Dinah Mulock Craik Research Articles

Godmother-Governesses and Biracial Cinderellas: The Use of Fairy Tales in Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Half-Caste

Abstract In Dinah Mulock Craik’s short and largely unacknowledged novella, The Half-Caste (1851), the half-Indian heroine, Zillah La Poer, achieves what seems impossible for a young woman of color in mid-century imperial Britain, rising from an uneducated and ill-treated biracial ward to a rich heiress-turned-bride, all under the watchful guidance of the novella’s narrator and main character, governess Cassandra Pryor. Though Craik’s novella has resurfaced in recent years with the help of a Broadview edition in 2016, the scholarly work and historical material in the introduction and appendixes do not highlight the fairy-tale inspirations and obvious Cinderella motifs in Craik’s text. Craik’s novella is, at its core, a Cinderella story, as Cassandra becomes a nonmagical fairy godmother tasked with transforming Zillah into a respected British citizen. As such, this article seeks to bring attention to Craik’s little-known novella by situating it in a larger tradition of Victorian Cinderella stories, highlighting the way it creates an idealized image of civilized harmony between non-white colonized people and white British citizens via governess-led education.

Queer Disabled Bodyminds in the Fairy Tales of Dinah Mulock Craik and Oscar Wilde

Abstract: The potential influence of Dinah Mulock Craik on Oscar Wilde's fairy tales has been often remarked but seldom analyzed. This article suggests that Wilde enters a dynamic engagement with Craik's literary fairy tales, particularly in their shared critique of nineteenth-century notions of deviance and wholeness. Locating these texts at the intersection of disability studies and queer theory, this article uses Margaret Price's conception of bodymind to read Craik's The Little Lame Prince and His Traveling Cloak (1875) and Wilde's A House of Pomegranates (1891) as a complex literary encounter that subverts ableist assumptions regarding "a sound mind in a sound body."

Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical, by Caley Ehnes

Reviewed by: Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical by Caley Ehnes April Patrick (bio) Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical, by Caley Ehnes; pp. vi + 238. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, $105.00, $24.95 paper, $27.95 ebook. In Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical, Caley Ehnes focuses on the intersection of two areas of study: Victorian periodicals and Victorian poetry. The monograph responds to calls from scholars in both fields to consider the importance of the poems published in the pages of Victorian periodicals. The most direct of these calls comes from Linda K. Hughes's seminal essay "What the Wellesley Index Left Out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies" (2007), which disputes the dismissal of poetry in periodicals as filler between pieces of prose. Where Hughes primarily addresses scholars working on Victorian periodicals, Ehnes speaks to poetry specialists, claiming: "the poetry of the periodical press is the poetry of the Victorian period" and thus "periodical poems should matter to all those interested in Victorian poetry whether they care for periodicals or not" (191). The book divides the four chapters by periodical title, grouping three weeklies related to Charles Dickens into the first chapter, pairing two of the most influential shilling monthly magazines into the second, and then separating two important but less-studied magazines into the third and fourth chapters. This structure creates consistency in the periodical contexts within each chapter, allowing Ehnes to present history and scholarship on each periodical and focus analysis on the features of the poetry and trends observed. Chapter 1 defines the inaugural poem as one that appears in the first issue—though not necessarily as the first item—and works to set the tone for a new periodical. In comparing inaugural poems in Household Words (1850–9) and All the Year Round (1859–95), Ehnes finds similarities in the poems' positions within each title's opening issue and theme of "advocat[ing] for greater sympathy between the classes," a mission suggested by Dickens in his own "Preliminary Word" at the outset of Household Words (26). The chapter also demonstrates how Once a Week (1859–80) used its inaugural poem to establish the periodical's treatment of poetry, use of illustration, and "construction of a middle-class identity defined by domesticity" (53). Throughout the chapter, Ehnes balances the introduction of larger claims that set the foundation for the remaining case studies, comparing features of the periodical context and themes of the poems, and performing adept close analyses of the individual poems. In chapter 2, Ehnes considers the first five years of Macmillan's Magazine (1859–1907) and The Cornhill Magazine (1860–1975), shilling monthlies that defined the style of such periodicals in the lives of middle-class families and the literary world. The chapter contrasts the emphasis on poetry in Macmillan's against The Cornhill's focus on literary labor and the role of the professional author. The section on Macmillan's discusses the ways periodical poetry fit into the careers of Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, and Dinah Mulock Craik, distinguishing between the style of poets who wrote primarily for the periodical press and those for whom such poems were more economically driven. From The Cornhill, Ehnes analyzes poems by Matthew Arnold, Adelaide Anne Proctor, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Owen Meredith, and W. M. W. Call that grapple with "the cost, legacy and responsibility of literary labor" (93). The chapter includes detailed analyses of the formal features of specific poems by each of these contributors along with valuable insights about the larger periodical press, the role of shilling monthlies in establishing middle-class literary tastes, and the poetics of the mid-nineteenth century. [End Page 489] Chapter 3 explores the role of poetry in religious literary periodicals through Good Words (1860–1910)—described as "a conventional literary periodical with a devotional twist"—which follows models established in previous discussions of Once a Week and The Cornhill (112). Here, the inaugural poem builds upon the suggestion in Once a Week that the periodical is central to bringing the family together for communal reading on Sundays. Ehnes argues that periodical poetry in Good Words brings readers...

