Victorian Review Research Articles

Contributors to this Issue

Other| December 01 2022 Contributors to this Issue Nineteenth-Century Literature (2022) 77 (2-3): 192–193. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2022.77.2-3.192 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Contributors to this Issue. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 December 2022; 77 (2-3): 192–193. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2022.77.2-3.192 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search Daniel Jenkin-Smith is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of English, Languages and Applied Linguistics at Aston University. He is coauthor and coeditor, with Abigail Boucher, of a series of articles for Victorian Review entitled “Bodily Fluids in the Long Nineteenth Century,” published in spring 2019. He has also coauthored, with Abigail Boucher, a chapter on Herman Melville’s Pierre (1852) as a mock-Gothic novel for the forthcoming collection Gothic Melville, edited by Monika Elbert and Jeffrey Weinstock. Currently he is preparing a monograph based on his doctoral thesis, “Bureaucratisation and the Rise of Office Literature: 1810–1900.” Stephanie Kinzinger is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is finishing a dissertation that uses literary theory and critical game studies to explore how the formal and political possibilities of video... You do not currently have access to this content.

Beyond the Gendered Stereotypes: The Conflict of Motherhood in Dollie Radford’s Poetry

This article sheds light on motherhood as a theme which – to my knowledge – has not been thoroughly explored to date in Dollie Radford’s volumes of poetry published in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It positions Radford’s depiction of the theme within Victorian conventions, and simultaneously in line with the radical meanings embraced by her contemporary women poets, including Christina Rossetti, Alice Meynell and Augusta Webster. In doing so, the article approaches the representation of motherhood at different levels, thereby eschewing a fixed reading of the selected poems. It offers an insight into Radford’s conflict as a mother who wishes to enlighten both her children and the future generation away from the prevailing doctrines. Thus, the argument presented herein adds to the existing body of knowledge on Radford and challenges the gendered readings imposed upon her poems by Victorian reviewers.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Christopher Keep this issue's forum, dedicated to Victorian weather, features essays about meteorological events—fogs, hurricanes, and droughts—and about understandings of climate. Prominent among the themes the contributors explore are the distance between Indigenous and settler perceptions of weather and the role of racialized identity in Victorian-era thinking about climate. We are pleased to add that this forum features what is almost certainly the only essay by a meteorologist to be published in the pages of Victorian Review. The winning essay of the 2020 Hamilton Prize competition is "The Representation of Self and Other in a Semi-Colonial Environment: An Analysis of Japan Punch, 1862–87" by Beninio McDonough-Tranza (Free University of Berlin). We are pleased to publish this exceptional contribution to the field of Victorian studies in the current issue. The Hamilton Prize is awarded to the best essay submitted to our annual competition by a graduate student. Our grateful thanks go to the advisory board members who generously served as judges: John Miller, Monica Flegel, and Tabitha Sparks. Finally, it is my great pleasure to announce two additions to the Editorial Advisory Board: Natalie Houston (University of Massachusetts, Lowell) and Janice Schroeder (Carleton University). Advisory board members serve as an important sounding board for the journal's editorial policy and assist with the mentoring of emergent scholars through our Hamilton Prize competition. We are very fortunate to have such highly respected scholars, with so many demands on their time, join our team. [End Page V] Copyright © 2021 Victorian Studies of Western Canada

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Christopher Keep This issue's forum, guest edited by Charles LaPorte and Mary Ellis Gibson, explores the varieties and denominations of Victorian Christianity. Whereas the Victorian Review editorial team initially conceived the forum as a broad survey of spiritual traditions of importance to Victorian culture, Gibson and LaPorte, sensitive to the importance of denominations to the history of religion, opted to focus on the internal complexities of Victorian Christianity. The engaging and very informative essays they share here reveal the centrality of denominational difference to nineteenth-century Christian experience and identity. This issue features, too, our second cluster of essays on animal studies. The essays explore topics ranging from animal language in Kipling's fiction and ape cognition in post-1859 science writing, periodical satires, and animal welfare advocacy, to the representation of flesh-eating in theories of totemism (the belief that religion has its origins in animal worship) and the role of tiger hunting in the rhetorical strategies of imperialism. Taken together with the well-received articles published in our Spring 2019 issue, these essays make a persuasive case for the role of animal studies in any consideration of the value of the humanities today. Let me close this note with a word of hearty congratulations. Lisa Hager's essay "A Case for a Trans Studies Turn in Victorian Studies: 'Female Husbands' of the Nineteenth Century" has received the Donald Gray Prize, awarded by the North American Victorian Studies Association for the best essay in the field of Victorian studies published in the past year. Hager's article appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of Victorian Review as part of the special issue on trans Victorians guest edited by Ardel Haefele-Thomas. The essay has helped provoke a much-needed rethinking of gender binaries in Victorian studies and brought long overdue recognition of the lived experiences of trans people in the nineteenth century. We are delighted to have provided a forum for Hager's innovative research and to see it so richly rewarded. [End Page v] Copyright © 2021 Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada

Athletic Antagonism in Wilkie Collins’s Man and Wife

ABSTRACTWilkie Collins’s Man and Wife (1870) has notoriously been criticised by both Victorian and contemporary reviewers for its seeming oversimplified antagonism toward athleticism and sport. However, Man and Wife provides profound insights into the debates and anxieties of the time regarding the cultivation of physical prowess in conjunction with British imperialism. Collins’s antagonism represents a view into Victorian discourse on the unprecedented vogue of athleticism, which made England the first modern sporting nation. This essay argues that Collins became a representative antagonist against athleticism due to his concerns about the decline of intelligence, morality, and even health combined with a concern about the popularity of amateur sports, which served as a means to segregate class. Collins’s controversial portrayal of an aristocrat’s excellence in sports was a warning against elite athleticism, which went against the Victorian current of class mobility. Analysing discourses on athleticism in Victorian periodicals and magazines, this essay offers insights into the shifting contours of sporting ethos and class identity in mid- to late Victorian society and into British endeavours to strengthen its economic and national power by adopting an innovative practice of athleticism.

