John Stuart Mill famously writes in his Autobiography (1873) that reading William Wordsworth's poetry brought him relief when he was depressed. Exhausted by the “habit of analysis” instilled in him through his father's rigorous educational program, Mill recalls that “the state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of my reading Wordsworth for the first time . . . an important event in my life” (137, 146; ch. 5). He describes how he “took up the collection of [Wordsworth's] poems from curiosity, with no expectation of mental relief from it,” but fortuitously found “the precise thing for [his] mental wants at that particular juncture,” the delightful “states of feeling” the poems conjure in their renderings of beauty (146-48; ch. 5).

That an advertisement on fashionable clothing should reference a novel which ostensibly satirizes the world of fashion is not as striking as it seems. It points toward the affinity between clothes/body making and novel/book production, an affinity widely attested to in contemporary literature. An 1836 Court Magazine piece, for instance, puts it like this:

Dickens's comic account of a charity dinner for the “Indigent Orphans’ Friends Benevolent Institution” in his sketch “Public Dinners” (Sketches by ‘Boz’) is illustrated in the 1838 serial and 1839 volume editions with the image in Figure 2.

On the morning of 15 May 1855, career criminal Edward Agar and his associate, William Pierce, walked away from the London Bridge Station of the South-Eastern Railway Company with over £14,000 in stolen gold. The bullion was the property of the City of London merchants, whose intention had been to ship the bars via train to Dover and then on to Calais by ferry. Security was comprehensive and the success of Agar's en route interception was made possible only through labor-intensive planning and meticulous execution. It was the type of job in which the thief specialized. Even before what would become known as the “Great Bullion Robbery,” Agar's criminal diligence and self-drive had provided him with the monetary resources to establish himself in the wealthy, middle-class suburb of Cambridge Villas, where he enjoyed a reputation as a consummate gentleman. Throughout Agar's planning of the bullion heist, his neighbors remained entirely unaware that his home was headquarters to an extensive criminal ring.

“The nation state . . . found the novel. And vice versa: the novel found the nation-state” (Moretti 17). Franco Moretti's famous formulation has proved as partial as it is influential, challenged by a growing body of transnational scholarship. It is challenged as well by a different set of novels from the canonical ones Moretti has in mind: working-class penny fiction. Given the inequities of society, it is not surprising that this literature expresses a more complicated relationship to England. The working classes laid claim to England itself, insisting that their autochthonic status made them its true sons but that within the nation-state they were subjects, not citizens. The gap between this deep sense of belonging and formal political exclusion structures hundreds of penny novels produced in the mid-nineteenth century.

In a controversial article on the life and fiction of Charles Dickens, George H. Lewes ponders the inexplicable preference of readers for the novelist's too-simplistic characters over the more complex characters of other writers. He finds an answer in the primitive reaction to fine art: “To a savage there is so little suggestion of a human face and form in a painted portrait that it is not even recognized as the representation of a man” (“Dickens” 150). The implication, it would seem, is that readers turn to Dickens because they are similarly incapable of appreciating more refined modes of art. Today the remark reads as gratuitous and insulting to readers, to Dickens, and to the other cultures Lewes stereotypes as savage. At the same time, the casual nature of the passage also suggests that it reflects commonly held beliefs about primitive life, beliefs we do not have but that Lewes and his readers took for granted. He was clearly safe in assuming such a body of common knowledge, for many other articles in the Fortnightly Review (in which Lewes's article appeared in 1872) had similar references to primitivism. Reading through the journal issues of the time, the extent to which anthropological concepts had escaped the covers of books on primitive society and taken up residence in the pages of review essays on contemporary issues – from history, to life in the colonies, to life in Britain itself – is striking. In its print context, the comment about savages and art is less isolated and inexplicable than it is representative of a broad turn to the topic of primitivism in social commentary and analysis during the 1870s.

For decades now, Christina Rossetti's poetry has proven to be a rich vantage point from which to explore the complexity of Victorian attitudes toward the material world. This is certainly true of her most famous poem, “Goblin Market.” Deliciously steeped in the sensual experiences it simultaneously condemns, “Goblin Market” is a poem invested – ambiguously, for most critics – in the relationship between humans and material things: the things they buy, look at, feel, taste. This is a relationship we tend to consider in terms of commodity culture and economic exchange. And such a reading makes sense: Rossetti's poem, a tale of two sisters whose domesticity is disrupted by the tramp of mysterious goblin men selling fruit from unknown climes, grapples in many ways with these exact terms. Laura (who barters a lock of hair for the goblin fruit and then begins to waste away from an insatiable appetite) and Lizzie (who saves her sister by bringing home an antidote in the form of fruit juice, which she herself has refused to consume) seem to embody the potential dangers faced by the female consumer. Indeed, so much has been written about the relationship between women and consumer culture in “Goblin Market” that it nearly qualifies as its own subfield in Victorian studies.

