Victorian Sensation Research Articles

"[T]he Ghost of Myself": Women, Art, and (Neo-) Sensational Representation in Joanne Harris's Sleep, Pale Sister

Joanne Harris’s Sleep, Pale Sister (1994) is one of a growing number of neo-Victorian texts to foreground a concern with the female body and the male artist. Such tropes are reminiscent of the Victorian sensation novel, and indeed Harris’s text draws heavily on the plot of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). Through an exploration of Harris’s novel, this article considers the role of the female body as objet d’art in neo-sensation fiction, contending that the artistic process represented provides a telling metaphor for the rewriting of the past in historical, and, more specifically, neo-Victorian fiction. I begin by examining the influence of Victorian sensation fiction on neo-Victorian writing, before exploring the representation of artists and their models in the two genres. I consider the extent to which Harris’s novel seeks to revise the power relations inherent in this relationship and empower the heroine, and the implications of this for the metaphor of creativity that emerges from a reading of the text.

THE FALSE CLUES OF INNOCENT SENSATIONS: ABORTING ADULTERY PLOTS IN RHODA BROUGHTON'S NANCY (1873)

Rhoda Broughton's Nancy (1873) was published when sensational representational strategies had become a staple of popular fiction and Broughton had established herself as a writer of sensational material. Broughton was keenly aware how the reception of her books was reflective of changing times and marketing strategies, yet with its pointedly anti-sensational, innocuous heroine, Nancy was to be her most misunderstood book. The novel aborts an adultery plot that seems at first inevitable, and which nonetheless provides occasion for titillating the reader. It tracks emotional turmoil, plays with short-circuited plot lines and exposes social expectations of unequal marriages. In creating an anti-heroine who transgresses the expected paradigms of Victorian sensation fiction, Nancy formed a catalyst for Broughton's complicated relationship with literary sensationalism.

RELIGIOUS SENSATION: ELLICE HOPKINS' ROSE TURQUAND

Written when Victorian social activist Ellice Hopkins switched from rescue work with women to preventative work with men, Rose Turquand (1876) is a long-overlooked novel with important links to Hopkins’ social activist work and to canonical texts regarding female vocation, both medical and spiritual. Rose Turquand revisions Victorian sensation fiction in religious terms, with an overdetermined narrative in which self-denial in the care of others leads to conflicted scenes of ecstatic sexuality and a feminist Christology with evolutionary overtones.

“SKINS TO JUMP INTO”: THE SLIPPERINESS OF IDENTITY AND THE BODY IN WILKIE COLLINS'SNO NAME

Victorian sensation literature wasinextricably related to identity and the body: its primary purposes were to elicit a physical response from the senses of readers and to question “the social formation of the self” (Taylor,The Secret2). Sensation fiction regularly relied on different, deformed, or diseased bodies to provoke fear or unease in its readers, and it created anxiety by juxtaposing the domestic with scandal, crime, and Gothicism to disturb the perceived stability of the home and social identity. Lyn Pykett argues that the genre reproduces the “real mid-nineteenth-century anxiety” that domestic selfhood “could be disrupted by danger, death or disease on the one hand, and the vagaries of the law, the banking system or the stockmarket on the other” (“Collins” 59). Nineteenth-century critics’ reactions to sensation novels connected anxieties about the body to fears about the instability of social identity: contemporary reviews described sensation literature and its works as “feverish” (Smith 141), “a collective cultural nervous disorder” (Taylor,The Secret4), and as “symptoms of . . . social disease” (Pykett, “Collins” 51). In his 1880–81 series of essays, “Fiction Fair and Foul,” John Ruskin argues that the “[p]hysically diseased, ‘deformed,’ and ignobly dead bodies [in Collins's and Dickens's novels] are symptomatic of diseased and deformed genres, produced by morally and physically ill writers to cater to the tastes of morally and physically diseased urban readers” (Holmes,Fictions92). These extreme critical responses, as well as the extreme popularity of sensation fiction, call attention to Victorian preoccupation with the body and social identity and with the instability of both. This paper, through analyzing the instability of bodies and identities in Wilkie Collins's sensation novelNo Name(1862) and its serial context, challenges readings by both Victorian and more recent critics that distinctly interpret diseased and disabled bodies in the novel as either symbolic of or a result of social deviance.