The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume VIII: The Short Fiction ed. by Ian Small

Reviewed by: The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume VIII: The Short Fiction ed. by Ian Small John Peters (bio) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume VIII: The Short Fiction edited by Ian Small; pp. 640. Oxford UP, 2017. $158.63 cloth. The oxford English Texts edition of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde has now published its eighth volume (this latest being a collection of Wilde’s short fiction) and has consistently shown itself to be the definitive scholarly edition of Oscar Wilde’s works. Prior to the OET edition, Wilde’s canon was sorely in need of good textual editing, with most previous editions of Wilde’s work relying on flawed early collected editions. The OET edition has remedied this problem and consistently supplied accurate texts for scholars of Wilde’s writings. The latest volume in this series continues that trend. Unsurprisingly, given his previous editing work in this series, Ian Small has produced a careful and thoughtful edition of Oscar Wilde’s short fiction, which stands up well against previous editions. Small’s extensive introduction clearly traces the (sometimes scant) evidence that exists concerning the composition and development of Wilde’s short fiction. Small provides good support for the choices he makes in determining copy text as well as his justification for the emendations he does make to his copy texts. His decision to use the first English book editions of these works makes sense given the fact that Wilde would have made his final revisions to these versions of the stories and that Wilde typically allowed his editors to regularize his punctuation, capitalization, and similar issues. Small’s decision not to use the first book edition of “Mr. W.H.” also makes sense because of the questions surrounding its authority, something that Small argues convincingly in his introduction to the origins, composition, and publication history of this tale. I particularly like Small’s inclusion of both the original, shorter version of “Mr. W.H.” and the longer version, a version that Small has had to put together from various sources (again clearly outlined in his introduction). This task is similar to what he did previously when editing De Profundis for the Oxford English Texts edition of that work. Similarly, Small makes a good decision to include Wilde’s translation of Turgenev’s piece “A Fire at Sea.” This is one of Wilde’s lesser-known works, and its inclusion in this volume is welcome. Of course, the greatest value of this volume is its providing an authoritative version of Wilde’s various works of short fiction, something that has been lacking until now. Along with an authoritative text, the next most valuable contribution this edition makes is its extensive annotations to the stories, far more extensive than those provided in any other edition of the stories. Along with the texts, introduction, and annotations, Small includes a list of Wilde’s writings from 1885–89, an introduction to the textual editing practices he employs, and an appendix containing a translation of Wilde’s “The Birthday of the Infanta” (“L’Anniversaire de la Naissance de la Petite Princesse”). All of these will be useful to those studying Wilde’s short fiction. [End Page 293] All in all, the Oxford English Text edition of Wilde’s short fiction will be a valuable resource to readers of Wilde’s fiction for years to come, and it certainly belongs in any research library’s collection. John Peters University of North Texas John Peters john peters is a University Distinguished Research Professor at the University of North Texas. He is the author or editor of a dozen books with such publishers as Cambridge University Press, Broadview, W.W. Norton, Brill, Ohio State University Press, and Routledge. His articles have appeared in such journals as Philosophy and Literature, College Literature, Victorian Review, Studies in the Novel, Studies in Short Fiction, and English Language Notes. He has also translated the Japanese poet Takamura Kōtarō’ s book The Chieko Poems (Green Integer, 2007). Copyright © 2019 Victorian Studies of Western Canada

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note Christopher Keep This issue’s forum explores the Victorian short story, a genre that has particularly strong roots in nineteenth-century print culture and one that has received a welcome reappraisal in recent years. The forum is guest edited by Victoria Margree (University of Brighton). The essays she has collected seek to develop new readings of some well-known stories and introduce lesser-known texts that are deserving of wider attention. Readers looking to enrich their understanding of this vital and increasingly important field of research and teachers looking for new texts to “change up” a syllabus will find much of interest in this engaging survey. The editorial committee is delighted to announce the recipients of the two prizes that our journal sponsors. The winning essay of the 2017 Hamilton Prize competition is “Subjective Realism and Diligent Imagination: G.H. Lewes’s Theory of Psychology and George Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such” by Scott Thompson (Temple University). We are pleased to publish this exceptional contribution to the field of Victorian studies in the current issue. The Hamilton Prize is awarded to the best essay submitted to our annual competition by a graduate student. Our grateful thanks go to the advisory board members who generously served as judges: Jason Camlot (Concordia), Amy Woodson-Boulton (Loyola Marymount), and Joan Greer (University of Alberta). The recipient of the 2017 Surridge Prize is Doreen Thierauf, for “Daniel Deronda, Marital Rape, and the End of Reproduction.” The essay appeared in the Fall 2017 issue of Victorian Review. In making this choice, the committee members were impressed by the ways in which the essay’s analysis compelled us to rethink Eliot’s complicated relationship with issues related to women and sexual violence, making this well-known novel seem rich and strange again. We were struck, too, by the deftness and suppleness of the argumentation, which moves the reader from the historical and legal frameworks for the adjudication of marital rape to scenes in the novel that are often overlooked. Thierauf ’s essay will be necessary reading for any future consideration of Eliot’s last published novel. The Surridge Prize, formerly the Editor’s Prize, is awarded annually to the best article published in the journal and is chosen by the members of the editorial committee: Karen Bourrier, Kristen Guest, Christopher Keep, Ryan Stephenson, and Vanessa Warne. This issue marks, too, the debut of our new book review editor. Ryan Stephenson (Douglas College) will be familiar to members of both the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada and the Victorian [End Page v] Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States. He was the co-convener of two very successful, recent conferences, the joint VSAWC-VISAWUS meeting in 2017 and the VSAWC conference in Vancouver in 2013. Ryan currently serves as president of VSAWC, so we are very fortunate, indeed, to have him lend his energy, enthusiasm, and expertise to this important position. [End Page vi] Copyright © 2019 Victorian Studies of Western Canada