A Woman’s Thoughts About Men: Malthus and Middle-Class Masculinity in Dinah Mulock Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman

ABSTRACT From its publication in 1856 to the present-day Dinah Mulock Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman has intrigued readers in its representation of masculinity and potential to be read “aslant”, offering a divergent model of manliness, or even the “split consciousness” of the woman writer’s self-image refracted through her depiction of a cast of male characters (Showalter, 1975). Most recently Karen Bourrier has discussed the novel’s exploration of industry and invalidism as told through the narrative framework of an “intense homoerotic friendship between a strong man and his disabled friend” (Bourrier, 2015), and, in a 2007 article, Silvana Colella uses gift theory to demonstrate the intrinsic codes of gentlemanliness inherent in capitalist economics faithfully embodied in the text. This article considers Craik’s representation of men in the novel as a lens through which Craik could engage with, and question, some of the largest theoretical areas of nineteenth-century, male-dominated intellectual life: economics, science, and politics. The article begins with an examination of the novel in relation to Malthus’ economic theories of population and the tensions between Lamarckian and Malthusian ideology in the field of evolutionary theory in the works of Robert Chambers, George Drysdale, and others. The article will then explore the effect of Malthusian theory on discourses that emphasised masculine self-control as articulated in the symbiotic relationship of the two male protagonists, before concluding with Craik’s intervention in the history of the woman writer as woman writer. I will demonstrate how this enormously popular novel interrogated and intervened in the assumptions of sentimental fiction by contextualising Craik’s construction of a male narrative voice and an interdependent male relationship in terms of nineteenth-century economic, scientific, and political theoretical debates.

Review

Review

Inside Digital Dinah Craik: Feminist Pedagogy, Cognitive Apprenticeship, and the TEI

In this essay, we describe our collaborative work as students and teachers on a TEI edition of Dinah Mulock Craik’s correspondence. Inside Digital Dinah Craik, our pedagogy is collaborative and inclusive, attentive to the material conditions of both the text and our labor, and is reproducible. We follow a cognitive apprenticeship model of education that emphasizes a community of practice where learners become increasingly proficient until, ideally, they are no longer apprentices but genuine collaborators. In this paper, we demonstrate how the five stages of apprenticeship learning—modeling, approximating, fading, self-directed learning, and generalizing (Hansman 2001, 47)—help us to foster what scholars such as Anne Balsamo, Elizabeth Losh, Jacqueline Wernimont, Laura Wexler, and Hong-An Wu call the “foundational ethical principles” (Balsamo 2011, 162–3) and “feminist virtues” (Losh et al. para. 26) of collaboration—confidence, humility, flexibility, integrity, and intellectual generosity.

Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical by Caley Ehnes

Reviewed by: Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical by Caley Ehnes Natalie M. Houston (bio) Caley Ehnes, Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), pp. xiv + 238, £75/$110 cloth. An important feature of Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical is its organization, which usefully departs from the scholarly convention of structuring monographs around a set of particular authors. Instead, after the introduction, Caley Ehnes offers four chapters that examine the poetry published in different kinds of 1860s periodicals aimed at the middle class: weeklies (Household Words, All the Year Round, and Once a Week), shilling monthlies (Cornhill and Macmillan’s Magazine), religious periodicals (Good Words and the Quiver), and the sensation magazine (Argosy). This structure allows her to examine how poetry functions within the framework of a given periodical’s purpose and audience. Along the way, Ehnes provides astute close readings of a diverse range of poems, some of them likely to be familiar to her readers (Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “A Musical Instrument” and Christina Rossetti’s “If”) and some of them not (“Love,” signed by “M.” in Good Words, and Sarah Williams’s “The Doom of the Prynnes”). Responding to Pierre Bourdieu’s view that cultural production occurs within a complex network of social forces and institutions, Ehnes focuses on poetry rather than poets, and periodicals rather than editors, “to theorise how the affordances of the periodical press, an undoubtedly commercial form, affected the circulation, reception, composition, and meaning of poetry in the 1860s” (13). Even the book’s index supports this view of poetry, including lists of poets and poems in the entries for the periodicals as well as under separate headings. Her compelling study encourages readers to think comparatively across different periodicals and careers and to see periodical poetry as central to our conceptualization of Victorian poetry more generally. In her first chapter, Ehnes demonstrates the important role poetry played in communicating the cultural aspirations of Charles Dickens’s weeklies by focusing on what she terms “inaugural poetry,” which “establishes the audience, literary value, tone, and brand of a publication” (24). In many cases, inaugural poems open the periodical’s first issue and may explicitly signal their role, as in Shirley Brooks’s “Once a Week” and “Good Words” by L. C. C. (Lucy Cummings Smith, not identified by Ehnes). But Ehnes also suggests that any poem published in the first issue of a periodical can be understood as containing encoded messages about the periodical’s vision. Thus she reads Leigh Hunt’s “Abraham and the Fire-Worshipper: A Dramatic Parable” as the inaugural poem of Household Words, even though it follows Dickens’s editorial introduction and the first serial installment of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Lizzie Leigh. Hunt’s parable connects [End Page 809] with the political vision Dickens put forward in his periodical by encouraging charitable action. After Dickens left Bradbury and Evans, their new periodical Once a Week established itself as a different kind of weekly by taking “a light-hearted tone focused on middle-class entertainment” and by featuring poetry, much of it illustrated, like Brooks’s eponymous inaugural poem (40). Ehnes suggests that illustrated poetry was central to creating the “textual, visual, and thematic rhythms” of Once a Week and, by extension, other Victorian periodicals (49). Her second chapter on Macmillan’s and Cornhill continues her examination of page design and illustration, looking at how the covers of the inaugural issues frame each title’s cultural value. Reading these monthlies as invested in shaping literary culture, Ehnes argues that their poetry helped affirm dominant middle-class ideology, and indeed this chapter examines works by many canonical figures. She reads poems by Dinah Mulock Craik as an example of how poets negotiated formal complexity and the commercial demands of the periodical, comparing them to Rossetti’s “A Birthday” and Alfred Tennyson’s “Sea Dreams” (also published in Macmillan’s). She also traces thematic connections among poems by Matthew Arnold, Adelaide Anne Procter, Owen Meredith, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and relates them to William Makepeace Thackeray’s editorial and literary vision for the Cornhill. Ehnes’s third chapter takes up...

