Title: Indignant Reading
Description: In 1871, R. H. Hutton criticized George Eliot for "unfairly running down one of her own characters": Middlemarch's Rosamond Vincy. Hutton blamed Eliot for being cruel to her own creation and used his role as a reader and a critic to lodge a public complaint on Rosamond's behalf. Indignant Reading identifies this response--dissatisfaction and even anger with an author for his/her perceived mistreatment of a fictional character--as a common occasion for literary criticism in the nineteenth century. The indignant readings found in Victorian reviews, letters, and prefaces advance conceptions of plot, characterization, and fictionality distinct from those offered in modern narratological criticism or historicist accounts of Victorian novel practice or literary criticism. Rather than abstracting the aesthetic and ethical concerns from the emotional terms common to Victorian criticism, I see these concerns emerging in conjunction with serious emotional demands and significant, if sometimes inchoate, beliefs about the "rights" of fictional characters.