The essays in this book commemorate the life and work of Sally Ledger, who died suddenly in January 2009, aged forty-seven. At the time of her death, she was the Hildred Carlile Professor of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. Ledger was a leading scholar of Victorian studies, and died very much mid-career with much work still anticipated. Her students, colleagues, and friends remember her infectious enthusiasm for literature, and her generosity and kindness in supporting others. These qualities live on in the work of those whom she personally influenced. More publicly, her legacy resides in an influential body of research on topics that have contributed to a remapping of the field of Victorian literary history. This legacy includes her innovative inquiries into the New Woman; her editorial projects with Jane Spencer and Josephine McDonagh on feminist literary criticism, and with Roger Luckhurst and Scott McCracken on fin-de-siècle culture; her authoritative charting of the cultural transformations of British and Irish writing of the 1880s and 1890s; and, latterly, her critical discussion of Charles Dickens’s career, which relocated him in the popular and radical traditions of the early nineteenth century. She left unfinished a study of nineteenth-century melodrama and the politics of the emotions.

Ledger’s scholarship is distinctive not only for its critical acuity, but also for its clarity and accessibility. Its sphere of influence has been wide, and in part through the filter effect of university syllabi on which it is now standard fare, her writing has been drawn quietly into our canonical understandings of the period. Ledger, of course, was not a solitary voice. She worked happily in collaboration with other scholars, but she was also, in another sense, a product of her time and education. In this section of our introduction, we begin by sketching Ledger’s career. We then position her research in the context of changing trends in the study of English literature within the British university system during the past forty years, and assess the particular intervention that she made.

Ledger was a beneficiary of some of the educational changes that mark British social history of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly the powerful belief that flourished in some sectors of society that education, and indeed a literary education, could bring about radical social change. Born in East Grinstead, West Sussex, in 1961, she grew up in a working-class family in Crawley, West Sussex. In the 1940s, Crawley had been designated by the government as a ‘new town’, one of a number of urban areas targeted for rapid expansion in response to the London post-war housing crisis and economic depression. By the 1960s, Crawley had grown from a small market town of around 9000 people to an industrial centre with a population of more than 40,000, in a newly built, planned community. Schools were an important element of the new-town ethos, and Crawley was among the first areas to introduce non-selective, comprehensive secondary schools, doing away with the traditional elitist division between grammar schools and secondary modern schools. ¹ Academically gifted, Ledger flourished and excelled in music and in English. She was inspired in particular by a brilliant young student teacher, Jim Porteous, who had recently graduated from Sussex University, one of a new generation of British universities that had been established in the 1960s. Built on a radical new model of interdisciplinary study, Sussex renovated the study of English literature through introducing students to new historical and theoretical contexts, in a progressive educational environment. Porteous brought the spirit of his university training with him to the sixth form in which Ledger was a student. Although the story of secondary education in this period is a mixed one, it was nevertheless a relatively optimistic episode in the history of British education, and it opened up intellectual and academic opportunities for Ledger. ²

It was literature, and especially Victorian literature, that fired Ledger’s imagination and engaged her mind. After a false start as a music student, she began an English degree in 1982 at Queen Mary College in the University of London. The choice of Queen Mary was significant. On the one hand, it would give her a thorough training in traditional literary history. This was a mode that provided a solid foundation to all her subsequent work. On the other hand, the College’s location in the East End of London, and its history as a Victorian philanthropic institution for the technical education of the London working class, presented an environment in which she felt both at home and in sympathy with its commitment to social advancement through education. ³ The college typically recruited its undergraduates from less privileged backgrounds (especially from the local area) than many of the students attending the other colleges within the federal university. Ledger was an exceptional undergraduate. On graduation she was awarded the University of London’s George Smith Prize for the highest first-class degree across all colleges in the University, and the following year she was admitted to Oxford to undertake postgraduate research.

