Subject to Contract: Liberalism and the Victorian Novel

Plate by John McLenan for Dickens's Great Expectations, Harper's Weekly, 1861. Courtesy of Philip V. Allingham and Victorian Web.

Subject to Contract: Liberalism and the Victorian Novel (Cornell University Press, forthcoming 2027) demonstrates how nineteenth-century novels challenged a foundational tenet of democratic political theory. While political philosophers were promoting the idea that expansive freedom of contract was the touchstone of liberty, Victorian novelists were questioning the alleged correlation between contractual agreement and willed consent. George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mona Caird, and Thomas Hardy, among others, all illuminated how even shocking acts of brutality and coercion—cannibalism, enslavement, sexual violence—were the foreseeable products of a relentlessly contractual society. Subject to Contract brings together literature, political philosophy, and critical theory to offer a new prehistory of the present, enabling a reconsideration of our continuing political preoccupation with freedom of contract.

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Frontispiece by Henry Macbeth-Raeburn for Hardy's Jude the Obscure, First Uniform Ed. of the Wessex Novels, Osgood-McIlvaine, 1897. Courtesy of Philip V. Allingham and Victorian Web.

Poster for theatrical adaptation of Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1880s. Courtesy of Library of Congress, digital ID cph.3g08267.