Victorian Secrecy

Albert Pionke is associate professor of English at the University of Alabama, USA and Denise Tischler Millstein is assistant professor of nineteenth-century British literature at Stephen F. Austin State University, USA.

'... a well-written, well-argued and very interesting book. ... demonstrate[s] that the idea of the information age, the very idea of information as a historical concept, continues to increase in scope and potency across a range of disciplines, and that the potential for cultural information history continues to be explored by scholars of all fields. Well worth a look.' Library and Information History '... the context provided by the volume encourages the reader to consider the wider cultural stakes.' Modern Language Review

• Contents: Introduction: Victorian secrecy; an introduction, Albert D. Pionke; Hidden agendas: the secret to early 19th-century British burial reform, Sarah Hoglund; Harriet Martineau's 'only political plot': assassins, duels, and Corn-Law repeal, Deborah A. Logan; Secrecy and reticence in John Henry Newman's Loss and Gain, David J. Bradshaw; 'What connexion can there be?': detection in Dickens's Bleak House, John McBratney; Concealing minds and the case of The Woman in White, Maria K. Bachman; A Victorian picture puzzle: Richard Dadd's The Fairy Feller's Masterstroke, Eleanor Fraser Stansbie; Detecting business fraud at home: white-collar crime and the sensational clergyman in Victorian domestic fiction, Tamara S. Wagner; George Eliot's Felix Holt, The Radical and Byronic secrets, Denise Tischler Millstein; The perverse secrets of masculinity in Augusta Webster's dramatic poetry, Robert P. Fletcher; Victorian conjuring secrets, Michael Claxton; A secret censorship: the British Home Office v. Town Talk, Allison L.E. Wee; Secrets, silence, and the fractured self: Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Brooke McLaughlin Mitchell; Bibliography; Index.