Heirs, Apparently: Nation-Building in Isabella Valancy Crawford’s Winona

WINONA; or, The Foster Sisters, only recently reprinted for the first time since its serialized appearance in 1873, is one of Isabella Valancy first publications. Editors Len Early and Michael A. Peterman, in their extensive introduction to the 2007 edition, detail the novel's origins in contest promoting Canadian national identity. Winona won this competition asking for quintessentially Canadian (52) to be formed on Canadian history, experience and incident (25). The novel appeared serially in twelve installments from 11 January to 29 March 1873 in The Favorite, which was, like its predecessor The Hearthstone, weekly 'story paper' (10), one of many short-lived publications of its kind and time interested in bolstering Canadian national spirit (23-24). Early and Peterman explain that Crawford was writing in unsupportive Canadian literary milieu (15) and, after the story paper defaulted on its cash prize for Winona, Crawford direct[ed] her fiction almost exclusively to an American market (30). Winona, then, presents an important opportunity to consider the place of Canadian settlement and nation-building in the work of this canonical Canadian writer. This paper examines inheritance in Winona as it suggests conception of merited belonging in early Canada. Winona falls into genre typical of the story paper context in which it first appeared--the Victorian sensation novel. Along with an emphasis on popular appeal, the sensation novel also presented challenge to reigning cultural conceptions. As Winona's editors explain, the sensation novel was involved in the debate about the so-called 'woman question'--the controversy over women's nature and place in society (37). Lyn Pykett, examining the sensation novel, writers, and representations of in nineteenth-century society, writes that sensationalist writing combined several female forms of the early nineteenth century, including domestic realism in such way as to challenge women's prescribed social and familial (6). For Early and Peterman, With its climatic triple wedding, novel certainly reinforces the most conservative of 'solutions' for in nineteenth-century Canada and in the world of nineteenth-century fiction, but Winona's status as 'Indian' ... permits her contravention of the normative femininity represented in all the other women (42). Yet, ultimately, this potential challenge to dominant roles is undermined in Winona. In this family, the wife is settled into the domestic, the Indian is excluded as outsider, Winona reinforces these conservative roles, and Winona (the text as whole) reinforces their prominence in its narrative. In this narrative featuring--as Ailsa Kay argues in Sensation and Civility: Protecting the Confederation Family in Isabella Valancy Winona; Or, the Foster-Sisters (1)--a family that is itself confederation representing various Canadian identities, significant aspect of Winona is its anticipation of ongoing exploration of Canada as nation. In particular, the editors note, a passage on pioneering (134-35) looks forward to the central 'nation-building' passages of both 'Malcolm's Katie' and Hugh and Ion (34). While Crawford continues to consider nation building in her later, most well-known works, she had also been investigating the theme since her earliest writings. Margot Dunn examines the fairy stories which Crawford seems to have written in her late childhood or teenage years (19), finding this work to show the roots of her optimism about the growing civilization of Canadian society (27). Dunn also finds in this early writing that Crawford's presentation of the idea of the woman (or female principle) holding the world together and the man (or male principle) venturing forth to other worlds translates into study of the Victorian family situation, not very changed century later (29). This combined interest in the family and the nation is important in considering Winona's family-as-nation as well as the demonstration of particular conception of belonging and entitlement that I find in depiction of the early Canadian nation. …

'Other Sensations'

Written in 2005 – at which point research into sensation fiction was seen to have reached a ‘crossroads’ – the sentiments expressed by Andrew Maunder resonated widely with those working within the field. Thanks, in part, to the work of Maunder himself, we have made considerable progress in effecting this ‘shift’, not simply in our thinking, but also in the subject of thought. I have in mind here his six volume collection, Varieties of Women’s Sensation Fiction: 1855–1890 (2004) which, together with the scholarly editions published by Broadview Press, Valancourt Books, and, most recently, Victorian Secrets, has served to broaden substantially the field of study and alert us to the breadth and diversity of the genre as a whole. For many of us, myself included, Maunder’s collection represented the first opportunity to read the novels of such ‘forgotten’ sensationalists as Florence Marryat, Felicia Skene, Mary Cecil Hay, and Dora Russell. The fruit of such recovery work has been evident in a number of recent publications, such as Kimberley Harrison and Richard Fantina’s Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre (2006), as well as a range of journal articles, most obviously those published by Women’s Writing, that move us beyond sensationalism’s most famous triptych of texts.

