Papers by Brett Beasley
Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray has the rare distinction of having not only contro... more Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray has the rare distinction of having not only controversial content, but a controversial textual history as well. In fact, the two are inseparable. The prosecutors in Wilde’s trials made use of the fact that Wilde had changed—or ‘purged’, as they put it—many aspects of the novel after its first appearance in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. But neither they nor the majority of Wilde readers knew that his original typescript had already undergone a great deal of censorship without Wilde’s permission before the novel found its way into print. In this paper I investigate these three texts—the typescript, the magazine version, and the first edition—using both the methods of textual studies and the methods of social and literary history, showing that the various texts of The Picture of Dorian Gray actually embody different arguments about the status of material objects themselves. Wilde’s only novel has long been recognized as a critique of Victorian society, but only by understanding it as social in its material instantiations can we come to understand the full scale and shape of that critique today.
Deadly fogs, moralistic diatribes, debunked medical theory – I explore a piece of Victorian scien... more Deadly fogs, moralistic diatribes, debunked medical theory – I explore a piece of Victorian science fiction considered to be the first modern tale of urban apocalypse.
Book Reviews by Brett Beasley
When I read of street muck that was like a “tenacious, glutinous paste,” my interest was piqued. ... more When I read of street muck that was like a “tenacious, glutinous paste,” my interest was piqued. By “sulphurous stinks” I was hooked—and I was not yet past the first page of Lee Jackson’s new book, Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth. The book proves to be a treasure trove of words and phrases for filth. Some are acutely descriptive; others are wonderfully euphemistic. Take, for example, “night soil,” “cesspoolage,” and “ejectamenta” (all terms for sewage), or “dustman” (garbage collector), “convenience” (toilet), or even “the big smoke” (a metonym for London itself). But for all its concern with these felicitous phrases, Dirty Old London is not primarily about language (although Lee Jackson’s experience as a novelist shows through to great effect). The book’s main concern is with Victorian history, albeit of a very specific kind. In Dirty Old London we see not the triumphant global empire of Victorian Britain, but rather the more embarrassing and more intimate effort on the part of Victorians to manage their own filth as it overflows and accumulates on streets, in homes, in the air, and even in or on Londoners’ bodies (and corpses). Although this endeavor might seem as simple as taking out the trash, it involved important developments in the discourses of sanitation, morality, science, and government. Jackson’s book, then, ends up providing both a history of the way filth was represented as well as how it was actually encountered and managed...
Uploads
Papers by Brett Beasley
Book Reviews by Brett Beasley