In Walter C. Phillips's Classic Study of 1919, Dickens, Reade, and Collins, Sensation Novelists: A Study in the Conditions and Theories of Novel Writing in Victorian England, there comes an instant when the critic believes himself to have caught the last of his novelists in a moment of artlessness. Remarking on the comforting and seemingly-conformist opening of Wilkie Collins's No Name, Phillips comments that “in the early sixties . . . the popular drift toward realism – stories of domestic life – had compelled some modification of Collins's . . . original melodramatic scheme” (133). Collins's predilection for artfulness is well-established. Rejecting his suggestions for an earlier foreshadowing of the Dr. Manette subplot in A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens comments in October 1859, “I do not positively say that the point you put, might not have been done in your manner; but I have a very strong conviction that it would have been overdone in that manner.” He goes on to characterize Collins's suggested revision as potentially off-putting for the readership because it would inevitably be discovered and the situation consequently judged “too elaborately trapped, baited, and prepared” (Letters 9: 127). This essay is in a sense an exploration of the special utility inherent in Collins's elaborately prepared traps for the reader. The elaborate plan can sometimes go places, make certain philosophical critiques, that the accommodative plot cannot. Collins was not known to be a writer who changed course easily in the face of criticism. Thus, it is surprising to find Phillips, as well as other literary critics, taking his opening in No Name seriously and as a sort of conservative retreat on Collins's part. But traps being what they are, that is, made to be fallen into, Phillips's misunderstanding is understandable. The opening of No Name does most assuredly invite such an interpretation. I will be arguing here, however, that, far from attempting to accommodate a newly emergent popular Victorian domestic taste, and pulling back from a previous subversive stance, Collins especially in his opening but also throughout his non-canonical masterpiece is actually covertly attacking that taste at its very foundations.

Two marble statues, each representing a reclining, sleeping nude of somewhat indeterminate sex, sit at the heart of Swinburne's early collections of poetry: the Hellenistic Sleeping Hermaphrodite (Figure 1) in his Poems and Ballads (1866) and Michelangelo's allegorical figure La Notte (Figure 2) in his “In San Lorenzo” sonnet in Songs before Sunrise (1871). Swinburne's dealings with the Hermaphrodite have had a long and ever increasing bibliography; his fascination with Michelangelo's sculpture has, to my knowledge, not yet provoked much scholarly attention. This imbalance may partly be ascribed to the immediate sex appeal of the Hermaphrodite – this “late Romantic freak,” as Camille Paglia appropriately called it (413) – which in the gendered critical discourse of the 1990s has given rise to a whole range of exciting explorations of Swinburne and the body, Swinburne and androgyny, Swinburne and poetic blindness. The Michelangelo statue was, however, turned into a poetic and political monument by Swinburne under far less erotically charged circumstances in the volume dedicated to Guiseppe Mazzini, and opens for different routes of inquiry.

In an 1867 treatise on diamonds and precious stones, Harry Emanuel writes the following:

In 1840, thePhrenological Journal published an anonymous personal testimony of phrenological salvation titled “Remarkable Case of Change of Character and Pursuits.” The article appears in the “Cases and Facts” section of the periodical, commonly reserved for correspondents who provided personal accounts of the truth of phrenology. The correspondent in this “Case” makes use of the conventional structure of the conversion narrative: youthful deviance, a moment of illumination, and rebirth into a new life of virtue, peace, and joy. Beginning with a description of his former life, he explains that being “Born in the lap of luxury – bred in the tainted atmosphere of opinion” led to the “best years of [his] existence [being] passed in idle, if not in sinful pursuits.” After becoming a military officer, his dissolute behavior increases until he finally decides to correct his character, and “the great instrument employed was phrenology” (342). After adopting a disciplined regimen of moral and intellectual mental exercises, he triumphantly emerges as a man who better knows himself and his capabilities. With his “new” character comes a new life more suited to his cultivated faculties: realizing that a soldier's advancement depends on the “number of victims” sacrificed for the country's cause, he “selected the more humble profession of the Civil Engineer, for which [he] believed, phrenologically, nature had made a fair provision.” He concludes by noting that his life has since been prosperous, and that he hopes now to “aid the cause of that science” through the phrenological education of his own children and his public confession in the journal (343).

