Abstract: It is by now well established that nineteenth-century writers like Algernon Charles Swinburne often turned to Sappho as a contrivance for thinking about desire between women—or, by way of analogy, between men. This essay contends that Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, First Series (1866) inaugurated a more extensive indexical relation not only between Sapphism and homoeroticism but also between Sapphism and gender variance as such, a relation that was taken up by other Victorian writers like Walter Pater, Michael Field, and Vernon Lee. Although Swinburne might have called this relation bisexual Sapphism, the term trans Sapphism offers more theoretical traction for talking about the ways Victorian writers used Sappho ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Soon after Isabella Heathcliff's arrival at Wuthering Heights, Hindley Earnshaw tries to frighten her by "pulling from his waistcoat a curiously-constructed pistol, having a double-edged spring knife attached to the barrel" (Brontë 121); she reacts differently than he expects. Terrorized by the household, isolated from her family, and without legal means of escape from her marriage, Isabella's sense of helplessness is momentarily relieved (rather than compounded) by the sight of the gun:I surveyed the weapon inquisitively. A hideous notion struck me: how powerful I should be possessing such an instrument! I took it from his hand, and touched the blade. He looked astonished at the expression my face assumed during ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Over the last twenty-five years, scholarship on nineteenth-century periodicals has tended to make two assumptions about serially published narratives, especially novels: first, that breaks between installments of a serial publication necessarily imply a state of waiting in the reader, a deferral of desire; and secondly, that these breaks in the fulfillment of desire are necessarily filled with mental or social activities addressing or anticipating the narratives they interrupt.1 These assumptions about serial reading have generated many important critical and theoretical conversations in the field, but they have also made it more difficult to recognize the existence of a different and more common kind of reading ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now (1874–75), Lord Nidderdale worries about playing cards with the American Hamilton K. Fisker at a London club, the Beargarden; he comically conflates the American speculator with the "'Heathen Chinee,' such as he had read of in poetry" (78). His comments allude vaguely to American poet Bret Harte's 1870 poem about the American West that features a character named Ah Sin. Harte wrote the poem—titled "Plain Language from Truthful James" but popularly known as the "Heathen Chinee"—to critique anti-Chinese sentiment in California in the 1860s and 70s, as Chinese migrants traveled to the region first to join the Gold Rush and later to work on the transatlantic railroad. Most ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Today the artist Robert Seymour is principally remembered, if remembered at all, for his suicide. He shot himself with his own fowling piece in the summer house in his garden at his home in Liverpool Road, Islington on April 20, 1836, leaving the serial sketches he was then working on unfinished and thus allowing Charles Dickens to arrogate The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) to himself. The Dalziel Brothers probably live on today most persistently in their engravings of John Tenniel's famous illustrations to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). These two excellent but very different books, Robert Seymour and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture: Sketches by Seymour and Comic Illustration and The Wood ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Writing to William Ernest Henley in 1881 about the serialization of Treasure Island (1881–82) in the magazine Young Folks (1871–97), Robert Louis Stevenson seems to champion text over image: "I don't get illustrated—a blessing" (qtd. in Holterhoff 31). Likewise, in an 1897 letter to his agent, James B. Pinker, H. G. Wells pleaded on behalf of The Invisible Man (1897), soon to appear as a serial: "Can I possibly escape being illustrated in Pearson's Weekly'—I find they put in detestable little sketches. … [By] omitting illustrations we may perhaps get more text" (131–32). On the basis of such private correspondence, we might assume that popular late Victorian novelists anticipated the modernists in seeing ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Laura Forsberg's ambitious study Worlds Beyond: Miniatures and Victorian Fiction adds to growing bodies of scholarship that have brought material culture studies and the history of science to bear on the study of Victorian literature. Forsberg effectively demonstrates that things miniature and microscopic had the capacity to invoke wonder, rendering the familiar strange and offering "an alternative mode of understanding reality itself, less as a series of certainties than as a set of circumscribed fancies" (5). She argues that a "language of scale" crossed the "diverse domains of art, science, childhood, and the book" and the examples she discusses across seven chapters do likewise (6).Part 1 comprises two chapters ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Ann Gagné's Embodying the Tactile in Victorian Literature: Touching Bodies/Bodies Touching and Kimberly Cox's Touch, Sexuality, and Hands in Literature, 1740–1901 attest to the influx of interest in manual embodiment during the past decade. Both books acknowledge the ways in which previous work by William