The limericks of Edward Lear (1812–1888) prompted a mid-Victorian craze that flourishes to this day. Gorgeously illustrated new limericks appear in a 2015 issue of Poetry magazine (Madrid), a five-line skewering of Stalin is tucked into a recent New York Times obituary (Grimes). The newly founded Edward Lear Society celebrates at the Knowsley estate, and the keeper of the Edward Lear website adds a new feature on Lear and Comics. The British Academy's Chatterton lecturer attends to Lear's birds, including the parrot that “seized” a man's nose and the raven that “danced a quadrille” (Bevis 39, 41) – Lear's first work, it must be remembered, was the magnificent Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots (1832). Of course he is best known today as a writer of nonsense (Peck 15). The illustrated limerick, his lighthearted venture into a double genre, perennially raises questions among his admirers and scholars about the internal dynamics linking its components. Borrowing from recent discussions of various picture-poem combinations, one might call the illustrated limericks in A Book of Nonsense “picture-limericks” (Dilworth 42), “imagetexts” (Mitchell, Picture Theory 89), or “iconotexts” (Louvel). As the labels all suggest, the core issue is the proximity of two media and whether or how they converge.

John Ruskin and Charles Darwin shared a desire to change the way their readers looked at both nature and art. However, when considering them together, we typically remember their failure to see eye to eye on man's place in nature. Examining Ruskin's responses to Darwin's work, sexual selection in particular, or Ruskin's late dissatisfaction with Victorian science more generally, scholars have emphasized their conflicting worldviews. Yet this tendency to focus on conceptual disagreement fails to consider a shared intellectual background between the two men: the science of geology.

During the first astronomy lesson shared by the two protagonists of Thomas Hardy's Two on a Tower (1882), Lady Viviette Constantine and Swithin St Cleeve share a decidedly gloomy interpretation of human insignificance in the face of a vast universe:

In its anonymous review of Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses (1874), the Academy notes rather hopelessly: “this will probably be one of the most popular children's books this winter. We wish we could understand it” (606). The reviewer – who later dwells on the “uncomfortable feeling” generated by this children's tale and its accompanying images – still counts as the most generous among the largely puzzled and horrified readership of Rossetti's story about three sets of girls experiencing violence and failure in their respective fantasy worlds (606). While clearly such dystopic plots are not out of place in Victorian literature about children, something about Rossetti's unusual narrative bothered her contemporaries. John Ruskin, for instance, bluntly wondered how Rossetti and Arthur Hughes, who illustrated the story, together could “sink so low” (qtd. in Auerbach and Knoepflmacher 318). In any case, the book still sold on the Christmas market, and a few months later, Rossetti would publish Annus Domini, a benign pocketbook of daily prayers that stands in stark contrast to the grim prose of Speaking Likenesses. It is therefore tempting to cast this work of children's fiction as a strange anomaly in Rossetti's oeuvre, which from the 1870s, beginning with Annus Domini, to her death in 1894, became almost exclusively dominated by devotional prose and poetry. In contrast, I argue in the following essay that Speaking Likenesses points to a widespread interest throughout Rossetti's writing – but especially in her most well-known poems from Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) and A Prince's Progress (1866) – in alternative modes of sociality that refract a conceptual preoccupation with likeness, rather than difference. Following traditions of critical thought that have paid increasing attention to relations that resist oppositional logic – Stephanie Engelstein and Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick's late work comes to mind here – I establish the primacy of a horizontal axis of similarity in both Speaking Likenesses and Rossetti's most canonical poem, “Goblin Market.” For Rossetti, the lure of similarity, or minimal difference, manifests itself most often in siblinghood and more specifically, sisterhood, the dominant kinship relation throughout her lyrics from Goblin Market and Other Poems. Sisterhood anchors the title poem I will examine in this essay, as well as shorter verses such as “Noble Sisters” and “Sister Maude.” At issue in such relations of likeness is the discreteness of a (typically) feminine self. For Rossetti, shunning oppositional structures of desire and difference that typically produce individuation (exemplified in the heterosexual couple form and the titles of her uneasy lyrics “He and She” and “Wife to Husband”) allows for a new (albeit perilous) space to carve out one's particularity as a gendered being.

It is a well-known fact that many Victorian women writers such as the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell adopted pseudonyms or anonymity in publishing their literary works, but few people are aware of how such naming practices had been received by contemporary readers, especially by Victorian periodical reviewers – the very first readers and mediators that presented any major literary works to the public. Since we, as modern day scholars, have become so intimate with their present forms of author names appearing on course syllabuses, school curriculums, and academic papers, we hardly ask how such naming has become possible.

