Science, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction

Abigail Boucher is Lecturer in English Literature at Aston University, UK.

• Introduction.- Chapter 1: Fashionable Diseases: Consumerism, Class, and Health in the Silver Fork Novels.- Chapter 2: “Unblessed by Offspring”: Fertility and the Aristocratic Male in Reynolds’s The Mysteries of the Court of London.- Chapter 3: Aristocratic Inbreeding: Exogamy and Endogamy in Sensation Fiction.- Chapter 4: Aristocratic Origins, Heredity, and Evolution in the Fin de Siècle Medieval Revival.- Conclusion.

“Boucher’s book provides a fascinating overview of representations of aristocratic lineage in Victorian popular fiction and will be of interest to scholars working in a variety of different fields, including scholars of Victorian popular fiction, scholars working on the history of science and medicine, and scholars interested in social class in literature.” (Sarah Frühwirth, BAVS Newsletter, Vol. 24 (2), 2024)“This title is a monograph … . It has a very detailed table of contents that make it easy to find Boucher’s discussions of individual topics and texts, and each chapter has its own conclusion and works cited. This makes Science, Medicine and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction easy to navigate and use in smaller pieces. This format also makes it ideal for classroom usage as a chapter can easily be excerpted from the whole.” (Ellen Stockstill, The British Society for Literature and Science, bsls.ac.uk, June 6, 2024)