Science, Medicine, and Arisratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction
explores the dialogue between popular literature and medical and scientific discourse in terms of how they represent the highly visible an pathologized British arisratic body. This books explores and complicates the two major portrayals of arisrats in nineteenth-century literature: that of the medicalised, frail, debauched, and diseased arisrat, and that of the heroic, active, beautiful ‘noble’, both of which are frequent and resonant in popular fiction of the long nineteenth century. Abigail Boucher argues that the concept of class in the long nineteenth century implicitly includes notions of blood, lineage, and bodily ‘correctness’, and that ‘class’ was therefore frequently portrayed as an empirical, scientific, and medical certainty. Due to their elevated and highly visual social positions, both historical and fictional arisrats were frequently pathologized in the public mind and watchedfor signs of physical excellence or deviance. Using popular fiction, Boucher establishes patterns across decades, genres, and demographics and considers how these patterns react to, normalise, or feed into the advent of new scientific and medical understandings.