The decade of Ledger’s university education was a turbulent time in Britain. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s shift towards neoliberal economic policies meant the withdrawal of public services, dramatic changes to traditional patterns of employment, and widespread social unrest. Besides bitter industrial disputes (notably, the miners’ strike of 1984–1985), there was an intensification of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland and a worsening of race relations across the nation, resulting in riots in Brixton (London), Handsworth (Birmingham), Chapeltown (Leeds), and Toxteth (Liverpool). The same was true of the upheavals in the education system. Throughout Thatcher’s long period in office (1979–1992), post-secondary education underwent several notable transformations stemming from her broader policy initiatives. First of all, the University Grants Committee (1918–1989) imposed severe budgetary cuts (14 % in 1981). There was, too, a marked shift away from traditional principles of university autonomy from government interference towards university accountability to the state. The vast expansion of the university sector largely through the low-cost polytechnics in the 1980s, followed in 1992 by the transformation of polytechnics into fully fledged universities, was built on meagre additional resources. ⁴ In addition, during the 1980s the introduction of the appraisal system of university research, which soon emerged as the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE: 1992, 1996, 2001, 2008) and the Research Excellence Framework (REF: 2014), changed the basis of funding for research and introduced new levels of scrutiny and surveillance within university departments.

This unsettled period intersected with some of the most fraught intellectual debates within the humanities and social sciences in modern times, ones in which English studies, together with the newly emerging cultural studies, was in the vanguard. For many critics based in Britain, the arrival of French theory from post-1968 Paris presented new and radical ways of understanding the place and purpose of culture within society. ⁵ Structuralist linguistics inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure, and its various offshoots within psychoanalysis, anthropology, and the social sciences, provided the field of English literature with a theoretical account of the work of culture. Post-structuralist theory—whether in translations of Jacques Lacan’s Ecrits (1977), Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1976), Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge (1977), or Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar’s Reading Capital (1977)—similarly spurred heated academic discussions about method and critical approach, as did English translations of major works of Russian formalism, such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s Dialogic Imagination (1981). In turn, Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron’s anthology, New French Feminisms (1980), for the first time made the works of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva available to many English readers. These were remarkable shifts that radicalized English studies at a time when the market pressures on the humanities were intensifying as never before.

It is hard to overstate the degree to which the advent of critical theory generated controversy throughout the discipline of English in Britain. The emergence of critical theory brought with it challenges to the very constitution of the curriculum and the established English literary canon. These issues hit the headlines in 1981 during the public dispute in Cambridge between, on the one hand, Colin MacCabe, an early advocate for structuralism, and, on the other hand, the traditional university, represented by the Edward VII Professor of English, Christopher Ricks, who stood for the conventional critical values of the Cambridge English Faculty. ⁶ Debates continued throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, often dividing English departments across the country. At stake in these discussions were questions of class and privilege. To whom does literature speak? And in whose name does literature speak? Although these were academic inquiries, they were nevertheless ones freighted and made urgent by the troubled context of 1980s Britain.

Although the federal degree of the University of London, with its cumbersome regulatory machinery, was notoriously resistant to change, and showed little formal impact of debates going on more widely within the discipline, a bright student such as Ledger had plenty of opportunities for extracurricular reading. She followed the discussions in newspapers and journals, and read works by Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and others. In conversations with her Queen Mary tutor, Christopher Reid, she thought through––often sceptically––the possibilities that these theoretical works presented. ⁷ In 1985, when she graduated from Queen Mary and enrolled as a graduate student at Oxford, she was appalled by the social conservatism and misogyny that she encountered there. She joined Oxford English Limited (OEL), a group organized by her friend, a fellow graduate student and Marxist critic, Tony Pinkney. OEL combined reading groups in Marxist and feminist theory with activism, putting pressure on the Oxford English Faculty to reform the curriculum through measures such as the abolition of compulsory Anglo-Saxon, the inclusion of women writers, and the teaching of critical theory on the undergraduate degree. ⁸ In retrospect, such objectives may seem relatively modest; yet in the context of the time, they accrued serious political significance.