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note Christopher Keep In the second chapter of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–57), it is unclear which “plague” has prompted the medical authorities in Marseille to detain foreign travellers en route from “the East” (13). Dickens sets the story some thirty years before the novel’s original serialization, at which time Marseille was locked down owing to an outbreak of smallpox, one that would eventually claim 1,507 victims, or 1.2% of the city’s population (Barbieri and Drancourt S7). But Dickens’s association of the disease with the Orient, and the text’s emphasis on environmental rather than person-to-person transmission, suggests he may have had cholera, which swept through much of Europe in the early 1830s, in mind (Wright 261). The lack of an explicit identification of the contagious disease in question is, of course, pretty much the point: Dickens is less interested in scientific questions concerning the global spread of a virus than in the affective and psychological dimensions of what it means to live in quarantine. Feeling himself constantly watched by his ever-vigilant warders, Mr. Meagles appears to have internalized the panoptic gaze and convinced himself that he must, indeed, be one of the infected. “That’s my grievance,” he tells Arthur Clennam. “I have had the plague continually, ever since I have been here. I am like a sane man shut up in a madhouse; I can’t stand the suspicion of the thing. I came here as well as ever I was in my life; but to suspect me of the plague is to give me the plague. And I have had it—and I have got it” (13). When Clennam remarks that his compatriot in isolation seems, nonetheless, “to bear it very well” (13), Meagles vehemently denies the claim until his wife encourages him to take consolation in the presence of and good cheer afforded by their daughter, Pet. Meagles concedes the point and Clennam, too, remarks that such company “has had the result of making even quarantine enjoyable” (13). Dickens’s depiction of life in quarantine, where listlessness and boredom strangely mix with a sense of deep foreboding and doom, and the fear for one’s own health seems to be as contagious as the virus that necessitated the establishment of the cordon sanitaire in the first place, will seem very familiar to many readers who come to these pages in the midst of the pandemic occasioned by the coronavirus. As I write these words, in April 2020, a third of the global population is under some form of lockdown while health-care workers struggle to tend to the overwhelming numbers of the afflicted and essential service providers strive to maintain basic needs. For many academics, this means being cut off not only from our daily contact with students and colleagues but from the libraries, archives, and other [End Page v] resources that are essential to our research. These are small sacrifices, to be sure, and many are making them, like Mrs. Meagles, cheerfully, knowing that they will be temporary and are in the name of the greater public good. Moreover, many organizations and institutions have responded to the present crisis with both ingenuity and generosity. Working with individuals, libraries, and universities across the world, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Internet Archive, for example, has established what it calls a “National Emergency Library.” This service makes available more than 1.4 million digital copies of books and other materials for the duration of the current health crisis—the references above to Little Dorrit come from just this source, as my dog-eared copy languishes behind the locked doors of my departmental office. Moreover, Johns Hopkins University Press is making all the journals for which it is responsible, typically accessible only by scholars and researchers through their universities and colleges, available to the general public through the Project Muse digital platform. This means that the entire run of Victorian Review, from its first issue in 1972 to the one you are reading now, can now be read by anyone in the world with access to the Internet, at least for the duration of the...

Introduction: Trans Victorians

IntroductionTrans Victorians Ardel Haefele-Thomas (bio) On saturday, 26 May 1810, the following excerpt appeared in the Norfolk Chronicle, or, The Norwich Gazette describing the death of Chevalier/Chevalière d’Éon:1 The Chevalier D’Éon . . . died at his lodgings in New Milman Street, Guilford Street, on Tuesday last. . . . It will be remembered that a great doubt at one time existed to which gender he belonged, which, however, was set at rest by the verdict of 12 matrons who decided in favour of the female; and from that time to the present he wore the costume of that sex. But on his decease taking place it was unexpectedly discovered that the Chevalier was a perfect male! (“Postscript”) Fifty-five years later, during a terrible heat wave in London, the gifted surgeon and social reformer Dr. James Miranda Barry died of dehydration following a long illness. Despite Dr. Barry’s instructions before he died, Sophia Bishop, a charwoman, acted out of respect by preparing his body for burial at Kensal Green Cemetery. A few days after Dr. Barry’s burial, Bishop went to the military post at Horse Guards and told the authorities that Dr. Barry was a woman. As historian Rachel Holmes writes, “Barry’s own body passed into history as one of the most disputed corpses of the modern age” (3). Clearly, though, only five decades earlier, there was another body that was highly disputed in life as well as in death. This may seem like an odd and perhaps even sensational place to start my introduction to this special issue of Victorian Review on trans Victorians. D’Éon and Barry, though, exemplify a Victorian conundrum, or at least a conundrum for scholars of the nineteenth century. We have often looked to figures like d’Éon and Barry as examples to demonstrate the ways in which Victorians were caught up in the imperial project of categorization and obsessed with a rigid gender binary that assigned women to the private and men to the public sphere. As famous controversial public figures who were often written about in the British popular press because neither adhered to a strict gender binary, the ambassador and the doctor actually present Victorian scholars with an opportunity to move away from our [End Page 31] own narratives of nineteenth-century British culture as one of absolute binarisms. As the above news article regarding d’Éon exemplifies, the chevalier/chevalière’s sex was often in dispute because of the ambassador’s gender presentation. Over the course of the nineteenth century, d’Éon, instead of passing into obscurity, in many ways became legendary. In 1895, eighty-five years after d’Éon’s death, the Leeds Times published an article entitled “Duellists In Petticoats” that featured the late ambassador as one of the duellists: “As dauntless a fighter as ever buckled a sword during the year when Louis XV was King . . . was the Chevaliere d’Éon. Whether this strange being was a man or woman . . . is not positively known to this day” (4). It is important to note the newspaper’s spelling of d’Éon’s title in the feminine despite the majority of the news articles earlier in the century proclaiming d’Éon as a “perfect male.” The ambiguity surrounding d’Éon’s identity as either a man or a woman simultaneously points out a gender dichotomy and underscores the possibility of someone embodying both or neither. Likewise, Dr. James Miranda Barry was known during the time of his medical posts in South Africa, Jamaica, and Canada as a bit of dandy. He loved lavish and colourful waistcoats when he was out in society just as he often took British and Dutch authorities to task for the horrendous ways that former slaves, sex workers, and people suffering with Hansen’s Disease (leprosy) were treated.2 Interestingly, Barry’s masculinity was anything but hypermasculine. As Lord Albermarle wrote in his memoirs, “I beheld a beardless lad . . . with an unmistakable Scotch type of countenance—reddish hair, high cheek bones. . . . there was a certain effeminacy in his manner”(144). Like d’Éon before him, Dr. Barry never clung entirely to one side or the other of the...

