overcome by the most distressing nausea I have ever experienced during my sanitary investigations.В .В .В . I did not stay to inquire” (Sanitary Ramblings, 9, 73). Chadwick exclaims about “intolerable” odors (Report, 117), and yet another investigator writes that “those whose senses are not very nice cannot breathe it [the air] with impunity, even for a few seconds; with others, two or three inhalations are certain to produce sickness” (quoted in Gavin, Habitations, 56–57). According to physician Thomas Southwood Smith, attending at such scenes is “not to be performed without danger. During the last year, in several of the parishes, both relieving officers and medical men lost their lives in consequence of the brief stay in these places.”14 Yet another, prefacing his observations with the claim that “[w]ith regard to myself, these effluvia are Page 43 →but a source of interest and an object of research,” soon found himself experiencing those effluvia in a more immediate way: “My limbs shook and my blood sickened; each time I was very ill.В .В .В . I felt the poison coursing in my veins” (“Miasma,” 239). Early socialist author Flora Tristan, too, remarked that as a result of her visit to a London slum, “my stomach was churning and my temples throbbed” (London Journal, 135). The body itself, permeable, susceptible, responsive, served as a legible medium in these texts, providing its own physiological testimony about the scene at hand. Where miasma disrupted the traditional boundaries between classes, then, it also blurred the distinctions understood to separate external from internal, investigatory observation from bodily participation. The period’s medical and literary texts, as Gilbert shows us, figured working-class bodies as in need of containment.15 But these representations suggested that middle-class bodies—including those of writers like Smith and Gavin—were also understood to be sites of potential for permeation and transmission. These accounts reimagined the contours of the body, figuring them as spaces of interchange and intersection, as charged loci within narratives thick with miasma. Indeed, what Foucault has described as the “intensification of the body, ” the discursive process that transformed the body into a site of heightened deliberation and discussion (History of Sexuality, 123), operates through these descriptions of miasma’s effects. According to the journalist who said his “blood sickened,” for example, the boundaries of the body—those regions of permeability—also served as a field of contestation and defense: “the skin became the great purifier of the bloodВ .В .В . upon its healthy activity depended the discharge of the cause of disease” (“Miasma,” 239). Likewise for Gavin, Chadwick, and others, corporeal surfaces and orifices—eyes, nostrils, skin—were the points through which the body’s processes both traveled beyond the self and allowed others to enter. For readers accustomed to fiction’s cultivation of sympathy, these passages might have elicited feeling for both the miserable lodgers and the intrepid observer—but these works invited them to sympathize at not just an emotional but also a visceral level, to experience their own disgust and nausea at the filth at the scene. But where other works, with their vivid descriptions and graphic details, merely invited readers to imagine themselves

vicariously present, Tristan explicitly situated them on site in her 1840 account of St Giles Parish in London. Writing about her experience, she shifts easily from the personal and specific “my,” to the more abstracted “one’s,” and finally to the inclusive “yours”: “[H]ow difficult it was to overcome my loathing and gather up sufficient courage to proceed through the mire and nastiness! In Page 44 →St Giles one feels asphyxiated by the stench; there is no air to breathe nor daylight to find one’s way.В .В .В . Foul odours rise from the mire at your feet, and dirty water drips upon your head” (Tristan, London Journal, 134–35).16 The “odours” and “mire” of the slum, literally too visible and uncontainable as they encroach upon the narrator’s person, become figuratively uncontainable by the text as well, as she suggests that even the anonymous reader might be engulfed by its filth. Later on this same page, however, Tristan reverses course: mindful of her socialist politics, she appeals to her own and the reader’s sympathy, declaring that the poor are “human beings, my fellow men” (135). But before long she vacillates again, comparing her human subjects to “so many animals” (135), and a few pages later, in her description of London’s Jewish quarter, returns to a familiar refrain, declaring that she “cannot breathe” and has a “feeling of nausea” (144).17 The body’s resurgence and the sociality situated there—in the transmission of smells and dirt from other bodies and surfaces to her own—symbolize at once a willing and unwilled fraternity with her subjects. Imagine what the poor must endure, her descriptions seem to say, yet her bodily revulsion, which repeatedly intervenes, conveys a kind of physiological reluctance to participate in their suffering: the body’s visceral sympathies counteracting her political ones. Her body (and, she implies, her readers’ bodies) enables sympathetic identification with the working classes and simultaneously prevents it from being sustained.

Miasma’s “Commonwealth” Like the cesspools and airborne poisons they described, these accounts were themselves uncontained: the observer’s personal and particular experience might, they suggested, be understood as a universal one. While some claimed that filth and disease were problems exclusive to the lower classes, others demonstrated that miasma’s uncontainability meant that all urban dwellers, not just members of the working class or visitors to the slums, might be within its vaporous reach. The miasmas to which the body is infinitely permeable, they imply, are a defining feature of urban experience. Miasma thus provided a language for describing the otherwise imperceptible relations among urban individuals, regardless of social class, gender, age, or even neighborhood. Moreover, while it sometimes lent itself to more traditional modes of representing connections across class, such as the rhetoric of sympathy or retribution, it also offered an alternative, a Page 45 →vision of physiological connectedness unrelated to one’s moral or economic condition. An 1843 Quarterly Review article, for example, observed that “our main thoroughfares, such as Oxford Street, Holborn, Piccadilly, the Strand, Pall Mall, and St. James’s StreetВ .В .В . [are] linked on either side, in the forms of courts, alleys, stable-yards, and culs-de-sac, [to] a set of vile stagnant ponds.В .В .В . Even the hollow square of the royal palace is made to retain its block of the stagnant fluid” ([Head], 418).18 Drawing on the motifs popularized by miasma theory—“courts” and “vile” liquids—it pointed out that the effluvia and odors of the city were everywhere, regardless of class or neighborhood. Christian social reformer Thomas Beames likewise described London by means of a similar set of juxtapositions, as “at once the seat of a palace and a plague spot; senators declaim, where sewers poison; .В .В .В and Europe’s grandest hall is flanked by England’s foulest grave-yard” (14). And a version of these juxtapositions that appeared in Fraser’s in 1847 sounded a particularly ominous note: Nor let our fashionable readers suppose that these scenes [“of misery and degradation, andВ .В .В . filth”] are only to be found in the low neighbourhoods of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, or St. George’s-in-the-East. They bask under the very shadows of the cathedral and the palace. They are profusely scattered, in all their festering foulness, through the aristocratic parishes.В .В .В . [A]s the palace of our queen has been built upon a swamp, and in the lowest level of the lowest district of London, you do but follow the fashion if your own abodes are not models of wholesomeness. ([Guy], “Sanitary,” 515) Miasma promised to be as encompassing as a map of the city, leveling distinctions and overcoming distances. But

rather than a lesson about brotherhood (or, as Carlyle would have it, “sisterhood”), these descriptions offer a lesson about miasma itself—about its inevitability, about the multiplicity of social relations enabled by its indiscriminate and inclusive movements. What writers, readers, queen, and her impoverished subjects share, according to these reports, is not a sense of national identity or capacity for emotion, but foremost the common waste and vitiated air in which all are imbued at that moment. These accounts offer a vision of embodied sociality, in which each urban dweller’s physiologically responsive body is not only a producer of miasma but also a potential recipient. The Registrar-General’s Report of Page 46 →1858, alluding to the generalizable quality of this mode of social participation, noted that more than two millions of people live in London over sewers and cesspools. The poison is generated in every house; it is distributed conveniently along all the lines of road, so as to throw up its vapours into the mouths, throats, and lungs of the people through innumerable gully-holes, which are either left untrapped, or trapped imperfectly, in order that the poisonous gases might escape. A variation in the pressure of the atmosphere draws up the stinking air from the sewersВ .В .В . passing currents of poisonous airs steadily over the people of London. (“MarriagesВ .В .В . Quarter Ended December, 1857,” 209) In this description, miasma functions as a defining, inescapable element of the urban condition; it is as general as London’s population. While the author criticizes an inadequate sewerage system (and elsewhere reformers were all too ready to accuse Irish immigrants on the one hand or indifferent middle-class landlords on the other), this account casts no blame on individual culprits. Miasma, it suggests, is by its nature untraceable, unassignable. Indeed, for adherents of miasma theory, even the exhalations of a healthy person represented air that was vitiated—“defiled and rendered poisonous,” as Gavin put it—by the mere fact of having passed through a pair of lungs (Sanitary Ramblings, 22). To exhale, in other words, was to emit poisons, and to inhale, especially in a crowded room or close space where unvitiated breaths were in limited supply, involved risk.19 Even in London’s “cleanest and best-ventilated houses,” according to Godwin, “countless myriads of minute atoms of matter are constantly floating in the atmosphere, and entering the lungs of young and old.В .В .В . constantly rising from the surface and floating around,—germs of disease, emissaries of death” (Town Swamps, 64).20 As unavoidable and as necessary as the act of respiration, miasma both enveloped and suffused all. It transformed Tristan’s experience of Britain’s capital into one of bodily oppression, where the individual became permeable to the city itself: “In London one draws gloom with every breath; it is in the air; it enters at every poreВ .В .В . one’s head is heavy and aching, one’s stomach has trouble functioning, breathing becomes difficult” (London Journal, 7). Merely to breathe in the city, then, was potentially to bring oneself, however involuntarily, into intimate contact with others, to accept the possibility of making oneself permeable and of transmitting one’s own bodily effects in turn. Page 47 → According to these reports, then, the body is a deeply social entity, at any moment a point of potential intersection with any number of others. Farr’s 1851 diagram of population density (fig. 2), which figures individuals as significant only in their connections to others, illustrates this vision of sociality. The image reduces the individual to a node, equivalent to and indistinguishable from others, as it draws attention to the social potential—the lines sprawling in every direction, joining node to node—in the spaces between one body and the next. Like miasma theory, the image focuses on social continuities, on the charged spaces that exist in the interstices between and excesses around each individual. While usually perceived as threatening, miasma’s social potential could nonetheless also lend a sense of coherence to urban experience. As one author reflected, “the air the labouring classes breatheВ .В .В . is the fluid in which rich and poor are equally immersedВ .В .В . it is a commonwealth in which all are born, live, and die equal” ([Head] 421). Here, where social participation was a matter of the senses and the viscera, of the physiological responses and processes of the body, those collective breaths represent a universalizing, even potentially redeeming physiological experience, shared by all. Thus as miasma theory transformed invisible

vapors and breaths into something material and consequential, it also rendered the distinctions and boundaries separating individuals—rich and poor, observer and observed, subject and reader—immaterial. In this involuntary intimacy of organs and orifices, where breaths passed out of one body and into another, the city’s population, spread across miles and economic divides, was joined into a continuous whole.

Sanitation’s Sensational Afterlife This genre of urban investigatory writing flourished during what historian David Roberts has described as a period of centralization from the 1830s to the 1850s, when social reform movements dominated the British political landscape. By the 1860s, however, such governmental initiatives lost momentum, and private, philanthropic endeavors emerged in their stead. Even so, this earlier literature of urban exploration provided one template for the latter; in his account of late nineteenth-century charitable (and fashionable) expeditions into the slums, Seth Koven argues that impoverished neighborhoods were not merely objects of philanthropic, clerical, and journalistic interest, but also opportunities for “emancipatory experiments” on Page 49 →the part of their bourgeois authors (5). For this chapter’s early Victorian doctors and sanitary reformers, too, we might imagine that the journey into the slums served multiple purposes, where political or professional agendas might be complemented by the pleasures of transcending the objective, observing self—and where the resulting text offered readers the possibility of corresponding pleasures, both vicarious and visceral.

Page 48 → Fig. 2. Diagrams Representing the Density and Proximity of the Populations of London, Census of Great Britain, 1851. Population Tables. I. Numbers of the Inhabitants, vol. 1 (London, 1852), facing l. (Courtesy of the Wellcome Library.)

Miasma’s conception of the body—and of the written text—as a medium for physiological transmission also traveled beyond these investigatory, sanitary endeavors, to find a potent afterlife in another form altogether: sensation fiction, which cultivated its own version of the permeable self and elicited the frisson of vicarious participation. To be sure, the undrained cesspools, excremental streets, and filthy houses that so entranced sanitary reformers in earlier decades were a world away from the thematic concerns of 1860s and 1870s sensation fiction: the concealed histories, sexual secrets, and underhanded schemings that abound in works like Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. Yet Nancy Aycock Metz has suggested that, with their emphasis on experiential immediacy and their voyeuristic concern with the base details of human existence, sanitary reform anticipated these later fictional works, whose primary function was not to educate, but to entertain and excite. Beyond these stylistic similarities, however, these two genres, sanitary and sensational, also share crucial assumptions about the body—both the bodies depicted within them and the body of the implied reader. Recent scholarship has revealed the ways in which mid-Victorian gothic and sensation novels both reflected and anticipated an emerging psychology of the body, where theories of hysteria, nervous reflexes, and responses to the uncanny explored the thresholds between psychic and physiological experience.21 At the same time, I suggest, sensation fiction looked back to earlier conceptions of the body’s permeability. It effectively inherited sanitary reform’s vision of the body, while also sanitizing it of epidemic potential and rendering it safe and pleasurable for public consumption. Sensation fiction both depicted and explicitly enacted the transmission of physiological effects through language, as it demonstrated the susceptibility of bodies within the text as well as of those outside it. For sanitary and social reformers, one indicator of the observer’s immediacy at the scene and hence of the authenticity of his or her testimony was the documented response of the body: asphyxia, nausea, faintness. Moreover, by recounting in considerable detail both these sanitary horrors and the authors’ own physical and emotional reaction to them, writers like Gavin and Tristan invited readers to share in that intensely visceral experience.Page 50 → Their accounts of the “stench” of “rotten potatoes,” the description of an overflowing privy, even more the “mire at your feet, and dirty water drip[ping] upon your head,” were designed to place the reader into a projected space of immediacy, where imagining the scene might be enough to produce real disgust or sickness. One need not live in such conditions to fall ill: the proximity of the visitor, standing in the same close room or near the same open sewer—or even the susceptibility of the imaginative and empathetic reader, learning about such encounters from the safety of his or her home—could induce similar symptoms. While the period’s medicine could account for the former but not (yet) for the latter, these works nonetheless invited the reader to imagine the transmission of bodily experience across the page, through the written word. This conception of the body as almost infinitely and infinitesimally permeable, this belief in its susceptibility to influences which might include the words printed upon the page itself, reemerged a few decades later as one of the central conceits of another genre, sensation fiction. As D. A. Miller has observed, sensation fiction operates precisely through this imagined experiential affiliation, producing “a fantasmatics of sensation in which our reading bodies take their place from the start” (Novel and the Police, 148); the reader registers the character’s nervousness, surprise, and horror, and the twinned response in the two bodies, the character’s and the reader’s, is legible through the involuntary twitches and tics described in the one and elicited in the other. Miller’s interest is in “the neuropathic body of the Woman” that appears in these works, a site of nervous sensation and also a readerly proxy, that which our own bodies come to resemble (Novel and the Police, 153). But other critics contend that male-identified readers of these fictions defined their responses in ungendered terms (Winter, 324; Casey, 4–5),22 and these miasmatic antecedents, too, suggest a larger, less clearly gendered history for sensation fiction’s sensational effects. To be sure, in the physiology imagined and mobilized by miasma theory, all bodies were susceptible and transmissible, subject to the communication of both excesses and effects. Cohen has argued that the Victorians conceived of internal feeling and external physiological experience as continuous, linked rhetorically and theoretically in prose, and, accordingly, sanitary and sensation writing alike translated the susceptibility of the reader’s imagination into a physiological permeability, sympathies transposed into symptoms. Both depended for their success upon the transformation of the internalized, imaginative experience of reading into an externalized, physiological one, such that the reader might

respond with frissons and nausea of their own. By this means sensation fiction,Page 51 → Alison Winter proposes, engendered its own sociality; like the mesmeric effects she investigates, sensation novels suggested the possibility of collective responses and experiences, the excitement and thrills they elicited traveling through the nerves of thousands of readers in precisely the same way (326–29). But analyzing these later works with relation to the physiology of miasmatic responsiveness illuminates not only their place within a broader history of the body, but also the ways in which they extend the experiential continuities between reading and immediate participation, as they demonstrate that texts have the power to transmit effects into the bodies of those who read or hear them. Collins’s Woman in White, as Miller reminds us, is replete with passages that suggest the transmission of sensation, as when the vision of Count Fosco with his mice “excites a strange responsive creeping in [Marian’s] own nerves” (253). The vicariousness of physiological experience travels from observed to observer here, but the novel elsewhere invites readers, too, to consider their own embodied inclusion in sensation’s trajectory. Collins and others reveal that words, by recalling or reproducing experience, have the power to elicit an immediate physiological response. When, for instance, Walter hears Marian read from a letter that comments on the resemblance between Laura Fairlie and Anne Catherick, he interrupts the letter’s transcription midsentence, “start[ing] up from the ottoman before Miss Halcombe could pronounce the next words. A thrill of the same feeling which ran through me when the touch was laid upon my shoulder on the lonely high road chilled me again” (86). Later, too, when examining the vestry-clerk’s copy of the Marriage Register and finding no record of the Glydes’ marriage, his body articulates his reaction to the text before him: “My heart gave a great bound, and throbbed as if it would stifle me. I looked again—I was afraid to believe the evidence of my own eyes.В .В .В . My head turned giddy—I held by the desk to keep myself from falling” (529). Further, Walter is not alone in his susceptibility; when he speaks to Pesca about the latter’s past involvement in Italian politics, his words, “harmless as they appeared to me, produced the same astounding effect on Pesca which the sight of Pesca had produced on the Count. The rosy faceВ .В .В . whitened in an instant, and he drew back from me slowly, trembling from head to foot” (593; emphasis in original). So, too, Lady Audley’s Secret repeatedly represents characters as particularly responsive readers; thus when Robert Audley, seeking clues to the true identity of his uncle’s new wife, locates a telling inscription in a book, “at the sight of this third paragraphВ .В .В . [his] face changed from its natural hue to a Page 52 →sickly, leaden pallor” (161). Later, upon receiving a letter from his cousin, “A sick and deadly terror chilled [his] heart as he read” (212), and likewise, the label on a discarded hatbox produced a “white changeВ .В .В . over the young man’s face” upon its reading (237). In emphasizing the vertigo and palpitations that mere words can elicit, these scenes model the vicarious physiological inclusion that sensation fiction empowers itself to enact upon readers at every turn of the plot. Words engender felt symptoms in these characters’ bodies, just as they might travel across the page—and across geographical, personal, and temporal distances—to relay their physiological effects into the reader’s body as well. Imagining that both characters and readers inhabit this body, this endlessly susceptible, sensible, and transmissible body, sensation fiction transformed what were, in earlier sanitary reform writings, unwilling forms of contact into a willing, even desired act of participation through fiction. Sanitary reform helped to produce and promote an understanding of the body’s permeability—its susceptibility not just to disease-causing miasmas but to physiological experience more generally—and decades later, sensation fiction’s own expressive physiologies elaborated upon this earlier conception of the body, transforming it into a signature element of its plots. In sensation as in sanitation, the most intangible media, whether odors, vapors, language, or imagined experience, enable and engender forms of socially continuous experience. In both, the distance between bodies emerges as a space alive with possibilities for transmission, in which the condition of the body—indeed, the very body itself—cannot be contained by visible corporeal boundaries, but travels outwards, toward any number of others in the social sphere.

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Three Contagious Narratives Distant Causality and the Emergence of Multiplot Middlemarch was among the many English towns and cities of the 1820s, both fictional and real, that contended with the effects of disease, and Eliot’s inhabitants responded with a historically representative mГ©lange of medical theories. Lydgate’s “new ideasВ .В .В . about ventilation” and the narrator’s allusion to the “unsanitary Houndsley streets” as the possible source of Fred Vincy’s illness register the period’s acceptance of miasma theory (Eliot, 118, 292).1 But when Mr. Vincy cancels his dinner party in order to put his ailing son and his house under “quarantine” (299), the novel alludes to an alternate theory in circulation—that of contagious causes. Contagionists’ belief that diseases spread through mediated or unmediated contact between persons was an alternative to miasma theory, with its emphasis on unsanitary conditions and environmental sources. While reflecting a range of scientific concerns—about the professionalization of medicine, about the role of housing and hospital reform in ameliorating public health, and about broader epistemological questions of diagnosis and representation2—Middlemarch remains largely noncommittal with respect to the foregoing etiological questions. Yet contagion is nonetheless central to the novel, I suggest, not as a medical theme but as a model of sociality, one mobilized by a subset of the medical community of the 1820s and ’30s to describe the distant, often unintended effects of contagious diseases. Thus when a minor character, Raffles, falls ill in chapter 41, the novel deflects a focus on physiology—on the language of ventilation or quarantine—and traces instead the social consequences of his extended, bedridden stay at Page 54 →Stone Farm. Its effects rupture existing models of community, radiating outwards in both expected and unexpected ways and eventually transforming Middlemarch’s social landscape. From the subtle, web-like influences that more traditionally guided action in rural England—Bulstrode’s political and financial power, the social aspirations of the Vincy family—the novel turns to influences that are undetermined, exemplifying what Leland Monk has called “the throw of the diceВ .В .В . the principle of absolute chance” that Raffles’s entrance represents (60). To be sure, his appearance has a direct and intentionally catastrophic effect on Bulstrode, the object of his years of blackmailing, but it also impacts Caleb Garth, whose chance meeting with Raffles in the road causes him to give up the remunerative management of Stone Court; Lydgate, whose treatment of the dying patient brings him under suspicion and ruins his professional ambitions; and Fred Vincy, who eventually finds himself master at Stone Court. The social model of petty pressures that frustrates characters like Lydgate and Dorothea in the novel’s first half, then, is supplemented if not yet supplanted by a different style of plot altogether. Raffles’s effects, both social and narrative, are cataclysmic, precipitating profound and sudden shifts of fortune for all those who come into even indirect contact with him. A number of critics have suggested that Raffles represents the intrusion of a Dickensian element into Eliot’s fiction.3 But in a novel so interested in social transformations of all kinds—medicine’s professionalization, political reform, the demographic shift from an agrarian to an urbanizing England—Raffles cannily embodies another transformation, in which one understanding of social participation gives way to another. Introducing him in terms that suggest the unease with which the book’s other characters might greet him, the narrator observes that he has “the air of a swaggerer, who would aim at being noticeable even at a show of fireworks” (450), and his behavior throughout (his drunkenness and dissoluteness, his threats and extortions) point to his incompatibility with the finer “threadlike pressure[s]” to which Middlemarch’s inhabitants, men like Lydgate and Farebrother, are acutely responsive (210). Indeed, Raffles represents a troubling new element, the incursion of urban anonymity into an otherwise largely unchanging social setting. The miasma of his past, as it were, surrounds him, the narrator tells us, like a “mental flavourВ .В .В . which seemed to have a stale odour of traveller’s rooms in the commercial hotels of that period” (450), and as we later learn, his personal history includes time spent in London (567). His background, then, is one of anonymous urban spaces,

whose “stale odour” conjures the intimacy of nameless bodies, the collective Page 55 →miasmatic excess of shared rooms and cheap lodging houses. His name, too, conveys the chance, unpredictable, and impersonal quality of those public encounters. Unlike the careful, agonized deliberation Lydgate exhibits at every turn, Raffles’s movements seem both unforeseen and undetermined, and his appearance in the novel seems to initiate a broader spirit of indeterminacy to the narrative more generally. Just pages before his first appearance, as if in anticipation of his arrival, the narrator asks, “Who shall tell what may be the effect of writing?” (448), and the evident answer to this open-ended speculation is to be found in the arrival of this unfamiliar character with his heretofore separate, unknown plot. If, as McWeeny has suggested, Eliot’s novel is interested in “social bonds between strangers” (“Sociology,” 542), then Raffles is its most visible and effective catalyst. Disrupting the social claustrophobia that Lydgate had associated with Middlemarch, Raffles both reveals connections—the community’s hidden ties with the unsavory public spaces of the city, the latent links between characters seemingly unconnected, like Will Ladislaw and Bulstrode—and engenders new relationships, directly between himself and Lydgate, and indirectly between Rosamond and Dorothea. He is at once a specter from the past, a personal history that the sanctimonious Bulstrode has taken care to conceal from his wife and neighbors, and an itinerant who is arguably the most “modern” of the novel’s characters. Middlemarch, like the two other mid-Victorian novels I consider at greater length in this chapter, lends thematic support to sanitary arguments—through concern for working-class living conditions and for the odorous state of city streets—but as I demonstrate here, these works also articulate a contagionist logic through their narrative structure. But the narrative and social implications of contagionism were apparent not only to novelists like Eliot and Dickens but also, in earlier decades, to the theory’s medical adherents, who envisioned a social sphere in which characters and subplots might be linked in unexpected, often imperceptible ways, and who mobilized new narrative forms to accommodate disease’s multiple relationships. For unlike miasma theory, whose synchronic model of sociality identified the all-too-perceptible physiological immediacy of other bodies in the environment, contagion often drew out the moment of contact, suspending it over time and space in a way that necessitated and also lent itself to narrative’s diachronic representations. Both novels and their medical antecedents suggested that contagion could demand and propel narrative in a way that environmental factors like miasma did not.4 Reflecting on the period’s varied explanations for health and illness in an Page 56 →1840 Quarterly Review article, Robert Ferguson, private physician to Queen Victoria and a frequent contributor to the journal, wrote: Paradoxical as it may appear, it is certain that a man’s health, nay life, is nearly as much in the keeping of those of whom he knows nothing as in his own. Of the three influences mainly acting on it—himself, society, and external nature—the first bears on it most intensely, the second most covertly, the last most constantly. (“Public Health,” 115) Here Ferguson frames the individual’s physiology as something implicitly public, as part of a broadly defined social sphere extending beyond a known circle of relatives and associates. But where miasma’s physiological effects were too apparent—the effluvia and exhalations of other bodies having an almost instantaneous effect upon one’s own—contagion’s effects were often “covert,” the overlooked intersections with other bodies that emerge into significance only later. The character of Raffles conjures this world of hidden causalities and delayed effects, where anonymous forms of contact can have imperceptible yet far-reaching consequences. These competing visions of disease’s transmissibility appeared throughout early Victorian medical writing in debates over the relative importance of social and environmental causes. For miasmatists, disease inhered in a continuous medium, like vapors or liquids, while for so-called contagionists disease spread through discontinuous moments of contact, not only in unmediated form (such as through meetings and touch) but also in mediated form (such as in leftover foods and discarded clothes). Yet these debates also revealed a broader rift between two conceptions of sociality and their corresponding representational strategies. To be sure, both theories envisioned

an uncontained body, where the transmissibility of the self unsettled more conventional notions of corporeal boundaries and limits. But where miasma theory sought to represent the excesses of the body in material terms—the cubic inches of expelled breaths or visible puddles underfoot—the contagious body left what were usually immaterial signifiers of its presence—an undefined something on a piece of paper that another person might subsequently touch, an invisible trace of the self left on a blanket or box. In addition, those who supported contagious explanations asked whether older narrative forms were capable of representing its conception of sociality, where intersections between individuals might be suspended over long temporal or geographical distances. Pointing to the inadequacy of more traditional accounts that favored a single plotline, they argued that tracing disease’s Page 57 →unexpected, “covert” movements required more complex narrative forms. In revealing the often chance circumstances by which a seemingly circumscribed life with its own plot intersected with any number of others, their accounts anticipated one of the dominant narrative forms of Victorian literature, multiplot. The structure of Victorian multiplot has received relatively little critical attention. In what remains the most comprehensive account of the Victorian multiplot novel, Peter Garrett reads the form as an expression of dialogism, which embraces differing perspectives and experiences within a single, unifying vision. His analysis responds to, as he puts it, a Jamesian question, “what the great Victorian multiplot novels artistically mean, ” rather than the more historically motivated inquiry, “why the multiplot novel was so important in the period” (4; emphases his). More recently, Jonathan Grossman has suggestively linked fiction’s use of multiplot to the period’s emerging transportation networks, to the simultaneities and intersections they enabled both authors and readers to imagine, and to the temporal communities they both revealed and enforced (109–10, 133–35). This chapter, like Grossman’s work, considers multiplot narrative’s historical and cultural contexts, and specifically here, the early medical and popular works where rudimentary versions of multiplot appeared. Examining medical and literary narratives together, I suggest that both recognized the possibilities and problems associated with increased mobility, communication, and crowding in the changing social landscape—and considered the strategies by which narrative might represent the distant connections and radiating consequences that were a function of this new social understanding. Because these medical multiplots were publicly contested in ways that their later fictional counterparts were not, the debates over their narrative validity shed light on the ways in which they challenged older representations of sociality. Both its proponents and opponents recognized contagion’s social function, the ability of its narratives to convey what Priscilla Wald has called a sense of “epidemiological belonging” (33). For Wald, the emergence of germ theory provided a specialized language to describe existing conceptions of communication, responsibility, and risk, and generated the conventions of what she describes as modern myth: a “formulaic plot” about globalization and “stock characters” like carriers and superspreaders (2–3). By investigating prebacteriological understandings of contagion’s narrative and social potential, understandings that also anticipated the twentieth-century accounts Wald discusses, this chapter uncovers nineteenth-century narrative conventions for representing contagious disease—the intersecting plotlines, Page 58 →the unexpected moment of revelation, the unwitting act of transmission—and the particularly Victorian set of concerns, about the limits of the liberal subject, about the shifting social boundaries and anonymities, that informed them. By making the period’s social transformations both visible and legible, contagionism provides insight into the causal trajectories that included and also extended beyond the self, into other bodies, other geographical and temporal frames, other narratives.

The Evidence for Contagion Debates over the validity of contagious explanations vexed the medical community during the early cholera epidemics of 1831–32 and 1848–49 that affected Britain and the Continent. For much of this period, the medical community was divided between the “contagionists,” as they called themselves, who held that disease spread through mediated or direct contact from individual to individual,5 and their opponents, the “anticontagionists,” who argued that proximity to any number of miasma-generating environmental causes, such as sewage, cemeteries, or swamps, was sufficient to produce disease within a population.6 But contagionism faced a number of challenges. Where miasma theory and sanitary reform made for a formidable alliance of politics

and medicine, contagionism’s favored preventive measure, quarantine, was regarded, according to Erwin Ackerknecht, as inimical to mid-Victorian free-market economics (566–59).7 Moreover, with its emphasis on anecdote and particularizing detail, contagionism seems to have left a less interesting legacy to scholars interested in the period’s normalizing discourses, and Christopher Hamlin, suggesting that other terms describe Victorian attitudes toward social reform and an emergent public health movement with greater precision, recommends that we discard the distinction between contagionism and anticontagionism altogether.8 Still, contagionist arguments were not only influential within medical and popular circles, but also, I suggest, made a unique contribution to the period’s narrative and social understanding. Other diseases may have been more prevalent during the 1830s and ’40s, but this chapter focuses on the two that received the greatest attention from the period’s medical and lay journalism: cholera and plague, which maintained a threatening presence in regions of the eastern Mediterranean.9 These were treated as, if not equivalent, then similar, as many of the concerns about plague were transferred to and often heightened in the case of Page 59 →cholera (Durey). The plague’s decimating effects upon London’s population in earlier centuries had earned it a primary place in many discussions of epidemics, and while cholera’s death rates in Britain did not even begin to approach those of its legendary predecessor, it received extensive attention across a range of journalistic sources.10 Anthony Wohl proposes that there were numerous reasons why cholera’s presence in the literature was, as he writes, “out of all proportion to its statistical importance”: its apparent suddenness of onset, the frequency with which affliction ended in death (Endangered Lives, 118; Morris). But significantly, too, cholera emerged concomitantly with medicine’s efforts at professionalization in the first half of the nineteenth century, a coincidence that raised the stakes of the debate over medical representation. What constituted medical evidence, and what form should it take? What kinds of narratives were best suited to representing the transmission of disease? Narrative, as numerous critics have noted, is by definition concerned with cause and effect,11 and this would seem especially so in the case of disease narrative. For contagionists, narrative could serve as a valuable tool in establishing the existence of a causal link between persons where none was apparent. Finding cases that would provide proof of contagious transmission, however, often proved challenging. One doctor turned to a report in which numerous inhabitants of a single house had fallen ill as evidence that cholera spread from individual to individual: “A woman, who lodged at the Old King’s-arms, in Houghton-street, Clare-market, died [of cholera].В .В .В . The next case was Mrs. Spraggs, the landlady, who, after eating a hearty supper, was seized, and died in the course of 48 hours. Soon after, a compositor, named Hulme, in my employ, who lodged in the house, was likewise attacked” (“Re-Appearance,” 773). But anticontagionists pointed out that such cases might, in fact, be evidence of environmental causes common to individuals in the same house or neighborhood (“Final Debate,” 148). Thus one prominent anticontagionist, Dr. Gilkrest, insisted in a letter to the Times, “[I] shall point out instances of apparent contagion,—that is, of individuals of the same family having been in a few instances attacked; a thing so often occurring, as in ague, from exposure to the same local causes” (3; emphasis his).12 Contagionists, needing to demonstrate transmission between otherwise unrelated individuals, sought cases where the disease’s victims had had no direct connection with each other. By tracing the specific, often overlooked means by which one person transmitted his or her bodily effects to another, Page 60 →they hoped to provide irrefutable proof for contagion. Their narratives foregrounded these moments of “covert” influence, of otherwise unnoticed contact between individuals. For their opponents, this search for evidence within the minutiae of medical case histories was suspect, even risible; where anticontagionists appealed to the authority of their longstanding experience in the profession (“he has been physician to the hospital twenty-four years, and has never seen the complaint communicated from bed-side to bed-side” ([Smith,] “Plague,” 517)), contagionists wrongly “made one thousand cases the exception, and one the rule general” (“Discussion,” 53). Yet as one author countered, “We have often contended that one instance of indisputable contagion is sufficient to establish the whole doctrine” (“The Cholera.—Scribbling,” 696). Instead of general rules, the individual narrative was the contagionist’s most compelling evidence.

