Thesis

Novelists in the mid-nineteenth century speculated about the specificity and concreteness of their fictions, and reflected on what it meant to engage with imaginary objects and worlds. W. M. Thackeray is troubled by the novelist’s capacity to ‘see visions, hold conversations with, even draw the likeness of, people invisible’. Anthony Trollope has ‘so realized the place, and the people, and the facts,’ of the setting he invented that ‘to me Barset has been a real county, and its city a real...