Cohen, Peter J. Capuano, Aviva Briefel, Pamela Gilbert, Sue Zemka, and others has opened up new pathways for further analysis. Although there are areas of overlap in theoretical orientation, subject matter, and textual evidence—Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of touch, blurred lines of homoeroticism, and analysis of Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market (1862), for instance—these are two quite different books. Gagné ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: What does it mean to take the concept of surface reading literally' What happens if we apply this reading practice, as defined by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus in their influential 2009 essay in Representations, to surfaces themselves: that is, if we try to read the surfaces of surfaces'In their collection Victorian Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture: Skin, Silk, and Show, editors Sibylle Baumbach and Ulla Ratheiser showcase nine essays, mostly by their colleagues at German and Austrian universities, which investigate and perform this idea through original analyses of a variety of Victorian cultural and literary objects. The editors indicate the "dual" nature of the project in their ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The long-anticipated return to aesthetics appears finally to have happened. On the day I began writing this review, the latest issue of PMLA featured seventeen scholars discussing "Aesthetic Education without Guarantees" (Nicholas Gaskill and Kate Stanley, vol. 138, no. 1 [2023], 127). While one might imagine aesthetic education to be a matter of perennial concern among those who teach and write about literature for a living, the notion that there is a realm of experience that "represent[s], at least imaginatively, possibilities and satisfactions beyond the limits of immediate usefulness, and in doing so becomes variously and powerfully useful," as George Levine defines "the aesthetic" in his introduction to The ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Emily Ennis's Writing, Authors hip and Photography in British Literary Culture, 1880–1920: Capturing the Image takes up popular photography (for example, celebrity photographs and kodaks) as a catalyst for rethinking literary authorship through the writings of four British authors: Thomas Hardy, Bram Stoker, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf. Ennis devotes two chapters to each author. One chapter examines the author's stance on popular photography (reflected in their correspondence for the most part); the other explores how their literary works engage with photography's impact on literary authorship. The chapters chart, in chronological order, late Victorian literary culture's increasing recognition of photography ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In 1860, Charles Canning, the British Viceroy of India, asked Ranbir Singh, the Maharajah of Kashmir, to pose for a portrait by William "Crimea" Simpson. Not to be outdone, Singh requested a portrait of Canning; he'd hidden a portrait painter under a sofa in a clandestine attempt to capture Canning's likeness. This "act of diplomatic subterfuge," suggests Sean Willcock in Victorian Visions of War and Peace: Aesthetics, Sovereignty and Violence in the British Empire, c. 1851–1900, signaled Singh's awareness that portrait requests were "power plays" of diplomatic imperial statecraft and moreover, that "control over images was an important function of sovereignty" in the "spectacular mode of imperial governance that ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Studies of Victorian imperial masculinity tend to cluster around one or the other of two poles on an interpretive continuum. Toward one end, we find those who understand representations of masculinity as ways of glamorizing imperial ambition, or, conversely, as representations of empire as ways of alleviating masculine crisis. Toward the other end are those scholars who, while acknowledging late Victorian efforts to yoke together masculine and imperial ideologies in partnership, attempt to expose that combination's less obvious tensions and strains. To paraphrase Martin Green, whose work helped establish the first approach, narratives of imperial manliness can be read as just the sort of cheering stories that ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Until quite recently, the study of racism in the nineteenth century has centered around the institution of slavery. Explanations of racial attitudes have tended to focus on justifications for the system of hyper-exploitation imposed by enslavement on people of African origins. Racism, from this perspective, was primarily a rationalization that made it acceptable to treat people of a certain skin color in an extraordinarily cruel, despotic, and instrumentally dehumanized way. In this framework, abolitionism fell (almost by definition) on the enlightened, progressive side of the racial equation. Whatever the mixed motives or residual prejudices of its adherents, it could be understood as a movement that represented ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Gabriel Polley's Palestine in the Victorian Age: Colonial Encounters in the Holy Land challenges our understanding of the origins of settler colonialism in Palestine. Before the arrival of British colonialism in 1917 and the founding of Jewish-Zionist settlements in the 1880s, British and American biblical scholars, travelers, and missionaries who visited Palestine between 1838 and 1888 laid the ideological foundations for colonialism and Jewish settler colonialism. Unlike European Christians who had traditionally visited the Holy Land to conduct a pilgrimage, these