What are we to make of the Victorians fascination with collecting? What effect did their encounters with the curious, exotic and downright odd have on Victorian writers and their works? The essays in this collection take up these questions by examining the phenomenon of bric-A-brac in Victorian literature. The contributors to Literary Bric-A-Brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities explore sites of unusual concurrence (including museums, the home, art galleries, private collections) and the way in which bric-A-brac brought the alien into everyday settings, the past into the...

What are we to make of the Victorians fascination with collecting? What effect did their encounters with the curious, exotic and downright odd have on Victorian writers and their works? The essays in this collection take up these questions by examining the phenomenon of bric-A-brac in Victorian literature. The contributors to Literary Bric-A-Brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities explore sites of unusual concurrence (including museums, the home, art galleries, private collections) and the way in which bric-A-brac brought the alien into everyday settings, the past into the...