To the anticontagionists these “instances” often seemed apocryphal, anecdotal, and, significantly, incompatible with the professional objectivity many in the medical community sought to cultivate during this period.13 For example, Southwood Smith, contrasting his own medical expertise with that of the contagionists, accused the latter of reviving “ancient” tales, remnants of an earlier, naive, and superstitious age. First appealing to the rationality of his audience, who “will scarcely forgive us for detaining him with things so frivolous,” he then refers to a series of improbable accounts, the first concerning a single plague-ridden bed responsible for 5,900 deaths, the next alleging that “the pestilent contagion was shut up in a rag for fourteen years!” and then another, claiming that “a flock of quails flew over the chimney of a house, in which several diseased persons were, and five of them fell dead upon the spot!” (“Plague,” 503).14 These irrational and fantastic misrepresentations were, he claimed, what passed for medical knowledge among contagionists, italics and exclamation points underscoring their unseemly emotional involvement in scientific matters. Yet as some contagionists sensed, the apparent failure of evidence was rather a failure of narrative: conventional narratives were ill-suited to representing the kinds of relationships forged by contagious disease.

Tales of Cause and Consequence While it is the very connectedness of narrative, critics tell us, the transmission of meaning from one point to another that distinguishes it from Page 61 →a mere agglomeration of details, the interest in questions of “transmission” was particularly intense at this time. Peter Brooks writes that the nineteenth-century novel, with its thematic emphasis on filial relationships and its formal use of multiple narrators and frames, “regularly enacts the problematic of transmission, looking for the sign of recognition and the promise to carry on” (28). That problematic lay at the center of mid-eighteenth-century legal discourse as well, according to Alexander Welsh, where lawyers sought ways to shape arguments in cases for which no eyewitness accounts existed. The solution was a causal narrative based on inference, in which jurors and judge were invited to identify, in the circumstantial evidence before them, a legible chain of cause and effect—a development that had a lasting impact on both criminal jurisprudence and the novel. In similar fashion, contagionists were tasked with constructing compelling narratives where material evidence of transmission was often fleeting or invisible. Cholera, in particular, was a disease that often eluded even the most attentive witnesses; unlike plague, which usually signaled its presence with buboes, or smallpox, with its telltale pocks on the victim’s skin, cholera had few symptoms regarded as unique. These accounts, then, are laden with the circumstantial, with details of behaviors, locations, and activities, through which authors attempted to convey the moment of transmission. The exigencies of contagionist argument, particularly its need to represent transmission outside the circles of family, neighborhood, and direct acquaintance, multiplied the links and trajectories made possible by disease’s spread. Depending less upon the traditional social forms of “recognition” and “promise” Brooks writes about than upon chance, unexpected outcomes, and concatenations of cause and effect, the relationships described in these accounts often join different social groups and extend to the indirect, the coincidental, and even accidental. Drawing upon the familiar language of eighteenth-century fiction, of familial relationships and inheritance, contagionists also reconfigured narrative itself, expanding its parameters to accommodate multiple axes of transmission and to make the accidental moment of intersection central to the whole. The uncontrolled and unexpected nature of transmission is central to these narratives. While their focus is on the everyday details of common life, on the bedding, clothing, and meals of their victims, these writers distance themselves from the unprofessional language Southwood Smith had associated with an earlier, unscientific age.15 Instead, they invite the reader’s rational inference based on the evidence presented: Page 62 → The son of a villager, who was coachman to a nobleman at fifty versts distance, died of cholera. The father went to the place to collect the effects of the son, and brought home with him his clothes, which he put on and wore a day or two after his arrival at his native village: he was shortly thereafter seized with cholera, and died of it. Three women, who had watched him in sickness, and washed his body after death, were also seized, and died of the disease. ([Ferguson], “The Cholera,” 194)

Unlike the “quails” that had improbably precipitated the deaths of plague victims, the circumstances and details included here occupy clear roles in the chain of events and the causal relationships the narrator attempts to establish: the distance traveled, which precludes environmental causes; the son’s clothes, aptly named “effects,” worn by the father, which provide one means of transmission; and the tending and washing of the father’s body, which provide another. The narrator draws attention to the central, mediating element, the clothes, which serves as both the narrative and physiological proxy for what is otherwise absent: the moment of direct bodily contact between father and son. A similar, central moment of mediated contact appears in this more fully elaborated account of contagion from the Lancet: The wife of a pensioner in the village had a sister in Glasgow, who lately died of the prevailing epidemic, and whose clothes were brought home to Campbelton in a box, by the Glasgow steamer. They were taken out to be washed with hot water, and the operation was commenced by the sister close to the place where the landlord, whose name was Leach, a very worthy old man, was, with his son, employed in repairing the thatch of the house. The latter frequently looked on at the washing, not suspecting danger; and it is even said that some of the hot water in which the dead woman’s clothes were washed was used in softening the clay with which the two men were working. The son became unwell, and by evening was very ill. The father, whilst ministering to the son, also became ill, and both rapidly sank, dying next day within an hour. (“Contagion of Cholera,” 413) The focus of this brief story lies at the point of contact through which transmission might have occurred, the circumstances that brought the dead Glasgow sister, present here only in the form of laundered clothes, into heavilyPage 63 → mediated contact with the landlord and his son, who are unrelated by geography, blood, or even acquaintance. The narrator refuses to specify the exact route of transmission, but the evidence of disease, realized in the workers’ bodies at the end, invites inference. Bodily contact is at once absent and implied throughout, where the possible vectors of transmission—proximity, “looking,” or the mixing of water into clay—hint at the strange physiological potential in this intersection between the dead sister and the two men. Although the catastrophic misfortunes of illness and death constitute both the starting and ending points of this narrative, the sister’s death is a mere preface, as the two men’s deaths serve as a denouement to the narrator’s main concern, the moment of transmission, which equals and perhaps even surpasses the characters in importance. In these seemingly trivial and unexceptional moments of daily life, physiology moves beyond the body; the corporeal effects that in miasma theory would have been communicated through the body—its exhalations or excrement—are here displaced onto objects or events, and outside the realm of intention or control. Through such unforeseen and unintended consequences, action becomes a mere node within disease’s causal trajectory, the point of intersection between the plot of the actor and plots in which he does not otherwise participate and which are often largely unknown to him, the means by which disparate, unsuspecting persons might be joined together.16 Indeed, the relationships between different plots and between the seemingly distinct individuals contained within them frequently eclipse the single individual in importance. More like the nineteenth-century multiplot narratives that Garrett describes than their eighteenth-century predecessors, these tales refuse to identify a primary plot, or even a clear hierarchy of plots. Instead, they articulate a different social vision, one characterized by the intersections between plots and by the resultant far-reaching causes and consequences that other, older forms of narrative were less able to support. While narrative cannot reveal disease itself, these accounts imply, it has the capacity to render visible the moment of communication between individuals that would otherwise go unmarked—the glance at the laundress, or the mixing of water into clay. Narrative suggests the link between what can be seen and narrated, the action or transaction that serves as the immediate cause, and the vector for that which cannot be seen and narrated, contagion. In this account of social participation subjects often act unknowingly, not always conscious of their infection or causative potential, just as the uninformed recipients of these consequences are also conscripted into contagion’s causal trajectories. Page 64 →

Traceable Effects For mid-Victorian clergyman and novelist Charles Kingsley, this involuntary status enforced rather than freed one from social responsibility. As an ardent Christian Socialist and advocate of muscular social reform, Kingsley held that the very unforeseeability of consequences enlarged one’s sphere of moral responsibility, to include all those who might be directly or indirectly affected by one’s actions.17 In his sprawling 1857 novel, Two Years Ago, whose title refers to a period of two national upheavals, the Crimean War and the 1853–54 cholera outbreak, the plot revolves primarily around the effects of the disease upon a fictional coastal village, Aberalva. Both the novel and its hero, Tom Thurnall, attribute cholera to an unsanitary environment, to local evils like overcrowding and poor drainage. Framing Aberalva’s epidemic as a “purifying challenge” that leads the characters through the process of emancipating themselves from sanitary failings and enables their transformation into self-governing citizens, Gilbert situates the village within the context of a larger “struggle for national purification and identity,” in an analysis that convincingly unites the novel’s otherwise seemingly divergent subplots, including one set in the antebellum South (Cholera and Nation, 183, 161). In a reading of the novel’s social rather than national vision, I, too, turn to the disease plot, and specifically to the ways in which Kingsley sutures the project of sanitary reform to a narrative ethics informed by contagionist theory. As Gilbert’s analysis suggests, sanitation plays a central role, serving as one of the novel’s moral proving grounds, the means by which characters demonstrate their worth. Thus Tom, the local physician, not only works to enact sanitary reform among the inhabitants but also attempts to enforce the Nuisances Removal Acts by personally removing the village’s waste himself.18 Where Tom demonstrates what Kingsley regards as moral strength in this instance, his boyhood rival, Elsley Vavasour, proves at once cowardly and unsanitary. Tom embodies the spirit of Kingsley’s practical, muscular social reform, in which spiritual and moral concerns are inextricable from physical and material ones. So, too, when the novel’s heroine, Grace Harvey, undergoes “sanitary repentance,” the ultimate proof of her spiritual awakening comes when she physically undertakes the disgusting work of town scavenger herself (I, 353). While Tom’s role as physician allows him to intervene out of professional concern, he also embodies the novel’s more general ideal of social responsibility—a sense of very direct personal responsibility for the conditions in which others live. The novel’s commitment to social reform is Page 65 →thus well suited to anticontagionism, with its established agenda of sanitary works, like clearing drains and burying the dead. Yet with a narrator who repeatedly emphasizes the multiple unintended consequences radiating from the individual, the novel also expresses a strong contagionist logic. Thus what might be read as ambivalence or confusion about disease’s origins in fact enables the novel to join sanitary reform’s emphasis on physical action to contagionism’s emphasis on narrative causalities. Indeed, in an earlier, unsigned essay for Fraser’s Magazine, Kingsley lamented that sanitary reform had not attracted more proponents precisely because the relationship between action and effect was too difficult to trace with any certainty: You have so little in it to show for your work. You may think you have saved the lives of hundreds; but you cannot put your finger on one of them; and they know you not; know not even their own danger, much less your beneficence. Therefore, you have no lien on them, not even that of gratitude; you cannot say to a man, “I have prevented you having typhus.” ([Kingsley], “Mad World, ” 138) Although these relationships remained invisible in the real world, Kingsley recognized that his fantasy of causal responsibility could be realized and rendered legible in fiction. Indeed, while promoting the lessons of sanitary reform, Two Years Ago mobilizes narratives that resemble their contagionist counterparts, drawing attention to the unlikely intersections between characters and plots. For moral responsibility in this novel requires not only action but also an acknowledgment of one’s social role—something, it implies, that can only be understood through narrative. Tracing cholera’s effects on Aberalva’s inhabitants necessarily depends upon the narrator’s watchful eye, which follows the disease as it “spring[s] on them from round every corner” and stealthily becomes “a little somewhat” in the fishmonger’s “fish-heaps” (II, 85, 88). But of yet greater import, Kingsley suggests, is the use of narrative to anticipate etiological outcomes, to project causes

and effects into an indeterminate future, and onto any number of other bodies. Both Tom and the narrator exemplify this forward-looking narrative skill, describing both what has happened as well as what might happen. For Kingsley, the moral individual is thus not merely capable of moral action, but also capable of generating narrative trajectories in which he or she envisions the consequences, however distant, of every action. The threatened arrival of cholera invites, even demands, this narrative Page 66 →vision; as Tom tells Grace, in an attempt to impress upon her the necessity of sanitary reform: “wheresoever cholera breaks out, it is some one’s fault: and if deaths occur, some one ought to be tried for manslaughter—I had almost said murder—and transported for life” (I, 387). Similarly, when Aberalva’s young preacher, Frank Headley, expresses his reluctance to sermonize on the cholera outbreak because he believes it a “secular” matter, Tom asks:19 There are your parishioners about to commit wholesale murder and suicide, and is that a secular question? You pound away, as I warned you once, at the sins of which they are just as well aware as you; why on earth do you hold your tongue about the sins of which they are not aware? You tell us every Sunday that we do Heaven only knows how many more wrong things than we dream of. Tell it us again now. (I, 359) Tom’s rhetoric reformulates the generalized sense of duty associated with sanitary reform into a particularized narrative of visible causes and effects, agents and victims, such that the otherwise invisible consequences of everyday behaviors (throwing waste into an alley, using dirty water to wash one’s floors) calcify into direct, murderous actions. In other words, Kingsley reimagines sanitation’s program of social responsibility, under contagionism’s transformative logic, as a web of narratives, in which each individual, willing or not, becomes a potential actor shaping the bodily fates of others. Contagion’s model of physiological sociality, in which one action might have any number of effects on any number of strangers, thus provides the foundation for Kingsley’s ethics of social belonging. For Thomas Haskell, an early version of this social self emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, when the expansion of capitalism required “thinking causallyВ .В .В . linking present choices to consequences more or less remote in time by the use of recipes that map a route from one to the other” (“Capitalism”).20 According to Haskell, this causal awareness signaled one’s willing participation in capitalism’s encompassing network of relationships; decades later, contagionists suggested that disease’s enforced sociality included even the unwitting and unwilling. Narrative made the physiological relationships of an invisible disease visible, but it also allowed for—even demanded, as Kingsley posited—this rescripting of causality. Where narrative gives shape to the possible range of distant consequences, and enables the production of positive rather than negative effects, the novel’s immoral characters prove incapable of imagining any but the Page 67 →most immediate consequences, especially those that extend beyond the self. When Elsley, for example, receives a visit from his brother-in-law, Lord Scoutbush, he blithely rejects the latter’s offer of repairs. Elsley has no thought for the consequences of his actions, but the narrator, who follows immediately after his refusal, does: “And so Elsley, instead of simply asking to have the house-drains set right, which Lord Scoutbush would have had done upon the spot, chose to be lofty-minded, at the risk of killing his wife and children” (II, 20). Here, the narrator supplies the physiological and narrative consequences that Elsley, typically, fails to generate for himself. Nor is Elsley’s vision of himself as a Romantic poet, author of “The Soul’s Agonies,” incidental to his role as antagonist in this novel.21 Though married, he lives in a self-imposed intellectual and emotional solitude, “attentive to that self which was fast becoming the center of his universe” (I,306). In a moment of crisis, Elsley attempts to isolate himself on Mount Snowden, against a theatrically sublime backdrop of lightning, chasms, caves, and spires. But disposing of this fantasy, the novel shows us Elsley’s limp, sodden body being most prosaically rescued by two good-natured boatmen who, concerned about his safety, have followed him up the mountainside: the episode recalls him both to the physical body he inhabits and to the social body of which he is a member. In the novel’s moral hierarchy of genres, Elsley’s poetry, in which the outside world exists to mirror

inner feeling, is inferior to prose. In the novel’s first chapter, “Poetry and Prose,” the young Tom wins friends by entertaining them with stories, while Elsley, “wool-gathering after poetry,” nearly poisons someone by delivering the wrong medication (I, 38). Poetry itself is not to blame,22 but unlike Tom’s narrative models, which help him to think causally and anticipate wide-ranging consequences, Elsley’s poetry focuses on the self at the expense of the social. Similarly, upon hearing Tom talk of aquatic “zoГ¶phytes,” Elsley aloofly responds that he can imagine no possible “link” between them and humans, to which Tom prophesies, “There is link enough sir, don’t doubt, and chains of iron and brass tooВ .В .В . which you will have a chance soon of seeing at work on the most grand and poetical, and indeed altogether tragic scale” (I, 260). This “link,” which Elsley refuses to acknowledge, is disease. Thus while the village of Aberalva—and the effects of this cholera outbreak upon it—might be relatively contained, disease is capable of authoring its own epic “poetical” narrative, as Tom suggests, encompassing the distant causes that Elsley refuses to recognize, between the zoГ¶phyte and the human, between the individual and (to quote Kingsley’s article for Fraser’s again) “the lives of hundreds.” Page 68 → Two Years Ago thus enjoins readers to see and foresee the effects that, in the medical literature, can only be represented as invisible and unforeseeable. For Kingsley, this enlarged sphere of moral consequence and responsibility gives new shape to the social imagination, a space in which all actions serve as potential nodes within a network of causal narratives.

Unexpected Intersections Contagionist accounts, too, drew attention to an expanded social vision, often turning its unveiling into the narrative’s central moment. Just as Middlemarch staged the displacement of the community’s “petty politics” by the devastating, radiating consequences of Raffles’s appearance (Eliot, 208), these medical narratives revealed that a more traditional account of social relations might be radically reshaped through its intersection with other plots and characters. The idea that an action might have unforeseen consequences, that it might serve as a node in some other causal trajectory extending beyond the individual and beyond intention, demanded these more complex narrative configurations. With causes multiplying and disseminating effects in unforeseen ways, an otherwise insignificant moment might well constitute a nodal point, a moment of intersection between the plot of the actor and other plots in which he or she does not knowingly participate. Persons in these narratives—as in their epidemiological equivalents—serve as unwitting vectors for an almost contagious joining of plots. Just as Victorian multiplot novels differed from their eighteenth-century predecessors in their refusal to identify a clear hierarchy of narratives, contagionist narratives foregrounded no single plot, but rather the intersections between plots. The moment of intersection was initiatory, precipitating the telling of other narratives—the emergence of another narrative trajectory or a return to a separate, earlier narrative as a way of explaining present circumstances. The multiplot elements present in early medical arguments, of course, were not the fully developed narratives we see in Dickens’s and Eliot’s work, but they do bear significant similarities to these later fictions. Even before the Victorian multiplot novel emerged as a dominant form, multiple intersecting narratives appeared in medical writings as an appropriate means of representing mid-nineteenth-century social relations and the farreaching causes and consequences that other, older forms of narrative were less able to support. Page 69 → Examples of multiplot narrative often surface within medical arguments when the primary narrative is revealed to be inadequate to explain the causal trajectory of disease. Only by tracing that trajectory back to some previously overlooked point of intersection with another possible narrative, they claim, can the proofs of contagion appear. Thus a Dr. Simpson, seeking to establish the means by which cholera is transmitted, describes the circumstances surrounding a series of cases afflicting the village of Monkton:

John Barnes, aged 39, an agricultural labourer, became severely indisposed on the 28th of December 1832В .В .В . on the day following, the patient was dead; but Mrs. Barnes (the wife), Matthew Metcalfe, and Benjamin Muscroft, two persons who had visited Barnes on the preceding day, were all labouring under the disease, but recovered. John Foster, Ann Dunn, and widow Creyke, all of whom had communicated with the patients above named, were attacked by premonitory indisposition, which was however arrested. Whilst the surgeons were vainly endeavouring to discover whence the disease could possibly have arisen, the mystery was all at once, and most unexpectedly, unraveled by the arrival in the village of the son of the deceased John Barnes. This young man was apprentice to his uncle, a shoemaker, living at Leeds. He informed the surgeons that his uncle’s wife (his father’s sister) had died of cholera a fortnight before that time, and that, as she had no children, her wearing apparel had been sent to Monkton by a common carrier. The clothes had not been washed; Barnes had opened the box in the evening; on the next day he had fallen sick of the disease. (quoted in Snow, 4–5)23 This relatively short passage, with its two stylistically distinct narratives, the first’s apparent self-containment ruptured by the second’s revelation, offers an encapsulation of multiplot discourse. In the first half, the author recounts the transmission of disease from John Barnes to his wife and their visitors, Metcalfe, Muscroft, Foster, Dunn, and Creyke, in a detached, formulaic way, with a tally of names and clinical outcomes. Information regarding the details and circumstances of these communications (Why did Metcalfe, Muscroft, and the others visit Barnes? What were the relationships among them? Did they visit separately, or together?) has no place in this account. At the same time, however, the author admits the inadequacy of this single narrative to provide the necessary information, and the surgeons who “vainly” ponder the first narrative soon find that it is far from self-contained. A second Page 70 →narrative enters with Barnes’s son at that moment, “Whilst” they are considering, suspended in the inconclusiveness of the first narrative. “Whilst” also appropriately suggests the simultaneity of the two narratives—the second half of this account, far from being a mere continuation of the first half, marks instead the point of intersection between two separate recountings, each, significantly, with its own stylistic markers. This second narrative is initiated by the arrival of someone from outside the immediate circle of village inhabitants, and in contrast with the reserve and containment of the first, it is marked by a sudden proliferation of adverbial modifiers and circumstantial detail, as it moves from what is implicitly a medical investigation, “all at once” to a “mystery” with dramatic flourishes. At the same time it shifts the focus retrospectively, to personal relationships, to the particulars and circumstances of the sister’s life, almost evoking a sense of her interiority through the details provided: a childless sister, her brother not present at her death, her unwashed clothes as her lone effects. The son’s narrative also reveals that by means of a box, the sister’s tale intersects unexpectedly with that of the town of Monkton, and the otherwise intimate and unseen moment of contact between a man and his dead sister’s clothes becomes the most consequential element in the narrative as a whole. This account describes a social sphere not merely transformed by new forms of transportation and communication—the steamer and the “common carrier” that deliver the disease-impregnated clothes to new communities—but rather one so fully reshaped as to render those technologies of connection unremarkable and even nearly invisible, noticed only when narrative draws attention to them. The world depicted here is one of geographical dispersal, where an emphasis on the familial tie between Barnes and his sister has been displaced by the narrative’s focus on the consequences radiating through Monkton, by the numerous accidental and indirect relationships wrought between the sister and Monkton’s inhabitants, in which Barnes is but an unwitting mediator. What contagionism demanded of readers and narrators, then, was an imagination capable of multiplot narrative, an ability to perceive in every action a potential nodal point through which one narrative might intersect with another. Thus when the anticontagionist physician Charles MacLean asserted that although “it is the custom in Turkey for the relations of those who died of the plague, to wear the clothes of the deceasedВ .В .В . there is no instance on record of the disease being communicated by these means,” the author of an 1826 Quarterly Review article demanded to know whether he had “traced all the old clothes which are worn by the relatives or sold at the Page 71 →bazaar?” (quoted in [Gooch] “Plague,” 252).24 And in response to MacLean’s claim

that he had not infected anyone with the plague even after having walked through Constantinople sick with disease himself, the author pointedly asked, “How does he know? did he inquire into the fate of all the people whom he had jostled in the streets, and sat by in the coffee-houses?” ([Gooch], “Plague,” 252). Unable to account for, or even to imagine, the range of unforeseen consequences and respective narrative trajectories that might radiate from any single, seemingly insignificant action, the author argues that MacLean fails to understand disease because he fails as a narrator. Indeed, MacLean seems to follow a different model for narrative altogether, one that accommodates only a single primary character and follows a single causal trajectory. By contrast, from a contagionist perspective his actions are no longer central or primarily causal, but are instead nodal points within a narrative scheme that might include many other equally important actors.25 Both this and Simpson’s account emphasize the need for an encompassing narratorial voice, a third-person narrator with the power to convey a comprehensive knowledge of multiple narratives to the reader. Hence, while anticontagionists might fault contagionists for relying upon seemingly insignificant narrative details, the latter critiqued their opponents for overlooking what for them constituted the crucial nodal points, the proofs of disease’s transmission. Another article directed a similar critique at Dr. Gilkrest’s narratorial skills in the case of “John Coffin,” who had died of cholera. Noting that only a single death, that of a girl, followed Coffin’s demise, even after several visits from relatives during his illness, Gilkrest summarily concluded that there was evidence only for environmental causes, not for contagion. One of the Lancet’s readers, however, refuted his claims shortly thereafter, and, after excerpting Gilkrest’s rather brief account, offered this more extended retelling of the original narrative: I think Dr Gilkrest should first have stated, that Cocklin had attended the wake of the first case [of cholera], in White’s RentsВ .В .В . but removed to Tile-yard to escape the disease; and that on the 21st of February he was attacked and died on the 25th. The girl, Julia Donnie, did not die the day after Cocklin, but was in and out of the room constantly where he lay, and slept in an adjoining apartment. She was attacked on February the 24th, at eight o’clock a.m., and died at eight p.m., previous to the death of Cocklin. The wake only continued two days. Cocklin’s sister visited him, and was attacked with severe diarrhoea. Mrs. Mayhoney, living in Poplar, who took an active part in Page 72 →rubbing the girl Donnie, was attacked with the disease, and died. Her daughter, Judith Carter, living in Limehouse fields, a distance of half a mile, came to see her, was attacked on the 3rd March, and died on the 6th. (“Contagiousness,” 127; emphases in original) The focal point of this narrative is not on the dying Cocklin/Coffin, but on the multiple, radiating narratives that emerge from his demise, narratives that are suspended over time (two weeks) and through different neighborhoods (Tile-Yard, Poplar, Limehouse). Moreover, the author of this piece means to prove not merely that cholera is contagious but more importantly, with a thoroughness intended to inspire the reader’s confidence, that he is a better narrator, a better observer of detail. He proceeds by noting that Gilkrest has mistaken the primary victim’s name, then by supplying us with the name of the girl, unnamed in Gilkrest’s account, and finally by methodically tracing the numerous circumstances and trajectories by which cholera spread from Cocklin to four other people absent from Gilkrest’s version. Where Gilkrest’s timeline is vague, mentioning that “Coffin’s” wake had ended “a week ago,” and that his death was “several days” before that, this author’s account is precise, specifying dates, times, and locations. As he remarks at the end of his letter, “The above circumstances are detailed as particularly as this space will admit.” MacLean’s abilities as a narrator in another case came under attack a few years later for similar reasons. Pointing to the case of “Madame W—” in Constantinople, who lay dying from plague as her father tended her and her child slept on her breast, he triumphantly observed that neither the father nor the child fell ill. However, as the author of a later article noted, MacLean “was guilty of an important omission, for in writing the account of Madame W—’s case, he never mentioned that a Greek servant girl some weeks after caught the plagueВ .В .В . and followed her mistress to the grave” (“A Story,” 171). This author then details the moment of unlikely contact, making it the focus of his own narrative, where, “fatigued by the labours she had undergone in opening and purifying the house, and oppressed by the heat of the day, [the girl] had thrown herself down and reposed some time on the mattress on which her mistress had expired.” Like his predecessor,

he accuses MacLean of an inability to look beyond his primary narrative. In focusing exclusively on Madame W— (the stylization of whose name draws, appropriately, upon the older literary genre of romans Г clef) and her immediate relatives, MacLean seems trapped within the earlier conventions of eighteenth-century narrative, with its single primary actor and single Page 73 →plot trajectory. But, as the contagionist author points out, he has ignored another intersecting plotline altogether, one with its own protagonist, the Greek servant girl. The girl has no name here, but she does have a nationality, a social class, and perhaps even more interestingly, something approaching an interior life, whose details begin to assume a significance nearly equal to those in the life of her mistress. The circumstances of her labor and her social position, which render her invisible in MacLean’s account, are what enable the narrator, attentive to her intentions and motives, to draw the reader into a moment of sympathy roughly corresponding to that elicited for Madame W’s protracted sufferings. This narrative representation, like disease itself, levels the distinctions between the servant and her mistress. Just as nineteenthcentury multiplot differed from its eighteenth-century precursors by providing no simple hierarchy of narratives, this retelling of plague’s transmission challenges the hierarchy implicit in MacLean’s account. The critique concluded with this admonition: “In cases like these every accompanying circumstance, every detail, however minute, should be noted and given” (“A Story,” 171). As the author’s counterpart in the Quarterly Review article had also implied, all such accounts might benefit from closer examination, for the overlooked or forgotten moment of contact that leads to another, significant narrative trajectory. Indeed, one Lancet author, proposing that all such case histories of cholera might reveal signs of contagious transmission if studied closely enough, inquired, “what right have we to say that no communication with infected persons or things has existed in the cases in which we could not trace it? What, too, becomes of this species of [anticontagionist] argumentВ .В .В . if it be sifted as rigorously as common induction demands?” (“Editorial Opinions,” 179). The apparent absence of contagion in any particular case, in other words, did not undermine the validity of contagionism’s claims, but rather merely revealed the limitations of readers and narrators in recognizing disease’s radiating plot trajectories. Yet however compelling contagionist narratives managed to be, they failed to win over the period’s medical community, which continued to look to sanitary factors as the primary causes of disease until the end of the century, when the rise of bacteriology rendered contagious explanations medically credible once again. Both Ackerknecht and Hamlin suggest that contagionism’s unpopularity in the 1830s and ’40s was due in part to the social cures it proposed. Implementing the kinds of measures proposed by sanitary reformers like Chadwick struck the medical and legislative communities as more feasible, and certainly more economically and politically palatable, Page 74 →than contagionism’s call for more quarantines. According to Ackerknecht, the success of anticontagionism during this period represented the triumph of liberalism and free commerce (567), while for Freedgood, contagionism, which made even everyday forms of human contact seem troublingly risky, fared poorly by comparison with anticontagionism, which offered practical strategies, whether in the form of Chadwick’s sanitary policies or Florence Nightingale’s guidelines for nurses, to contain that sense of risk (42–73). As both imply, sanitary reform aligned more neatly with the period’s governmental and economic agendas, while by its very nature contagionism unsettled them. Indeed, in a move that could not easily be linked to political affiliation, contagionism threatened to replace the plot of the individual with the far more complex and potentially troubling plot of the social. Even after debates over disease’s transmission had receded from public attention, however, contagionism remained influential in popular writing. Especially in literature, the logic of contagion enjoyed an enduring impact—though less as etiology than as social epistemology, as a way of understanding and representing the distant causalities of which the individual was a part. Perhaps nowhere does contagion’s connective force—narrative, bodily, and social—play as important a role as it does in Bleak House, a novel in which traditional modes of connection (paternity, inheritance) are consistently thwarted, and in their stead chance intersections serve as the primary motivators of plot. Numerous critics have observed that contagious disease plays a central, thematic role in Dickens’s novel, as a metaphor for the period’s social ills.26 But in these final pages I argue that contagion also has an important structural role in the novel. For as in Middlemarch, disease’s thematic treatment functions as something like a pretext for its structural function in Bleak

