A Companion to the Victorian Novel

Contents Acknowledgements Notes on contributors Introduction: The Victorian Stage and Visual Culture K.Newey PART I: RUSKIN AND THE THEATRE John Ruskin, Olympian Painters and the Amateur Stage J.Richards Ruskin at the Savoy T.Hilton Ruskinian Moral Authority and Theatre's Ideal Woman R.Dickinson Re-interpreting Ruskin and Browning's Dramatic 'Art-poems' A.Leng Ruskin and the National Theatre A.Heinrich The First Theatrical Pre-Raphaelite? Ruskin's Moliere A.Tate PART II: THE THEATRE AND THE VISUAL ARTS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY The Britannia Theatre: Visual Culture and the Repertoire of a Popular Theatre J.Norwood Supernumeraries: decorating the late-Victorian stage with lots (& lots& lots) of live bodies D.Mayer 'A truer peep at Old Venice'. The Merchant of Venice on the Victorian stage R.Foulkes The Photographic Portraiture of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry S.West 'Auntie, can you do that?' or 'Ibsen in Brixton': Representing the Victorian Stage through Cartoon and Caricature J.Davis Bibliography Index

Volume 1: Enlightenment Gothic and Terror Gothic Clara Reeve, The Champion of Virtue: A Gothic Story (1777) Mary Butt (later Sherwood), The Traditions: A Legendary Tale (1795). Reeve's novel was republished in 1778 as The Old English Baron. It was one of the earliest and most reprinted Female Gothic novels, appealing to reform-minded readers in Britain during the transition from classical republicanism and Enlightenment social critique, through revolutionary protest, to the development of patriotic liberal ideology. Sherwood's The Traditions is an extravaganza of Gothic elements, written by a schoolgirl who attended the same school as Jane and Cassandra Austen, who subscribed to the novel Sherwood later became the most prolific writer of didactic children's fiction, often adapting Gothic elements. Volume 2: Street Gothic - Female Gothic Chapbooks Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Sir Bertrand's Adventures in a Ruinous Castle: The Story of Fitzalan: The Adventure James III of Scotland had with the weird sisters in the dreadful wood of Birnan: The Story of Raymond Castle: The Ruin of the House of Albert: And Mary, a Fragment (1800) Sophia Lee, The Recess: A Tale of Past Times Charlotte Smith, Rayland Hall or, The Remarkable Adventures of Orlando Somerville: An original Story [The Old Manor House] Ann Radcliffe, The Midnight Assassin: or, Confession of the Monk Rinaldi containing A Complete History of the Diabolical Machinations and unparelled [sic] Ferocity together with a circumstantial account of that scourge of mankind The Inquisition with their manner of bringing to trial those unfortunate beings who are under their clutches [The Italian] The Southern Tower: or, Conjugal Sacrifice and Retribution [A Sicilian Romance] Sarah Wilkinson, The Spectres of Lord Oswald and Lady Rosa, Including an Account of the Marchioness of Civetti, who was basely consigned to a Dungeon beneath her Castle by her eldest Son, whose cruel Avarices plunged him into the Commission of the worst of Crimes, that stain the Annuals of the Human Race: An Original Romantic Tale (1814) The White Pilgrim or, Castle of Olival: An interesting and affecting tale, founded on singular facts translated from the popular French novel, Le Pelerin Blanc (n.d.) The White Cottage of the Valley or, The Mysterious Husband: An Original, Interesting Romance (n.d.). This volume presents a range of cheap Gothic novelettes written by women or adapted from full-length Gothic novels by women these chapbooks were designed and marketed for lower-class and lower middle-class readers, often sold in the street by hawkers, and also kept in public houses for the entertainment of drinkers. Volume 3: Erotic Gothic Charlotte Dacre, The Libertine (1807) Like Dacre's earlier Zofloya, which influenced the young radical poet Shelley, The Libertine successfully appealed to middle-class fascination for decadent upper-class libertinism and fear of lower-class blatant sexuality. Volumes 4 and 5: Historical Gothic Jane Porter, The Scottish Chiefs (1810) This pioneering historical romance incorporates Gothic elements and was the ultimate source for the Mel Gibson film Braveheart. The Scottish Chiefs preceded Walter Scott's better known Waverley Novels, and was itself reprinted into the twentieth century as a representation of Romantic nationalism. Volume 6: Orientalist Gothic Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, The Missionary (1811) Owenson campaigned for her native Ireland in such novels as The Wild Irish Girl (1806), (Pickering & Chatto, 2000), anticipating twentieth-century post-colonialism. In The Missionary, set in India, she went on to address anxieties of empire generated by the Napoleonic wars and continued into the Victorian age, when the novel was republished.

