For those of us whose life's work consists of the study of the Victorian Era, nothing is plainer than the fact that one cannot escape from “things.” Indeed, for many of us the wealth of detail and artefact available is one of the attractions of the era: who could resist the hats, coaches, buttons, newspapers, lengths of ribbon, packets of tea, bits of old lace, sugared plums, ink pots, keys, and pocket watches that clutter the pages of Dickens, overflow from Gaskell, and crowd in amongst the characters of Collins, Thackeray, Trollope, Eliot, and Brontë? The Victorians had a preoccupation with and predilection for the careful and considered acquisition and utilisation of objects, and this preoccupation has become a focus for critical trends in this area. In 2003, Lynn Pykett wrote that “The Victorians were fascinated with objects and things – but recent scholarship has proved equally fascinated with this Victorian obsession” (1). This obsession can be traced back to a turn in Victorianist criticism in the 1980s, beginning with Brigg's Victorian Things and based on theories of commodity culture in writers such as Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, and Walter Benjamin, towards an interdisciplinary interest in material culture and particularly in consumer culture and theories of consumption and commodification. More recently critics have moved away from Marxist explorations of objects as commodities, to explore the possibilities of the object in contexts other than those generated by discourses of exchange value, production, and consumption, adopting cultural materialist and new historicist approaches to the objects of Victorian culture and literature. This movement has become known as “Thing Theory.” Starting with Bill Brown's seminal work, A Sense of Things, in 2003, critics have sought for ways of explaining the relationship between the subject and the object in terms other than those of the capitalist market system, in order to take account of the complexities of the object as a signifier. This review seeks to give an overview of these two critical perspectives on the objects of Victorian studies, from the roots of “thing theory” in consumer culture and commodity studies, to the key texts and indicative readings which have shaped “thing theory” as a discipline. Starting with a look at some key texts on consumer culture in the nineteenth century, I then move on to look at those “thing theory” works which have moved away from a focus on the object as commodity, towards cultural materialism and an understanding of the Victorian “object” beyond its role in consumer culture. Finally, I look at some readings indicative of the work currently being published in the field.

Commodity Culture: Key Texts and Indicative Readings

In 1995, Andrew H. Millar published what was effectively the first major critical work on the social impact of the commodity in Victorian culture and literature, Novels Behind Glass. Taking as his starting point the impact on consumer culture of the rise to prominence of large, well-lit glass windows, Millar uses literature as a lens through which to examine the “spectacle” of Victorian consumption. He describes, in the introduction to Novels Behind Glass, how such windows

For Millar, then, the sensual, visual dynamic of shopping translates with alarming ease into cultural discourses about nationalism and political economy, and furthermore functions as a potent metaphor for anxieties about social relations between people where commodities act as mediators. As he goes on to say,

The book is organised according to a scale of reactions to commodities – from fetishization of the object in Thackeray, to denial and resistance to commoditisation in Gaskell and Dickens. Millar's work in 1995 was unusual in that, like Marx but unlike a majority of Marxist readings of texts, Millar takes as his starting point not the labourer, producer, or consumer of the commodity, but the commodity item itself. This approach was eventually to become the founding stone of “thing theory,” for even as Millar explicitly focuses his critique on the commodity item, he cannot help acknowledging that, for Victorian writers and thinkers, the significance of the object always extends beyond the merely economical exchange value associated with it by consumer theory. For this reason, the objects which appear in Millar's study – diamonds and tea sets, sleeve buttons and old lace – are nearly always in the process of escaping from consumer cycles of exchange, affixing themselves instead to the identities, memories, affections, and aspirations of the characters they possess.

