2026/03/01 by Simon Gikandi
paper · doi:10.1632/s0030812926101862
I studied Victorian literature, or the thing that goes by that name, in three different institutions in three different countries, and each of these experiences, which involved modes of disciplining and undisciplining, consolidation and displacement, taught me that the making of literary fields was a malleable process overdetermined by time and place. As an undergraduate at the University of Nairobi in the late 1970s, I learned that the nineteenth century was the favored period of the new intellectual class not because of what postcolonial criticism claims—that it was the age of empire and hence the fulcrum of decolonial discourses—but because it provided important lessons about the necessity and danger of progress, the most quintessential Victorian idea of all. The industrial novels of Charles Dickens ( Hard Times ), Elizabeth Gaskell ( North and South ), and George Eliot ( Felix Holt ) occupied a prominent position in the Nairobi curriculum; Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England was considered a primary text. The theoretical primer was Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society , especially the chapter dealing with industrial novels.