<em>Evolutionary Naturalism in Victorian Britain: The ‘‘Darwinians’’ and their Critics</em>, by Bernard Lightman

Reviewed by: Evolutionary Naturalism in Victorian Britain: The 'Darwinians' and their Critics Jim Endersby (bio) Evolutionary Naturalism in Victorian Britain: The 'Darwinians' and their Critics, by Bernard Lightman ; pp. xx + 326. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009, £85.00, $149.95. Bernard Lightman's name is closely connected with two topics that are among the most important for scholars of the Victorian period. His groundbreaking first book, The Origins of Agnosticism (1987), established him as one of the world's most significant scholars of the complexities of the impact of science on Victorian religious faith. More recently, books such as Victorian Popularizers of Science (2007) provide important new insights into the lay audiences for Victorian science. These two strands of his work inform most of the essays in the volume under review, the earliest of which dates from 1989, but most of which appeared in the last decade. Discussions of the Victorian crisis of faith traditionally centred on the literate elites, whose diaries, letters, and novels provided the bulk of the primary sources through which scholars assessed the ebbing of the sea of faith. The impact of science-particularly of Alfred Tennyson's "terrible muses," geology and astronomy-was the central focus of such scholarship, but again the emphasis was on the elite writers and readers whose ideas about evolution, energy, and entropy seemed to have had such a profound impact on the [End Page 553] Victorians. In recent decades, however, historians of science have turned their attention away from elite science and its practitioners in an attempt to assess wider questions about scientific audiences and the roles that non-expert readers and writers played in creating, disseminating, and responding to the scientific discoveries that reshaped Victorian Britain (see, for example, James Secord's Victorian Sensation [2000] or Gowan Dawson's Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability [2001]). In several of the essays in this collection, Lightman applies the methods and insights of reception-based histories of science to well-established themes-notably those of faith and doubt-and also to the closely connected question of the professionalisation of Victorian science. Recent scholarship challenges the idea that Charles Darwin's evolutionary ideas were a banner under which a group of would-be scientific professionals united in order to drive the parson-naturalists and the Oxbridge Anglican elite out of British science. Lightman's introduction shows how inadequate this story has become, particularly the assumption that scientific naturalism-the assumption that nature can be explained entirely by natural as opposed to supernatural causes-became dominant in the late nineteenth century. Lightman instead emphasises the continuing power and influence of Christianity in its many different forms and analyzes the diversity of both those lumped together as professionals and those who opposed them. The latter group, long overlooked as history's losers, are in particular need of greater scholarly attention, and in this volume Lightman makes important contributions toward providing it. Given Lightman's focus on audience and reception, however, it seems appropriate to ask who the audience for the present volume is intended to be. The quality and importance of the scholarship is beyond doubt, but the same cannot be said for Ashgate's publishing strategy. This book is part of their Variorum series, which republishes articles with their original pagination and formatting. The series is presumably intended to facilitate access to items that would otherwise be difficult to find, but with the availability of many scholarly journals online and the fact that most of the essays in the present volume are from edited collections that are still in print, few items are difficult to find in libraries. There are, of course, scholars whose natural medium is the short article, rather than the longer book, and in such cases a collection like this would present an ideal opportunity to assess the overall shape and scope of their work; Lightman is, however, as adept at the monograph as he is at shorter pieces, and he provides overviews of his work in several excellent monographs. One cannot, therefore, help wondering why books like this still appear in the twenty-first century, particularly at such an astronomical cost. Who does Ashgate imagine is going to buy them...

Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences , and: Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences (review)

