Most Dreadful Visitation

Valerie Pedlar teaches at the Open University in Manchester. She has contributed to a number of publications including 'The Nineteenth Century Novels: Identities' (ed. Dennis Walder Routledge 2001.)

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction1. Insurrection and Imagination: Idiocy and Barnaby Rudge2. Thwarted Lovers: Basil and Maud3. Wrongful Confinement, Sensationalism and Hard Cash4. Madness and Marriage5. The Zoophagus Maniac: Madness and Degeneracy in DraculaConclusionBibliographyIndex

In The Most Dreadful Visitation: Male Madness in Victorian Fiction Valerie Pedlar looks at the treatment of "fears, insecurities and ambiguities concerning the state of manhood" in representations of male insanity (pp.1-2). Pedlar pursues her topics-idiocy, erotic frustration, wrongful confinement, madness in marriage degeneracy-across a wide range of texts, some of them familiar (by Dickens, Tennyson, Trollope, Bram Stoker) and some not (Ellen Wood's Martin's Eve, Eliza Lynn Linton's Sowing the Wind, Henry Cockton's The Life and Adventures of Valentine Vox, Ventriloquist). Pedlar's study complements-and in some aspects corrects-the preoccupation with madness as a female condition in recent historicist studies. Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, The Nineteenth Century Volume 50, Number 4