ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. Critical attention has long been held by, and directed us to scrutinise, the significance of the material substance of nineteenth-century literature. The reification of the literary through the material centralises the importance of object matter to strategies of interpretation and even just strategies of reading. The book explores the material world that forms the backdrop, and sometimes the foreground, of nineteenth-century literature and culture. But it is a contention of the book that not all objects can be read in the same way. This is because some of them are bric-a-brac. Object matter was given literary representation before the nineteenth century and has been since, but people believe that bric-a-brac is a peculiarly Victorian phenomenon and a peculiarly Victorian word. The etymology of bric-a-brac tells that it is an interim condition through which commodities may pass but in which they never permanently reside.