The “condition of England” in the middle of the nineteenth century was, for most Victorians (and is, indeed, for most modern scholars of the Victorian period), about as far removed from desert pirates and neo-Grecian queens as London from Jerusalem. But such was not the case in 1847 for the ambitious novelist-turned-politician Benjamin Disraeli, himself a mixture of political and social incongruities, who chose to conclude his political trilogy with a novel that bore greater resemblance to an Arabian Nights fantasy than to any mid-Victorian reform fiction. Contemporary readers of Tancred, or The New Crusade (1847) were understandably perplexed: “There is no principle of cohesion about the book, if we except the covers,” complained one reviewer (qtd. in Stewart 229). And, while critics have expanded upon this dismissive condemnation throughout the twentieth century, not much has changed regarding the general critical appraisal or thoughtful analysis of what Disraeli regarded as the favorite of his compositions (Blake 215). The least popular of the Young England novels both in its own day and in ours, Tancred has most frequently been viewed as an anomaly – an abandonment of the political manifesto Disraeli began in Coningsby and continued in Sybil.

When Carlyle praises “wondrous Dualism” in Past and Present, he invokes a model for conceptualizing man's role in the world that held widespread, even hegemonic currency in mid-Victorian culture. The centrality of dualist discourse during the mid-Victorian period, thanks in part to Carlyle's translations of German literature and philosophy in the 1830s, cannot be overstated. Carlyle argues that dualism transhistorically frames all human activity: “In wondrous Dualism, then [in the year 1200] as now, lived nations of breathing men; alternating, in all ways, between Light and Dark; between joy and sorrow, between rest and toil” (50; bk. 2, ch. 1). The subject “man” – I use the masculine advisedly – endlessly oscillates between the opposing elements that constitute the universe. This, for Carlyle, is the position of all men. To be heroic, however, one must recognize and negotiate the most wondrous dualism of all, time and eternity: “this Earthly life, and its riches and possessions, and good and evil hap, are not intrinsically a reality at all, but are a shadow of realities eternal, infinite; that this Time-world, as an air-image, fearfully emblematic, plays and flickers in the grand still mirror of Eternity; and man's little Life has Duties that are great, that are alone great, and go up to Heaven and down to Hell” (72; bk. 2, ch. 6). Minor dualisms are subsumed in the opposition between “Time-world” and “Eternity,” and in the “mirror” of the latter, man discerns himself: his ultimate insignificance, yet the greatness of his “Duties.” Carlyle emphasizes that these duties demand the payment of obedience to one's temporal and eternal superiors – heroic ancestors, captains of industry, colonial governors, and God. Only then can heroic men once again be born, like the laboring Hercules or the humble Christ, from temporal-eternal intercourse.

In an 1857 Saturday Review article of the novel Two Years Ago, T. C. Sanders characterizes Charles Kingsley's ideal man: he “fears God and can walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours – [he] breathes God's free air on God's rich earth, and at the same time can hit a woodcock, doctor a horse, and twist a poker around his fingers” (qtd. in Haley 108). Tom Thurnall, the fearless, constitutionally robust, well-traveled doctor and hero of Two Years Ago, fits these requirements. His physical strength also manifests itself as a charmed immunity to illness: during a cholera epidemic in Aberalva (a fictional Cornish town), “[Tom] thought nothing about death and danger at all . . . Sleep he got when he could, and food as often as he could; into the sea he leapt, morning and night, and came out fresher each time” (Kingsley, Years 288). Charles Kingsley's own self-proclaimed medical and religious philosophies give clear insight into Two Years Ago's intended effects. A sanitary reformer in the mould of Edwin Chadwick and Florence Nightingale, Kingsley felt that disease arose from crowding, filth, and poisonous vapors. Kingsley's contemporaries named his perspective “muscular Christianity,” recognizing that Kingsley “strong arms” his readers by inspiring in them fear and uncertainty about their own health practices and then shows them the way, with examples like Tom, to an active, devout lifestyle.