Reviewed by: Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences, and: Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences Christine Ferguson (bio) Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences by Bernard Lightman; pp. 545. London and Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007. $51.95 cloth; $37.95 paper. Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences edited by Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman; pp. 410. London and Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007. $51.95 cloth. The year 2007 was a landmark both for Bernard Lightman and, accordingly, for the contemporary scholarship on the history of Victorian science. The year saw the publication of Lightman's magisterial, single-authored monograph Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences and the groundbreaking essay collection Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences that Lightman co-edited with Aileen Fyfe. Both are ambitious, provocative, and paradigm-shifting studies that will inevitably change the way we think about the status, reception, and circulation of science in nineteenth-century Britain. These works do not simply contribute to an existing body of scholarship on Victorian science; rather, they reconfigure it, deflating the often over-exaggerated importance of the academic elite in disseminating scientific knowledge to a supposedly passive audience and focusing instead on the non-practicing professional writers through whom and popular exhibition sites through which science became a topic for passionate public debate rather than obeisant consumption. In the breadth of their focus and the originality of their research, the studies also achieve a genuine and expert interdisciplinarity, one which renders them invaluable reading not only for historians of science but also for anyone interested in Victorian publishing and reading practices, class politics, gender studies, and popular culture. In its formidable size and scope, Victorian Popularizers of Science will undoubtedly provoke critical comparisons to James Secord's Victorian Sensation (2000), a work which, like Lightman's , eschews a Great Man approach to Victorian scientific history in favour of a focus on the cultural dissemination and reception of emergent scientific ideas. Lightman focuses specifically on the discourses of popular science, although he is careful to problematize this term, pointing out that its application to the Victorian period, in which science had not yet been fully professionalized, might be considered anachronistic. Despite its limitations, he nonetheless preserves the term as an expedient means of referring to those science writers who were not university-trained practitioners. Lightman divides his popularizing writers into seven (sometimes overlapping) groups: Anglican parsons; women; visual demonstrators and public lecturers; writers of "evolutionary epics"; periodical contributors; professionals such as T.H. Huxley and Robert Ball, who also wrote for mass non-specialist audiences; and late-Victorian popularizers. The last category is the least coherent of them all, but nonetheless allows Lightman to include a number of understudied and difficult-to-classify figures who might not [End Page 133] otherwise have made it into the study, such as Agnes Mary Clerke, Henry Hutchinson, and Eliza Brightwen. Lightman's rationale for focusing on popular writers of science is as lucidly stated as it is compelling. "Since they were influential, and since their interpretation of scientific ideas was often at odds with the agenda of elite scientists," he writes, "they cannot be ignored. Any attempt to investigate how the British understood science in the second half of the century must take them into account" (ix). This claim becomes all the more convincing at the end of the book, when we are presented with the impressive sales figures for Victorian popular science books: Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859) may have been one of the most influential scientific works of the late century, but it was consistently outsold by popular science writer Ebenezer Brewer's (now virtually forgotten) Guide to the Scientific Knowledge of Things Familiar (1838). No less significant than the insights of Victorian Popularizers of Science into the development of and audience for popular science writing throughout the Victorian period is its contribution to a feminist history of science through its recovery of contemporarily successful (but hitherto underacknowledged) female writers whose work played a crucial role in establishing the social, religious, and aesthetic contexts through which new...

Figure and affect in Collins

Established critical commentary on Victorian sensation fiction has long assimilated the depiction of sensation to the production of bodily effects. These effects are sometimes understood as involun...

The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Sensation. By Rohan McWilliam (London & New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2007. xii plus 363 pp. $49.95)

Journal Article The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Sensation. By Rohan McWilliam (London & New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2007. xii plus 363 pp. $49.95) Get access Peter Bailey Peter Bailey University of Manitoba/Indiana University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 43, Issue 3, Spring 2010, Pages 793–795, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.0.0305 Published: 01 March 2010

Victorian Sensation Fiction: A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism (review)

Victorian Sensation Fiction: A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism (review)

Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature Patrick R. O'Malley (bio) Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature by Maureen Moran; pp. 324. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2007. $99.76. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a significant constellation of books devoted to the place of Catholicism in nineteenth-century British literature and culture. Among those with strong literary allegiances, there have been (to name only a few) Ruth Vanita's Sappho and the Virgin Mary (1996), Ellis Hanson's Decadence and Catholicism (1997), Kimberly VanEsveld Adams's Our Lady of Victorian Feminism (2001), Frederick S. Roden's Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (2002), Susan Griffin's Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2004), Michael Wheeler's The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century Culture (2006), and Maria LaMonaca's Masked Atheism (2008). To this, of course, could be added those accounts of nineteenth-century Catholicism that ground themselves more specifically in traditional historical methods, published with some regularity since the end of the nineteenth century itself. As Maureen Moran suggests at the end of her vigorously argued and wide-ranging Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature, the surprise should not, perhaps, be the recent proliferation of such studies but rather the relative dearth that preceded them, a dearth encouraged by an academic culture for which religion—especially a [End Page 236] religion like Catholicism—seems fundamentally opposed to "liberalism, secularism, rational science ... and other progressive, non-religious outlooks" (284, quoting Turner 6). The cultural studies approaches that could most add to the complexity of our understanding of nineteenth-century religious belief and practice have been, in some ways, most suspicious of religion's reactionary politics: The mapping of texts and authors on a faith-doubt continuum replicated the twentieth-century cultural myth endorsed by historians: that Victorian society grounded our own modernity through the move to a more "enlightened," non-spiritual understanding of the world. The embedding of critical and cultural theoretical discourses in the academy has certainly put paid to such grand narratives. Nonetheless, these traditions of intellectual activity have tended to eclipse the importance of religion to the Victorian literary imagination. (285) That is particularly unfortunate, Moran correctly insists, since "the saturation of nineteenth-century culture by Christianity and its denominational variants makes religion always and everywhere a presence" (3). As the list that opens this review suggests, Moran's book is certainly not alone in striving to fill the void, but it is one of the most intelligent and most cogently constructed. Moran's chapters are generally thematically (rather than chronologically) organized, each appearing under the rubric of a topic of importance to the nineteenth-century representation of Catholicism and focusing on two or three more or less canonical texts or sets of texts. Thus, a chapter on representations of Jesuits provides significant readings of Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho! (1855) and Wilkie Collins's The Black Robe (1881), while one on martyrdom highlights Grace Aguilar's The Vale of Cedars (1850) and George Eliot's Romola (1862-63). Poetry is represented by Robert Browning's monologues (paired with Charlotte Brontë's Villette in a chapter on nuns and priests) and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Francis Thompson (in a chapter devoted to Art Catholicism). An effective epilogue nicely frames the book, gesturing toward modernism and, ultimately, our own contemporary moment. Moran situates the anchoring texts of each chapter within a clear and engaging set of historical events, other literary texts, and various archival documents; the bibliography that she has assembled is alone a valuable resource. Collins aside, Moran does not in general focus on the sensation novel but rather on a broader and conceptually more complex notion of "sensationalism," bringing together "the many and interrelated understandings of 'sensation' that haunted the period" (3). Related to the Gothic, and largely opposing realism, this Victorian sensationalism stresses heightened emotional states—"extreme, eccentric scenarios and language" (12), and it "replaces the passive, escapist comforts of the older genres with a somatic involvement—a physical frisson that moves the reader from shock to curiosity and thence to the active decoding [End Page 237] of a hidden truth" (13). In Moran's account, a culture of...

