The Secret Lives of Neo-Victorian Things

My paper focuses on two neo-Victorian novels which prominently feature Victorian objects and the fates of their ‘collectors’: Brian Moore’s The Great Victorian Collection (1875) and Harry Karlinsky’s The Evolution of Inanimate Objects: The Life and Collected Works of Thomas Darwin (1857-1879) (2010). In Moore’s novel, a Canadian history professor inadvertently becomes the guardian of a mysterious collection of Victoriana, which materialized over night in front of his window. A ‘miracle’ and burden at the same time, the collection’s origin is never explained, while Moore details the deleterious effect it has on its owner. Karlinsky’s protagonist, the fictional youngest son of Charles Darwin, too, is defined by his relationship to things. Inspired by his famous father’s work, Thomas Darwin seeks to expand the Theory of Evolution to include ‘inanimate objects.’ His studies on the procreation and hybridization of cutlery eventually lead to his admission in an ‘asylum’ in London, Canada. Although differing in period of publication, setting, and style, both novels reflect on Victorian objects leading real and imagined secret/social ‘lives’ (cp. Appadurai, “Commodities and the Politics of Value,” 1988; Brown, “The Secret Life of Things,” 1999). They imagine the collections’ uncanny animation and influence on their owners’ lives, teasingly withholding (Moore) and overtly presenting frameworks and explanations for the objects’ strange agency. Such uncanny collections prominently appear in late-Victorian fiction, where this constellation of dubious owners and their curated possessions evokes the period’s concerns with life in high capitalism, commodity culture, and new patterns of consumption, often fictionalized as verging into the Gothic (cp. Goetsch, “Uncanny Collectors,” 2007). The two novels triangulate these ‘secret lives’ with Victorian, and especially late Victorian, ideas about objects and commodities and our own desire to access the Victorian past through original evocative objects, antiques, and memorabilia.

Sabina Fazli is a postdoc in the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Mainz University (in the project Transnational Periodical Cultures) and the English Department at Göttingen University. Her PhD thesis was in Victorian studies and explored the entwinement of memories and things in sensation novels. It has been published as Sensational Things: Souvenirs, Keepsakes, and Mementoes in Wilkie Collins’s Fiction in 2019.