In between writing Middlemarch (1872) and her final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot recorded in her notebook that she wanted her fiction to explore “great turning points” in history by depicting “in detail” not only “the various steps by which a political or social change was reached” but also “the pathos, the heroism often accompanying the decay and final struggle of old systems, which has not had its share of tragic commemoration” (Essays 402). Indeed, by writing Daniel Deronda, the only one of her novels set in her contemporary moment, Eliot seems intent on examining shifts, presumably incomplete ones, taking place during her life. The incomplete nature of change may be echoed in the novel's unusual bifurcation: famously, its two plots address the title character, Daniel Deronda, who searches for a way to serve humanity, and Gwendolen Harleth, a beautiful woman who must address the narcissism she has been encouraged to develop. Deronda's story traces his gradual discovery and acceptance of his Jewish heritage, while Gwendolen has a story line that is only indirectly related to Deronda: she suffers in a tragic marriage and only partially comes to terms with the position of femininity in late Victorian England. Many readers hope, or simply expect, that the two stories will be joined in Daniel and Gwendolen's romance and marriage. Dismayed, however, by a double plot where Deronda and Gwendolen have separate trajectories and endings without marriage, readers and critics have frequently commented on the plot's structural problems, often noting “the narrative disjunction” that is one of the novel's most prominent features (Levine 421).

Mary Elizabeth Braddon launched her editorship of Belgravia magazine by painting a picture for her readers of a murderous medical practitioner. At the outset of Birds of Prey (1867), the serial novel which kicked off the magazine's publication, Braddon introduces us to a surgeon-dentist named Philip Sheldon. The narrator ironically explains, “Of course he was eminently respectable . . . A householder with such a door-step and such muslin curtains could not be other than the most correct of mankind” (7; bk. 1, ch. 1). Sensation novels of the 1860s have long been critically recognized as vehicles for revealing the disparity between respectable façades and seedy interior truths, and Braddon's underexamined work Birds of Prey and its sequel Charlotte's Inheritance (1868) are no exception: by the close of the second novel, the seemingly upright Sheldon has been revealed as a liar, a cheat, and a killer.

This essay examines the ways in which New Woman novelists and their critics negotiated and revised Victorian literary canons in the 1880s and 1890s in light of the controversial publications of the Higher and feminist critics of the Bible. It explores the relationship between nineteenth-century literary and religious canons and the ways in which New Woman writers both drew on and intensified contemporary debates on canonicity. While literary canons are often perceived as allowing the possibility of adding new or re-evaluated works whereas biblical canonization seems final and definitive, nineteenth- century discoveries of early, non-canonical Christian writings and fragmentary gospels such as Pistis Sophia and the Gospel of Mary profoundly problematized late-Victorian understandings of the process of canonicity. The growing recognition of the historical significance of such fragments, as well as fierce theological debates in the leading magazines of the day, highlighted canonization as a political procedure which enforced internal coherence and unity at the expense of cultural diversity. Many writers suggested that canonization involved a repression of ideological controversies and a marginalization of competing narratives, a process which was both dramatized and redressed in New Woman fiction. The scholarship that turned to the era before the biblical canon had been sealed explored the conditions which made it final and unassailable, enabling feminist novelists to examine canonicity imaginatively and critically. By drawing attention to the essentially historical and political forces that governed processes of canon formation, New Woman writers sought to expose the narrowness and the limitations of the literary canon within and against which they worked.

In the last years of the nineteenth century, Arthur Conan Doyle, a prolific writer with a global reputation and readership, was settled with his family at Hindhead in Surrey. In his Memories and Adventures (M&A) he was to recall this period as an interlude of peace: “The country was lovely. My life was filled with alternate work and sport. As with me so with the nation” (151). This last sentence refers chiefly to the apparent placidity of the time, soon to be rudely spoilt by the outbreak of the South African war, which was to prove a critical and formative testing-ground for Great Britain and for Conan Doyle personally. But the sentence can also refer to the plenitude of a life divided between work and sport, and I will argue that Conan Doyle would be right to claim his experience here as representative of the national life. At the end of the century which invented modern sport, Conan Doyle's enthusiastic participation in sports, his writing about the subject, and his understanding of sporting culture have a great deal to tell us about Victorian Britain. As with him, so with the nation.

