Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination

This book examines representations of tuberculosis in Victorian fiction, giving insights into how society viewed this disease and its sufferers.

Introduction; 1. Nineteenth-century medical discourse on pulmonary phthisis; 2. Consuming the family economy: disease and capitalism in Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son and Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South; 3. The consumptive diathesis and the Victorian invalid in Mrs Humphry Ward's Eleanor; 4. 'There is beauty in woman's decay': the rise of the tubercular aesthetic; 5. Consumption and the Count: the pathological origins of Vampirism and Bram Stoker's Dracula; 6. 'A kind of intellectual advantage': phthisis and masculine identity in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady; Conclusion; Appendix A. Phthisis mortality; Appendix B. Medical publications on consumption; Appendix C. Gender distribution of phthisis.