IT SHOULD COME AS NO SURPRISE, and probably doesn’t, that cultural studies and Victorian studies have much in common. As George Levine observes in his overview of the earlier field over the past quarter century, “the founding of [the journal] Victorian Studies, in 1957 . . . was almost exactly contemporary with the publication of Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society, one of the most influential books of the last half century” (136).1 Williams’s book was equally influential, indeed something of a founding text, both for Victorian studies and for cultural studies. And this makes sense. Williams’s tough-minded but generous salvaging of the romantic anti-capitalist tradition from Burke through Arnold and all the way to Orwell, which did so much to reinvent Victorian studies for the left, might also be seen as an argument for the necessity of cultural studies, which went on to integrate the tradition of romantic anti-capitalism into its pluralized, anthropological view of culture and to extend it into the present.