My dissertation project centers on the organizing theme of “maintenance” in Victorian Britain. I am interested in the ways in which the conditions of market growth, capital accumulation, urbanization, and imperial expansion that so characterized the nineteenth century produce vivid demands and anxieties about maintenance or upkeep. Drawing from a variety of domains, but with an emphasis on the novel, I ask what it would mean for us to conceptualize the Victorian period as an age consumed by upkeep, in the same way that we are accustomed to considering the far-reaching implications of its obsession with growth, development, and “progress.”
I argue that maintenance becomes an increasingly fraught practice across multiple cultural registers in the nineteenth century, from urban infrastructure (which must be kept up by increasingly specialized forms of labor as it becomes more complex and more centralized) to palatial country estates (which, especially in the wake of landscape “improvement” ventures in the 18th and 19th centuries, require costly teams of gardeners and other maintenance staff – which in turn intensified pressure to extract value from colonial ventures). Each chapter of my project considers a different maintenance crisis, as imagined by writers like Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and William Morris.