The Ideas in Things ─ Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel

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 reconnects the things readers unwittingly ignore to the stories they tell. Building her case around objects from three well-known Victorian novels—Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations—Freedgood argues that these things are connected to histories that the novels barely acknowledge, generating darker meanings outside the novels’ symbolic systems. A valuable contribution to the field of object studies, The Ideas in Things pushes readers’ thinking about things beyond established concepts of commodity and fetish. “Ultimately, what Freedgood generates is far more than a new set of readings of key Victorian texts. In her important project of recuperating the meaning of things, Freedgood demonstrates the considerable delights and rewards of literal-mindedness.”—Victorian Studies