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).

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.

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.

My first chapter takes up one of the most canonically central novels of the Victorian period: Charles Dickens's Bleak House. 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 Bleak House, and from early anthropological studies like Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, 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.

In my second chapter, I shift my attention to two novels by Anthony Trollope: The Warden (1855), Trollope's first major literary success, and The Fixed Period (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 The Fixed Period, 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 The Fixed Period as an attempt to secure a low-maintenance imperial future.

My third chapter turns to William Morris's News from Nowhere, 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.