visitors were imbued with strong Evangelical ideals and believed the restoration of the Jews in the Holy Land was necessary to bring about the Second ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Jonathan Parry's Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East is a political history of British diplomacy in the Ottoman Middle East between the 1798 Napoleonic invasion of Egypt and the Crimean War of 1854. The central conundrum that informed much of British imperial politics on the Eastern Question was how to maintain the territorial integrity of a weak Ottoman Empire as a defense against the possible influence or dismemberment of that empire by French and Russian designs. British officials worked to preserve the Ottoman Empire but kept it weak enough so it could remain the object of various British designs meant to render it dependent on British power and expertise. The legacies of that diplomacy, as ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: These two books situate Ireland in a wider world; one offers broad perspective on the governance of the British Empire and the other offers diverse international perspectives on what happened in Ireland when British governance failed. The first book, Lord Dufferin, Ireland and the British Empire, c. 1820–1900: Rule by the Best', by Annie Tindley, carefully examines the imperial career of Lord Dufferin, a Protestant aristocrat from County Down, in order to illuminate the understandings and motivations of British imperial administrators at the highest level. In contrast, Heroes of Ireland's Great Hunger, edited by Christine Kinealy, Jason King, and Gerard Moran, looks far below official policymaking and the spectacle ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The Great Famine rises like a mountain out of the landscape of nineteenth-century Ireland. In the past many historians preferred to avoid it as being just too hard to conquer. As a result, academic studies of the Famine before about 1990 were surprisingly few in number. The topic is certainly a huge one for, as Charles Read explains, the Famine was the "worst economic crisis in the modern history of the British Isles" (293). The commemoration of the 150th anniversary during the mid-1990s prompted an outpouring of publications and, since then, books and articles have continued to appear at a steady rate. The mountain that is the Famine is now far more familiar terrain. Yet it can still offer formidable challenges ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: W. M. Jacob's Religious Vitality in Victorian London overturns established narratives about the decline of faith in nineteenth-century Britain's urban center, demonstrating instead that religion played a crucial role in London's transformation into a thriving, modern city. This book shows that sensationalized stories about mid-Victorian London as "a city of heathenism and pagan apocalypse," as memorably highlighted in Peter Ackroyd's London: The Biography (2000), obscure the degree to which religiosity itself operated as a vibrant, dynamic force that both underwent and inspired substantial change (qtd. in Jacob 1). As Jacob outlines, the notion that Victorian religion declined due to philosophical advances such as ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Lisa C. Robertson's Home and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literary London offers readers a compelling and timely examination of the range of ways that nineteenth-century novelists, poets, politicians, reformers, architects, investors, and pundits of all persuasions understood the housing crisis then unfolding in London and thereby conceived of new forms of housing and modes of domestic arrangement that were designed to address and alleviate it.Robertson's title is somewhat vague, implying a broader historical scope than what is considered here: 1880 through 1920, the forty-year period spanning the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. However, Home and Identity in Nineteenth-Century ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Vagabonds. It is an antiquated word, although perhaps more spritely than its cognates, vagrant and rogue. Under the 1824 Vagrancy Act, a vagabond is legally defined as "every person wandering abroad and not giving a good account of himself or herself … every person going about as a gatherer or collector of alms … every person playing or betting in any street" (Parliament, 1824 c. 83). The Act serves to demonstrate how capacious the term vagabond could be, a hold-all for any number of wanderers, beggars, traders, muscians, performers, and sex workers. It is these people that Oskar Jensen is concerned with in Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century London, a collective biography that tells the ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Little-known and rarely read today, Maria Polack's Fiction without Romance, or The Locket-Watch (1830) was the first novel to be published by an openly Jewish Englishwoman. But who was she' The very title of her pathbreaking text has a curiously paradoxical air, where "romance" serves as a singularly unstable term in a narrative that pits rational reflection and interfaith dialogue against the violence and loss visited upon lives ruled by the passions. But Heidi Kaufman's fascinating study seeks to move beyond this ethical frame, turning instead to the wider social contexts within which Polack and her readers lived and worked and bringing new archival resources to bear on an author who still remains a mystery. ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Heather Bozant Witcher's Collaborative Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century: Sympathetic Partnership and Artistic Creation focuses on the artistic process of selected nineteenth-century British authors, giving special attention to the ways that Victorian concepts of sympathy, difference, and community come together in literary collaboration. Covering approximately one hundred years, Witcher's book provides detailed descriptions of how specific collaborations operated under Romanticism, Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, and modernism. Witcher's approach is primarily archival, as she quotes extensively from private journals as well as from letters between Percy and Mary Shelley, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: "In Victorian Britain," writes Tom Baynes near the end of Tennyson and Goethe's Faust, "Faust was a central text, which ranked alongside Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and the Romantics" (210). This is true, and it is more of a puzzle than Baynes's informative and old-fashioned influence study entirely recognizes.Baynes treats the influence of Faust (1808/1832) on Tennyson as acting principally on his poems' topics and themes, which comports with Goethe's broader reception in Victorian Britain as a thinker and a sage, rather than as a poet. The book's second part includes chapters on religious doubt, on nature, and on sacred and profane love. Baynes's valuable account shows that on all these topics, Tennyson's ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The Century Guild was an artists' and architects' collective founded on Ruskinian principles that sought to unify the fine arts and applied arts—both from the point of view of the arts themselves, and at the level of domestic and professional relations between the personalities involved. Its first members, the architect Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo and the artist Herbert Percy Horne, were joined by the lapsed priest and artist, Selwyn Image. Their experiments followed in the footsteps of John Ruskin and William Morris, but unlike Charles Robert Ashbee or the Cotswold School of furniture makers, their experiments were sufficiently early to influence these progenitors in return. They worked with Ruskin's Sheffield ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In 2024, each day seems to bring a new controversy implicating the complex relationship between art, intellectual property, and new technologies: from deepfakes to generative Artificial Intelligence. In such an atmosphere, it can be easy to forget the long history of legal, philosophical, and social questions arising from this nexus. More than fifty years before the publication of Walter Benjamin's famous essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production" (1935), eminent civil servant Thomas Henry Farrer reflected on the manner in which "modern science" facilitated the reproduction of a wide variety of copyright works, noting: "The printing a book, copying a photograph, photographing a drawing, engraving ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Cathrine O. Frank's Character: Writing and Reputation in Victorian Law and Literature powerfully illustrates what the best law and literature scholarship can accomplish. Frank summarizes and elucidates complex legal histories, rules, and issues in a way that makes them seem indispensable for understanding the novels in her study. She disavows the sweeping generalizations characteristic of older studies that conceive of literature as the liberatory foil to a primarily regulatory law. Instead, she aligns herself with the historically inflected and theoretically nuanced work of more recent law and literature scholars such as Christine L. Krueger, Jan-Melissa Schramm, and Lisa Rodensky.As she did in her 2010 Law ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Whereas historians of earlier generations wrote lazily about scientific ideas being in the air, Diarmid Finnegan's fascinating and highly readable study of five British scientists on the American lecture circuit brings us up close and personal to the soundscape of the Gilded Age and, in the process, of Victorian Britain. The scholarly labor required to recover that lost soundscape is not for the faint-hearted, and Finnegan impresses in his innovative use of a range of sources—most notably the kinds of news report that helped to create and sustain the lecture circuit—in helping us to hear the echoes of the past. The five substantive chapters of The Voice of Science: British Scientists on the Lecture Circuit in ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The absent definite article carries great significance for Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain. One section head apart, it is only in the very final sentence of the book that Lawrence Goldman allows himself to speak of "the Victorians," (327) and inattentive readers expecting an exploration of "The Victorians and Numbers" are likely to be disappointed, for although Goldman expresses his desire to "explain the history of Victorian statistics and society through the biographies of some of the major and minor figures of the age," this is not the collective biography or prosopography that might have been expected from the former General Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Who said the Victorians were not amused' In fourteen wide-ranging chapters, Playing Games in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America, edited by Ann R. Hawkins, Erin N. Bistline, Catherine S. Blackwell, and Maura Ives, sets the record straight. The collection treats not only forms of play with which readers of nineteenth-century literature will be familiar—the games of whist over which Jane Austen's characters whiled away the hours and the symbolically