Exhibit:

Material Culture and the Victorian Novel: Objects, Places, and Historical Events

  

 

 Henry Treffey Dunn, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his Friend Theodore Watts-Dunton at Rossetti's home in Cheyne Walk, 1882, National Portrait Gallery .

 Material objects and historical events and places incorporated into the nineteenth-century British novel position the genre in a cultural moment. Our gallery includes objects, events, or places of importance to novels by William Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. Victorian material objects--such as those on display in Rossetti's Cheyne Walk home in Chelsea in this 1882 painting by Henry Treffey Dunn--as well as historical events and places fill our virtual “cases” and root the nineteenth-century British novel in the material culture and history of the period.