The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel by Karen Bourrier

BOURRIER, KAREN. The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in Mid-Victorian Novel. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2015. 184 pp. $65.00 hardcover; $35.00 paperback. Over a decade ago. Martha Stoddard Holmes's Fictions of Affliction called for disability studies interventions in Victorian Studies, which has long been invested since work of Bruce Haley in role of health and embodiment. The Measure of Manliness contributes to this developing subfield of Victorian disability studies by putting into conversation long-standing Victorian scholarship on invalidism and illness with more recent disability theory and its investments in social model of disability, where sickness and disability are not fixed biological states but part of a culturally constructed continuum of ideas about fit body (16). Drawing explicitly on Holmes's work. Bourrier focuses on relationship between affect and disability, and how it shapes a normative Victorian masculinity characterized by taciturn strength. Methodologically, her study hinges upon a central dyad: the affective of masculine and disability and impact it has on narrative form of midcentury (16). In a move similar to Georges Canguilhem in The Normal and Pathological and Lennard Davis in Enforcing Normalcy, Bourrier argues for mutual dependence and co-constituency of disability and normative health as key concepts animating Victorian fiction. The archive to which Bourrier turns is mid-century domestic novel, which persistently features what she describes as pairing of strong man and weak man, in which latter serves as an alternative and complementary Victorian mode of masculinity, supplementing masculine strength with his emotional self-consciousness and verbal effusiveness (3). The narrowing of scope to middle-class masculinity enables her to 1 ) connect figure of Victorian disabled man to earlier eighteenth-century man of feeling, and 2) trace strong-weak dualism as a narrative pattern within a particular generic form. Bourrier begins with novels of muscular Christianity: Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) and Kingsley's Westward Ho! (1855) and Two Years Ago (1857). The contrast between taciturn suffering of characters like Guy Morville or Tom Thurnall and their vulnerable, disabled counterparts valorizes an active masculinity that is physically capable and spiritually sound. It is this model of intimate friendship that underpins Bourrier's second paradigmatic example. Dinah Mulock Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman (1856). where Christian masculinity gives way to self-discipline and self-consciousness of self-made man. While represented as individually self-made, John Halifax's social climbing and industry is quietly enabled by Phineas Fletcher's invalidism and influence. Bourrier turns then to Eliot's The Mill on Floss (1860) and Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881) as revisions of this originary strong man-weak man with which both authors were deeply familiar. Eliot's Tom Tulliver and Philip Wakem and James's Caspar Goodwood and Ralph Touchett represent markedly different duos than their predecessors in that disabled weak man does not exist purely to support able strong man; in fact, these men begin to diverge from one another entirely. Measure of Manliness thus traces a trajectory from an uncomplicated and improving friendship between strong man and a weak man to a rivalry to almost no relationship at all (123). …

Taking the Multitudes Abroad: Dinah Mulock Craik's Travel Narratives in Victorian Family Magazines

This essay discusses travel narratives by bestselling nineteenth-century novelist Dinah Mulock Craik. I examine Craik's literary professionalism as a contributor to periodicals and explore the ways in which she articulated middle-class discourses about foreign people and places. Her travel narratives published in Good Words (1867, 1884), Saint Paul's Magazine (1870), and the English Illustrated Magazine (1884, 1885, 1887) demonstrate that she found it difficult to maintain an open spirit toward the sites and people she observed.

Finding a Transatlantic Audience: Reading Dinah Mulock Craik’s Mistress and Maid in Good Words and Harper’s Magazine

While scholars have long assumed that success came to bestselling novelist Dinah Craik with the publication of John Halifax, Gentleman in 1856, this article uses new archival evidence to show that the watershed moment of her career was actually the publication of a lesser-known novel, Mistress and Maid (1862), in serial form on both sides of the Atlantic. Craik developed a long and lucrative relationship with one of the new illustrated family magazines, Good Words , in Great Britain, and with Harper’s Magazine in the United States. The emphasis of Mistress and Maid underwent a subtle thematic shift in these two national contexts, foregrounding the Christian value of women’s labor in Good Words and the significance of class-based aspirations in Harper’s .

Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature ed. by Duc Dau, and Shale Preston