In 2003, Christoph Lindner built upon Millar's work to produce a more generalised chronological study of commodity culture in literature, entitled Fictions of Commodity Culture. Following the work in consumer culture of cultural theory critics such as Theodore Adorno, Georg Lukács, and Martin Amis, the book traces the development of commodity culture from its beginnings in the eighteenth century, through to its dominance in the present day. While the bulk of the work provides close textual readings of what Lindner considers to be the representative texts of key moments in this development, the opening chapter, entitled “Can't Get No Satisfaction: The World of Commodities,” provides a concise and insightful summary of the development through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries of social and literary responses to the rise of consumer culture. Lindner defines commodity culture as “a culture organised around the production and exchange of material goods” (3), and he describes the book as exploring how “the commodity, as capitalism's representational agent, created and sustained a culture of its own in the nineteenth century, and how that culture, still with us today, has persisted and evolved since then” (1). Although Lindner draws extensively on historical material to illustrate his point, this is primarily a book about literature, and in particular the place of the commodity within nineteenth-century fiction. For Lindner, it is in fiction that the abstract concepts theorised in the economic politics of Marx, Engels, and Smith find a testing ground in the specificity of social reality; he examines the ways in which “fiction, from realism through modernism and into postmodernism, accommodates and responds to the commodity's colonisation of the social imagination and its desires” (1) through close analysis of Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, and William Thackeray. However, the book is not concerned merely with an analysis of the commodity within the Victorian era, but rather with tracing the comparative trajectory of the commodity from its heyday in the mid-nineteenth century through to the disillusionment of the modernist period, and finally to the frenetic ascendancy of the commodity in the postmodern period and beyond. As such, it is concerned with the relationship of society to the commodity, as expressed through fiction, and as it developed over the three centuries covered. Like Novels Behind Glass, however, Lindner's text suggests strongly that these objects cannot be read as commodities alone, but must be read in the context of their wider cultural relations – while Lindner's objects begin and end as commodities, the autonomy he ascribes to the commodity and the power it has over society is in part the result of its potential to escape from commodity systems of exchange. This is not a theme that Lindner develops, but in indicating its existence he points towards possibilities that would later be developed in “thing theory.”

Taken together, these two critical texts point clearly to the incontrovertible importance of the commodity in Victorian society, and the corresponding significance of commodity culture to the study of Victorian literature and culture. As Lindner's choreographical study shows, the Victorian era occupied a transitional space between the eighteenth-century idea of political economy endorsed by writers like Smith, and the immeasurable and impersonal global commodity culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Acting almost as a fulcrum between these two temporal stages, the Victorian era is characterised by an ambivalence towards the commodity which resulted in a vast body of self-searching, self-problematizing literary explorations of the interactions among people, commodities, and society. This literary abundance has provided food for an equally rich accumulation of critical evaluations of the place of commodity culture in Victorian literature and culture, and both the literature and the criticism clearly indicate that, while the commodity is the starting point for evaluating subject-object relationships in Victorian Literature, such relationships complicate the straightforward commodity-based models described by economic politics, indicating but not developing the potential for non-commodity readings of subject-object relations. Two good examples are Waters's Commodity Culture in Dickens’ Household Words and Fromer's Tea in Victorian England.

Of all the canonical Victorian writers, studies of the commodity have most persistently turned to Thackeray, Trollope, and Dickens as exemplars of literary explorations of subject-object relations. Thackeray and Trollope both present their readers with pages crammed full of the products of consumer society, but it is Dickens – with his numerous lively, animated, and anthropomorphised objects – who offers the best scope for the development of material culture studies beyond the commodity and towards “thing theory.” Waters's 2008 volume, Commodity Culture in Dickens’ Household Words, explores this potentiality through close reading of Dickens's editorial and authorial roles in the magazine Household Words. As she explains in the introduction to the text, “Dickens's fictional interest in the objectification and commodification of subjects, and his animation of objects which seem, in his novels, to take on a life of their own, have long been recognised by critics” (3), and she goes on to develop the idea of this interest as an engagement with issues of commodity culture, saying “The strange kinship of persons and things . . . is the disquieting perception of subject-object relations that emerges from Household Words's engagement with commodity culture” (5). Like Millar, Waters is concerned with the commodity as “spectacle,” and also like Millar, she addresses not only the representation of commodities within literature but also literature itself as a problematically implicated commodity. Although the main body of Water's critique concerns itself exclusively with the object of commodity, she nevertheless points clearly and explicitly in her introduction to the potential in Dickens's work for analysis beyond the confines of consumer culture studies, citing Elaine Freedgood and the special issue of Critical Inquiry on “thing theory” in an acknowledgement that the divide between “commodity” and “thing” is rarely clear-cut or straightforward. Just as Lindner's and Millar's earlier critical stances waver on the edges of a movement away from purely commodity-based readings of subject-object relations in Victorian fiction, so does Waters's critique of Dickens indicate the movement of other contemporary critics in that direction.

