https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1224-7380
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Lakshmi Krishnan, Kari Nixon, Outbreak: Contagion and Culture in the Victorian Era: Introduction, Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 27, Issue 2, April 2022, Pages 276–282, https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac014
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Abstract
One can hardly read a Victorian text without encountering contagious diseases, those striving against them, or those marked by them: from the tuberculous resonances in Dracula (1897) to Jonathan Hutchinson’s (1828–1913) syphilography, Mary Seacole’s pioneering nursing and treatment of cholera in Panama (Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, 1857), and finally Bleak House’s Esther, disfigured by smallpox. This Roundtable asks how the Victorians approached contagion, examining the ways in which it became such a central preoccupation for a society already fixated upon health and illness and the transactions between life and death. Through our analysis of the long nineteenth century, we hope to illuminate our own contagious transformations. As the novel coronavirus pandemic continues to reveal our individual and communal interdependence, complicated navigation of information, panic, sickness, harm, and isolation, and as it underscores tensions between individual liberty and the collective good, Victorian understandings of contagion acquire fresh relevance to us. In Victorian studies, these interpretations remain a critical touchstone for thinking about medicine, history, narrative, and social and public policy.
