2026 Spring Seminar Series: ‘The eyes of a sick man’: Fevers and Flu at the Fin de Siècle

Please note this is a hybrid event. You are also welcome to join us in person in Attenborough Building room 1707.

Wednesday 25 February: Dr. Emily Vincent (University of Durham)

‘The eyes of a sick man’: Fevers and Flu at the Fin de Siècle

Between 1889 and 1895, a destructive influenza epidemic swept across Britain. This so-called ‘Russian Flu’ was part of a series of global outbreaks which made an indelible impression upon fin-de-siècle literature and culture. Renowned Gothic tales – including Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Story of the Brown Hand’ (1899), and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901) – were quick to fictionalise the emergent epidemic, while their authors concurrently experienced the physical effects of the infection’s ‘dreadful low fever’ which led, in Wilde’s case, to ‘absolute nervous prostration’, and for Doyle, to the loss of several family members. This paper will therefore demonstrate how the very real fevers, agues, and mental debilitation which accompanied the ‘Russian Flu’ epidemic were creatively transplanted onto the fictional bodies of several Gothic protagonists at the fin de siècle.

Biographical Note: Dr Emily Vincent (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Birmingham. For the UKRI and CHANSE funded Media and Epidemics project, Emily is co-writing a book on influenza epidemics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British media and fiction for Manchester University Press (Social Histories of Medicine series). Emily holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Birmingham. Her first monograph Spiritualism and Maternal Grief in Late Nineteenth-Century Literature (Cambridge University Press) explores how Margaret Oliphant, Florence Marryat, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman navigate maternal grief in fin-de-siècle ghost stories by examining loss, spiritualism, and maternity. Emily is a Teaching Associate in English in the Continuing Education Department at the University of Oxford and a Deputy Associate Director of Research at the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies International (CN-CSI), based at Durham University.