Unique among the majority of commodity culture studies, Julie Fromer's 2008 A Necessary Luxury: Tea in Victorian England concentrates not on a single author, work of fiction, or time frame, but rather on a single commodity itself. The volume is interesting in that despite the obvious emphasis in the introduction and throughout the analysis on tea as a commodity within a consumer society, the breadth and scope of the work are such that Fromer moves, by necessity, towards a more complex reading of the cultural significance of tea than that offered by a purely commodity-based reading. Tea, in this analysis, becomes the subject for a metonymic reading which takes account of it not only as a product for consumption, but also as a key component in the formation of individual, national, and conflicting identities, an “icon that mediates between various subject positions within the larger category of English national identity” (3). She takes as her starting point the idea of tea as a mediator between social categories of subject, saying “against a backdrop of industrialisation, urbanisation, and the resulting changes in class structure in nineteenth-century Britain, the everyday habit of tea drinking acquires cultural and social significance that reflects larger Victorian struggles of self-definition” (6). She furthermore suggests that the straightforward iconography of tea offered by the non-fiction texts and advertisements she examines are interrogated and disrupted by the representations of tea in literature, and goes on to examine works by Hardy, Gaskell, Lewis Carroll, Dickens, the Brontës, and Eliot, among others. The work is innovative and thorough, but as with the earlier works of commodity culture studies, it goes no further than hinting at the wider relationships that might exist between the object and the subject, confining itself instead mostly to the multiple symbolic processes of subject consumption.

The further one looks at the literary representations of the relationships between people and their possessions, the more it becomes apparent that the processes of production, trade, and consumption are not the only issues pertaining to interactions with objects. Bill Brown's A Sense of Things (Reference Brown2003) started, in many respects, the critical move away from purely commodity-based readings of literary objects towards the more complex interrogations of subject-object relations in literature which comprise “thing theory.” Such critical works, as we will see in the second section of this review, eventually move away entirely from an interest in the object as commodity. John Plotz's Portable Property (Reference Plotz2008) and Suzanne Daly's The Empire Inside (Reference Daly2011), by contrast, provide a middle ground between these two positions by offering a critique which depends on a doubled reading of the object as both commodity and non-commodity. As such, it is worth looking at these two volumes before moving on to full-blown “thing theory.”

Plotz is primarily concerned in Portable Property with ideas about Empire, and the necessary transmission of British/English people, products, and possessions that Imperial pursuits entailed. For Plotz, as for Lindner, the Victorian era marked a turning point between the eighteenth- and twentieth-century perceptions of objects and object relationships. Specifically, he locates this turning point in the exigencies of Empire, tracking the particularly identity-driven investments that Imperial subjects placed in the objects that travelled with them. He writes that “when possessions fill Victorian novels . . . they generally serve not as static deadweights, but as moving messengers . . . [Collected objects] acquire meaning primarily from their earlier peregrinations” (1). That people far from home might place a great deal of sentimental value in the objects that alleviate their homesickness might seem obvious; for Plotz, however, the complexity of the issues lies in the fluctuation between the fiscal value and the sentimental worth of the objects in question. Unlike Lindner or Millar, Plotz argues explicitly that the most important objects in Victorian literature and culture are those in which tension is caused by an oscillation between a measurable market value as a commodity item, and a sentimental value as a non-saleable item. It is an argument which builds upon the strongest foundational blocks from both critical perspectives, although the specificity of the focus on portability and Empire necessitates a narrow reading of the object as non-commodity. He envisages the relationship between commodity and non-commodity as part of a traffic-flow of objects into and out of the home country to and from the further reaches of the Empire; portability is made possible by the object's commodity status while it is the sentimental investment in and identification with the object that renders that portability desirable. This desirability, however, is also potentially problematic for the stability of Empire:

Interestingly, Plotz includes as the most poignant example of this type of “portable property” the English novel itself: “Themselves sentimentalised items, endowed with a fiscal and a transcendent value at once, English novels from the 1830s onwards took on the project of making sense of resonant but potentially marketable objects” (1). His idea of the “portable” comes very close to the “idea in things” that Bill Brown establishes in A Sense of Things, when he discusses the slippage between the portability of the physical book and of the idea or story contained within it. In doing so, Plotz offers not only a reading of the relationship between subject and commodity, or subject and possession, but also a reading of the triangular relationship among subject, commodity, and sentiment.

