How much time has passed since the publication of VLC’s Keywords issue five years ago? This is not a trick question. Students of nineteenth-century British literature and culture are primed to see five years as a long time (“with the length of five long summers”), and events at both national and global scales have encouraged a widespread sense that 2018 is located less in the recent past than on the far side of a divide—in the Before Times. On the other hand, the long view encouraged by a scholarly focus on a period that ended over a century ago may see little or no meaningful time as having passed between 2018 and 2023. Moreover, on a more quotidian level, the very pace of scholarship—the amount of time it typically takes to conceive, research, write, and publish work, even for those without a Casaubonian bone in their bodies—can make five years seem like no time at all (“five summers that flew by,” as Wordsworth might have put it had he been on an academic calendar).

This essay focuses on “abstraction” as an underresearched keyword in Victorian studies. I argue that the productive ambiguity of abstraction indexes contradictions and tensions in capitalist modernity, statistical thinking, and interdisciplinary mediations that trace significant parts of their histories to the nineteenth century and still heavily inform our current Victorian scholarships.

In Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), Walter Pater asks if “modern art” can “represent men and women in these bewildering toils so as to give the spirit at least an equivalent for the sense of freedom?” I discuss how the notions of both subjective and aesthetic autonomy that Pater refers to here have gotten a bad rap for the past century or so for helping facilitate the liberal, capitalist, and imperialist projects of the nineteenth century. I then argue, however, that the version of autonomy described in the writings of Pater and other Victorian aesthetes and decadents is actually quite different from the bourgeois, Enlightenment notion of sovereign subjectivity that has been rightfully critiqued by postmodernists and poststructuralists. I end by suggesting that aestheticist and decadent versions of autonomy, which affirm humanity's capacity to unmake and remake ourselves and our society via the aesthetic, might serve as a resource for countering the racist Western myth Sylvia Wynter refers to as “biocentricity”: the notion that humankind,and thus the hierarchies that justify the uneven distributions of power, is wholly and intractably in thrall to natural laws beyond our control.

This keyword introduces readers to the theory of ethics of care, arguing that it is both a historically appropriate metric for Victorian studies and a theoretical form grounded in the experience of marginalized subjects. Moreover, care is a way of thinking that encourages us to interrogate our own scholarship.

The word “conscience” appears frequently in Victorian writings across realms of discourse, in which it assumed an edge of ambivalence and energy difficult for us to perceive in the twenty-first century. While conscience today may seem a residual concept, recent critical strains in Victorian studies have suggested the possibilities bound up in examining anew this complex and multivalent word. Turning particularly to the writings of Charles Darwin and George Eliot reveals a self-conscious awareness not only of how the fluctuating meanings of conscience capture broader social shifts, but the ways these shifts are registered and enacted in language.

The conservative—as both a philosophy and a political ideology—was radically unstable in the Victorian period, and so too were its manifestations in the literary sphere. However, as one of the keynotes of Victorian politics, life, and literature, it raises some serious questions about the consequences for our scholarship that it remains relatively neglected and undertheorized. We should train ourselves to read for the conservative alongside the liberal, to see how conservative aesthetics shape writers and texts in myriad ways.

This article argues that the field of Victorian cosmopolitanisms has largely neglected accounts of migrants, exiles, and nomads in explorations of the nineteenth-century cosmopolitan world of empires. A focus on these hypermobile figures draws attention to the ways in which mobility, in all forms, disrupts our understandings of place, home, and world as they are conceived in cosmopolitan thought. These examples of displaced subjectivities reveal how cosmopolitanism travels along space, disregarding borders of region, nation, or empire and conjuring new ideas about how we belong to the world. By thinking about how different cosmopolitanisms contend or coexist with one another, the article reconsiders a question that persistently reappears in debates about cosmopolitanism across time and space: Is it an ideal of sameness and commonality or an orientation toward difference and plurality?

The article surveys the significance of the dandy as a central figure in nineteenth-century constructions of masculinity and social class.

The trope of critical reading as diagnosis draws on health humanities scholarship to enable responsive, collaborative readings that pair attention to form (symptoms and signs) with a meticulous address to how author, publisher, text, and reader co-create diverse strands of meaning within different settings. This model can assess how most Victorian texts feature a spectrum of overlapping literary genres, and how these genres are formed in the working partnerships that texts and readers create across changing contexts. The text itself becomes not an inert object to be cataloged but a living, changing organism. Diagnostic reading can address both the ostensible meanings of a passage and other possibilities latent within the text or new meanings that arise as texts circulate to new audiences. It also insists that texts and readers are both embodied, thus bridging literary scholarship and print culture studies by reminding us that readers know texts as cognitive, affective, and physical interlocutors. Medical diagnosis usefully addresses not just disease but many human conformations, and—as with readers and texts—it opens up a relationship between caregiver and patient that evolves as conditions change. Overall, the diagnostic model encourages a more versatile and inclusive understanding of scholarly work.

