Rebecca Richardson is an Advanced Lecturer in Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric. She also enjoys teaching courses on nineteenth-century novels through Stanford Continuing Studies. Her book Material Ambitions: Self-Help and Victorian Literature (JHUP, 2021) explores how self-help narratives centering a hardworking individual provided a moralized cover story for ambition in the Victorian era – a narrative many Victorian authors used the novel form to question and complicate. She is also interested in how the rhetoric of health developed, across the nineteenth century, to suggest overlaps or conflicts across human, economic, and environmental health – particularly in texts like Jane Austen’s Sanditon and Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy. Mostly broadly, she is interested in how nineteenth-century texts can speak to our own moment. Her work has appeared in Dickens Studies Annual, ELH, Studies in Romanticism, ISLE, Nineteenth-Century Prose, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and New Ohio Review.

Which nineteenth-century historical event has been most influential for your work and for your thinking about the nineteenth century, and why?
I’m immediately thinking of the development of “monomania” as a diagnosis in the nineteenth century. Stumbling across the scholarship on that question had an outsized effect on my work on Victorian self-help and the way I think about throughlines from the nineteenth century to our own moment. It’s also on my mind – in this age of ChatGPT and other LLMs being held up as a shortcut for research and writing – as an example of just how messy but also serendipitous the research process can be.

One morning, I was searching across nineteenth-century periodical databases for “ambition,” a key term I’d been tracking across self-help texts. Somehow, I stumbled across some nineteenth-century articles describing cases of monomania – for example, someone obsessed with inventing a machine capable of perpetual motion. I hadn’t started with this term in mind, but the way monomania was being described sounded eerily like the examples of persevering self-help I’d been reading in my key texts, including Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help. Curious, I did a sweep for research on the topic. And then I learned that the term and diagnosis were new developments in the early nineteenth century, that Jean- Étienne Dominique Esquirol first described it around 1810 in France, and that it quickly spread.

According to Lennard J. Davis in Obsessions: A History, “monomania” was soon a widespread diagnosis for patients entering French asylums. By 1843, a New Monthly Magazine writer could assume their audience would be familiar with the term, joking that “…the most of us are the victims of more than one monomania in the course of our lives; and there are not wanting unfortunates, great generals, grave divines, sound lawyers, able mathematicians, or what not, whose existence has been one long succession of various
monomaniae, without a single moment of what may fairly be called a lucid interval.”

The more I read around nineteenth-century case histories of monomania, the more I was struck by how they described behaviors that, in the context of Victorian self-help texts, would be held up as qualities to emulate – perseverance, dedication, indefatigable work. Not coincidentally, I think, there was a sub-category of monomania associated with ambition: monomanie ambitieuse. (For more on this, Jan E. Goldstein’s Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century is a great resource).

Stumbling across those articles that day – and then turning to the research around monomania and obsessive-compulsive disorder – launched me on a path of thinking more about the relation among ambition and work, illness and disability in the nineteenth century as well as our own.

I’m always hoping that my students will have those moments of discovery and the experience of getting lost down what seems like a rabbit hole, only to realize it somehow connects back to their core ideas. But I’m very aware that all of this depends on having the time and space to explore ideas – and that it’s increasingly difficult to make the case for this process when technologies seek to substitute it with quick and all too predictable and linear “research” results.

What is most difficult and what is easiest about teaching undergraduates about the nineteenth century?
One thing that makes teaching nineteenth-century texts easier, at least in my experience, is that the nineteenth century gives us so many parallels to our own moment – for example, to read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and to connect with those questions about science and nature, and to think about how a text can take on new meaning for us. In the case of Frankenstein, students have been eager to connect it to our own discourse around “Frankenfoods,” CRISPR, mRNA vaccines, etc.

The challenge, always, is helping students wade through different prose styles. I regularly teach a class for first-year students on the “Rhetoric of Empathy,” where we start with some foundational definitions — including excerpts from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. I’ve realized how important it is to slow down and “translate” key passages into more conversational and contemporary language.

This question also got me thinking about my other main point of comparison – teaching nineteenth-century novel courses for Stanford Continuing Studies, with a student population that tends to be older adults and dedicated, experienced readers. Even these highly motivated participants, who have sought out literature courses for the love of the pursuit and who regularly read a variety of fiction and nonfiction, have reported needing to slow down and adapt to the style of, for example, the Brontës or George Eliot. I’ve found it helpful to ask new readers to track which passages feel especially dense or confusing. And it’s wonderful to have readers share their strategies.

When I taught a class on Jane Austen, we had a group of self-proclaimed Janeites who were able to share fantastic tips and motivation with first-time Austen readers. They recommended listening to audiobooks and/or reading aloud to get more of a “feel” for the rhythm of sentences, watching adaptations while reading to follow the larger plot points, and trusting that it will get easier the more one reads.

And all of this leads me to what feels hopeful at this moment despite the defunding of the humanities: the fact that so many people sign up for Continuing Studies classes on Austen or Eliot out of curiosity or enduring interest. Many people do see the value of reading “difficult” novels, even when it requires putting in extra time and effort. And I’ve also found it powerful to see how students have been attentive both to a text’s initial audience and context, as well as to what it might mean to them now, in our own moment. For example, during a discussion of one of the (many!) middle sections of David Copperfield, students analyzed Mr. Wickfield and compared ideas about addiction in the nineteenth century vs. our own moment (with Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead centering those throughlines). This also led to discussions about the portrayal of caregiving, the gendering of care, and the risk of self-sacrifice and burnout.

What form of nineteenth-century transportation would you most like to experience, and why?
My first thought was of all the sorts of nineteenth-century transportation I’m very glad not to have experienced – from jostling stagecoaches to long journeys by sea. Then what came to mind are the experiences I’ve actually had – like riding on a historic train! But really, what I’d most like to experience isn’t the train ride, but the train ride as Victorians would have experienced it. I’ve been in fast-moving vehicles since before I can remember – but what would it have been like to ride a train in the nineteenth century for the first time?