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Abstract

This dissertation redeploys Karl Marx’s theory of the reserve army of industrial labor in order to redescribe the understudied and undertheorized social relations of Victorian literary production. It argues that the rise of literary capitalism in the nineteenth century, underpinned by developments in publishing which constituted a kind of industrial revolution in literature, produced a class of surplus, semi-employed writers who served the interests of the bourgeois literary establishment. It argues further that these writers recognized, theorized, and even resisted their exploitation as “surplus” labor through various forms of what I call “surplus style.” It thus charts the emergence of literature’s reserve army as a legible cultural and class formation with an insurgent relationship to the dominant culture.In assembling the actors within this countercultural class formation, the dissertation draws largely from the records of the Royal Literary Fund, a charity for indigent authors to which most of the writers studied here applied many times, and in whose archives alone some of their histories remain. It is also organized around writers in the orbit of Charles Dickens as a representative of capitalist class of Victorian literature. It studies works in a wide range of literary genres—plays, serialized fiction, urban ethnography, periodical essays, journalism, memoirs, and begging letters—produced by a diverse range of writers: William Moncrieff, Thomas Peckett Prest, Henry Mayhew, Hannah Maria Jones, George Augustus Sala, and Mary Seacole. In bringing a new theoretical lens to bear on the lives and writing of these marginal and understudied figures, the dissertation offers a new social history of Victorian authorship as well as a new account of the power relations of the field of cultural production.

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