Fretted Lines: Di-versification in Augusta Webster's Dramatic Monologues

Fretted Lines:Di-versification in Augusta Webster's Dramatic Monologues Herbert F. Tucker (bio) It seems as if the resistance, so to speak, offered to the plastic despotism of the artist by characteristics accepted, not made, called forth a subtler and a stronger skill than if he had worked with the limitlessness of free invention.1 I'll find it for you on a whitewashed wallWhere the slow shadows only change so muchAs shows the street has different darknessesAt noontime and at twilight.2 —Augusta Webster Nothing seems more to have gratified the modernism of Vita Sackville-West, in the course of a briskly condescending 1920s retrospect of Victorian women's poetry, than to drop Augusta Webster's dramatic poetry into the dustbin of intellectual history: "these blank-verse pieces . . . she probably regarded as vehicles for expressing her sociological opinions rather than as poetry."3 The remark of course is not really about Webster's intentions but about Sackville-West's opinion that the verse lies beneath notice. In this paper all that I have to say arises from the opposite opinion: that Webster's dramatic verse rewards the most careful attention we can muster. But first let me engage Sackville-West's imputation that the poet's chief allegiance was "sociological." I do so because most of the literary criticism Webster's long-neglected work has attracted within the last academic generation in effect endorses the sociological premise. It reads her writing for the ideas that are expressed there about socially embedded ideologies—principally of gender—as these were institutionally enforced and personally enacted in a British Victorian context. In pursuit of this quarry, our scholarship on Webster is seldom detained much longer than Sackville-West was by the artistic medium of expression. We now have [End Page 105] much better accounts than we did of the poet's life and career, discerning investigations of her feminism, and thoughtful calibration, at a generic level, of the prose and verse kinds she practiced. What remains regrettably scarce is analysis, even appreciation, of her poetry as such.4 Victorian reviewers knew better. Whether they commended or chastised Webster's versecraft, they made a point of discussing it; and the contradictory reactions they posted suggest that it may have proved particularly resistant to description within received Victorian categories. Whereas for one 1860s reviewer "Mrs. Webster's blank verse has none of the sustained music, the organic rhythm, which is necessary to make blank verse endurable," another found it if anything sustained to a fault, complaining about "the too great monotony of the verse, . . . the sameness, the lack of spring and impulse."5 This defect struck a successor as still unaddressed in the 1870 collection Portraits: "Mrs. Webster's verse, though always smooth and mellifluous, seems to us sometimes wanting in spontaneity." 6 But that same year, another critic suspected instead that she "composes too rapidly; many of the lines appear to run too easily" and want "concentration."7 The concentrated spontaneity these reviews jointly demand seems a tall order; yet it describes pretty well the result this poet obtained, with remarkable freshness of invention, in the books to which her critics were responding and to whose formal qualities their criticisms bore authentic if splintered witness. As a more acute contemporary reader of Portraits put the case, no doubt with an eye to the blinkered journalistic competition, "Her simplicity is likely to repel the multitude, whose taste has been vitiated by false imagery and sham sentiment. And this simplicity is combined with a subtlety of thought, feeling, and observation which demand that attention which only real lovers of poetry are apt to bestow."8 Subtle simplicity, concentrated spontaneity: getting at the characteristics that these oxymora name, and appreciating the artistic originality and cultivation that produced them, will require more attention to form than Webster's latter-day admirers have been accustomed to pay. Webster is not only an accomplished prosodist but is furthermore, within the metrical tradition certifying that accomplishment, an exquisite innovator in the resources of blank verse. We can more clearly apprehend the innovation, understated and elusive as it is, after a look at how thoroughly she mastered...

