Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative

Jan-Melissa Schramm is a Fellow in English at Trinity Hall College, Cambridge and an affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, where she teaches Victorian literature. She worked as a lawyer before undertaking doctoral research in English. She is the author of Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology (Cambridge, 2000), as well as a number of articles and book chapters on representations of the law in the works of Dickens and Eliot, Victorian satire and first-person narration.

• Introduction: (unmerited) suffering and the uses of adversity in Victorian public discourse; 1. 'It is expedient that one man should die for the people': sympathy and substitution on the scaffold; 2. 'Fortune takes the place of guilt': narrative reversals and the literary afterlives of Eugene Aram; 3. 'Standing for' the people: Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and professional oratory in 1848; 4. Sacrifice and the sufferings of the substitute: Dickens and the atonement controversy of the 1850s; 5. Substitution and imposture: George Eliot, Anthony Trollope and fictions of usurpation; Conclusion: innocence, sacrifice, and wrongful accusation in Victorian fiction.

'Schramm's work is a significant work for Victorian scholars and all who wish to understand more clearly the political, legal and theological ferment of the nineteenth century and how that is reflected in attitudes to sacrifice and substitution in the Victorian novel.' Peter Stiles, The Glass