Unsolved Seas and the Victorian Novel

This chapter attends to nineteenth-century texts where the sea lurks in the background—as the context for a sojourn or a crossing or a memory, or as a figurative element. The first part of the discussion shows how the Victorian novel’s sprawl and supposed formlessness were sometimes negotiated through marine objects, experiences, and metaphor. Particular attention is paid to a sea-shell metaphor used by George Eliot. The other sections examine three canonical Victorian novels: William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. These texts reveal a set of authors who were to varying degrees attracted by the sea, unsure about the depth of their commitment to it, and interested in making imaginative use of that same irresolution. The chapter also contains a short discussion of Victorian sea-poetry, in which the more rigorous formal structures of verse discipline marine vagueness.