weighted charades Jane Eyre witnesses—but also those that constitute, at least for contemporary audiences, an "unfamiliar wonderland" (2). The essays assembled here examine physical activities such as hunting and boxing; domestic entertainments including board games ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In British Children's Literature and Material Culture: Commodities and Consumption 1850–1914, Jane Suzanne Carroll offers an original and highly persuasive account of how the rise of the so-called golden age of children's literature is inextricably enmeshed with the rise of British consumer culture. This historical convergence prompted a concomitant rise in representations of everyday commercial goods within texts aimed at child audiences, as well as an increase in the production of commodities custom made to capitalize on the popularity of children's books (Peter Rabbit dolls, for instance, or a line of clothing at Liberty's department store based on Kate Greenaway illustrations). Though the golden age spans the ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Helen Cowie's wide-ranging and admirably accessible study Victims of Fashion: Animal Commodities in Victorian Britain traces the means by which animal products—feathers, sealskins and furs, ivory, alpaca wool, musks/perfumes, and exotic animals themselves—ended up in the hands and homes of Victorian and Edwardian consumers. She describes the methods by which these products were extricated from animal bodies; the trade routes they traveled and the difficulties they faced during transit (sometimes still attached to the "victims of fashion" to which they belonged); the immense environmental challenges the demand for these fashionable items created; and the efforts taken, both on legislative and voluntary levels, to ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The nineteenth century's shores, seas, and oceans are increasingly attracting attention from literary scholars. Prompted especially by Margaret Cohen's The Novel and the Sea (2010), the saltwater turn offers such promise because it intersects with questions of ecology, economics, infrastructure, and imperialism, as well as providing a salutary reminder of Britain's island status. The three books under review highlight to varying degrees the potential for the blue humanities both to extend and be enriched by Victorian studies, expanding horizons of genre, geography, period, and methodology. At the same time, the comparison between them also speaks to questions about the direction of Victorian studies at this moment ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: "Australasia hail her George's Natal Day!" proclaimed the convict poet Michael Massey Robinson in his June 9, 1810 poem on King George III's birthday, published in the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser ("For His Majesty's Birth Day," vol. 8, no. 336, line 8). Among the first mentions of "Australasia" in Australian print, the geography Robinson invokes signals that New South Wales was, in the way British colonialists imagined their situatedness, primarily turned outward toward the Pacific rather than inward toward the vast continent on whose edge the fledgling colony perched. The notion of interconnectedness—with Aotearoa New Zealand, with various Pacific islands, and with Asia to the north—would ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Long before the south became global, it had ceased to be a direction or a space. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the term had never simply been a direction or space—the meanings of such categories being always overlaid and undergirded by race, ethnicity, gender, nation, civilization, humanity, progress, and other such knotty concepts. Already, in 1748, Montesquieu was using the term to offer a climatological account for differences in human morality—"In northern climates, you shall find peoples who have few vices, a sufficient number of virtues, and a lot of frankness and sincerity. Draw near the southern countries, and you will think you have left morality far behind" (The Spirit of the Laws, edited and ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Comments & Queries are welcome via email: victstu@indiana.edu.Please also follow us on Facebook at Victorian Studies, on X (formerly Twitter) @victstudies, and on Instagram at @victorian_studies.In the print edition of Victorian Studies, vol. 65, no. 3, Diane Sadoff's paired book review of Mark Gorman's Saving the People's Forest: Open Spaces, Enclosure and Popular Protest in Mid-Victorian London and Carolyn Lesjak's The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons incorrectly lists Carolyn Lesjak's surname as "Lesjack" on pages 546–48. The digital version of the issue has been corrected.In Victorian Studies, vol. 65, no. 3, David Finkelstein's paired book review of Priti Joshi's Empire News: ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Katherine Judith Anderson (she/her) (katherine.anderson@wwu.edu) is Associate Professor of English at Western Washington University. The author of Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain (2022), she has also written for digital outlets such as Public Books and The Strategy Bridge. Anderson is at work on a second monograph examining biowarfare in the literature and history of the British Empire.Peter J. Capuano (pcapuano2@unl.edu) is Professor of English at the University of Nebraska and a Faculty Fellow in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH). His past work includes Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body (2015) and Victorian Hands: ... Read More PubDate: 2024-08-07T00:00:00-05:00
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