This dissertation investigates how state bureaucracy was portrayed in British fiction during the long nineteenth century. This was a period of innovation and transformation in British public administration. It saw the invention of a host of administrative practices and official textual genres that live on today in various guises, such as the decennial census and competitive civil service entry exams. It was also the period in which the word “bureaucracy” entered the English language and public administration emerged as a prominent theme in popular literature. Previous studies of Victorian and modernist representations of British public administration have tended to foreground the importance of liberal anti-interventionist modes of governance (Goodlad) or else they have argued that the Victorian novel performed a disciplinary function in the service of the state (Miller). Moving away from such paradigmatic Foucauldian perspectives on the relationship between literature and the state, this thesis identifies a rich and multifaceted tradition of “writing the state” in long-nineteenth-century British fiction.

The dissertation explores the treatment of state administration in the work of Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, and H. G. Wells, authors who intervened forcefully in ongoing debates about official institutions. Through an examination of the historical contexts in which these authors operated and through close readings of selected works, the dissertation delineates two key moments in the evolution of literary representations of state bureaucracy in long-nineteenth-century Britain. It shows that Martineau and Dickens responded to the rise of the administrative state by portraying the type of bureaucratic systems that Victorian readers increasingly came across in their everyday lives. These two authors pioneered a new type of story—the “bureaucratic horror story”—which centred on encounters between civilians and state functionaries, stories which were pedagogic in nature, highlighting the importance of bureaucratic literacy in the emergent institutional landscape. At the turn of the twentieth century, however, the bureaucratic state had become thoroughly familiar to the populace, partly through the efforts of writers such as Martineau and Dickens, and at this point the educational component of literary narratives about state bureaucracy shifted focus from familiarisation to defamiliarisation. That is, Conrad and Wells problematised ordinary citizens' habitual participation in administrative state culture, portraying it as an impediment to independent thought and perception, not least with respect to the state itself.

Through detailed analysis of the ways in which a select group of prominent long-nineteenth-century authors portrayed public administration, the study identifies recurring narrative techniques and tropes that were used during this period to characterise and critique the nascent administrative state. The dissertation interrogates the influence of the bureaucratic paradigm on Victorian and modernist literary aesthetics whilst also describing the role that narrative fiction played in the evolution of the modern British state imaginary. The dissertation thereby contributes new perspectives on and models for the study of literature and state administration in long-nineteenth-century Britain and beyond.