<em>Species, Serpents, Spirits, and Skulls: Science at the Margins in the Victorian Age</em>, by Sherrie Lynne Lyons

Reviewed by: Species, Serpents, Spirits, and Skulls: Science at the Margins in the Victorian Age Sharrona Pearl (bio) Species, Serpents, Spirits, and Skulls: Science at the Margins in the Victorian Age, by Sherrie Lynne Lyons; pp. xiv + 245. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009, $75.00, $24.95 paper, £53.50, £17.75 paper. It is a scholarly problem that will seemingly never be solved: what do we call those practices that we no longer consider sciences? Starting with Roger Cooter's foundational The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science (1984), there have been a number of serious scholarly books in the history of science dealing with the these practices and, necessarily, the category and nomenclatural problems they present. These works offer a variety of terms for the practices they explore, including pseudoscience, popular science, and the alternative sciences. As this field of study has matured, scholars have subjected these terms to rigorous critique for the ways in which they do not take the scientific value of these practices and their practitioners seriously in their historical context. By falsifying the practices or rendering them peripheral or unscholarly through nomenclature, any historical investigation of their import and value is curtailed at the outset. Some of the most significant works in the field, including Alison Winter's Mesmerized (1998) and James Secord's Victorian Sensation (2000) deal with the problem by demonstrating the historical debates around scientific authority and situating their objects of study within these debates. Sherrie Lynn Lyons's book finds itself awkwardly situated within this body of literature. Through a series of interesting case studies, Lyons seeks to subject the historical account itself to reckoning, explaining why some sciences have been codified as such while others were banished to the margins. By examining these practices, she seeks to demonstrate that in their historical context the designation of evidence as legitimate was neither inevitable nor obvious. Lyons's marginal sciences include the study of sea serpents, phrenology, and spiritualism, all of which she contrasts with [End Page 141] Charles Darwin's theory of evolution as an example of a heretical science that ultimately succeeded. All four practices and their practitioners drew on overlapping evidence and even had some common philosophical perspectives. These similarities, she claims, offer evidence that it is not only the subject of study but its social context that determines the status of a practice. It is difficult, she notes, to determine the scientific value of a set of discoveries within their historical moment, an argument she supports by exploring the current controversies surrounding evolutionary psychology and the fossil record. Lyons seeks to demonstrate that it is the interpretation and evaluation of evidence, not just the evidence itself, that confers scientific status upon an area of investigation. Interpretation and evaluation are of course influenced by a variety of considerations, of which efficacy and rigor are only a small contribution among a broad host of social, political, philosophical, and religious factors. None of Lyons's claims concerning the role of context in creating authority are surprising or particularly controversial in the history of science, particularly Victorian science. The phrenological and spiritualist ground has been carefully explored by Cooter, Secord, Winter, and others including Robert Darnton, Janet Oppenheim, and Alex Owen. These works offer a depth of primary research and analytical insight that Lyons's case-study approach does not, a problem compounded by a heavy reliance on secondary sources for evidence and images. The awkwardness of this book in relation to other works on similar themes emerges from Lyons's more teleological approach to scientific discovery. Though she challenges narratives of inevitability around the conferral of scientific status, seeking instead to show the complicated factors contributing to what ultimately counts as valid and efficacious evidence, she undermines her own claims to take Victorian science on its own terms by pronouncing judgment on both her historical actors and the historical record. In her analysis of phrenology, for example, Lyons critiques Franz Gall's methodology based on contemporary scientific standards, noting that "several serious methodological problems existed in his work" (60). Her narrative is shaped by her understanding of science as "self-correcting," a practice that provides us with an...

