Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination

Katherine Byrne is Lecturer in English at the University of Ulster.

• Introduction; 1. Nineteenth-century medical discourse on pulmonary phthisis; 2. Consuming the family economy: disease and capitalism in Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son and Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South; 3. The consumptive diathesis and the Victorian invalid in Mrs Humphry Ward's Eleanor; 4. 'There is beauty in woman's decay': the rise of the tubercular aesthetic; 5. Consumption and the Count: the pathological origins of Vampirism and Bram Stoker's Dracula; 6. 'A kind of intellectual advantage': phthisis and masculine identity in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady; Conclusion; Appendix A. Phthisis mortality; Appendix B. Medical publications on consumption; Appendix C. Gender distribution of phthisis.

'Byrne's is a really useful and most enjoyable book - it's carefully argued, connects a deep understanding of the novels with an excellent reading of the cultural, social and economic history of the Victorian era … Also, it conveys the relevance of literature for the history of medicine in a very positive way. This is a beautiful piece of work in the field of medical humanities which deserves almost universal praise and recognition.' Archiv