Art, Race, and Fantastic Color Change in the Victorian Novel

As a study of color in the Victorian novel, this volume notices and analyzes a peculiar literary phenomenon in which Victorian authors who were also trained as artists dream up fantastically colored characters for their fiction. These strange and eccentric characters include the purple madwoman Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), the blue gentleman Oscar Dubourg from Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872), the red peddler Diggory Venn in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native