The Ideas in Things

"Ideas in Things explores apparently inconsequential objects in popular Victorian texts to make contact with their fugitive meanings. Developing an innovative approach to analyzing nineteenth-century fiction, Elaine Freedgood here reconnects the things readers unwittingly ingore to the stories they tell." "Building her case around objects from three well-known Victorian novels - the mahogany furniture in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, the calico curtains in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, and "Negro head" tobacco in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations - Freedgood argues that these things are connected to histories that the novels barely acknowledge, generating darker meanings outside the novels' symbolic systems. A valuable contribution to the new field of object studies in the humanities, The Ideas in Things pushes readers' thinking about things beyond established concepts of commodity and fetish."--Jacket.