This dissertation argues that nineteenth-century British literature responded in a variety of critical ways to the limits of individual success and thereby constituted failure as a defining aspect of the modern subject. While scholarship typically acknowledges how nineteenth-century British developmental narratives reflected a causal link between hard work and success, this dissertation traces an alternate history of texts in the period that strongly called this association into question. These texts portray hard work that does not necessarily lead to success while also depicting failure as a generative educative process. In the process, these works beg the question: what happens if a citizen works hard and acts according to social directives but nevertheless fails in business, personal relations, or expected individual maturation? This dissertation contends that these texts, through the portrayal of failed development, express a deep skepticism of exclusionary narrative models of individual development. Moreover, these texts hypothesize preventative adaptive behaviors that enable their readerships to avert developmental failure in the context of nineteenth-century political and social structures.This dissertation traces this reconceptualization of failure as a generative process through a lineage of texts spanning several genres. Chapter One analyzes Robert Southey’s Madoc (1805) through the lens of the title character’s failed development. It argues that Madoc, which proposes a scenario of personal improvement but ultimately only offers momentary glimpses of maturation, depicts the developmental limits of colonial settings while also exposing the manner by which Romantic individualism masks failure as personal genius. Next, Chapter Two argues that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) critiques the related social models of sensibility and Bildung by demonstrating the exclusionary boundaries of these superficially inclusive ideologies. Later, Chapter Three examines the history of revision in George Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) and Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860-61). It contends that the author’s revisions to the original versions represent a crucial cultural moment in the adjudication between uncompromising cause-and-effect models of development and more complicated portrayals of the effects of individual effort. Finally, Chapter Four argues that George du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson (1891) reflects on the dangers of nineteenth-century models of individual development by offering a sustained engagement with the ramifications of novelistic prototypes of building the self, thereby highlighting the exclusionary politics of this process.Broadly conceived, this dissertation intervenes in literary critical works about Romantic individualism, the history of the novel, and the Bildungsroman by scholars such as Nancy Armstrong and Jed Esty. Additionally, this project extends the usual literary archive of this type of study, examining texts of literary failure beyond the novel, including Romantic poetry, scientific works, and self-help treatises. Overall, the deployment of individual failure portrayed in this project’s genealogy demonstrates an unexamined foundation for contemporary conceptions of failure as generative. These texts deployed stark instances of individual failure to suggest new models of subjectivity and establish a cultural framework in which failure generates criticism, resistance, and a new definition of success.
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