EVENBEFORE ESTHER LYON enters the narrative of Felix Holt, she is introduced to the eponymous hero, whom she will eventually marry, through two smells — one present, the other absent; one highly conventional, the other distinctly unusual. As the narrator explains, Mr. Lyon’s sitting room contains “certain things” that are “incongruous” with its “general air” of “privation,” among them the “delicate scent of dried rose-leaves” and a wax candle. Lyon, embarrassed by what he takes to be Felix Holt’s unspoken criticism of such indulgence, explains to his visitor, “You are doubtless amazed to see me with a wax-light . . . but this undue luxury is paid for with the earnings of my daughter, who is so delicately framed that the smell of tallow is loathsome to her” (Eliot 53–54; ch. 5).1 Esther’s association with the scent of roses is quite unremarkable: it simply and quickly registers her as a wholly acceptable marriage partner. Lyon’s reference to the smell of tallow candles is, however, according to the practices of Victorian fiction, quite unconventional, first because it explicitly evokes a smell that is not there, the strong odor of candles made from animal fat; secondly, because it identifies a good smell or the relative lack of one, that of wax candles, with a negative moral judgment: Esther’s practice of spending her earnings on such candles is, to Lyon at least,

IN 1839, G. A. WALKER, a London surgeon, published Gatherings from Graveyards, Particularly Those in London. Three years later Parliament appointed a House of Commons select committee to investigate “the evils arising from the interment of bodies” in large towns and to consider legislation to resolve the problem.1 Walker’s study opens with a comprehensive history of the modes of interment among all nations, showing the wisdom of ancient practices that removed the dead from the confines of the living. The second portion of the book describes the pathological state of forty-three metropolitan graveyards in an effort to convince the public of the need for legislative interference by the government to prohibit burials in the vicinity of the living.2 Walker’s important work attracted the attention of Parliament and social reformers because of his comprehensive representation of the problem of graveyards, especially among the poor districts of London; his rudimentary statistics that, in effect, isolated them from the rest of the society; and his unbending insistence that national legislators solve the problem. These three impulses influenced the way Edwin Chadwick, secretary to the New Poor Law Commission from 1834 to 1842 and commissioner for the Board of Health from 1848 to 1852, identified and represented the problem of corpses and graveyards in his A Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry into the Practice of Interment in Towns (1843).

“THE NATION is only the aggregate of individual conditions, and civilization itself is but a question of personal improvement,” argued Samuel Smiles in his 1859 Self-Help, the work that codified the supremacy of aspiration over occupation as a marker of identity for thousands of readers on the ill-defined boundary of the lower-middle and upper-working classes (16; ch. 1).1 Smiles’s importance, then and now, lies not in his invention of “self-improvement” as a defining feature of this group, but rather in his skill at publicly expressing the complex set of ideals and values that had already been worked out in, and expressed by, small groups of improvers for at least two generations.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

—Percy Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry”

THESE WORDS, written in 1821, celebrate the figure of the poet as leader and prophet.1 By noting that this position is “unacknowledged,” however, Shelley intimates that the Industrial Revolution sweeping Britain threatens to shrink the political and social relevance of poets. While Shelley makes no mention of class distinctions in “A Defence of Poetry,” had he paused to consider the relative status of the poet in class terms, he would probably have admitted that his era’s working-class versifiers were, with a few exceptions, the most unacknowledged poets of all.

Crowds of miserable Irish darken all our towns.

—Chartism

THUS WROTE THOMAS CARLYLE in his famous long pamphlet Chartism, published in December 1839. But what moved Carlyle, the intellectual hero of the age, to direct attention in Chartism to the Irish presence in the early Victorian city? Why did he present the Irish in England in such negative terms? Was his analysis correct? And what was the wider significance of his interpretation? These, as Carlyle might have said, are measurable questions and they form the essential framework of this paper. Yet it is impossible to respond to these questions without first examining the contemporary social, economic, and political contexts within which Chartism was written; Carlyle’s development as an historian in the early 1830s; and the purpose of Chartism, including the chapter on the Irish entitled “The Finest Peasantry in the World.”

IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND, a governess was the primary educator of male and female children in a middle-class household; particularly by virtue of her work educating girls through their mid-teens, the governess simultaneously effected and disrupted the transparent transmission of class and gender identity between generations of middle-class women. Recent scholarship has de-emphasized this pedagogical function in its readings of the figure.1 Discussion has centered, instead, on the ways in which the governess represented a crisis for early Victorian definitions of bourgeois femininity (which centered on middle-class women’s financial dependence and apparent leisure) because she was a middle-class woman who earned her own living. But to read the figure of the Victorian governess through Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847) is to see that she troubled bourgeois hegemony because of her job. I contend that the governess disturbed the early Victorians not only because she blurred the boundary between the separate spheres, but also because she dramatized the potentially illimitable effects of education. When you hire someone to teach your children, how do you ensure that she is teaching what you wish and as you wish?

I

ON JULY 23, 1830, Parliament passed “An Act to permit the general Sale of Beer and Cyder by Retail in England.” Commonly known as the Beer Act of 1830, this law called for a major overhaul of the way beer was taxed and distributed in England and Wales. In place of a sixteenth-century statute that had given local magistrates complete control over the licensing of brewers and publicans, the Beer Act stipulated that a new type of drinking establishment, the beer shop, or beer house, could now be opened by any rate-paying householder in England or Wales (Scotland and Ireland had their own drink laws). For the modest annual licensing fee of two guineas, rate-payers in England could now purchase a license to brew and vend from their own residence.1

DEBATES ABOUT FEMALE EMIGRATION to the British colonies throughout the Victorian era routinely capitalize on the crucial role women could play in consolidating the empire through the civilizing mission. Advocates of female emigration frequently publicized the benefits of “matrimonial colonization,” a rendering of what is now called republican motherhood that defines women’s place in the nation in terms of their domestic and reproductive roles.1 The founding in 1862 of the Female Middle Class Emigration Society (FMCES) by two educated middle-class women, Maria Rye and Jane Lewin, marked a departure from this conventional approach to female emigration. The work of the FMCES was carried out in the spirit of energy and determination that characterized the period of growing feminist activity in the 1860s, when the British rhetoric about “superfluous” women was reaching the tenor of a national crisis.2 While campaigns for improving female education and employment opportunities were long-term solutions to the problem, emigration offered a more immediate palliative. Concerned primarily with the plight of single, middle-class women, Rye and Lewin saw in emigration an alternative plot to the tragic denouement in poverty and spinsterhood that awaited a large proportion of Britain’s population of single, unemployed women. Ignoring the civilizing mission and the inducements for genteel women to marry or to become domestic servants in the colonies,3 Rye and Lewin instead focused on creating a class-differentiated access into colonialism by enabling single middle-class women, most of whom were governesses,

AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, Victorian painting experienced at least one mass media event, so far as circulation is concerned — the appearance of Frederic Leighton’s The Bath of Psyche (1890) on the wall of the drug kingpin in Paul Thomas Anderson’s notorious film Boogie Nights of 1997. As a ferocious deal is going awry, over the desperate dealers looms one of the masterpieces of the Victorian High Renaissance, a commentary through the cool classicism of the late Victorians about the corresponding fin-de-siècle of the lately finished century. It is a stunning moment — perhaps recognized only by historians of British art — but there it is nonetheless. One is to presume that the dealer has acquired the original from the Tate Gallery, since he would never own a copy, let alone a poster! Busboy superstud Mark Wahlberg has brief, violent contact with a masterpiece.