House—as if disease emerges in a few scenes, only to migrate back into the novel’s formal apparatus, where it joins disparate plots and characters with an almost epidemic efficiency. Dickens’s third-person narrator famously asks, “What connexion can there be” between the rarefied spaces of the aristocratic home and the dirt of the slums, as the novel lays out a web of connections, both of the expected (ancestral and sympathetic) and of the unexpected variety (between Lady Dedlock and an impoverished scribe, between a French maidservant and a prominent lawyer, between an aged eccentric and London’s court system) (209). Read as Caroline Levine proposes, through the lens of contemporary network theory, the novel constitutes Dickens’s experiment “with the representation of society as a kind of meta-network,” an exercise in uncovering “multiple principles of interconnection” among characters (519, 521). DiseasePage 75 → is one among many enforcers of these interconnections, Levine argues (518), but others claim for it a more central role in the novel’s narratorial and epistemological frameworks. Elana Gomel, for example, argues that disease enacts a horizontal mapping of the city’s relationships in the novel, a flГўneur’s-eye view from the street, or what Mary Burgan has called a “panoramic diagnosis” of fictional spaces (837). Similarly I suggest that disease’s contagious logic is pervasive, inhabiting both plot and form in Bleak House. But where disease enabled a concatenated series of unintended intersections between plots and persons in contagionist accounts, Dickens’s narrative dispenses in large part with disease’s agency: while adhering to the conventions of its epidemiological forerunners the novel enacts that logic of its own volition, as it were, proliferating multiple connections through the chance meetings, unexpected intimacies, and wide-ranging causalities that were now understood to be elements of social—and especially urban—experience. These points of seemingly insignificant contact, which would otherwise have passed unseen or unremarked upon, constitute the links joining seemingly unrelated characters and events together within the novel’s intricate, interwoven plots. Moreover, like the constellated details that betoken the intersection of plots in contagionist reportage, many of these slight moments of recognition—Esther’s likeness to Lady Dedlock, for example, or Lady Dedlock’s reaction to Nemo’s handwriting—remain latent, unnoticed for long narrative stretches, their significance only emerging later, like the symptoms of disease, when the novel reveals the primary connection at its center: that between Esther and Lady Dedlock. But the uncovering of the novel’s central secret resolves more than the thematic mystery of Esther’s relationship to the Dedlocks; it resolves as well the formal mystery of the novel’s disconnected, dualnarrative structure. The alternating narratives represent two separate worlds in two distinct voices: the one an official world of institutions and Lady Dedlock’s upper-class life, described by an impersonal, third-person narrator, and the other a space of domesticity and interiority, recounted by Esther Summerson as its first-person narrator. However, the distance between the two—in social class, in focus, in tone—is, as the novel reveals, a mere precondition to their eventual connection. The work’s overall narrative motivation is toward this primary connective node of the novel, the intersection between the two characters and their narratives. While that node does not displace the main characters in importance, as it does in medical and journalistic accounts of disease, it certainly rivals them. For the node is plot in Bleak House; it is the point around which the narrators narrate and from which characters and events Page 76 →radiate. Even the tenses employed by the two narrators reflect the centrality of this nodal point, the third-person narrator moving forward in present tense, and Esther beginning later, more than seven years in the future, but moving back through the past, in past tense. Thus Lady Dedlock’s tale moves forward in anticipation as Esther’s moves in retrospection toward the convergence of their two complementary narratives: like two arrows beginning at different poles, they point toward a common center.27 This moment of revelation alludes to an older narrative convention, where a hidden familial connection is revealed in a climactic scene—a scene that has repeated itself in novels like Moll Flanders, Tom Jones, and Oliver Twist. But unlike these earlier works, where that disclosure occurs near the novel’s end, Bleak House follows the contagionist convention of locating the scene of connection at the work’s center. As if to underscore its importance, the novel presents the moment of connection three times, in three separate registers. This moment, domestic and sentimental when Lady Dedlock finds Esther in the park and confesses her secret—“I am your wicked and unhappy mother!” (579)—is reframed as a matter of juridical concern when the lawyer Tulkinghorn, making the same revelation a few chapters later, calls it a “business

consideration,” a legal liability for the Dedlock name (658). But the intersection also finds physiological expression; here, disease emerges at the level of the plot, as it spreads from London’s slums and into Esther. Her illness has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention, where the third-person narrator’s miasmatic pronouncement that there is “not an atom of Tom’s slimeВ .В .В . but shall work its retribution” (710) serves critical readings of disease as a figure for social or moral revenge. For some critics, for example, disease functions as an otherwise unarticulated act of class retribution moving from poor Jo to the bourgeois Jarndyce household as a just punishment for the middle class’s economic and political sins against London’s poor (A. S. Williams, 66–68; Schwarzbach; Gurney; Fasick), while others identify it as a much more specific gesture of revenge, an act of moral retribution against an immoral affair, whose illegitimate offspring, Esther, is its object.28 But Esther’s illness is not just a response to what has occurred in the past. It is, like the plague and cholera of contagionist accounts, also an initiatory moment, in which new relationships are realized, new narratives produced. Yet whereas disease’s symptoms and spread were often internal and invisible in medical accounts, the smallpox in Bleak House results in a too-visible disfigurement by pocks, and its trajectory from Jo to Charley to Esther is clearly described by the two narrators. Here, contagion is a figure in the Page 77 →novel for the other, “covert” forms of connection that await discovery—in this case, the familial bond between Lady Dedlock and Esther. Esther’s disease originates in London’s working-class neighborhoods, to be sure, but arguably and more specifically in the “reeking” and “deadly” urban cemetery where Captain Nemo, Esther’s biological father, lies, the “scene of horror” that Lady Dedlock visits in the company of Jo (262). The episode’s language and imagery are those of miasma theory, but the effects for plot and characters, the cascading consequences, are recognizably contagionist. However, in contagionist narratives such connections usually moved outside the family, realizing unexpected and anonymous relationships, whereas disease in this novel moves in a converse direction, reaffirming, though in an unexpected way, the familial bond. In this scene of promiscuous contact, Lady Dedlock’s reunion with her former lover results, after a six-installment period of gestation, in an ironic scene of rebirth,29 when disease, having passed from Jo to Charley, Esther’s maid, finally reaches Esther herself. Disease, in other words, retraces the more traditional biological relationship, from father and mother to child, but in this case takes an alternate route, passing unpredictably through two workingclass intermediaries before resulting in Esther’s literal and figurative reconception, when she is reborn with a new, altered visage. Contagious disease represents the relationship between Lady Dedlock and Esther by rerepresenting it, by erasing the resemblance that is the sign of a traditional familial relation and transforming it into the sign of an anonymous social relation. More generally, the connective power of disease in Bleak House initiates a shift from a local understanding of social relations to a decidedly more far-reaching one. Here, too, the consequences that emanate from that moment transcend the bodies of its primary victims, affecting the plots of the opportunistic Guppy, the physician Allan Woodcourt, and even Lady Dedlock’s young servant, Rosa; these effects suspend themselves over the disparate spaces of London as well as over time, so that even on the novel’s last page, Esther turns back to that decisive contingency, the moment of narrative intersection (989). In this sense, contagion’s social logic manages to be both disruptive and productive in novels like Middlemarch and Bleak House. It traces not only the symbolic demise of an older social order—the dissolution of Bulstrode’s power, the decline of the Dedlocks—but also the rise of a newer one, where professionals like Ladislaw and Woodcourt signal emergent forms of social authority. But by disrupting an otherwise legible and predictable social landscape, these intersections, between the familial and the anonymous, the Page 78 →intentional and the accidental, also enforce an emergent social epistemology, an awareness of multiply concatenated anonymous relations, extending over time and distance. Indeed, as they unsettled more traditional forms of sociality, based on class or geography, they also enabled new kinds of alliances and kinships. Marriage between a wealthy widow and disowned artist, reconciliation between the owner of a Leicester Square shootinggallery and England’s mightiest baronet: these bonds and others succeeded in uniting “many people” from across the “innumerable histories of this world” (Bleak House, 256).

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Four Radical Solutions, Conservative Systems Narratives of Circulation and Closure The evidence that London’s population had undergone a more than twofold increase during the first half of the nineteenth century—with nearly three million persons inhabiting the city’s densely packed streets by the 1850s (Evans, 428)—lay in the bodily waste that was seemingly everywhere, apparent to both eye and nose. Journalist Henry Mayhew figured the collective bodily output at close to an alarming four billion cubic feet of raw sewage and drainage per year for the city alone (Mayhew, 430). The disease-causing potential of this human waste and filth had been a subject of concern in the sanitary writings of the 1830s and 1840s, as seen in chapter 2, but by midcentury a more immediate problem—the sheer quantity of excess, and its apparent immovability—became a focus of urban investigation in its own right. In 1848, for example, Gavin, one of the central figures in early Victorian sanitary reform, offered this account of an all-too-common urban spectacle: In this most dirty street, exists one of the most atrocious nuisances which it is possible to createВ .В .В . a receptable [sic] for every kind of manureВ .В .В . [with] a frontage of 450 feet, andВ .В .В . about 140 feet in depth.В .В .В . the whole of the area is filled with every variety of manure in every stage of offensive and disgusting decomposition; the manure is piled up to a considerable height, and is left to dry in the sun; but, besides this table mountain of manure, extensive and deep lakes of putrefying night soil are dammed up with the more solid dung. (Sanitary Ramblings, 9; emphases his) Page 80 → Gavin seems less concerned here with the pile’s eventual consequences for public health, than with the size of the “mountain” he confronts, the sheer quantity it represents. Significantly, his description of excrement “piled up” and “dammed up” suggests the fear not that such waste might overflow into water supplies or living spaces, but that it might in fact rest immobile—that it might not go anywhere at all, but rather, simply accumulate over time. A desperate “contractor for scavengering” quoted in an 1843 Quarterly Review admits a similar anxiety when he exclaims, “I have given awayВ .В .В . thousands of loads of nightsoil—we know not what to do with it!” ([Head], 427).1 But for many midcentury Victorian reformers and social observers, the solution to too much waste was not necessarily its elimination, but rather its recirculation. Avrom Fleischman has suggested that this response was a foregone conclusion, that “[i]n the presence of so much natural and unnatural waste it [was] inevitable that men [would] turn the by-products of production into productive industries” (119), while others have pointed to the ways in which writers like Mayhew and Dickens, by depicting a material culture of transformation and reuse, anticipated contemporary visions of recycling and environmentalism.2 This chapter, too, focuses on the material instantiations of waste—the rags and excrement—that littered both the streets and the pages of the period, but it also draws upon Hamlin’s and Gallagher’s historically contextualized accounts of the metaphysical, even transcendent potential associated with the processes of organic decay and recovery during this period (Hamlin, “Providence”; Gallagher, “Bio-Economics”). As I demonstrate here, the possibility that waste might become useful elsewhere enabled writers like Mayhew to transform an earlier discourse, in which waste threatened to become a vector for disease, into an alternate model of social connection: a positive, utopian one. They envisioned engineered systems—networks of pipes, chemical processes of transformation, even narrative circuits of recuperation and closure—through which waste could be redeemed, recovered, and remade into something productive once again.3 This waste took multiple forms, from the detritus of people’s lives, such as worn-out clothes and discarded foodstuffs, to industrial by-products. But as these passages suggest, the body’s most direct physiological product, excrement, remained waste’s most visible, most egregious sign. Thus where the accounts examined in this chapter reflect a broader cultural desire to optimize efficiency and output, to apply the

principles of political economy across the breadth of everyday experience, excrement remained the most material emblem of that desire’s fulfillment or failure. Page 81 → Waste’s cultural significance, its multiple roles as nuisance, object of scientific study, by-product and raw material—as well as its power to enact social connection—are the subject of an 1850 Punch cartoon, “Sanitary and Insanitary Matters” (fig. 3). Waste, in this artistic rendering, is not the monolith Gavin encountered, but it is nonetheless omnipresent. In the upper panel, men and women of different classes travel along the river and hold their noses in poor defense against the stench. Below them, to the right, at once fascinated and horrified, gentlemen investigators and workers closely examine the liquid drainage in a ditch. In the bottom panel appears Father Thames, surrounded by his kingdom of dead and living animals, whose bodies litter the river. Above him, an uneven street surface leads up to the left, where a working-class neighborhood advertises its trade in rags, old bottles, and bones. Arranged just above them in the top panel are “bone crushers, soapsellers, and knackers,” factories remanufacturing waste products into consumer items, while simultaneously polluting the surrounding air and water. The image alludes to miasma and disease—the observers’ reluctance to inhale, the rotting organic matter filling the Thames—but the cartoon itself is not a simple invective against waste. Rather, it suggests that without waste, London’s multiple relationships, occupations, and industries would cease to exist: in some fundamental way, waste constitutes and defines the city. It forms the basis both for a middle-class economy, the subject of study for sanitary investigators and the materials to be rendered and profitably remade as soaps and bonemeal, and for a working-class one, where discards might be scavenged and resold. Like the miasmas described by sanitary reformers, waste serves in this cartoon as the shared matter that links the city’s inhabitants, albeit involuntarily at times, into an unlikely “commonwealth.” But unlike Gavin’s account of the immobile “mountain of manure,” the cartoon also suggests that, through human intervention, waste might serve as the medium for a productive social and narrative continuity. Indeed, distinguishing waste from “mess,” David Trotter explains that the former presupposes the existence of a “system” within which it “remains forever potentially in circulation” (20).4 Never truly waste, as the image amply demonstrates, what is thrown away is often of value to someone else in the urban economy. That waste is not inert in these accounts, but is always in circulation, in movement and transformation, means that it has narrative potential as well. If, as Gallagher puts it, “political economy’s organic premises were already structured as plots, as highly consequentialist, if extremely schematic, stories” (Body Economic, 35), then this chapter considers waste as one of the leading figures in that “plot,” Page 83 →an antagonist turned protagonist in a tale of moral redemption. In the narrative depicted within the Punch cartoon, waste mobilizes social and economic connections, as the discards of one panel are consumed in the next: the bones of dead animals might be sold in shops and its fat productively rendered into soap, while the excremental runoff of river and city streets provides material for scientific labor. Waste is not merely everywhere, but it also joins the different classes and geographies of the city together through concatenated narratives of production and consumption, use and reuse. And while the cartoon depicts the ubiquity of urban pollutants and discards as lamentable, it also lends itself to a more positive reading, where through its very circulation, waste might be redeemed, where the unwitting or unsought social connections that characterized miasma and contagion might come to figure as components of another, more positive social model, where through active effort and economy, nothing goes to waste. Indeed, waste is central to the cartoon’s own narrative coherence; its circulation enables continuity and order, in which the details of one panel engender those of its neighbor. Just as the image depicts an economic order in which everything, even the dead animal at the bottom of the Thames, has value, it exemplifies a narrative order in which no detail exists outside the work’s overall economy of meaning.

This cartoon was not exceptional, but typical in its account of the circulation of waste. Whether in the form of excrement, old clothes, soiled paper, or uneaten food, the detritus associated with the body troubled the period’s sanitary and journalistic writers, for whom that excess represented both a nuisance and a miasmatic or contagious threat. But at the same time, many envisioned that waste’s presence could also be its own solution. Waste thus gave rise not only to a negative social model, where polluted air, water, and streets rendered urban populations coherent by way of disease and filth, but also enabled the representation of a positive one, in which the possibility of its reduction, removal, and regeneration reaffirmed the social bond in more beneficial ways, by linking producer and consumer, excess and need, input and output. Waste enabled urban observers like the Punch cartoonist to reimagine those continuities in the social sphere as productive ones—and also to envision waste’s circulation as the basis for a new narrative order. By mobilizing an aesthetics of closure and resolution, works about urban waste, such as Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor and Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, not only described but also exemplified these lessons of recovery through a recuperative formal logic. These accounts of waste, like their contagionist counterparts, focus on Page 84 →the causal trajectories linking often disparate social groups or geographies together. Within medical narratives, old clothes might be the unexpected means of transmitting disease from one locale to another, and so, too, in these representations the remaking of rags into expensive new cloth, for example, could be the means of bringing London’s beggar into unforeseen juxtaposition with the city’s fashionable classes. Both of these discourses helped to generate a social vision in which persons might be traceably connected to each other, albeit in unanticipated ways. But where narratives of contagion often suggested that such trajectories might be ever expanding and uncontainable, accounts of waste’s recovery actively circumscribed those trajectories, managing its excesses by demonstrating its usefulness within a finite social order.

Acts of Recovery The drive to find worth in waste aligned with a number of historically specific impulses: the emphasis on efficiency in both industrial and political economy, the moral value attached to recovery and redemption, and the ideal of conservation articulated in the period’s sciences.5 But such ideals, not limited to the realm of theory, had their place at the level of the streets as well, where urban observers contemplated London’s informal economies as systems of production and consumption, of potential waste and potential value. Even the most penurious of the urban poor, they found, expressed the culture’s ethic and practice of recovery: “many, in order to live, struggle to extract a meal from the possession of an article which seems utterly worthless,” Mayhew wrote, concluding that “nothing must be wasted” (6). Mathematician Charles Babbage observed that the working classes displayed particular ingenuity in making use of others’ discards, what he called “materials of little value” (11).6 Indeed, these items, he suggested, acquired greater value through such acts of recovery: [T]he hoofs of horses and cattleВ .В .В . are employed in the production of the prussiate of potashВ .В .В . The worn-out saucepans and tin ware of our kitchens, when beyond the reach of the tinker’s art, are not utterly worthless. We sometimes meet carts loaded with old tin kettles and worn-out iron coal-skuttles traversing our streets. These have not yet completed their useful course; the less corroded parts are cut into strips, punched with small holes, and varnished with a coarse Page 85 →black varnish for the use of the trunk-maker, who protects the edges and angles of his boxes with them; the remainder are conveyed to the manufacturing chemists in the outskirts of the town, who employ them in combination with pyroligneous acid, in making a black die for the use of calico printers. (11–12) This sketch exists in a rather peculiar juxtaposition with the other topics he discusses, such as windmills and mechanical contrivances for sorting freshly manufactured needles. But in keeping with his other examples, this passage attributes agency to the materials and technologies of transformation, not to the humans involved in their use and production (Schaffer). Indeed, Babbage draws attention to the modern machinery of transformation,

which permits the conversion of horses’ hoofs into valuable chemicals and of old metals into dies. Persons with a role in such transformations—the trunk-makers and chemists—are themselves units within an efficient, intricate social mechanism, a human system of efficient collection, distribution, and salvage that, he implies, is itself as much a technology as the needle-sorting machine, both serving the overall economic well-being of the nation. For Mayhew, too, the recovery of waste reveals both the complexity and efficiency in London’s social relations. In his “Table Showing the Quantity of Refuse Bought, Collected, or Found, in the Streets of London, ” he provides a comprehensive itemized list of the varieties of waste he has discussed in greater detail throughout volume 2 of London Labour and the London Poor, such as “Pickling jars” and “Soot” (462–63), and for each, he tabulates an annual quantity, price per unit, average value, and population of buyers. Significantly, nothing is without purpose, value, or a potential consumer in the urban system of use and reuse he represents.7 But where Babbage’s social system was a technology largely devoid of persons, Mayhew emphasizes the personal relationships between producer and consumer, high and low, that such a system facilitates. Indeed, what fascinates him perhaps most about this system are the connections between social classes and urban geographies realized by the circulation of waste. Moreover, in contrast to sanitary reformers’ horrified and disgusted reactions to filth’s connective potential, Mayhew’s account of these unexpected links abounds with expressions of amazement and wonder, as he repeatedly frames them as positive, even redemptive. In describing the market for old clothes, for example, he observes: [I]t is curious to reflect from how many classes the pile of old garments has been collected, .В .В .В in what scenes of gaiety or gravity, in Page 86 →the opera-house or the senate, had the perhaps departed wearers of some of that heap of old clothes figured—through how many possessors, and again through what new scenes of middle-class or artizan comfort had these dresses passed, or through what accidents of “genteel” privation and destitution—and lastly through what necessities of squalid wretchedness and low debauchery. (27) With this sweeping rhetorical gesture, Mayhew depicts the journey such old clothes make as encompassing the full range of social conditions. The “wretchedness” to which a rag has sunk does not mark its death, but the moment of its secular resurrection, of transformation and revivification as an active participant in the social system once again. Modern technologies allow the ground-up rag, “shoddy,” to be used again and even to regain the full measure of its social status: “[t]hus the rags which the beggar could no longer hang about himВ .В .В . may be a component of the soldier’s or sailor’s uniform, the carpet of a palace, or the library table-cover of a prime-minister” (31). The rag’s circulation thus exemplifies an inclusive social system that lets nothing go to waste, and further one in which the intimacies enacted between classes and social spheres are themselves redeemed. Discarded clothes no longer threaten with the possibility of disease’s transmission, but rather affirm, in positive and productive ways, the social bond. Like contagionist narratives, which joined the wealthy woman to her maid, these accounts of waste’s circulation succeeded in bringing otherwise disparate persons and lives into an unlikely intimacy. But where contagion threatened to enact such connections uncontrollably, the sociality associated with waste was, if not always predictable, then nonetheless engineered, contained by the mechanisms and technologies of reuse. Distinguished chemist Lyon Playfair, too, turned to the figure of the wealthy woman, but the control exerted by the chemical processes he discusses allowed him to celebrate, rather than deplore, such examples of unexpected social connection. Indeed, he describes how “[m]any a fair forehead is damped with eau de millefleurs, without knowing that its essential ingredient is derived from the drainage of cowhouses” (quoted in “Penny Wisdom,” 100), and later remarks that “[t]he offal of the streets and the washings of coal-gasВ .В .В . are used by [a woman] to flavour blanc mange for her friends” (101). The chemical transformation of all forms of waste—bestial, domestic, industrial—allows for the otherwise incongruous joining of the excesses of production to the excesses of refined consumption, from stench to fragrance, the most common of public spaces to the most exclusive of private ones. Scenes of waste’s production linked Page 87 →to consumption, which were treated with disgust and horror in sanitary and medical documents, are themselves transformed in Playfair’s telling; his examples, each relying upon a dramatic, unexpected turn at the moment of

transformation, are meant to elicit both shock and pleasure at the seemingly magical power of chemical processes. They direct satirical humor at feminine luxuries: the Frenchified perfumes and desserts so valued by upper-class women are, they suggest, no more than a form of excrement. At the same time, they hint at the possibility of an almost supernatural social mobility, where even the lowest forms of waste, discarded even by the humble cow, might attain an elevated social position, remade into the products of a fine lady’s table and indeed translated into the exclusive language of refinement. Moreover, as Playfair’s account reveals, such transformations are engineered as much by narrative processes as by chemical ones. Playfair’s rhetorical sleights-of-hand engender these radical juxtapositions, eliding the chemical and economic complexities that would otherwise intervene. Mayhew’s encyclopedic London Labour and the London Poor, of which nearly the whole of the second volume is devoted to a discussion of the city’s economy in secondhand goods and waste, from its rag-gatherers and rat-catchers to its secondhand sellers of hats and its street-cleaners, likewise recognizes and draws attention to the transformative power of narrative; his representation of waste both describes and actively enacts the recuperation that renders the system coherent. From the outset, Mayhew fashions himself as something of a census-taker, whose task is to count the uncounted, and in this sense as a figure not unlike the social reformers whose investigations into lower-class neighborhoods sought to bring the urban unknown into middle-class consciousness. But in addition to this, he invites the reader to recognize a certain similarity between the narrator and his subject. For like the street seller, scavenger, dustman, and sewer worker he portrays, Mayhew himself engages in an act of recovery, as he locates those who have sunk beneath the notice of his middle-class readers and government officials alike; they become useful not only within the street economies he describes, but also within his own more rarefied economy—of journalists, publishers, and well-to-do urban readers, for whom these figures become subjects worthy of interest. For Mayhew, counting those who lie outside the sphere of official notice, those city-dwellers subsisting on the streets about whom “[g]overnment returns never have given us, and probably never will give us, any correct information” (1; emphasis his), is itself an act of representational recovery. They are, as it were, narrative waste, analogous to the discards off which his subjects make a living. For instance, near the volume’s beginning he states, “I may Page 88 →say a few words concerning what is, in the estimation of some, a second-hand matter. I allude to the many uses to which that which is regarded, and indeed termed, вЂoffal,’ or вЂrefuse,’ or вЂwaste,’ is put in a populous city” (7; emphasis his), a pun implying that his discussion of offal might itself be a kind of rhetorical secondhand good, lying outside the reader’s diet of more conventional texts. A contemporaneous essay in Household Words invoked a similar analogy in describing a seemingly useless “huge heap of chemical refuse” lying near the river, when it proposed that “it is of such nothings as these that we would speak; and of the ingenuity which, from time to time, draws something therefrom” (“Penny Wisdom,” 97). For both, the text exemplifies the process of recovery, in which the act of writing about waste, refashioning it into a valuable literary commodity, parallels the very transformations they describe. But Mayhew’s text goes further, not just depicting these street workers as recoverers of waste but also at times transforming them into examples of waste. He applies such language liberally to figures like the streetfinders, who gather discarded food to eat and other scraps to sell; they are described, alternately, as “the outcast” (136), “the very lowest class of all the street-people” (138), and to all appearances “insignificant and contemptible” (142). Their very bodies, too, become almost indistinguishable from the city’s waste. One bone-grubber appears wearing a “ragged coat—the colour of the rubbish among which he toiled—[which] was greased over, probably with the fat of the bones he gathered, and being mixed with the dust it seemed as if the man were covered with bird-lime” (141); likewise the pure-finder, a street-worker who collects dog excrement, is to his eyes almost imperceptible at first, so much did she “resembl[e] a bundle of rags and filth stretched on some dirty straw in the corner” (144).8 Even the minds of these workers, he suggests, manage to circulate little of value. When he asks one bone-grubber what he thinks of while searching, he replies, “вЂOf nothing, sir’” (136), while of others he writes that “in intellect, [they] are little elevated above the animals whose bones they gather, or whose ordure (вЂpure’), they scrape into their baskets” (464). In spite of these accounts of waste embodied, however, the street-worker finds his place within

the textual economy of Mayhew’s volumes. Hence the bone-grubber manages to contribute his own tale, and the seemingly inert pure-finder proves, as Mayhew acknowledges, unexpectedly literate and articulate. Waste, these accounts imply, engenders sociality—but at the same time it emphasizes that the social intimacies produced are less sympathetic than systemic, less about identification than about the concatenations of transformation. For just as the discarded bone might be ground into fertilizer Page 89 →or carved into a handle, dog excrement used in the dressing of leather, or a dirty slum-dweller framed as a fit subject for middle-class interest, these transformations remind readers of the mediating processes separating raw material from finished product. For both Playfair and Mayhew, these narratives control the potential for a transgressive sociality: waste in its inanimate form might ascend the social ladder (the beggar’s rag remanufactured into the palaceresident’s tablecloth), but never in the form of persons or populations. Thus as the Household Words essay pointed out, chemical transformation might make the once “troublesome” vapors of muriatic acid into “a most respectable and respected friend to the manufacturer” (“Penny Wisdom,” 98–99), but the hints of social mobility embedded here, the ascendance from “troublesome” to “respectable,” cannot apply to actual persons. Perhaps nowhere is this point more evident than in a single, exceptional case in London Labour and the London Poor, where Mayhew’s treatment of one of London’s mud-larks, “grimed with the foul soil of the river, and their torn garments stiffened up like boards with dirt” (155), reveals the implicit limits that otherwise contain his subjects. Typical of the other urban underclasses discussed in these volumes, the mud-larks play familiar roles in the streets where they sell coal pieces to the poor, old nails and rope to rag-shops, or the occasional tool to sailors. In his account he redeems his impoverished subjects with a familiar rhetorical gesture, distinguishing them from the mud in which they labor and from the otherwise shapeless population of which they are members. But in concluding his sketch of these boys, Mayhew departs from his usual treatment of the poor. Focusing on a single mud-larking boy who impresses him favorably, who promises to redirect his own life if given the opportunity, Mayhew moves beyond rhetorical recovery; indeed, he recommends him to a position with a prominent London publisher, Bradbury and Evans. In the end, the mud-larker’s value resides not just in his role as scavenger within the local economy, or even in his worth as a character within Mayhew’s representational economy. Instead, Mayhew recovers him by removing him from those two roles altogether. From his seemingly immutable position as a boy living off the streets, he has been fully elevated; no longer the subject of a book about the poor, he has become, like Mayhew, a participant in the publication and circulation of those very books. That his social mobility depends upon his escape from the text, however, draws attention to the reifying work these texts perform, their insistence on the very social stratifications they describe. For the world internal to these narratives is not merely one of labor and poverty, but also of limited opportunitiesPage 90 → for economic or social improvement. It is precisely because London Labour represents a world in which upward social mobility is impossible, that it must remove the exceptional mud-larking boy from being represented and instead incorporate him into the position of producing such representations. In his treatment of other workers, Mayhew demonstrates little interest in intervention or in any unsettling of the social order. Thus while known during his lifetime as a critic of workers’ exploitation by the middle classes and often a vocal advocate for higher wages (Thompson), his London Labour suggests that social recovery cannot be considered a viable or acceptable solution to the inequities of class. In offering a detailed description of each of these street-workers, their persons, their lives, and their work, he demonstrates that they are not unlike the mechanical components of Babbage’s needle-sorter, elements of a remarkable system for recovering waste, the effectiveness of which depends on the very constancy and immutability of their own labor.

Anti-Malthusian Transformations But where the prospect of recovering actual persons was a potentially troubling one, proposals to recover their byproducts, the excesses of bodily consumption and production, met with few detractors. If the former raised uncomfortable questions about the dangers of social mobility, the latter directed attention to the comparatively safer realm of sewage and effluvia—something that all could agree was a problem. Moreover, as the

period’s writers recognized, to find a use for Gavin’s mountain of manure was not merely to rid the city of an unsightly, odorous nuisance: it was also to offer a solution to the greater problem of Malthusian bioeconomics. A sign commonly found in rag-shops, Mayhew tells readers, shows “a man and woman, very florid and fullfacedВ .В .В . on the point of enjoying a huge plum-pudding, the man flourishing a large knife, and looking very hospitable. On a scroll which issued from his mouth were the words: вЂFrom our rags!’ .В .В . The woman in like manner exclaimed: вЂFrom dripping and house fat!’” (105). Where he elsewhere noted that household waste might be made useful in some general way, here he suggests that waste might be intimately linked to consumption—might indeed serve as a primary form of bodily sustenance. At another point, he makes the relationship between waste and food more explicit still when he observes that the rag too worn to be ground into shoddy can instead be used as a kind of fertilizer for Page 91 →hops and corn, and thus “we again have the remains of the old garment in our beer or our bread” (32). Although both the temporal and geographical distances between fertilized field and marketable bread or drink might be considerable, Mayhew evokes an image of unmediated consumption, as if a close look at a mug of beer would reveal the fragments of someone’s castoff clothes. Waste’s immediate and complete reincorporation into food, he and others understood, might challenge an otherwise inescapable Malthusian economics in which population, and hence consumption, increased geometrically, in a multiplicative fashion, while food increased only arithmetically, in a linear fashion. In this new recuperative calculus, the Malthusian problem of too many people multiplying too rapidly could, through waste’s reincorporation into food, become its own solution. Sanitary reformers of the 1830s typically expressed dismay over conditions that permitted domestic waste to contaminate food and drink: Gavin pointed out that the breathable air in many closed rooms was heavy with the “foecal remains” of their inhabitants (Sanitary Ramblings, 69), and Godwin’s descriptions deplored the draining of domestic sewage into the water supply (Town Swamps, 58). One solution to the threat of such unwanted connections lay in the enforcement of segregation and individuation, the “disciplinary projects” Foucault associates with late modernity (Discipline, 198). But another solution, these texts suggest, lay in transforming anxieties about corporeal miscibility into productive visions of the social, in reimagining miasma’s bodily continuities as the basis for a positive conception of sociality. By rerouting epidemia’s sociality through the discourse of political economy—at whose center lay the processes of the human body, as Gallagher reminds us (Body Economic, 89–90)—they reconfigured the role of waste in the period’s narratives of production, efficiency, and self-sufficiency. Thus Mayhew, recognizing that the unsanitary recirculation of waste from one body to another might serve as a template for its healthy reincorporation into the social system, concluded that “nature, ever working in a circleВ .В .В . has made this same ordure not only the cause of present disease when allowed to remain within the city, but the means of future health and sustenance when removed to the fields” (160). Significantly, he figures “nature” as the agent of these recuperative processes, and indeed the period’s bioeconomics had its foundations in a providential vision, wherein divine purposes were understood to guide natural processes (Gallagher, “Bio-Economics”; Hamlin, “Providence”). But for visionaries like Mayhew, recovery also required human (and for Chadwick, governmental) intervention, acts of engineering to enforce productive, rather than destructive, Page 92 →systems of circulation. Moreover, these systems—where the rag or pile of excrement traveled through the social economy—imposed a form of spatial and narrative order on otherwise unlikely social juxtapositions, rendering them if not predictable, then legible, such that the invisible trajectories suggested by disease’s potential transmission were redirected within an orderly and controlled network of connections. Multiple, knowable circuits would join waste to food, production to consumption, city to countryside, body to body. Tracing the chemical elements and transformations that all organic processes shared, including putrefaction and growth, prominent German chemist Justus Liebig proposed that (in Hamlin’s paraphrase) “a natural process could both be the source of disease and the key to continued agricultural production” (“Providence, ” 383). Translated and popularized in England by fellow chemist Playfair, Liebig’s theories lent support to Victorian proposals for waste’s recuperation and redemption. All varieties of organic matter, according to

Liebig, were simply different combinations of the same set of chemical units, and all biological processes, such as decay or growth, were similarly combinations of a finite set of chemical reactions. Moreover, those two processes were linked, such that the by-products or excesses of one organism provided the essential raw materials, as it were, for the growth of another. Thus in his assertion that “[p]lants not only afford the means of nutrition for the growth and continuance of animal organization, but they likewise furnish that which is essential for the support of the important vital process of respiration.В .В .В . Animals on the other hand expire carbon, which plants inspire,” Liebig promoted a vision of the natural world in which decomposition represented not an endpoint, but a moment of transformation, of possibility for renewal (21). Translating this account into one that included the human body, Kingsley advised that “though you must not breathe your breath again,” an action with miasmatic consequences, “you may at least eat your breath, if you will allow the sun to transmute it for you into vegetables” (“Two Breaths,” 73). But where Kingsley drew attention to the importance of transmuting processes and agents—sun, plants—Mayhew elided those intervening steps when he wrote that “man gets his bones from the rocks and his muscles from the atmosphere.В .В .В . The iron in his blood and the lime in his teeth were originally in the soil. But these could not be in his body unless they had previously formed part of his food” (160). Mayhew’s formulation short-circuits the processes of chemical transformation; it takes pleasure in the immediacies revealed between human body and dirt, in the implied intimacies among tissues and orifices, which become not Page 93 →only inevitable but also desirable. Elsewhere too, Liebig recognized the provocative potential of that juxtaposition when he asserted that “[w]hen it is considered that every constituent of the body of man and animals is derived from plantsВ .В .В . the animal organism must be regarded, in some respect or other, as manure” (174–75). Just as the palace carpet was a reincarnation of the rag, the human body was no more than an embodiment of soil and excrement. Mayhew played with this understanding of waste’s dual nature, where unrecovered urban waste, such as the “mountain of manure” described by Gavin, might give rise to disease or, if regenerated, might help to produce food. Indeed, he concluded that bodily waste is food, and to dispose of excrement as mere sewage waste into the Thames, as London did, was to fling into the Thames no less than 246,000,000 lbs. of bread every year; or, still worse, by pouring into the river that which, if spread upon our fields, would enable thousands to live, we convert the elements of life and health into the germs of disease and death, changing into slow but certain poisons that which, in the subtle transmutation of organic nature, would become acres of life-sustaining grain. (162) The collective human and animal waste of the city, generated by all households regardless of income or location, could be transformed into a positive “commonwealth” and redistributed as bread, the most fundamental form of human sustenance. A similar logic motivated Chadwick’s ambitious proposal for a network of sewers and pipes running throughout the city to remove waste to surrounding agricultural areas, where it might serve as a ready-made fertilizer for crops.9 His plan inspired the author of a contemporaneous article in Fraser’s to a paean in honor of “those mines of liquid wealth, the guano streams of England. Their waters, rich in all the elements of fertility, can now be conveyed to the land for the production of food, and to the confusion of face of all who hold to the dispiriting theory of the pressure of population on the means of subsistence” (“Public Health,” 445). Hence while Malthus had based his conclusions on a unidirectional, linear food chain, in which bodies depend on food, Mayhew and his contemporaries envisioned a food chain in the form of an infinite loop, in which food, as it were, might depend on bodies. For Mayhew, Malthus’s direful calculations are worth citing only to demonstrate the inadequacy of his approach, Liebig’s triumphant new science assuring him that “Malthus and Liebig are incompatible” (161). Liebig’s chemistry enabled an alternative calculus, where future population growth Page 94 →would result in the production of more waste, and, in the end, more food and drink to sustain human life. Mayhew’s rhetoric celebrates both the providential and the technological virtues encapsulated in waste’s recovery, a process that, as he puts it, affirms the “wondrous economy that marks all creation” (160),10 while it also exemplifies scientific ideals such as quantifiability, rationality, and efficiency. What is more, he and others recognized, it could represent an economic ideal as well. Chadwick’s argument for efficient sewerage,

for example, emphasizes the value and potential profit directly associated with human waste in Edinburgh: “if it were made completely available by an appropriate system of town drainage, [there] would beВ .В .В . an income of 15,000ВЈ. to 20,000ВЈ. per annum for public purposes” (Report, 124). Likewise, when certain Edinburgh farmers were ordered to stop irrigating their fields with manure, they protested that such an action would result in a diminishment of agricultural output worth approximately 150,000ВЈ ([Head], 427–28).11 But Mayhew pressed this association further still; for him, waste was not merely exchangeable for money—it was money: “since the total amount of refuse discharged into the Thames from the sewers of the metropolis is, in round numbers, 40,000,000 tons per annum, it follows that, according to such estimate, we are positively wasting 40,000,000l. of money every year” (161). Where he had elsewhere converted waste into food, here his repeated numerical figure, “40,000,000,” enacts a different—though again, perfectly efficient—transmutation, a rhetorical sleight-of-hand in which excremental tons can be converted into British pounds. In this transformative economics, waste transcends its lowly position to become, in the figurative language of these authors, both food and money. Waste only went to waste, these accounts implied, when it was left unexploited, outside the system. “Waste” was not excrement, then, but a result of inaction with respect to excrement. As sanitary scientist F. O. Ward put it when criticizing the current practice of draining excrement into rivers, “we consider such a process a deplorable waste” (quoted in Gille, 236). Indeed, Mayhew’s use of the term “waste” undergoes an evolution over the course of volume 2 of London Labour and the London Poor. Where he initially equates “waste” with “our refuseВ .В .В . that which we egest,” the “ordure of the people”—in other words, literal excrement—he concludes his argument by describing the image of bread thrown into the Thames as “this waste” (160, 162). For these writers, then, “waste” was no longer simply disease-causing dirt or refuse lying underfoot, but was rather an inefficiency in the system, a social failing. As decaying foodstuffs and excremental matter were Page 95 →redeemed through chemical transformations, made into plentiful and nourishing meals, so the word “waste” was itself redeemed from the literal and pestilential, transmuted into a term of moral judgment about the urban economy as a whole.