Like Plotz, Daly is concerned with the symbolic value of imperial objects within British culture; however, Daly concentrates not on the British objects which circulated to and around India, but on those Indian objects which found their way into British life and culture. She explores the ways in which objects imported from India helped to mediate the difficult relationship between imperial power and colony, creating an illusion of possession and control which larger political pictures might have belied. While a large proportion of the book treats objects as commodities – particularly tea and cotton – Daly also looks at other modes of object transfer, such as gifts – cashmere shawls – and plunder – notably, diamonds. As she states in the introduction, the book “examines the ways in which Victorian novels offer readers ways to make sense of emerging notions of both British India and the British home through the medium of Indian imports” (6), predominantly by deconstructing the “myths” of identity that centred around imported objects, especially as they appeared represented in the mid-Victorian literature of the Brontës, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, and Collins. Taken together with Plotz's Portable Property, the volume offers an intriguing reading of the imperial commodity as something more than just commodity.

While the commodity may have provided a starting point for explorations of the relationship between people and things, however, it has become clear through recent scholarship that the significance of the object extends far beyond the bounds of production and consumption networks and processes. Beginning with Brown's A Sense of Things, as I have discussed, there has been a proliferation of critical studies which seek to understand this significance, particularly for nineteenth-century literature.

Beyond the Commodity: Thing Theory

In 1988, long before the above texts had been published, and at a time when the theory of cultural historians such as Adorno, Benjamin, and Baudrillard was becoming popular in application to commodity culture, Asa Briggs brought out the first edition of the seminal history on objects in Victorian culture, Victorian Things. It formed the last part of a trilogy (beginning with Victorian People in 1955 and moving on to Victorian Cities in 1963), in which Briggs traced a trajectory of social significance from the people of the Victorian era, to the cities they lived in, and finally to the objects they interacted with:

Despite his status as historian, Briggs draws extensively on literary sources in order to illustrate the complex interactions which occurred between people and objects, and the following revised editions (in 1996 and 2003) have remained pivotal texts in the study of Victorian material culture. The interdisciplinarity which characterised Briggs's approach to literary representations of objects is a precursor to the approach which would later come to characterise “thing theory.” As he states in the introduction to the 2003 revised edition, published at the same time that Brown was producing A Sense of Things and Pykett was commenting on the critical fascination with Victorian objects, “Every thing has its history as every person has his own biography” (13). Throughout Victorian Things, Briggs indicates clearly that this history cannot be limited solely to the production and consumption cycle of the object's life, but must be related back to more complex social networks and interactions.

Extending beyond the focus on the object as commodity which characterised the studies of Millar, Lindner, and Plotz, “thing theory” has been marked by a pronounced tendency towards interdisciplinary collaborations. Museum studies, archaeology, anthropology, history, and art theory in particular have played an important role in exploring the differing ways in which relationships between objects and subjects are mediated: the psychology and dynamics of collecting and collections, the visual interpretation of objects and the emotional response to the visual, and the roles of memory, nationalism, and identity in relating to objects have all been important ideas in the development of “thing theory.” Bill Brown's A Sense of Things, published in 2003, can be considered the first major critical work to examine these ideas, and it is significant that he chose to do so through the lens of nineteenth-century literature. As writers such as Millar, Lindner, and Plotz had already firmly established, the nineteenth century offered a range of literary and cultural engagements of unprecedented richness in the exploration of subject-object relationships, and it is for this reason that Brown's study focuses on the literature and culture of the nineteenth century – in particular the literature and culture of nineteenth-century America – in order to develop the idea of the object as a critical cultural signifier mediated by fluctuating modes of identification.