In the early months of 2012 excitement built for the initial public offering of Facebook, the behemoth social media company with the boy-wonder CEO. Two days before shares began trading on May 18, the IPO was expected to generate $16 billion for the company, placing it third after General Motors and Visa in the list of largest IPOs in the United States to that date. In the “frenzy” leading up to the IPO, the New York Times reported waiting lists at events for potential investors and speculation about where “newly minted Facebook billionaires” would go for a drink, while the company revealed its plans to celebrate with a “hackathon” featuring employee DJs and Red Bull (Rusli and Eavis).

In multiple entries in his notebooks, Robert Louis Stevenson pauses to consider the failure of scientific language to communicate the abstractions that undergird its theoretical models of natural processes. In failing to make the operations of the physical world speak, materialist discourse suffers from a terminological disorder. His diagnosis is sweeping and acerbic: “Scientific language like most other language is extremely unsatisfactory” (“Note Book” 300). In what follows I will argue that over the course of several key essays of the 1880s and his most famous work of fiction, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Stevenson aims to redress the fundamental abstraction of the most prominent materialist doctrine of his day, Darwinian evolutionary theory, rendering it viscerally communicable in the figure of Hyde, who represents both the individual organism subject to the pervasive modifying forces of speciation and the embodiment, in a single yet fluctuating corporeal entity, of those very forces. Further to this, I will propose that in imagining Hyde's genesis at the laboratory table (the result of Jekyll's incursions into nature) and in placing Hyde in symbiosis with the London fog (the admixture of natural forces and human intervention in the form of the burning of fossil fuels), Strange Case can be added to the body of literature that hails the dawning of the Anthropocene, famously defined by Paul Crutzen as the “human-dominated geological epoch supplementing the Holocene” in which the human has become “a major environmental force” (23). The figure of Hyde thus manifests evolutionary forces in all their teeming presence while also harkening the new forms of subjectivity emerging from our catastrophic agency in the present era – one in which the human has become, in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, a “geophysical force” (13).

In their evaluation ofJude the Obscure (1895), some earlier literary critics have justifiably (given the historical context) judged the text by the standards of the then dominant and sustained New Criticism trend, taking into account its symbiotic relationship with modernist aesthetics. The basic premise behind this conception was the aesthetic notion of structural and thematic unity as well as coherence and integrity of character. These notions were high on the agenda of the New Criticism of the 1940s and onwards. The narrative was found most lacking in this respect. An article entitled, “Hardy and the Fragmentation of Consciousness” (1975) by Harold L. Weatherby, a foremost Hardy critic, serves as an outstanding example of such a critical view. It makes the case that what ails Jude is its unruliness and disjunctiveness: “the brilliance of the novel's peripheries can scarcely compensate for a profound weakness at its center. Indeed the centre cannot hold: the book falls into fragments” (“Hardy” 469). Weatherby continues, arguing that “There is no unified authorial consciousness” (470), that “Hardy as narrator contradicts himself repeatedly in his estimation of what is right or wrong, good or bad, for his characters” (470), and that it is “an artistic failure . . . failing to achieve unity and coherence” (479). Hardy, in addition, is undeservedly dismissed as “the old-fashioned man from Wessex” (483) – which reminds us of the well-known “good little Thomas Hardy” epithets of Henry James's adverse judgment (Cox xxxi). The article also associates incoherence and contradictions in the narrative with attitudinal ambivalences in Hardy's own mind (473, 476). Undeniably, Jude is permeated with incoherence. Who can disagree? It is deeply involved in sustained and unsettled opposition and what may be termed the play of Derridean différance (Positions 14). And, indeed, Hardy himself acknowledges the tangle of disconnections and self-contradictions disrupting the stability of character in a notebook admission (which shows it to be his design):

