Includes bibliographical references (p. [159]-186) and index.

Introduction: Reading things -- Souvenirs of sadism: mahogany furniture, deforestations, and slavery in Jane Eyre -- Coziness and its vicissitudes: checked curtains and global cotton markets in Mary Barton -- Realism, fetishism, and genocide: negro head tobacco in and around Great Expectations -- Toward a history of literary underdetermination: standardizing meaning in Middlemarch -- Coda: Victorian thing culture and the way we read now.

While the Victorian novel famously describes, catalogs, and inundates the reader with things, the protocols for reading it have long enjoined readers not to interpret most of what crowds its pages. The Ideas in Things explores apparently inconsequential objects in popular Victorian texts to make contact with their fugitive meanings. Developing an innovative approach to analyzing nineteenth-century fiction, Elaine Freedgood here reconnects the things readers unwittingly ignore to the stories they tell. Building her case around objects from three well-known Victorian novels--the mahogany furnitur.

Description based on print version record.