Brown, as he explains in the introduction to A Sense of Things, is concerned with more than the straightforward commodity value of objects in American culture: “This is a book about something other than the ‘consuming vision,’ ‘the culture of consumption’ . . . . It nonetheless concerns the slippage between having (possessing a particular object) and being (the identification of one's self with that object)” (13). He takes as his starting point Marx's concept of “commodity fetishism” or reification, but his argument develops from Marx's concern with the commodity to a more generalised analysis of the ways in which American subjects identify with and through the objects they possess, and which come to possess them. Focusing on literature, but with by-paths into art, museum studies, archaeology, interior decoration, and architecture, Brown's study engages with issues of identity and nationality, and the particular ways in which festishisation distances the object from the modes of representation created by consumer desire (economic), and repositions it within a representational system more akin to language (semiotic) where objects and subjects are interchangeable and cross-referential. “No ideas but in things” is the phrase that Brown returns to again and again, as he negotiates the nineteenth-century concept of a material identity.

Along with Brown's A Sense of Things, Elaine Freedgood's 2006 work, The Ideas in Things, can be considered one of the key texts in “thing theory” today. Unlike Brown, Freedgood concentrates her analysis on the classic British Victorian cannon – specifically the Brontës, Gaskell, Dickens, and Eliot – in order to free the study of the objects of Victorian literature from their traditionally Marxist interpretations. Freedgood describes the traditional method of reading objects as “allegorical,” a surface-only reading which prioritises the subject/plot focus of the object above the object itself. She argues against this sort of reading of the object, and argues instead for readers to “recover (or rather, imagine) the material qualities of fictional things” by “avoid[ing] the temptations of allegory and follow[ing] instead the protocols of the collector” (2). It is in this sense that she describes the wealth of objects in Victorian literature as “critical cultural archives” (1), and her readings all draw heavily on historical and sociological materials to contextualise the object in and of itself, before returning it to its setting within the text. As she describes her method in the introduction, “I begin with objects rather than with subjects and plots and stay with them a bit longer than novelistic interpretation generally allows” (4). Like Brown, she is less interested in the commodity significance of such objects than in the complex Victorian negotiations between subject and object which, at that time, coincided with the idea of the consumer “fetish”:

Freedgood's first three readings – of mahogany furniture in Jane Eyre, of calico curtains in Mary Barton, and negro-head tobacco in Great Expectations – do take commodity culture as their starting point, but what they are really concerned with is unpicking the complex social histories which lie encoded within these objects and which can be read as other kinds of object relations.

Published in 2006, Peter Schwenger's The Tears of Things builds upon the theories developed in Freedgood and Brown to offer a psychoanalytical perspective on “thing theory.” Although the book has more to say about modernism and post-modernism than with the Victorian era, and does not concentrate exclusively on literature, it nevertheless offers a refreshing framework with which to read the objects of Victorian literature through a non-Marxist, non-consumerist lens. Focused as it is with the process of self-identification through and in relation to material objects, it allows for objects to be valued or devalued without reference to economic exchange systems, concentrating on the wider cultural exchanges that revolve around objects in society. The first chapter in particular, which looks more specifically at literary theory, uses psychoanalytical theory – notably Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva – to postulate that human being are, by virtue of the process of self-identification, inherently and irrevocably separated from things, which must always remain alien. Schwenger posits that this separation leads to a sense of loss and longing for the lost “object,” akin to Freud's death drive, which underscores all relationships to objects, rendering them melancholy. His emphasis on collecting, and on the fetishisation of objects, echoes the themes explored by Brown and Freedgood to offer a theoretical starting point from which to psychoanalyse the subject-object relationship. There is, in this beginning, scope for fruitful development in the field of Victorian literature and culture.

