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This article considers what we can and cannot learn from objects in texts. As its chief example, it takes Peggotty’s workbox in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield and, through this particular object in a particular text, thinks about how far it is legitimate to “read” cultural-social-historical meanings back into a text, and how far objects in texts operate differently than objects in the world. It then reads the workbox as a marker of memory in the novel, challenging Nicholas Dames’s “associationist” reading of David Copperfield in his Amensiac Selves. The essay ends by considering some of the problems and potentials of “thing theory” in literary studies.

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This article examines the history of the popular immortelle flower and its role in aesthetic and material culture from the period of 1780–1930 in England and the United States. The flower was often used and referred to in funerary and literary productions as a symbol of longevity, resurrection, and, of course, immortality (as its name suggests). Exploring the flower’s once far-reaching span reveals a rich memorializing tendency during this period that sought to challenge the anxieties of modernity.

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In this essay, I discuss the relationship between photography, photographic technology, and memory in the final decades of the nineteenth century. I do so first in relation to the desire to possess actual material memories of the deceased, and then move to consider the way in which the photograph was often used as a metaphor for the processes of memory. I argue that apart from exceptional cases, this was, in fact, a false analogy. Taking Amy Levy’s 1888 novel The Romance of a Shop as a text through which to examine both death-bed photography and the workings of memory, I explore the idea of the memory flashing back, suddenly, and link this to the developments that took place in flash photography at the time that Levy was researching her photographically-themed novel. The metaphor of the flash – and the flash-back – has proved of more lasting value in the semantic linking of photography and memory, I argue, than other attempts to link the materiality of the photographic process to the workings of the brain.

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In the late-Victorian period considerable speculation that dreams provided access to ancestral memories appeared in both literary and psychological texts. Psychologists and psychical researchers such as Thomas Laycock, Samuel Butler, and F. W. H. Myers, among others, conceptualized memories and dreams as social, rather than solitary, mental functions, capable of making trans-historical connections with other minds. Their theories of ancestral memory effectively challenged the boundaries of subjectivity and the singularity of selfhood by extending identity across generations. One of the most sensational and sustained explorations of ancestral memory was George du Maurier’s 1891 novel Peter Ibbetson, which simultaneously adopted, popularized and expanded this ongoing debate about the nature of memory and the evolutionary scope of the unconscious. This essay traces the various ways in which these discourses on ancestral memory intersect. Both echoing and anticipating writers in the newly emerging memory sciences, Du Maurier’s novel explores the central role of the senses in producing and retrieving involuntary memories and envisions the mechanisms of memory as akin to modern technologies such as photography and phonography. Du Maurier’s account of ancestral memory thereby dramatizes some of the most far-reaching questions in late-Victorian psychology about the relationship between memory, identity, and the material world.

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This article argues that William Morris’s “The Defence of Guenevere” (1858) writes history through a singular unit of the time, the ephemeral moment. The moment is constructed through sensory experience, lodging historical narrative in the body and departing from mainstream Victorian progressive narratives. Morris constructs what I call an historiography of conditionality, an historical consciousness predicated on the immanent self-contradiction of memorializing any particular moment. In doing so, Morris anticipates what Walter Benjamin and others, following Karl Marx, theorized as historical materialism. My reading of “The Defence of Guenevere” departs from critics who have labeled Morris as escapist, nostalgic, or someone who uses the past to critique the present. Instead, Morris creates a poetic historical consciousness that weighs the cost of memorialization for the present day.

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This article addresses the rubric of "memory and materiality" by considering how works of literature held within individual minds might have contributed to material changes in the world at large. For a good proportion of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the most important relationship between literature and millions of English-speaking people was created by one particular pedagogical regimen: the memorization and recitation of short poetic pieces. I take as my test case a single work from the schoolroom canon—Charles Wolfe's 1817 poem, "The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna"—and examine the various ways in which lines and phrases from these verses were explicitly or implicitly cited by people caught up in the bloody turmoil of the American Civil War, the conflict which first witnessed the widespread development of state-sponsored practices to commemorate the corpses of common soldiers. I argue here that the presence of Wolfe's poem in the minds of ordinary individuals played its part in creating the social expectations that led to the establishment of the National Cemeteries in the United States, and thus, in due course, the mass memorialization of World War I.

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At the symbolic centre of every Dickens novel is the roaring fire of a domestic hearth. Readers of Dickens frequently related clustering in familial groups around a fireplace, sharing in the fire’s uncertain pools of light and warmth while they read the text aloud. And within the texts themselves, the Dickens fireside has been seen as an idyllic space of conflict resolution: as Alexander Welsh has put it, “if the problem that besets” Dickens “can be called the city, his answer can be named the hearth.” This essay seeks to remember the materiality of the fireside alongside its more symbolic evocations. Comparing Dickens’s representation of the coal fuelling the fires of A Christmas Carol (1843) and Our Mutual Friend (1865), written over twenty years later, and taking in several short fictions published in Household Words in the intervening decade, it shows that Dickens often based plots of fictional transformation on the fantastic metamorphoses embodied in the lump of coal itself. While there was something exuberant about this change in the 1840s and 1850s, when Britain’s plentiful coal supplies were frequently imagined as tokens of a divine plan favourable to British industrial and imperial expansion, the darkening mood of Dickens’s late fiction chimed with contemporary fears about the waste and depletion of resources and the increasing competitiveness of the global markets. Most importantly, however, throughout his career the material dimension of coal offered Dickens both narrative possibility, and representational trouble. So important was it to his social vision that he often overlooked the cost of coal in his desire to keep his poorest characters warm, and in the 1860s he repeatedly ridiculed the national panic that Britain’s coal reserves might run out. Thinking about Dickens’s firesides as both symbolic and material spaces, fuelled by the coal whose history was of such fascination to the readers of Household Words, we see that the hearth was not only Dickens’s all-solving “answer” to the problems of the “city.” It was a space in which many of his most central concerns would sit in unequal, and unresolved, tension.

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Mr. Brooke fails to become an elected political representative, but he nevertheless functions as a representative of Middlemarch society’s dominant mode of abstraction. Brooke’s comic idiom of “that sort of thing,” “that kind of thing,” and other variations of the word “thing” may be taken as a paradigm for George Eliot’s style throughout Middlemarch. Brooke parodies how characters and the narrator employ a grammar of things to articulate their relationships both to what they value in the material world and to their own interiority. I ascribe this grammar of things to what I call an “epistemology of character” because Eliot uses the same grammar of things to generate complex subjectivity within fully developed characters like Dorothea and Ladislaw as she does to describe scientific, conventional, religious, commercial, and physical realities.