This article explores the evolving Chinese representations of Queen Victoria from the First Opium War (1839) to her Diamond Jubilee (1897), beginning with early Qing official histories that deliberately omitted or delegitimized her presence, portraying her implicitly as a female usurper whose rule violated Confucian gender norms and dynastic orthodoxy. Such initial silencing is later juxtaposed with increasingly complex portrayals across a broad spectrum of textual and visual sources, including painting captions, diplomatic travelogues, private poems, newspaper reports, and illustrations. Focusing on envoys like Binchun, whose cautious official diary contrasts with his more admiring private poetry, and Zhang Zuyi, whose pseudonymous writings convey ambivalence and critique, the essay examines how rhetorical strategies were shaped by genre, anonymity, and audience. The analysis also extends to popular and elite print culture, particularly Dianshizhai Pictorial and Shenbao , to trace how Queen Victoria’s image circulated among both literate and semiliterate readers. Throughout, the article argues that acts of translation and mediation—visual, linguistic, and ideological—shaped not only perceptions of the British monarch but also reflected the fractured modernity of the Qing empire. The study contributes to global Victorian studies by foregrounding non-Western receptions and complicating imperial iconography through a Sinocentric lens.

In the twenty-first century, leftist politics has taken a turn toward antiwork philosophy and postwork imaginaries. These politics critique not only the work-centered capitalist society but also challenge the “productivist ethics” of other leftist traditions. A popular variation of this antiwork/postwork politics calls for full automation, the replacement of as much human labor as possible with technological alternatives. Positioning work as a realm of unfreedom, these thinkers argue that human liberation can only be achieved in a world with less work. This article reads Oscar Wilde’s “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1891) as a precocious articulation of a postwork imaginary that demands full automation. In response to contemporaries like William Morris, who argued that capitalism had severed humanity from a natural affinity for work, Wilde expresses an antiwork position, arguing that humanity was made for contemplative leisure and creative expression. Thus, automated labor becomes a key element of his utopian vision. Though Wilde formulates a necessary critique of a Victorian radical politics that was decidedly prowork, his postwork utopia is based on a troubling premise: “civilization requires slaves.” In reading twenty-first-century postwork thinkers alongside Wilde, we find the same premise still subtly operative within this politics.

In Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Thomas Hardy imagines a Brazil that functions as an established settler colony and as a more informal zone of economic influence. This imperial anachronism that played out in an ostensibly sovereign Brazil, as my reading will show, physically and ideologically deforms Angel and his fellow colonists. Angel’s moral awakening accompanies a body ripped apart by the competing demands of settlement and movement aligned, on one hand, with older models of imperial expansion and, on the other, with newer modes of economic dominance driven by infrastructural investment and speculation. As a site of Britain’s economic influence, Brazil becomes a potent symbol of the dangers of pursuing an anachronistic imperial model and a fatal warning back home that attempting to replicate older models of colonial governance cannot remedy England’s provincial woes.

This cluster of short essays discusses Kathy Psomiades’s Primitive Marriage: Victorian Anthropology, the Novel and Sexual Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2023), winner of the North American Victorian Studies Association’s 2023 Subsequent Book Prize, along with a response from the author.

This essay examines five children’s homemade manuscript magazines and advances an argument that creative collaboration was an important feature of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century childhood, especially for middle-class young people associated with artistic circles. Focusing on children connected to the Pre-Raphaelite and Bloomsbury circles, the essay shows how select children formed their own artistic circles, modeled on those of the adults in their lives. The magazines are The Scribbler (1878–80) by the children of William Morris with assistance from the children of Philip Burne-Jones; Our Paper (1870–87) by the children and cousins of the Strachey family; The Gem (1898) by Margaret Keynes with her brothers Geoffrey and John Maynard; the Hyde Park Gate News (1891–95) by the Stephen children, later Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell; and the Charleston Bulletin (1921–27) by Vanessa Bell’s sons, Julian and Quentin Bell. Through serialized stories, correspondence, competitions, and abundant editorial commentary, child-authors and editors asserted a textual agency as they documented and created collaborative artistic communities.

This article examines the significance of Christina Rossetti’s caregiving responsibilities and suggests that the relationship between caring and writing is a central, if critically neglected, concern of her poetics. I focus on two periods in Rossetti’s life to show how her creative practice was shaped by her duties as a carer, and vice versa. In the 1840s, when the adolescent Rossetti suffers a breakdown while caring for her father, Gabriele, her physician, Dr. Charles Hare, helps her find solace in self-reflection and writing poetry. Forty years later, Rossetti revisits Hare’s holistic approach when looking after her mother and aunts. During this period, she produces Time Flies, the experimental, hybrid form of which addresses and accommodates her struggles to balance writing and caring. I conclude by arguing that Rossetti’s efforts to live and write with divided attention provide fresh opportunities for exploring the connections between domestic labor and creativity. As well as endorsing Talia Schaffer’s call for “a literary criticism that is predicated on care,” I propose that writing as an act of care has implications beyond the academy: I end with a short discussion of the ongoing poetry workshops for carers that were directly inspired by my research on Christina Rossetti.

Despite their overlapping fin de siècle New Woman communities in London and their correspondence, few scholars have compared the literary works of South African writer Olive Schreiner and Jewish author Amy Levy directly. Reading allegories from Schreiner's first collection, Dreams (1890), in relation to two of Levy's early verse works, “Xantippe” (1881) and Medea (1884), I argue that they both imagine new futures for queer community as an alternative to the oppressive status quo of imperialist England. This paper suggests that Schreiner and Levy, feminist writers with fraught relationships to Englishness, can best be understood as members of a rich community of late Victorian visionaries. When they turn their attention to the forms of allegory and dramatic monologue, Schreiner and Levy are able to explore radical possibilities for gender and community that did not exist in their real lives or their realist fiction. Schreiner and Levy share a deep skepticism about the benefits of marriage, family, and other conventional sources of community, and both offer queer visions of suspended present states or undetermined futures as alternatives.

Focusing on famine novels by William Carleton and Anthony Trollope and drawing upon Sianne Ngai's account of aesthetic categories, this article questions how the “interesting,” as an aesthetic category, accommodates cultural difference and distance, on one hand, and demonstrates how material interests shape and delimit the expansion of the public sphere, on the other. It argues that Irish novels present Ireland as aesthetically interesting insofar as it differs from England—suggesting strangeness, peculiarity, unpredictability. Yet including Ireland in a vision of a shared public tends to require the opposite—the assimilation of Irish people into British interests—rendering Ireland conventional and familiar. In other words, the strangeness or novelty that makes Ireland aesthetically interesting is the very thing that prevents Irish people from being incorporated into the liberal idea of a public or a vision of British public interest.