Convalescence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

The Afterlife of Victorian Illness

Hosanna Krienke

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781108844840
• eBook ISBN: 9781108957267
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Englische Literaturkritik

Victorian Britain witnessed a resurgence of traditional convalescent caregiving. In the face of a hectic modern existence, nineteenth-century thinkers argued that all medical patients desperately required a lengthy, meandering period of recovery. Various reformers worked to extend the benefits of holistic recuperative care to seemingly unlikely groups: working-class hospital patients, insane asylum inmates, even low-ranking soldiers across the British Empire. Hosanna Krienke offers the first sustained scholarly assessment of nineteenth-century convalescent culture, revealing how interpersonal post-acute care was touted as a critical supplement to modern scientific medicine. As a method of caregiving intended to alleviate both physical and social ills, convalescence united patients of disparate social classes, disease categories, and degrees of impairment. Ultimately, this study demonstrates how novels from Bleak House to The Secret Garden draw on the unhurried timescale of convalescence as an ethical paradigm, training readers to value unfolding narratives apart from their ultimate resolutions.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Convalescent Time: Caregiving and the Strain of Modern Life
• Chapter 1 Convalescence and the Working Class: Convalescent Homes, Illness Outcomes, and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House
• Chapter 2 Spiritual Convalescence: Reading against the Deathbed in Convalescent Devotionals and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth
• Chapter 3 Novel Reading as Convalescence: Gender and Leisure in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone
• Chapter 4 Convalescence and Mental Illness: Recuperability in Insane Asylums, the After-Care Association, and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon
• Chapter 5 Imperial Convalescence: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, Convalescent Depots, and the Birth of Rehabilitation Medicine
• Conclusion Convalescent Futures: Recovery in the Age of the Remission Society
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index