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Reviewed by:
  • Victorian Bestseller: The Life of Dinah Craik by Karen Bourrier
  • Brenda Tyrrell (bio)
Karen Bourrier, Victorian Bestseller: The Life of Dinah Craik. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan P, 2019. Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-472-13138-9. $85.00. 363pp.

It is no secret among disability studies scholars that impairment and disability are historically difficult to label in the texts of Victorian authors; using the term disability to group together cognitive, physical, and sensory impairments simply did not occur during this era. Moreover, acknowledgments of Victorian women’s presence in the literary world as author, not simply support staff, are equally rare. Karen Bourrier’s Victorian Bestseller: The Life of Dinah Craik seeks to correct and connect these two areas of inattention. Craik wrote a variety of stories and novels in the late-Victorian era that heavily feature characters that might be identified contemporarily as disabled—for example, A Noble Life, The Little Lame Prince, and so forth—yet is “all but forgotten,” according to Bourrier (vii). The book consists of eleven chapters that proceed chronologically through Craik’s life, as well as a Preface, an Epilogue, and several useful artifacts: a Chronology, a listing of the Manuscripts and Archival Collections consulted in the project, a Notes section, and an Index. There are also twenty-four illustrations in the midsection of Craik, her family, and other influential persons in her life.

The first two chapters provide a glimpse into Craik’s child- and young adulthood and introduce the reader to the influential players in Craik’s early life; most notably, her father (Thomas) and his repeated incarcerations in either debtor’s prison or confinement in the local asylum. Much of Craik’s later writing is shaped by the events happening around and to her. For example, her father’s confinement and the financial impact that his absence had on the rest of the family manifests in how Craik positions these later stories alongside contemporary legislation regarding women’s rights to property, inheritance, and so forth. In Chapter 2, we meet her brothers, Tom and Ben, and Thomas returns to the family fold and experiences success in his lecture circuit involving literary works and authors. This success results in the family moving to London and develops into multiple opportunities for Craik, including access to various literary circles and the development of Craik’s “literary sociability” (24). Bourrier also offers a brief look into the rise of “juvenile writers” and how the periodical press supported these ventures, which benefits Craik as she [End Page 255] publishes her first poem (26). The chapter ends as Craik’s mother dies from breast cancer and their father abandons the siblings. After their mother’s death, the destitute Craik is left in charge of youngest brother Ben.

In Chapters 3 and 4, Bourrier transitions into Craik’s early publishing ventures, developed through a literary sociability that connects writers and publishers through social venues and extended stays at each other’s homes. Craik develops beneficial friendships with many publishers and writers. Most notable of all of these were the Chambers brothers, who maintained three self-published journals through the use of steam power at their press, a technology Bourrier discusses alongside other new technologies available in publishing in the 1840s. Craik relies on her translating skill and writing short stories to earn a living, as well as publishing her first four novels. Much of the reason for this frantic pace is related to Craik’s familial situation; Thomas dies at age nineteen and Ben relocates to Australia. Despite the surviving siblings living so far apart, they still “pooled [their] financial and emotional resources” (65). This relationship, Bourrier posits, mirrors other Victorian accounts of brothers and sisters living together. Bourrier also provides an extensive rationale for Craik’s decision to publish her first four novels, beginning with The Ogilvies in 1849, as “an open secret” and her poetry anonymously (65). The chapter ends with a short commentary on the effect these frenetic years of publishing ultimately had on Craik’s health.

These health concerns bubble over into Chapter 5 as persistent not only for Craik, but also for Ben. Craik reports that her progress on her fifth...

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