AS SUSAN L. MEYER SUGGESTS, “[a]n interpretation of the significance of the British empire in Jane Eyre must begin by making sense of Bertha Mason Rochester, the mad, drunken West Indian wife whom Rochester keeps locked up on the third floor of his ancestral mansion” (252). In Richard Mason’s deposition concerning the marriage of Edward Fairfax Rochester and Bertha Antoinetta Mason in Spanish Town, Jamaica, Bertha is described as the child of Jonas Mason, West India planter and merchant, and Antoinetta Mason, identified only as a Creole. In Rochester’s account of Bertha’s family the “germs of insanity” are passed on by the Creole mother (334; ch. 27). In this essay I retraverse late eighteenth- to mid-nineteenth-century ethnographic discourses about white Creole degeneracy and situate Brontë’s representations of the Creoleness of Bertha and Richard Mason in relation to them, arguing that Jane Eyre demarcates both femininity and masculinity in imperial and racial terms, while also blurring these categories. Brontë, I demonstrate, links the degenerate moral and intellectual character of the white Creole with the cruelties of the slave-labour system in Jamaica, and with historical Jamaican slave rebellions figured through metaphor and allusion. This depiction suggests that Brontë has carefully historicized the relationships among Bertha Mason Rochester, Edward Fairfax Rochester, and Jane Eyre.

“A handful of foreigners have shown China what they can do against murderous thousands, and it only remains for the Powers to stamp the lesson deeper, and exact punishment for the guilty and full compensation for losses sustained.”

— W. Murray Graydon, The Perils of Pekin (1904)

“To find something akin in its savage barbarity you must go back to Lucknow, where a mixed multitude shut up in the Residency were holding out against fearful odds in expectation of relief by Havelock’s Highlanders, resolved to perish of starvation rather than surrender, for the fate of Cawnpore stared them in the face. “It adds point to this parallel to remember that the Tartar rulers of China are cousin german to the Great Moghul who headed the Sepoy Mutiny. “It was some excuse for the King of Delhi that he was seeking to regain his throne. No such apology can be offered for the Empress Dowager of China. She has made war not without provocation, but wholly unjustifiable, on all nations of the civilized world.”

— W. A. P. Martin, The Siege in Peking (1900)

THIS ESSAY REVIEWS THE LITERARY PRODUCTION — primarily adventure novels, and several of them bestsellers — centered around the events of the 1900 Boxer Rebellion, in which a Chinese “secret society,” with the collusion of certain Manchu authorities, carried out a systematic attempt to annihilate all Westerners and “native Christians” living in China.1 The Boxers, so-called because their “superstitious” practices looked like magic boxing, swept across North China from the spring of 1900, eventually throwing much of the imperial capital of Peking (Beijing) into confusion.2 Forced to hole up in the Legations and other barricaded areas, the Westerners of the region joined forces under largely British leadership and fought against incredible odds to protect themselves, holding out until an international resistance force, led by the British, rescued them fifty-five days later, and the Rebellion subsided.3 Important as a turning point in Chinese international relations and as a mark of the increasing weakness of the central authority of the Middle Kingdom, the Boxer Rebellion served an even more important function with regard to British conceptualizations of the empire in its formal and informal forms. It threw into question non-interventionist trade strategies and underscored the tenuous nature of imperial authority both in formal colonies such as India (where fledgling nationalist movements were evolving) and in areas bordering on these formal colonies and largely dominated through foreign authority. (The central Chinese government, for instance, though not dependent on imports and loans to any great degree, at this point gathered all of its significant income from the British-led Imperial Maritime Customs Service.)

BY THE EARLY 1820s, medievalist representations of the British nation, such as those disseminated through Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, had increasingly displaced longstanding, Francophobic forms of nationalist imagery popular throughout Britain during the century of wars against France before 1815. The “medieval revival” of the early nineteenth century provided inspiration for a new strain of nationalist imagery and discourse that would evolve and help to shape British subjects for nearly a century preceding the Great War. Scholarship since Alice Chandler’s A Dream of Order (1970) has widely explored the literary and artistic development of medievalism in the nineteenth century. What needs further discussion or theorization are the cultural uses of nineteenth-century medievalist representations of the British nation, its history, aristocracy, and chivalric ideology. What also needs further discussion are the subject-forming and nation-forming implications of texts by popular, recently revived medievalist writers such as Felicia Hemans (Figure 5).

