Victorian Darknesses: Body, Mind, and Place

This book targets a cluster of darknesses in a century that, in the wake of the Romantic euphoria for the nocturnal, preferred to see itself guided by the glaring light of positivism and clear factitiousness. Yet, both canonical and non-canonical texts of the Victorian age prove that the beacons of affirmation and technological progress were persistently drowned out by stentorian voices of darkish doubt and suicidal abandon. Moored in an ontology that had lost the time-honored balance between light and dark, Victorians were on the point of losing the old idea of the chiaroscuro of life, which had informed early-modern arts. With a focus on body, mind and place, Victorian darknesses addresses the morbid interest in corpses and (female) suicides, the contradiction between spiritualism and the wish for a radically sanitised and enlightened darkness and images of London that show the metropolis sinking into the mire of darkness, pauperism and crime. Legions of self-styled Promethean torchbearers, vampire-slayers and sleuths were dedicated to bringing light, but inevitably thrust the Victorian age into more impenetrable darkness.