Victorian Sensations, Neo-Victorian Romances: Response

Victorian Sensations, Neo-Victorian Romances: Response Rohan McWilliam (bio) A specter is haunting the world of Victorian studies: the specter of neo-Victorianism. We might choose to call it the study of post-1901 Victorianism or Victorian afterlives, but either way a new scholarly field is announcing itself and was much in evidence at the 2009 joint NAVSA/BAVS conference in Cambridge, UK. The theme of the conference was the relationship of the Victorians with the past, but the conference program also asked participants to ponder “the heritage that the Victorians invented for us” and to consider whether we are “still living in a Victorian world” (“Programme”). By the end of the event, Victorian Britain felt like a haunted house, haunted by history and offering a past that haunts us. Speakers responded to the first theme with papers covering topics such as folklore collecting, constitution-making, medievalism, optical technology, costume history, the domestic interior, and Victorian views of Pompeii. Nineteenth-century attitudes to the past were rarely presented as simple exercises in nostalgia, antiquarianism, or even as early forms of the heritage industry. Rather, they emerged as dynamic strategies for dealing with the present and the future. The Victorian relationship to history was, in an odd sort of way, not backward looking. The other theme, that Victorian culture was not something that ended in 1901 or 1914 but has continued to shape the social and political imaginary since then, is relatively new. Ten years ago it barely entered academic discussion, but it has grown so quickly that it can now boast its own web-journal, Neo-Victorian Studies. An early indicator of this tendency was the 1994 collection After the Victorians, edited by Peter Mandler and Susan Pedersen, which located Victorian influences in a range of twentieth-century figures. Since then there have been important monographs on modern Victorianism by John Gardiner, Simon Joyce, and Cora Kaplan as well as a number of useful books of [End Page 106] essays.1 Victorian studies as a field is redefining itself by examining nineteenth-century influences after 1901. Why have we become so preoccupied with these Victorian afterlives? What is at stake in this agenda is a set of question marks about the so-called “modernity” of the twentieth century. The implication of a number of the papers I have selected is that the Victorians never went away. Twentieth-century moderns (for all the anti-Victorianism of the Bloomsbury Group) failed to truly disown the Victorian inheritance. The Victorians proved good to think with, to react against, or to serve as a convenient reference point. The Victorians matter because their agendas have continued to be reworked in different ways by political figures such as Margaret Thatcher, Newt Gingrich, and Tony Blair. Tracking the different forms of engagement with the category of the Victorian, we now see, is a profound way of interrogating culture since 1901. We were inevitably going to view the Victorians differently as we moved further away from them. I view this literature as emerging from the experience of the millennium and the disorienting feeling that we can no longer speak of the Victorians as inhabiting the last century. Neo-Victorianism has the effect of reintroducing us to the Victorians and reclaiming their relevance in a new century. Neo-Victorian studies also proves to be another way of talking about familiar themes like gender, class, race, empire, heritage, and postmodernism. Most of the people who have considered Victorian echoes since 1901 come from a Victorianist background. In the future there are likely to be studies of Victorian appropriations undertaken by people more fully grounded in twentieth-century (or post-1901) studies. We look forward to the different perspectives they will bring. The present time is distinctive because a number of novelists have deliberately adopted Victorian voices and narrative devices or simply set their stories in the nineteenth century. A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996), Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), and Sarah Waters’s first three novels count as some of the most prominent examples of this tendency. The attraction of these novels for scholars is that they take place...

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE ABNORMAL BODY INTHE MOONSTONE

Wilkie Collins'sThe Moonstoneis anovel constructed through the repeated representation of the abnormal body. ReadingThe Moonstonein critical terms has traditionally required a primary engagement with form. The work has been defined as a foundational narrative in the genre of crime and detection and at the same time read as a narrative located within the context of the immensely popular group of sensation novels that dominate the Victorian literary marketplace through the middle and the second half of the nineteenth century. T. S. Eliot is one of the first readers to define one end of this paradigm, reading the novel as an original text in the genre of detective fiction, and famously saying thatThe Moonstoneis “the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels” (xii). On the other end of the paradigm, the novel's formal workings are again often cited as a larger example, and even triumph, of Victorian sensation fiction – melodramatic narratives built, according to Winifred Hughes and the more recent Derridean readings by Patrick Brantlinger and others, around a discursive cross-fertilization of romanticism, gothicism, and realism.