FOR THE EXHIBITION of his collected works at the Burleigh Gallery in London during the spring of 1865, Ford Madox Brown supplied a lengthy descriptive catalogue which gave highly detailed accounts of many of the paintings on display. Rarely before had a painter offered such an insight into his artistic methods and intentions, and the reviewers of the day were suitably impressed; the Pre-Raphaelite critic William Michael Rossetti even went so far as to remark that if others were to follow Brown’s practice, “it would enable the spectator to know for certain exactly what the artist meant, and what his work means, and would thus cut short a deal of silly and often perverse guess-work” (Rossetti, 1970: 181).The centerpiece of the show was a highly detailed canvas called Work (Figure 8) which had taken the artist over ten years to complete. In his review for Fraser’s Magazine Rossetti commented that the artist’s account of this painting was particularly valuable, since it enabled one “to follow out the whole scheme of thought into its details with certainty instead of by guess,” so that one gradually came to realise that “not a corner of the picture, a figure, or an action, is without its close yet varied relation to the central idea” (1970: 182). And indeed, Brown’s catalogue description did give a remarkably full account of its development, recording its transformation from a comparatively modest genre painting into a large-scale celebration of modern labor:

ALTHOUGH VICTORIAN REVIEWERS uniformly praised Elizabeth Barrett Browning for the “sincere” poetic voice of Sonnets from the Portuguese, they often blamed her for faulty craft. In structure and rhyme scheme the poems in the sequence recall the Petrarchan tradition, suggesting the idealized love that accompanies it, yet their varied syntax and diction seem more conversational than ideal. Enjambment usually destroys the integrity of octave and sestet. Then in the Sonnets Barrett Browning continued her use of odd rhymes, which had been raising critical eyebrows since earlier poems. For example, in the most famous sonnet — XLIII, “How do I love thee?” — Barrett Browning rhymed the noun phrase “put to use” (9) with the infinitive “to lose” (11) and rhymed “faith” (10) with “breath” (12). Victorian reviewers, somewhat disoriented, offered a variety of explanations for these apparent technical lapses. Some attributed them to a defective ear for music (“Review of Poems” 278; [Massey] 517).1 George Saintsbury — taking the lead from the controversy over the “cockney school” of poetry — reproved Barrett Browning, born to the educated classes, for relying out of laziness on vulgar pronunciation to force rhymes instead of taking the time to discover correct ones (280–81). Even her poet-friend and correspondent, Mary Russell Mitford, wondered if isolation at Wimpole Street had led to an overly narrow experience with proper pronunciation of English (reported in Horne 458; see also Hayter 38–39). Victorian reproofs and anecdotes like these followed Barrett Browning’s work into the formalist twentieth century.

[I]t is not enough to make the Jew respected, but to have JUDAISM rightly reverenced; and to do this, there must be a JEWISH LITERATURE, or the Jewish people will not advance one step.

— Grace Aguilar, The Jewish Faith (1846)

THE ESSAYS COLLECTED in this issue of Victorian Literature and Culture seek to introduce Victorianists to some of the many Anglo-Jewish writers of nineteenth-century England. What differentiates this moment in Anglo-Jewish scholarship from most previous considerations is that we do not purport to fill a falsely constructed “void” of Anglo-Jewish literary silence; on the contrary, this collection seeks to amplify the fullness of nineteenth century Anglo-Jewish literary life. In 1846, Grace Aguilar, the important Anglo-Jewish writer and theologian, called out for the production of a “Jewish literature” that would aid the “right reverence[e] of Judaism,” and “advance” the Jewish people in Victorian England. All too aware of the way exclusion from Hebrew literary and religious texts often precipitated assimilation, conversion, and more generalized alienation from Jewish religious life, Aguilar sought new tools to combat Jewish religious apathy. Detailing the subtle conversionary and theological assumptions that so-called secular — yet clearly Christian — literature often performed, Aguilar reasoned that a Jewish literature could provide Jewish readers — and especially Jewish women — with literary pleasure and a simultaneous sense of Jewish values and ethics; likewise, such a literature could recast the generally negative images of Jewish people and Judaism which pervade the long history of English literature.1 With her emphasis on a Jewish literature, then, Aguilar sought to claim the cultural and ideological power literature held in Victorian England for specifically Jewish uses. Significantly, Aguilar’s tone in the statement above suggests that she saw no such Jewish literature in past moments of Anglo-Jewish history; Aguilar’s intensive production of such a literature in a variety of genres was her own response to this desire for Jewish literature.

