THE EAST END OF LONDON was not a common destination for the upper- or middle-class sightseer in the early nineteenth century. The requisite steamer ride down the Thames from London Bridge for the excursion out of the city to Greenwich would show, along the way, in the words of one tourist, “The Custom House and the Tower, the only prominent objects rising out of the dreary range of shabbiness which stretches along close to the water's edge” (Hawthorne 232–33). There was one exception to the habit of overlooking the East End: a significant proportion of the twenty-four million persons who passed through the Thames Tunnel between Wapping and Rotherhithe from 1827 to 1865 had indeed made the eastward excursion expressly for that purpose. Essential viewing at the time but little studied since, the history of the Thames Tunnel indicates the stakes and the consequences of remapping the urban topography of London during the era when middle-class tourism was being invented. Comprised of two 1200-foot-long arched passageways joined by a wall of open arches in an overall brickworked space of 22 1/2 feet high by 38 feet wide (Bobrick 58), the Tunnel was unique among the obligatory sights of the city in that it was also a practical thoroughfare employed as such almost wholly by the working classes. It was open twenty-four hours a day, and, as one visitor noted, it offered the unusual experience of emerging “in the midst of one of the most unintelligible, forlorn, and forsaken districts of London or the world” (Catlin 2: 112–13; qtd. in Altick 373), the docklands and slums of the East End. Through a half-century as a symbolic hub of London life from the years of its design and excavation (1824–43) to its conversion to a railway tunnel on the East London Line in 1869, the Thames Tunnel mobilized the tensions in the modernizing city between technological progress and social repression into a dense network of underground myths.

IN HIS LATE PLAY, Sardanapalus (1821), Byron repeatedly presents questions of legacy, as the Assyrian monarch struggles to determine what his reign will mean to future eras. The drama ends with Sardanapalus and his beloved slave, Myrrha, atop a suicidal pyre meant to destroy the palace as the rebellious satraps close in–the pyre also to be the king's final monument, the act by which posterity will remember him. Indeed, he imagines his flaming destruction will produce “a light/To lesson ages, rebel nations, and/Voluptuous princes,” even though “Time shall quench full many/A people's records, and a hero's acts;/Sweep empire after empire, like this first/Of empires, into nothing” (V.i.440–45). In the event, Sardanapalus's last words on the matter come in the form of a satire on the Egyptian pyramids, those proud Ozymandian monuments which time has turned into sites of confusion: [I]n this blazing palace,And its enormous walls of reeking ruin,We leave a nobler monument than EgyptHath piled in her brick mountains, o'er dead kings,Or kine, for none know whether those proud pilesBe for their monarch, or their ox-god Apis:So much for monuments that have forgottenTheir very record! (V.i.480–87)

HOW DID IT COME TO THIS? How did the precious coin of the sovereign become the twaddle of misguided preachers? Where did condescension go wrong?

“‘LETTERS!’ … ‘I BELIEVE HE DREAMS IN LETTERS!’” so exclaims Betsey Trotwood of Mr. Micawber, the epistolary aficionado of Charles Dickens's David Copperfield (664; ch. 54). David's aunt Betsey is not the only one to wonder at Micawber's prolific, albeit prolix, nature. His letters have made him a favorite of nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers alike; his “in short” has become one of the most memorable Dickensian tag-lines. But however much attention Micawber's epistolary endeavors garner, this notice fails to raise him to the position of respected writer–the position reserved for the eponymous hero of the novel. In the usual line of thinking, David stands as the ideal literary man while Micawber molders in the world of fantasy and comedy in which J. B. Priestley, James Kincaid, and J. Hillis Miller so securely position him.

GLOSSING FREUD'S FAMOUS EXAMPLE of “shine on the nose/glance at the nose” (Glanz auf der Nase), Christopher Pye suggests that the familiar account of the fetish (as a simulacrum standing in for a missing object) does not capture what is exemplary about the example, that is, the way the act of looking is crystallized in the object seen, a shine equated with a glance. In that conflation, one can recognize the ultimate grounds for the fetish's captivating properties, as well as the entire economy of repudiation and renewed loss it embodies. Not simply a reassuring compromise object in place of a loss, the fetish actively plays out and shores against that originating split in the experience of being inscribed within– ‘fascinated’ by–the gaze as it derives from elsewhere. (176 n.17)

TERRY EAGLETON has suggested that “the mid-nineteenth century bourgeois state had problems in resolving its Oedipus complex” (76). Eagleton's semi-serious remark certainly holds true for nineteenth-century British culture, which, while supposedly patriarchal in its political structures, features a great number of significant literary narratives in which the paternal parent is either missing, dead, or never mentioned. The poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, are no exception. Gerhard Joseph, Christopher Ricks, and Linda Shires, among others, turn to Freudian psychoanalysis, the Oedipal complex, and Freud's seminal essay “Mourning and Melancholia” for insight into why so many father figures are absent from Tennyson's work. Yet neither the Oedipus complex nor “melancholia” accounts for how these father figures, while literally absent, are nevertheless present and influential. Another model is needed to describe the relationship between Tennyson, the missing paternal figures of his narratives, and the age that he has come to represent.

LARGELY OVERLOOKED in Collins scholarship, the 1872 novel Poor Miss Finch: A Domestic Story describes the complicated relationships between a young blind woman, Lucilla Finch, and twin brothers, Oscar and Nugent Dubourg. Lucilla's blindness results in her aversion to dark colors, and as she and Oscar fall in love, he must deploy a series of elaborate deceptions in a desperate attempt to keep from her his own dark secret–that his skin has been turned blue by medication prescribed for his epileptic condition. Following an extraordinary operation, Lucilla's eyesight begins to return, and Oscar's carefully guarded secret of blueness threatens to destroy their relationship. The plot of Poor Miss Finch explores the ways in which Oscar hides his blueness from Lucilla as well as the duplicitous function of his twin, Nugent, who stands in for Oscar as Lucilla begins to regain her sight. At every turn, Poor Miss Finch mines issues of identity and investigates the ways in which identity becomes withheld and disclosed–closeted and uncloseted–through a series of spectacular deceptions that enable the keeping of secrets.