Ledger pursued her doctoral research under the supervision of one of the few critical theorists at Oxford. Her supervisor, Terry Eagleton, was at that time the most prominent Marxist literary critic in Britain. His influential books from this period include Criticism and Ideology (1976), Walter Benjamin: Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (1981), and the popular Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983). Helen Taylor records that ‘[a]fter reading Literary Theory’, Ledger found English ‘“suddenly…a controversial, dynamic and exciting field of study rather than a static body of texts”’. ‘It was’, Ledger added, ‘exhilarating, too, to discover that there was space for my politics in “English”’. ⁹ Yet although critical theory, and the political debates it fed, shaped Ledger’s early intellectual and social context, in her own work she was resistant to abstruse and abstract modes of theoretical argument. Instead, at Oxford she continued to develop a style of research based on her training in historical method at Queen Mary, but broadened it to include a fuller account of the social and political contexts of literary works. This approach allowed her to practise a form of literary criticism that addressed questions of social exclusion in direct and principled ways. In this regard, Raymond Williams’s socialist criticism, such as Drama, from Ibsen to Eliot (1952) and Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (1958), was highly influential in providing a model for interpreting literary texts in their social and political contexts. Ledger’s choice of the little-read late nineteenth-century radical, anti-imperialist, and realist novelist William Hale White as the subject of her doctoral study, reflected her affiliation with this tradition. Her dissertation set out to understand the intellectual and historical themes in White’s oeuvre, but at the same time to analyze the ways in which powerful works of the imagination might participate in the transformation of society. Even though Ledger did not publish ‘History, Politics and Women: A Contextual Analysis of the Writings of William Hale White (Mark Rutherford)’ (Oxford DPhil, 1991), her dissertation nevertheless established the three pillars of her working method. Based on an archive of published and manuscript sources, including White’s correspondence with intellectuals of the time such as William Morris and Philip Webb, Ledger’s thesis was in equal parts an archaeology of forgotten writers and their works, a social history of the time, and a work of literary interpretation. ¹⁰

Ledger was particularly drawn to the later decades of the nineteenth century, the period at which White was active, and this interest resulted in some of her most important subsequent work. The fin de siècle, which for her embraced both the 1880s and 1890s, was a transitional period when the social norms of the Victorian era came under intense pressure: a time marked by economic depression, the rise of imperialism, and changing modes of economic behaviour. Part of the appeal of the fin de siècle to Ledger was its resonance with her own times. The impetus behind an important volume of essays that she commissioned with Scott McCracken, Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (1995), was that an understanding of the end of the nineteenth century would shed light on the present historical moment. As Eagleton writes in his contribution to the volume, ‘The Flight to the Real’:‘[The fin de siècle of the twentieth century] arrived in the 1960s, a period whose structure of feeling uncannily reproduces much of the culture of late Victorian England’. Although Eagleton ends this thought on a pessimistic note––that, unlike in the 1880s and 1890s, the political forces at the end of the twentieth century ‘ha[d] been temporarily scattered and diffused’ ¹¹ —the insistence within Ledger and McCracken’s volume on interrogating the relationship between the then and the now gives a special tone to a collection that did much to shape the critical reassessment of literature and culture of the final two decades of the nineteenth century. In order to understand the works of this era, Ledger argued, it was important to appreciate their full intellectual, cultural, and political context. That meant reading widely beyond sources that were strictly literary to materials in contemporary science, politics, and social science, Moreover, Ledger’s research showed the significance of taking into account the ideas and debates that nineteenth-century readers would often have encountered in periodical literature, newspapers, and reviews. Ledger followed Cultural Politics with a further co-edited volume, with Roger Luckhurst, The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c.1880–1900 (2000). This was a selection of primary sources drawn from their broad reading of late nineteenth-century writing. The anthology rapidly became the textbook for syllabi dedicated to the period, and it was important for establishing the fin de siècle as a multidisciplinary field, one dominated by Darwinian thought, in which works in anthropology and racial science, for instance, are properly seen as part of a nexus of political, social, and cultural ideas.

For Ledger, however, it was the New Woman––a term that Sarah Gra...