Editors’ Note

Editors’ Note Karen Bourrier, Kristine Guest, Christopher Keep, Daniel Martin, and Vanessa Warne This issue’s forum was inspired by the 2016 meeting of members of the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada at Dalnavert Museum, an 1895 house museum in Winnipeg, Canada. Our contributors examine both the history of the nineteenth-century museum and the role of museums in the preservation—or, perhaps more accurately, the invention—of nineteenth-century culture. While museums that preserve homes or have their origins in homes are explored here, so too are small-scale domestic equivalents of the museum—the album and the mantelpiece collection. We hope readers will be prompted by the research and personal reflections shared here to think anew about the history and the future of museums and also to reflect on the role museums play, or might play, in our teaching and research. The editorial committee is pleased to announce the winning essay of the 2016 Hamilton Prize competition: “To Talk of Many Things: Chaotic Empathy and the Anxieties of Victorian Taxidermy in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” by Lin Young of Queen’s University. We warmly congratulate her on this outstanding achievement. Honourable mention goes to Justin Tackett of Stanford University for his essay “John Clare’s Poetic Treatment of Vocalization and the Written Word.” Our grateful thanks go to the advisory board members who generously served as judges for the 2016 Hamilton Prize: Kirstie Blair, Britta Martens, and James Hanley. This issue of Victorian Review marks an important, if melancholy, milestone in the journal’s history, as we say goodbye to Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge. Mary Elizabeth and Lisa have been the guiding lights of the journal’s editorial team for the past decade. Under their inspired leadership, the journal’s look, from its typeface to cover design, was transformed and the journal’s finances put in order, first through federal grants and then through our current publication arrangement with the Johns Hopkins University Press. Moreover, they undertook to broaden the journal’s horizons, digitizing the back catalogue and introducing new features such as the forum, a venue that has not only included a dazzling array of established scholars but helped launch the publication careers of many emergent and independent scholars. Propelled by their energy, enthusiasm, and sheer ingenuity, the journal has become a force to be reckoned with, attracting some of the most significant and widely read interdisciplinary work in Victorian studies. According to JSTOR, 36,372 articles from Victorian Review [End Page v] were viewed/downloaded in 2016, up from 34,088 in 2015. Project Muse reports a further 12,613 views/downloads in the same year. That means, on average, 134.2 articles from the journal are viewed or downloaded each day, or 5.59 articles every hour. For this success, and for such more, we owe them our thanks and gratitude. [End Page vi] Copyright © 2017 Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada

“THESE VERBAL PUZZLES”: WILKIE COLLINS, NEWSPAPER ENIGMAS, AND THE VICTORIAN READER AS SOLVER

In 1861, in a reviewof Wilkie Collins'sThe Woman in White, a critic for theSpectatorcomplained that, “We are threatened with a new variety of the sensation novel … the whole interest of which consists in the gradual unraveling of some carefully prepared enigma” (“The Enigma Novel” 20). He was hardly the only reviewer to use a vocabulary of “puzzlement” or “enigma” when discussing Collins's work. Whether we look to an earlier review ofThe Woman in Whiteto find Collins faulted as “not a great novelist … the fascination which he exercises … [is] that he is a good constructor. Each of his stories is a puzzle, the key to which is not handed to us till the third volume” (Rev. ofThe Woman in White249) – or whether we turn to a critic ofThe Moonstone, who found Collins and his latest production “[un]worthy”: “We are no especial admirers of the department of art to which he has devoted himself, any more than we are of double acrostics or anagrams, or any of the many kinds of puzzles on which it pleases some minds to exercise their ingenuity” (Page, ed. 171–72) – we come up against the fact that Collins's novels, and especially his sensation novels, were sometimes known as “enigma novels” in the Victorian period. We can see too that this was not necessarily intended as a complimentary label. Indeed, though our own contemporary tendency has been to employ this particular moniker in a more neutral, descriptive register – to denote simply some fictions' reliance on mystery – we quickly find that Victorian reviewers were not so dispassionate in their usage. Instead, tracking names like “conundrum novel” or “enigma novel,” and terms like “puzzle,” “enigma,” and even “anagram,” shows that Collins's critics often used such phrases to index some of the same kinds of problems or concerns they more familiarly described with a rhetoric of “sensation.” A short survey suggests that their language of “puzzles” and “enigmas,” like their language of shocks and nerves, expressed disappointment at Collins's tendency to create anticlimaxes (the novel fizzles when the “puzzle” is solved); his emphasis on plot – or “carefully prepared enigma[s]” – over character; and his potential to render readers amoral and passive – patient attendants of solutions (“the key to which is not handed to us”) – rather than creatively engaged thinkers or moral questers. A simple nickname would seem to be a damning label indeed, on fuller survey.

Editors' Note

Editors' Note Karen Bourrier, Kristen Guest, Mary Elizabeth Leighton, Daniel Martin, Lisa Surridge, and Vanessa Warne We are delighted to share with our readers this special issue of Victorian Review, which focuses on the works of the Brontë family and is guest edited by Lauren N. Hoffer (University of South Carolina Beaufort) and Elizabeth Meadows (Vanderbilt University). To celebrate the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë's birth, this issue invites into conversation established and emergent Brontë scholars and presents both traditional and innovative methods for studying the Brontës' oeuvre. This issue marks the end of the joint editorship of Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge, who, in 2006–07, took over the editorial role previously occupied so ably by Susan Hamilton. Under their direction, the journal has reached a vastly wider readership through JSTOR, EBSCO, and Project Muse; it has achieved financial stability; and it has moved in-house with the prestigious Johns Hopkins University Press. Having realized these editorial goals, the team is thrilled to hand over the journal to the expert editorial direction of Christopher Keep, who brings his vast intelligence and critical acuity to the task of taking the journal to a further level of achievement. At this moment of transition, we recognize and celebrate the many past editors and associate editors who have guided Victorian Review, from its beginnings as a regional newsletter to its current form as an international peer-reviewed journal published under the auspices of a university press: Isobel M. Findlay, Christopher Gordon-Craig, Susan Hamilton, Chris Hosgood, Leslie Howsam, Joel H. Kaplan, Adrienne Kertzer, Glennis Stephenson, Sheila Stowell, Douglas Thorpe, C.S. Wiesenthal, and George Wing. Finally, Lisa and Mary Elizabeth want to thank past and present members of the editorial team, with whom it has been an enormous pleasure to work over the years: Karen Bourrier, Alison Chapman, Constance Crompton, Susan Doyle, Rebecca Gagan, Kristen Guest, Ruth Knechtel, Daniel Martin, Judith Mitchell, and Vanessa Warne. They also want to thank the University of Victoria students who cut their copy-editing teeth on the journal and have gone on to enjoy many professional successes, of which the team is deeply proud. Mary Elizabeth and Lisa extend special thanks to current and former students Michael Carelse, Amy Coté, Jenny Duggan, and Kelsey Kilbey. [End Page v] Copyright © 2016 Victorian Studies of Western Canada

