Late Victorians Research Articles

“Hero of the Half-Breed Rebellion”: Gabriel Dumont and Late Victorian Military Masculinity

This essay examines late nineteenth-century concepts of military heroism and martial manliness in the context of the 1885 North-West Campaign through contemporary interpretations of Métis general Gabriel Dumont (1837-1906). Many Canadian nationalists were able to distinguish heroic values in Dumont because his military exploits seemed to conform to the philosophy of rugged, muscular manhood that many in the country and the British Empire were attempting to instill in young male citizens. The reactions to Dumont suggested that these imperialists and nationalistic militia supporters recognized a non-White enemy warrior as a potential military model who reflected a distinctly Canadian martial spirit. This depiction of Dumont as an aggressive, individual fighter, however, also sought to separate him from Métis political advocacy. Canadian appropriation of Dumont served a nationalist agenda by reframing the conflict in 1885 as a contest of martial masculinity rather than a consequence of communal Métis resistance.

An Immense Quantity of Clever and Thoughtful Rubbish’? Twentieth Century Victorians and the Problem of History

The twenty-first century places the neo-Victorian narrator in a dangerously exposed position, operating a text which seeks engagement between an assumed reader and characters with immeasurably different cultural norms. While this location of narrative authority posed similar problems for writers nearly a century ago, the post World War I life writing of late Victorians, such as Mary Cholmondeley's Under One Roof: A Family Memoir (1918), E. F. Benson's As We Were: A Victorian Peepshow (1930) and Netta Syrett's The Sheltering Tree (1939) subtly elude reader expectation. As they renegotiate the terms of fin de siècle ‘rebellion’ in the light of twentieth century assumptions about the Victorian age, each of these narratives seeks to resist or complicate historical appropriations of the 1880s and ‘90s.

Posthumous Playback: Oscar Wilde and the Phonographic Logic of Modern Biography

For many late Victorians, the death of Oscar Wilde in 1900 marked a victory for the normalizing narratives that constituted the Victorian eminent life. In retaliation, a small coterie of writers sought new ways to preserve his memory. This essay demonstrates that in the memorial texts that spring up at the start of the twentieth century we find an obsessive focus on preserving the distinctive cadences of Wilde’s speech transformed into an avant-garde response to critics and cultural commentators satisfied that Wilde’s death meant that an unsavory voice would be heard from no more. Wilde’s early biographers (including Robert Sherard, Andre Gide, Frank Harris, and Laurence Housman) borrow the haunting properties of the phonograph to invoke a dead voice whose very volubility dismantles a calcified generic aesthetic.

Race and racism in modern East Asia: Western and Eastern constructions

List of Illustrations and Tables Conventions Preface 1. Modern East Asia and the Rise of Racial Thought: Possible Links, Unique Features, and Unsettled Issues Rotem Kowner and Walter Demel PART I: WESTERN RACE THEORIES, RACIAL IMAGES AND RACISM 2. Early Modern European Divisions of Mankind and East Asians, 1500-1750 50 Walter Demel and Rotem Kowner 3. How the Mongoloid Came into Being: Late Eighteenth-Century Constructions of East Asians in Europe Walter Demel 4. Between Contempt and Fear: Western Racial Constructions of East Asians since 1800 Rotem Kowner 5. Very Great Gulf: Late Victorian British Diplomacy and Race in East Asia T.G. Otte 6. Pan-Mongolians at Twilight: East Asia and Race in Russian Modernism, 1890-1921 Susanna Soojung Lim 7. National Identity and Race in Post-Revolutionary Russia: Pil'niak's Travelogues from Japan and China Alexander Bukh 8. Class, Race, Floating Signifier: American Media Imagine the Chinese, 1870-1900 Lenore Metrick-Chen 9. Racism for Beginners: Constructions of Chinese in Twentieth Century Belgian Comics Idesbald Goddeeris 10. Race, Imperialism, and Reconstructing Selves: Late Nineteenth Century Korea in European Travel Literature Huajeong Seok 11. Race, Culture and the Reaction to the Victory of 1905 in the English-Speaking World Philip Towle PART II: EAST ASIAN RACE THEORIES, RACIAL POLICIES AND RACISM 12. A Certain Whiteness of Being: Chinese Perceptions of Self by the Beginning of European Contact Don J. Wyatt 13. Racial Discourse and Utopian Visions in Nineteenth Century China Sufen Sophia Lai 14. The Discourse of Race in Twentieth-Century China Frank Dikotter 15. Racist South Korea? Diverse but not Tolerant of Diversity Gi-Wook Shin 16. Skin Color Melancholy in Modern Japan: Male Elites' Racial Experiences Abroad, 1880s-1950s Ayu Majima 17. Anatomically Speaking: The Kubo Incident and the Paradox of Race in Colonial Korea Hoi-eun Kim 18. Who Classified Whom, and for What Purpose? The Japanese in Northeast China in the Age of Empire Mariko Asano Tamanoi 19. Race and International Law in Japan's New Order in East Asia, 1938-1945 Urs Matthias Zachmann 20. East Asia's Melting-Pot: Reevaluating Race Relations in Japan's Colonial Empire 583 Yukiko Koshiro 21. Categorical Confusion: President Obama as a Case Study of Racialized Practices in Contemporary Japan Christine R. Yano Contributors Bibliography Index