Railway Reading and the Late Victorian Literary Series

Reviewed by: French Novels and the Victorians by Juliette Atkinson Thomas Smits (bio) Juliette Atkinson, French Novels and the Victorians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. ix + 425, £85.00 hardcover. In Victorian Britain, French literature was seen by many as explosive material, a source of "corruption and immorality," a product of an "unstable and dangerous" society that threatened the equilibrium of the Victorian home in book form (266). Some Victorian book lovers even advised their friends to burn French novels directly after reading them. This anecdote from the introduction to Juliette Atkinson's French Novels and the Victorians—which leads her to wonder if any French novel "escaped conflagration"—is exemplary for this well-written and equally well-researched book that draws the reader into a world of authors, translators, publishers, readers, and reading habits (2). From a transnational perspective, it makes a strong case for re-evaluating the role of French fiction in Victorian Britain in the mid-nineteenth century. Atkinson makes three broad claims that correspond to the three parts of the book. Countering previous claims about the perceived literary "insularity of the Victorians," such as those made by Franco Moretti in his Atlas of the European Novel (1998), the first part demonstrates "the omnipresence of French novels [in Britain] between 1830 and the early 1870s" (20). The next two chapters reconsider the negative status of French novels in Victorian society and study the impact of this status in theory and practice. The final part describes how the reception of French literature, far from being a one-sided and passive process, was the result of a transnational literary culture in which the judgment of French writers and literary critics played an essential role. The first part of the book offers insights into Victorian reading habits that will excite even those who have little interest in the lures of Gallic literature. How could French novels be obtained and how did they circulate? Three suppliers—libraries, bookshops, and periodicals—are the focal point of the first chapter. Studying the issue books of the London Library, Atkinson concludes that, despite constant attempts of dissuasion from the library itself, French literature was heavily borrowed. Between May 1841 and March 1849 over 4,000 loans of popular French novels were issued: Paul de Kock was the most popular author (900 loans), closely followed by Alexandre Dumas (820), Honoré de Balzac (780), George Sand (650), and Eugène Sue (530). In this period, over two-thirds of all library patrons borrowed at least one French novel. Because the London Library might be seen as "an island of cosmopolitan interest in an insular nation," Atkinson shows that popular circulating libraries, such as Mudie's, similarly stocked and lent French books (45). [End Page 204] One easily stumbles upon serialized translations of French novels while studying Victorian periodicals, and Victorian readers must have had the same experience. While library patrons and bookshop customers deliberately set out to procure French fiction, the large audiences of popular Victorian periodicals such as the London Journal and Cassell's Illustrated Family Paper were involuntarily exposed to it. Translations were repackaged "to meet the requirements of different readerships" and, as a result, easily "crossed class and gender boundaries" (28). Noting how periodicals veered between "revealing and concealing" the French origin of these stories, Atkinson describes how Ainsworth's Magazine introduced Dumas as a character in his Gabriel Lambert (1843) and how Blackwood's turned Balzac's Le Père Goriot (1835) into a select translation of only five pages (66). The second part of the book reconsiders British condemnations of French novels as immoral and dangerous. The third chapter focuses mainly on John Wilson Croker's 1836 condemnation of French novels in the Quarterly Review, which is still seen by many researchers as the emblematic Victorian response to French literature. Innovatively, Atkinson discusses the article in the context of an Anglo-French world of periodicals, arguing that it should not be seen as a typical British reaction to French literature but rather as an outspoken opinion in a transnational debate about literature. Croker's article was translated, plagiarized, and, most importantly, discussed in France, making his condemnation "in some ways...

The Cybernetic Victorians

Playing Life and Death in Provincetown:

Jonathan Rose (2002), ‘Education, Literacy and the Victorian Reader’, in Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing (eds), A Companion to the Victorian Novel, Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 31-47

William Tinsley (1830–1900) was a noted Victorian publisher whose catalogue included works by such celebrated novelists as Thomas Hardy and Wilkie Collins. This two-volume autobiography, first published in 1900, traces his life from his rural childhood to the establishment and rise of the Tinsley Brothers company in 1858, and its later collapse. Each chapter contains a series of brief sketches of authors and other contemporaries. Volume 1 spans Tinsley's early days and travels to London, along with his first encounters with the publishing world. It includes detailed portraits of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and H. J. Byron, and incorporates material on the development of transport and general commerce in the Victorian era. Based on Tinsley's personal recollections, and incorporating letters as well as anecdotal information, these volumes will fascinate anyone interested in the history of publishing and the development of the nineteenth-century novel.