Personal Business: Character and Commerce in Victorian Literature and Culture by Aeron Hunt

Reviewed by: Personal Business: Character and Commerce in Victorian Literature and Culture by Aeron Hunt Nicholas Daly (bio) Personal Business: Character and Commerce in Victorian Literature and Culture by Aeron Hunt; pp. x + 225. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2014. $49.85 cloth. In Personal Business, Aeron Hunt offers a careful reassessment of two of our idées reçues about the nineteenth century: that the economic world became increasingly rationalized, with an increased tendency toward abstraction of all kinds; and that corporations and other large-scale and impersonal economic agents replaced individuals. Hunt points out that economic historians have long held the view that, rationalization notwithstanding, Victorian business continued to be based on personal and familial relations; it is literary criticism that clings to a less nuanced vision of Max Weber’s ineluctable iron cage of modernity. As Hunt convincingly shows, the Victorians remained thoroughly preoccupied with the role of individual character in the business world: What could they really know about the people with whom they traded? Could salaried employees be trusted in the same way as partners? Did bankruptcy stem from moral weakness? Could financial acumen—or complete fecklessness—be inherited from the previous generation? Victorian writers of inspirational business hagiographies and hard-headed business guides alike were deeply concerned with such questions. But this historical picture is only part of Hunt’s project. Personal Business uses the all-pervasive issue of character as a way of showing the proximity of the Victorian business world to that of Victorian literature. In doing so, Hunt offers a critique of Mary Poovey’s influential Genres of the Credit Economy (2008), which argues, among other things, that in the nineteenth century, the literary realm became increasingly removed from other kinds of writing, offering a self-referential aesthetic world in lieu of outside reference. (As a master-narrative, Poovey’s anti-discursive account resembles Georg Lukács’s hostile account of Modernism, mutatis mutandis; in this respect, the “new economic criticism” is, perhaps, not so very different from the old.) For Hunt, the issue of character provides an example of how this interchange happened: literary and commercial texts both concerned themselves, in similar ways, with issues of character, proof that specialization at the level of form does not necessarily mean an end to literature’s relationship with other kinds of writing; mediation, in Marxist terms, can sometimes take fairly direct forms. Hunt argues of course, that this is in part because character is no more to be taken for granted as a factor in the business world than it is in the novel; it is something to be interpreted and guessed at, and something that shifts with the nature of the transaction involved. In four chapters, Personal Business takes us on a quick tour of the Victorian financial world while also offering us detailed readings of four novels: Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848), Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Margaret Oliphant’s Hester (1883). The financial tour alone is well worth taking. This reader, at [End Page 196] least, was not familiar with such things as character books, which consisted of “testimonials, hearsay, and observational notes about local and foreign business clients and associates, especially potential ones” (23). Equally interesting are the controversies about the new category of salaried business managers, who seem, like Victorian governesses, to have been perceived as worryingly interstitial, neither employees nor proper members of the family business. But readers of Victorian Review will also be drawn to the literary readings that such richly detailed information makes possible. Taking two of the major texts under consideration, Hunt demonstrates that both Dombey and Son and The Mill on the Floss responded to contemporary economic concerns and offered their own insights into how character was read. Carker, the smiling villain of Dombey and Son, comes into much clearer focus when we realize that the novel is touching on contemporary debates about the trustworthiness of business managers, as well as reworking details of the real-life defalcations of one Thomas Powell. Powell was a managing clerk for the merchant Thomas Chapman, an aspiring author...

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Secular Pleasures and FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Nineteenth-century British poetry famously drew upon religious models for secular ends. As M. H. Abrams argues, William Wordsworth offered a modern counterpart to theodicy justif[ying] suffering as necessary means toward ... achieved maturity. Fiction that was ostensibly preoccupied with worldly matters similarly adopted religious paradigms and vocabularies. Pointing out much common ground religious and secular literature share, Barry Quails shows that Victorian novels addressed the pilgrim's query, 'What is truth?' (1) As these literary critics show, fiction and poetry together reabsorbed preoccupations that before had been specific to theological discourse. The overlap between religious and secular modes of thought has been a topic of interest in current cultural critiques as well. Works such as William E. Connolly's Why I am Not a Secularist (2000), Talal Asad's Formations of Secular: Christianity, Islam, and Modernity (2003), and Vincent Pecora's Secularization and Cultural Criticism (2006) treat secular as a mutable and internally contradictory set of concepts and practices, which, like religion, deal with suffering, shape attitudes toward body, and potentially lead to destructive collective formations. (2) prominent recent contribution to this emergent field is Charles Taylor's Secular Age (2007), a comprehensive exploration of origins and trajectory of secular thought in West) Taylor challenges commonplace modern narrative that treats rise of secularity as liberation from irrational delusions. He argues that modern subjects who sought to ascribe meaning to human experience without reference to a transcendent power had to invent new ideologies and myths about human life and its role in cosmos. As Secular Age suggests, to approach secular as a social construct is to look beyond its claims to rational objectivity and explore how it crafts fulfilling accounts of existence. In this essay, I turn to a Victorian text that offers an early articulation of some of insights that have come to inform critical study of secular today: Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which had arguably become by far best known and most popular poem in English language at end of nineteenth century. (4) In this poem, FitzGerald imagines a secular experience that resists reign of reason. Musing on transcendental matters cannot help speaker to make sense of life or his own existence, but neither can rational inquiry. Longing instead for A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse--and Thou / Beside me singing in Wilderness, he relates to material world around him seeking and embracing pleasure. (5) Through senses of wonder, connectedness, and enchantment inspired self's engagement with natural world, FitzGerald transfers some of most fulfilling aspects of religion onto a secular experience. Discussing sensuality and materialism in Rubaiyat, some Victorian reviewers drew attention to poem's secular orientation. (6) a reviewer in National Review, for example, suggested that FitzGerald ably captured zeitgeist (1899): there is now some recent change in mood of Anglo-Saxon race that has caused this wide response to Omar-in-FitzGerald. It is, one must imagine, that there has been of late a wide and rapid decline in religious belief, so that a vast number of English people are able to understand and largely sympathize with old rebel against orthodox Islamite Puritanism of East. (Holland, p. 649) Another reviewer claimed that inexactness of FitzGerald's translation had allowed for infusion of a modern element into quatrains. That we have heard a good deal of late about Omar Khayyam is not due ... to any increase in number of Persian scholars, but to fact that existing translation harmonises with a special phase of modern thought, commented reviewer, diligently comparing individual quatrains to their Persian originals (Cadell, p. …