The P-Word: Reconsidering the Relationship Between Modernism and the Popular Novel

In recent years the historical categorization of cultural objects as high-, middle-, or lowbrow has come under increased scrutiny and the demarcations and motivations of those who initially determined them are being questioned and re-evaluated. Martin Hipsky's study attempts to reconsider the hierarchical cultural assumptions of the ‘popular’, which distinguish bestselling work from that which is intellectually and artistically innovative, challenging, and therefore, apparently more culturally desirable. Consequently he reconsiders the frequently aired assumption that popular art objects are middle- or even lowbrow, and therefore not connected to high modernism. University reading lists and elite academic publishing houses have largely determined the last generation of students' understanding of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ literature, without interrogating how these ranks were initially assigned. For this reason, Hipsky's thoroughly researched contribution to this field is very welcome. Kate Macdonald, in her edited collection The Masculine Middlebrow 1880–1950: What Mr Miniver Read (2011), and building on previous work by John Baxendale, observes that it has been the proponents of modernist ‘highbrow’ writing who have generally dictated how we view the popular. When figures such as Virginia Woolf have spoken derogatorily of the middlebrow, they have demonstrated not only their own tastes and aspirations but also their social class.1Yet, Woolf ought not to have had such a lasting influence on the way we continue to define writers who pre-date her and who did much to formulate a literary environment where high modernism was possible. In other words, while many of the popular writers whom Hipsky considers cannot be grouped as ‘modernist’, they can be credited with contributing to the evolution of the cultural environment that produced modernism. If the popular novels of the late Victorians are to be considered for their share in the modernist moment, and their contribution to the artistic sphere that spurred such innovators as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, then the factors that put the literary hierarchy in place must be reconsidered and the texts seen in terms of their merits as well as their failings. Hipsky does this without crediting authors like Corelli, Orkzy and Ward with the cerebral exactitude and deft creativity of the high moderns. He recognises their role as creators of dynamic fictions, that reflect their period, exhibiting the influence of their literary past as well as offering evidence of the future direction of British writing. As he asserts, the study will ‘reconsider … writing by Mansfield, Lawrence, Joyce, West and Woolf to explore how these modern writers incorporated elements of the romance mode and a related neo-Romanticism into their innovative fiction and (in the cases of West and Woolf) literary criticism’ (pp.xvi–xvii).

‘One single ivory cell’: Oscar Wilde and the Brain

This paper considers Oscar Wilde's ongoing interest in the image of a single brain cell as a souvenir of human autonomy in a world of matter. Taking a long view of Wilde's career that demonstrates the relevance to his literary work of his college interests in physiology and philosophy, this paper shows how Wilde's socialism can be explained by his uniquely aesthetic take on the brain. For many late Victorians brain science threatened both the autonomy of human action and the legitimacy of beauty because it had the potential to invalidate conscious experience, but writers whose work Wilde knew, like Ernst Haeckel, W.K. Clifford and John Tyndall, apply aesthetic vocabularies to their own discussions of cells. Their theories illuminate Wilde's representation of the cell as an aesthetic object. Wilde's art collaborates with science to reject action, as action is conventionally understood, without relinquishing beauty as his ultimate value. His discovery of beauty in matter that is beyond the pale of human exp...