Natsume Soseki arrived in London in October 1900, with great expectations, both his own and those of the Japanese government officials who sponsored his scholarship to study abroad for two years. Soseki would eventually become one of the most important figures in modern Japanese literature, featured on Japan's 1000-yen note from 1984 to 2004; before he wrote the novels that earned him such fame – including I Am a Cat (1906), And Then (1910), and Kokoro (1914) – Soseki, who was then a young English teacher in the Japanese provinces, was sent to study English language and literature as part of Japan's large-scale modernization and westernization efforts, following the “opening” of Japan to the West by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1854 and the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Soseki's London sojourn coincided with the peak of British imperial might and also Japan's emergence as a world power. Soseki witnessed numerous important historical events as the Victorian era drew to a close, including the return of troops from the second Boer War and Queen Victoria's funeral procession. Following the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, Japan won major financial and territorial concessions from China, a sign of Japan's new military power and ambition. Indeed, much of the funding for the “rapid expansion of the Japanese higher education system” came from these war reparations that “essentially bankrupted the Chinese government, hastening the downfall of the Qing Dynasty and the Sino-centric order in Asian culture. . . . Soseki's journey to London – metropole of the British Empire – was part and parcel of the geopolitical rise of one empire and the fall of another” (Bourdaghs, Ueda, and Murphy 4). Questions of empire and the relative strength of nations were very much on Soseki's mind during his time in London. During what was then a fifty-day journey by sea from Japan to England, “all ports between Yokohama and Marseilles were under British, French, or Dutch rule” (Hirakawa 171).

The novels of Indian writer A. Madhaviah (1872–1925) are deeply ambivalent toward British Protestant missions in the Madras Presidency. The son of a Brahmin family from the Tirunelveli District in what is now the state of Tamil Nadu, Madhaviah had the opportunity to form close intellectual relationships with British missionaries and Indian Christian converts while studying for his B.A. at the Madras Christian College, completing his degree in 1892. Although he remained a Hindu throughout his life, Madhaviah's first English novel, Thillai Govindan (1903), praises some missionaries for their moral characters, naming in particular the Madras Christian College's principal, William Miller (1838–1923); however, the same novel also criticizes other unnamed Madras missionaries for extravagant lifestyles that squandered the money of unsuspecting supporters in Britain (64). Madhaviah's deep commitment to late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Indian women's reform movements, including widow remarriage, the abolition of child marriage, and women's education, meant that he often agreed with British missionaries championing similar reforms in Indian society. However, his early novels also criticize the proselytizing activities of missionaries, particularly in educational settings. In his Tamil novel Padmavati Carittiram (1898, 1899) and English novel Satyananda (1909), Madhaviah exposes missionary attempts to take advantage of a young pupil's inexperience in an educational setting or to exploit a quarrel between pupil and family members to secure a conversion. Yet in contrast, Madhaviah's final English novel, Clarinda: A Historical Novel (1915), offers perhaps the most positive depiction of an Indian Christian conversion in his fiction. A historical novel that reimagines the life of a renowned eighteenth-century Marathi Brahmin woman convert living in Thanjavur, Madhaviah's Clarinda offers Christian conversion as a liberating decision for the young Clarinda. Her conversion allows her as a widow to escape the patriarchal control of her abusive husband's family and to contribute to her community as a philanthropist and an early social reformer. While Madhaviah remained critical of certain conversion tactics, which could transgress ethical boundaries, Madhaviah also acknowledged that missionary goals for women's improved lot within society often intersected with his own convictions.

Herbert Sussman, Editor

The Morbid and the Trendy

ANN C. COLLEY

Oscar Wilde and the Queer Time of Imprisonment at Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison

GREGORY SALTER

In a 1990 review of Jenny Bourne Taylor's In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (1988), Lawrence Rothfield commented that the book explores what “until recently might have seemed a bizarrely specialized cultural context and an equally obscure literary phenomenon” (97). Rothfield argued that Taylor's study was representative of the recent move to new historicist methodologies, which made contexts and authors once considered to be historical footnotes important to scholarship. Prior to that shift, “[n]ineteenth-century English psychology, a mishmash of scientifically dubious theories and practices such as phrenology, physiognomy, moral management, and mesmerism, hardly seemed key to understanding the broad cultural issues of concern as traditionally construed in Victorian studies” (97). Strikingly, now some twenty-five years later, knowledge of nineteenth-century psychology seems essential to the field. Presses, alert to that shift, have republished out-of-print literary studies that explored Victorian literature in relation to psychology in the years preceding the current surge of interest in the subject. (Faas's 1989 Retreat into the Mind: Victorian Poetry and the Rise of Psychiatry was reissued by Princeton University Press in a 2016 hardcover edition. Kearns's 1987 Metaphors of Mind in Fiction and Psychology was reissued in 2014 by the University of Kentucky Press.) Judging by the number of publications in the area, as well as by titles on the programs of recent conferences, the sciences of the mind have become one of the central topics in Victorian studies.