Description
Literary sketches were a popular genre throughout the Victorian period, pioneered in the 1820s with Mary Russell Mitford’s perennially popular Our Village (1824-32) and Charles Dickens’ Sketches by Boz (1833-36), both of which went through many editions across the century, as well as countless examples modelled on these two texts. Sketches were a commercially useful form since they were especially suited to individual publication (and republication) across different periodical venues, as well as collecting into volumes set at different price points for different markets. Such versatility was matched in their literary form as a genre that straddled fiction and non-fiction, and enabled writers to engage with a diverse range of subjects and disciplinary fields. This paper takes up the analytic challenge presented by such versatility, arguing that one of the fundamental techniques popularised by writers like Mitford and Dickens was a descriptive technique in which specific categories of phenomena are described in place of particulars – e.g. a typical farmer in place of a particular farmer, a typical pawnbroker in place of a particular pawnbroker. Categorical specificity enabled writers to generate an illusion of truthful depiction that was specific enough to be convincing but remained expansive enough to function across the different publication contexts through which a successful sketch might be remediated. Beyond its commercial value, the technique also poses questions about the nature of representation which, as this paper will show, had important political implications for a newly industrialised society – a fact not missed by Victorian commentators who interrogated the “truth” of the representational categories such writing presented.| Period | 14 Jul 2025 |
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| Event title | The 17th Annual Conference of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association : Heights, Depths, and Extremes |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Birmingham, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |