WITH AMPLE SELECTIONS FROM contemporary family letters, the sixth chapter of E. M. Forster's Marianne Thornton: A Domestic Biography (1956), entitled “Deceased Wife's Sister,” narrates the story of “a fantastic mishap” that the members of his grandparents' generation “could only regard as tragic” (189). After the death of his first wife, Harriet, in 1840, Henry Thornton decided to take another – Harriet's younger sister Emily – and at once, “the situation became very awkward” (190). Having lived with Henry all her life, his sister Marianne “behaved civilly” (190) to Emily Dealtry, who “had continued to frequent the house” after Harriet's demise, helping “to look after her nephew and her nieces” (189), but another Thornton sister, Isabella, “refused to see her anywhere” (190). Spending “vast sums” without success “in trying to get the 1850 bill passed” (192) – a bill that would have repealed the 1835 statute invalidating all such future marriages – Henry closed up the family home and took Emily, her mother, and his own daughters abroad to solemnize the marriage in one of the many European states where these unions were legal. Appalled, the rest of his nine siblings, most of them married, worked to maintain a united front. Upon Henry and Emily's return to England, they prevailed upon the susceptible Marianne to stay away from Battersea Rise, the family home: even “a single visit” from her, Forster's clerical grandfather insisted, “will be magnified into countenance and approval by a leading member of the family: and every artifice be employed to draw others in …. In the mind of society the family may become mixed with the offenders: and real injury be done without any resultant benefit” (214). By this act on the part of “the Master, the Inheritor, who had betrayed his trust,” Forster characterizes the other members of the family as “excluded for ever” from their ancestral home “unless they bent the knee to immorality, which was unthinkable” (205). Marking his own distance from Thornton family values, Forster comments, “to the moralist, so much discomfort will seem appropriate. To the amoralist it will offer yet another example of the cruelty and stupidity of the English law in matters of sex” (210).

IN HIS INTRODUCTION to The Question of the Gift, Mark Osteen claims that “economism … is the land mine of gift theory” (5). For many theorists, he explains, gift-giving and market exchanges share the same forms of calculation; for others, more specifically, self-interest is the “objective truth” of the gift. The challenge that gift discourse has taken up in recent years is how to rethink reciprocity, altruism, and generosity while at the same time avoiding both the “Scylla of sentimentality and the Charybdis of economism” (Osteen 31). In this paper I discuss Dinah Mulock Craik's mid-Victorian bestseller, John Halifax, Gentleman (1856), using gift theory (or some insights thereof) as my main analytical tool. Why is gift theory relevant to the understanding of a novel that openly extols the advantages of self-help and economic individualism?

IN THE PREFACE TO HER twenty-five volume series of novellas, Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–33), Harriet Martineau advertises her attempt to popularize the emergent science of political economy. However, at the same time that she justifies her plan to illustrate various principles of political economy through her use of narrative form, Martineau goes further, arguing for the global scope and significance of this contested and often misunderstood new science. Toward the close of her preface, she writes:

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY'SVanity Fair (1847–48) makes a passing reference to a seemingly insignificant trope, the “Black Hole of Calcutta.” Part of an eighteenth-century legacy of unofficial rule in India by the East India Trading Company, this reference to a prison incident in June 1756 rehashes the event that occurred there – nearly one hundred years before the novel was published. The name, the “Black Hole,” evokes the prison itself: an enormous pit dug deep into the ground “eighteenth feet long by fourteen feet, ten inches wide,” according to social historian Brijen K. Gupta. It was “British” in the sense that East India Company agents stationed on-the-ground in Calcutta controlled this makeshift dungeon, using it to enforce local trade agreements with native authorities. Those who intervened were deemed traitors, the worst offenders of state.

“HE IS (NOT) A GENTLEMAN” is a verdict that we frequently encounter in Trollope's novels. The writer's concern with defining the English gentleman is virtually obsessive; however, his effort is fraught with numerous frustrating contradictions, reflecting the Victorians’ struggle to decide what constitutes exemplary masculinity. In some instances, Trollope's gentleman is a product of a certain class, while in others such elusive and intangible criteria as physical appearance and moral conduct come to define him. Despite the perennial identification of the name “Trollope” and Trollope's writing with thoroughly conventional ways of constructing gender, I argue that his gentleman is an expression of his nostalgia for an ideal of manhood that possesses traditionally feminine characteristics.

Here, we had better stop, though we have not told half that might be related on the subject of buttons. It is wonderful, is it not? That on that small pivot turns the fortune of such multitudes of men, women, and children, in so many parts of the world; that such industry; and so many fine faculties, should be brought out and exercised by so small a thing as the Button.

—“What There Is in a Button,” Harriet Martineau (1852)

FROM “MY LAST DUCHESS” to The Picture of Dorian Gray, portraits are ubiquitous in Victorian literature – lurking behind velvet curtains or stowed in locked attics, their canvases turned to the wall. The literary portrait, a variation on the copious nineteenth-century description typical of the Victorian novel, provides a verbal representation of physical appearance that most conspicuously functions to establish character. Literary portraits work vicariously, asking readers to conceptualize imaginatively what the characters actually see, requiring that they visualize a painting – see it in their mind's eye. Verbal and visual, private and portable, the literary portrait is a memento of an exciting reading experience. To better understand the appeal of literary portraits in the Victorian era, we might explore the effects of verbal description and the psychosexual impulses motivating the production of literary portraits. Victorian literary portraits commonly fetishize female subjects for a purportedly male gaze; even post-Freud, psychoanalysts view fetishism as a primarily masculine proclivity (Metz 89). Novels such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), to name only one among many, present a fetishistic portrait that seems to be a classic illustration of Mulvey's observation that “[i]n a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female” (11). Film theory offers literary critics ways to theorize specularization – the behavior of “looking” – that precinematic viewers could not yet articulate.

POSTCOLONIAL READINGS OFJane Eyre have often highlighted the historical occlusion of West Indian slavery in the novel. Carl Plasa, for instance, argues thatPenny Boumelha points out that by her reckoning there are “ten explicit references to slavery in Jane Eyre. They allude to slavery in Ancient Rome and in the seraglio, to the slaveries of paid work as a governess and of dependence as a mistress. None of them refers to the slave trade upon which the fortunes of all in the novel are based” (62). While Jane Eyre's allusion to slavery in the seraglio is indeed the most precise historical allusion in the novel, critics working with general schemes of slave and imperial history have not been able to identify or unpack its topical reference to an anomalous moment in the history of British abolition of slavery. Like all of Jane's references to slavery, however, this allusion gains considerably in importance when read against that history, as I will demonstrate in this essay. I will also elaborate the generic and more broadly historical intertextuality of Jane's Gothic narratives of identification with the slave. By doing so, I disclose further meanings of slavery and empire in Jane Eyre, as well as the ways in which Gothic and heroic modes become a means, for Brontë and her characters alike, of articulating fraught racialized identifications and disavowals. Jane's growth of religious feeling, which Barbara Hardy has influentially suggested is taken “for granted” rather than demonstrated (66), is, I argue, grounded in her consciousness of the tensions between slavery and Christianity as they are played out in domestic and imperial spheres at a particular historical moment. That historical moment may be established through Brontë's allusions to slave rebellions and charters, and to a particular edition of Sir Walter Scott's poem Marmion.

“THE PRINCESS,” TENNYSON's narrative poem about a radically feminist princess and a cross-dressing prince, framed by an imagined argument between Victorian men and women concerning the role of women in modern society, has, understandably, formed the central text in a number of articles about nineteenth-century gender poetics. Critics have been eager to engage with the fictional authors of the narrative, casting Tennyson as, on the one hand, a bastion of Victorian patriarchy, and on the other a subversive feminist. Donald E. Hall, in an essay, published in his collection Fixing Patriarchy, is the most persuasive advocate for a masculinist Tennyson, presenting “The Princess” as undertaking a project of “subsumption,” in which the words and demands of the women are “ingested, modified and incorporated by the patriarch” (46). In an article entitled: “Marginalized Musical Interludes: Tennyson's Critiques of Conventionality in ‘The Princess,’“ Alisa Clapp-Itnyre provides a representative case for the defence, presenting the lyrics as “pivotal feminist commentaries” that work to interrupt and deconstruct the male narrative (229). Herbert Tucker locates a third way, identifying the poem as a “textbook Victorian compromise” (Tennyson 352). He argues that it “avoids taking a position on a hotly debated issue by taking up any number of positions” and characterizes this compromise, not as a commitment to portraying a complex contemporary issue with integrity, but as the result of Tennyson's not caring particularly either way: “neither the rallying of Victorian feminism” he writes, “nor the patriarchal status quo was sufficient stimulus to commitment” (352). In order to open up a new line of enquiry into “The Princess” I would like to look beyond the gender questions that continue to be batted back and forth amongst Tennyson's critics and to offer the figure of the child as an alternative and more powerful cultural, aesthetic and professional stimulus to Tennyson's poem.

“One of the very worst books of that abominable class!” exclaimed the old lawyer, opening at the coloured frontispiece, from which brazen Miss Random smiled bewitchingly out, as if she had no doubt of captivating Time and all his veterans on a fair field. “Pah!” he shut her to with the energy he would have given to the office of publicly slapping her face.

—George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel

Promiscuous adj. 1. Consisting of diverse and unrelated parts or individuals; confused. 2. Lacking standards of selection; indiscriminate. 3. Indiscriminate in sexual relations. 4. Casual; random. [Latin promiscuus, mixed: pro (intensifier), thoroughly + miscere, to mix.]

—American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

THE POWER THAT COMES FROM being English in the Victorian period is crucially dependent on a categorizing imperative that establishes and structures a series of distinctions such as those between citizen and foreigner, colonizer and colonized, and metropole and colony. These distinctions have epistemological borders that require policing, as do all cross-border interactions that threaten to muddy the imperial landscape with unsanctioned forms of knowledge and affiliation. It is against such a framework of constraints for understanding the regulation of Englishness that the story of the Jamaican-born Mary Seacole and her self-styled role as “Mother” Seacole to British soldiers during the Crimean War appears particularly pregnant with bothersome possibilities. Seeking self-consciously to identify herself with the “mother” country and the imperial metropole, she constantly tests the waters of reception by English society in the mid-nineteenth century. Seacole deploys the image of her racially different body in various noticeably frontier places, mainly Panama and the Crimea, to induce a recognition of herself, if not as English, then as at least functionally so. In so doing, she disrupts the claim to cultural or national identity that is frequently grounded in racial and geographical specificity. She puts strain on the idea of Englishness as foreclosed essence, demonstrating through performance and reiteration its irreducibly performative nature as discourse.

IT IS WELL KNOWN that both traditional, historically orientated, literary criticism and new-critical studies were inseparable from a belief in the “unity” of meaning – a belief in the existence, below the multicolored surface of the literary text, of a single semantic center, which unifies the text and turns it into an “organic whole.” Similarly, Russian Formalists and Prague Structuralists, though critical of the notion of the “organic whole” and its use in art criticism by the Neo-Romantics and the Symbolists, never questioned the alleged semantic unity of the literary text. An alternative approach to the problem of meaning was developed in the early books of Michel Foucault and conceptualized in his Archeology of Knowledge; he described meaning as “dispersal” and “dissemination.” A little later, in Dissemination and On Grammatology, Jacques Derrida radicalized Foucault's position by questioning the existence of clear-cut boundaries for Foucault's semantic “dissemination,” and he applied this notion in both philosophy and literary criticism. The resultant polemics between the two major approaches to the problem of the organization of meaning in the literary text caused the extreme polarization of literary studies; moreover, this polemics was often based on the tacit assumption that there exist only these two possibilities of the formal description of such organization: it should be described as either “unity” or “dissemination.” At the same time, from the logical, a priori, point of view, these terms describe only the poles of possible organization of meaning; moreover, practical criticism tends to show that both pure “unity” of meaning and its pure “dissemination” are very rarely found in literary texts. Thus, it seems to me, that those scholars who work in the field of literary criticism and cultural theory should attempt to create more complex and more precise models of the organization of meaning, which will transcend the dichotomy of “unity” and “dissemination.” One of these such models, the model of “semantic counterpoint,” is described and exemplified in this paper.

IN 1877, AS AN OXFORD UNDERGRADUATE, Oscar Wilde was invited to fill out two pages of a “Confession Album,” an informal survey of his likes, dislikes, ambitions, and fears. Wilde's answers testify to his deep appreciation for all things Greek: his favorite authors include Plato, Sappho, and Theocritus; he would hate to part with his Euripides; he admires Alexander the Great. But when faced with a question regarding the place he would most like to live, Wilde chooses not Athens or Argos but “Florence and Rome”; and when asked about the historical period in which he would most liked to have lived, Wilde opts for “the Italian Renaissance” (Holland 44–45). As there was no room on the form for Wilde to expand on this statement, we can only speculate as to why he saw Renaissance Italy as a time and a place in which he would have felt at home. But what the response tells us for certain is that while he was at Oxford, Wilde found the culture of Quattro- and Cinquecento Italy particularly appealing, was comfortable imagining himself as part of that period, and was prepared to acknowledge his enthusiasm for the period to his friends. Moreover, it shows that while Wilde may have treasured the cultural artifacts of ancient Greece as a young man, he was more eager to experience the whole way of life captured in the idea of the Italian Renaissance.

“… of Night, but not of Sleep” James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night

JAMES (BV) THOMSON'S insomnia is well documented. Bertram Dobell's memoir of the poet makes several mentions of it, as do critics of his work such as Robert Crawford, Edwin Morgan, and William Sharpe. Although widely acknowledged and noted as a significant biographical detail by critics, Thomson's insomnia has not been examined in terms of its relation to the specifically apocalyptic tone in some of his work. It is this curious relationship and its implications for the reading of his long poem The City of Dreadful Night which form the focus of this paper.

VICTORIANS WERE IN LOVE WITH natural history. David Allen describes their passion as a series of crazes – over geology, over shells, and over ferns, as in pteridomania (mania over ferns) – to cite just a very few examples. Lynn Merrill, on the other hand, delineates a more comprehensive, cultural romance, one extending over many years. Whatever we choose to call this love, we are still in the process of discovering just how deep and lasting it was. Like many love affairs, it was marked at first by a blush enthusiasm and fascination with otherness. This was followed by curiosity and a rage to risk self in the quest to know more about the other – and sometimes, as a result, by ridiculous missteps. Think of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes sloshing around at the seashore, ill-equipped but determined to find out enough to write about what they were trying to capture and study. Or recall Mary Kingsley out in Africa in a canoe propelled by several Congolese, tumbling out of the boat but saving her trusted copy of Albert Günther's 1880 Introduction to the Study of Fishes, tenacious in her desire to bring back labeled specimens to the British Museum of Natural history. Earlier, in a similarly resolute quest to record birdlife, John and Elizabeth Gould globe-trotted to the extent that they put Elizabeth's life and their growing family at risk. And people like explorer/naturalist Thomas Bowdich died of fever for their fervor over natural history, in Bowdich's case as he worked to detail facts about specimens in Porto Santo, off the coast of West Africa. Bowdich left a wife to fend for herself and their family via her own study of natural history, and one result was Sara Bowdich Lee's beautifully illustrated Fresh-Water Fishes of Great Britain (1828). The romance with nature certainly cut across class and gender barriers. Stonecutter Hugh Miller could lose himself as easily in geological pursuits as could Charles Darwin or Sir Charles Lyell and Marianne North's passion for plants may well have matched or exceeded that of Kew's famous botanist, Sir Joseph Hooker.

I accepted his invitation; but having once begun to dance, he would on no account be prevailed on to cease. At last I grew uneasy. I fixed my eyes upon him with anxiety; it seemed to me as if his eyes grew dimmer and dimmer, his cheeks paler and more wasted, his lips shrivelled and skinny, his teeth grinned out, white and ghastly, and at last he stared upon me with bony and eyeless sockets.

—“The Dance of Death,” Blackwood's Magazine It is ill dancing with a heavy heart.

—George Eliot, Mill on the Floss

OFFICIALLY, BRITAIN WAS a reluctant coloniser in the Pacific. Unwilling to take on the expense and responsibility of colonial administration, or to interfere with the imperial ambitions of other European powers in the region, successive British governments in the nineteenth century turned down offers of protectorates and other opportunities to colonize Pacific lands. But the energies and ambitions of individual British subjects were not similarly constrained, and the many who went to the Pacific to evangelize, to plant, and to trade established a strong unofficial British presence in the region. Acts of private colonization and a range of quasi-colonialist activities by Britons eventually forced their government to alter imperial policy and take on island protectorates and colonies, but except for the annexation of Fiji in 1874, this did not begin to happen until the late 1880s. For most of the century, Britain contented itself with passing a series of laws which attempted to control what its subjects did on the other side of the world, while minimizing responsibility for the administration of colonies.