Reviewed by: Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture Patricia Fara (bio) Jonathan Smith , Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), xxiii + 349 pages, illustrated, hardback, £60 (ISBN 0 521 85690 6). When he attacked Charles Darwin, John Ruskin was not above flippancy. In an Oxford lecture, Ruskin imagined attaching a hair-brush to a millwheel so that its bristles would be blown flat like birds' feathers after aeons of flight; and in Proserpina, he speculated about an alternative direction for evolution, wondering what the human race would be like if blushing young maidens had held a baboon-like predilection for blue noses when selecting their male partners. Ruskin's was just one amongst the many critical voices that have been obliterated from conventional Darwinian eulogies, which were narrated retrospectively by victors in the prolonged debates about natural selection. But dramatic tales of instantaneous conversion are now being replaced by scenes of bitter conflict: although 2009 will be celebrated world-wide as the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species, historians (unlike fund-raisers) no longer depict 1859 as a definitive turning-point when progressive science dealt a death-blow to reactionary religion. In his latest absorbing book, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture, Jonathan Smith provides a valuable addition to the substantial literature of Darwinian reappraisal by imaginatively deploying imagery to provide novel and illuminating analyses of Darwin's background, reception and influence. Inspired by the theoretical approach of W.J.T. Mitchell, Smith does not focus exclusively on Darwinian images, but instead analyses how they interact with texts. As he puts it, Darwin's 'pictures could only be worth a thousand words through his spending thousands more in elucidating [End Page 128] them' (16). In some ways parallelling Gillian Beer's exploration of Darwin's verbal metaphors, Smith examines how Darwin's visual choices affected and also responded to Victorian life and society by considering a wide diversity of imagery – caricatures, photographs and oil paintings as well as diagrams and illustrations in scholarly publications. As Darwin strove to persuade his readers that his innovatory ideas were valid, he combined rather than supplemented words with pictures, a rhetorical strategy that obliged him to make important decisions about style and colour, about size and orientation, about captions and textual references, about engravers and photographers. Smith's contents page immediately reveals a surprising omission –On the Origin of Species. Darwin's most famous book contains only one illustration, a diagram he designed to explain how distinct species can evolve from a single common ancestor over many many generations. Presented by Smith as a thought-experiment, this assembly of dashed and solid lines, of letters and numbers, is probably the clearest example of how Darwin integrated visual and verbal arguments. Nevertheless, Smith devotes the bulk of his book to a convincing demonstration that Darwin exerted similarly strong control over his apparently more straightforward representations, although he concentrates on analysing the published image, not on the behind-the-scenes discussions between Darwin and his collaborators, such as engravers and photographers. Smith's book itself exemplifies the reciprocal bonding of verbal and visual arguments that he is exposing; regrettably, Smith says little about the restrictions imposed by publishers on Darwin's ambitions, yet his own analyses would have been articulated more powerfully if colour had not been restricted to the dust-jacket. Disappointingly, although this book claims to subvert triumphalist accounts of Darwin, its structure is dictated by Darwin's personal preoccupations rather than by broader aspects of Victorian culture. To cope with Darwin's voluminous output, Smith has marshalled his own copious information into five of Darwin's interests – his barnacles, birds, plants, faces and worms. Within each of these topics, Smith starts by examining Darwin's work, and then explores its connections both with a larger Victorian theme (including the seaside and sexual selection, but concentrating on aesthetics) and also with another author (often Ruskin, but sometimes Philip Gosse, John Gould or Charles Bell). Like Ruskin and other Victorian authors, Darwin devoted great effort to making his texts and illustrations mutually reinforcing, yet Smith is particularly concerned with breakdowns in such symbiotic relationships, which – like all clashes – are...

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is now a classic, widely read and studied book and is beloved by generations of readers. Jane Eyre has been perceived from different angels by critics through centuries. This thesis is to explore the gothic features in this masterpiece. The first part of the thesis is a brief introduction to the life and works of Charlotte Bronte as well as an introduction to the gothic traditions. The main body of the whole thesis focuses on the characteristics of the novel Jane Eyre: the typical gothic characters, the weird settings of gothic atmosphere and the theme involved with spirit, religion and super-natural power. Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre functioned as the hero and heroine of a gothic romance. Rochester the aristocratic owner of a castle which is at the same time his prison lived a lonely and gloomy life until Jane intrude in with her intelligence, individuality and love. Some minor characters are depicted as villains hindered on the hero and heroine's way to happiness. Bertha Manson, John Reed, Mr. Brocklehurst are some instance of evil characters in a gothic romance. Weird settings are the general scenes in gothic stories, Jane Eyre is no exception. In addition, spirit, religion and super-natural theme are discussed in this part. The last part is a conclusion of the thesis.

The Evasion of Literary History

Reviewed by: Thomas Hardy’s Legal Fictions by Trish Ferguson Marc Milton Ducusin (bio) Thomas Hardy’s Legal Fictions by Trish Ferguson; pp. 178. Edinburgh Edinburgh UP, 2013. $120 cloth. Exploring the intersections of Victorian literature and law, Trish Ferguson’s Thomas Hardy’s Legal Fictions (2013) is a compelling study of how Hardy’s fiction engaged with prominent legal debates and reforms of his time. Drawing on the biographical background of Hardy’s interest in the law as a magistrate, Ferguson reads Hardy’s novels and short stories as vehicles for reform—literature that exposed the fissures between existing legal structures and the need for social progress, thereby “training readers in judicial reasoning” (16). Ferguson organizes this compelling argument into four chapters that address the flux and contestation of major legal issues in the period: the gender dynamics of domestic abuse cases, the fraught legal definition of insanity, the subordination of married women’s rights, and problems of inheritance. Ferguson succeeds in giving a thorough, persuasive account of the dialogue between Hardy’s literary output and Victorian legal discourse. Her analysis gains particular rhetorical force in her discussions of how Hardy’s work drew attention to women’s legal rights. Ferguson’s text further adds to the corpus of recent scholarship situating Hardy’s fiction in conversation with other discourses of the era, such as Tony Fincham’s study of Hardy and medicine, Hardy the Physician: Medical Aspects of the Wessex Tradition (2008). In addition, like Richard Nemesvari’s Thomas Hardy, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode (2011), Ferguson’s monograph examines Hardy’s use of the sensation genre to question the status quo in Victorian culture. Particularly convincing are Ferguson’s observations about how the legalistic aspects of Hardy’s prose fiction affected his narrative choices. Ferguson finds strong evidence in Hardy’s first published novel, Desperate Remedies (1871), a text that is becoming indispensable to Hardy scholars with growing interest in Hardy’s sensationalist roots, as evinced by recent works such as Nemesvari’s. According to Ferguson, Hardy forayed into sensation fiction with Desperate Remedies because of the genre’s preoccupation with legal concerns, yet his subsequent novels would eschew the pat conclusions associated with sensation texts in favour of more open-ended narrative structures that anticipated Modernism (5). This open-endedness allows Hardy to engage his readers in what Ferguson deems a kind of legal reasoning. Ferguson elaborates on this technique in chapter 2, “The Legal Defence of Insanity.” She refutes criticisms of William Boldwood’s characterisation in Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) by contending that Hardy purposefully limits the reader’s access to Boldwood’s interior consciousness in order to “[create] a narrative like a legal trial,” with “conflicting evidence” that “attests to Boldwood’s state of mind,” but deliberately leaves ambiguous “whether or not this evidence would support an insanity defence” (69). This reading [End Page 161] construes Hardy’s narrative in legal terms, developing Ferguson’s central premise that Hardy’s fictions draw on the reasoning of legal procedure even if they rarely depict the scene of a literal trial. The deft comparison of a limited narrative viewpoint to the procedure of a trial keeps Ferguson’s analysis within the realm of the literary while opening up the metaphorical possibilities for locating legalistic structures in Hardy’s writing. Some of Ferguson’s strongest points occur in the third chapter, which touches on cases of domestic abuse as an impetus for reforms that increased the legal rights of married women. Ferguson contends that Hardy “sought to expose the limited definition of marital cruelty and also to show that marital abuse was a symptom of more widespread economic control” (91). Thus, the plights faced by the heroines of Desperate Remedies, Far From the Madding Crowd, Two on a Tower (1882), and The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) gain a sense of urgency in the context of the severe limitations that Victorian laws imposed on married women. The historical contextualization in this chapter is illuminating. Ferguson refers to the trial of Martha Brown for the murder of her violent and unfaithful husband, as well as to the famous case of Caroline Norton, who was unable to...