Austen Henry Layard's Nineveh: The Bible and Archaeology in Victorian Britain

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Austen Henry Layard uncovered parts of several ancient, buried Assyrian cities, including the capital, Nineveh, and dragged sizeable bits of them back to the British Museum. His book, Nineveh and Its Remains (1849), was a Victorian sensation. This article explores some aspects of Layard's book and discoveries that captured the Victorian imagination. Many were fascinated with Assyrian remains as they related to the history of art. Layard's work was also received as having helped to illuminate or even confirm the Bible. Although some statements by Layard had helped to fuel this interest, he was not personally an orthodox Christian. Despite having been standardly portrayed this way by scholars, these early archaeologists were not Christian apologists who exaggerated the scriptural connections of their discoveries. To the contrary, subsequent developments, particular the deciphering of the cuneiform writing, revealed that Layard and his follow pioneering Assyriologist, Henry Rawlinson, had underestimated the extent to which these findings related to stories in the Bible.

The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856, by Ralph O'Connor

Reviewed by: The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856 Michael Freeman (bio) The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856, by Ralph O'Connor; pp. xiii + 541. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007, $45.00, £26.50. Ralph O'Connor's The Earth on Show taps into an already vigorous stream of research and writing on nineteenth-century engagements with the prehistoric world. Martin Rudwick, James Secord, and a host of others have, within the last two decades, rescued twentieth-century narratives of geology and palaeontology from dry-as-dust moulds of presentation. They have put in their place exciting new interpretative perspectives that demonstrate the measure by which emerging discoveries about earth history in the nineteenth century were accommodated within an exceptionally broad spectrum of cultural production, covering literature, poetry, and art, not to mention all manner of popular cultural expression. The publisher's dust-jacket evaluation describes O'Connor's book as an "innovative blend of the history of science, literary criticism, book history, and visual culture." Anne Barton, Emerita Professor of English at the University of Cambridge, adds to this endorsement by remarking how O'Connor writes with wit and verve to produce an enthralling story, constructed around the relationship between science and imagination in the period. There is further praise from other scholars on the rear of the dust-jacket. Nigel Leask, for example, remarks upon O'Connor's brilliance in applying "techniques of literary and visual exegesis to the heterogeneous body of early-nineteenth-century writings and images of antediluvian worlds." The Earth on Show is a hefty tome, running to 450 or so pages of text, copiously referenced and with a very substantial index. It bears all the familiar hallmarks of painstaking scholarship and reveals a wide body of primary investigation. In turn, and following the pattern of many of the University of Chicago Press's publications, the book is extensively illustrated with numerous half-tones, together with a small selection of colour plates. The book's structure splits into two parts. The first aims at "building [End Page 384] the story," the second at "staging the show." O'Connor rehearses Gideon Mantell's observation that the literary productions of some nineteenth-century geologists and palaeontologists had the power to exceed in allure the fiction of romance. In tandem, many such productions were performances, "rhetoric of spectacular display," to use Secord's apt phrase (Victorian Sensation [2001] 439). O'Connor closes his absorbing introduction by describing early-nineteenth-century literature on earth history as verging towards a "single cosmic pageant" (27), blending human, sacred, and natural history into a kind of seamless confection. On the face of it, then, this is a volume that has a tantalizing attraction. As one dips further within it, however, some readers will register shades of disappointment. The illustrations are the first to sow seeds of doubt. The vast majority are incredibly familiar. One picks up almost immediately the range of existing modern published works from which the ideas for illustration appear to have been garnered. Then there are the chapter heads and sub-heads: they offer a "cast" that rather dampens the publisher's claim that this is an innovative work. Part 1, for instance, has the following checklist: "Enter the Mammoth"; "William Buckland: Antiquary and Wizard"; "Lizards and Literalists"; "Lyell Steps In." The sequence is predictable almost to the point of tedium, and a proportion of the content suffers likewise. To be fair, O'Connor does, in places, offer the reader important and clever insights. One sees the merit of some of the powerful endorsements on the dust-jacket. Equally, the handling of source materials is almost everywhere sensitive and reflexive. Chapter 7, on time travel and virtual tourism in the age of the apocalyptic painter John Martin, forms a fascinating essay and could almost stand on its own. The problem, though, lies with the broader canvas. The promises of the dust-jacket and the introduction of an innovative framework of analysis are only partially realized. One component of this difficulty may have to do with the somewhat arbitrary time frame that O...