IN 1887, RICHARD JEFFERIES, a popular nature essayist, added his name to the list of several dozen individuals who had written either introductions or notes to Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selborne (1789). Jefferies, like many who chose to edit and introduce this text throughout the Victorian period, represents White as a model figure – but a model for two quite different things. On the one hand, Jefferies commends White and his Natural History as examples of simple, reflective engagement with a local, natural economy – an approach to nature that any inquisitive and observant person could emulate. White is thus allied to fictional working-class naturalists like Job Legh in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton and leisured clergyman like Mr. Farebrother in George Eliot's Middlemarch. All that is needed to become a student of natural history, Jefferies suggests, is curiosity and intelligence. He informs his reader that, “In the same manner [as White] any one who has a taste for out-of-door observations may study natural history without any previous scientific learning. There is not the smallest need to know the Latin names of the birds in order to watch them, or of the flowers in order to gather them” (viii). White is thus put forward as an exemplar of what anyone may aspire to be. White, Jefferies tells his readers, Was not full of evolution when he walked out, or variation, or devolution, or degeneration. He did not look for microbes everywhere. His mind was free and his eye open. To many it would do much good to read this work if only with the object of getting rid of some of the spiders’ webs that have been so industriously spun over the eyesight of those who would like to think for themselves. (ix)

WHEN THE BRITISH ORNITHOLOGIST and bird illustrator John Gould launched his monumental publication on The Birds of Australia late in 1840, the cover of the serial parts bore the image of the lyre bird (Menura superba) and a prominent dedication, “by permission,” to the young and recently-married Queen Victoria (Correspondence 2: 213; see Figure 4). A few months later, issuing the part with the plate and descriptive text for the lyre bird, Gould declared Menura superba “an emblem for Australia among its birds” (Birds of Australia vol. 3, plate 14; see Figure 5). This visual juxtaposition of Victoria and the lyre bird also reflected an association between them in Gould's mind, the lyre bird serving as emblem not only for the Australian colonies but also for their Queen. The association became more explicit and was extended to include Victoria's Consort in the decades that followed, for although The Birds of Australia was completed in 1848, Gould issued irregular supplemental installments during the 1850s and 60s and published a two-volume Handbook to the Birds of Australia in 1865. One of the first discoveries Gould announced and figured in the Supplement was a new species of lyre bird, which he named Menura alberti in 1850 to acknowledge Prince Albert's “personal virtues” and “liberal support.” In 1862, in a tribute likely inspired by the recent death of the Prince, Gould divided Menura superba into two species and christened the newly-created one Menura victoriae, thereby providing his grieving queen with an avian namesake to accompany Albert's.

ROSA CAMPBELL PRAED left Australia for London in 1876. In the decade or so subsequent to her arrival in the metropolis she forged a successful career as a writer of occult-inspired novels that drew on both theosophical doctrine and a nineteenth-century tradition of popular fiction that included Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. A string of novels published in the 1880s and the early 1890s, including Nadine: the Study of a Woman (1882), Affinities: A Romance of Today (1885), The Brother of the Shadow: A Mystery of Today (1886), and The Soul of Countess Adrian: A Romance (1891), produced a sort of popular aestheticism that melded an interest in fashionable society, a market-oriented Gothicism, and speculations on the philosophy of art that were indicative of Praed's relationship to a fin-de-siècle Bohemia and its literary circles. There is no doubt that these novels can be located in terms of the numerous popular genres – the art novel, the aesthetic novel, the occult novel – that form the literary background to much better known texts such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Bram Stoker's Dracula and George du Maurier's Trilby. But to account for Praed's ephemerality in terms of a series of generic categories elides too easily the pressures – economic, political, and aesthetic – impinging on a colonial, female novelist quickly forging a career at the centre of an imperial culture. Praed's novels are hybrid, polysemic creations, over-determined by these pressures, which in turn, no doubt, have contributed to her invisibility in contemporary literary studies. Their Gothicism and their appropriation of theosophical doctrine are both manifest in themes like mesmerism, telepathy, duel personality, and the recurring figure of the spiritual or “moral vampire.” Yet these obviously commercial novels are also intensely invested in aesthetic questions, in the dislocated character of imperial experience, in the accrual of cultural capital, and in their own relationship to the vexed question of their originality vis-à-vis the market for popular fiction.