This article analyzes the tension between the active, present body and the absent, passive body in this medical case study, presented by doctor and prosthetist Henry Robert Heather Bigg in his 1885 book Artificial Limbs and the Amputations which Afford the Most Appropriate Stumps in Civil and Military Surgery. I reproduce Bigg's account in its entirety because, to date, Artificial Limbs has not been digitised, although it is held at around a dozen academic libraries in the UK and USA respectively. Bringing attention to and providing a close reading of a source not previously discussed academically sheds new light on the way the disabled body was read by medical professionals in the second half of the nineteenth century. In addition, I consider Bigg's narrative rendering of this unique case study alongside several contemporary sources, including memoirs, novels, short stories, and journal articles. In doing so, I identify how assumptions made by Bigg about the (disabled, female, privileged) hand mirror and echo those in the wider cultural sphere. The sensing hand is an instrument of will, and the creation of such a prosthesis troubles the dynamics of active and passive, touching and touched that Pamela K. Gilbert has identified as crucial to nineteenth-century discourses surrounding the hand. By designing and making this prosthesis, Bigg exerts his professional and masculine agency to make the woman's body assume the position of something beheld rather than embodied.

A story titled “The Impressionists” that was published in 1897 should have something to say about art, but does it? The sixth installment in Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co. series, “The Impressionists” follows the antics of M'Turk, Stalky, and Beetle, three cunning boys at a dreary English military preparatory school. Suspecting these boys of cheating on their schoolwork, housemaster Mr. Prout turns them out of their private study into the main house dormitory. For revenge, and hoping to win back their room, Stalky & Co. become agents provocateurs. They start a fight in their house and manage to involve the other housemasters’ houses: “Under cover of the confusion the three escaped to the corridor, whence they called in and sent up passers-by to the fray. ‘Rescue, King's! King's! King's! Number Twelve form-room! Rescue, Prout's – Prout's! Rescue, Macrea's! Rescue, Hartopp's!’” (102). The three boys then allow Mr. Prout to overhear a conversation that makes money-lending seem common practice in the houses: “‘Where's that shillin’ you owe me?’ said Beetle suddenly. Stalky could not see Prout behind him, but returned the lead without a quaver. ‘I only owed you ninepence, you old usurer’” (103). Stalky & Co. rile up the other boys by telling ghost stories and spreading slanderous ditties; they turn the house against the prefects and undermine Mr. Prout's authority; and in the end they win back their room, but they are also found out by the headmaster, who mixes corporeal punishment with his admonishments: “There is a limit – one finds it by experience, Beetle – beyond which it is never safe to pursue private vendettas, because – don't move – sooner or later one comes – into collision with the – higher authority, who has studied the animal. Et ego – M'Turk, please – in Arcadia vixi” (117). The boys take the headmaster's attentions as a compliment, and they take his advice. Never again do they stake the school's peace in the pursuit of their own ends.

Nineteenth-century religious ideology is adamant about the spiritual outcome that should arise from the experience of illness: “The time of sickness is a season when every afflicted person should resolve, with the assistance of God's grace that if his health be restored, he will ever afterwards live a truly religious life” (Church of England Tract Society, Manual of Instructions 8). However, sickroom visitors consistently report that, even when a patient makes such a resolution, physical recovery often coincides with a spiritual relapse. As one writer laments, “The friends of religion, whose warning and consoling voices are heard at the bed of sickness, are often compelled to witness the dispersion of their fairest prospects of good, at the period of returning health” (Fry, A Present for the Convalescent vii-viii).

The Great Stink of London took place one year before the publication of George Eliot's The Lifted Veil (1859). As a peak sanitary crisis, the Great Stink helps us to understand the particular telepathy of Eliot's narrator, since The Lifted Veil combines the rhetoric of telepathy with that of a more threatening form of transmission among bodies: foul odor and contagious air. Throughout the figurative structure of Eliot's story, tropes that convey the narrator's ostensibly supernatural experience contain traces – sometimes cryptic, sometimes explicit – of the earthly matter of sanitary crisis. The first section of this essay explores the sanitary dimension of The Lifted Veil, linking the story to sanitary crisis and to Victorian materialist psychology – particularly the work of George Henry Lewes – which conceived mind in physical terms. With the role of sanitation established, the second section shows the importance of the sense of smell to Latimer's first-person narration of telepathy. This section outlines the transition, contemporaneous with sanitary reform, from the use of animal to the use of vegetable perfumes. Throughout the story, vegetable scents act as prophylaxes against the narrator's too-physical telepathy. From these readings, it becomes clear that Eliot writes “extrasensory” perception with recourse to sensory figures. Telepathy and sanitation overlap in this exceptional gothic science fiction in such a way as to demand a new concept of olfactory telepathy.

In Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 short story “Green Tea,” the Reverend Mr. Robert Lynder Jennings becomes obsessively engaged in a potentially subversive research project on ancient pagans, and finds himself experimenting with green tea as a stimulant to sharpen his mind, boost his productivity, and maintain his stamina through long, sleepless nights bent over books. One day, while riding an omnibus, Jennings sees two piercing deep red eyes staring at him, and gradually realises that they belong to a small black monkey, which was “pushing its face forward in mimicry to meet mine” (23). At first fancying the creature to be the “ugly pet” (23) of a fellow traveller, Jennings attempts to ascertain the monkey's mood, and “poked my umbrella softly towards it. It remained immovable – up to it – through it!” (23–24). Gradually, he becomes convinced of the creature's demonic nature, and this grinning, screeching vision persecutes Jennings for the rest of his days, sitting on his books and interrupting him while he studies, shrieking curses and blasphemies to drown out his prayers, soliciting him to perform evil acts, and finally, commanding him to commit suicide, which he does, slitting his own throat with a single-edged razor. In the final analysis offered by Jennings's physician and confidant, the metaphysical doctor Martin Hesselius, a significant contributing cause to Jennings's nightmarish experience was his gradual self-poisoning by green tea.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century future or speculative fiction became big business in Britain. It was a safe haven for invasion narratives, for socialist paradises or hells, for worlds ruled by benevolent machines, or worlds ruined by mechanical dependence. Themes and plots were varied, but they always reflected some facet of contemporary society. The future was not a bubble, untouched by time or trouble, but a field of battle, where ideas could be tested and philosophies given a test drive. The future was a place where the mistakes or triumphs of today dictated the course of human progress. I argue in this essay that the nascent ideas about euthanasia of the early and middle Victorian period became full-fledged philosophies in the late-Victorian period and that Malthusian philosophy and Darwinian-informed theories were manipulated by novelist and theorist-turned- novelists, resulting in euthanasia becoming a tool in class warfare and in the fight to eradicate social undesirables for their good and for the good of society.

In 1892 the celebrated physicist and chemist William Crookes commented on the existence of “an almost infinite range of ethereal vibrations or electrical rays,” which he believed could revolutionize telegraphic communications (174). A few years later, and aided by Crookes's experiments with vacuums, the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen successfully produced X-rays, a hitherto unrecorded form of electromagnetic radiation, which he tantalizingly described as “a new kind of invisible light” (Röntgen 413; Warner 256). Crookes was quick to speculate as to “the possibility of links between roentgen rays and the cerebral ganglia,” that an undiscovered organ in the brain might be “capable of transmitting and receiving . . . electrical rays” (Lyons 105; Crookes 176). X-rays, he thought, might prove a psychic counterpart to higher wavelength radio waves, allowing the transmission of messages telepathically rather than telegraphically, and even communication with the world of the spirits (Lyons 105). Crookes theorized that the parapsychological was intimately entwined with the findings of contemporary physics, occupying different zones of the same electromagnetic spectrum. An ardent Spiritualist, he believed that the ether, the “impalpable, invisible entity, by which all space is supposed to be filled” and which contained countless “channels of communication” also sustained “ghost-light . . . invisible to the naked eye” and acted as a medium that allowed “ethereal bodies to rise up” (Crookes 174; Warner 253–56). In other words, the matter through which light and electrical signals passed was envisaged as the same substance which allowed the spirits to fluctuate between visible and invisible forms. These links between the electromagnetic field and the occult, endorsed by Crookes and certain other members of his circles such as the Society for Psychical Research, anticipated turn-of-the-century associations between electricity, radiation and ancient Egypt which, through its reputation as the birthplace of magic, was central to Victorian conceptions of the supernatural.

H. G. Wells's 1908 novel Tono-Bungay is a remarkable concoction, binding together characters and setting out of Dickens, sparkling imitations of fin-de-siécle commodity culture and new media, bitter social satire inflected by Wells's socialism, fascination with invention and flight, and murderous imperial adventure. Readers, though often seduced by the wit and precision of Wells's depiction of patent medicines and their advertisements, have not known whether to read the narrative as anti-Bildungsroman, Condition of England novel, science fiction, or imperial romance. It is no wonder that many critics have labeled this novel a failure.

Writing as recently as 2011, Michael Bennett asks if Salomé is an anomaly in the oeuvre of Oscar Wilde (viii). Read against his witty societal comedies of manners, it certainly appears to be one. Salomé has been regarded as a fine example of symbolist drama in the history of British theatre, and few critics would dispute its “seriousness” as such. Its growing significance in recent discourses of gender and sexuality also adds seriousness to the play. Although Feminist and gender critics show little qualms about dubbing the play as symbolist, the final tableau of a young girl kissing the mouth of the severed head seems to me at odds with symbolism, whether Salomé is seen as an archetypal femme fatale, a queer man in disguise, or a New Woman as critics argue. Symbolism in Wilde's Salomé is widely different from other specimens of the genre such as Yeats's The Countess Cathleen, for instance, which directly deals with a spiritual issue of the salvation of soul. Salomé also lacks the fatalistic sense of doom that dominates Maeterlinck's Princess Maleine, with which it is often compared. Wilde's wayward heroine is not a victim of the invisible forces in the same way Maeterlinck's characters are. Wilde's Salomé is “monstrous,” as Herod says: she seems to commit “a crime against some unknown God” (Complete Works 604). How can we reconcile her cruel passion of carnal desire with the supposed spirituality of the symbolist tradition? Also problematic in a symbolist reading of the play is the presence of the comic and the parodic, as pointed out by many critics. Is Wilde's Salomé an authentic symbolist drama?

Charles Kingsley's children's novelThe Water-Babies (WB), written in the spring and summer of 1862, is a politically anxious text. In this essay I argue that although The Water-Babies’ overall structure appears to be chaotic and arbitrary – J. M. I. Klaver, for example, deems the work a “Victorian fantasy crowded with Kingsley's hobby-horses” where he “pour[s] out whatever he had on his mind” (517) – in fact Kingsley's disquietude concerning the Irish Famine, U.S. slavery, and the condition of the British working classes provides a logical framework for the text.

Herbert Sussman, Editor

Alice in Manhattan

U. C. KNOEPFLMACHER

Facing Britain's Imperial Past?

KATE NICHOLS

The Victorian Art Scene in 2016: Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists and Marie Spartali

Stillman's Overdue Retrospective in the UK

MARGARET D. STETZ

The Fallen Woman

HILARY FRASER