Clare Pettitt

BA (Cambridge University), D.Phil. (Oxford University)
Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture

Contact Clare Pettitt

Nineteenth-century literature and culture: I work on Victorian literature and cultural history. I am a Research Director of a five-year Leverhulme Research Project in Victorian Studies; a Committee Member of the British Association for Victorian Studies; an Advisor to the Board of the ‘Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition’ a collaborative project between King’s, Birkbeck, and the British Library. I am also the Convenor of the MA in English at King’s and I organise the Department’s Research Seminar.

My research falls into three broad areas. First, I am interested in the history of the book and in the development of different ideas of authorship in the period. My first monograph, published by Oxford University Press in 2004, is called Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel and argues that the debate over the ownership of both mechanical and literary property in the nineteenth century had profound effects on the way texts were written, and the way in which authors represented their authorship. The book also considers how the law affects the cultural construction of categories, and, according to Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 (SEL), it succeeded in “break(ing) new ground” (vol.44, No.4, Autumn 2004). I have published several chapters on cognate themes in collections of essays and research journals. One of these is ‘Legal Subjects, Legal Objects: The Law and Victorian Fiction’ in A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel (2005). I have also published articles about Victorian fiction more generally, on Dickens’s Great Expectations, Dickens’s Bleak House, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters and her novella, Cousin Phillis, the self-help novels of Margaret Oliphant, and two articles on the Great Exhibition of 1851. On publishing history, I am currently planning a volume of essays on genre and narratives of development in British periodicals of the 1820s,1830s and1840s.

The second strand of my research concerns the media, technology and what the Victorians liked to call “the annihilation of space and time’ in the period. This is an interest I share with Mark Turner in the English Department at King’s. My second monograph, ‘Dr. Livingstone, I Presume?’ Missionaries, Journalists, Empire, is coming out in March 2007 with Harvard University Press, and in May 2007 with Profile in the UK. This book focuses on the meeting between Stanley and Livingstone in 1871, and asks why we remember the phrase ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume?’ without knowing why we remember it. The book argues that without the recently-installed Atlantic Cable, and improvements in newspaper production technologies in Britain and the United States in the late 1860s, we might never have remembered it at all. I am also writing a chapter for the Cambridge History of English Literature: The Victorian Period (Cambridge University Press), entitled ‘Bridging the Spaces: Communication and Technology’, and I am editing H.M. Stanley’s In Darkest Africa and writing an introductory essay for Broadview Press.

The third strand of my research has been stimulated by my Research Directorship of a five-year Leverhulme Programme Grant for a Victorian Studies Project (2006-2011) which focuses on the ways in which the Victorians coped with their discoveries of multiple pasts. To find out more about this interdisciplinary project, see http://www.victorians.group.cam.ac.uk. For an article I wrote in the Times Higher Education Supplement about the project with another of the Directors, click here. I am now embarking on a major research project which develops the interest I discovered in the relationship between Britain and America in the nineteenth century when I was researching the Livingstone and Stanley book. It will focus on the ways in which the two ‘Anglo-Saxon’ peoples represented their own nations and cultures to each other in the supposedly ‘neutral’ or ‘other’ space of Rome at a critical point in the emergence of an Anglo-American idea of liberal democracy. This book will explore the ways in which Italy, and particularly Rome, with its complex history, was mapped – both culturally and politically - into the debate about democracy taking place between Britain and America. I am also planning to spend time in Rome and the United States researching the ways in which Americans viewed Britain and Rome, and Romans viewed America and Britain. I hope the result will be a kind of triangulation of cross-cultural evidence – both literary and historical - that will challenge Anglo-centric views of both ‘Reform’ and of reading in the nineteenth century.

I would be pleased to hear from prospective research students interested in any aspect of nineteenth-century literature, but particularly the novel, print-culture, literature and empire, literature and technology, or transatlantic or Anglo-Italian subjects in the period.