From this theoretical framework, “thing theory” has been applied specifically to the objects of Victorian literature and culture in a wide-ranging and refreshingly interdisciplinary number of ways. Two of the most popular – perhaps because of the irrefutably important position they held in the Victorian imagination – have been the social importance of food, and the cultural discourses surrounding interior decoration. In these two areas, both so vital to the construction and perception of the Victorian middle classes, critics have analysed extensively the complex relationships that existed between Victorian middle-class subjects and the objects that filled their abundant leisure time. Two of the best examples of such analysis are Wagner's and Hassan's Consuming Culture, and Flanders's The Victorian House. Both offer insightful readings of the subject-object relationships that permeated Victorian middle-class society, through the medium of the literature that represented, participated in, and critiqued that society. The role of food and drink in the nineteenth century is also addressed in the recent special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture (Reference Daly and Forman2008), edited by Daly and Forman.

One of the most exciting aspects of “thing theory” is the multidisciplinary nature of the readings it provides of well-known texts, inviting new perspectives and fresh approaches to well-worn classics as well as less canonical texts and new or little-known historical sources and materials. Consuming Culture, published in 2007, offers a good example of this; as the editors state in the introduction to the volume:

The volume is a fascinating analysis of the relationships of Victorian subjects to the food that they produced, purchased, and consumed. Covering not only the Victorian era but also parts of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, in order to provide a reading of the “long nineteenth century,” the book is split into three sections – the production, preparation, and serving of food, the spectacle of food consumption, and finally the wastage or regurgitation of food. As in Brown's A Sense of Things, these essays explore the slippage of referentiality that occurs when food – the most consumable of consumer items – is valued against criteria outside the consumer exchange system. As the introduction goes on to explain, the collection

As with Brown, Freedgood, and Schwenger, Wagner and Hassan locate Victorian material culture as part of a wider modernity of responses to the subject-object relationship, and the volume provides an historical framework for the understanding of the development of modern responses to consumable objects.

One final text is worth looking at, for it brings the critical focus back full circle to Millar's starting point in the analysis of Victorian material culture: in Victorian Glassworlds, Isobel Armstrong, like Millar before her, takes as her departure point the symbolic and metaphorical significance of glass as a transitional marker between Victorian modernity and later movements towards modernism, identifying in the discourses surrounding glass a particularly Victorian response to subject-object relationships. Unlike Millar, Armstrong is concerned not with glass as a frame for the display of commodities, however, but with the glass itself as a paradoxically doubled object: both “barrier and medium” (11). As she observes in the introduction to Victorian Glassworlds, “Transparency enables a perceiver to make a seemingly unbroken transit from subject to object” (11). She goes on to describe how discourses surrounding the production, use, and nature of glass were, in the nineteenth century, fundamentally linked to questions about the relationship between subject and object:

This trope is the structuring point for the study, which examines glass in three forms peculiar to the new developments of the Victorian period: the glass pane, the mirror, and the lens. The study is wide-ranging in its exploration of Victorian culture, and utilises literary readings of glass culture as a means of unpicking the Victorian relationship to objects in a fascinating reversal of the techniques employed by Millar a decade earlier.

From its beginnings in commodity culture studies, “thing theory” has blossomed into a far-reaching exploration of the complex relationships between subjects and objects, both within and beyond literature. Its application to Victorian literature and cultural studies has swelled far beyond the bounds of the texts discussed in this review. In her introduction to the 2008 special issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, entitled “Victorian Fiction and the Material Imagination,” Victoria Mills catalogues the growing list of publications, conferences, and forums in this area, and the issue covers topics ranging from rocks to automata, from supernatural visitations to household clearances. Seven years earlier, the 2001 special issue of Critical Inquiry posed some of the questions that would later characterise Brown's A Sense of Things; in it Brown asks the question “why not let things alone?” (1), and he answers himself: “Fat chance . . . even the most coarse and commonsensical things, mere things, perpetually pose a problem because of the specific unspecificity that ‘things’ denotes” (“Thing Theory,” 3). “Thing theory” is neither frivolous nor superficial: as this review has demonstrated, engagement with the objects which clutter the pages of nineteenth-century texts involves fundamental questions about identity and identification, the construction of the individual subject, and the mediated relations that subject forms with the material world and with society. The interdisciplinary nature of such explorations offers fresh and exciting perspectives on nineteenth-century literature and culture, and as much innovative work as has already been done, there remain still vast tracts of unexplored potential in this field.