Inconvenient Husbands and Superfluous Wives

Inconvenient Husbands and Superfluous Wives Maia McAleavey (bio) Let us begin with a family scene from Tennyson’s narrative poem “Enoch Arden” (1864): a fire crackles in a snug cottage, where a husband, “Stout, rosy, with his babe across his knees,” and his loving wife, her beauty replicated in her “fair-hair’d” daughter and son, pass their evening amid a cozy setting, including “cups and silver on the burnish’d board” (lines 768, 771, 764). The scene readily summons the Victorian ideal of domestic harmony, [End Page 35] defined and metonymically produced by countless hearthside family portraits just like this one. But a supernumerary lurks on the edge of this familial bliss: Enoch Arden himself gazes longingly on the “genial … hearth” through the window (765). He is looking at his own wife, who has remarried, believing him lost at sea, and two of the three children are his. This framed scene (the window is as central to its iconography as the fire) enshrines the nuclear family at the moment of its greatest narrative threat, when bigamy might replace monogamy and illegitimacy devour patrimony. This is the crisis of a story that poses the question of who is inside and who is outside the social and narrative institution of marriage. Enoch, though structurally poised to attack, does not expose the couple; he manages to prevent himself from emitting “a shrill and terrible cry, / Which in one moment, like the blast of doom, / Would shatter all the happiness of the hearth” (790–93). On the one hand, Enoch’s decision to refrain from destroying “all the warmth, the peace, the happiness” of this nuclear family underscores the power of its ideal, trebly rehearsed in Tennyson’s threadbare phrase (783). But on the other hand, the proximity of one wife and two husbands opens up the possibility—part fantasy, part nightmare—of multiple marital partners. As Enoch’s wife, Annie Lee, first hoped and then feared, her seafaring husband was alive when she married his rival. All three had long been friends, and both men had loved her as boys, when they had “play’d at keeping house. / Enoch was host one day, Philip the next, / While Annie still was mistress” (24–26). In the moment at the window, Annie has fulfilled her childhood promise that “she would be little wife to both” (36). The monogamous couple at the heart of Victorian literature is shadowed on all sides by alternates for the husband or wife, in the shape of parents, wards, governesses, or sisters-in-law, among others. Setting aside these more indirect challengers for the moment, I would like to consider here the many rivals to the married pair that are institutionally confirmed through bigamous marriages. In numerous novels, plays, and poems published in Great Britain throughout the nineteenth century, but especially in the 1860s, a husband or wife remarries bigamously, believing (or merely wishing) that his or her first spouse is dead. The resulting melodrama often includes bribery, arson, and murder, as the story struggles to find places for what the reviewer Alfred Austin derided as “an inconvenient number of husbands, and a most perplexing superfluity of wives” (413). These plots develop a variety of narrative solutions to this crisis, all of which demand the elimination of one of the inconvenient spouses: Bertha Mason is burned in the Thornfield fire; Lady Audley pushes George Talboys down a well; and Enoch Arden quietly expires after his rough decade at sea. Only one husband and one wife can sit by the fire; any extras must be left out in the cold, murdered by either a fellow character or the author. [End Page 36] Many critics argue that these reprisals effectively police the conservative social order. Nancy Armstrong, for instance, writes that Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) “slowly but surely exiles or kills off those characters who dare to exist in alternative living arrangements, … [universalizing] a radically restricted notion of kinship based on the married couple and their biological offspring” (144). Armstrong reiterates the logic of some Victorian reviewers, who interpreted the bigamy plot, commonly associated with the fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and other sensation novelists, as counterintuitively reinforcing marriage. For...

Teaching Guide for: ‘“Moving Things into Certain Places”: Nature, Culture and Art as Practice in Victorian Writing’

