The City Elsewhere: The Urban Form of the Victorian Provincial Novel

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the urban dimension of nineteenth-century British provincial novels. It challenges the city-country division that serves as a persistent shorthand in novel studies and instead foregrounds the urbanization process that shaped city and country, metropolis and province, alike. By employing the urban as less a geographical category and more as an analytical framework, this project reframes the provincial as an extension, or yet another iteration, of the urban, and makes the case for reading provincial novels as urban fiction, or narratives of the “city elsewhere.” Each chapter focuses on a work that centers the experience of provincial life to bring to view the far-reaching impact of the socio-spatial transformations of the urbanization process that render even remote, seemingly insular places already urban. I show how provincial novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and William Morris draw upon the locationality of the provinces to enact their critical engagement with the changing spatial relations under capitalist urbanization. Collectively, the chapters demonstrate the nature of the provincial as an ideological construction whose contours were constantly shifting in tandem with broader currents of change at home and abroad. The City Elsewhere thus intervenes in studies of the Victorian provincial novel by making visible the unique testimony the subgenre bears to the urbanization process in which nineteenth-century British society as a whole was engulfed. From this angle, the provincial, far from signifying sleepy, timeless backwaters, provides a singular vantage point from which to plumb the dynamism of the urbanization process and its tensions, complexities, contradictions.