NDLI: Spying in the British Post Office, Victorian Politics and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White

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Spying in the British Post Office, Victorian Politics and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White

Content Provider	Scilit
Author	Cove, Patricia
Copyright Year	2017
Description	Journal: Journal of Victorian Culture In 1844, the British public learned that the government was secretly opening exiled Young Italy leader Giuseppe Mazzini's private letters and sharing information with continental authorities. For outraged citizens, espionage in that quintessential liberal institution, the reformed British Post Office, appeared un-English, despotic and criminal, the makings of a Gothic plot. Representations of the Post Office Scandal in Parliament and print predict the revision of the Gothic into the sensation novel that occurred with the publication of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White. Attention to the fields of Anglo-Italian studies, mid-Victorian print culture and the development of narrative form in the mid-nineteenth century illustrates the historical and political implications of letter-opening for the emergence of a new fictional genre. The Post Office Espionage Scandal and The Woman in White share a central place in a mid-Victorian moment of evolution in the mutually constitutive relationship between Italian and British national identities, producing and reflecting a crisis in Britishness focused on the secret tyrannies concealed beneath the surface of Victorian liberalism. The letter-opening scandal reveals a crisis in Victorian liberalism in the political realm and the media, while The Woman in White translates this Victorian crisis of confidence into a literary genre defined by exposing the sordid undercurrents of British society: sensation fiction. Together, the espionage scandal and Collins's novel respond to and generate a challenge to Victorian complacency that emerged out of the collision of British and Italian politics and culture in the mid-nineteenth century.
Related Links	https://academic.oup.com/jvc/article-pdf/22/3/380/22332295/jvcult0380.pdf
Ending Page	398
Page Count	19
Starting Page	380
ISSN	13555502
e-ISSN	17500133
DOI	10.1080/13555502.2017.1302895
Journal	Journal of Victorian Culture
Issue Number	3
Volume Number	22
Language	English
Publisher	Informa UK Limited
Publisher Date	2017-03-22
Access Restriction	Open
Subject Keyword	Journal: Journal of Victorian Culture Nineteenth Century Woman in White Espionage Scandal
Content Type	Text
Subject	History Cultural Studies Visual Arts and Performing Arts Literature and Literary Theory

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
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4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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