@article{THESIS,
      recid = {12810},
      author = {Rossi, Julia},
      title = {The Age of Upkeep: Maintenance, Labor, and Statecraft in  the Victorian Novel},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2024-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      abstract = {<p>This dissertation project centers upon the organizing  theme of maintenance in British novels from the second half  of the nineteenth century. Across three chapters, I trace  the ways in which the conditions of market growth, capital  accumulation, urbanization, and imperial expansion that so  characterize the nineteenth century produce vivid demands  and anxieties about maintenance or upkeep. Drawing from a  variety of domains, but with an emphasis on the novel, I  ask what it would mean for us to conceptualize the  Victorian imagination as consumed by maintenance, as a  counterweight to our familiar understanding of the period's  far-reaching obsessions progress and growth. I frame  maintenance as an increasingly fraught practice that runs  across multiple cultural registers in the nineteenth  century, from urban infrastructure (which requires upkeep  by increasingly specialized forms of labor as it becomes  more complex and more centralized) to colonial fronts  (which demand increasingly difficult, laborious, and  violent systems of control as the century unfolds).</p>  <p>Using moments in literature as touchstones for  interpretation, this dissertation seeks to foreground and  clarify a set of Victorian writers' complex relationships  to paradigms and practices of maintenance. My goal for this  project is not only to track the intensification of  maintenance as a category of labor and experience across in  the nineteenth century, but also to examine the ways in  which this phenomenon of intensifying maintenance becomes  absorbed into or refracted by culture. Each chapter  explores the nuanced ways in which maintenance features in  the stories the Victorians told to and about themselves,  drawing out patterns that illuminate connections across  three capacious and overlapping domains: labor, capital,  and statecraft. Along the way, my project clears conceptual  space for Victorian representations of maintenance to  inflect upon our own cultural moment, which remains in so  many ways trapped within the physical systems and  institutional legacies of the nineteenth century.</p>  <p>Across my three chapters, I treat maintenance as both an  explicit thematic within some of the Victorian period's  most enduring works of fiction – a concept that writers  like Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and William Morris  deliberately grappled and engaged with – and as an  inchoate, disavowed, and sometimes inarticulable strain  that lingers within the logics of Victorian capitalism and  imperial expansion. By attending to the latter half of the  nineteenth century as an epoch of maintenance, and to a set  of canonical novels from this period as mediators of  maintenance crises, my project sheds light upon a suite of  interrelated historical arcs.</p> <p>My first chapter takes  up one of the most canonically central novels of the  Victorian period: Charles Dickens's <em>Bleak House</em>. I  focus my study on the character of Jo, a vagrant child who  spends his days attempting to scrape a living by sweeping a  dirty “crossing” (or crosswalk) and begging for  small payments from pedestrians. Drawing from scenes in the  novel, from newspaper and periodical pieces that depict  crossing-sweepers from the years surrounding the  publication of <em>Bleak House</em>, and from early  anthropological studies like Henry Mayhew's <em>London  Labour and the London Poor</em>, I suggest that Jo embodies  a mounting tension between the need for public maintenance  labor to sustain an industrial society and the illegibility  of such labor within the rubrics of classical political  economy. Moreover, I trace the ways in which the public,  unpaid sweeping of “Poor Jo” (and the real-life  Victorian crossing-sweeper population that he so  sentimentally represents) begins to register in mid-century  discourse as a form of work that should properly be managed  by the state.</p> <p>In my second chapter, I shift my  attention to two novels by Anthony Trollope: <em>The  Warden</em> (1855), Trollope's first major literary  success, and <em>The Fixed Period</em> (1882), a  nearly-forgotten futuristic dystopia that Trollope  published at the end of his life. Both novels are  thematically concerned with the management of elderly  population. In <em>The Fixed Period</em>, these  problematics related to the management of elderly  populations are layered onto questions about the management  of “aging” (i.e., residual and  resource-depleted) colonial zones. At critical moments in  both novels, Trollope introduces ethical questions about  aging individuals and residual colonial fronts by invoking  a vocabulary of their “maintenance.” Both  novels engage with questions of what it means for a  national economy to “maintain” a person or a  population, and in particular, a person or population that  has aged out of productivity. In the first part of this  chapter, I examine the various functions of this explicit  vocabulary of maintenance, which appears with remarkable  frequency in works of political economy and which features  in Trollope's novels in ideologically freighted ways. In  the second part of the chapter, I read Trollope's  endorsement of settler-colonial models of imperial  expansion (as opposed to the annexation “colonial  dependencies”) in <em>The Fixed Period</em> as an  attempt to secure a low-maintenance imperial future.</p>  <p>My third chapter turns to William Morris's <em>News from  Nowhere</em>, a speculative utopia that takes place in a  socialist, post-revolutionary England. The first part of  this chapter considers depictions of infrastructural  maintenance and repair that are scattered across Morris's  utopian narrative. In one scene, for example, Morris  depicts a group of men who have gathered to fix a broken  stretch of highway; in other moments, Morris's characters  suggest that the residents of this futuristic landscape  have internalized a sense of responsibility for the upkeep  of their shared infrastructures and their built  environment. I show that these maintenance scenes are  essential to Morris's project of imagining a socially  complex and physically connected nation that does not a  require the mediation of private companies or state  bureaucracies. The chapter concludes with a turn to the  aesthetic dimensions of maintenance in Morris's futuristic  landscape. I show that Morris frequently casts the  characters in his utopia who gravitate toward maintenance  work (as opposed to artisanal production) – including  dust-collectors and road repairmen – as people who possess  slightly idiosyncratic or eccentric “tastes.”  In my reading, Morris leverages the dynamics of taste –  and, more specifically, a natural distribution of human  tastes – to render a speculative world that maintains  itself in the absence of market incentives or the  machinations of statecraft.</p>},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/12810},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.12810},
}