DAU, DUC, and SHALE PRESTON, eds. Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature. New York: Routledge, 2015. 291 + ix pp. $145.00 hardcover; $54.99 e-book. In this eclectic collection. Due Dau and Shale Preston have assembled ten inventive chapters written by a mixture of early-career and senior scholars whose work stands to advance the field of gender and sexuality studies. These compelling essays cohere around one central premise: the Victorian was neither as uniform nor as conventional as we have imagined it to be. Each entry presents a unique family dynamic in order to challenge the angel-in-the-house and queen-in-her-garden models of bourgeois, middle-class, English domesticity. At a moment when our own conceptions of the are rapidly expanding, Dau and Preston offer this collection 'as a corrective against limited and traditionalist definitions of the family (2), hoping to reveal that a multiplicity of relations exist--both now and then--alongside the reproductive household of husband, wife, and children. Their point, as this collection illustrates, is that kinship is and always has been heterogeneous (9). The chapters are divided into three parts, although the wide range of texts, authors, and subjects--from marriage plot novels and same-sex desire to masculinity and femininity, challenges to reproductive futurism, and Victorian revisionist historicism, among others--could allow for any number of groupings. Opening part I, Queervolutions, Laura White names a plethora of queer (read: odd) clusters of disparate characters that make up Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland tales, from ineffectual queens and their card-servants to unstable dinners attended by dodos and dormice. In these fantastical imaginings. White suggests. Carroll crafts a world without authority, where is forged only by accident (though she does not address the fact that most children's literature escapes to such alternate worlds). Moving to other canonical texts, Shale Preston looks to Dickens's Bleak House, where she identifies Esther's non-normative same-sex attractions, and Tracy Olverson considers the same-sex eroticism underpinning the queer aunt-niece pairing behind the authorial identity of Field. Through historical dramas, Olverson suggests, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper expose possibilities for same-sex connection while living their own queer Victorian partnership--a lifestyle acknowledged and accepted by their family. Closing this section is Michael Shaw's work on William Sharp, whose metaphors of nation-building reject traditional masculinized myths in order to embrace a more fluid gender identification, which Sharp himself practiced through a female pseudonym. Overall. what this section lacks in coherence of topics and texts, it gains in heterogeneity, thus meeting Dau and Preston's intentions. Part I enumerates narrative constructions of alternative systems and examines applications of history to tell the various stories of Victorian sexualities. The three essays of part II, Queer Actually, discuss queer characters who are integrated into rather than rejected by the Victorian family, thus extending our sense of that system's malleability and breadth. Monica Flegel studies the pet-centered paternity (103) of The Woman in White's Count Fosco, whose affectionate attachment to his pets, she claims, marks a broader social concern: couples and individuals who adopt pets as surrogate children may complete their own circle but defy the social obligation to reproduce. While Fosco's pet-centric life mocks the masculinity that his own queer relations expose as performative, Clare Walker Gore confronts masculinity via disability studies in her chapter on Dinah Mulock Craik and Charlotte Yonge. …

Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes by Emelyne Godfrey (review)

Reviewed by: Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes by Emelyne Godfrey Caroline Reitz (bio) Emelyne Godfrey, Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. xiv+192, $85/£50 cloth. Emelyne Godfrey’s Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society follows her 2011 study, Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Culture. My sense of the first book, which I reviewed for RaVon, was that it read more like a highly informative (indeed, jam-packed) social history of some overlooked late Victorian texts than a comprehensive argument about gender and crime. This is my assessment of this book as well, which provides an in-depth look at H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica (1909), Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael (1889), Elizabeth Robins’s The Convert (1907) and Where Are You Going To . . . ? (1913), and Richard Marsh’s The Adventures of Judith Lee (1916), [End Page 152] which originally appeared as a series of stories in the Strand. Godfrey uses these complex works to address an amazing array of topics, including train travel; suffragettes; hatpins (or the “hatpin-wielding suffragette” [82]); “moral panic” over the “White Slave Trade”; gentlemanliness and its relationship to physiognomy (so that women can assess the threat level of potential suitors); physical fitness (and its relationship to political freedom); and jujitsu (the Japanese martial art adapted by Edward William Barton-Wright and promoted by Edith Garrud and Emily Diana Watts in The Fine Art of Jujutsu [1906]). This is not to say that Godfrey’s book does not make an argument. Godfrey begins her book with a reading of Ruskin’s essay “Of Queens’ Gardens” from Sesame and Lilies, which “echoes through the literature of women’s self-defence” and provides a defining example of how Victorian domestic ideology genders private and public spaces (4). In Ruskin’s formulation, female domestic spaces are associated with peace and male public spaces are fraught with danger. As late nineteenth-century social changes propel women from the garden into the wider world, both real and fictional women navigate the perils and possibilities of these new spaces. Sometimes this involves learning how to use martial arts to protect suffragettes from police and hostile crowds or how to protect oneself from intimate violence in train cars or at home. Godfrey argues convincingly (if a bit hectically) that the capacity to protect herself is a crucial component to a woman’s increasing freedom in public and political arenas. The main interest of the book, other than reminding us of these fascinating yet weird primary texts, is its representation of the eclectic conversation in Victorian periodicals. Godfrey illustrates the diversity of opinion provided in these pages, from the practical perspective of Dinah Mulock Craik, who wrote a series of essays on women’s capacity for self-defense in A Woman’s Thoughts about Women (1858), first published in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, to the provocations of Eliza Lynn Linton, whose “Out Walking,” published in Temple Bar in 1862, argued that “nine times out of ten” women were at fault if they were pestered in the streets (21). Like the rapidly changing fin de siècle society she chronicles, Godfrey’s book is so fast-paced and packed that it can be a bit disorienting (blink and you might miss the “dagger-fans” of the subtitle, covered hastily in two pages). But the range of her research gives a sense of the dizzying, if dangerous, opportunities of a pivotal historical moment. [End Page 153] Caroline Reitz John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY Caroline Reitz Caroline Reitz is an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY. She is the author of Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture (2004), as well as articles on Victorian serials, Victorian travel writing, and contemporary female detective fiction. Copyright © 2014 The Research Society for Victorian Periodical

