Necropolis: disease, power, and capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom

Abstract

space, including the space of the novel, the nation, and the land. Fiction offers a useful space for considering how individuals act in concert with one another, rather than in competition. Richardson notes that Martineau’s characters “are bound to others through systems of both dependency and complicity, figured in their embodiment, their economic activity, and their physical environment” (92). Whereas Smiles relied on imagined communities to create a notion of Nation in his self-help examples, Martineau used fiction to situate her characters in interdependent relationships to illustrate community. Richardson considers that Anthony Trollope treats his characters as individuals also vying for space in the novel. Through her close reading of Trollope’s use of comparisons in the novel, Richardson argues that Trollope “suggest[s] individualism’s limits and dependencies” (175). Characters work both in competition and comparison to one another, rejecting the idea that there be a “clear winner and loser” (157). Turning to the limits of the land, Richardson notes that Martineau pays greater attention to the environment and ecology than Smiles, and that she “represented the scope as well as the limits of individual agency and ambition, whether at the scale of one’s own body or of a wider, global system” (65). Miles Franklin takes this consideration of the environment further in the colonial contexts of her novels, with particular attention to how the natural environment is portrayed as a way to draw attention to issues of nationalism and colonialism in relationship to ambition. Franklin’s novels focus on the New Woman narrative of the fictional heroine Sybylla, who is a writer experiencing “an Australia hampered by gender and class norms and stricken by drought, which kills off the imported livestock and crops along with the settlers’ aspirations” (178). Richardson interprets the drought as an opportunity that enables Sybylla to write. Richardson thus reads the Australian environment in the novel as serving parallel narratives of race, empire, and gender. The chapter on Miles Franklin, more than any other, provides key cultural perspectives and historical contexts to ground the analysis. Overall, Richardson’s study of self-help challenges typical notions of laissez-faire capitalism with wider critiques about disability, gender, and colonialism that make this a valuable contribution to Victorian studies in self-help.