Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative (Paperback)

Introduction: (unmerited) suffering and the uses of adversity in Victorian public discourse; 1. 'It is expedient that one man should die for the people': sympathy and substitution on the scaffold; 2. 'Fortune takes the place of guilt': narrative reversals and the literary afterlives of Eugene Aram; 3. 'Standing for' the people: Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and professional oratory in 1848; 4. Sacrifice and the sufferings of the substitute: Dickens and the atonement controversy of the 1850s; 5. Substitution and imposture: George Eliot, Anthony Trollope and fictions of usurpation; Conclusion: innocence, sacrifice, and wrongful accusation in Victorian fiction.