James Joyce and the Revolt of Love: Marriage, Adultery and Desire (review)

Reviewed by: James Joyce and the Revolt of Love: Marriage, Adultery and Desire Juliane White Janine Utell . James Joyce and the Revolt of Love: Marriage, Adultery and Desire. New York: Palgrave, 2010. x + 177 pp. Marriage is hard. Anyone who has ever been married can attest to this. For Joyce, though, marriage—at least marriage the way it was [End Page 417] constructed by the late Victorians of his formative years—was also an unethical practice. Although promulgated, of course, as a blissful oneness by the cultural milieu around him, Joyce rejected this unrealistic and ultimately oppressive practice, spending his adult life with Nora Barnacle, but not married to her. We all know this. However, Utell asks the inevitable question that arises from this set of circumstances on the first page of her introduction: "If Joyce found the institution of marriage to be so problematic, why does he continually explore it, even affirm it?" (1). It is this question that drives the production of Utell's slim volume. Examining evidence from Joyce's letters to Nora during their courtship, the political and personal fallout from the Parnell-O'Shea affair, his unpublished, "deeply flawed" play Exiles (52), the "short notebook of prose poems" called Giacomo Joyce (60), and most importantly, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Utell closely traces Joyce's struggle with marriage, adultery, and desire in order to carve out some modicum of understanding of Joyce's ongoing intellectual problem about marriage and how (or whether) it can be conducted/engaged in ethically. The late-nineteenth-century notion of marriage is wildly overblown and overladen with cultural values and expectations of the negation of the self, especially for the wife; this is presented as foundational fact for Utell's study, and she does not spend any time rehashing that well-trodden ground. Instead, she starts in the empty space beyond that to suggest that Joyce presents adultery "not only as part of the world of two"—a piece of the marriage puzzle either ignored, rejected, or denied by the culture of the time—but also as "potentially transformative" (1). So although adultery has always been viewed as the ultimate threat to the sanctity of marriage, Utell claims that Joyce, based on the evidence in his writing, saw adultery as the way toward a re-envisioning of marriage as a more ethical practice. What seems antithetical, even oxymoronic, Utell explains clearly, and she provides ample evidence from Joyce's work to convince even the most skeptical of readers. Utell shows how Joyce's letters "allow [him], and us, a space in which to consider the meaning of love and how Joyce defines it; the nature and narrativization of the love story and how we tell and retell it; the place of desire within and beyond marriage and other social conventions meant to regulate that desire; and the ultimate impossibility of bridging the separation between lover and beloved" (17-18). That impossibility is key to her argument. Utell focuses on the Other's ultimate unknowability, or her "alterity"— the state of being radically alien to the conscious self or a particular cultural orientation. Not only, then, is the Other essentially unknowable; she is also radically different from what her culture has led her partner to expect, and many times, even different from the [End Page 418] selfhood she is consciously aware of. If she does not fulfill cultural expectations, and she does not even truly know herself, then what hope does her husband have? This is what ultimately prevents the "oneness" that is supposed to be at the heart of a union between husband and wife. This is also, in the final analysis, what must be given expression for a marriage to be ethical. Since oneness is impossible, then the only other option is for the male partner to allow the female partner her agency, whether that agency is expressed with her husband or some other partner. But Joyce does not arrive at this conclusion easily, or quickly. He works it out, sometimes painfully, over the course of his life, through his writing and within and without his partnership with Nora. Through his letters, readers see his struggle with his feelings of...

