| My dissertation examines the cases of major Victorian con artists in order to show how these men exploited mid-nineteenth-century understandings of gentlemanly identity in order to create believable aliases, under which they would then perpetrate their crimes. Ultimately, I argue, such "character-making" informed how Victorian novelists - and especially those working in the sensational genre (novels focusing on domestic crime) - not only generated their own characters but also understood formal issues more broadly. My various chapters explore, for example, how authors looked to the criminal to generate alternative modes of "realist" characterization, re-conceptualize the dramatic unfolding of plot, and contrive unexpected links between characters and narrative action. My overarching purpose is to bring new understanding to the ongoing critical conversation about narrative/form in the 19th-century novel by reading from a unique and challenging historical context.;In my chapter on Wilkie Collins, I argue that the inconsistent behavior of characters in the author's 1866 novel, Armadale - behavior historically read as a mimetic deficiency - is in fact a focused attempt to integrate the performativity of con-artists into middle-class understandings of identity. Collins's characterization, I suggest, registers the ideological bias behind readerly tendencies to equate consistency with realism. Chapter three examines Charles Dickens's attempt to legitimize social "character-making"--- a prerogative which he aligns with the novelist's task of misleading and surprising readers for the sake of instructing them. Our Mutual Friend's (1864) gentleman protagonist, John Harmon, creates a secret identity as a vigilante, under which alias he is able to manipulate others and thus "author" the events that drive the plot, ultimately generating an orderly and happy resolution. My final chapter argues that novelistic characterization in The Way We Live Now (1875) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) uses late-century degeneracy theory's interest in criminal etiology to fashion narrative links between the transgressive deeds which rupture plot stability (Melmotte's forgery, Dorian's slumming) and seemingly unrelated, reputable characters. These links, I argue, cast social repute as form of criminal alias. |