AFTER MINA HARKER awakens from Count Dracula's vampiric embrace, she asks the men around her, but more pointedly herself, “What have I done to deserve such a fate, I who have tried to walk in meekness and righteousness all my days?” (285, ch. 21). As she recounts this perverse seduction in her own words, however, she contradicts her earlier disavowal: “strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him” (284). These conflicting statements capture the peculiar double bind with which Mina struggles throughout Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Many critics concentrate on Dracula himself and the men who do battle with him; interestingly, the novel also develops Mina's complex subjectivity through her unspoken but deep affinity with the vampire. Van Helsing's paranoid observation, “Madam Mina, our poor, dear Madam Mina, is changing” (319; ch. 24), epitomizes shifting cultural anxieties at the moment when a long-standing ideological conception of proper femininity comes under suspicious attack. Although nothing seems more natural to Mina than her desire to help her husband in the public sphere while maintaining an intimate friendship with Lucy Westenra in the private, these familiar roles become estranged by the new taxonomies of deviancy popularized during the late nineteenth century.

IN KING SOLOMON'S MINES (1885), H. Rider Haggard describes the journey of three robust English men who successfully penetrate a sexualized landscape in southern Africa, depicted as both the body of the long-dead Queen of Sheba and that of her contemporary, King Solomon. The three English adventurers, led by the narrator Allan Quatermain, climb “Sheba's breasts” (26; ch. 2), traverse her torso, and arrive finally at the location where diamonds are stored inside her cavernous body, in the space Haggard calls “King Solomon's treasure chamber” (27; ch. 2). Narrative desire and the mystery of the Jewish patriarch's ancient empire propel these men through a series of male bonding adventures that lead to their arrival and conquest of the famed mines, where they pocket diamonds “as large as pigeon-eggs” (225; ch. 17) and plot their escape from what they fear may be a sealed cave.

IN 1883, the American physician J. B. Mattison made the startling announcement that the majority of American morphine habitues were doctors and suggested that between thirty and forty percent of medical professionals were addicted (23). By 1909, an English addiction specialist had broadened the context and seemingly raised the ante, claiming “that the proportion of medical addicts to the total of cases is in some statistics as high as ninety per cent., and that one-fifth of the mortality in the profession is said to be caused by morphinism” (Jennings, The Morphia Habit v). Looking back in 1924, the German psychopharmacologist Louis Lewin referred to a “statistical table of [morphine] addicts, including all countries of the world,” which “gave 40.4 per cent doctors, 10.0 per cent doctors' wives” (54). Of course, all these data are somewhat questionable since reliable measures would have been all but impossible to obtain and the proportions surely varied over the periods and areas in question. But we can reasonably deduce at least this much: medical professionals were consistently the most prominent demographic group among morphine addicts in the developed western world after the middle of the nineteenth century.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI and his artistic circle are emerging as privileged sites of modernist genesis. Studies by Jessica Feldman (Victorian Modernism: Pragmatism and the Varieties of Aesthetic Experience) and Allison Pease (Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity) include Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne, respectively, in their reassessments of modernism. In a complementary move, Jerome McGann argues in Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be Lost that Rossetti's art anticipates Imagism (44) and is characterized by a “hyper-realism that anticipates certain Postmodern styles” (32). Such work implicitly questions, in Feldman's words, the narratives of “strife, loss, [and] rupture” (4) that have been told about modernism's relationship with its predecessors. By linking nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists in a historical trajectory of aesthetic change, as Pease does, or by effacing the historical through a “web” of Victorian modernism, as Feldman does, it becomes possible to see new relations among authors previously separated by critical practice. Rossetti and associates enjoy a new spotlight as they become modern through their aesthetic productions and domestic arrangements.

ELIZABETH GASKELL'S WIVES AND DAUGHTERS, often considered her finest and most psychologically complex novel, tells its story through narrative indirection–what Gaskell's heroine Molly Gibson identifies in a conversation late in the novel as telling a story with a “mental squint; the surest way to spoil a narration” (623; ch. 58). In this conversation, Molly is conscious of her audience–her admiring and encouraging aunts and her less admiring and less encouraging stepmother. Like Gaskell, Molly is conscious of the presence of a “critical listening.” Thus Molly selects which details of her visit to the Towers, the manor of the largest landowners in her town, she will relate. In examining the use of details, of particulars, in Victorian and Modernist poetry, Carol Christ makes clear that what is at stake is “not whether literature should contain detail but what the significance of the detail should be, and consequently what the criteria for its selection are” (4). Gaskell's realist domestic fiction delights in detail. Yet Gaskell has been taken to task by such critics as Virginia Woolf for an incidental and excessive use of detail, detail that for Woolf represents the mid-Victorian novelist's inability to select what is important in rendering reality. The aesthetic problem with detail, Naomi Schor explains, lies in the way that detail subverts internal hierarchic ordering by blurring the lines between the foreground and the background, the principle and the incidental (20–21). Schor's explanation of this internal subversion is useful for opening up Gaskell's use of detail in Wives and Daughters.

IF SCHOLARS have a role model, he might be Umberto Eco's Brother William of Baskerville. Certainly our notion of the activity of scholarship–an investigator reading in a great library, alive to the treasures collected there–altered little from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century and still persists at the beginning of the twenty-first; but by the end of this century, the practice of scholarship will have changed utterly, and the scholar will require quite different skills from those that graduate students are being equipped with today.