Conservation’s Ideals To build a social system based on these relationships, to forge the links from consumption to excretion and back to consumption again at a municipal, even national, level, was to envision a self-sustaining world. For Mayhew, reducing the reliance on new production was the only way of sidestepping Malthus’s seemingly inexorable numbers. To this end, he devotes much of his second volume to demonstrating that London possesses the social machinery to achieve such an ideal, as he emphasizes the city’s multiple forms of reuse and elevates them both economically and morally over the production of the new. For example, he accuses the lower-middle classes of poor judgment when they spurn secondhand markets in favor of cheaply manufactured new goods. He learns from the old-clothes sellers that their trade has suffered because potential customers—shopkeepers, clerks, and naive country curates—are “often tempted by the priceВ .В .В . to buy some wretched new slop [cheaply mass-produced] thing rather than a superior coat second-hand” (29). Even the printed advertisements for these slops, distributed “all over country and town” and sized “about four inches squareВ .В .В . to prevent their being any use as waste paper” (29), defy an economy of reuse.12 But Mayhew’s greater concern is that the decisions made by the nation’s leaders are no better. He notes that England pays “two millions every year for guano, bone-dust, and other foreign fertilizers. In 1845, we employed no fewer than 683 ships to bring home 220,000 tons of animal manure from Ichaboe alone; and yet we are every day emptying into the Thames 115,000 tons” of ready fertilizer (161).13 By casting out its own waste and at the same time importing “new” waste from abroad, the nation demonstrates that it is no wiser than its slop-buying clerks. If, by contrast, the nation were to recognize the value of the waste it already possessed in quantity, the nation could become self-sufficient; its economy might function as an ideal system, a finite space of infinite circulation and recirculation in which nothing would be discarded, nothing imported, nothing ever outside an established network of reuse. Mayhew reminded readers that one such circulatory economy was already in place in London: the sewers, like the Thames, reacted Page 96 →to the tidal ebb and flow, meaning that “the pollution which they remove at low-water, they regularly bring back at high-water to the very doors of the houses

whence they carried it” (161). This failure to replace a destructive circulatory system with a healthy, productive one meant that, in his words, “We import guano, and drink a solution of our own faeces” (386). Thus the city’s mountains of manure and its ever-multiplying populations of urban poor, seemingly unsolvable problems when considered independently, could instead become complementary parts of an encompassing, self-sustaining system of recovery. The rhetoric of dangerous connections, examined in earlier chapters, might itself be redeemed by the new vocabulary of sewerage and drainage. Indeed, Mayhew echoes the language of sanitary reformers when he declares, “in the вЂreach,’ as I heard it happily enough designated, of each of these great sewers, the reader will see from a map the extent of the subterranean metropolis traversed, alike along crowded streets ringing with the sounds of traffic, among palatial and aristocratic domains, .В .В .В and teeming streets, the resorts of misery, poverty, and vice” (407), but here the sewer redeems this once threatening model of inclusive sociality, of unexpected juxtapositions between classes and geographies, and transforms it into a cause for celebration. The “reach” of the sewerage system delineates this new realm of connection, and the accidental commonwealth of effluvia can become a domain of control and coherence. For Chadwick this vision of complete recovery was a compelling one. By outlining an “arterial system” of pipes and drains to transport clean water into each dwelling and wastes out to nearby farms (Finer, 223), he imagined, like Mayhew, that no element would ever escape this closed system, would end up as mere “waste.” This model of perfect efficiency represented a Benthamite ideal of sanitary and economic success. But as Chadwick implied elsewhere, waste’s complete containment, indeed, the promise of its total elimination, transcended the material. Even for this usually literal-minded utilitarian, it represented a kind of spiritual fulfillment, a formal achievement. As he put it, sewers would “complete the circle, and realize the Egyptian type of eternity by bringing as it were the serpent’s tail into the serpent’s mouth” (quoted in Finer, 222), a metaphor that alludes not only to the system’s material accomplishment—linking consumption (the mouth) and excretion (the tail)—but also its transcendent potential. By transforming the once-threatening trajectories of disease into a safe circuit in which the excesses of any number of anonymous bodies can be gathered and contained within the city’s pipes, these accounts reconfigure the sociality of physiological connection. The origins of this ideal of urban Page 97 →containment, according to Didier Gille, might be traced back to medieval conceptions of the city, where actual walls and fortifications rendered it “a little world in itselfВ .В .В . a closed circuit” (243). For these Victorian authors, containment meant that the city was both circumscribed and circulatory, a space in which one could imagine the physiological processes of individuals—eating, breathing, digesting, excreting—linked into a productive continuity. Hence the once uncontained vectors of bodily production joined neatly with those of consumption, excess transformed into subsistence. But as Chadwick’s vision of “the Egyptian type of eternity” reveals, waste’s recovery held out the promise of immaterial attainment as well. According to Gille, in translating the material concerns of earlier ages into more abstract ones, the modern city became “a space of formal operations” (251), and for the Victorians that promise existed not only in the sewer, but also in its social, economic, and narrative articulations, and specifically, in the ideals of closure expressed therein. However, the period’s scientists might have reminded them that no system could be perfectly self-sufficient and self-perpetuating in the ways they had envisioned. Mayhew’s insistence on reuse met with a number of difficulties, even as he continued to point to the virtues of a self-contained secondhand economy. For example, in spite of his claim in the “Table Showing the Quantity of Refuse Bought, Collected, or Found,” which represents “750,000 loads” of cesspool soil being each year recovered for use as manure (462–63), he elsewhere and at great length laments the discarding of excrement, its failure to be reused; he observes, alongside many of his contemporaries, that cesspoolage was known for being left uncollected, to accumulate in public streets or to leak into neighboring water supplies (436–37).14 What is more, the hope that organic waste’s plenitude might be converted into a correspondingly bounteous harvest foundered on another, more immediate limitation, that of land’s availability. While Malthus, the author not only of the 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population but also of the lesser-known An Enquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent in 1815, understood the value of land to both financial and political economies, Chadwick, Mayhew, and their contemporaries posited that moral judgment rather than land was the primary arbiter of agricultural supply.

London’s many unrealized loaves of bread, Mayhew implied, needed only the right civic or national outlook to rescue them from the Thames and put them onto the dinner tables of the city’s many hungry citizens. But when a group of farmers later attempted to put Chadwick’s ambitious proposals into practice, the results fell far short of the closural ideal he had envisioned; indeed, the amount of waste so far Page 98 →exceeded the land available for fertilization that “photographs of British sewage farms were repeatedly mistaken for pictures of the ocean, so heavily were they irrigated” (Hamlin, “Providence,” 393).15

Fictions of Closure Yet what often failed at the level of social or sanitary planning could—as suggested by Mayhew’s and Playfair’s tales of perfect recovery, in which rags became beer, animal excreta perfume—be realized by narrative. Within the text, narrative’s encompassing, omniscient reach performs its own feat of engineering, its rhetoric of reuse enacting a perfect social order, where production and consumption, bodily processes and effects, might be seamlessly joined. Moreover, just as visions of pipes and drains reconfigured social space, rendering its inclusiveness no longer threatening and instead describing the possibility of redemption through the social bonds it reaffirmed, so narrative, both sanitary and otherwise, offered a circumscribed social vision, enclosed within the legible spaces of the text. For example, Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, a work so clearly about waste at the level of theme, also articulates sanitation’s vision of the closed circle at a structural level. The novel adapts this distinctly nineteenth-century ideal, in which bodies and their effects circulate productively, to more traditional, linear models of narrative: its nine-hundred-odd pages balance the fantasy of self-perpetuating containment and reuse—a circle completed—against a linear narrative momentum, which casts away what it has consumed as it moves toward finality. Broader critical definitions of closure often seem inadequate to describing the narrative work performed by such mid-Victorian social novels. In its most general narratological sense, “closure” refers to the sense of narrative finality and resolution of meaning at a work’s conclusion (D. A. Miller, Narrative, xi–xiii). In her more specific account of closure, one especially useful to this chapter’s concerns, Marianna Torgovnick considers narrative’s “metaphor of circularity[, w]hen the ending of a novel clearly recalls the beginning in language, in situation, in the grouping of characters, or in several of these ways” (13; emphasis hers). Torgovnick’s description calls to mind the familiar conventions of any number of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury novels, where the orphan hero discovers his long-lost relations in those closest to him, or the heroine, having passed through many romantic travails, marries the man for whom she was originally intended. In these, the circular plot structure, where the future links unexpectedly back to the past, the new to Page 99 →the old, approaches Torgovnick’s account of closure. But as the foregoing pages suggest, the concept of closure in works like London Labour and Our Mutual Friend signifies something more than the status of characters and events at the narrative’s conclusion, or even the relationship of its opening to its final chapters; rather, closure denotes the condition or quality of the whole, the “reach” (to borrow Mayhew’s term) and containment of its universe. “Closure” in Chadwick’s or Liebig’s sense refers to the circulation and transformation of the work’s elements throughout; more closely approximating what Henry James has called the “selection” found in art (as opposed to the “inclusion and confusion” characteristic of real life) (D. A. Miller, Narrative, xi), it denotes a field of finite potential, the contained scope of narrative possibilities—the varieties of social interactions, and the locations and characters involved—demarcated by the novel from the outset. In other words, the mid-Victorian aesthetic of closure, as represented in its social novels, characterizes the very process by which a conclusion is reached, the process of circulation through which the novel circumscribes the range of its own possible narrative trajectories. This definition of closure thus has a spatial dimension as well. Whereas Peter Brooks locates a psychoanalytic repression and return in this closural property of nineteenth-century novels (113–42), Franco Moretti proposes that such works offer a symbolic “map” of the city, a textual landscape of legible places and possible connections among them, thereby suggesting one means by which we might visualize “closure” as the result of a process (79). But where Moretti’s account looks to the actual geographies being narrated, the final pages of this chapter will consider the more abstract spaces conjured within works like Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend. Through their visions of the urban—their juxtapositions of social strata, their reintroduction of

long-forgotten characters at the moment of resolution, and their emphasis on the processes of recovery and transformation—they reaffirm the recuperative, formal ideals exemplified in contemporaneous economies of waste. This conception of “closure” implies “enclosure” as well, a sense of legibility and finitude characteristic of the closed circle, the narrative space within which we as readers are allowed to imagine possible outcomes and alternatives.16 At a literal level, Dickens’s two great urban novels, Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend, describe a London dominated by waste. In its opening lines, Bleak House canvasses a city filled with waste, from the sedimented mud and soot in the streets and air, the “documents” filling Miss Flite’s bags, and the rags, bottles, and waste paper of Krook’s shop, to the “extraordinary Page 100 →creatures in rags, secretly groping among the swept-out rubbish for pins and other refuse” (66). The London represented here, as in Mayhew’s work, functions as a space for waste’s recovery,17 but for Dickens the juxtapositions of social class and wondrous material transformations serve as forces propelling the novel’s plot. The love letters from Honoria to Captain Hawdon, for example, once the sentimental emblems of an illicit middle-class romance, reappear as a pauper’s seemingly worthless effects, only to be transformed once again, as they are transferred from Krook to Smallweed to Tulkinghorn to Bucket, into something of value. Similarly, the Jarndyce will, central to the plots of both the courtroom and of Ada and Richard’s lives, is discovered as a “stained discoloured paper, which was much singed upon the outside” (947) buried among the waste papers filling Krook’s shop. This economy of circulation and recovery pervades the world of Our Mutual Friend as well, such that many of the characters, from the working-class Riderhood and the Hexams, who recover corpses from the Thames, to the highliving Fledgeby, who trades in old bills of sale and debts, to the wealthy Harmon, whose fortune derives from the city’s dustheaps, earn their livings from what others have thrown away. While, as in London Labour, some waste remains mere waste (as Esther observes of Krook’s shop, “everything seemed to be bought, and nothing to be sold” [67]), Dickens’s moral judgment seems directed, not at these unrecovered remnants of urban life, but rather at those who, like Mayhew’s slop-sellers, attempt to situate themselves outside this economy entirely. Figures without a history and with no legible role in that economy, like the wealthy Veneerings, “bran-new people in a bran-new house,” are characters worthy of scorn (48); as mere languorous commentators on the events taking place, they are ironically located at the periphery of the plot, while those working to recover waste, who usually reside at the margins of social recognition, are at its center. Numerous critics have pointed to the way in which the Thames, an emblem of waste, pollution, and recovery for Chadwick and Mayhew, functions as the focal point for the moral and social economy of Our Mutual Friend. Framing the novel as part of a wider-reaching, middle-class effort at cleansing urban society, for example, Deirdre David reads the novel as “a kind of novelistic embankment and drainage project” in moral terms, such that undesirable elements are drained away, foundations are solidified, and the whole regenerated through the effort (63), while Michelle Allen considers its application of the period’s sanitary rhetoric, the language of pollution and purification, to a river that becomes “a means of mobility,” geographic, social, and economic, for its characters (91). For others, its focus on waste’s Page 101 →recovery reflects the period’s deep metaphysical preoccupations, its concern with the redemptive potential in sustaining life through decay, or with the desire for transcendence through deferral (Gallagher, “Bio-Economics”; Chappell; Kuskey). In Gallagher’s reading, the novel’s preoccupation with moral recovery and redemption reflects its own antiMalthusian bioeconomics, a concern with the means by which value can be extracted from decay and death, such that the rescue of a character like Eugene Wrayburn from near-drowning in the river also serves as the key to his personal redemption (“Bio-Economics,” 348–57).18 Collectively, these readings reveal the ways in which the processes of decomposition and regeneration, the emblems of waste and reuse, are symbolically linked through the novel. These ethics and aesthetics of recovery extend, I suggest in this chapter’s remaining pages, to the shape of Dickens’s narrative as well. For just as Chadwick detailed the means by which the city might achieve sanitary closure, so, too, Dickens’s novels traced the process of reaching narrative closure. Indeed, much like Mayhew’s London Labour, Dickens’s narrative enacts a recuperation of “secondhand” subjectmatter and subjects, demonstrating how otherwise discarded or marginalized elements might be reincorporated

into a coherent understanding of the city. Thus the incidental, seemingly “throwaway” details introduced early in Bleak House often prove to be useful and productive components within the economy of the novel. The nameless figures who only momentarily appear in chapter 1’s panoramic view of the city, the “little mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet” and the “ruined suitor” from Shropshire, for example, might seem undistinguished from the other detritus around them (15, 16); but as even waste paper later proves its significance, these figures are eventually encompassed by the emerging narrative, in which they resolve into meaningful characters, Miss Flite and Gridley, respectively. Similarly, Esther’s initial survey of London includes a cursory glance at “the extraordinary creatures in rags, secretly groping among the swept-out rubbish” (66); later these urban figures, who might have seemed unworthy of mention at first, reappear in significant roles, as characters like Krook and Jo. The opening scenes of Our Mutual Friend unveil a fictional city similarly crammed, not only with literal forms of waste—dustheaps and drowned corpses—but also with a quantity of legal and social detritus—the Harmon will, the scavengers on the Thames, two idle lawyers. Just as the neighborhoods inhabited by each define the geography of the novel in Moretti’s reading, these narrative elements and spaces define its conceptual landscape: their circulation and potential for transformation delineate realms of narrativePage 102 → possibility; they constitute something like a pipe and drain network of possible trajectories for the development of plot and character, and ensure their containment. As the novel progresses, they might recede, but like the constant sweeping return of gossip to the Veneerings’ dinner table, they emerge again and again throughout. While a psychological or providential reading of such recurrences is possible, these elements also enact the circulatory dynamic that Mayhew had identified in the inevitable return of the Thames at high tide. In Mayhew’s London Labour the narrator ensures that nothing is forgotten. Delighting in the radical intimacies enabled by waste’s recovery, he plays the providential role himself, enacting a rhetorical juxtaposition between beggar and prime minister, or reaching into the text to elevate the filthy mud-lark to the publishing house. In tracing the often more circuitous means by which its recuperations are accomplished, Dickens’s final completed novel reveals that it is not the result of recovery but the process of transformation—especially for characters—that is of greatest importance. Hence, unlike the seemingly miraculous changes Playfair described, in which raw materials and end products were often in an unrecognizable relationship to each other, Our Mutual Friend privileges the continuities engendered through transformation, the retention and recollection of the past preserved through the process of recovery.19 Indeed, the novel invests that sense of continuity with moral significance, such that the sympathetic characters are those who maintain and recirculate elements of the past. Lizzie Hexam, for example, refuses to renounce her father’s memory or his trade; in rescuing Eugene from drowning she makes use of and redeems her own past, “that old time” of pulling corpses from the Thames with her father, now “turn[ed] to good at last!” (768). Other characters, too, exemplify this continuity with their respective pasts: even after becoming an upright member of Betty Higden’s household, Sloppy retains the name that links him with his origins in the slops; the Boffins remain loyal in spirit to the memory of the young John Harmon; after repenting of her mercenary tendencies, Bella, recognizing the value of the humbler life she has left behind, returns to her clerk father and “mendicant” suitor; and Eugene, too, recovered from the river and an almost certain death, must recall the errors of his past in order to undergo repentance and moral reformation.20 But Dickens’s circulatory economy, unlike Mayhew’s, allows deserving characters like Lizzie social mobility, whereas characters who seek radical reinvention—Charley Hexam, the Veneerings, the Lammles, Bradley Headstone—are effectively jettisoned from the plot over the course of the Page 103 →narrative. The novel demands continuity with the past, a respect for its sentiments and hierarchies, and generates the future by remobilizing what has come before. In the face of accumulating detritus and possible social disorder, the main plotlines of the novel are—in both senses of the word—conservative. In the world of this novel, where the plot’s trajectories emphasize transformation and conservation, sociality is a closed system. For while Our Mutual Friend alludes to uncontained risk and the anonymity of urban interactions, the novel also manages these narrative possibilities, such that the materials with which it began are also those that contribute to its resolution. Here, no previously unknown relatives suddenly materialize to provide

an orphan with family; no colonial landscape enables characters to escape for a decade or more to remake their place in society. Where such elements contribute to narrative closure in works like Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre, and Great Expectations, in the world of Our Mutual Friend, there is no equivalent external space upon whose resources its resolution can draw. It constructs new relationships out of old characters, and formulates social coherence through internal circulation. The novel’s preference for recirculation over generation or multiplication is exemplified through its treatment of the titular character, who appears twice in the opening chapters as a “stranger in London” (66, 82), the first time as Julius Handford and later as John Rokesmith. In both cases, the narrative plays with the suggestion that these are “new” characters, men who have seemingly materialized out of nowhere. But that game is soon up: Handford and Rokesmith are the same person, and identical, too, to John Harmon, who already circulates in the first chapter as a dead body floating in the Thames, and in the second chapter as the central figure floating through Mortimer Lightwood’s anecdote.21 Indeed, the novel’s title, which alludes to the observation that the Wilfers’ mysterious lodger is also, as it happens, Mr. Boffin’s secretary, is itself emblematic of this formal economy of character, a kind of narrative parsimony that makes do with what it already has on stock. That proliferation of identities gestures at the vastness and anonymity of the city’s population, but its eventual containment serves as a reminder of what we already know: Our Mutual Friend is an engineered space, a closed circuit of narrative possibility.22 Even when representing chance meetings, the novel resorts to this logic; in these pages, chance’s open-endedness gets rescripted as coincidence, an arbitrary circumscription of statistical possibility.23 For instance, when in chapter 11 of book 3, an angry Rogue Riderhood appears at Mortimer’s gate in the middle of the night, the stranger he happensPage 104 → to meet there is Bradley Headstone, a character already well established within the novel’s network of plots. Similarly, when Betty Higden escapes from London to die free of the poorhouse, she travels up the river into the countryside, where she encounters Rogue Riderhood as the keeper of the lock. These meetings reveal the extent to which these characters circulate within the narrative’s closed economy, such that rather than dispersing and proliferating, its multiplot vision of social participation instead recirculates and rejoins. Thus when Betty seeks her deathbed on the river’s bank soon afterwards, she encounters another unexpected Londoner, Lizzie Hexam, whose appearance from the very first chapter as one of the novel’s “waterside characters” (to borrow Riderhood’s description of himself [197]) brings them together. What is more, the novel demonstrates that even Betty’s imagination cannot move beyond these circumscribed trajectories. When she awakens in her dying moments, disoriented and confused, she at first mistakes Lizzie, who hovers over her, for yet another Londoner, Bella: “вЂIt cannot be the boofer lady?’” (575). To be sure, her confusion hints at the parallels between the novel’s two heroines and foreshadows Bella’s moral reformation under Lizzie’s influence—but it also suggests the impossibility, for Betty, as for the novel itself, of conjuring a brand-new character. Even the imagination, the novel suggests, is capable only of recirculation; its circuits, too, are closed. Harmon aptly acknowledges his awareness of the city’s—and the novel’s—closed social vision when, after many chapters, he finally meets Mortimer by accident in the street and observes that “chance has brought us face to face at last—which is not to be wondered at, for the wonder is, that, in spite of all my pains to the contrary, chance has not confronted us together sooner” (827). Chance might in other contexts be open-ended, an infinitesimal statistical possibility in a metropolitan population of over three million persons, but in Harmon’s rendering “chance” signifies the inevitability of the fictional city’s contained social networks, whose trajectories must at some point intersect. Social participation is represented here not as joining an infinitude of nameless, faceless bodies, but entry into a finite space, which contains known characters and geographies within a closed circulatory system.

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Five Recollections of the Body Anatomical Science and Fictions of Wholeness Death would seem to represent the definitive moment of closure for a novel’s characters, the point at which all narrative possibilities must come to an end. When Bradley Headstone and Rogue Riderhood end up drowned at the bottom of a canal in the final installment of Our Mutual Friend, for example, both their plots and their lives arrive at a logical point of conclusion. Yet from its opening chapters, Dickens’s novel proposes that death might also serve as a beginning, a moment when characters enter into another sphere of participation and relation, their bodies initiated into an alternate form of sociality. The gathering of corpses from the Thames by Rogue and his rival, Gaffer Hexam, launches the dead body on a journey through coroners’ offices and into the shady economies of reward and robbery, as John Harmon’s apparent death sets in motion his own circuitous journey through London. For sanitary reformers, too, death was not only an endpoint, that which public health measures were designed to prevent, but also a starting point, the miasmatic or contagious source from which new and threatening narratives of social contact might emerge. Thus Bleak House figured the crowded urban cemetery as the site from which “malignant diseases are communicated” to the living (180), and with yet greater immediacy, Krook’s combusted corpse was the source of a “thick, yellow liquor,” the “sickening oil” deposited onto the bodies of the living (516). Where, for Patrick Chappell, such lingering effects are the hallmarks of Dickens’s “subaltern bodies” (794), elsewhere the novelist and his contemporaries suggest that all bodies bear this potential for the transmission of postmortem consequences. Indeed, according to chemist Lyon Playfair, the corpse’s “state of putrefaction” should be of general Page 106 →concern to the living, as the former might readily convey its “putrefied,” or diseased, state to the latter, and similarly, George Godwin, one of the period’s leading housing reformers, pointed to the decomposing body as the source of “fluids and gases” that “pass into the air and do their evil work” (London Shadows, 53).1 The potential for contact between bodies, then, did not stop with life. Death was, if anything, generative in new and unwelcome ways, when the body reasserted its capacity for transmission. Where, as the preceding chapter revealed, disease narratives invited writers like Mayhew and Playfair to consider the possibility of waste’s productive recirculation, the threat posed by the dead body prompted reformers to ask whether the corpse’s narrative might also be rewritten: Could the dead body be recovered like other material objects that had reached a natural terminus—like rags and manure—into a similarly productive, controlled social economy? Was there a corporeal equivalent of a shoddy mill or a system of agricultural fertilization? More to the point, to what extent could the corpse even be understood as analogous to other forms of material waste, as having a potential “use”? This chapter investigates the discourses surrounding the difficult question of the dead body’s utility: the controversial 1832 Anatomy Act, which allowed “unclaimed” bodies—the corpses of the workhouse poor—to be dissected in medical institutions; the logic of labor and debt, especially as adherents of political economy sought to extend it beyond the moment of death; and the rhetoric, both medical and literary, of the fragmented body. In attempting to reinscribe the dead body within the labor and market economies of the living, these accounts pressed the social potential of the body to its logical extreme. For where narratives of contagion or miasma envisioned that social participation might be premised on bodily effects (on old clothes, on exhalations) that were dissociated from and could travel beyond the originary self, these arguments around anatomy questioned the very idea of the self and its associations with identity. Indeed, the prospect of the body circulating independently of life, of identity, where even parts might circulate independently of the whole, multiplied the possibilities for both social participation and corporeal contact. For some, this expansion verged on a dangerous promiscuity of bodies and parts, while for figures like Sydney Carton and John Harmon in A Tale of Two Cities

and Our Mutual Friend, respectively, the body’s prospective dissociation from identity was charged with both moral and narrative potential. The cultural relevance and resonance of the Anatomy Act, especially for working-class populations, can hardly be overestimated, as Ruth Richardson’sPage 107 → research has amply demonstrated. Moreover, the way it extended—and in some cases even came to symbolize—the rhetoric of political economy sustained public attention to and debate over its clauses for decades after its passage in 1832. Indeed, a range of writers, questioning the ethical implications of the Act’s fundamental supposition that the corpse had an assignable value, both scientific and monetary, often strategically placed it in discursive continuity with slavery and prostitution. But the rhetoric of anatomy also enabled writers to imagine new and morally productive roles for the body in the social economy; Dickens, for example, who generally reaffirmed the sentimental value of the self, also turned to an anatomical language of bodily fragmentation and dispersal in his novels. Indeed, I suggest here, in a range of works—but especially in A Tale of Two Cities—anatomical self-awareness serves as the necessary precondition to physiological and personal reconsolidation. For both its detractors and its adherents, the rhetoric of anatomy helped to mobilize the body’s circulation through the discursive spaces of the social; it made the body, especially the piecemeal body, into something “useful” indeed to the period’s social and representational economies.

