Writing Victorian London: The Representation of Nineteenth-Century Anxieties in The String of Pearls and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

• Thesis title in Czech: Londýn ve viktoriánské literatuře: vyobrazení úzkostí 19. století ve Šňůře perel a Podivuhodném případu dr. Jekylla a pana Hyda
• Thesis title in English: Writing Victorian London: The Representation of Nineteenth-Century Anxieties in The String of Pearls and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
• Key words: Viktoriánská literatura|úzkosti|populární literatura|Sweeney Todd|Doktor Jekyll a pan Hyde|urbanize|industrializace
• English key words: Victorian literature|anxieties|popular fiction|Sweeney Todd|Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde|urbanisation|industrialisation
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2019/2020
• Thesis type: Bachelor's thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: PhDr. Zdeněk Beran, Ph.D.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 14.09.2020
• Date of assignment: 14.09.2020
• Administrator's approval: not processed yet
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 21.09.2020
• Date and time of defence: 07.09.2021 10:30
• Date of electronic submission: 16.08.2021
• Date of proceeded defence: 07.09.2021
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: Mgr. Helena Znojemská, Ph.D.

Guidelines

Steven Bruhm wrote in his essay “The contemporary Gothic: why we need it” that “[A]as we confront this underlying terror of our times, after all, the Gothic provides us a guarantee of life even in the face of so much death” (Bruhm, pp. 274, 2006). The thesis aims to analyse The String of Pearls and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in the light of Bruhm’s claim. The thesis will combine New Historicism approach and psychoanalytic theories.
While eighteenth-century Gothic fiction was predominantly set into the past, the nineteenth century replaces ancient castles with contemporary urban settings. This shift in literary tropes is significant in its relation to Victorian anxieties: living conditions in ever-growing London metropolis, industrialisation and scientific progress, the gruesome state of London sewage system, asylums as prison cells of burdensome persons, child prostitution, criminality, and homosexuality. These anxieties are embedded in both texts: victims of Sweeney Todd as villagers lost in infinite immensity of London population, Mrs Lovett’s pie factory as an embodiment of a factory-Hell, operation of which is contingent on human bodies supplied by Sweeney Todd, Dr Jekyll’s accomplishment of dividing his soul into two bodies, rotting bodies in the crypt of St. Dunstan’s Church, Mr Hyde’s violent trampling over a little girl’s body and Utterson’s dreaming of Mr Hyde’s appearance in his bedroom.
The two texts were chosen for three reasons: they both share a hideous monster in the human frame, Sweeney Todd and Mr Hyde, creeping upon the streets of London who is a source of locomotion of the Victorian anxieties embedded in the texts. The second reason for choosing these two texts is that the forty-year span between the publication of both texts indicates that London, the capital of the British Empire, maintained a position of a place of terror in literary imagination for some time. The texts are to be compared with non-literary texts, especially The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) and In Darkest England, and the Way Out (1890), which substantiate the presence of the Victorian anxieties in the literary texts. Both texts also show that an aesthetic depiction of traumatic events often experienced or witnessed by readers themselves can lead to higher popularity because “we need the consistent consciousness of death provided by the Gothic in order to understand and want that life” (Bruhm, pp. 274, 2006).

References

Rymer, James Malcolm. Sweeney Todd: The String of Pearls. Ed. Dick Collins. Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 2010.
Stevens, Robert Louis. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales. Ed. Roger Luckhurst. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 1–66.

Allen, Michelle. Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010.
Booth, William. In Darkest England, and the Way Out. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1890): Internet Archive <https://archive.org/details/indarkestenglan00bootgoog/page/n6/mode/2up>.
Bruhm, Stephen. “The contemporary Gothic: why we need it”. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 259–276.
Byron, Glennis and David Punter, eds. Spectral Readings: Toward a Gothic Geography. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.
Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Daly, Nicholas. The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2015.
Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. Trans. David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Epstein Nord, Deborah. Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.
Fawley, Maria. “The Victorian Age, 1832–1901”. English Literature in Context. Edited Paul Poplawski. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Flanders, Judith. The Invention of Murder. How the Victorian Revelled in Death and Detection and Invented Modern Crime. London: St. Martin Griffin’s, 2014.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Gray, Drew D. London’s Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City. London: Bloomsbury, 2010.
Houghton, Walter. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870. New Haven (Conn.); London: Yale University Press, 1985.
Lee, Jackson. Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014.
Luckhurst, Roger. “Introduction”. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. VII–XXXIII.
Mack, Robert L. “Introduction”. Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. VII–XVIII.
Mearns, Andrew. The Bitter Cry of Outcast London. London: James Clark and Co., 1883.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.