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Victorian Personhood(s)

Personhood is having a cultural moment. The ambiguous status of agency and rights animates compelling and diverse critical responses: from studies of animals, AI, and fetal protection laws (Kurki and Pietrzykowski, 2017), to Frankenstein as a model for corporate personhood (Atkinson, 2022), to anthropocentric ideas of personhood versus the environment (Rochford, 2024), to studies of “potential people” including chatbots and embryos (Kalantry 2025). Lindsay O’Connor Stern and Julie Stone Peters (2025) recognize that personhood “is a critical problem for our time, perhaps the critical problem.” Yet these contemporary issues and problems are a legacy of the nineteenth century, when questions concerning who or what should be recognized as a legal person saw sustained debate. Following the success of the Reform movement and the abolition of slavery, the Victorian period began with major changes in legal understandings of personhood. Defined by compelling, psychologically interiorized characters presented through realism’s omniscient, third-person narration, the Victorian novel was likewise exploring personhood from Elizabeth Gaskell’s concerns about corporations, unions, and other collective entities to George Gissing’s direct responses to the Married Women’s Property Acts (1870 & 1882). The Reform Acts (1832, 1867, 1884), too, tightened the associations among legal capacity, economic agency, and political voice, making the Victorian era a flashpoint for legal and cultural definitions of who and what qualified as a person with rights and duties.

This themed issue welcomes essays that consider the troublesome conception of Victorian personhood, understood not only as a legal but also as a literary-cultural property. We seek contributions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following questions:

How did formal and thematic innovations in the novel reflect or even inform the Victorian era’s changing notions of personhood?
How did Victorian authors and legal professionals engage with personhood, whether in their biographies, their professional lives, or in their written work?
How does Empire complicate Victorian personhood? Were legal and/ or literary-cultural definitions of personhood unified at home and in the colonies, or did place, context, and imperialism turn personhood into an uneven field?
How was personhood connected to major socioeconomic, political, and literary changes in Britain such as the growth of Industry (e.g. corporate personhood, nonhuman entities), the universal suffrage movement, the rise of the serialized periodical, etc.?
How do popular Victorian genres (sensation fiction, the detective story, the domestic novel, etc.) reflect changing definitions of personhood?
How did women writers and authors of color respond to legal restrictions that limited their personhood?
How did legal debates surrounding unsettled and limited states of personhood (e.g. the unborn, stillborn, enslaved, absent, and dead, as well as trans and intersex people) inspire the literary imaginary?
How did writers imagine future notions of personhood in terms of corporate, animal, environmental, and technological conceptions?

Submit to Victorian Personhood(s) by 20 March 2026

Please send 300-word abstracts with working title for a 7000–7500 word article and brief CV by 20 March 2026 to co-editors Jolene Zigarovich (jolene.zigarovich@uni.edu) and Adam Kozaczka (adam.kozaczka@tamiu.edu).

Authors will be notified if their proposals have been accepted by 31 March 2026 and complete articles will be due by 15 October 2026. This themed issue will be received for review at SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, and submissions will undergo double-anonymized peer review.