When T. S. Eliot famously called Wilkie Collins's 1868 novel The Moonstone “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels” (The Moonstone 1966, v), the implication, presumably, was that the “detectives” are the hero Franklin Blake and other English characters who carry out the detective function, such as the family lawyer, Mr. Bruff. In addition to a detective story, the novel has been read variously as imperialist, anti-imperialist, a narrative invested with economic undertones, and as an exploration of gift theory, among others. In all these iterations, however, the underlying assumption has been that the only real “detectives” in the novel are the English characters; it is they who solve the theft of the diamond and work to police it. The Brahmin priests, whose pursuit of the diamond parallels that of the English, have generally been viewed as peripheral to the main narrative; a marginal acknowledgement of the impact that India, in its various facets, had upon nineteenth-century English society. Vicki Corkran Willey calls the priests, tongue-in-cheek, “‘villains’. . . working in tandem with two other imported troublemakers – [John] Herncastle's stolen diamond and the drug, opium” (226). Timothy L. Carens describes them as practicing “dutiful self-renunciation” (246) in their search for the diamond, implying that passivity is inherent in such dutifulness, and Jenny Bourne Taylor suggests they are important only because of their use of “[c]lairvoyance [which] is projected on to them as a form of romantic fascination, [and] which they then internalize and represent” (193). Critics are in general agreement, then, that the priests are not central to the novel, and their involvement in the solving of the crime is minimal. The present essay will refute this perspective and argue that, in fact, the Brahmin priests are central to the narrative and far more active (and effective) policing agents than the English characters.

Parenting advice has become a booming industry as well as probably one of the most contested discourses. Its proliferation and continued diversification are often considered a particularly contemporary problem, yet the virulent marketing of “expert” advice on childrearing has its roots as much in the nineteenth-century publishing industry as in the overlapping Victorian cults of domesticity, maternity, and childhood. The nineteenth century saw an explosion of advice literature on the physical, moral, and intellectual education of infants and young children. Childrearing, or parenting, rapidly created a niche market, producing specialised manuals and magazines for mothers, the precursors of the current parenting advice literature. As Victorian novelists tapped into the anxieties that these publications both addressed and further fostered, they laid bare the pressure that the childrearing discourses were exerting on mothers, yet popular authors also quickly realised how their own writing offered a vehicle for specific conceptualisations of motherhood. Harrowing scenes were used to dramatise the effects of different parenting practices; protagonists’ quarrels about such practices served both as characterisation devices and as comments on ideological conflicts between different concepts of childrearing. In the most self-consciously insightful moments, the growing supply of information came itself under criticism. Victorian novelists actively participated in shaping and circulating parenting advice in print. The sensationalised nursery fascinatingly expressed the anxieties surrounding childrearing and showed how versatile the interpellation of mothering instructions in fiction could be.

The animal turn in studies of nineteenth-century imperialism has been a long time in coming. Scholars seeking to yoke together questions of nonhuman life and the domain of the colony have come to acknowledge, at long last, that the imperial landscape was not a purely human one. Only now, suggests John Miller, has the considerable scholarship on empire and the natural world made an impress upon Victorian literary studies (479). The animal turn, however, is not new in the scholarship on Rudyard Kipling. For Kipling, empire never was simply an affair of human beings; more perhaps than any other writer of the colonial experience, he saw imperialism as encompassing plural and multiply scaled orders of animate life. Henry James, an early admirer of Kipling's work, took disgusted note in 1897 of what seemed to him the simultaneous multitudinousness and diminution of the younger writer's fictional world: “My view of his prose future has much shrunken in light of one's increasingly observing how little life he can make use of. . . . In his earliest time I thought he perhaps contained the seeds of an English Balzac; but I have given that up in proportion as he has come down steadily from the simple in subject to the more simple–from the Anglo-Indians to the natives, from the natives to the Tommies, from the Tommies to the quadrupeds, from the quadrupeds to the fish, and from the fish to the engines and screws” (Page 49).

H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) has hitherto been read in two principal scientific contexts: those of evolutionary biology and thermodynamic physics. Numerous critics have situated the romance in the context of evolutionary biology and contemporary discourses of degeneration (McLean 11–40; Greenslade 32–41). Others have discussed it in the context of thermodynamic physics. For instance, Bruce Clarke has read The Time Machine as “a virtual allegory of classical thermodynamics,” and shows that its combination of physical and social entropy reflects a wider transfer within the period of concepts and metaphors from physical science to social discourses of degeneration (121–26). Neatly linking these scientific contexts with issues of form, Michael Sayeau has argued that the social and physical entropy that are themes of the romance are reflected in its narrative structure, which manifests a type of narrative entropy, and thereby raises the spectre of the end of fiction (109–46).

The very first line of Mary Augusta Ward's novel Marcella ends with the word “beautiful,” repeated twice, the second time in italics. In this paper I will argue that this symbolizes the central role of aesthetics in the novel in a discourse that engages the social criticism of John Ruskin and William Morris. Some scholars have assessed Marcella (1894) as having a retrograde ending of Marcella marrying a Tory politician and landowner. Judith Wilt's critical study of Ward is entitled Behind Her Times, an indication of the general view of Ward as a political conservative, although Wilt argues that she was also progressive in many ways, and Ward has enjoyed other nuanced, sensitive re-readings and assessments (Argyle; Sutton-Ramspeck). I, too, am arguing that Ward's political and social views in this novel are complex and mixed and that examining the novel's Victorian cultural discourses can illuminate complex socio-political content that draws on late-century art world debates. The very texture of Marcella belies an unstable view of class and social problems, as the eponymous protagonist goes through several stages of thinking and trial-and-error solutions, some socialist, to problems of poverty and class disparity.