JUDITH MONTEFIORE’SPrivate Journal of a Visit to Egypt and Palestine by Way of Italy and the Mediterranean has been called “the first account in English by a Jewish woman traveller.”1 Recorded in 1827–28 and privately printed in 1836 but never published, the Journal is not widely available and has received only passing acknowledgment, mostly in assessments of the life and career of Moses Montefiore, Judith Montefiore’s husband and perhaps the most celebrated Jewish philanthropist of the nineteenth century.2 What begins as a casual record of travels, first through France and Italy — in the familiar style of the picturesque traveller — becomes the record of a spiritually transforming event in Jerusalem. After this journey the Montefiores became more ritually observant, more focused on tzedakah (acts of righteousness), and more widely connected to the Jewish world.

But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh; but he of the free woman was by promise. Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Hagar. For this Hagar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children. But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all. . . . Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise.

— St. Paul, Epistle to the Galatians

These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind . . .

— Longfellow, “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,” 1852

GIVEN PAUL’S TORTUOUS, divisive rhetoric, the Jew is always the proto-Christian, deprived of actual historical identity and development. For Christianity, founding itself on usurpation, cannot dispense with the Abrahamic covenant or the sacrifice of Isaac (to Jews, the akedah, binding) that prefigures the martyrdom of Jesus. Because Christianity begins by absorbing Hebraic characters as patterns, it must represent real Jews by a second displacement, as non-Jews: “These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind.” In Christian eyes, the Jew is twice dispossessed — once by metamorphosis into the potentially free Christian, and again by disguise as a creature of bondage.

IF THERE IS to be a challenge to the increasingly prevalent impulse to recover Anglo-Jewish texts from the silences of the archives, the challenge will undoubtedly arise in relation to the novels of Julia Frankau.1 Frankau’s late Victorian novels on Jewish subjects, Dr. Phillips: A Maida Vale Idyll (1887) and Pigs in Clover (1903), explore and authorize a particular set of attitudes known as “Jewish self-hatred,” and, I will argue, legitimate these attitudes by recourse to an idiosyncratic form of scientific racism. Moreover, as I will demonstrate, these texts have served as spurs to the production of racial anti-Semitism. In such a case, what does it mean to recover the text? For what purposes does one revive interest in a self-hating work that has a history of generating dangerous consequences?

IN 1861 AMY LEVY was born into a middle-class Anglo-Jewish family with deep roots in England, and was part of the first generation of women at Cambridge University. Her life was marked by the opportunities and predicaments of Anglo-Jews at a pivotal moment in their history. Receiving full political rights in 1858, two years before Levy was born, England’s Jews attained positions of status in the late-Victorian period and became integrated into the fabric of British society. Todd Endelman, however, like other commentators on Anglo-Jewry in this period, gives the British a mixed evaluation on their treatment of the Jews. Tolerant in many ways, England was “hostile to the notion of cultural diversity. Circles and institutions quite willing to tolerate Jews as intimate associates were not willing to endorse the perpetuation of a separate Jewish culture or to see any value in the customs or beliefs of the Jewish religion” (209).

BENJAMIN LEOPOLD FARJEON (1838–1903) was a novelist of, at best, middling abilities who achieved a modicum of popular success working in the sentimental realist tradition. He was also Jewish, a fact that he neither avoided nor obsessed over. It is just Farjeon’s laissez-faire approach towards ethnic identity that spurs our interest today. He assumed an attitude that was only beginning to be possible in the British Empire in the middle to late Victorian period. Over the years, Farjeon has made perfunctory appearances in such familiar survey and reference materials as Richard Altick’s The English Common Reader (1957), John Sutherland’s The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (1989), and Linda Gertner Zatlin’s Nineteenth Century Anglo-Jewish Novel (1981), but the only substantial piece of scholarship devoted solely to his work is Lillian Faderman’s dissertation “B. L. Farjeon: Victorian Novelist” (1967). Where Faderman provides a broad-based chronicle of Farjeon’s publications, I focus here on one aspect of his legacy — i.e., how he partook of an incipient opportunity to construct a position for Jews as Englishmen in economic terms.