Reviewed by: The Impact of Victorian Children's Fiction Ruth Anne Thompson (bio) Bratton, J. S. The Impact of Victorian Children's Fiction. New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1981. "If you would in fact have a literature of saints, first of all have a nation of them." Although John Henry Newman wrote that in 1852, the authors of children's fiction in the nineteenth century scarcely agreed. In The Impact of Victorian Children's Fiction, J. S. Bratton details their struggles to reverse the procedure and produce saints through literature. The book succeeds on two levels: first, as an effective piece of scholarship; and second, as a cautionary tale of what children's fiction once was and ought not to be again. Bratton's purpose is to describe and evaluate the formulae of didactic fiction that dominated the field in the Victorian age, the first era to develop a concept of childhood as a state apart. Examining lists of works distributed through schools as rewards for attendance and behavior, she offers detailed summaries of plots and themes, encapsulated biographies of authors, and some collation of motifs and evaluation of quality. Contending that the humanistic tradition of literary criticism "offers no effective approach to the material," she presents what is essentially a sociology of literature, covering with thoroughness, if not always with originality, the writers, publishers and purchasers of children's fiction. By checking publishers' catalogs, school records, and even dedications in flyleaves of the books themselves, she has come up with a representative sampling of the works and authors which were popular with the adults who bought books for children. The new literacy of the Victorians, fostered by growing educational legislation, was closely connected to Bible study and the Sunday school movement. Children of the poor were to be engaged in saving their souls, and were to be kept out of mischief on the one day each week that they were free from their labors. The deserving poor needed to be rewarded for making the effort to better themselves, while at the same time they needed to be protected from the temptations and seductions of the printed word. The Religious Tract Society and the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, fueled by the fires of evangelicalism in the early years of the century, took on the burden of supplying uplifting moral tales for young readers. By 1818 they had printed from twenty-five to thirty million copies of such works, which were often distributed, like the chapbooks they were meant to replace, through the networks of ballad sellers. These "cheap but gorgeous" Sunday school prizes are divided by Bratton into three major classifications: evangelical works, books for boys, and books for girls. The motifs that characterized the earliest works, conversions, deathbed scenes, and infant piety, were taken from the common stock of popular literature rather than from "high culture." Many writers were women, often spinsters of indifferent education, who found that writing such tales produced a genteel and socially acceptable source of income, while at the same time they satisfied the evangelical call for benevolent works outside the home. By the fourth decade of the century, the stories began to carry a social as well as a religious message. Not only were the young to be convinced of innate sinfulness, they were also to be socialized into prescribed roles, partly to maintain the status quo in a society which was undergoing, most uneasily, a radical transformation. As Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism percolated through Victorian sensibilities, the evangelical emphasis on the hero-soul engaged in a dramatic life-death struggle with the powers of darkness gave way before more immediate concerns and practical considerations. A growing focus on the lower orders as mere instruments in the lives of their betters appeared in books like The Little Servant Maids, which reflected the chilling anonymity imposed on the individual by wiping out the most primary sense of identity: "Mrs. Sewell, thinking fine names unsuitable for little servant maids living in a tradesman's family, always called [them] Mary." Commercial publishers quickly recognized the economic potential of the children's market, and after mid-century, when the domination of sectarian groups began to...