<em>Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses</em>, by William A. Cohen

Reviewed by: Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses Rachel Ablow (bio) Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses, by William A. Cohen; pp. xvi + 182. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, $67.50, $22.50 paper, £42.00, £14.00 paper. What does subjecthood feel like? According to William Cohen, over the course of the nineteenth century, writers increasingly recognized the impossibility of answering this question. To have a body, Cohen argues, involves an openness to the world that necessarily puts pressure on the idea of the subject. Thus, throughout the century, writers recognized how “the non-alignment of body and subject suggests that the body has the capacity to unmake the human” (xvi). But at the same time, they understood the consequences of that recognition in more and more radical ways: while Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë use sensory experience primarily as a way to describe intersubjectivity, by the time we get to Thomas Hardy and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the subject is being imagined as importantly contiguous with and even indistinguishable from the world. Embodied opens with an introduction and first chapter that make a historical and theoretical argument for thinking about the senses on the model of touch rather than the more common model of vision. While sight has been used by critics to underscore the operations of disciplinary power, Cohen claims, the writers he examines transform even the seeing eye into “both an orifice—an opening into the body—and a tactile surface for drawing together the subject and the object of sight” (25). Each of the chapters that follows explores the consequences of this shift in perspective. In his chapter on Dickens and Brontë, Cohen examines these writers’ fantasies of intersubjectivity as a form of bodily penetration. In the next chapter, he argues that Anthony Trollope conceives of racially coded skin in his short story “The Banks of the Jordan” (1861) as both a barrier between self and world and a potential site of contamination. In his chapter on The Return of the Native (1878), Cohen shows how Hardy uses sensory perception to undermine distinctions between human and nonhuman. And in his chapter on Hopkins, he discusses the poet’s understanding of the body as registering a natural world linked to both divine perception and debased matter. Within Victorian studies, Cohen’s project contributes to the recent explosion of interest in Victorian sensation and perception exemplified by such works as Janice Carlisle’s Common Scents (2004), John Picker’s Victorian Soundscapes (2003), Nancy Armstrong’s Fiction in the Age of Photography (2002), and Jonathan Crary’s Suspensions of Perception (2000). It also engages with recent work interested in the meaning of embodiment and materiality: Catherine Gallagher’s The Body Economic (2006), Daniel Hack’s The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel (2005), and Mary Poovey’s Making a Social Body [End Page 155] (1995), for example. Despite their divergent methodologies and objects of study, all these critics share a commitment to intellectual history. Cohen, by contrast, attempts to recapture the historical specificity of feeling itself through “cultural phenomenology,” which he defines as an attention to “embodied experience, to affects, emotions, and senses, and to bodily transformations” that “understands such experience to be socially, culturally, and historically situated” (24). For Cohen this phenomenology largely takes the form of innovative close readings of descriptions of embodied experience—readings that reveal the consistency with which Dickens characterizes perception in terms of ingestion, for example, or the way Brontë repeatedly describes the body as a kind of casing threatened by violation from without or explosions from within. The historical specificity of these descriptions comes to the fore especially strikingly in the chapter on Trollope’s story where Cohen uses archival materials to link anxieties regarding the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 and the “Great Stink” of 1858 to the protagonist’s bizarre horror of being sullied while bathing. Cohen’s interest in historicizing sensory experience coexists with a commitment to engaging with twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of embodiment. It might seem risky to rely on the work of theorists rarely invoked by Victorianists: Didier Anzieu and Frantz Fanon, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Georges Bataille, and Maurice...

Are the Victorians Still with Us?: Victorian Sensation Fiction and Its Legacies in the Twenty-First Century

This essay argues that sensation fiction’s most significant legacy is its selfconsciousness about how print culture both constructs the present moment and mediates the past. These resonances are particularly evident in the work of neo-Victorian novelists Michael Faber and Sarah Waters, who, like the sensationalists, are writing at a time of great stress and change in the publishing and print industries. Faber and Waters’s self-awareness of the materiality of writing echoes concerns raised in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, both of which draw attention to the importance—and the fallibility—of print while still recognizing their own embeddedness in print culture.

Teaching Victorian Poetry and the Body: Forming Affect

The article discusses some of issues involved in teaching Victorian poetry and the body, whether at the undergraduate or postgraduate level. A related course that the author has been teaching in various forms for years, which is the Victorian Sensations, are briefly tackled. It is noted that in terms of pedagogy, the method showed in this paper, could be described as formally inflected close reading, with attention to cultural and historical contexts. In teaching of poetry, the author aims to help students understand wider cultural forms through detailed attention to the microcosm of the poem's language.