Nash, Jessica2026-05-112026-05-112026-05-11http://hdl.handle.net/10393/51626https://doi.org/10.20381/ruor-31929This thesis uses computational techniques to examine how frequently Victorian authors rendered disability within their fiction. While past and present literary criticism of the Victorian novel has proven that disability plays a narratively important role in this era, my dissertation approaches this question computationally to analyze the relationship between disability and plot on a larger scale. In doing so, I argue that disability is not a modern-day concept applied anachronistically to the study of Victorian fiction, but a key feature of Victorian plots in an era where an expanding working class placed emphasis on the body and its ability to perform labour. To make this argument, I digitized hundreds of novels from the Victorian era and used randomized corpus downsampling to take a snapshot of the fiction published during this period. What the data reveals is that almost half of the novels contain the words "disabled" or "crippled" in them at least once. When I expanded my search-term list to include historically relevant words that ascribe disability using Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1851), the results show that close to 100% of the randomized fiction list included words related to disability. The frequency of disability in Victorian fiction highlights how the novel embodies shifting class ideologies through the legible forms of physical difference. This idea is proven effectively through the computational linguistic tools this thesis uses, such as natural language processing, which determined that the language of physical difference in novels is often found near mentions of poverty or class. What this co-occurrence demonstrates is that the boundary between poverty and disability was porous because of the tenuous relationship working-class Victorians had to income that was entirely dependent on their ability to perform and maintain labour. After making this argument, my thesis pivots from a distant reading to a close one, and I analyze select works of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins to argue that these authors use disability to furnish their narratives in contradictory ways that reveal their respective conceptions of the physical body in relation to its political and social world. My close readings use narratological concepts to study the structural affordances of disability within their fiction. By engaging with concepts from Disability Studies and crip narratology, I argue that Dickens flattens his disabled characters in service of plot momentum, while Collins shifts the weight of disability from identity to experience to create narrative contours that aid in the sensationalism of his novels. By studying the frequency of disability in over 3,000 works of Victorian fiction, in addition to the select works of authors known for their disability narratives, this dissertation reveals a key contradiction found at the heart of Victorian fiction: that the plots that work often rely on the bodies that can't.enAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/English literatureVictorianDigital Humanitiesdisabilitycrip theorycomputational linguisticsfictionThesis