AT THE END of the Victorian era and in the first decades of the twentieth century, Israel Zangwill was a well-known name in Europe, America, and even the Middle East. The enormous success of his 1892 novel Children of the Ghetto had made Zangwill the spokesperson for English Jewry throughout the world, as he revealed and explained an alien community to its non-Jewish neighbors and made the universe of the Jewish immigrants more intelligible to their acculturated coreligionists. An early Zionist, Zangwill met with Theodore Herzl in London and attended the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897; he continued to participate in the movement until 1905, when he formed his own nationalist group, the Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO). He became active in the pacifist and feminist movements of the early 1900s, and his literary output of that period for the most part reflects those interests, although he still explored issues of Jewish identity in numerous short stories and the highly popular play The Melting Pot (1908). In all, Zangwill published eight novels, nine collections of short fiction, eleven plays, and a volume of poetry, writing on both Jewish and more general themes; and (with the exception of some of his later thesis drama) his work was for the most part both popular and acclaimed. During the later 1880s and 1890s Zangwill was a prolific journalist, publishing columns on literature and current topics not only in the Jewish Standard, but also in the comic paper Puck (later Ariel, which he also edited), the Critic, and the Pall Mall Magazine. In short, he was very much a turn-of-the-century literary personality, esteemed as one of their own by his Jewish readers, but also prominent in the more general transatlantic literary milieu.

IN THE JEW IN THE TEXT:Modernity and the Construction of Identity (1995) Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb noted that although questions of race, colonialism, and Eurocentrism were now prominent in cultural studies, the ways in which the “Jew” had been represented in modern culture remained relatively unexplored (6). Over the last few years, however, exploration of this kind has burgeoned, bringing with it important challenges both for Jewish studies and for English literary history. The nineteenth century has proved a particularly rich resource for such research, and the importance of this period for considering the relationship between modernity and the “Jew” is underlined by Nochlin:

ON FEBRUARY 18, 1845, Robert Browning sent a poem entitled “The Tomb at Saint Praxed’s” to the acting editor of Hood’s Magazine. He writes: “I pick it out as being a pet of mine, and just the thing for the time — what with the Oxford business, and Camden society and other embroilments” (DeVane and Knickerbocker 35–36). Because of this letter, the immediate historical context for the poem has commonly been taken as the Oxford (Tractarian) movement and Newman’s retraction in 1843. The Cambridge Camden Society (not the London antiquarian society of the same name, which is sometimes thought to be Browning’s reference) was also associated with Romanism, being accused of popery in 1844 and subsequently dissolved by the Cambridge authorities in February 1845, the same month Browning submitted his poem. (It continued as the Ecclesiological Society.) Through its journal, The Ecclesiologist (1841–), the Cambridge Camden Society aimed to study ecclesiastical architecture, following Pugin’s Contrasts (2nd edition, 1841) in complaining about the moral corruption of church architecture and promoting an ethical-spiritual basis for reform.1 Journal items focussed on a range of issues from the symbolic function of church layout to the details of epitaphs and tombs, generally mixing visual values with ecclesiology. Kenneth Clark in The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (139–44) and John Morley in Death, Heaven, and the Victorians (52–62) detail these issues. Browning’s “other embroilments” may well refer therefore to the growing controversy in the 1840s about sepulture and sepulchral style, about the appropriateness or otherwise of ornate tombs and canopies. Hence this poem about a deathbed scene and a Bishop’s tomb may be clearly located within the broadly enveloping mid- Victorian network of cultural practices related to death: distinctively encoded rituals of mourning, debate about gravestones and epitaphs, depictions of deathbed scenes (in painting as well as literature), and widespread discussion of what came to be known as the four last things — death, judgement, heaven, and hell.

