The Victorian Novel On File Secrets, Hoards, and Information Storage

The Victorian Novel On File argues that the nineteenth-century information explosion shapes the novel form. In a world teeming with data, the novel is a storage medium, cluttered with detail and accumulating more than it can use. The fictional things that have been read as insignificant should be seen instead as vessels of information, embedding the text with potential. This study weaves together a formal account of the novel with media and information studies as well as new materialist approaches to objects. Information took material form in the nineteenth century: in Victorian literature, data can be located in bric-a-brac, folded-up papers, semi-precious stones, and rubbish heaps. Yet this information may never be transmitted as knowledge. Instead, the novel offers indefinite storage, gesturing toward the future while holding action and accountability in abeyance. Fallen by the wayside of plot are documents left on file, containers left unopened, stock left on the shelf, and secrets left untold-enacting, this study argues, the Victorian novel's aesthetics of deferral. In readings of works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Rudyard Kipling, this study illustrates the formal effects of cultural questions about value and meaning, longevity and history, abundance and overwhelm, and keeping and discarding. It closes by showing how these same questions animate the twenty-first century's information culture as well.

Priyanka Anne Jacob, Assistant Professor of English, Loyola University Chicago

Priyanka Anne Jacob is Assistant Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago. She writes about the form of the novel, as inflected through Victorian information and material cultures. Other research interests include: temporality, narrative, detective fiction, epistolarity, empire, and race and gender studies. She has published scholarly articles, one on sensation fiction in Victorian Studies, which received the honorable mention for the 2020 Donald Gray Prize, and one on George Eliot in Victorian Literature and Culture. She has also contributed teaching materials to the website Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom. She earned her doctorate at Princeton University and previously taught at the College of Wooster.

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction- The Novel Is a Container1. Lady Audley's Secret and the Files of Detection2. A City of Secrets in Little Dorrit3. George Eliot's Remnants of the Past4. Information on the Move in KimConclusion- Remaindered Bots and Digital HoardsNotesBibliography