Speaker: Chris Louttit
Chris Louttit is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. He is a past President of the Dickens Society, the current Editor-in-Chief of English Studies and has recently been appointed to the Editorial Board of Adaptation. His research focuses on mid-Victorian fiction and its afterlives in popular visual culture and in film and television adaptations. He is the author of Dickens’s Secular Gospel: Work, Gender, and Personality (Routledge, 2009), and has published articles in a variety of scholarly journals including Adaptation, Book History, European Journal of English Studies, Gothic Studies and Philological Quarterly. He has a chapter on web series adaptations of North and South in The Routledge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell (2026) and is at work on several projects including the Dickens and Mayhew chapter for the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Literature of London and a study of Victorian Bohemian fictions.
Lecture Abstract
Scholars working on Victorian Bohemia including Peter Blake, Jacky Bratton, Christopher Kent and James Gatheral have discussed it mainly in relation to periodical studies and theatre history. My lecture questions this straightforward association of Bohemians and Bohemianism with these contexts by uncovering a less familiar connection between the subculture and Victorian popular fiction. It does so by turning attention to the 1860s craze for fictions of Bohemianism that peaked in 1866. As a Saturday Review critic noted that year, ‘The inhabitants of Bohemia have invaded fiction, and run wild and rampant over the scenes of half the novels that are intended and supposed to entertain us’. In this lecture, I map the contours and characteristics of this neglected sub-genre of fiction, noting its origins in French fiction and stray earlier examples of the 1850s before focusing in detail on Annie Edwardes’s Archie Lovell, Annie Thomas’s Walter Goring, Florence Marryat’s For Ever and Ever and Edmund Yates’s Land at Last (all 1866). These novels, I argue, deploy the transgressiveness of Bohemianism to breathe some new life into the by then familiar, even slightly tired, form of the sensation novel. As examples from an intriguing and neglected micro-genre, they offer a new perspective on the mechanics of changing fashions in popular fiction while also reframing our understanding of the sometimes fraught relationship between male Bohemian writers and their female competitors.