AFFECTIVE HYBRIDITIES: DINAH MULOCK CRAIK'S OLIVE AND BRITISH HETEROGENEITY

In this article, Alisha Walters argues that Dinah Mulock Craik's Olive (1850), frequently received as an emulation of Charlotte Brontë's more famous novel Jane Eyre (1847), is a thematically significant text on its own merit, as it directly engages with ideas of race and hybridized Victorian nationalism. Published in 1850, at a time of rampant anti-Celtic prejudice in Britain and during the ascendance of Saxonism—an ideology which posited that the nation owed its essential character to a pure Teutonic racial lineage—Craik's text of mixed-race characters paints a controversial, hybridized national portrait. Her Britain is comprised of both Saxons and Celts, while the novel also cautiously posits that Britishness may include forms of non-white mixture, in light of the empire. This article claims that what links these forms of national hybridity in the novel is the discourse of sentiment. Affect intersects with Victorian theories of racial mixture, and an emotive understanding of the racialized Other is produced in Olive. Affective language urges acceptance of racial difference, as a “felt” model of hybridized nationality is inculcated in the text. At a time when exclusionary theories of monoracial origin were gaining national popularity, Craik deploys affect to create a more complex, heterogeneous ideal of Britishness in the mid nineteenth century.

AFTERWORD: DINAH MULOCK CRAIK FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Although more than 90 books, articles and dissertations in the past 30 years have discussed Dinah Mulock Craik, usually while analysing a topic common to the work of several mid-Victorian writers, only four of Craik's books have been treated more than once or twice. In the last few years, however, almost all of her writing has become easily available, which, combined with additional documents and artifacts, should lead to new and richer considerations of Craik and her work.

INTRODUCTION: REREADING DINAH MULOCK CRAIK

In the introduction, the author draws on new archival material from Bromley, where Dinah Mulock Craik lived for the last 20 years of her life, in order to situate the author's reputation both during her lifetime and afterwards. The introduction further draws on Craik's unpublished correspondence to update misconceptions about the author's life and to give a clearer picture of her entry into the literary marketplace. Craik's work was first recovered for an academic audience 30 years ago and, as the articles in this issue demonstrate, her novels especially remain fertile ground for current arenas of academic inquiry, including disability studies, children's literature, post-colonialism and new studies of women writers' careers. Further investigation into the various kinds of literary work that Craik undertook, including writing poetry, journalism and translation, would offer scholars a fascinating opportunity to explore the various genres, audiences and venues of publication that could sustain a popular Victorian woman writer's career for more than 40 years.