Imagining the Ancient Britons: Victorian Adventures in Wye-Land

Depicted in the mid to late nineteenth-century periodical press as wild, remote, and ‘intensely national’, Wales was perceived as a place of quiet mystery, geographically and socially distinct from the industrialisation of Victorian England. The borderland territory of the Wye Valley – what the Victorian journalist and historian, Barbara Hutton, called ‘Wye-Land’ – has been inhabited for over 12,000 years and preserves an ancient British identity in its rich archaeological landscapes. Developments in mid Victorian archaeology and anthropology precipitated a rise in the number of prehistoric excavations, which popularised knowledge of how ancient Britons lived and died. Drawing from articles in the late Victorian periodical press, and the activities of the Cardiff Naturalist's Society in the 1870s, which included the study of geology, botany and archaeology, this paper suggests that the observation of natural phenomena in the late nineteenth century was closely associated with the study of past human societies. I identify the changing interpretations of prehistoric sites – from early Victorian notions of barbarous druids, to more informed and sensitive appreciations of ancient British societies, whose sympathetic relation to the landscape fostered imaginative connections between late Victorians and their ancestors. This transition away from perceptions of being wholly distinct from prehistoric activity, shaped late Victorian pastoral journalism and encouraged a more integrated vision of the relationship between past and present human activity in the region.

<em>The Late Victorian Folksong Revival: The Persistence of English Melody, 1878–1903</em>, by E. David Gregory

<em>The Late Victorian Folksong Revival: The Persistence of English Melody, 1878–1903</em>, by E. David Gregory

Imperial Boyhood: Piracy and the Play Ethic

Representations of perpetual boyhood came to fascinate the late Victorians, partly because such images could naturalize a new spirit of imperial aggression and new policies of preserving power. This article traces the emergence of this fantasy through a series of stories about the relationship of the boy and the pirate, figures whose opposition in mid-Victorian literature was used to articulate the moral legitimacy of colonialism, but who became doubles rather than antitheses in later novels, such as R.L. Stevenson's "Treasure Island" and Joseph Conrad's "Lord Jim." Masculine worth needed no longer to be measured by reference to transcendent, universal laws, but by a morally flexible ethic of competitive play, one that bound together boyishness and piracy in a satisfying game of international adventure.

Travel Cinematography and the Indian City: The Imperial Spectacle of Geography at the End of the Long Nineteenth Century

This article looks at the ways in which early films, as much as photography and colonial exhibitions, transported the spectators to a version of India existing in great part as the creation of unchecked British imagination. Late Victorians and Edwardians stepped into this exotic world through different media, and cinematic exposure to the East would soon dominate visual culture and consolidate the East as a product of European imagination.It investigates the ways in which at the end of the so-called long nineteenth century a very Victorian passion for geographical spectacle migrated to early films of urban spaces in colonized territories, and reassess the part played by early films in the imperial project by investigating the cinematic image of Indian cities between 1895 and 1914.

‘Rude am I in Meh Speech': Vocality and Victorian Shakespeare

This article refutes some of the assumptions, most often associated with Peter Hall and John Barton, that colour accounts of the vocality of verse actors before the emergence of contemporary stylisations. It focuses on the earliest recordings of late Victorians actors – in particular, Edwin Booth, Ellen Terry and Henry Irving – performing Shakespearean roles. By examining the social, political and cultural evaluations of the actor's voice from the period 1870-1901, it emerges that the actors who dominated the English-speaking stage of the period spoke with a voice unaffected by Received Pronunciation, which was becoming increasingly dominant through the education system. By timing the rate of speech of existing recordings it becomes clear that the application of pejorative terms – such as 'declamation' – to the actors' vocal styles is inaccurate because their voices progress through the text at a rate in the median of twentieth-century dramatic speech. Most importantly, their training – rooted in the repertory system and the late nineteenth-century forms of elocution – required the use of a different resonance centre than that used by contemporary performers, which lends to their voice a timbre more suited to the space of a large auditorium. The article asks for a reconsideration of those voices as more recognisably 'natural' to the actor and to the nineteenth-century audience than they are to their contemporary counterparts.

‘Where there is a will there is a way’: The late Victorians on psychology and the will

The question of human agency in nature, while humans are part of nature, and the corresponding topic of the will, gave rise to perplexed comment in the Victorian period. This continues. I discuss the psychology and philosophy in central contributions to the late Victorian intellectual debate, with an eye on recent claims that the will is an illusion. The paper re-examines James Ward and G. F. Stout, in particular, to suggest that there is more of interest in their theories of mental activity than their reputation as outmoded in an age of experimental science might suggest.

