The Novelty of Rights: Advocacy for the Marginalized Subject in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

Abstract

This dissertation examines the way ‘rights language’ influenced how mid-nineteenth-century novelists advocated for marginalized subjects – namely, women, children, and slaves – in Victorian Britain. Debates about rights, sparked by the Revolutions in America and France, centred on the act of declaring them publicly. The taut, repeatable sentences deployed in these declarations represented a new species of language that possessed radical potential in delivering a horizontal or egalitarian society. Rights language invested people with autonomy, the ability to think and speak for themselves, and to become visible as subjects. From the undifferentiated mass came the entitled citizen who demanded real legal and political outcomes. This is something Victorian novelists picked up on and, indeed, rights became a dominant theme in the nineteenth century. The long form of the novel, however, complicated the brief, austere formulations favoured by drafters of the 1776 and 1789 Declarations. Moreover, imaginative and sentimental writing had the effect of containing and sometimes blunting the radical potential of rights language itself. In light of mounting debates in the 1830s and 1840s about extending the franchise in Britain, a central question which Victorian novelists grappled with was ‘What sorts of people are worthy of having rights?’. In advocating for disenfranchised subjects, mid-nineteenth-century novelists often relied on ‘types’ – the saintly child, the humble slave, the virtuous young woman – to forge sympathetic connection between the reading public and those who were commonly unrepresented. The presumption underlying this strategy is that only ideal representations would lead to readers’ virtuous actions – a tendency which I examine in more depth across all three chapters. In Chapter 1, I consider how Dickens’s sentimentalized depiction of stunted, damaged, and often doomed children was used to exert para-parliamentary pressure and hasten reform in the area of children’s rights. In Chapter 2, I consider Britain’s reception of the ‘American’ problem of slavery during the interabolition period when a transatlantic conversation about the status of the black enslaved subject emerged. Finally, in Chapter 3, I consider how mid-century women novelists engage with rights language to demand a more independent and public-facing existence for Victorian women. The Victorian novel, I claim, offered a way of negotiating and disciplining the emotion that came with political unrest and democratic change. Its emphasis on exceptionally worthy characters, however, advanced rights but simultaneously undermined an Enlightenment rhetoric of natural, self-evident, and so-called ‘universal’ rights.