“I unreservedly confess, for myself, that I cannot leave my natural perception of what is natural and true, at a palace door, in Italy or elsewhere, as I would leave my shoes if I were traveling in the East. I cannot forget that there are certain expressions of face, natural to certain passions, and as unchangeable in their nature as the gait of a lion, or the flight of an eagle. I cannot dismiss from my certain knowledge such common-place facts as the ordinary proportions of men’s arms, and legs, and heads; and when I meet with performances that do violence to these experiences and recollections, no matter where they may be, I cannot admire them.”

— Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (1846)

IN HIS ACCOUNT of his 1844 trip to Rome, Charles Dickens expressed bewilderment that the martyrdom of St. Sebastian should have been so commonly exploited as a subject by Italian artists. The novelist took the opportunity to disparage the “indiscriminate and determined raptures” of certain critics of Renaissance painting as “incompatible with the true appreciation of the really great and transcendent works of art . . . Neither am I partial to libelous Angels, who play on fiddles and bassoons, for the edification of sprawling monks apparently in liquor.” Dickens concluded that representations of St. Sebastian did not “have very uncommon and rare merits, as works of art, to justify their compound multiplication by Italian painters” (195).1

TWO OF THE BEST accounts of the relations between Thackeray and Carlyle are those by Gordon N. Ray in his great life and letters of the novelist, and the well-informed essay by C. R. Sanders “The Carlyles and Thackeray” in his Carlyle’s Friendships and Other Studies. Yet both of them are crucially and entirely wrong in attributing a review of a work by Carlyle in the Times to Thackeray when we now find it was obviously by a regular reviewer Samuel Phillips.1 So they are mistaken in several conclusions that go well beyond biographical detail and bear on the way both writers represent mid-Victorian opinion in matters affecting fiction and belief. The Times, the two writers, and the work in question, which was Carlyle’s Life of John Sterling (1851), were all opinion-formers, going to the centre of what we think of as Victorianism. But it seemed curiously clear to the otherwise perceptive Sanders and Gordon Ray that, since Carlyle and Thackeray differed on a number of questions such as the place of the great man in history, it was acceptable that the savage and stupid Times review of 1 November 1851 was his. After all, Thackeray’s daughter Lady Ritchie declared that she had talked to Carlyle about The Life of Sterling in 1871, when she “spoke of her father’s review in the Times” (Ritchie 160), with the result that it was included in the standard Centenary edition of his Works.

WHERE IS “Victorian autobiography” in the late 1990s? Everywhere and nowhere. Always contested as a genre, autobiography has stretched its fragile boundaries and diffused itself among the many forms of self-representation that interest contemporary critics: travel narratives, letters, journals, fiction, poetry, essays, biography. This diffusion is in many ways a fruitful development, although it raises the question of whether “Victorian autobiography” is still a meaningful category to use in describing critical work. Although I concentrate here on a number of recent books that flourish the word “autobiography” in their titles, I come to this review with a sense that some of the most vital work on Victorian self-representation may be flying under different banners.

IN THE POST-THEORETICAL (re)turn to history there is now, in literary and cultural studies, an increasing preoccupation with material relations, manifest in the growing number of interdisciplinary approaches foregrounding the importance of the production, circulation, and reception of texts. It has become increasingly evident that, despite internal claims for praxis, a much-vaunted cultural materialism has found itself at times imaginatively and practically restrained as a consequence of extreme textualist legacies. The familiar and too easy dichotomy between the so-called empiricism and the so-called critical theory is now beginning to recede as empiricist methodologies, much maligned in the post-humanist critiques of the 1980s, are beginning to make their presences felt again, though in revitalized and theoretically informed ways.

AS I WAS FINISHING this essay — taking yet another procrastination break for tea and idling through the mail — there it was, in the middle of the September Lands’ End catalog, between the luggage and the imported cotton shirts, William Least Heat-Moon’s journey to the western isles of Scotland. In a few hundred words, beginning with Dr. Johnson’s complaint of the barrenness and “sterility” of these rocky shores, and sketching the latest economic, geographical, and demographic changes in the Shetlands, the author described a complex reconfiguration. Big petroleum had arrived some time back, along with Indian and Chinese restaurants and new houses redolent of Levittown. All this has provoked a “local fervor for things Nordic” and a “vigor of nostalgia.” The eye-catching photos accompanying the story of course contain nary an oil rig, not a single plate of stir-fry. Indeed, no inhabitants are pictured at all. Only archaeological sites and derelict crofters’ cottages.