This guide accompanies the following article: Erchinger, Philipp. ‘“Moving Things into Certain Places”: Nature, Culture and Art as Practice in Victorian Writing’. Literature Compass 9/11 (2012): 786–800. DOI: 10.1111/j.1741‐4113.2012.00923.x.Further ReadingOne way of developing the argument of this essay further is to supplement it with recent research on nineteenth century energy physics and its literary cultivation. For, as this research shows, what much Victorian work on thermodynamics has in common with Darwin’s evolutionary theory and Mill’s dynamic conception of ‘nature’ is the assumption of an emergent continuity, or, as Barri J. Gold put it in a recent article for this journal, “a productive indistinction between what is natural and what, technological” (Literature Compass 9/2 2012, 220). Both discourses, that is to say, shared an essentially temporal view of the cosmos, according to which ‘nature’ is inseparable from the practices of culture through which this nature is observed, manipulated and shaped into readable forms. This meant that the organic and the social were, on this account, not seen as fixed and definite structures, with a separating gap in between. Rather, the so‐called ‘gap’ between these two spheres was regarded as a creative space of conversion and transformation, a “developmental niche”, to use Regenia Gagnier’s term (“Twenty‐First‐Century and Victorian Ecosystems: Nature and Culture in the Developmental Niche.”Victorian Review 36.2 (2010) 15–20), in which the natural and the cultural were constantly translated into each other through the medium of practice or work.Indeed, ‘work’, as Anson Rabinbach has shown in The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (University of California Press, 1990), “became a metaphor for physicochemical exchange” in the nineteenth century which, if considered simply as a way of converting energy, “could be applied to nature, technology, and human labor without distinction” (46). The thematic resonations and ramifications of this complex metaphor have been anything but sufficiently explored, even though there are now at least a couple of books, namely Gold’s Thermopoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (MIT Press, 2010) and Ted Underwood’s The Work of the Sun: Literature, Science, and Political Economy 1760–1860 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) which approach the theme of nineteenth century energy in interdisciplinary terms, inviting literary critics to engage more with this theme. What deserves further attention is especially the overlap between discourses of ‘work’, ‘energy’, ‘evolution,’ and, I would say, ‘art.’ Meanwhile, Allen MacDuffie’s article “Victorian Thermodynamics and the Novel: Problems and Prospects” (Literature Compass 8/4 (2011) 206–213 may serve as a good induction into this nascent field.Useful LinksCharles Darwin’s works are now all openly accessible online, complete with private papers, manuscripts and reviews: http://darwin‐online.org.uk/. A large amount of his letters, too, can be read in digital form: http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwins‐letters. For reviews of books on ‘literature and science’, I recommend the website of the British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS): http://www.bsls.ac.uk/. From a more general perspective, ‘The Victorian Web’ is always a useful resource: http://www.Victorianweb.org.SyllabiThis article could, for example, be used in a course on ‘Victorian Ecologies’ which might include extracts from William Paley’s Natural Theology as well as from Charles Darwin’s Origin, especially from the first chapter, and from Variations of Animals and Plants under Domestication. These texts could be studied alongside George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, Robert Browning’s ‘Caliban Upon Setebos’, a selection of natural history writings, such as G.H. Lewes’s Sea Side Studies and Philip H. Gosses’s A Naturalist’s Ramblings along the Devonshire Coast or Evenings at the Microscope, as well as Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Binsey Poplars’, Thomas Carlyle’s ‘The Signs of the Times’, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South. I could also see the essay feature in individual sessions on ‘Victorian science writing’, on ‘Victorian theories of culture and art’, or on pragmatist approaches to ‘culture’.After all, Pragmatism – now mainly associated with the Americans William James, Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey – is a movement that may well be traced to British Empiricists such as G.H. Lewes and J.S. Mill from whom W. James avowed to have learned “the pragmatic openness of mind” and whom he therefore liked “to picture as our leader were he alive to‐day” (Pragmatism, Dover Publications, 1995, “Dedication”).

Robert Browning's Necropoetics

I. Introduction: The Limits of Reanimation When Robert Browning published his 1868-89 book-length murder poem, The Ring and Book, his reputation as poet special gifts of intellect and originality that were at same time put in service of poetics of great crudity and jolting violence seemed once again confirmed. (1) I felt ... like creature with one leg and one wing, half hopping, half flying, Browning's friend William Allingham said after reading poem's first volume, while others characterized poem as incongruous materials incapable of forming harmonious or as simultaneously life-like and morbid anatomy. (2) These friends and reviewers, torn as they were between awe at poem's intellectual ambition and disgust at its aesthetic execution, envisioned their ambivalence as states of bodily transformation and incomplete states at that: halfway from legs to wings, from parts to whole, from life to death. Without acknowledging directly grotesque corporeality so prevalent in many of Browning's most well-known dramatic monologues, these readers nonetheless see almost-changed body as metaphor for Browning's poetic strangeness: strangeness characterized by formal tension, as historian Thomas Carlyle would have it, between Old Bailey story that might have been told in ten lines and long dramatic monologue, or, as Browning himself wrote in his Essay on Shelley, between poetry that reproduces things external and poetry that is radiance and aroma of [the poet's] personality. (3) In Browning's dramatic monologues, as in responses above, changing body--specifically, in monologues, once-dead body, almost-alive-again body--is locus for aesthetic experimentation that both critiques poetry's inevitably subjective relation to facts--historical facts, observable facts, and facts of literary influence--and uses that relationship as basis for generic innovation. The reanimated body, whether appearing in poems like The Ring and Book or in shorter dramatic monologues like Porphyria's Lover and My Last Duchess, becomes figure through which Browning considers fraught relation between unassailable historical materiality and original aesthetic practice--between dictates of what has come before and desire to create something new out of it. The dramatic monologue, in its dual capacity functioning as critical and always-ironic foil to multiple projects of aesthetic so in vogue during nineteenth century--the Arthurian revival in art and literature, vogue for museum exhibitions that recreated ancient tombs, and phenomena like magic lantern shows and spirit photography--as form becomes both self- conscious vehicle for poems of reanimation and mode of reanimation itself. While critics have argued that we can see dramatic monologue as a form of verbal resuscitation of dead, quasi-Spiritualist voicing of dead men and women, (4) and Victorian reviewers especially found in Tennyson's dramatic monologues the secret of transmigration of soul, dramatic monologues in which dead come to life in turn call our attention to limits of poet's reanimating power by exposing inherent subjectivity of any resuscitative poetic project. (5) These monologues embody fictive and necessarily inventive nature of aesthetic resuscitation: nothing can come back from dead unless poet reanimates it. Browning uses his dramatic monologues to draw an analogy between corporeal reanimation and poetic practice, and in doing so probes, critiques, and reinvents process by which new, living poetry can emerge from intransigent bodies of past. His necropoetics bring long-dead voices back to life, but not with expectation that his monologists will speak truth. Rather, inalterable fact of their deaths creates condition necessary for Browning to scrutinize and to relish imaginative truths his own poetics of aesthetic resurrection could reveal. …