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Victorian Humor: A History, a Narrative Theory, and the Experience of Reading book cover

1st Edition

Victorian Humor A History, a Narrative Theory, and the Experience of Reading

By Glynnis Cox Copyright 2026
226 Pages 18 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

226 Pages 18 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
Humor and the novel both belong, in important ways, to the nineteenth century. It is in the nineteenth century that we saw an unprecedented outpouring of novels and short stories, and it was also in the nineteenth century when humor emerged as the dominant term through which the comic was described. Victorian Humor argues that these two features of nineteenth-century culture shape one another... Read more

Contents:

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction: Victorian Humor

·       Their Laughter, Our Laughter

·       A Place for Shared Laughter

·       Current Humor Scholarship

·       Humor and the Victorian Novel

Chapter One - A History of the Comic and Humor

·       Pre-Modern Views of the Comic and a “Changed Intellectual Habitus”

·       From Typology to Personality

·       Moral Theory, Sentiment, and Ridicule in the Eighteenth Century

·       The Romantic Imagination, Pathos, and Humor

·       The Character of Victorian Humor

·       Conclusion

Chapter Two - Patterns of Attention

·       Introducing Humor: Dickens’ Christmas Carol and Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Treasure Island

·       Victorian Realism and Accurate Eccentrics: Collins’ The Moonstone

·       Victorian Manners and Recognizable Eccentrics: Trollope’s Orley Farm and Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters 

·       Conclusion

Chapter Three - Narration

·       The Interpretive Implications of Intimacy: Gaskell’s Cranford and Thackeray’s “A Little Dinner at Timmins’s”

·       Dual-Focalization and Characterizing the First-Person Narrator: Dickens’ Great Expectations

·       Rhetorical Irony, Romantic Irony, and the Narrator: Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham

·       Humorous Narratorial Presence: Eliot’s Middlemarch

·       An Avatar of Benevolence: Dickens’ Pickwick

·       Conclusion

Chapter Four - Characters

·       Peripheral Figures: The Immortality of Micawber

·       Satiric Anti-Heroines: Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Frances Trollope’s Widow Barnaby, and Meredith’s Evan Harrington

·       Humorous Heroines: Dickens’ David Copperfield and Our Mutual Friend, Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks and Phoebe Junior, and Trollope’s Barchester Chronicles and The Prime Minister

·       Conclusion

Chapter Five - Persuasion

·       Novel Religious Priorities: Trollope’s Rachel Ray, Eliot’s “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton”, and Oliphant’s “The Rector”

·       Humorous Extremes and Humorous Mediation: Dickens’ Hard Times and Trollope’s The Warden

·       Conclusion

Conclusion - A Changing Character

·       A Convivial Invitation


Index

Biography

Glynnis Cox is a recent graduate of the University of Edinburgh, where she served as graduate coordinator for the James Tait Black prize in fiction and biography and was a recipient of a Saltire Foundation scholarship. She is an independent scholar. 

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