PROSTHESES AND NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE IN DINAH MULOCK CRAIK'S THE LITTLE LAME PRINCE

Using narratology and prosthetic theory to examine disability in Dinah Mulock Craik's The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak: A Parable for Young and Old (1874), this article argues that while the novel's overall structure appears to eradicate disability by prostheticizing it through the hero Prince Dolor's magical gifts—a travelling cloak that flies and a pair of golden spectacles and of silver ears that allow the prince to see and hear from far distances—the narration and focalization within the story destabilize bodily difference in the following ways. The narrator's denial of authority combines with the story's illustrations to indicate the limitations of all bodies, including the narrator's and the reader's. While focalizing the narrative on Dolor creates an asymmetrical power dynamic based on pity, focalizing through Dolor focuses attention on the social rather than physical experience of disability and creates an equal power relationship between the reader and Dolor via empathy. Finally, focalizing alongside Dolor while he uses his magical prostheses emphasizes the omnipresence and beauty of difference. Ultimately, the contradicting concepts of disability found in the structure of the text exhibit the complicated and ever shifting role of the body in Victorian thought.

THE HALF-CASTE: A HALF-TOLD TALE

Dinah Mulock Craik's 1851 short story The Half-Caste tells us less about the title character, a young woman of mixed British and Indian descent, than about Cassia, the embedded narrator. The most revealing parts of Cassia's narrative are her silences, those places where she skirts around the unspeakable. In addition to Cassia's apparent sexual repression, this article considers the ways in which the gaps in the narrative serve to draw attention to the repression of colonial problems, particularly the discrepancies between colonialist attitudes and Craik's egalitarian ideals. The narrative gaps are only partial ones; secrets are half-told rather than untold, and this serves to heighten their significance. Cassia's silences reveal her desires all too clearly, and although, as this article argues, the story ultimately centers on Cassia herself as the quintessential Englishwoman, the importance of the colony to her very identity is apparent in the characterization in, and the form of, The Half-Caste.

DINAH MULOCK CRAIK'S OLIVE: DEFORMITY, GENDER AND FEMALE DESTINY

Dinah Mulock Craik tells an unusual story in her 1850 novel Olive: she writes about a woman, born deformed and abject, who eventually becomes a fulfilled wife and mother. Moreover, the marriage plot in Olive is only one of many transformative scenarios experienced by the title character. In this essay, the author explores the construct of Olive's deformity as an opportunity to shape and reshape the life of a “different” woman. Rather than compare Olive to other disabled or deformed characters in fiction, this essay situates the novel amidst other mid-Victorian women's novels that explore, with varying levels of success, the ability of women to transform their own lives. That Craik's Olive enjoys professional success and financial independence, as well as a blissful marriage, suggests that her physical difference expands rather than restricts the narrative paths available to an anomalous woman.

A MEDIATED INTIMACY: DINAH MULOCK CRAIK AND CELEBRITY CULTURE

This article analyses Dinah Mulock Craik's acute, early appreciation of celebrity culture and articulates how Craik manages her literary persona via a mediated intimacy with her admirers. Credited with first using the word in our modern understanding of the term, Craik's thematic use of celebrity in her novel The Ogilvies (1849) highlights the need for nineteenth-century literary stars to market themselves and not just their work in order to become famous. Herself constructing a persona out of fiction, this essay also excavates Craik's reputation as it develops through her association with her most famous novel, John Halifax, Gentleman (1856). It explores how the author successfully creates an identity palatable to middle-class Victorian readers but an identity that does not withstand ideological changes at the fin de siècle, posthumously leaving Craik open to personal critique for the same reasons that she was first so popular.

SINGLE BUT NOT SOLITARY: DINAH MULOCK CRAIK'S VISION OF A PROTESTANT FEMALE COMMUNITY

This essay re-evaluates Dinah Mulock Craik's attitude towards female community by examining her series of essays A Woman's Thoughts about Women (1857) and her neglected novel Mistress and Maid (1862) in their periodical contexts of Chambers's Journal and Good Words. The author argues that Craik's narrative voice simultaneously acknowledges, identifies with and attempts to shape a community of single, female readers. Furthermore, her mode of address and publication practices created a support network for these women. While Victorian commentators debated the role of “surplus women”, suggesting options ranging from emigration to Anglican sisterhoods, Craik advocated pragmatic changes based on single women's financial and emotional needs. Although she eschewed political sisterhood, Craik valued female communities that were based on a middle-class Protestant belief in the saving power of work. In addition, by depicting single women's diverse emotional experiences, she combated the stereotype of the angelic spinster prevalent in the religious press where she published Mistress and Maid, while still promoting single women's social value.