Some John, we are told, possibly both the Evangelist and the beloved apostle, but, for reasons we will see, possibly only one, the other, or neither, reanimated so his dying words can be recorded by other early Christians, tries to tell those who will now live with no contact with anyone who had contact with Jesus Christ, how they may live with that absence. Although his reanimaters preserve and venerate his words, it's not clear that they actually follow them or even understand them. In the wake of the questions first German Higher Criticism and then more recent work in the 1860s had raised with regard to the historical accuracy of the New Testament, Robert Browning, tries to propose how his contemporaries might believe. At the same time, as a consequence of a definition of how to believe, Browning also suggests how to look at the beliefs of others as expressions of one's condition and situation rather than as assertions whose accuracy it is in our interests to measure: he tells us what a dramatic monologue may show us. With regard to either aim, either with his contemporaries or with his critics, he did no better than John did with the poem's auditors. At least with regard to the issue of how to believe, one watches an odd critical history as readers have become increasingly aware of how completely Browning seems to have accepted the conclusions of the Higher Criticism about the historicity of the gospels, but have refused to accept how completely this meant that his justification for belief wound up reproducing the Higher Critical position about the historical reality of Christianity, with the addition of an epistemologically daring and dangerous justification of willed belief in an object accepted as possibly fictional that gives his ostensible Christianity only the appearance of an orthodoxy it had in fact abandoned.

In a 1927 lecture the Director of the British Museum Sir Frederic Kenyon countered the futurist leader F. T. Marinetti's calls for the destruction of museums by arguing that “in times of upheaval . . . salvation is to be found in adherence to tradition” rather than in “break[ing] loose from” it. Kenyon explained the museum's role in promoting this salvation:

Elisabeth Baumann was born in Warsaw in 1819 to a German mapmaker, Philip Adolph Baumann, and his German wife, Johanne Frederikke Reyer. Her early training took her to Berlin and, from 1838, to the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, a leading one in its day. According to Hans Christian Andersen, who would later write a biography of his friend Elisabeth, the famous German painter Peter von Cornelius much admired Baumann's paintings, and speaking of them he declared, “She is the only real man in the Düsseldorf school,” which was doubtlessly meant as a compliment (see Andersen, qtd. in Von Folsach 83). In Düsseldorf, Baumann was influenced by the prevailing realist trend of the Academy but added to it an idealistic and sensuous quality that would become her distinctive mark. After the completion of her training in 1845, Baumann went to Rome where she met the Danish sculptor Jens Adolf Jerichau, one of the outstanding talents of his time, whom she married a year later. The couple settled in Denmark in 1849 (although Jerichau-Baumann kept a studio in Rome) as Jens Adolf became a professor at, and later President of, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.

I departed hospitable Athens on the first of February, the city of Pallas Athena glowing in the evening sun. My Greek Palace-servant Spiro had taken me to Piraeus in a Vienna-cart, where my numerous belongings were stored. It was the last minute to still be able to reach the ship, and steam could already be seen as we came closer to Piraeus. I am not the most punctual person, but when it is really necessary I can be on time. This time, however, it was a close call. Instead of being able to pack my own things, like other people of my standing, with my own hands or with my servants’, two of the most loveable and highly regarded people appeared on my threshold. The lady wore Turkish spectacles in front of her lovely eyes, the gentleman smiled warmly. And who were the lady and the gentleman? No less than His Royal Highness King George of Greece and his majesty's lovely Queen! “Mrs. Jerichau, you will not be ready, can we help? Here is a hairbrush and there is a silk ribbon you are forgetting, and your sketch book.” All this was put into the luggage, along with many pleasurable things “for the children.” These small things were later unpacked in Copenhagen with much enjoyment and laughter. At the same time, the carpenter was waiting who still had to box up my recently finished paintings. Truly, he had to wait, and Mrs. Jerichau tip-toed from the innermost rooms to the entrance hall, away from the swelling suitcases, which seemed to be filled up more and more as if by fairies, while the owner ran away from them towards the carpenter outside, and again away from the carpenter – a Greek who only poorly understood her, and who had even poorer understanding of how to pack pictures. Because he had not brought with him enough of the boards made in the King's palace, he had to make do with thin wooden bars such as one uses when sending chickens to the market. Out between the bars, the beautiful “Girl from Hymettus” and her companion, the “Shepherd on the Acropolis,” peeked. Finally, everything was ready, Mrs. Jerichau made as deep a curtsey as she was capable of, and thanked [her guests and helpers] from the bottom of her heart, but secretly did not believe that she would manage to reach the boat in time.

Victorians Live examines the afterlife of the Victorians, the ways that Victorian literature and culture remain alive, continue to live in our own day.

It Was the Worst of Times: A Visit to Dickens World

MARTY GOULD AND REBECCA MITCHELL

Turner in America

JASON ROSENFELD

Holman Hunt at Toronto

HERBERT SUSSMAN

The Afterlives of Aestheticism and Decadence in the Twenty-First Century

MARGARET D. STETZ

Darwin at Yale

MARGARET HOMANS