I examine the temporality of disaster through a condition that I term “retroactive hopefulness”: looking back at a time when we could still hope that we would be exempt from imminent catastrophe. I discuss this condition in relation to our current Covid moment and to H. G. Wells's dystopic novel The War of the Worlds (1898).

This “Keywords Redux” article examines the significance of drugs (psychoactive substances) in Victorian culture and literature, theorizing their potential for both performance enhancement and for pleasure.

In the mid-twentieth century, the term environmentalism became commonly used to refer to efforts to protect the natural environment from human abuse and disrespect. Attitudes to safeguarding the environment, however, had already been taking shape for some time, based on interpretive practices that affirmed the values, needs, and desires of some people and not others, and rarely those of nonhuman animals. Changing perceptions of species, race, gender, class, and wealth influenced who had the privilege, knowledge, and opportunity to recognize abuses of nature, envision environmentalist possibilities, and act on them. Philip P. Morgan observes, for example, in a study of Caribbean ecology across centuries, that global capitalism, extractivism, and ecological dispossession have skewed which parts of the human population and the natural world have been recognized as worthy of attention and the forms this attention has taken.

This essay argues that “experience” is an essential keyword for Victorian studies. The concept spiked in interest in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Causes for this spike include the division of humanistic knowledge into the modern disciplines, and the pressure that idealist philosophy put on British empiricist thought. Shadworth Hodgson's 1898 The Metaphysic of Experience is featured both as a text exemplifying the paradoxes of Victorian experience-talk and as an invitation to further study.

In Victorian studies, the term “extraction” helps us express the nineteenth-century emergence of a society fully reliant on finite underground materials and thereby describe the material and value relations at the heart of imperialism and at the heart of the provincial-metropole dynamic. Much of the recent attention to extraction in Victorian studies and beyond returns us to the sites of removal, to the extraction zones or sacrifice zones left behind when commodities of value are withdrawn, tallied, and sold. In Victorian literature, England's coal mines, copper mines, quarries, and other sites of extraction left a hefty footprint, but so did the British extractive industry that was increasingly moving to the colonial frontier. Written in the aftermath of the emergence of the first fossil-fuel-based society, Victorian literature is a crucial archive for understanding extractivism and how it was both normalized and challenged across the British imperial world.

The nineteenth century was pivotal in shaping contemporary Western attitudes toward fat. Victorian representations of fatness participated in the construction of knowledge about bodies in general, intersecting with economic, medical, gendered, and racial discourses. Fatness was thought to make manifest those hidden consumer appetites lurking within all bodies. It thus provided a visual grounding for the impetus toward bourgeois self-management. At the same time, representations of fatness were complicated by intersecting discourses of class, gender, and race. This essay argues for the adoption of new directions for research that foreground the role played by perceptions of body size in the construction of Victorian bodies. Fattening Victorian studies requires an interrogation of the ways in which the normative ideologies and practices associated with bourgeois body management have structured a society that was, and remains, hostile to fat bodies.

This article makes a case to the effect that the free will vs. determinism dichotomy is relevant for Victorianists.

This essay surveys the variant meanings and uses of the term “girl” caused by gender, age, class, race, and etymological differences. It argues that the extremes of idealization and contempt expressed toward girls and through the figure of the girl accentuate the girl's use as a fulcrum for assigning value in Victorian literature and culture.

Although grammar is often associated with schematic approaches to education, it was a hotly contested subject in the nineteenth century. Considering nineteenth-century grammar texts, as well as the recent turn to “grammar” as a theoretical lens in nineteenth-century studies, this keywords entry proposes that grammar, far from reflecting fixed and incontrovertible precepts, serves as a powerful tool for querying and renegotiating disciplinary structures.

Historicity—that is, a cultural and aesthetic engagement with historical movement—is a crucial term for analyzing and evaluating what we commonly call “realist” fiction. In The Historical Novel (1939), Georg Lukács famously associated literature's historicity with the realist novel's ability to capture historical movement through typical characters, a feature he tied to Walter Scott's historical romances. For Lukács, Scott's “faithfulness” to history does not imply “a chronicle-like, naturalistic reproduction of language, mode of thought, and feeling of the past.” Rather, it comes from the way Scott uses “necessary anachronism” to portray the past “as the necessary prehistory of the present,” primarily through his protagonists’ symbolic movement between warring camps. Although historical romances remained popular in British literature after Scott's death, Victorian historical romances differed from the Waverley novels in important ways. This brief keyword essay considers the nature of those differences and their effect on literature's historicity more generally.

This keyword essay discusses the importance of centering Indigenous perspectives as Victorianists engage in the work of “decolonizing” their research and teaching. It underscores the necessity of citing Native and First Nations scholars and activists and of building reciprocal relations with living Indigenous communities in both local and global contexts.