The Corpse at Labor The problem posed by the dead body was often understood as related to the familiar problem of urban excess. Accounts of corpses accumulating in the city, like accounts of accumulated detritus or excrement, emphasized quantity: the sheer numbers of bodies, their cumulative dimensions. Godwin, for instance, claimed that St. Giles’s-in-the-Fields and St. Martin’s cemeteries regularly stacked corpses “from a depth of about 13 feet up to 3 or 4 feet from the surface,” until the whole area was a “loose and quaking” mass of decomposition (London Shadows, 53, 52), while surgeon George A. Walker calculated that in an urban cemetery designed to hold 1,200 bodies, “from 10,000 to 12,000 bodies have been depositedВ .В .В . within the last sixteen years!” and explained that when a new corpse was to be buried gravediggers often “penetrated through a mass of human bones eight or ten feet in thickness” (237, 168).2 At the same time, others pointed out that there was a demand for corpses in cities like London and Edinburgh, where surgeons-in-training required anatomical subjects for dissection. Before the Act’s passage, medical institutions had traditionally obtained an irregular supply of corpses from two principal sources: from the government, which supplied schools with the Page 108 →bodies of hanged felons, and from grave robbers, who would unearth freshly buried bodies to sell. The passage of the Anatomy Act in 1832 virtually guaranteed medical institutions a ready source of corpses from poorhouses. As long as a pauper’s body was “unclaimed” (in other words, as long as no family members came forward to claim the body), the poorhouse might surrender it to doctors for dismemberment and dissection in exchange for a small payment to cover its costs. No longer dependent on the bodies of the capitally guilty or on the criminal classes who robbed the graves of the innocent, surgeons distanced themselves from the twofold taint of criminality that had marred the dissection-table in earlier years3—a change that also contributed to the medical community’s broader efforts during this period to cultivate the appearance of professional legitimacy. Still, as Richardson compellingly argues, the Act did not do away with but merely transformed the punitive connotations of anatomization. Once endorsed by legislation, anatomical dissection, heretofore an ignominy reserved for the worst felons in the eighteenth century, punished those who from the perspective of middle-class political economists were among the nineteenth century’s worst offenders: the poor. But at a more general level, the Act’s passage marked a transformation in representations of the body. The medical community may have been the most immediate beneficiary of the Act’s provisions, but it was political economy that shaped its rhetoric, that applied the logic of supply and demand to the corpse. Yet unlike those who proposed to recover other forms of urban waste, such as excrement or industrial by-products, through plans that assumed an anti-Malthusian force, the Act’s supporters could have no illusions that consumption would ever match production—that the dissection of corpses would ever solve the problem of overcrowded

cemeteries. Rather, these debates about cemeteries and corpses were, I propose, ways of grappling with the implications of the period’s competing discourses, of thinking through the problem of the body as a material object. Early modern science, according to Michael Sappol, had framed the body in more abstract “astronomical and/or humoral terms” (22), and indeed Roy Porter informs us that it was only in the eighteenth century that professional medicine took a decidedly materialist turn (Flesh, chaps. 20–21), a shift that would provide the basis for a nineteenth-century medicalization of the living body. As for the dead body, once emptied of life and intention, to what narrative—religious, economic, social, medical, familial—did it belong? In bringing together two discursive projects, the Act helped to transform the corpse not only into an object of medicalized inquiry, but also into an object Page 109 →with market value, an object of exchange. At the same time, while dissection might have retained punitive associations after 1832, the Act’s passage enacted dissection’s transformation from a theatrical procedure whose meaning was largely symbolic, to a utilitarian one, an element in the efficient and economical operation of the state. To be sure, even before this period the dead body was understood to have economic value. In the eighteenth century there were instances in which corpses were held as a form of collateral for debts owed by family members, and they were sometimes also substituted for ready cash as medical school tuition (Richardson, 54–55). The profit to be made from the dead was certainly something the notorious William Burke and William Hare understood when they murdered sixteen persons in the late 1820s in order to sell their corpses to anatomists.4 But the logic of political economy gained legitimacy in the 1830s and ’40s, such that its application to the body transformed what was once private into a matter of public interest. According to Gallagher, the dead body was central to political economy’s framing of the relationship between the human body and economic value; thus Victorian writers like Dickens and Chadwick implicitly understood the “open secret that money is always ultimately taken out of flesh” (Body Economic, 94).5 That often metaphorical, abstract understanding was literalized in the debates around the Act, when both economists and sanitary reformers considered whether the systematic approach that had been applied to the recovery of manure and discarded clothes might also extend to the corpse. Indeed, echoing the contemporaneous rhetoric of sewerage and recovery, an 1869 Free Lance article argued that to refuse such uses of the dead body would be a “a mere waste of useful material” (quoted in Richardson, 279). In a similar spirit, Jeremy Bentham claimed that systematizing the reuse of corpses would eliminate grave robbing, “by rendering the dead body too cheap, in consequence of affording a legal, regular, and abundant supply” (130), and Southwood Smith, a vocal proponent of the Act, asked why the pauper’s body should not legitimately be “converted to the public use”? (“Use,” 94). Even in a spirited attack on the Anatomy Act, another author criticized surgeons’ thoughtless squandering of medical subjects in terms that the political economist would easily have recognized: “Ought not the legislature to prevent at least the waste of the human material of instruction?” (“Dialogues,” 734). The adopted language of supply and demand, use and waste, transformed the corpse from a focus of religious and familial concern into a marketable object, from a memorial of a living self into an anonymous piece of flesh. So central was the rhetoric of economic value to Page 110 →the Act’s proposals that another critic of Anatomy gave it this sarcastic turn: “As the bones of horses and cattle are now converted into manure, so IN FUTURE, are the last dear remnants of the dead to be converted into a mode of INCREASING THE FEES OF CORONERS!” (quoted in Burney, 55–56; emphasis in original). But the value of the corpse was understood not only with relation to its status as a commodity in the marketplace (as something possessed of value), but also with relation to an accepted logic of labor (as a potential producer of value). In a move designed to extend governmental and medical control over the body into the grave, the Act’s proponents argued that the corpse might well do a kind of “labor” after death, might serve a productive role within the economy of the living, by furthering medical knowledge and thereby increasing both the length and quality of life for the living. Moreover, in focusing attention on the pauper’s body, these arguments were directed at those who had presumably failed in or refused labor’s social and economic exchange while living. For the Act suggested that the poor, by submitting to the surgeon’s knife, could still perform a kind of work after death. Indeed, like the 1834 New Poor Law, which reduced poorhouse relief as a strategy to motivate the poor to maintain themselves through their own efforts, the Anatomy Act promoted a

utilitarian conception of labor, where the logic of the marketplace, with its rhetoric of loans, debts, labor, and payments, might apply in equal measure to the living and the dead. As Southwood Smith put it, in pressing for the passage of the Bill, “no maxim can be more indisputable than that those who are supported by the public die in its debt” (“Use,” 94). The Act effectively enabled the impoverished individual to enter the labor market retroactively, to offer his or her body in exchange for the sustenance that had been provided in the poorhouse at governmental expense. Thus where Thomas Laqueur, distilling the essence of the Act, writes that “those who in life could not sell their labor for sufficient money to provide for a decent interment were of value only when they no longer owned their labor or their bodies” (122), I suggest that the Act went further still: it claimed that dissection was not merely a recompense for the poor person’s failure to labor—it was labor’s postmortem equivalent. These questions, about the relationship of the dead to the living, and about the relationship between the body and monetary value, are central to Dickens’s last complete work of fiction, Our Mutual Friend. Indeed, the novel mobilizes a “curiously death-centered bioeconomics” from its opening chapter, wherein the corpse functions as what Gallagher calls “a nexus of two kinds of economic exchange,” one of reanimation, in which the dead body Page 111 →can be converted back into a living one, and the other of labor, in which it can be traded for a “living” (Body Economic, 93). The extent to which these forms of exchange relied on the discourse of anatomy—on the imagined fragmentation and circulation of the body—is illustrated at the center of the novel, in a kind of set piece between Rogue Riderhood (satirically called the “Deputy” here) and Betty Higden, who, having sensed death’s approach, travels into the countryside to meet it: “Stop a bit,” said the Deputy, striking in between her and the door. “Why are you all of a shake, and what’s your hurry, Missis?” “Oh, Master, Master,” returned Betty Higden, “I’ve fought against the Parish and fled from it, all my life, and I want to die free of it!” “I don’t know,” said the Deputy, with deliberation, “as I ought to let you go. I’m a honest man as gets my living by the sweat of my brow, and I may fall into trouble by letting you go.” (572) In this encounter, Betty’s determination to keep the last few coins that will preserve her from the Parish poorhouse meets Rogue’s greedy determination to relieve her of them. Their opposing agendas notwithstanding, Betty and Rogue both express an awareness of the systems of bodily exchange in which they are participants. While Rogue refers to his willing role in an economy of labor and Betty speaks fearfully of her own unwilling one in the Parish’s political economy and, as this chapter proposes, in its practice of dismembering the bodies of the poor, the interchange also points to an underlying similarity between the two. Betty’s insistence on independence is, we learn in this chapter, sustained by the money “[s]ewn in the breast of her gown” (573) that will keep her out of the poorhouse; in effect, she has more or less “purchased” her own bodily freedom, just as Rogue, albeit with his clichГ©d language, likewise recalls the exchange of body for money that his labor entails. With its knotted play of literal and figurative terms, indicating both that his body (his literal “living”) can be sustained through the pains of labor (the figurative “sweat”), and that the effort of his body (whose evidence is his literal “sweat”) can be exchanged for money (his figurative “living”), his reasoning provides a double affirmation of the body’s place in economic exchange, a place Betty’s savings are meant to help her avoid, but which ironically only further involve her in her own body’s commodification. Yet their formulations also posit contrasting interpretations of labor’s relation to the body. For Betty, who clings to the coins she has honestly earned and saved, labor is the means by which she has achieved selfownership, and Page 112 →thus affirms the wholeness and independence of her body. Rogue, by contrast, suggests that labor requires the dispersal and trading away of the body, its “sweat,” in exchange for money. And although his “labor” is often of an illegitimate, shady nature, an attempt to cheat someone else out of a living rather than getting it by his own efforts, the logic of exchange does catch up to him; he nearly sacrifices his

life at one point, almost drowning in an attempt to “get his living,” and at the novel’s conclusion he loses his life in an attempt to blackmail a living out of another character. Thus a proposal that the poor need not wait until death to earn a living, that they might trade away their lives, revealed what Dickens, too, seems to convey in this scene: the Anatomy Act extended the logic of labor, where dissection merely literalized the figurative violence that labor was already understood to enact upon the body. One surgeon, linking the two discursively, argued that “any one” should be “at liberty to sell his body for anatomical purposesВ .В .В . for there were few paupers who would not be glad to leave ten guineas to their widows” (“Birmingham Petition,” 945), and by a similar logic, in the words of a member of Parliament, the poor might avoid the workhouse by selling “their bodies during their lives, securing to them the right of preemption in the re-purchase of their bodies on paying due interest” (Hansard’s, 9: 833).6 These imagined transactions simulated labor’s exchange in its most fundamental terms, making the body itself, the promise of a corpse delivered in the future, into the commodity that can secure its own living in the present. An 1845 Punch cartoon offered a more critical reading of this exchange, as it depicted skeletons worked to the bone—persons who had literally traded away their lives for a “living”—crowded into a small workshop. But the language of corporeal exchange brought the Act’s proposals into uncomfortable proximity with other, less palatable forms of exchange as well: slavery and prostitution. Even those who supported the Act acknowledged the troubling similarities between the anatomical subject and the slave. The MP who argued that the poor be allowed to sell their bodies in advance also declared his firm opposition to any “open sale,” to a “market of human flesh” (Hansard’s, 9: 833), and a Household Words article that equivocated in its stance regarding the Anatomy Act nonetheless affirmed, “In this country let no man alive or dead be denied bodily freedom” ([Morley], 364). Fraser’s was more direct still in using the language of emancipation to attack the Act: “[W]hy [do] you invade the right of a freeman to his own flesh? Whose person was not free and safe in Britain, except indeed the wretches aimed at by your Act?” (“Dialogues,” 733–34).7 Thus where an exchange of body for food and shelter might be understood by some as a version of labor, for Page 113 →others the literalization of that exchange—where the “living” extracted from the body was life itself—entailed the wholesale surrender of any right to self-ownership. Yet perhaps nowhere did the Act’s proposals reveal labor’s difficult and often violent contradictions more clearly than when the subject was a woman. To be sure, the image of a female body on the surgeon’s table was a troublingly sexualized one. For the Act’s opponents, not only would the woman’s body be rendered “public” on some figurative level, but her anatomization, her prone, naked body being exposed to strangers’ hands, was read as a violation. Fraser’s, for example, conjured the image of a young wife, “tremblingly alive once to modesty,” her purity once guarded by her husband during life, now “naked among strangers, exposed to the eyes, and all mutilated under the hands, of many lewd young fellows” (“Dialogues,” 746). Indeed, when the apparition of the anatomized wife next appeared before her husband, “instead of the white-marbled, sweet bodyВ .В .В . she presents a shapeВ .В .В . composed of bloody fragments of many bodies” (“Dialogues,” 741). Her living body, once characterized by its perfect, inviolate surface (of “marble” rather than mere embodied flesh), an emblem of chastity and containment, returns after death as a figure ruptured, a site exposed and violated by countless other, anonymous bodies. Dissection, as its opponents framed it, threatened to transform the once chaste wife into a public woman. But Smith and his utilitarian contemporary, Jeremy Bentham, mobilized this association between anatomy and promiscuity to argue for the validity of conscripting bodies into medical service. Urging that London should follow the rational example set by other European cities, Bentham notes that there, “all the poor who are supported at the public expense, and the public women, are given up to anatomy” (145). The prostitute and the workhouse pauper might be viewed as roughly equivalent in their moral reprehensibility, but more important is the sense that the prostitute has also, like the poor man, been “supported at the public expense.” For not only has she made herself publicly available, he argues, but she, like the pauper, has also already implicitly surrendered her body to the public in exchange for her sustenance. An 1858 Household Words article likewise compared the work of the prostitute to that of the anatomical subject through an extended double entendre; it summarizes the case of an “unfortunate woman” who contacted a surgeon so that she might

pay the few pounds that she owed to creditors. For these reasons, she wished to sell her body. She was of such an age—so tall, so stout—of Page 114 →fair complexion; and she might be seen on the Strand side of Temple Bar at a certain hour on a certain day. If he would buy her for dissectionВ .В .В . he would pay those who might bring her body to his rooms. If he did not accept her offer, she would find somebody who would. ([Morley], 363)8 This scenario exposes the parallels aligning the bodies of the prostitute, the pauper, and the anatomical subject, as it also lays bare the similarities in the corporeal exchanges required by labor and by dissection. The “unfortunate woman” who has presumably sold her body in the marketplace of prostitution now seeks financial relief through another kind of exchange mediated through the body, but rather than giving herself up to the poorhouse (where, upon death, she would likely end up on the dissecting table anyway), she offers herself directly to the surgeon in the familiar language of solicitation. The physical attributes—her height, her figure, her youth—that she regularly puts on display as a prostitute for prospective clients are those that presumably render her available and desirable to the surgeon as well. Yet unlike the poorhouse pauper, whose dissection was thought to substitute for unperformed labor, the prostitute already earned her own living within the economy. Indeed, in drawing equivalences among these three “public” bodies, both Southwood Smith and the Household Words author overlook the fact that prostitution is itself a form of labor that could prevent a woman from succumbing to the financial insolvency that the pauper experiences in the first place. In Judith Walkowitz’s account of Victorian prostitution, the distinction between the prostitute and the “virtuous” working-class woman was often thought to be dangerously unclear, especially since prostitution was often a temporary or occasional activity during the nineteenth century rather than a permanent or definitive occupation among the lower classes;9 rather than acknowledge the prostitute’s economic self-sufficiency, these arguments about anatomy, like the medical examinations Walkowitz discusses, insist on the moral boundary separating “virtuous” from nonvirtuous labor. The posthumous drama involving one prostitute, Polly Chapman, a suicide, is particularly instructive in this regard. A newspaper account of the inquest reports that although Chapman’s fellow prostitutes expressed their desire and ability to pay her funeral expenses, their appeal to the coroner was in vain, for he ruled that her body should be turned over to the anatomist “as an example to prevent suicide amongst unfortunate women” (quoted in Richardson, 234). Refusing her a private burial, he presses her, like the pauper, into public service and enforces her identity as a “public woman,” even in death. Page 115 →

Going to Pieces Though neither prostitute nor workhouse pauper, Betty Higden might nonetheless be understood as Polly Chapman’s counterpart in Our Mutual Friend, the character for whom the moment of contested burial functions as one of the central dramas of her life. A virtuous widow, Betty earns her living and—as she hopes—her bodily and financial independence through work. While her adamant and repeated refusals to enter the poorhouse have been read as typical of Dickens’s heavy-handed treatment of character,10 her anxiety about her body’s posthumous fate also implicitly exemplifies what Richardson has shown us was a deep working-class suspicion of what was known as a “parish burial,” a rite that had been transformed from an accepted if not desirable end for the pauper in the early nineteenth century, into a dreaded fate after 1832, when interment was assumed to take place only after postmortem dissection (Richardson, 274). Rather than expressing an irrational fear or a misguided sense of respectability (and she has been accused of both), then, Betty’s avowal that she would prefer to have her house and its inhabitants burned down, “sooner than move a corpse of us there!” reflects her aversion to the outcome with which she, as a working-class widow, would have been well aware (248). Although this statement and her other proud declarations, such as “I have stood between my dead and that shame I have spoken of, and it has been kept off from every one of them” (252), do not specify what “shame” she wishes to avoid, her very inability to articulate the exact nature of that fate accords with Richardson’s account of the pauper’s mysterious silences, in which, during “Victoria’s reign, the fact that the misfortune of poverty could qualify a person for dismemberment after death became too intensely painful for contemplation; became taboo” (281). Whatever the reasons for Betty’s reticence, however, the

two items she safeguards in the breast of her dress as she flees London speak volumes. Both the letter from her wealthy friends, the Boffins, and the money she has saved to pay her funeral expenses reflect her familiarity with the Act’s provisions, since they were the only two protections that would have prevented her body from being claimed for dissection. Moreover, the narrator informs us that when she envisions her own death these two possessions play a central role: “the letter would be found in her breast, along with the money, and the gentlefolks would say when it was given back to them, вЂShe prized it, did old Betty Higden; she was true to it; and while she lived, she would never let it be disgraced by falling into the hands’” of the parish (574). What, readers of this passage might well ask, is “it”? The referent is left ambiguous here; while possibly an allusion to the money or the Page 116 →letter she carries, “it” also seems to refer, especially in the elegiac words of the “gentlefolks,” to the dead body itself. The effect of this ambiguity, where the three possible referents—money, letter, body—within the sentence come to seem exchangeable one for the other mirrors their literal exchange under the Anatomy Act’s provisions, the letter and money that would allow Betty to maintain her bodily independence. In expressing a desire to “be of a piece like, and helpful of myself right through to my death” (441), she makes precisely this connection, linking her financial autonomy (“helpful of myself”) to her bodily integrity (“to be of a piece”) in an effort to keep herself from being, in the hands of the anatomist, cut into pieces. Betty’s language suggests that the Anatomy Act did more than propose to dissect a few ostensibly unwanted bodies. Rather, it mobilized a rhetoric of bodily fragmentation that extended beyond the surgeon’s table: it invited readers to question the integrity not just of the dead body, but also, like Betty Higden, of their own living bodies. Even (or especially) for her, the body is a material object, one whose wholeness is a provisional condition, always shadowed by the potential for strategic exchange. Self-ownership is paradoxically assured in this context only by participation in a corporeal trading away, of “sweat” for a “living,” in labor or in death. Contemporaneous fictional and journalistic works, too, often participated in the work of anatomy, by employing the language that takes bodies apart. But many of them, mirroring Betty’s own journey back to integrity, also expressed a desire for their recuperation. Thus even as they uncovered the multiple discursive processes shaping the contours of the body, they worked to reconcile—albeit often uneasily—the dispersive rhetoric of labor and anatomy to an opposing narrative impulse to contain the self, to insist on a discernible identity. For Southwood Smith, bodies were as easily halved and quartered rhetorically as they might be surgically. In an 1829 Westminster Review essay he complained that the limited supply of dead bodies allowed “to each medical student in London [only] half a body for dissection,” a formulation that, in assuming the body’s divisibility, enacts its own rhetorical anatomy ([Arnott], 126). Parliamentary debates about the Act participated in this rhetorical dissection as well, with some arguing that doctors should be allowed to take parts home for further study since, as one member of Parliament put it, “no person would have an entire body when he only wanted a part,” while another objected that such a practice would lead to “the wholesale cutting up of the bodies of the poor, joint by joint” (Hansard’s, 12: 315).11 Still another predicted that with the “sale of quarters of the human carcase [sic], first to one and then to another,” the body might come to be butchered and Page 117 →distributed like pieces of meat (Hansard’s, 12: 899).12 Hence even those who objected to the Act participated in these nonchalant operations at the level of language, rendering bodies little more than mere aggregates of heads and limbs. Such casual references to dissection inspired Dickens’s satirical treatment of this dinnertime conversation between medical students: “вЂI’ve put my name down for an arm, at our place,’ said Mr Allen. вЂWe’re clubbing for a subject, and the list is nearly full, only we can’t get hold of any fellow that wants a head. I wish you’d take it’” (Pickwick Papers, 393).13 Where Bianca Tredennick contends that Dickens’s journalism was unequivocal in this matter, that for him “the dead refuse to be objectified; they decline to be mere objects of exchange among the living” (78), I suggest that both his A Tale of Two Cities and Our Mutual Friend reflect on and even promote the ambiguities associated with the body’s contingent status—as well as its social potential. These works thematize the practice of anatomy, but instead of condemning its conception of the body (as one might expect, given his sympathetic treatment of Betty Higden) they feature narrators who, through the liberal use of metaphor and personification, readily participate in the practice themselves. The dramatization of the anatomical trade, in other

words, is simply a reminder, a literal instantiation of the rhetorical and discursive potential for the dispersal, circulation, and recollection of all bodies. Rather than offering only a specific commentary on the Anatomy Act or anatomical science, these moments in Dickens’s fiction reflect the more general effects of anatomical discourse on representations of the body. Indeed, they suggest that anatomy made available a new vocabulary for thinking about the body, for describing what once seemed inherently whole as now only provisionally, even strategically so. Thus A Tale of Two Cities features Jerry Cruncher, a “resurrectionist” who robs graves for a living and delivers the corpses to the surgeon, but, ironically, the novel never shows us the surgeon’s dissecting table; instead, the violence of dismemberment takes place elsewhere. Specifically, in a suspenseful scene Charles Darnay finds himself, on the first of numerous occasions in the book, on trial for his life; accused of treasonous behavior against England, he faces the prospect of a torturous death by drawing, disemboweling, beheading, and quartering. The crowd’s fascination with him, as they clamor forward “to see every inch of him” (92), is likewise driven by a desire to imagine that punishment being enacted upon his body, to gaze upon “the form that was to be doomed to be so shamefully mangledВ .В .В . [a] creature that was to be so butchered and torn asunder” (93). That desire to “see every inch,” rather than signifying a desire to see the body as an uninterrupted whole, Page 118 →expresses a willingness to imagine the body in increments, as whole only for the moment, so that it may be, by the spectators’ very gaze, proleptically dismembered, “mentally hanged, beheaded, and quartered, by everybody there” (93). The violence of dissection is thus displaced from Cruncher’s unseen surgeon client to the crowd, which eagerly imagines Darnay’s body in pieces. But the novel aligns the two forms of violence by showing us Cruncher’s reaction to the bloodlust of the masses. For while Cruncher is the only one to object, declaring the threatened punishment “barbarous!” (90), for him, too, the body’s wholeness is only provisional, shadowed always by the possibility of its fragmentation. Cruncher merely hopes to postpone its coming apart until a later point, so that the immediate entertainment value that Darnay’s body promises to a crowd eager to see him ripped to pieces might be replaced by the monetary value that it represents for Cruncher himself, who would sell it to anatomists; for he can well understand sentencing a man to death, “but it’s wery hard to spile him” through violent quartering, which renders him useless as a surgical subject (90). With either imagined outcome, Darnay’s body is worthy of interest only when others can imagine it being taken apart. Yet just as the violence of quartering by an angry mob contrasts with the cool rationality of dissection in the surgeon’s chambers, the crowd’s almost primal desire is quite different from the resurrection man’s calculating greed.14 For if the English onlookers’ hunger for violence, foreshadowing that of their revolutionary counterparts across the Channel, fixes the novel’s historical events firmly in the eighteenth century,15 Cruncher’s attitude toward the body anticipates a definitively nineteenth-century political economy. Preferring the monetary to the carnal, Cruncher refuses to join the masses around him in their violent passions, and looks instead to his economic interests.16 Likewise when he observes the disorderly funeral procession for the political spy, Roger Cly, he does not join in the emotional fervor of the crowd that celebrates the traitor’s (apparent) death, but instead envisions Cly’s body from a financial perspective, commenting to himself that “[Cly] was a young вЂun and a straight made вЂun” (188). Where the other spectators judge Cly for his actions while living, Cruncher assesses rather his economic value to the anatomist after his death. While we might expect such rhetoric of the bloodthirsty and greedy characters in Dickens’s novels, what is more surprising is the narrators’ participation in imagining the dismemberment of the body. For a writer whose works have justly been read as honoring emotions such as sympathy, generosity, and loyalty, the frequency with which their narrators turn to the Page 119 →body—and indeed, take recourse in the period’s less sentimental language of bodily dispersal—seems rather incongruous. Yet throughout his fiction the language of anatomy seems to provide a kind of useful vernacular for writing about the body’s provisional unity. Cruncher’s body, for example, is described as one whose pieces have no necessary association with each other, and are only just held together by conspiracy: “He had eyes thatВ .В .В . [were] much too near together—as if they were afraid of being found out in something, singly, if they kept too far apart” (45), and

likewise Wegg in Our Mutual Friend threatens to “fly into several pieces” at the sight of Boffin (645). Moreover, while these characters might seem especially deserving of such rhetoric, Cruncher in particular a worthy victim of the same anatomizing logic to which he subjects his victims, the narrator’s language is seemingly impartial in its comic application. In Our Mutual Friend, for instance, with the narrator’s description of the otherwise amiable Sloppy as having a “considerable capital of knee and elbow and wrist and ankleВ .В .В . [and] always investing it in wrong securities” (249), he recalls the body’s piecemeal quality, its monetization and potential dispersal. Likewise, the benevolent Mr. Boffin is represented as having “an exceedingly distrustful and corrective thumb, thatВ .В .В . often interposed to smear his notes” (226). Pip, when he sees Magwitch running across the marshes in Great Expectations, remarks that he was “hugg[ing] his shuddering body in both his arms—clasping himself, as if to hold himself together” (6). Even Jenny Wren, a character of undisputed moral authority in Our Mutual Friend, through her frequent complaint that “[her] back’s bad, and [her] legs are queer” (271), expresses a kind of alienation from her own body, as if its parts are recalcitrant children whom she must tend as she does her own father. If the wholeness of the body is a semblance, an effect of an active holding onto one’s parts, this anatomizing rhetoric raises questions about the degree to which parts can be said to “belong” to the self—or even to each other—and even about the contours and limits of that centralizing self. If the parts might, as it were, have a life of their own, then what keeps the integrity of the character—the “I” of his or her narrative—intact? Cruncher seems to pose this very question when, in describing his own nervous condition, he remarks that “my lines is strained to that degree that I shouldn’t know, if it wasn’t for the pain in ’em, which was me and which somebody else” (87). The bloodthirsty spectators anticipating Darnay’s punishment imagine a similar dispersal of the self into its parts: “he’ll be drawn on a hurdle to be half hanged, and then he’ll be taken down and sliced before his own face, and then his inside will be taken out and burnt while he looks on, Page 120 →and then his head will be chopped off, and he’ll be cut into quarters” (91). Torn limb from limb, his body also comes apart from the self, such that the once definitive “he” is imagined both as the body being punished (the “he” whose “inside will be taken out and burnt”) and as the fascinated spectator to its own punishment (the “he” who “looks on,” just another witness to the body’s protracted suffering). Decades earlier, the Fraser’s journalist had imagined a similarly anatomized subject declaring, “I’m all in little steaks, chops, and cutlets.В .В .В . I expect my ear won’t know my head, nor my toe its neighbourtoe” (“Dialogues,” 732). Rendered piecemeal, the anatomized body described in this Fraser’s article cannot own or even acknowledge itself. As the author later claims, dissection would result in a body wholly “frittered away, the fragments scattered, the contexture destroyed, every thing that goes to the composition of a distinctive form utterly lost, confounded, and irrecoverable!” (“Dialogues,” 735). Anatomy’s violent destruction of the body might mean a self dissolved and dispersed, whose identity, in the end, is obliterated. Even physician Robert Gooch, who supported the Act, admitted that dissection’s fragmentation of the body could unsettle traditional notions of the self. While a layperson might believe that anatomical science involves a mere “opening, and then closing” of the body, in fact, [d]issectors are as thorough workmen as putrefaction and the worms.В .В .В . it would be almost as difficult to collect the fragments of a dissected body for burial; the utmost care could not prevent parts of different bodies being buried as one person; and a list of the fragments jumbled into one coffin would be as curious as the composition of the witches’ cauldron in Macbeth. (“Unlawful Disinterment,” 12–13) Dissection’s dispersal of the body means that its integrity and even identity, like the name associated with the contents of a coffin, become little more than fictions. Making piecemeal of the self, mixing parts with parts, the Anatomy Act had the imagined effect of bringing even the most private parts of bodies, as it were, into unprecedented, anonymous contact. These examples thus invert the traditional metaphor of the social body, in which populations might be understood by analogy with the human body, where separate classes of people constitute a ruling head or laboring hands;

here, the individual body is understood as a population—and not a particularly sociable or cooperative one at that. They emphasize the divisibilityPage 121 → of the body, its separate parts often seemingly eager to run away, disown each other, or revolt, where their tentative collaboration at any given moment might just allow the body an effect of wholeness. Thus where O’Connor, investigating a nineteenth-century culture of amputations and prosthetics, reveals the technologies underlying the transformation of nonnormative bodies into approximations of normative ones (102–47), these accounts emphasize the continuities understood to exist between fragmented and whole bodies, between the body’s dispersal and a fictionalized, normative state of coherence. Rather than serving as a moral judgment of the observer or observed, these examples suggest an acceptance of the consistently illusory quality of the body’s integrity, of its not being, however temporarily, in pieces. While representations of contagion and miasma had imagined the undoing of the body’s boundaries and its inclusion within a realm of corporeal participation, the rhetoric of anatomy unsettled bodily integrity in different ways. Not only did it underscore the body’s necessary involvement in the public marketplace, through the logic of labor and exchange, but as these examples demonstrate, it also represented the body itself as a space of internal social participation, a loose association of only contingently related parts, competing against or conspiring with each other. Yet these comedic suggestions that the self is a kind of fiction notwithstanding, Dickens’s novels also express and invite a sense of nostalgia for the whole, for something more than that provisionally unified self.

