Dreadful plots: Conspiracy narratives and political struggle in early nineteenth-century British writing.

摘要

This study focuses on conspiracy narratives from the late 1830s through 1840s, when the Chartist movement strove to change the political lot of the working class but lost momentum, and when novelists Phillip Meadows Taylor, Charles Dickens, W. H. Ainsworth, and Charlotte Bronte enjoyed considerable fame. I argue that these novelists and other writers address political or social concerns of the time through the metaphor of conspiracy, and show that conspiracy narratives become a mode for the novelists to interrogate their own roles as public plotters.; Chapter 1 examines the conspiracy narrative of the Indian Thugs. Harriet Tytler's memoir and William Sleeman's legalistic report, Ramaseeana , insist on the authority of the British to combat the Thugs. Taylor's novel, Confessions of a Thug, provided what many saw as evidence for the need to expand British control of India, while paradoxically undermining the idea that Thugs should be taken seriously as it raises the problem of taking crafters of fiction at their word. Chapter 2 considers Dickens's Barnaby Rudge, which, through its account of the Gordon riots of 1780, suggests that an expansion of democracy in Dickens's time would be tainted by conspiracy. I also show how the novel responds to charges that Dickens's writing fostered criminality. Chapter 3 discusses the figure of Guy Fawkes in Victorian discourse about Chartism. I detail how Ainsworth's Guy Fawkes draws an implicit parallel between 1605 and the 1840s, and argue that the novel also replies to those reviewers who worried Ainsworth's novels would engender criminality. Chapter 4, the last chapter, examines Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, a tale set when Luddites made nocturnal raids. I examine how, through the metaphor of plotting, Shirley confronts the sex and gender system and defends Bronte's position as a professional plotter.; My study helps explain the political and imaginative power of the conspiracy narrative, especially as it intersects with the novel at an important time in its development in the marketplace. It demonstrates the ways in which plotting was a central issue in heated debates about the position of novelists and subalterns in colonial and metropolitan Britain.