HAVING SURVIVED THE Y2K HYSTERIA, we may feel we have entered new corridors of one hundred and one thousand years. But it is only in 2001 that the punctilious and historical among us may at last observe a centennial, truly the final year of the past century and the hundredth anniversary of the death of Queen Victoria.1 The Jubilees in the last decades of Victoria’s life, and the ceremonies of international mourning that followed her death, might seem to have said goodbye to all that, but in many ways we are still under the sway of the great queen who lent her name to the age before “the American century.” Our own fin-de-siècle urges us to rediscover the many forms of Victoria that have “been hidden in plain view for a hundred years,” as Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich put it in their co-edited collection of essays, Remaking Queen Victoria (1).2 While North American and British feminist studies have dwelt among Victorian ways since the 1970s — with implications that I will consider below — the queen herself has recently commanded critical attention that might seem, like so many features of Victoria’s public performance, out of proportion. Yet that excess, like our obeisance to the arbitrary power of the calendar, seems to be the very stuff of imagined community and ideological construction, and thus worth watching in action. In any case, when feminist literary critics such as Adrienne Munich, Margaret Homans, and Gail Turley Houston

CARLYLE AS FETISHIST: this oldest of charges against Carlyle holds the key to his new importance as cultural critic. Carlyle’s earliest reviewers singled out for disapproval the indiscriminate admiration Carlyle seemed to feel for idols chosen according to an obscure logic of personal need or affinity. In the Quarterly Review of September 1840, for example, William Sewell1 complains:

Castration . . . is the seminal fantasy of the decadent imagination.

— Charles Bernheimer, “Fetishism and Decadence: Salomé’s Severed Heads”

When now I announce that the fetish is a substitute for the penis, I shall certainly create disappointment; so I hasten to add that it is not a substitute for any chance penis, but for a particular and quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but had later been lost. That is to say, it should normally have been given up, but the fetish is precisely designed to preserve it from extinction. To put it more plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and — for reasons familiar to us — does not want to give up.

— Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism”

DESPITE FREUD’S AUTHORITATIVE DECLARATION, contemporary critical theory deploys a conceptual plasticity of the fetish, which refutes the notion of any single narrative of origin.1 Many recent discussions of the fetish have pointed to the limits of the explanatory powers of classical psychoanalysis2 and have been critical of the theoretical importance invested in a narrative of causation which figures women’s bodies as “lacking” or mutilated, according to “the fact” of their “castration.” Focusing on Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, this essay will argue that despite Bernheimer’s claim,3 the Freudian fable of castration need not be taken as the singular, phallic, “seminal fantasy of the decadent imagination.” To do so merely reiterates the gender and sexual hierarchies of classical psychoanalysis and denies the ambiguity of some fetishistic imagery produced in the fin de siècle.

“To tell you the truth, Stein,” I said, with an effort that surprised me, “I came here to describe a specimen. . . .” “Butterfly?” he asked, with an unbelieving and humorous eagerness. “Nothing so perfect,” I answered, feeling suddenly dispirited with all sorts of doubts. “A man!” “Ach so!” he murmured, and his smiling countenance, turned to me, became grave. Then after looking at me for a while he said slowly, “Well — I am a man, too.”

— Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim(ellipsis in original)

ETHNOGRAPHIC TRAVEL ACCOUNTS AND THE COLLECTING of objects — whether body parts or cultural products — functioned together in the Victorian era as a means of “knowing” other peoples and places to a degree not previously possible. It is true that travelers had long been involved in the appropriation of foreign peoples and their cultural products: we need only think of Christopher Columbus or James Cook returning to Europe with Native Americans or Pacific Islanders and their handicrafts in tow.1 But the importance of both writing about and collecting foreign peoples took on new urgency at a time when scientific organizations and newly-forming disciplines were seeking not only to classify and catalog races but also to determine the moments and means of their differentiation. The historical development of a racialized humankind as the object of intense scientific inquiry, along with the general growth of scientism and the professionalization of scientific disciplines in the Victorian period, resulted in an intense need for raw materials that could be transformed or interpreted into scientific data about non-Europeans. To a considerable extent, anatomists, natural historians, armchair ethnologists, and anthropologists created this data about race based on the information supplied by travel narratives and by the objects — including skulls, skeletons, and cultural artifacts — sent or brought to Europe by travelers to Africa, Asia, and the Americas.