Collecting Oneself The body in A Tale of Two Cities is always threatening to come apart, whether as a result of the English court’s verdict, at the hands of the French revolutionary mob, under the knives of the medical men Cruncher supplies, or through the narrator’s rhetoric. But at the same time the novel reveals the extent to which the body’s possible disintegration and its integrity are linked—indeed, it uncovers the mechanism by which the body’s undoing might ultimately serve as the prerequisite for its sentimental recuperation and reconsolidation. Appropriately for a novel in which the Terror casts a dark shadow over its characters, readers are frequently reminded that the body’s wholeness might be short-lived. For example, the prosecuting attorney in Darnay’s English trial explains to the jury, Page 122 → [t]hat, they could never lay their heads upon their pillows; that, they could never tolerate the idea of their wives laying their heads upon their pillowsВ .В .В . that there never more could be, for them or theirs, any laying of heads upon pillows at all, unless the prisoner’s head was taken off. (97) This scene retraces a version of the self-consolidating encounters with crowds that McWeeny has identified in Matthew Arnold’s poetry; but where Arnold’s work details the reaffirmations of the lyric self that occur in the midst of the anonymous masses (“Crowd Management”), Dickens’s lawyer arrives at a vision of the reconsolidated self via a more material circuit, in which the confrontation with the crowd ensures the body’s integrity in terms that are also a reminder of its anatomically contingent condition. For those attending the trial can be reassured of their own corporeal wholeness only by accomplishing Darnay’s beheading; his head, once removed, enables a symbolic exchange with other heads that will as a result remain attached. This logic of exchange accords with the novel’s reliance on what Daniel Stout has identified as a broader logic of substitutions, evident both in the guillotine’s sequential action and in the representational quality of historical fiction, in which individuals stand for groups. But in this passage and elsewhere, the novel displays a more literal kind of bodily exchange in action. For by representing the association between head and body as socially contingent, dependent on the condition of other bodies, the attorney’s speech articulates a new vision of the body’s participation in the social sphere, where someone’s now dissociable and circulable arm or head might, even in the imagination, come to substitute for the arm or head of someone else. By this logic, if coming apart represents the greatest threat in Darnay’s world, it also represents the means of achieving the greatest redemption: Carton’s self-sacrifice, the “far, far better thing” he does, is to take

Darnay’s place on the scaffold of the guillotine and to be beheaded at the novel’s end (404). That moment of redemption has understandably been the focus of numerous critical investigations,17 but few have considered it with respect to the novel’s broader representational strategy for the body. If Carton’s redemptive act, as Cates Baldridge has argued, demonstrates the moral value of “communion” as opposed to individualism,18 then Carton’s decision, I suggest, is an extension of the strangely “communal” anatomical logic that also permeates the novel, where one body is always linked, through the potential for substitution, to another. Just as an implicit act of exchange underlay the act of anatomical dissection, in which the corpse served as a model for its livingPage 123 → counterpart, so Dickens’s novel, both in its courtroom rhetoric and its resolution, enacts this logic of corporeal substitution by linking one body’s wholeness to another body’s decapitation. But outside the world of Dickens’s strategic design, this logic of bodily substitution was a source of anxiety, as revealed by a Household Words article published just one year before. A scandal arose after an enterprising workhouse master at Newington conspired with an undertaker to double the money earned from each burial, the article related, in which “[i]t was proved that at that particular workhouse twelve or fourteen times in a year, friends of a deceased pauper were allowed to see the body in the coffin, and then sent as mourners to the churchyard in the train of a different, dissected body, carried to the grave in place of that which they had seen” ([Morley], 364).19 Sending one corpse to the anatomist while burying another just fresh from the dissecting table, the workhouse master and the undertaker set in motion a sustained sequence of substitutions in which they were paid twice for each body—once by the parish (for burial) and once by the hospital (for dissection). These concatenated exchanges, which the author termed acts of “atrocious jugglery” ([Morley], 364), in which the body dissected into pieces substituted for the whole body, and one pauper’s body substituted for another, thus enacted on a literal level what the period’s anatomical language had all along accomplished in rhetoric. The master and undertaker promulgate a morbid kind of sociality here—a distorted version of Carton’s redemptive exchange in A Tale of Two Cities—where dissection’s stripping of identity allows for the intimacy of substitution, one person taking on the identity, the coffin, the life of another in the moment of death. These accounts of parts scattered and exchanged raised questions about where identity could properly be said to reside—when does the part “count” as the self, as possessed of identity? Gooch recalls a surgeon friend who kept a preserved human leg for study, which, if the law had compelled the body’s burial, “would, it is true, have been buried with funeral rites” (“Unlawful Disinterment,” 14), and in the case of one veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, the amputated leg was given its own burial while the man himself outlived his limb by several decades (A. Gavin). In Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, a leg might indeed have a life of its own: Silas Wegg, visiting the amputated limb in Venus’s shop, famously asks “how have I been going on, this long time?” (124). His “I” signifies not with the majority of his body but with the part owned by Venus, while his name, “Wegg,” reminds us that the rest of his body identifies itself by its wooden leg, the very sign of his original leg’s absence. Page 124 → Inviting the prospect of identity’s dispersal into parts and into multiple narrative trajectories, anatomical discourse envisioned a sociality of the body stretched to its logical endpoint, where the very idea of the body might come undone altogether. The sentimental fiction of the body—as inherently whole, as inalienable from the self—would seem to be opposed to an anatomizing logic that anticipates only the moment of its dismemberment and circulation. But in A Tale of Two Cities, as in the Newington workhouse scandal, the sentimental and the anatomical were also linked, the former dependent upon the latter. Just as the unmaking of one body through dissection enabled the surgeon to preserve the sentimental illusion of another body’s wholeness for friends and family at its burial, so were the safely whole bodies of the courtroom jury and the soon-to-be-decapitated Darnay rendered exchangeable in the prosecuting attorney’s rhetoric. Likewise, in conceiving of his plan to save Darnay from the guillotine, Carton embraces this same logic and even manages to exploit it—though significantly, he does so not in order to commodify the body, but in order to return it to its place in the novel’s sentimental economy. In all of these examples, one body’s integrity—or the semblance thereof—is contingent upon another body’s dismemberment. Where those involved in the Newington case

produced only an illusion of wholeness within a closed coffin, novels like A Tale of Two Cities and Our Mutual Friend worked insistently through the rhetoric of dissection and exchange only to return in their moments of resolution to sincere assurances of bodily integrity and stability, to the promise of the body’s reconsolidation. Indeed, in spite of his narrators’ personifications or near personifications of the body’s parts—their suggestion that they could have their own narrative trajectories independent of the apparent whole, where Magwitch’s torso could threaten to escape from his arms’ grasp or Jenny Wren’s legs refuse to comply with their owner’s commands—Dickens’s novels nonetheless work to reaffirm the body’s wholeness. The incoherences of identity that result from the body’s circulation, endless exchange, or dispersal resolve into a semblance of stability by the end: bodies do not fly apart, Carton’s own final attempt at a “jugglery” of bodies and identities is discovered by a seamstress in the novel’s last pages, and even Cruncher vows to give up his resurrectionist activities. The body might well suffer dissolution, but the endings of these novels make an effort to sustain the sentimental fiction of its integrity. The closing chapter of Our Mutual Friend, in which high-society gossip turns to Eugene and Lizzie’s marriage, exemplifies this trajectory, as it explores the competing rhetorics of dispersal only to engineer the body’s reconsolidation in the novel’s final moments. In response to the disapprovingPage 125 → Lady Tippins’s request for a report of the “savages,” Eugene’s friend Mortimer sidesteps the question by joking that “they were eating one another” (888). When she dismisses this response as frivolous, another guest proposes that Eugene might instead have settled his moral debt to Lizzie by supplying her with an annual income of “so many pounds of beefsteaks and so many pints of porter,” the “fuel to that young woman’s engine” by which she might earn even more money (890). These two replies represent alternative narratives for the body: a “primitive” one in which the body participates in cannibalistic violence, and a nineteenth-century, utilitarian one in which the body becomes a mathematical problem for political economists. Like the competing visions—the crowd’s and Cruncher’s—of Darnay’s body, both of these approaches take the body apart, the first with a kind of literal tearing asunder, and the second with a rhetoric that divides Lizzie into mechanisms for production and consumption. But in the novel’s concluding paragraphs the usually reticent Twemlow offers up a third possibility when he reflects that “if such feelings on the part of this gentleman, induced this gentleman to marry this lady, I think he is the greater gentleman for the action, and makes her the greater lady” (891). Rejecting both discourses of bodily fragmentation, Twemlow thus proffers his own recuperative vision of the body’s reaffirmed wholeness and reconsolidated identity, in which Eugene and Lizzie have augmented rather than reduced each other’s persons. In spite of the narrative’s acceptance of and even participation in multiple forms of discursive and possibly literal dismemberment, Twemlow’s reconsolidating declaration reflects the underlying ethic of this last novel more generally, in which characters like Betty Higden and even the novel itself affirm the value of wholeness. Pleasant Riderhood’s repeated refusals of Venus’s offers of marriage, for instance, reflect her distaste for being “regarded in [the] bony light” of his craft as a taxidermist-anatomist (854). When she finally relents, upon Venus’s avowal that he will refrain from working with female subjects, he nonetheless draws attention to the anatomical impulse underlying the conventional language of romance: “The lady is a going to give her ’and where she has already given her ’art” (853). Although he describes the body of his fiancГ©e as necessarily fragmented, he, too, articulates the novel’s sentimental ethic of reconsolidation; he recognizes that the crucial act of joining on the wedding day will not only be between himself and Pleasant, but also, crucially, between Pleasant’s “hand” and her “heart,” such that like Lizzie, she will be made more whole rather than less through the act of marriage. Further, that affirmation is consistent with Venus’s role as a selfdescribed “anatomist”;20 although he may take bodies apart, his primaryPage 126 → interest is in reassembling them, in creating an illusion of wholeness in a world of fragments and parts. Dickens’s working notes for Our Mutual Friend reveal that these concerns about fragmentation and reconsolidation applied to the process of novelistic production as well. Like his friendly anatomist, the author understood the difficulty of reconciling the serialized novel’s economically determined, piecemeal status with the aesthetic and sentimental whole he was attempting to craft. In his postscript to the novel, he comments on the fragmented “mode of publication,” which renders it “very unreasonable to expect that many readers,

pursuing a story in portions from month to month through nineteen months, willВ .В .В . [at first] perceive the relations of its finer threads to the whole” (893). Yet the seemingly organic body of the text is, as his notes reveal, a composite whose parts—its chapters, scenes, or subplots—might readily be divided or exchanged for others across installments. The division between serial installments 4 and 5, for example, broke the whole that was originally chapter 13, “Tracking the Bird of Prey,” into two separate chapters. Similarly, he had designated “A Marriage Contract” about the Lammles as chapter 7 in number 2; instead, it became chapter 10 in number 3, a substitution about which Dickens commented in his notes, “This chapter transferred bodily from No. 2” (Cotsell, 73). Even the plots of this and of A Tale of Two Cities, divided as they are socially and geographically, suggest the fragmented quality that exists within the whole. London and Paris, the world of genteel dinner parties and that of the working-class river workers, Christian and Jewish—the relationships forged between these spheres create an effect of integrity.21 His notes for Our Mutual Friend reflect an almost anatomical vision of its multiplot structure as he reviews the “position of affairs” at the end of number 10—Lizzie’s “part of the story,” John Harmon’s “part of the story,” the concerns of “the Bower,” and then “the chorus, rest”—before plotting out their convergence in his notes for number 13: “Lizzie and Bella come together/ And Mr Boffin?/ And Rokesmith?/ Yes” (Cotsell, 194, 214). The effort involved in bringing these pieces of plot together into a cohesive whole, and especially the often happenstance quality with which these novels represent their intersection, serve as a reminder of the extent to which the narrative is itself only contingently and compositely whole. Yet in spite of this self-consciously piecemeal construction, both Venus’s anatomical projects and Dickens’s novelistic ones emphasize and sustain a deeper belief in the value of bodily integrity, something others might have abandoned.22 For example, Venus describes one skeleton, “a miscellaneous one” as “a perfect Beauty.В .В .В . One leg Belgian, one leg English, and the pickingsPage 127 → of eight other people in it” (124). Venus readily admits the incoherent nature of the body he has painstakingly assembled, but perhaps more than most, he appreciates the value—not only monetary but also aesthetic—that the whole possesses. Wegg, too, has a deeply personal understanding of the contingent condition of the body; in hoping to reclaim the amputated leg in Venus’s possession, Wegg explains, “I have a prospect of getting on in life, and elevating myself by my own independent exertions.В .В .В . I should not like—under such circumstances, to be what I may call dispersed, a part of me here, and a part of me there, but should wish to collect myself like a genteel person” (127). The desire to “collect” himself, to reassociate his leg and the rest of his body into a kind of unified self as a necessary precondition to a middle-class gentility, merely confirms that the bodily integrity to which he aspires can only be an approximation of what he and we might imagine to be the real thing. Indeed, the leg to which he eventually lays claim, rather than rejoining the body, is instead delivered to him in a brown-paper parcel, and his newly consolidated identity is, significantly, achieved through an economic transaction. His collected self reveals the very tenuousness of the body’s integrity and the multiple contingencies shaping its association with identity. Yet while he is perhaps the novel’s most graphic example of the human body’s uncertain status, Wegg is not anomalous but rather emblematic of the bodily condition of the novel’s characters more generally. Venus’s comment when he returns Wegg’s leg—“I am glad to restore it to the source from whence it—flowed” (351)—with its tentative pause and laughably inappropriate metaphor, emphasizes the unnaturalness of the body’s relationship to its parts, even as his act of restoring the leg reifies, at least nominally, a more conventional conception of bodily integrity. Throughout the novel, the body, far from existing as an organic whole, is repeatedly cut up, broken down, screwed back together, bought and sold, and tucked away in brown-paper parcels. If, as Judith Butler has written, the body is “always a phenomenon in the world, an estrangement from the very вЂI’ who claims it” (17), then what Our Mutual Friend reveals is that that provisional status of the body’s integrity and identity during the mid-nineteenth century is a phenomenon of the economic and anatomic logic of the period. Indeed, this ninehundred-page narrative seems to be an attempt to grapple with that contingency in spite of itself and to reproduce, if not bodily integrity, then at least its effect, by representing through John Harmon’s progress from a dissociated to a reassociated self, the difficult process by which one “I” might at last stop circulating, and come to be reconciled to its body.

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Six Visions Global and Microbial Germ Theory and Empire Reporting on recent bacteriological research, an 1882 article for Cornhill Magazine regarded its revelations with some ambivalence: this new realm of knowledge was, as the author put it, “varied in character, sometimes seeming to promise a domain more hurtful (on the whole) than fruitful; a sort of intellectual Afghanistan” (“Living Death-Germs,” 303). “Afghanistan,” a nation that Britain had struggled through two inconclusive wars to bring under imperial control, was understood by Victorian readers as a signifier for difficulty, usually of the military variety, though significantly, the figurative battlefield imagined here is situated far from the geographical Afghanistan, in the most private spaces of the English home. For these studies revealed that “[d]angers lurk where none would suspect them,” and that one might find the origins of disease “in a dress, a child’s toy, a lock of hair, a letter, or a carpet” (318); the inner sanctum of the nation, even the reassuring emblems of English domesticity—its carpets and toys—were transformed into another, unexpected “Afghanistan.”1 The article emphasizes that the groundbreaking studies of Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur, and others have led to promising experiments and treatments, but in its conclusion it reverts, by way of an analogy with imperial navigation, to its earlier, ambivalent tone; it asserts that such investigations, as they “indicate a haven of safety, so also do they show the presence of concealed rocks, of dangers heretofore unnoticed” (317). In earlier accounts disease often signified the excess of other bodies, their transmissibility across space and time. But popular understandings of germ theory transferred that principle of contact—the often seemingly indeterminate causalities associated with the dying body or the sick patient’s clothingPage 129 →—to an identifiable, animate entity. By providing the foundation for assigning a competitive, even antagonistic nature to disease, bacteriological research allowed for the personification of the microbe, such that this newly embodied agency came to have, quite literally, a life of its own. The late nineteenth-century language of germs thus transformed the broader condition of sociality conveyed in earlier disease theories into something identifiable and material, and invited scientists, the lay public, and fiction writers to imagine the intimacies between bodies in vivid new ways. Where previous chapters, that is, explored earlier models of social participation, where epidemiological, sanitary, and anatomical discourses destabilized traditional assumptions about the body’s integrity and limits, this chapter suggests that germ theory’s popularization in the 1880s and 1890s permitted, even promoted, a more literal representation of the corporeal intimacies effected by disease. Disease was no longer the result of vapors, proximities, or other uncertain consequences of the body. Rather, the bacterium, an identifiable, microscopically visible body not only lent disease a specific agency but also gave material form to earlier accounts of proximity and contact. Moreover, in linking the visible with the invisible, the imperial with the scientific, the foreign with the domestic, the Cornhill article represents the sociality enacted by the germ as much more broadly encompassing, as extending beyond the borders of the British Isles. The twenty-first-century reader, conscious of the ways in which recent accounts of bioterrorism have repeatedly situated that threat on foreign soil, might well recognize this intersection between the fear of disease and the fear of the “East.”2 Yet this chapter suggests that the late nineteenth-century reader would not have been surprised by “Afghanistan” as the author’s chosen metaphor—indeed, would have been similarly attuned to the discursive continuities that existed between imperialism and late-Victorian science. Although contagious diseases like cholera had sometimes been associated with foreign, usually “Eastern” origins during the first half of the nineteenth century,3 the great epidemics of the 1830s and 1840s, Gilbert informs us, were not regarded as specifically “foreign.” The association between biological threat and a political, often colonial menace revived only in later years (Gilbert, Cholera, 110, 120), and bacteriology supplied the means by which that decades-old association could be represented in embodied, albeit microscopic, form. Accounts of the germ provided a specific language for expressing anxieties about colonialism, for describing forms of unwanted contact and susceptibility. The representation of the

microbe—foreign, invasive, oppositional—enabled both popular and scientific writers to rearticulate their culture’s relationship Page 130 →to colonized spaces, to imagine a challenge not only to the conception of the individual but also to the assumed centrality of Englishness itself. This chapter turns to popular accounts of the germ, and especially to the narrative conventions for representing microbes that lay journalism, popular science, and works of fiction extended. The entrenched language of colonialism enabled scientific writers to explain germs to the public in familiar terms, and, in turn, bacteriological research furnished a new set of images and narratives that allowed popular writers to articulate growing concerns about the colonies. Thus as the germ figured in the period’s fictions as a metaphor through which writers could represent the insidious nature of the foreigner’s threat to England, so, too, did the narratives and rhetoric of empire, of occupation and colonization, provide the more familiar metaphors by which popular and scientific journals made these unseen microbes comprehensible to their readers. More generally, these germ narratives (as I term them) elaborated upon popular conceptions of sociality beyond the scope of what midVictorian writers such as Dickens and Mayhew had envisioned, indeed beyond metropolis and nation, to include both the global and the microbial. But in addition to these explorations of metaphor, germ narrative also raised questions about the structural principles of traditional narrative—about temporality, genealogy, continuity, and the hierarchy of narrative frames. Fiction transformed the two contrasting registers characteristic of the germ, one large and encompassing and the other almost imperceptibly small, both ordinarily invisible to the lay viewer, into a legible narrative; it suggested that more conventional narratives might be viewed from a radically new perspective. The English prose tradition had long provided the means by which similar explorations of nonnormative perspectives might take place: eighteenth-century “it-narratives” reflected an active sphere of commerce and exchange by transforming objects—lapdogs, coins, coaches—into protagonists and narrators, satirical commentators on a world of endless commodification and circulation;4 popular “confessions” and Newgate fictions invited readers into the minds of criminals, prostitutes, or addicts. Yet these narratives still alluded to the centrality of a normative, English perspective. One of Charles Darwin’s innovations, by contrast, was inviting readers to “look at the organisation of nature from the point of view of other species and orders of life,” as Beer puts it, and other natural historians, geologists, and physicists of the period similarly questioned an insistence on the centrality of human life (31). Turning to more recent examples, Catherine Belling argues that science fiction and medical thrillers, by providing readers Page 131 →insight into the germ’s perspective, offer “challenges to anthropocentrism” (85), and the emergence of the bacterium in late-Victorian narratives presented similar challenges not only to conceptions of human history but also to conventional understandings of plot and character. The microbe extended earlier discourses of involuntary social participation: the human protagonist, previously linked to others through the circulation of miasma and waste, was here likewise situated among anonymous multitudes, the body a site of intimate contact with others. But germ narratives also transformed the fear of unwitting and unwilling involvement. The human, no mere victim of chance or circumstance, was figured here as the innocent within the germ’s own plots and agendas; no longer the author of his or her own narrative, the human (its body, society, indeed the whole of its history) became in these accounts little more than a chapter in the germ’s own story. This emphasis on the body’s vulnerability thus offered a means of describing a political or social threat to the Englishperson’s sovereignty, and of representing that threat at the level of narrative. Popular accounts of bacteriological research invited readers to imagine that the bacterium had its own narrative, one that existed in contradistinction to that of its human host. Some of these personified the germ, transforming the microbe into an ambitious or romantic hero such that an inversion of human and germ was staged for comic effect. But fictions like H. G. Wells’s story, “The Stolen Bacillus,” and Bram Stoker’s Dracula drew upon these narrative conventions to describe the workings of a fearful human antagonist. This invisible, alternate narrative could thus be seen as a “plot” in two senses of the word—at once a secretive, conspiratorial gathering of antagonistic forces, and a narrative impulse, a suggestion that the primary narrative might be renarrativized from a different standpoint, from the perspective of the germ itself. In effect, germ discourse produced its own form of multiplot, albeit one quite different from the more familiar, intersecting narratives of Dickens or of the

contagionists discussed in chapter 3. Like the microbe, which resides inside the body, the microbial narrative inhabits the host narrative, where it exists in parallel and often treats the same events, though from an opposing perspective. This implied frame structure, in which the germ’s narrative is contained by that of the host, might well function as a discursive strategy for controlling the microbial threat within the plotted, legible order of the English narrative. But contemporaneous scientific accounts frequently reminded readers that containment was also the very condition that permitted the microbe to exert control over its host from within—and to threaten to reverse the dynamic implied by narrative frame, to subordinate the human narrative Page 132 →to the bacteria’s own, ongoing plot. This vision of the germ raised the prospect that at any moment, that other, invisible plot might simultaneously be unfolding, and moving toward a different resolution. Such representations of an individual narrative ruptured by other perspectives seem to anticipate psychology’s divided identities and Modernism’s incoherences of the self, with their attention to the multiple narrative impulses present within the individual; like germ theory, these turn-of-the-century developments also articulated fantasies and theories of the self’s fragmentation from within. Yet the germ, occupying a wholly distinct register of time, space, and perspective, unsettled fundamental assumptions about human centrality and human history altogether: its reframing of narrative threatened to upset the narrative tradition’s very premises.

Microscopic Bodies Germ theory, in the broadest and most commonly understood terms, posited that bacteria or, as they were sometimes called, germs or microbes, were the agents responsible for the symptoms and transmission of a range of diseases, and according to conventional medical histories, this theory—with its compelling microscopic evidence—came to dominate the professional and public consciousness by the 1880s and ’90s.5 Michael Worboys has recently demonstrated that there was in fact a “plurality of germ theories,” an array of overlapping and often competing forms of knowledge about the germ (2). Where others have located the emergence of a single, unified germ theory in a limited number of specifically bacteriological discoveries, Worboys looks to the continuities between earlier disease theories, such as miasma and contagion theory, and the germ theories that appeared in the latter half of the nineteenth century, as well as to the debates over germs that took place within the medical community: Were germs chemical or animal? Did they reproduce? Were they disease’s symptoms or causes? In his more nuanced historical rendering, “germ theory” encompasses a varied and shifting collection of beliefs, schools, and methods (Worboys, 2–5). Indeed, even a closer examination of the canonical account of “germ theory” reveals the geographical and chronological disparities that characterize this narrative of discovery, where the foundational microbiology of France’s Pasteur and the antiseptic methods of Britain’s Joseph Lister gained attention as early as the 1850s and ’60s, while bacteriology came to the fore only after precise identifications made by Germany’s Koch in the 1880s.6 Page 133 → This heterogeneity notwithstanding, where debates only continued on new fronts and over new questions after the bacteriological findings of the 1870s and ’80s, many medical proponents of the germ theory—and indeed, as this chapter demonstrates, many lay writers—insisted on referring to germ theory as a unified entity (Worboys, 3). In the popular imagination, to the readers of Cornhill Magazine and the period’s fictions, the germ theory of the 1880s seemed to initiate a major transformation in thinking about the body. For while the theories that had dominated the medical profession and popular understandings of disease through the 1870s were premised on the spread of certain vapors or physiological principles from unhealthy bodies to healthy ones,7 these bacteriological studies revealed that disease had animate, as opposed to inanimate, origins. Moreover, and as journalists suggested, perhaps more troublingly, they indicated the apparent ubiquity of microscopic organisms, their presence in people’s homes, their food, and even their bodies. Popular representations transformed the world around the Victorians into one teeming with unseen life forms. An 1891 article, “The Realm of the Microbe,” described the way in which everyday perceptions had been

forever altered by these new findings: “we must allow our minds to carry us into the region of the invisible, for we have to realise the fact that the air round about us is crowded with the germs, in every stage of vitality, of small organisms which are noiseless, intangible, unseen” (Priestley, 811). This and like descriptions revealed social participation’s new dimensions: if the congested space of the city was already a realm of unwitting participation and contact, then the body itself was transformed by these invisible “crowd[s]” into another version of that threatening social space, where microscopic entities circulated around—and even inside—the individual at every moment. The mediated forms of contact that enabled the circulation of disease or waste in earlier discourses were made visible and given embodied form through bacteriological discourse. Germs did not remain external to the body, of course, and many journalists translating bacteriological findings for a popular readership focused on the kinds of intimate internal contact that could take place between humans and germs. Some articles asserted that not all such associations were harmful. As one writer cheerfully admitted, “we [humans] all afford hospitality to a multitude of invisible guests, which find an admirable home and nursery in portions of our frame” (Gabbett, 940).8 Nonetheless, in the eyes of many of the period’s journalists, this newly revealed social space was not a peaceful one: the theory rather transformed the body into a site of conflict and Page 134 →confrontation. Thus an 1880 Times article designated bacteria the “unseen enemies in the daily life of our population” (“Unseen”), and another called them “the small assassins that lurk in our drinking water and contaminate our milk” (Gabbett, 938). Nor was this language limited to the popular press; for instance, an 1885 Lancet article warned of the “invasion of external organisms” and declared that “[w]e may conceive a state of war between the microscopic cell elements of the body and the microphytes [microbes]” (“Bacteria,” 348, 350). Another published the following year speculates that “we are always surrounded by millions of germs which may at any moment develop into a dangerous enemy, ” and later refers to them as the “young and vigorous warriors” and “ferocious microbes” attacking the body’s organs (Power, 1114, 1115). The unconventional nature of this contest, the implied inferiority of the opponent in both size and complexity counterbalanced against the magnitude of their numbers, was central to many of these accounts. Drawing on a familiar literary example to make its point, the Lancet notes that in a diseased state, “the normal cells weakened by inanition may fall, like Gulliver before the Lilliputians, victims to the attacks of their minute but numerous and persevering enemies” (Power, 1115). Similarly, according to T. Mitchell Prudden, a practicing bacteriologist at Columbia University’s Medical School and author of popular accounts that were widely read on both sides of the Atlantic, the germ “multiplies with such rapidity that within a few days or hours the body may be overwhelmed” (91–92).9 Unwillingly, the human body shared its most private spaces with multitudes of invisible entities; unwittingly, it became a participant in a battle for control, its body the site of military engagement. Just as the domestic safety of the home could be transformed into a bacterial breedingground, so the internal physiological order of the body might be disrupted and transformed into a bacterial colony. Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor recognizes the significance of the germ theory to an emergent rhetoric of the body as a battlefield; she writes that “[i]t was when the invader was seen not as the illness but as the microorganism that causes the illness that medicine really began to be effective, and the military metaphors took on new credibility and precision” (97). But in English representations of the period, such comparisons were more than generalized references to warfare. Indeed, many of these accounts of disease allowed writers and readers to explore their concerns about the growth of Britain’s imperial networks and the now more numerous possibilities for contact between English bodies and the bodies of others. Anxiety about the Page 135 →growth of bacterial colonies in the body, then, served as a proxy for anxieties about the shifting fortunes of the British colonial project. Ironically, the conventional narrative of colonialism was one in which the British were the occupying bodies inside a foreign land, while germ narratives enacted a reversal of this relation, such that foreign others were the occupying bodies within the English self. According to Laura Otis, who highlights this inversion in her discussion of fin-de-siГЁcle European germ theory and imperialism, figuring colonized peoples as invaders worked as a discursive strategy by which imperial “aggression” could disguise itself as physiological “defense”; in her reading, Europe’s “microbe-hunters” and physicians became imperialism’s heroes, enforcing the boundaries separating the self from cultural others (Membranes, 5).

But while some elements of this late nineteenth-century fascination with the microbe allowed both writers and readers to reaffirm their nation’s centrality and its colonial project, especially in works such as the Sherlock Holmes stories Otis discusses, this chapter focuses on accounts of the germ that troubled such scientific and narrative strategies of containment. By personifying the microbe, they revealed the existence of encompassing microbial life narratives in which the human perspective was itself secondary, subordinate to, and in some cases even controlled by the germ. In this regard, the period’s representations of germs also resonated with the more unsettling aspects of England’s place within a global economic and imperial network, where there had been repeated instances of organized resistance—not only in Afghanistan, but elsewhere in Asia and in the Caribbean. Even as Britain’s empire expanded, so, too, did an anxiety about a colonialism that might work in reverse, an anxiety expressed in H. Rider Haggard’s 1887 She, for example, when the immortal African queen, Ayesha, describes her plot to return to England and overthrow Victoria. Moreover, bacteriological and colonial anxieties were linked by more than mere discursive likeness. In his study on the rise of bacteriology in imperial Germany, Christopher Gradmann points out that “[t]he rapid success of bacteriology in the 1880s and 1890s was due not least to the fact that scientific concepts of bacteriaВ .В .В . resonated with contemporary ideas about political enemies” (9), and the British context similarly exploited the continuities between late-Victorian science and the period’s imperial undertakings. Just as popular accounts of the germ theory seemed to rely on a language of imperialism that was readily available, so they provided in turn a means of articulating growing anxieties about the strength of British imperial rule, and about possible threats to English self and nation. Page 136 → Representations of the germ revealed the otherwise imperceptible agendas and plots of this newly discovered entity, one often indifferent to human concerns. For example, in the opening pages of his appropriately titled 1889 The Story of the Bacteria, Prudden declares that he will introduce readers to “the simple but significant story of the bacteria” (1). While he is still the narrator for this “story,” he nonetheless implies that bacteria might have their own distinct “story” in which they are the central players, and in which the human body figures only as a landscape to be colonized, its blood and organs the means by which these new bodies might circulate and propagate. Moreover, when Prudden provides us with a moment of insight into the microbial point of view, he implies that human and the bacterial perspectives might be fundamentally irreconcilable. In attempting to explain the germ’s size through an analogy, he writes that if a bacterium were magnified to the size of an illustration shown in his book, that same degree of magnification would “make a man look about four times as big” as a mountain (15–16). Seeing the germ and its “story” from a fellow germ’s perspective renders the human scale virtually unrecognizable. Proposing that an Englishperson might be seen from another perspective, from which he or she is out of focus and perhaps even invisible, inverts the relationship conventionally assumed to exist between the English body and what would appear to be biologically inferior creatures. Prudden’s momentary recalibration of the reader’s perspective, moreover, implies the possibility of a more lasting reorientation at the level of narrative, an alternate “plotting” of events. The revelation that microbes might have their own narratives suggests that any life-story might be retold with the germ at its center, sovereign over the person it inhabits. Indeed, a number of other works from the period cast the germ itself as the speaker or narrator. A comic poem in the 1888 Lancet, “The Loves of the Bacilli,” featured a germ describing for readers this reversal of sovereignty, one that his role as the poem’s primary voice exemplifies: Quoth Bacillus to Bacilla (Surely everything has sex): “It is quite enough to fill a Soul with pride, to see the necks Of these mighty men of Science

O’er the microscope bent low, While beneath them in defiance Spins the merry Vibrio. Page 137 → “Proud am I to think, my Comma, While the world rolls on its way, Every fell disease springs from a Fairy filament, they say. Autocrats that tower Titanic Have been known to bow to me; Mighty potentates in panic Disinfect at thought of thee. “Rash would he be who should presage That no germs behind us are; We are part of that great message Which outrings вЂtwixt earth and star. What by thousands or by tens is Multiplied, in vain they show; Something lies beyond his lenses Mortal man may never know! “We are greater, my Bacilla, Than all monarchs; for meseems We need but exist to fill a Strong man’s brain with fever-dreams. Such the thought my passion kindles, O my microscopic bride: Kiss me! although twenty Tyndalls Have their eyes upon the slide!”10 The poem’s framing device, with its parenthetical aside, implies that what follows is speculation rather than

fact, and the germ’s personification likewise renders him reassuringly familiar, his differences described in recognizable terms. But at the same time the poem turns the frame on its head: for in contrast to the human speaker, whose own weak extrapolation (“Surely everything has sex”) signals the limits to his knowledge, the germ possesses a vision that encompasses speaker, readers, and, indeed, political and cosmic mysteries alike. The bacillus leaves no doubt that the human is both inferior and incidental to the microbe himself; the world of the latter is nearly inaccessible and incomprehensible even to the scientist, who bows myopically in homage over his microscope, while the realm of the “great message,” a Page 138 →transcendent universal vision beyond the earthbound, exceeds the scope of human perception and knowledge altogether. Significantly, the frame remains open, leaving the germ to have the final word; in these final lines he reveals that his power extends as well to the internal workings of mankind, such that even the “strong man” is subject to the “fever-dreams” he might induce. The poem offers only a hint of what microbial control over human interiority might mean, but a popular story that appeared four years later in Blackwood’s Magazine, “The Bacillus of Love,” took as its premise the suggestion that bacteria might be responsible for human subjectivity. In this work, the germ narrator relates his struggles against other, competing microbes to control the mind and emotions of the slow-witted German girl whose body they inhabit. As he explains from the outset of his narrative, “what [men and women] imagine to be human wavering, indecision, or vacillation, is simply the outcome of one of the disputes that are constantly occurring amongst the various bacilli” (671). Human actions and feelings are thus no more than the effects of the microbial activities and emotions that occupy the central place in his tale. Unlike the poem from the Lancet, which showed the bacillus exulting in his superiority over humans, this bacillus’s narrative has all but removed humans from its perspective. It concerns the German girl only peripherally, and instead focuses on the bacillus’s own ambitions, his feelings of being unappreciated by the microbial community, and his conflicts with fellow-microbes. Thus as much as humans might believe themselves to be acting autonomously, to be the central figures in plots of their own constructing, they have, like the German girl, become passive participants in the microbes’ own life-story. What is more, just as the lives of human individuals might be subject to reinterpretation from this new perspective, so might all of human history: We bacilli constitute the hidden origins which men are vainly seeking to fathom; it is we who have lifted man to what he is; for to us was confided, from the beginning, the task of guiding the processes and the proceedings of humanity. We are the universal suscitating cause; we are everything; we are everywhere; without us all would be impossible. (668) This passage provides some insight into the nature of the “great message” briefly alluded to in the Lancet poem, a microbial vision at once imperceptible and transcendent. The microscopic bacillus possesses a historical and biological perspective that renders humanity insignificant in its own way, in Page 139 →which the origins, causes, and progress of human history are only fleeting incidents in a bacterial narrative. Not only is the bacterium sovereign over humans, “the one ruling agency,” as he describes himself and his fellows, but he and his kind also engulf humankind altogether (668). His challenge to a conventional Victorian order of things in which humans are the focus also extends to the level of narrative, as he insists upon his own centrality to the story he tells. “I am a bacillus,” he declares at the beginning, asserting his own sovereign authority as narrator and character (668). His narrative is not written for a human readership or for himself alone; rather, as he explains, these pages are intended for “the private archives of [his] family,” to be “of guiding use to [his] successors,” and never [to] be seen by men” (668). The bacterial lineage he traces is thus at once biological and narrative, joining one generation of his “mighty race” to the next (668). Like the bacillus in the Lancet poem, this microbial narrator turns away from any interest in human narrative or intergenerational continuity in his conclusion; the romantic life of the girl he inhabits concerns him only insofar as it reflects his sovereignty over her, but as for her future or that of her descendants, he comments indifferently that she “will be married some day—at least, I suppose so” (687). His closing remarks focus instead on his own narrative efforts and on the continuity they represent, as he “throw[s himself] once more into literary labour, andВ .В .В . commences another book [which] promises to

be most remarkable” (687). This continuity, at once biological and narrative, cannot be measured by the human scale of things. It represents a vision imperceptibly small and at the same time transhistorical, encompassing the “hidden origins” of humankind and of civilization, its “beginning[s]” as well as the present moment. As Prudden’s account had pointed out, bacteria were quite probably earth’s first life forms, old indeed by comparison to that “nursling, man,” whose “microscopic contemporaries and possible ancestors,” he reminded readers, were germs (18). So, too, in “The Bacillus of Love” the microbe both comprehends and inhabits the Darwinian scale of history, in which the human is by comparison incidental, a virtually microscopic presence within the germ’s enduring story.