Metaphor and Maternity: Dante Gabriel Rossetti 's House of Life and Augusta Webster's Mother and Daughter

In Gabriel Rossetti and Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence, John Holmes recently discussed shaping influence of The House of Life (1870, 1881) on a wide range of authors, Christina Rossetti and Rupert Brooke to scarcely known Theo Marzials, George Barlow, and Rosa Newmarch. Augusta Webster, to whose posthumously published sonnet sequence Mother and Daughter (1895) Holmes devotes a brief section, sticks out as neither a familiar face nor a complete stranger. (1) When Webster's oeuvre was rediscovered in 1990s, critical interest initially focused on controversial female speakers of her dramatic monologues (Portraits, 1870): an infanticidal mother in Medea in Athens, a genteel prostitute in A Castaway, a bewitching temptress in Circe. The thematically much more conventional Mother and Daughter, by contrast, has been slow to make its way into scholarly publications. Dorothy Mermin was probably first to note that it extends emotional range of sonnet sequence beyond its traditional amatory concerns. (2) Angela Leighton and Alison Chapman also addressed sequence briefly in their surveys of Victorian poetry, and Florence Boos discussed it in more detail in her contribution to a study of Rossettis' literary legacy. (3) Despite pioneering insights she offers into works of several virtually unstudied late nineteenth-century female sonnet writers, Boos persistently refers to Webster's sequence as Mother and Child, thus inadvertently betraying just how unfamiliar most critics still are with work. To figure Rossetti's influence on Webster, Holmes and Boos both adopt metaphor of literary kinship. Boos quite conspicuously presents Webster, Mathilde Blind, Amy Levy, Olive Custance, Rosa Newmarch, and Michael Field in title of her essay as Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poetic daughters. Holmes's discussion of late Victorian women poets follows a chapter devoted to the sons of Gabriel, suggesting that women he goes on to consider belong to female lineage of Rossetti's poetic offspring. The adoption of genealogical vocabulary seems most apposite in this context since, as Harold Bloom has pointed out, from sons of Homer to sons of Ben Jonson, poetic influence [has] been described as a filial relationship. (4) Yet, by taking Rossetti's literary parentage for granted, Boos and Holmes create major critical blind spots. While they meticulously scan Mother and Daughter for Rossettian approaches to life, and death, profusion of references to birth, childhood, and maternity in The House of Life, which, in case of Webster, constitutes such an obvious point of comparison, remains largely undisclosed. In addition, although figuring of literary influence in terms of son- or daughter-ship may accord with distinct predilection that Rossetti, like so many of his predecessors and colleagues, had for trope, it does not necessarily do justice to Webster and her sequence. Most crucially, it obscures possibility of reading Mother and Daughter as a cogent critique of alienation of fundamentally female experiences, such as birth and motherhood, and of female body in general for use as metaphors of male creativity. Gabriel Rossetti's plan to compose The House of Life sprang Willowwood, a series of four sonnets that boldly rewrite Ovid's myth of Narcissus. The group heads all early drafts and manuscript versions of sequence, and was first published in 1869 in Fortnightly Review as sonnets 1 through 4 out of sixteen sonnets On Life, Love, and Death before taking its final position at heart of 1870 and 1881 printed editions. Critics have variously described it as addressing problem about love and hope of its fulfilment, recording the obsessive nature of desire for unity and fact that desire becomes even more obsessive after separation, and most recently, exploring homoerotic potential of Rossetti's vision of love, but it was probably William Michael Rossetti who best captured scope of Willowwood when he claimed that it is all about the pangs of severance. …

Facing the Late Victorians: Portraits of Writers and Artists from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection. Margaret D. Stetz

<i>Facing the Late Victorians: Portraits of Writers and Artists from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection</i>. Margaret D. Stetz

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence: Sexuality, Belief and the Self by John Holmes

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence: Sexuality, Belief and the Self by John Holmes

Journalism in the Late Victorian Scottish Highlands: John Murdoch, Duncan Campbell, and the Northern Chronicle

Journalism in the Late Victorian Scottish Highlands: John Murdoch, Duncan Campbell, and the Northern Chronicle

Facing the late Victorians: portraits of writers and artists from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection

