Victorian fiction is full of weather that seems to have opinions. Fog presses against windows. Smoke curls through narrow streets. Gas lamps glow inside dirty yellow air. Strangers appear suddenly out of darkness, while familiar buildings dissolve only a few yards away. For modern readers, the amount of fog in nineteenth-century British novels can seem … Read more
A locked door in Victorian Gothic fiction is rarely just a locked door. Behind it may be a forbidden manuscript, a disgraced relative, evidence of a crime, an unwanted wife, a family inheritance, or a memory that respectable society would rather forget. Sometimes the reader does not even need to know what is inside. The … Read more
A woman stands beside a window and looks into the street. A child presses against a pane, watching a world he cannot enter. A wealthy family closes its curtains against the city. Someone inside a drawing room observes a stranger approaching through the glass. Victorian novels are full of windows. At first, this can seem … Read more