Germ Narrative These accounts might have relegated humans to a lower status at the margins of bacterial existence, but their humorous personifications of the microbe also enacted a form of control over this new realm of knowledge, renderingPage 140 → the usually imperceptible not only legible but also familiar. With his all-too-human motives and complaints, the bacillus in the Blackwood’s story becomes comprehensible, even sympathetic. But other works turned the implicit narrative reframing that takes place in Prudden’s Story and in the Lancet poem—the conceit of a narratorial protagonist who is not human but germ—to less humorous ends. Works like the 1894 “The Stolen Bacillus” and the 1897 Dracula seemed to relegate the germ itself to the backdrop again, to the status of prop in the former or metaphor in the latter. But these fictions also revive the familiar association between politics and bacteriology; they exemplify Otis’s point about colonized peoples and places populating Europe by passing “through [its] now permeable membranes” (Membranes, 5). Where the language of conflict or invasion drawn from political discourse was applied to the microbe in earlier comedic works, by contrast these later works mobilized the elements of bacteriological discourse in plots ostensibly focused on English politics. Thus where Prudden or the Blackwood’s author showed readers a microbe whose behavior was all too human, Wells and Stoker would reveal a human antagonist operating like a microbe—a dangerously alien body.11 Moreover, while the Lancet poem abstracted the bacterium from any specific historical or national context and the Blackwood’s story safely displaced the bacillus onto a German character, these later fictions situated their political and physiological contests in England, within the English body. “The Stolen Bacillus” appeared in the Pall Mall Budget in 1894, during a decade of intense productivity for Wells, when he authored some of his more famous fictions, including The Island of Dr. Moreau and The War of the Worlds. In contrast with the futuristic quality of these other works, “The Stolen Bacillus” is a personal, domestic drama, in which a scientist is visited by an anarchist, who plots to steal a concentrated solution of cholera in order to advance his cause through an act of bioterrorism. In his physical appearance, the anarchist is the embodiment of both otherness and microbial disease; he represents the convergence of the markedly foreign and the diseased state that the microbe will produce in others. His physical difference is immediately apparent both to readers and to the scientist he visits: The Bacteriologist watchedВ .В .В . his visitor’s expression. This man, who had visited him that afternoon with a note of introduction from an old friend, interested him from the very contrast of their dispositions. The lank black hair and deep grey eyes, the haggard expression and nervous manner, the fitful yet keen interest of his visitor were a novel change. (224) Page 141 → The scientist’s coolly intellectual study of his visitor contrasts with the latter’s “fitful” and “nervous” behavior, and figures the anarchist himself as a kind of specimen, a novel creature to be examined and classified. His appearance leads the scientist to some careful “musing on the ethnology of his visitor. Certainly the man was not a Teutonic type nor a common Latin one,” and, as he finally decides, this visitor can only be described as a “morbid” type (225). A vaguely racialized other, the visitor eludes any precise classification, but significantly, his appearance evokes popular nineteenth-century representations of cholera victims—as haggard, lank, fitful yet keen (Wohl, Endangered, 118–19),12 and his characterization as “morbid” further associates him with the disease-causing germ he seeks, and with its common nineteenth-

century name, the “cholera morbus.” What is more, just as his proposed weapon, the stolen bacillus, threatens to produce a kind of physiological anarchy within each victim’s body, an uncontrollable wasting and diarrheal sickness leading to death, this morbidly pale anarchist himself threatens to produce social anarchy within English populations through the spread of that messy and fatal disease. In spite of the bacteriologist’s efforts to pursue him through the streets of London, the anarchist drinks the culture and then loses himself in the city’s crowds, and his untraceable swallowing up by the social body anticipates the microbe’s unseen entrance into the individual bodies it has reached. If, as Martin Willis proposes, the 1896 The Island of Dr. Moreau stages the period’s concerns over the transformation of the laboratory, once a semidomestic realm, into an isolated scientific space, “behind whose walls research of a dubious morality took place” (Mesmerists, 212), then it is significant that “The Stolen Bacillus,” published just two years before, aligns the laboratory with the normative spaces of the home. Here, danger lies not in the laboratory but outside it, propagated by an anarchist whose entrance also transmits a kind of domestic anarchy within the bacteriologist’s middle-class household. For even before the anticipated outbreak, the anarchist claims a first victim; the visitor’s “mental disorder” spreads to the bacteriologist, whose own behavior turns, as the narrator puts it, “incontinent” (226).13 In his haste to pursue the thief, the scientist thoughtlessly leaves home hatless and in slippers, an action that prompts his wife, Minnie, to exclaim, “He has gone mad!В .В .В . running about London—in the height of the seasonВ .В .В .—in his socks!” (226). Having surrendered his detached and controlled scientific gaze, he has “gone mad,” and has, in a sense, been infected by the germ of anarchic behavior, and this “germ” infects even Minnie herself, who must pursue her husband in a wild cab ride through town, prompting workingclass onlookers to comment, “She’s a followin’ him.В .В .В . Usually the other Page 142 →way about” (227). Already, then, the anarchist’s plot has introduced an almost contagious anarchy of gender role reversals, inappropriately dressed gentlemen, and working-class humor about middle-class characters into an otherwise orderly middle-class English space. Thus it is not just the bacillus that has been stolen from the bacteriologist, but his control over a narrative situated within the socially sanctioned spaces of respectable laboratory and home, in which he has been accustomed to playing the central role. The story’s shifting focalization reinforces this struggle, such that the opening scene, located in the controlled space of the laboratory and in the mind of the scientist, surrenders to the anarchic spaces of London’s chaotic streets and to the perspective of the fleeing anarchist, where through free indirect discourse readers discover an alternate narrative of politically radical history, in which the once-central bacteriologist is a powerless and incidental figure. Yet the story’s conclusion safely reins in the disorder threatened in domestic, social, and narrative spheres. The bacteriologist, yielding to social convention, is coaxed back into his shoes and overcoat by his wife; in the same moment he reveals that the bacterial solution the anarchist has drunk is not cholera at all, but instead a solution that will produce blue spots on his skin; and the narrative’s focalization returns firmly to the bemused perspective of the scientist. For the anarchist, who had attempted to incorporate the bacteriologist and indeed all of London into his own plot for social uncontainment, ultimately finds himself rather the unwitting victim within the bacteriologist’s own plot, a comic plot whose result is anarchy’s containment. Far from becoming the means of invisibly infiltrating and undermining the social body from within, as the anarchist had hoped, his blue spots will only further mark him as an outsider and an outcast from the English social body. The story suggests that the germ and the anarchist share the capacity, even the desire, to produce a kind of disorder, one within the individual body and the other within the social body. The anarchist’s vision of an uncontrolled mixing of bodies, whether in the form of the London crowds in which the anarchist manages to lose himself or in the anticipated exchange of bodily fluids that will enable cholera’s spread throughout the city, promises both an epidemic and widespread social fear and unrest. His fantasy—and one might say the germ’s as well—is to produce a deindividuated sociality by undoing the boundaries of the individual body, such that the crowds in London’s streets might become the nameless participants in a proliferating social disorder transmitting itself through moments of anonymous contact. In the scientist’s opposing vision of the social, cholera remains safely quarantined Page 143 →inside the sealed vial and the laboratory, and thus his final

two acts in the story’s moment of resolution are to step back from the chaotic public space of the streets and to affirm the inevitability of individuation, both by resuming his own proper role as a gentleman and by revealing that the outsider will be marked and recognized as such. Yet while the threat of disease’s transmission provides the occasion for a rather neat circumscription of possible danger and a reassertion of social order by the conclusion, Wells’s story also suggests that the order maintained by science and society is a tenuous one, capable of being disrupted at any moment by the possibility of disease’s reemergence. Published three years later, Stoker’s Dracula draws upon a similar set of narrative conventions in detailing England’s less easily managed undoing by its central character. Like the anarchist, this antagonist is a sallowskinned, dark-haired foreigner, whose entrance into England, as numerous critics have remarked, represents both a racial and a sexual threat to the existing social order.14 But in its conflation of an invisible, germ-like etiology and a malevolent foreign body, the novel also enacts the threat of what Stephen Arata has called “reverse colonization,” not only in the political and racial sense Arata emphasizes (630), but also in a more specifically epidemiological one. To be sure, Dracula’s entrance into England registers concerns about the consequences of imperialism, about political resistance and English vulnerabilities. But to recognize the germ and germ narratives as informing Stoker’s fiction is to understand Dracula’s attempt at “colonization” more completely, not just as the metaphoric equivalent of contamination or miscegenation, but as the threat of occupation by another life-form that travels within and through the essential fluids of the body. Indeed, as Willis argues, the novel mobilizes the tenets of fin-de-siГЁcle bacteriology, especially through the figure of Van Helsing, whose focus on identifying a specific agent and references to antisepsis, for example, signal the antagonist’s association with the germ (“Invisible Giant,” 311–13). Yet where Willis focuses on the intersections between Dracula and a range of disease theories, such that earlier, miasmatic principles of transmission play at least as central a role in his reading as contemporaneous bacteriology, and reveals the ways in which these scientific contexts—the discoveries in the laboratory and the conclusions of experts—inform Stoker’s fiction (“Invisible Giant,” 311–22), this chapter’s closing pages direct attention instead to the narrative lineage from which the novel emerges. Specifically, I turn to the ways in which the conventions of germ narrative—the insidious presence of the foreign, the play of radically different timelines, the disruption and threatened inversion of English narrative—assume a central role in Dracula, such that readers Page 144 →familiar with popular accounts of the germ might recognize in its human antagonist the incarnation of the microbe. In proposing that “[h]orror arises not because Dracula destroys bodies, but because he transforms them,” Arata underscores the sexual threat that Dracula’s foreign body presents to English racial purity (630). But that transformation also reflects an adherence to the trajectory of other popular germ narratives, where bacterial “colonization” entails a seemingly superior body being transformed by the controlling presence of a foreign agency. Thus characters like Lucy and Mina are not affected through mere contact or proximity, as would have been consistent with contamination more generally, but by the same means by which germs were understood to gain ascendancy over the body: by inhabiting the interior spaces of the body, rendering the English self passive and irrelevant, or perhaps even displacing it altogether. Contemporaneous accounts of the germ enacted an inversion of outside and inside—while being observed on the slide, the microbe knows that he already inhabits man’s “fever-dreams”—and Stoker’s novel enacts that involution at the level of plot: the outsider is an insider, moving through England’s cities, buying up its real estate, transmitting himself in the form of “fever-dreams” to its women. The threat he represents to the English nation is thus not only that of the colonial other who refuses to be contained,15 but, significantly, that of the other who is already contained, occupying the interior spaces of the nation and of its people, moving undetected through their most private spaces. Hence while Dracula draws upon earlier vampire traditions for inspiration, it articulates that threat through a historically specific, recognizable set of representations, both imperial and bacteriological. The conclusion of Stoker’s work moves toward the reconsolidation of English national integrity and imperial dominance, but the novel as a whole emphasizes England’s susceptibility, and in particular the risks associated with its place as an economic and imperial center. Exploiting the machinery of the host body for his

own reproductive, propagative ends, Dracula enters England through the networks of empire that were designed to assure its own dominance, the same ties of international business and the concomitant availability of shipping and transportation routes that allow Jonathan to travel to Transylvania. Its ordered communication and transportation networks, designed to uphold British sovereignty, also provide the means by which a foreign body can engineer their undoing. The conventions of germ narrative are likewise evident in the effects of Dracula’s appearance on the very sovereignty of English narrative. Recent critics have pointed to the fragmented, contested quality of the narrative in Page 145 →Dracula, to the failures of authorship the novel depicts throughout.16 For David Seed, these incoherences hint at another, “implicit” presence lurking in the text’s gaps (68), while for Alison Case the proliferation of “narrators who do not understand the full significance of their own experience” might invite speculation about where that broader knowledge resides (236). Germ narrative provides one answer to this narratological concern: as the amorous bacterium on the slide revealed, the germ itself wielded control over the encompassing narrative that humans struggled to grasp, and here Dracula, who seems at first a secondary character inhabiting an Anglocentric narrative in which Jonathan Harker figures as both main character and primary narrator, soon threatens to reverse the dynamic of this hierarchy, such that Harker and other Englishpersons become, from his perspective, the involuntary participants in his own plot, the vectors whose role is merely to ensure the continuance of—to borrow the language of the Blackwood’s bacillus—his own “mighty race” and of its encompassing history. This counternarrative, which lurks within Jonathan and Mina Harker’s journals and Dr. Seward’s diary as the fragments and suggestions of a historical vision they cannot fully comprehend, is part of Dracula’s attempt to incorporate other lives into his own story, and to engulf their own puny plots entirely. In both body and in consciousness, Lucy, Renfield, and Mina are all at points subsumed into Dracula’s own plot. Renfield, who becomes a “Slave” at the “bidding” of his “Master,” and Mina, too, come to share his consciousness and to understand themselves and their world as elements of his narrative (98). As Harker describes his wife’s internal transformation at one such moment: “Mina opened her eyes, but she did not seem the same woman. There was a far-away look in her eyes, and her voice had a sad dreaminess which was new to me” (271). Losing her foothold within the English plot, Mina becomes instead a participant in Dracula’s unseen world of apocalyptic events and distant geographies. The assiduous recording of events, especially in the novel’s latter half, might then be read not only as a typically late nineteenth-century effort to impose rational documentation upon the unknown but also as a desperate attempt to assert narratorial ownership over a collaborative effort that threatens to dissolve, and for Mina, an attempt to reaffirm her position within an English plot from which she is on the verge of slipping away. Indeed, there is an air of compulsion associated with many of these entries, from Dr. Seward’s “[t]o write diary with a pen is irksome to me; but Van Helsing says I must” (291), to Harker’s more vivid, “I must do something or go mad, I write this diary.В .В .В . I must keep writing at every chance, for I dare not stop Page 146 →to think” (252–53). Writing promises to prevent the succumbing to an alternate narrative, a fate that both Renfield and Wells’s bacteriologist experience in their removal from the familiar order of English social space.17 In Harker’s account, writing is itself “do[ing] something,” a rough equivalent to action through which he may assert, however temporarily and thoughtlessly, his narratorial sovereignty. Narrative serves as a crucial means by which these characters attempt to resist being engulfed by Dracula’s counternarrative, and to insist upon the dominance of their own telling. In a novel where the antagonist takes a visible, human form, and where no microscope, for example, is required to view him, the problematic of physical scale that characterized other germ accounts is here redefined as a temporal one. With its global and transhistorical reach, Dracula’s story exists on a scale that cannot be readily comprehended or measured by English standards; within it, the English plot, with its petty human coordinates of time and space, is itself rendered microscopic.18 Dracula emphasizes the incommensurability between his own grand story, which reaches back to ancient times, and the meager one of other nations when he explains to Jonathan that his race has a “record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach” (35). His essence might inhabit English blood at some imperceptible level, but at the same time his narrative threatens to dwarf other bodies and lives altogether: hence the dual nature of his threat, as he moves both

to inhabit interiors and to swallow up whole centuries. Indeed, like the bacillus in Blackwood’s who spoke of “guiding” humankind “from the beginning,” or like the anarchist in Wells’s story, who imagines himself as one in a great lineage of radicals, Dracula, in “speaking of things and people, and especially of battles, .В .В .В spoke as if he had been present at them all,” a puzzled Harker notes; “he always said вЂwe’” (33). That transhistorical narratorial “we,” invoked as well by the Blackwood’s bacillus, suggests a germ-like generation and regeneration, the other’s infinite division into a multiplicity of selves, a collective identity that need never experience the boundaries associated with an individuated, finite human life.19 In Dracula’s “we” there is something both undead, passing from one generation to the next without regard for mortality, and also inherently social, passing from one body to the next without regard for the distinctions between selves. Like Wells’s story but in a more explicit way, Dracula functions as a multiplot narrative, though one quite different from the horizontally sprawling mid-Victorian multiplot novels and intersecting narratives described in chapter 3. In these earlier examples, as Peter Garrett writes, “there is often no clear or consistent principle of subordination” among separate plots, so that, for instance, Dorothea’s and Lydgate’s largely separate plots might well seem Page 147 →to be of near equal importance in Middlemarch (4). Stoker’s novel and other germ narratives, in inviting readers to ask which narratorial voice is central, also seem to elude this “clear or consistent principle of subordination.” But unlike more traditional works, germ narratives turn the uncertainty around narrative primacy into a competition among plots, a struggle for narrative dominance or subordination. Rather than intersecting with each other, as Esther Summerson’s and Lady Dedlock’s plots do in Bleak House, Dracula’s plot and that of his Western European opponents strive to encompass each other. Here, narrative trajectories do not only radiate outwards from the body in all directions, bringing Dracula into corporeal contact with Harker and Lucy: they also swallow up other trajectories in that moment of contact. Thus the Harkers’ attempt to manage and make legible Dracula’s plot within the context of their own is matched by Dracula’s own narrativizing impulse, to manage and render insignificant the Englishpersons’ plot within his familial history. The uncertainty Jonathan admits to during his first disorienting days in Transylvania exemplifies the text’s shifting fault lines: “Let me say at once how I stand—or seem to” (30). The expressive gap between standing and seeming, between the desire to assert his own narratorial certainty and the fear that he—and soon, his family and nation—will have been swallowed into another history, is never fully filled in. The end of his narrative is an attempt to reassure, as it ostensibly puts an end to Dracula’s engulfing history and instead turns to a more human scale of events. Affirming the intergenerational link between parent and child, in which Jonathan literally extends his biological lineage upon the birth of his and Mina’s son, the conclusion also asserts the continuation of an English narrative lineage, in anticipating the moment when the son will inherit his parents’ story of triumph over Dracula. Wells revisits the bacterial narrative in his 1898 The War of the Worlds, and ventures that humans are not merely unwitting players in some other plot, but might be altogether irrelevant to it. Like Dracula, Wells’s short novel offers a reassuring resolution in its final chapters, with the defeat of the Martians that have invaded and laid waste to London. But where Stoker’s novel culminates in a final moment of triumphant unity for the English characters, the Martians’ demise elicits a more ambivalent response in Wells’s narrator, when he realizes that their defeat has been achieved not through English efforts to repel these invaders—indeed, not even by the agency of a human, but by that of a germ: “dead!—slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth” (184). The destroyed bodies of Page 148 →the Martians thus uncover another narrative completely separate from his own, or even that of his nation or species. In this ongoing germ narrative, the previously overlooked main actor is the microbe, which has succeeded where English ingenuity and military effort have failed. Regaining his composure, the narrator calls the lowly germs “microscopic allies” (184); with rhetoric at once providential and personifying, he attempts to situate this episode as part of what he calls the process of “natural selection,” by which the Martians have been eliminated and humans have rightfully triumphed (184). Yet the facts of the microbe’s history forestall

this facile attempt at an anthropocentric narrative; as the narrator admits, that bacterial agency has been at work “since life began” (184). In other germ narratives, whether Dracula or the Blackwood’s story, the human is at least a worthy contender, a viable biological and narratorial competitor. Wells’s novel, however, unsettles even that distinction. Here, making but a fleeting appearance, the microbe is almost entirely beyond the compass of human narrative. In the work’s refusal of personification, the germ is neither hero nor villain; rather, it and its narrative are wholly indifferent to humans and their momentous “war of the worlds.” For in spite of the narrator’s desire to view the Martians’ defeat as personally meaningful, the novel suggests a more rational interpretation of this Darwinian narrative, where multiple species coexist within the space of London: humans, Martians, the prolific red weed spreading over the city, and the lowly germ. In the microbe’s “world,” Englishpersons, like all of humankind, are incidental and irrelevant. The microbe, humble hero and ally though it might seem from the narrator’s perspective, knows only its own transhistorical narrative of reproduction and survival. The discovery of bacteria did not just reveal the seemingly ubiquitous source of disease to human eyes, but as these popular accounts of the germ emphasized, the existence of another narrative, with its own spatial and temporal coordinates, its own ever-unfinished plot of reproduction, lineage, and outcomes. In this sense, germ narrative initiated the reader into a new conception of sociality, where bodies mixed in ways the early Victorian contagionists could never have imagined, where contact with others was not only involuntary but also constant, not merely intersecting but also enveloping. The germ might be both short-lived and unimaginably small, but its narrative—in both message and form—only validated Pasteur’s famous prediction: “c’est les microbes qui auront le dernier mot”20—“it is the microbes who will have the last word.”

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Conclusion These narratives of bodily contact, connection, and circulation reflect nineteenth-century social anxieties and ideals, but they also illuminate the accounts we continue to generate in our current century to explain the intersections between one body and another. The development of new forms of knowledge and technologies, such as organ transplants and transgenics, has only increased both the possibility and the visibility of such anonymous connections over the past decades, and with these new modes of interaction have come renewed anxieties about the consequences of contact—disease, environmental havoc, bioterrorism—as well as novel strategies for managing them. At the same time, the possible narratives we might generate about those connections have likewise multiplied, as we look not only to the viral and even the molecular for causal origins and agencies that are not our own but also to an ever broader definition of the global for a sense of the distances that such trajectories might traverse. Through an examination of twentieth- and twenty-first-century outbreaks of typhoid, AIDS, and SARS in Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, Priscilla Wald argues that the way we imagine the social has become ever more inclusive with each passing epidemic. Thus recent accounts of disease, she proposes, foreground a “fascinationВ .В .В . with the changing social formations of a shrinking world” (2). As a result of both real and virtual modes of global transportation, the airport in China, the bustling market in Germany, the hospital in Africa, the crowded classroom in Ohio, no longer seem so distant from each other—in geography or in the imagination. If the distances between continents and even regions still felt immeasurably vast to most nineteenth-century Britons, the period’s many writings about contagion and germs, risk and miasmas surely did their part to make the distances between persons seem much closer. Through their potential Page 150 →for dissolution, transmission, and circulation, bodies came into unforeseen proximity with each other. For the space of social interaction was, these works reminded readers, a space of physiological interaction as well, where the possibility of corporeal connection attended the anonymity of daily life, where the indifferent brush of other persons in a crowd signified what was simultaneously emotional distance and the potential for an all-too-intimate sharing of breaths, excrement, limbs, microbes. These connections could have retributive or transgressive significance, as these Victorian reformers, journalists, statisticians, and novelists understood, but they could also operate with a total disregard for the economic and social boundaries that would give transgression meaning. In removing the body from Victorian society’s more visible and stably stratified contexts of gender, social class, geography, and race, they also (albeit usually only temporarily) stripped the individual of agency or identity. The markers of his or her social identity—indeed, the markers of bodily identity itself—could be reconfigured and dispersed through the circulation of discarded clothes, exhalations, and excrement through public spaces. In imagining the numerous possibilities for contact between one body and another, many of these literary, medical, and journalistic writers devised new narrative strategies to accommodate the otherwise unrepresented trajectories of human interaction. The statistical sciences that emerged in the 1830s and 1840s understood the individual’s corporeal milestones with respect to an always inclusive hypothetical population, while contemporaneous medical theories situated the self in a physiologically mediated relation—through its surfaces and breaths, its orifices and parts—to innumerable others. This relation, novelists and social reformers posited, was a multivalent one, the precursor to disease, or alternately, the means to redemption. Moreover, these accounts of social participation invited readers not only to rethink the relationships among bodies but also to reimagine the internal configurations of the body. These works represented the body as susceptible, transmissible, dissociable, a site of seemingly infinite potential for exchange and dispersal. There were numerous available answers, then, to the famous rhetorical question, “What connexion can there be” among the far-flung places and individuals inhabiting a fictional—or real—London (Dickens, Bleak House, 256). For in addition to the sympathetic relations that literary works like Bleak House dramatized, the discursive intensification of the body suggested an array of other connections, both physiological and narrative,

that might join persons otherwise unknown to each other. The very shape of multiplot, whether in the form of intersecting narratives (as in Our Mutual Friend) or Page 151 →of competing ones (as in Dracula), revealed that the emphasis on the individual, the premise of the period’s liberal individualism and of a corresponding liberal literary tradition, was always tempered by an alternate vision, one in which the individual was defined by the connections that joined him or her to innumerable others. Yet even (or perhaps especially) today, the renewed wonderment with which journalists greet accounts of, for example, body parts being globally distributed or disease spreading from one continent to another, registers a reluctance to acknowledge these forms of connection as both ubiquitous and quotidian, as it also reveals the degree of our investment in the idea of the autonomous, whole individual. But here, too, fiction—often science fiction—has explored the implications of expanded modes of contact, ones that might include other universes or heretofore undiscovered microscopic entities, and the value of imagining ourselves positioned within new contexts of interaction. Like Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, whose narrator, transforming such possibilities into an alternate mode of intimacy, occupies the interstices of a lover’s body—“Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon’s wall” (120)—these works refashion more conventional notions of physiological selfhood and corporeal relations. Like the Victorians before them, they uncover the charged potential in the spaces between selves: they envision the promise of intimacy beyond the conventions of sympathy and desire, where the body’s surfaces, organs, fluids, and spaces might constitute the loci for intensified forms of experience and representation.

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Notes Introduction 1. See, for example, Byerly, Grossman, Menke, and Otis (Networking). 2. See, for example, Ablow (Marriage of Minds), Butte, Greiner, Jaffe, and A. Miller. 3. For a helpful overview of the period’s political and legislative efforts, see Roberts. 4. These include Allen, Childers, Hamlin (Public Health), and Walkowitz. 5. Gilbert, Cholera and Nation; Gilbert, Citizen’s Body; and O’Connor. 6. Hadley also provides a particularly lucid exposition of this approach (31–32). 7. Paula McDowell proposes an equivalence in Defoe’s novel between such examples of spreading rumors and the contagious communication of disease. See also Bewell, for whom Shelley’s insistence on racial and national differences helps to reaffirm the illusion of English insusceptibility to plague in The Last Man (296–314).

Chapter 1 1. John M. Eyler attributes this article to Dickens (Victorian, 128, n.23), but I have been unable to confirm this attribution, and bibliographies of his writings do not include this work. 2. The author dismisses the value of mortality statistics, which the British General Register Office had systematically gathered since the Registration Act of 1837, while also arguing for the utility of statistics regarding casualty and disease, figures that the Office did not yet collect. 3. The use of “risk” in this sense in the All the Year Round essay seems to be a fairly early example. The chronology supplied by the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that from the seventeenth century “risk” referred to hazard or chance, usually as a condition voluntarily entered by an individual; by the twentieth century, the sense of “risk” as an involuntary condition gained currency, usually with reference to disease or death. A brief survey of mid-nineteenth-century reports from the Statistical Society likewise suggests that this conception of inevitable “risk” was only emerging during this period, Page 154 →and was still not commonly used. Terms like “chance,” “susceptibility,” “liability, ” and “danger” were also in use to convey a similar meaning (Thomson, 278; Guy, “Annual Fluctuations,” 53; MacLaren, 123); an early use of “risk” in this later sense occurs in another Guy article (“On the Duration of Life,” 23) as well as in Sykes, Guy, and Neison (1). 4. The article was [Gooch], “Plague”; see Humphreys (ix). 5. See Flinn (43–53) and Finer (96–114, 154–63, 209–29), who provide excellent historical background about the production and content of the Report. 6. For these figures Flinn cites Chadwick himself as well as John Simon, who served from 1848 as London’s first Medical Officer of Health (54–58). 7. For a brief history of these Bills of Mortality, see Cullen (1–5), Fletcher, and Angus. 8. Cullen (29–43) and Hacking (118–19) discuss Farr’s significance at greater length. Chadwick’s use of statistics did receive criticism from other statisticians, most notably from F. G. P. Neison, who attacked his failure to consider variations in age distribution in different locales; even Farr agreed with this critique (Neison, 40–68; Eyler, Victorian, 70). 9. See Farr’s own discussion of the table for a brief history (“Letter,” 278). By 1815, other, more reliable tables had appeared, most notably the Carlisle table developed by Joshua Milne of the Sun Life Assurance Company, which was based upon statistics from the first two censuses (Eyler, Victorian, 74). Nevertheless, as Farr remarks, Price’s was still the primary table in use in 1840. 10. As Farr writes, Price’s methods were “only explained indirectly in his works; and the extent of the deviations from the facts is nowhere stated” (“Letter,” 281). 11. On the inadequacies and inaccuracies plaguing the Northampton table, see Flinn (26) and Farr (Vital Statistics, 445–70). 12. Farr expends considerable energy seeking the origin of this figure, 11,650, but whether the figure is

arbitrary or refers to an actual population count remains obscure; Price’s description, however, certainly implies the latter. 13. Chadwick was a vocal advocate for statistical methods. In an early article in the Westminster Review, for example, he argued that life assurance companies required better statistics to describe mortality rates, and he employed hypothetical populations of 10,000 to compare the rates across different tables (“Life Assurances,” 405). 14. However, registration of births and deaths was not required by law until 1874. For a more extended discussion of this and other details concerning the Registration Act, see Wohl (Endangered, 11–12) and Cullen (29–32). 15. The comprehensive Cholera Returns of 1832 enumerated illnesses and deaths, but did not include percentages and rates (“Cholera Returns,” 45–68). 16. Compare Robert Ferguson’s “The Cholera” and “Directions”; David Moir’s “The Asiatic Cholera” and “The Contagious Character”; and Smith’s “Spasmodic Cholera” with, for example, William Guy’s “Sanitary Commission”; W. E. Hickson; and Lord Morpeth’s speech (“Sanitary Regulations”). 17. On Farr’s mathematical background and abilities, see Eyler (Victorian, 66–68). 18. John Stuart Mill wrote that “our whole belief expands itself uniformly over infinite space, just as a finite mass of perfectly elastic fluid, if perfectly free, would expand itself throughout all space and have a uniform density” (T. Porter, 87; see also 82–88 for a more general treatment).Page 155 → 19. Daston’s “The Domestication of Risk” provides a more detailed history of the Equitable’s leadership in this regard. 20. This example seems strangely oblivious to marketplace economics in assuming that supply always equals demand. Nonetheless, it does illustrate Hacking’s point. 21. This passage is also quoted by Hacking (147). 22. Poovey describes the process of moving from “actual” numerical facts to inductive social or medical hypotheses as producing a crisis for British liberal philosophy in the 1830s (History, 326). 23. The novel’s many incoherences have been amply investigated; in addition to inconsistencies of causality, scholars have focused on the tension between melodramatic and political genres, and the disjunction between different temporal modes (Lesjak, 51–59; Tillotson, 211–23; Zemka). Felber suggests that these inconsistencies are symptomatic of Gaskell’s as-yet unformed politics.

Chapter 2 1. See, for example, “Inquiry.” 2. See Metz (68); Briggs (87); A. Susan Williams (chap. 1); Schwarzbach, “Bleak House”; and Poovey, Making a Social Body (chap. 4). 3. Donald Reid observes that the major cholera epidemics on the Continent seemed to crystallize around years of revolutionary activity—1831–32 and 1848–49—and that French representations of disease were often charged with the language of social unrest (3, 18, 25). 4. See, for instance, Nord (81–111) and Gilbert, Citizen’s Body (chap. 8). 5. There were dissenting opinions, of course. Freeland points out that Gaskell’s novels question the period’s ready association of moral with physical forms of degradation. 6. Wohl’s “Sex and the Single Room” reviews the historical context for such anxieties. 7. Poovey analyzes the normalizing and moralizing qualities of Chadwick’s domestic descriptions at greater length (Making, 115–31). 8. The dead body was a matter of particular concern in London, where overcrowded parish cemeteries were often located in the city’s center, adjacent to residential areas. 9. No legislative action was taken until the 1850 Interments Act, which moved cemeteries to the outskirts of the city (Finer, 381–89). A decade after Chadwick’s report, Dickens would evoke such horrors in describing the urban cemetery of Tom All-Alone’s in Bleak House. 10. David S. Barnes’s “Confronting Sensory Crisis” offers a worthwhile account of disgust’s political and cultural contexts.

11. A competing theory held that diseases spread contagiously, through direct contact by touch with other persons; while this had its adherents, it was less influential among medical professionals. 12. The period’s leading medical writers, including Chadwick, Smith, Gavin, were miasmatists for varying periods of their careers. 13. Smell was generally considered evidence of miasma’s presence, which was Page 156 →thought to have a “disorganizing” effect upon the body; enough disorganization could cause the body to show symptoms of illness, an early sign of decay or decomposition. For more details about the purported effects of “vitiated air,” see Gavin (Unhealthiness, 53) and, more generally, the work of Liebig. 14. From the Appendix to the Fifth Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners, 1839 (quoted in R. Porter, London, 260–61). For evidence of Smith’s miasmatist beliefs during this period, see his “Contagion and Sanitary Laws.” The “poison” did not always kill observers, it was generally argued, because immediate removal to fresh or well-ventilated air was believed to relieve the body of the disease-producing effects of miasma. 15. See Gilbert, Mapping (110–12); Gilbert, Citizen’s Body (chap. 8). 16. This translation maintains the shifts of person found in the original French: “[J]e dus alors maГ®triser mes rГ©pugnances et rГ©unir tout mon courage pour oser continuer ma marche Г travers ce cloaque et toute cette fange! Dans Saint-Gilles, on se sent asphyxiГ© par les Г©manations; l’air manque pour respirer, le jour pour se conduire.В .В .В . La fange sous vos pas exhale ses miasmes, et sur votre tГЄte les hardes de la misГЁre dГ©gouttent leur souillures” (Tristan, Promenades, 191). 17. Nord suggests that this ambivalence is a reflection of Tristan’s self-identification as a woman who existed outside of British social and sexual conventions (115–35). 18. Buckingham Palace, as many sanitary critics noted, had been built in a low-lying, marshy area, and the grounds and palace were regularly subject to flooding from the sewage-polluted Thames nearby; the adjacent royal stables and the palace’s improperly draining cesspools were exacerbating hazards. 19. See, for example, Godwin (London Shadows, 16). 20. Although Godwin refers to “germs of disease,” he uses this term generically and in its older sense, to mean “seeds.” By contrast, the germ theory, which displaced miasma theory at the end of the century, ascribed disease to bacteria; see chapter 6. 21. See, for example, Hurley’s The Gothic Body (39–52); Anderman’s “Hysterical Sensations”; and Winter’s Mesmerized (326–29). 22. See also Cvetkovich and Ablow (“Good Vibrations”), who focus on the significance of Walter’s responsive (male) body in Collins’s novel.