This is a lavishly illustrated volume that offers a new interpretation of the significance of the portrait image during the final decades of the nineteenth century in Britain, using materials drawn from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection at the University of Delaware. This study highlights the connections between the images of writers' and artists' faces that circulated through the British periodical press, through exhibition spaces in London, and through book publishing, and such late-Victorian cultural obsessions as defining genius, masculinity, femininity, and class status. It focuses in particular on the figure of Oscar Wilde as the writer who best exploited the new market for portraits in advancing his own career, but moves beyond him to look at the broader topic of how and why writers' and artists' faces were idealized, caricatured, and also studied by the general public. It examines, too, the relationship between the circulation of portraits and notions of modernity created through advertising, public relations, and commodification. Margaret D. Stetz is the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware.

The Pitfalls of Prosopography: Inventors in the Dictionary of National Biography

The Pitfalls of Prosopography Inventors in the Dictionary of National Biography Christine MacLeod Alessandro Nuvolari Abstract This article investigates the representation in the Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900) of inventors and inventive activities during the British industrial revolution. We analyse a data-set of all individuals born in the period 1650–1850 whose entry credits them with at least one invention, in order to interrogate the late Victorians' concept of invention and its influence on successive narratives of the British industrial revolution. Our study suggests that the DNB's selection of inventors reflected various Victorian biases and preconceptions about the role of technology in the transformation of contemporary society. Consequently, the use of collective biographies as a source for the history of technology is open to several methodological pitfalls, of which historians need to be aware. The Dictionary of National Biography was a triumph of Victorian literary engineering and private enterprise. Its original sixty-three volumes contained 29,120 entries. 1 They were produced in "eighteen years of unremitting labour" between 1882 and 1900, and published at the formidable rate of one volume every three months (precisely). 2 The Dictionary (henceforward DNB, as it is affectionately known in Britain) was intended to provide "full, accurate, and concise biographies of all noteworthy inhabitants of the British Islands and the Colonies (exclusive of living persons) from the earliest historical period to the present time." 3 [End Page 757] In order to investigate the representation in the DNB of inventors and inventive activities during the British Industrial Revolution, we have constructed a data-set of all individuals born during the period 1650–1850 whose entry credits them with at least one invention. These individuals number 383 and account for slightly more than 1 percent of all original entries. 4 If this seems a small proportion, we need to remember the inclusiveness of the enterprise and "the rich tapestry of British history" that the DNB represented. 5 It was the editors' goal to include all those who had achieved distinction in "any walk of life"; their list of examples mentioned "inventor" sixth, after "statesman, lawyer, divine, painter, author." 6 Certainly, if the DNB had been compiled a century earlier, the representation of inventors (as well as engineers and scientists) would have been negli-gible. The high regard in which inventors and engineers were held in Victorian Britain was a novel phenomenon that peaked during the second half of the nineteenth century. The men who selected the entries for the original DNB grew up in a society that celebrated the achievements of the inventor and the engineer in literature, museums, and public art as never before or since. 7 The second half of the nineteenth century began with the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace and ended with the unprecedented elevation to the peerage of such inventors and engineers as Joseph (Baron) Lister, Samuel Cunliffe Lister (who took the title Baron Masham), William (Baron) Armstrong, and William Thomson (Baron Kelvin). It witnessed the erection of statues in city centers and major public buildings to men such as these and other inventors, and saw the opening in South Kensington of the Patent Office Museum (later part of the Science Museum), which attracted 4.5 million visitors between 1855 and 1878. 8 The period was [End Page 758] awash with biographical studies, of which those produced by Samuel Smiles represented only the tip of a publishing iceberg. The aim of this article is to scrutinize the criteria adopted by the Victorian edition of the DNB when selecting British inventors born during the period 1650–1850. 9 We work with this first edition in order to interrogate the late Victorians' conceptualization of invention and its influence on successive narratives of the British Industrial Revolution. Simultaneously, we seek to raise methodological issues about the selection of historical sources for prosopographical studies. This is a timely exercise for two reasons. First, the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), while...

John holmes. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence: Sexuality, Belief and the Self. Pp. viii+190 (The Nineteenth Century). Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Cloth, £45.00.

john holmes. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence: Sexuality, Belief and the Self. Pp. viii+190 (The Nineteenth Century). Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Cloth, £45.00.