https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7537-9815
![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This paper investigates the representation of domestic accidents in popular Victorian fiction. Taking Mrs Henry Wood’s Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles (1862) as a case study, I discuss how accidents at home signpost changing reactions to risk and risk-management as much as to the work of managing a household. Women’s writing is more likely to depict the home as the site of domestic labour, as a place of worry even, rather than as a stable space that stands apart from or in opposition to work. Wood goes further in turning housework into a sensational topic, capitalising on a growing tendency in Victorian print to expose the hazards of everyday life, while importing new ideas of risk into household management. A critical reconsideration of accidents in the Victorian home allows us to trace how the representation of household hazards impacted on shifting concepts of chance, coincidence, and risk, as well as on attempts to make sense of them in and through narratives.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Holmes’s article (Citation2014) on working-class households in police reports and coroners’ inquests forms an exception.
2 Influential Victorian thinkers such as Ruskin may have engendered the notorious bifurcation of the public versus the domestic sphere that presented the latter as a rest from strife, yet as Victorian scholars have amply pointed out, “the celebration of heteronormative domesticity associated with the Angel in the House and Ruskin’s domestic queens was always more ideal than actual” (Hager and Schaffer Citation2013, 7).
3 A striking exception, George Eliot suggests that this is a fallacy, using a randomly scratched pier-glass as a metaphor (book 3, chap. 27) in Middlemarch (1872).
4 Consisting of household books, medical manuals, and a growing range of domestic magazines, this specialised publishing market generated often contradictory advice. Seminal scholarship includes Attar (Citation1987) and Beetham (Citation1996). See also the work of Berry (Citation1999), Bailey (Citation2012), Nelson (Citation2007), Shuttleworth (Citation2010), Reynolds (Citation2016), and Wagner (Citation2017).
5 On Wood’s representation of maternity, see also Shuttleworth (Citation1992, 44–49); Wagner (Citation2017, 801–819).
6 In Chapter 44 of David Copperfield, “Our Housekeeping,” Dora’s dog Jip tears the pages of the Cookery Book, balances on it, and walks over the page of the account-book, “wagging his tail, and smear[ing] them [i.e. the recent entries] all out” (Dickens Citation1850, 525, 628).
7 Wagner (Citation2017) suggests that one of Wood’s favourite shock-tactics is to build on parents’ fears about their children’s safety by depicting murders that look like fatal accidents.
8 Most studies on Victorian fiction have focused on insurance scams. Pearson discusses “moral hazards,” including crimes that insurance seems to invite. Novels, ironically, might sustain them as a generic privilege (Citation2002, 1–35).
9 Coveney speaks of “the one last, careful, twist of the knife of the sadist masquerading as moralist” in East Lynne (Citation1957, 136).
10 In Hardy’s Tess, both Tess’s accident with the cart and the accidentally concealed letter are linked to an unpropitious fate.
11 For a good discussion of Wood’s integration of “pious Christianity” into sensation fiction, see Palmer (Citation2011, 16). The Victorian work ethic likewise combined piety and self-help, and Jane Halliburton can also be seen to exemplify this combination. Banerjee terms it “a blend of Smilesian philosophy and religious proselytising” (Citation2013, n.p.).
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Tamara Silvia Wagner
Tamara Silvia Wagner is Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her books include The Victorian Baby in Print: Infancy, Infant Care, and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture (2020), Victorian Narratives of Failed Emigration: Settlers, Returnees, and Nineteenth-Century Literature in English (2016), Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction (2010), and Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel, 1740-1890 (2004). She has also edited collections on Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand (2014), Victorian Settler Narratives (2011), and Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (2009).