Reviewed by: The Circus and Victorian Society Mary Elizabeth Leighton (bio) Brenda Assael, The Circus and Victorian Society (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), pp. xiii+237 , $35.00 cloth. The Mayor of Casterbridge famously begins with a wife-selling at a country fair. A drunken Michael Henchard auctions off his wife for five guineas in a fair tent, while outside, crowds enjoy attractions such as "peep-shows, toy-stands, waxworks, inspired monsters, . . . nick-nack vendors, and readers of Fate." By the time Hardy published his novel [End Page 265] in 1886, one offshoot of the country fair, the circus, had developed into a commercial spectacle which rivalled lavish theatre productions and provided entertainment to thousands of spectators. The development of the Victorian circus, from its roots in various cultural sites (including the fair, the ancient amphitheater, and the cabinet of curiosities) to the late-century consolidation of "an organized and respectable trade" (2), is the subject of Brenda Assael's fascinating and important new book. The circus is an understudied Victorian spectacle, given recent emphases on the 1851 Exhibition, the theatre, the music hall, and the museum. Assael's welcome study participates in overlapping fields of inquiry (the histories of leisure, of sport, of entertainment, of celebrity, of reading, of the periodical press) and complements recent work on Victorian visual culture and the grammar of visuality in Victorian prose. Readers of VPR will particularly relish Assael's careful and extensive use of the Victorian press, which includes more than 60 newspapers and 40 periodicals, as she analyzes (for example) "waif stories" of child circus performers, topical military spectacles, debates over female acrobats, and humanitarian concern for exotic animal displays. In contrast to the freak show, the circus featured strong bodies, which were showcased in the gymnastic and equestrian elements of the program. Although "the strong body became a metonym for progress and power" (1), Assael provocatively suggests that "an examination of the circus at times reveals an anti-improvement narrative of the nineteenth century" (11). That is, circus spectators were torn between their desire for "respectable entertainment and transgressive thrill" (11). These individual responses are located in letters, memoirs, parliamentary and police court evidence, and, notably for VPR readers, newspaper and journal articles. In Assael's compelling study, the circus emerges as a site of contestation whose conditions of development included changes in work (e.g., the reduction of the working week and the proliferation of leisure activities) and technology (e.g., the greater mobility railways provided proprietors and performers). Countering the resistance model prevalent in much working-class historiography, Assael also argues that certain circus performances consolidated British patriotism. Particularly convincing in this regard is her chapter on "The Spectacular Hero," in which she considers the popularity of the equestrian military drama in relation to the rise of print culture and the manufacturing of heroic images. She estimates that more than 250,000 people, including the Duke of Wellington, saw The Battle of Waterloo at Astley's auditorium in 1824. Army officers who saw this production commented on the spectacle's accuracy, which "provided living proof of newspaper descriptions" (53). Long before the Times's war correspondents vividly depicted the Crimean [End Page 266] theatre of war, circuses presented theatrical panoramas not unlike the Illustrated London News's panoramic illustrations and patriotic representations. Assael's wide-ranging archival research has unearthed intriguing information about circus performers and their working conditions. Her broader arguments are illustrated well by individual cases, such as the fundraising campaign for clown Tom Barry mounted by fellow performers, the courtship of itinerant equestrian performer W. H. Cooke and his middle-class fiancée Caroline Heginbotham, and the death of high-wire acrobat "Madame Blondin" in her eighth month of pregnancy. The book is handsomely illustrated with circus posters, cartes de visite, and advertisements and cartoons from periodicals. Scholars of the periodical press will find this study valuable not only for its mining of the press as a resource (Assael quotes from many little-known specialist magazines such as Gymnast, which merit further research), but also for its thoughtful considerations of method, material practices, and popular culture. [End Page 267] Mary Elizabeth Leighton University of...

Encompassing such diverse disciplines and fields as fine and applied arts, art, literature, science, photography, theater, and early cinema, Victorian visual culture is far ranging, complex, and multifaceted. The invention of illustrated press and photography disseminated information about the arts and sciences, England, and the colonies. Scholars such as Kate Flint (see Flint 2000, cited under General Overviews) explore the problematics of external and internal vision and their impact on representations and interpretations. A study of visual culture must take into consideration key Victorian figures who addressed the subject in several of their works as well as modern critics on Victorian artists, movements, and genres; representations of race and orientalism; modern visual technologies; visual perception; and psychology. General overviews of the subject include historical accounts of the Great Exhibition and the establishment of national galleries, while others deal with broad surveys of the visual arts and their impact on various aspects of Victorian culture. Theoretical perspectives on the subject vary from multidisciplinary approaches to poetry, science, art, architecture, politics, and history to discussions of the coalescence of the verbal and the visual in the novel and in poetry, as well as the significance of the relationship between text and illustrations. Covering the rise of literary painting, some works examine the market dynamics, periodical criticism, and poetic influences on Victorian art, while others examine the reciprocal forces that impacted literature and art or the interdisciplinary connections between images and words in illustration. Quite a few works are devoted to women artists, their works, their training, and the conditions they had to overcome to be accepted by mainstream culture. Yet other studies, devoted to landscape painting, explain the Victorian nature aesthetic or the problematic relationship between English landscape painting and socioeconomic changes during the Industrial Revolution. Visual culture and science is the topic of several recent studies ranging from the role of illustrations in the works of Charles Darwin to his relationship with artists and photographers as well as Darwin’s influence on literature, art, and culture. Attributing the origins of the cinema and the theater to the Victorian obsession with the visual, scholars also discuss the social concerns that these forms of visual culture represent.