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From the teeming streets of Dickens's London to the households of domestic fiction, nineteenth-century British writers constructed worlds crammed beyond capacity with human life. In 'Populating the Novel', Emily Steinlight contends that rather than simply reflecting demographic growth, such pervasive literary crowding contributed to a seismic shift in British political thought. She shows how the nineteenth-century novel in particular claimed a new cultural role as it took on the task of narrating human aggregation at a moment when the Malthusian specter of surplus population suddenly and quite unexpectedly became a central premise of modern politics. In readings of novels by Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Mary Braddon, Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad that link fiction and biopolitics, Steinlight brings the crowds that pervade nineteenth-century fiction into the foreground.

English fiction --- Population in literature --- Fertility, Human, in literature --- Malthusianism --- History and criticism --- Malthusianism. --- Fertility, Human, in literature. --- Population in literature. --- Eugenics --- Population --- History and criticism. --- population in nineteenth century literature, Victorian biopolitics, Victorian fiction and the masses, the nineteenth century British novel and demography, Malthus and literature.