Chapter 3 1. Dorothea’s and Lydgate’s respective interests in housing reform and environmental causes also reflect this thematic treatment of sanitary causes. 2. See, for example, Rothfield (89–119); Beer (139–68); Kennedy (119–47); and Leckie. 3. Monk notes that David Carroll was the first to propose this reading (54). 4. Carolyn Anne Jacobson argues that contagious disease serves as the “motor” for plot in a number of the period’s fictions (11). 5. FranГ§ois Delaporte traces the intellectual history of European contagionist theory, specifically what nineteenth-century contagionists retained and discarded from earlier theorists (155–63). 6. The distinctions between the two are parsed in “Contagion and Quarantine” Page 157 →and [Smith], “Contagion and Sanitary Laws,” or more recently, Morris (176–84); Wohl (Endangered, 120–21); and Ackerknecht (566–69). In fact, later bacteriological explanations revealed that both contagionist and anticontagionist arguments had a certain validity. Cholera vibrio, for example, usually spread to new victims through the ingestion of food or water contaminated with excreta from those already infected. 7. Ackerknecht held that “the ascendancy of anticontagionism coincides with the rise of liberalism, its decline with the victory of reaction” (589); for a differing treatment of the political and economic contexts of this medical debate, see Hamlin (Public Health). In France, a discourse of social reform lent

contagionism moralistic overtones that justified midcentury governmental policies for social regulation, at the expense of individual liberties (Aisenberg). 8. Citing the unclear boundaries at times separating contagionist and anticontagionist theories, as well as the debates’ narrow focus on diseases such as cholera, plague, and yellow fever, Hamlin argues that a more useful “axis” for mapping Victorian disease theory would be that of predisposing causes as opposed to exciting causes. Those who believed in predisposing causes held a multitude of environmental and social causes (which included economical, geographical, nutritional, and psychological factors) responsible for disease, whereas those arguing for the importance of exciting causes posited that a single immediate factor, such as filth, produced illness. The former foregrounded a determinative matrix of social and personal issues while the latter focused on single universal issues that might best be addressed by a systematic governmental program, like the sanitation policies implemented under Chadwick (“Predisposing Causes”). 9. As Wohl notes, between 1845 and 1856 more than seven hundred works about cholera were published in London alone (Endangered, 121). 10. Morris estimates that earlier plagues may have killed up to half of London’s population, and that later plagues likely killed between 15 and 25 percent. By contrast, cholera was fatal in less than 1 percent of cases in London, and even in the hardest-hit locales, mortality reached perhaps 10 percent at most. In the words of a contemporaneous article in the Edinburgh Courant, “The smallpox is still raging amongst us, numbering even more victims than the cholera; .В .В .В the dread of it is absorbed in the all pervading thought of cholera” (quoted in Morris, 12, 14). 11. See, for example, Russian Formalist Criticism, particularly Tomashevsky (66–67) and the editors’ introduction to Shklovsky (25). 12. The Times maintained a strong anticontagionist bias in its discussion of cholera, and Gilkrest was one of anticontagionism’s most outspoken medical spokespersons. 13. The contagionists’ tools, observation and narrative, could hardly be said to be exclusive to medical professionals and experts; as one medical historian put it, “The layman perceived the broad truth of contagion as he watched the plague spread from country to country and from seaport to seaport; but the physician knowing the facts more intimately realized that no existing theory of contagion taken by itself could possibly explain those facts” (Winslow, 182). See also Choi (“Narrating”) for a fuller discussion of this issue. 14. Emphasis as given by Smith, although it is unclear whether the emphasis was present in the original from which he quotes.Page 158 → 15. For other contemporaneous examples, see “The Cholera in Paris”; “The Cholera in London”; [Gooch], “Dr Macmichael”; Salmon; “Indications of Contagion”; and “Treatment of the Malignant Cholera.” 16. I suggest that these narratives contributed to the construction of a nineteenth-century urban social geography that was as much spatial as textual, and in that spirit I borrow the term “node” from Kevin Lynch’s landmark work on the city. In theorizing urban space, he writes that “nodes are the strategic foci into which the observer can enter, typically either junctions of paths, or concentrations” (72). More recently, in an analysis of the multiple relationships in Bleak House, Caroline Levine adopts the term “node” from contemporary network theory. 17. According to one review, this Christian Socialist “message” was what rendered the book unpalatable to contemporary readers: “as a novel it has a too plainly pronounced purpose; like the goody stories which a little friend of ours objected to as having вЂa motto’” (“Life and Letters,” 432). For further discussion of Kingsley’s role within the Christian Socialist movement, see Brantlinger (129–49). On the Christian elements of Two Years Ago with relation to the author’s Christianity, see Muller; on the importance of the body in muscular reform, see Hall, Muscular Christianity. 18. The Nuisance Removal Acts (1846, 1855, 1860, and 1863) allowed local authorities to investigate and remove common waste, such as garbage and excrement in the streets, and also industrial waste (Wohl, Endangered, 153, 308–12). By claiming that waste’s removal will help prevent cholera, Kingsley’s hero adheres to a belief in environmental rather than contagious causes. Like Tom, Kingsley was an ardent advocate for improving the living and working conditions of the laboring classes, and he supported similar public health measures.

19. Kingsley, in his capacity as clergyman, gave a number of such sermons. 20. Elaborating on Adam Smith’s example of the woolen coat as an appropriate emblem of labor’s collaborative effort, through which the work of the spinner, weaver, tailor, dyer, and shipper were joined into a single social fabric, Haskell argues that the economic contract entails an awareness and acceptance of these relationships (“Capitalism”; “Persons”). The structural similarity to contagion’s relationships is worth considering; however, contagion necessarily obviated such contractual understandings. 21. The novel’s publication temporarily strained the relationship between Kingsley and Lord Tennyson, who interpreted Elsley’s portrayal as a personal attack (“Two Years Ago,” 1010). 22. Indeed, Lancelot, the hero of another Kingsley social problem novel, Yeast, proclaims, “What a yet unspoken poetry there is in that very sanitary reform!” Nonetheless he finds sanitation best suited to the epic form; the first line of his planned Chadwickiad is “Smells and the man I sing” (87). 23. Snow was technically neither a contagionist nor an anticontagionist; his removal of the Broad Street pump handle famously demonstrated that cholera spread through the ingestion of contaminated water, though the epidemiological import of his study was not fully credited until decades later. 24. Emphasis his. MacLean, an expert on epidemics who often found himself at odds with the British medical establishment (Kelly) and whose writings received greater credit among colonial and continental audiences than in England, is here referred to as “McLean.”Page 159 → 25. What often marks Victorian multiplot as distinctive, Garrett explains, is its refusal to designate a single “primary” plot to which other plots might be subordinated, and “even those novels which at first seem closest to the traditional model of main and subplot often turn out to subvert it as different plots advance or recede in importance” (4). 26. See, for example, Benton; Wang. In addition, Bowen suggests that contagion serves as a metaphor for “social or psychic forces” (76). 27. A similar operation is also at the center of The Old Curiosity Shop, according to Grossman; in this earlier work, the “narratological re-assembly process that would bring its two main disconnected retrospective narratives together becomes the story’s conspicuous focus” (116). 28. According to Nord, disease functions as an emblem of sexual taint; as Esther must bear the mark of her mother’s transgression, she absolves it through her own purity and self-abnegation (96–111); see also Maxwell for a similar argument. Other efforts have focused on identifying the epidemiological referent (Benton; West). 29. A differing reading of this rebirth, by Helena Michie, argues that Esther’s disfigurement enables her emergence into a new selfhood, a feminist liberation of self.

Chapter 4 1. “Night-soil” was human excrement, so named because it was often (and indeed, by law in Paris) collected only at night. 2. These readings have linked such efforts to the period’s emphasis on eliminating wasted energy (Kuskey), to Dickens’s ecological vision (Chase and Levenson), and to contemporary rubbish theory (Chappell). 3. For Leslie Simon, waste’s “positive value” inheres in its liminality, its “heightened state of play” in the aesthetic economy of representation (223, 224). 4. Related terms include “dirt,” which Mary Douglas defines as “matter out of place,” whose removal “is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organize” (48, 12); and “filth,” whose multiple symbolic meanings are capably reviewed by Cohen (“Introduction,” ix–xvii). 5. A discussion of these contexts may be found in Roberts; Kuskey; Gold; Choi (“Forms of Closure”). 6. This and portions of the next passage are also quoted by Mayhew (6). 7. On the symbolic function of these secondhand marketplaces, such as auctions and pawnshops, in the period’s fiction, see Womack. 8. “Pure” was sold to tanning yards, where it was used as a preparative treatment on leather. Both

fictional and nonfictional works of the period often described the appearance of such figures as comparable to piles of rags or accumulations of dirt. See, for instance, the description of the bricklayer in Dickens’s Bleak House: “a man, all stained with clay and mudВ .В .В .В , lying at full length on the ground” (130). 9. Even in the 1840s London had neither a centrally constructed system of sewers to receive waste, nor a centrally administered system for waste’s removal. Bodily waste was generally left to accumulate in shared cesspools, and the task of drainage or removal was usually either privately managed or ignored altogether (Finer, 209–29).Page 160 → 10. Hamlin’s “Providence and Putrefaction” provides a thorough and nuanced account of the close relationship between sanitary reform and the period’s more traditional providential rhetoric. 11. More generally, however, Head was circumspect about the applicability of this project on a large scale, and expressed concerns about the miasmatic hazard presented by such farming practices, as well as about the likelihood of achieving a balance between the supply of manure and agricultural demand. 12. The problem was further compounded by the slop coat’s purportedly poor quality, and hence its inability to be remade into anything more than shoddy. 13. Ichaboe is an island off the coast of what is now Namibia. For an extended analysis of the period’s guano trade, see Mathew. 14. Mayhew cites Gavin’s Sanitary Ramblings here. He also applies a similar argument to (and reveals a similar failure in) the market for secondhand clothes in London (464). 15. This failure aside, Chadwick’s plans also met with considerable political opposition, as the governmental and administrative centralization required for their implementation was seen by some as unfeasible, and by others as undesirable (Finer, 293–331). 16. Critics have been particularly attentive to the concept of “selection” in Jane Austen’s novels. Raymond Williams, for example, notes that her “very precisely selective” narrative vision delineates a class-based community (English Novel, 24), while D. A. Miller reads the process of selection in Sense and Sensibility as Austen’s commentary on Elinor’s and Marianne’s circumscribed lives and marriage prospects (Narrative, 67). 17. Noting that Mayhew had published substantial portions of London Labour and the London Poor in the form of articles for the Morning Chronicle as early as 1849, some critics have suggested that Dickens drew inspiration from Mayhew in his portrayal of such denizens of the street (Nelson; Sucksmith; Dunn). 18. See also Gallagher’s Body Economic (8–16, 36–43). 19. In a contrasting reading of Our Mutual Friend, Arac sees Dickens abandoning the connective, coherent quality of his earlier novels (164–85). 20. Vargish reads Eugene’s near-drowning and rescue as a scene of rebirth or baptism (156–62), while Gallagher frames it as a state of suspended animation in the process of transformation from illth to wealth (“Bio-Economics,” 361). Significantly, this and Bella’s scenes of redemption, like the chemical recovery of manure in Chadwick’s and Mayhew’s sewerage plans, take place just outside London, in the countryside. 21. For Hutter, these transformations of character reflect the novel’s engagement with a logic of detection and order (158). 22. Michal Peled Ginsburg argues that because characters like Harmon and Eugene Wrayburn make active choices in the processes of their transformation, the novel operates much more like a traditional bildungsroman, focused on a linear narrative of individual development (“Case”). 23. This reading supports Hilary Dannenberg’s contention that the use of coincidence more generally is no mere vestige of “fundamentally premodernist narrative” forms; here, its linkage to the period’s statistical understanding marks it as distinctly of its historical moment (91).Page 161 →

Chapter 5 1. Chadwick cited Playfair as an authority on this matter in his 1842 Report (21), and Gavin promoted this theory as well (Unhealthiness, 53). For an excellent historical overview of the corpse’s changing relationship to conceptions of filth, see Hamlin (“Good and Intimate Filth”).

2. Chadwick’s 1850 Metropolitan Interments Bill, which would have removed burials to less densely populated areas outside the city, faced numerous economic, religious, and political impediments (Finer, 412–20). 3. Neil Arnott makes this argument in support of the Act (483–85, 490–91). 4. Indeed, Burke and Hare were inspired to sell their first corpse when a lodger died without having paid his rent (Fido, 107). 5. Gallagher makes an earlier version of this argument in “Bio-Economics.” 6. Similar proposals have been made in recent years by medical professionals and patients’ advocates as a way of dealing with both the demand for transplant organs and the ever-increasing ranks of the poor (Scheper-Hughes, 204–5). 7. Ironically, the body’s status as the ultimate form of property, or even its equivalence to other forms of property, had no legal foundation. Because the corpse could not be considered property, trading in or even stealing a body was not a crime, while removing anything else from a grave, such as clothing or coffin fittings, was a felony; William Cobbett commented on this with some bitterness, since even the stealing of an animal’s carcass was punishable by death in the 1820s, while stealing a pauper’s body to sell for dissection was considered no crime at all (Richardson, 58–59). 8. Interestingly, in spite of some initial ambivalence, this article comes out in favor of the Act. 9. The Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s, the subject of Walkowitz’s inquiry, were part of an attempt to define “prostitution as a dangerous form of sexual activity, whose boundaries had to be controlled” (3). 10. These were criticisms made in Dickens’s own time, as well as more recently. In his postscript to the novel, Dickens sternly addressed readers who “contend[ed] that there are no deserving Poor who prefer death by slow starvation and bitter weather, to the mercies of some Relieving Officers and some Union Houses,” or who “denyВ .В .В . that they have any cause or reason for what they do” (894). See also note 1, chapter 16, by editor Stephen Gill (901–2). 11. Richardson notes that some surgeons managed to skirt laws against grave robbing, which generally applied only to whole bodies, by taking parts only; the Swan Street riot in Manchester, for instance, was instigated by the taking of a corpse’s head (244). 12. Yet another imagined the “cutting up and mangling of the bodies of human beingsВ .В .В . done with as little concern in those human shambles [slaughterhouses], as the bodies of beasts were cut up” in Smithfield (Hansard’s, 303). 13. The practice of purchasing parts only is mentioned by Gooch (“Unlawful Disinterment,” 6). 14. For Gallagher, this contrast mirrors the historical shift from theatrical to novelistic modes of representation (“Duplicity,” 140).Page 162 → 15. The narrator observes, “They hanged at Tyburn, in those days” (90); these hangings and their anticipatory festivities were publicly attended until 1783. 16. Cruncher’s dispassionate, calculating attitude perhaps introduces a third term into John Kucich’s distinction (via Hegel) between a “pure” violence, whose only object is itself, and the outwardly directed, vengeful violence of the Defarges and the angry crowds (119–37). 17. See, for example, Rankin and Schor. 18. Indeed, a number of other critics have pointed to the fundamentally social quality of agency in this novel, a quality that problematizes Dickens’s usual practice of focusing on the individual (F. Ferguson, “On Terrorism”; Ginsburg, “Dickens”; Stout). 19. The beginning of the article refers to this case as one “recently made public,” whose “scandalous details” the readers will not fail to recall (361), but a search of contemporaneous journalism identified no other references to this event. 20. As Alice Jenkins has noted, Dickens based Venus’s character on the contemporaneous comparative anatomist, Richard Owen (33). Both share a talent for reassembling skeletons from fragments, but the anxiety over his role in dismemberment and dissection, expressed by Pleasant, Wegg, and others, seems to function as an allusion to the other, older meaning of “anatomist” as well. 21. In her study of both nineteenth-century and contemporary serials, Jennifer Hayward suggests that the development of unifying relationships among separate plotlines is characteristic of the serial form (41–52).

22. Both Hutter and Creaney draw parallels between the novelist and his taxidermist, Venus: both work to create a semblance of life.

Chapter 6 1. This conception of Englishness would already have been undermined by the popularity of decorative items imported from British colonies, especially India, in English homes; see, for example, Saloni Mathur’s India by Design (6, 10). 2. For example, during the 2001 anthrax mailings in the United States, even publications like the liberal Nation magazine looked to terrorists from the Middle East as the source, in spite of evidence that the mailings were part of a domestic plot (Shapiro). 3. See, for example, Bewell. 4. For a more extended discussion of this genre, see Blackwell, The Secret Life of Things, especially the editor’s introduction (9–14) and Liz Bellamy’s chapter, “It-Narrators and Circulation” (117–46). 5. See Rosen (280–95). 6. Rosen (280–95), for example, provides a more detailed account of this history. 7. John Snow was among those who had suggested that cholera could be linked to a specific, transmissible source, but this work received relatively little credit at the time of its publication (Eyler, “Changing Assessments”). See Baly and Gull for a contemporaneous example illustrating the uncertainty with which Snow’s findings were received.Page 163 → 8. More recently but in a similar spirit, microbiologist Lynn Margulis wrote that, “The human body isn’t besieged; it’s saturated, infused with microbial life at every level” (quoted in Bilger, 106). 9. Prudden’s book was cited and reviewed in a number of contemporaneous British journals. 10. The Lancet attributed the poem to “H. S. C.,” and noted that it had been reprinted from a recent issue of the St. James’s Gazette. “Comma” was a common reference to the shape of the cholera bacillus as seen under the microscope. 11. According to Priscilla Wald, twentieth- and twenty-first-century representations of epidemics effected a similar conflation of carrier and disease, as they figured individuals as malevolent “superspreaders” (4). 12. In popular representations, the cholera victim’s body was often racialized, described as darkened or transformed in some essential way (O’Connor, 51). 13. Intestinal incontinence was known to be one of the telltale symptoms of cholera (O’Connor, 39–41; Gilbert, Citizen’s Body, 134). 14. These include Arata; Craft; Halberstam; Valente; Warwick; and Zanger. 15. In Gayatri Spivak’s foundational account, characters like Frankenstein’s creature and Christophine in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea are marginal to both the narrative and the imperial project, but their very uncontainability also allows them to disrupt those structures. 16. Seed and E. Butler analyze Jonathan’s failures of narratorial control, while Pope and Case emphasize the gendered implications of Mina’s attempts to assert narratorial authority. 17. E. Butler offers a contrasting reading, suggesting that the characters’ compulsion to write is in fact a sign of illness or infection (21). 18. In a compelling examination of modern temporalities, Adam Barrows analyzes the immortality of both Haggard’s Ayesha and Stoker’s Dracula as a form of defiance against Eurocentric conceptions of rational time (85–86). 19. Carol Colatrella reads what she calls this capacity for “replication,” associated with the supernatural and technological, as competing with Mina’s maternity. 20. Quoted in Waksman (364).

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Index Accidents, 10, 15; in fiction, 10, 13, 28–29, 32 Ackerknecht, Erwin, 58, 73–74, 157n7 Air. See Breathing; Miasma Allen, Michelle, 100 Anatomy Act, 11–12, 106–17; criminality and, 108; dissection and, 11, 106, 107–9, 112, 113, 116–17, 120, 122–23; identity and, 119–21, 123–27; rhetoric of, 107, 108–14, 116–27. See also Body; Corpses Anonymity, 1, 3, 10, 12, 32, 54, 77, 131 Arata, Stephen, 143–44 Arnold, Matthew, 122 Babbage, Charles, 84–85 Bacteria, 6, 129, 132; personification of, 12, 129, 131, 135–40, 146, 148. See also Germ theory Baldridge, Cates, 122 Beames, Thomas, 45 Beck, Ulrich, 15 Beer, Gillian, 6, 130 Belling, Catherine, 130–31 Bentham, Jeremy, 109, 113 Bills of Mortality, 16 Bioterrorism, 12, 129, 140–42, 149 Body: excesses of, 11, 34, 56, 83, 97; exchangeability of, 11, 111–12, 122–23; fragmentation of, 11, 110, 116–27; middle-class, 4, 43, 44, 127; monetary value of, 12, 107–16, 118–19; parts, 9, 116–17, 119–27; transmissibility of, 10, 34, 36–37, 41–43, 46, 50–52, 56, 106; vicariousness of, 10, 35, 41, 43, 49–52; working-class, 5, 43, 88, 106, 115. See also Anatomy Act; Corpses; Disease; Excrement; Miasma Braddon, Mary Elizabeth: Lady Audley’s Secret, 49, 51–52 Brantlinger, Patrick, 35–36, 158n17 Breathing, 9, 33–34, 42, 46–47, 92. See also Miasma; Smell Brooks, Peter, 61, 99 Burgan, Mary, 75

Burke, William and William Hare, 109, 161n4 Butler, Judith, 127 Carlisle, Janice, 34 Carlyle, Thomas, 8, 36, 45 Case, Alison, 145 Causality: in legal cases, 61; in literature, 28–32, 65–67, 75, 84; in medical narrative, 59, 61–63, 71, 74 Cemeteries, 7, 15, 77, 107–8. See also Corpses Cesspools, 10, 15, 33, 38, 40–41, 44 Chadwick, Edwin, 16, 42, 43, 73–74, 91, 93–94, 96–97, 99, 100, 154n8; on interments, 39, 161n2; Sanitary Report, 5, 16–17, 21, 25, 37–38, 154nn5–6 Page 182 → Chance, 22, 26, 27, 29, 30–32, 54–55, 57, 61, 103–4. See also Probability; Statistics Chappell, Patrick, 105, 159n2 Childers, Joseph, 36 Cholera, 11, 36, 58–59, 61, 64–68, 129, 141–43, 155n3, 157n10. See also Kingsley, Charles; Wells, H. G. Christian Socialism, 64, 158n17. See also Kingsley, Charles Class, social, 17, 29–30, 34, 47–49, 73, 75, 76, 84, 85–90, 96, 141–42; mobility and, 87, 89–90, 102–3, 127; moral judgment and, 37–41; sympathy and, 31, 44; transgression of, 4, 43, 44–45 Closure. See Narrative Cohen, William, 37, 50, 159n4 Collins, Wilkie: Woman in White, 49, 51, 156n22 Contagion, 53: arguments against, 58–60, 71; evidence for, 59–60, 61–63, 69, 71, 73; narrative structure and, 55, 57–58, 63, 64–78; theory of, 6, 7, 53, 56–60 Cooter, Roger, 29 Corbin, Alain, 34 Corpses, 11, 33, 37, 38–39, 100, 102, 105–18, 161n7; burial and, 38–39, 107, 115, 120, 123, 155nn8–9; public health and, 105–6; uses of, 107–10, 112, 118; women’s, 113–14. See also Anatomy Act; Body; Cemeteries; Grave robbery Cournot, A. A., 22–23 Crowds, 4, 118, 122, 141–42 Darwin, Charles, 130, 148

Daston, Lorraine, 6, 14–15, 22, 24, 26, 155n19 David, Deirdre, 100 De Morgan, Augustus, 23–24 Death. See Anatomy Act; Corpses Defoe, Daniel: A Journal of the Plague Year, 7–8, 153n7 Deleuze, Gilles, 26, 32 Dickens, Charles, 3, 5, 7, 9, 54: Bleak House, 7, 13, 27, 74–78, 99–101, 105, 150; Great Expectations, 103, 119; Hard Times, 13, 14, 27; Our Mutual Friend, 11, 83, 98–104, 106, 110–12, 116–17, 119, 123–27; Pickwick Papers, 14, 117; A Tale of Two Cities, 12, 106–7, 117–124, 126 Disease: as retribution, 8, 36, 76; Eastern associations with, 129. See also Bacteria; Cholera; Contagion; Miasma; Plague; Smallpox; Typhus Dissection. See Anatomy Act Donkin, W. F., 23–24 Eliot, George, 5; Middlemarch, 1, 8, 9, 53–55, 68, 74, 77–78, 146–47, 156n1 Empire, 128–32, 135, 140, 143–45 Excrement, 8, 9, 33, 42, 79–83, 87, 89, 93–94, 95–97, 159n1. See also Cesspools; Waste Eyler, John M., 20 Familial relations, 8, 36, 38–39, 61, 70, 74, 76–77, 147 Farr, William, 15–23, 25, 33, 47, 154nn8–9, 154n12. See also Statistics Ferguson, Frances, 24, 162n18 Ferguson, Robert, 56, 62, 154n16 Fleischman, Avrom, 80 Food, 11, 33, 37, 41, 56, 80, 86–87, 88, 90–94, 97, 133, 134 Foucault, Michel, 5, 8, 9, 36, 43, 91 Fourier, Joseph, 23 Freedgood, Elaine, 14–15, 27, 74 Fyfe, Paul, 27–28, 30, 31 Gallagher, Catherine, 28, 29, 31, 80, 81, 91, 100–01, 109, 110–11, 160n20, 161n5 Garrett, Peter, 57, 63, 146–47, 159n25 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 3: Mary Barton, 10, 27–32, 155n23 Gavin, Hector, 5–6, 40–43, 44, 49–50, 79–80, 81, 90, 91, 93, 155nn12–13

Germ theory, 12, 57, 128–29, 132–33, 135, 143; popular accounts of, 12, 129–40, 144. See also Bacteria Giddens, Anthony, 2 Gilbert, Pamela, 4, 6, 9, 17, 36, 37, 43, 64, 129 Page 183 → Gille, Didier, 96–97 Godwin, George, 40, 106, 107 Gomel, Elana, 75 Gooch, Robert, 70–71, 120, 123, 161n13 Goodlad, Lauren, 9, 14 Gradmann, Christopher, 135 Grave robbery, 108–9, 117–18, 124 Green, Judith, 29 Grossman, Jonathan, 57, 159n27 Guillaume, Marc, 37 Guy, William, 39, 45, 153n.3 Hacking, Ian, 22–26, 154n8, 155n20 Hadley, Elaine, 9, 153n6 Hale, Dorothy, 3, 5 Hamlin, Christopher, 58, 73, 80, 91–92, 157n8, 160n10, 161n1 Haskell, Thomas, 66, 158n20 Hospitals, 4 Household Words, 88, 89, 112, 113–14, 123 Insurance, 17, 24–25, 29–30 James, Henry, 57, 99 Kay, James Phillips, 6, 16, 20, 21, 37 Kingsley, Charles, 3, 7, 64: Two Years Ago, 6, 7, 64–68, 158n18; “Two Breaths,” 92 Koch, Robert, 128, 132 Koven, Seth, 47–49 Labor, 12, 106, 110–16. See also Prostitution

Laboratory, 141–43 Lancet, The, 62, 71–72, 73, 134, 136–37, 140 Laqueur, Thomas, 110 Levine, Caroline, 74–75, 158n16 Levine, George, 6 Liebig, Justus, 92–94, 99, 155n13 Lister, Joseph, 132 Luckin, Bill, 29 MacLean, Charles, 70–71, 72–73, 158n24 Malthusian economics, 11, 90–91, 93, 95, 97, 101 Manure. See Excrement Marriage, 125 Mayhew, Henry, 8, 79, 80: London Labour and the London Poor, 11, 83, 85–97, 99, 101, 102 McWeeny, Gage, 4, 55, 122 Medical profession, 33, 53, 59–60, 73, 108 Metz, Nancy Aycock, 49 Miasma, 7, 33–36, 39–47, 49–51, 53, 54–56, 58, 77, 91, 143, 156n14 Mill, John Stuart, 23, 154n18 Miller, D. A., 50–51, 98–99, 160n16 Monk, Leland, 27, 54 Moretti, Franco, 99, 101 Multiplot, 11, 57, 63, 68–78, 104, 126, 131, 146–47, 150–51, 159n25 Narrative, 7, 8, 9–10, 11, 60–78, 81–83, 87–90, 92, 130–32, 143–47: closure, 9, 11, 80, 83, 97, 98–99, 101–5, 142; continuity, 139; frame, 12, 131–32, 137–38; scientific and medical, 7, 11, 55–60, 61–63, 68–73. See also Multiplot Networks, 57, 66, 80, 92, 93, 95, 104, 144 Network theory, 74, 158n16 Newsom, Robert, 26–27 Nord, Deborah Epstein, 36, 156n17, 159n28 O’Connor, Erin, 4, 121

Otis, Laura, 135, 140 Pasteur, Louis, 128, 132, 148 Percentages, use of, 10, 15–16, 20–22, 24–25 Philanthropy, 4, 35, 47 Plague, 5, 7–8, 9, 58–59, 60, 61, 62, 70–71, 72–73, 76, 153n7, 157n8 Playfair, Lyon, 86–87, 89, 92, 98, 102, 105–6, 161n1 Plotz, John, 4 Poisson, SimГ©on-DГ©nis, 22–23 Poor Law, New (1834), 4, 110 Poovey, Mary, 4, 6, 17, 36, 155n22 Porter, Roy, 108 Porter, Theodore, 23 Page 184 → Probability, 10, 14–15, 22–23, 24–27, 32. See also Risk; Statistics Prosthetics, 5, 121, 123 Prostitution, 107, 112–15, 161n9 Providence, 27, 32, 91, 94 Prudden, T. Mitchell, 134, 136, 139–40, 163n9 Public health, 5, 36, 80, 105 Public Health Act, 4, 22 Punch magazine, 81–83, 112 Quarantine, 8, 53, 58, 73–74, 142–43 Recycling, 80. See also Reuse; Waste Reform Act, First (1832), 36 Reuse, 11, 80–98, 100–4, 106, 109 Reverse colonization, 143. See also Empire Richardson, Ruth, 106–7, 108, 109, 114, 115, 161n11 Risk, 13, 14–15, 24–26, 27–28, 30, 32, 74, 153–54n.3 Roberts, David, 47

Rothfield, Lawrence, 6 Ruskin, John, 13–14, 15, 26, 27, 28 Sanitary reform, 16–17, 33, 35, 49, 52, 55, 58, 64–66, 73–74, 85, 91, 96, 100 Sappol, Michael, 108 Schwarzbach, F. S., 36 Seed, David, 145 Sensation fiction, 8, 10, 37, 49–52 Serialization, 126 Sewage. See Waste Sewers, 7, 11, 46, 80, 93, 95–96, 159n9 Sexuality, 38–40, 49, 143–44 Shelley, Mary: The Last Man, 7, 153n7 Slavery, 107, 112–13 Smallpox, 61, 76–77, 157n10 Smell, sense of, 2, 10, 34, 40–42, 44, 155n13. See also Breathing Smith, Adam, 158n20 Smith, Thomas Southwood, 10, 42, 43, 60–61, 109, 110, 113, 114, 116, 154n16, 155n12, 156n14 Snow, John, 5, 41, 69, 158n23, 162n7 Sontag, Susan, 134 Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White, 4, 9, 34 Statistics, 3, 6, 10, 13–27, 31–32, 153n2. See also Chance; Percentages; Probability Stoker, Bram: Dracula, 12, 131, 140, 143–48, 151, 163nn16–19 Stout, Daniel, 122 Sympathy, 1, 3, 5, 9, 31–32, 37, 44, 50, 73 Thames, River, 22, 25–26, 81–83, 93–95, 97, 100–101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 156n18 Torgovnick, Marianna, 98–99 Transportation, forms of, 2, 3, 57, 70, 144 Tredennick, Bianca, 117 Tristan, Flora, 43–44, 46, 49–50, 156nn16–17

Trotter, David, 81 Typhus, 7, 8, 33, 36, 65 Vernon, James, 2 Wald, Priscilla, 57, 149, 163n11 Walker, G. A., 107 Walkowitz, Judith, 114, 161n9 Ward, F. O., 94 Waste, 16, 40, 41, 79–98, 99–103, 109–10. See also Excrement Wells, H. G., 3, 140: The Island of Dr. Moreau, 140–41; “The Stolen Bacillus,” 131, 140–43, 146; The War of the Worlds, 140, 147–48 Welsh, Alexander, 4, 61 White, Allon. See Stallybrass, Peter Williams, A. Susan, 36 Williams, Raymond, 4, 160n16 Willis, Martin, 141, 143 Winter, Alison, 50–51 Winterson, Jeannette: Written on the Body, 151 Wohl, Anthony, 59, 155n6 Worboys, Michael, 132–33 Wordsworth, William: “We Are Seven,” 24 Workhouse, 4, 106, 108, 110–12, 113, 123