Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society

In this manuscript, Lauren Goodlad looks at Victorian literature as the means for a post-Foucauldian study of Victorian culture, arguing that Victorian Britain was a liberal society. She explores diverse works of Victorian literature as they converged with major developments in the modernization of the British state. In so doing, she relays literature’s relation to developments that have long occupied social historians including poor law, sanitary, educational, and civil service reforms, and the substitution of organized charity for the state. Each chapter takes up a contentious aspect of the Victorian state, linking debates over governance to major works by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, John Stuart Mills, and others.