This article uses a corpus of manuscript diaries to illuminate the practices and meanings of everyday mobility that shaped the lives of nineteenth-century Englishwomen. The female pedestrian has typically been characterized by scholars as a marginal or transgressive figure whose movements are interpreted through comparison to a masculine peripatetic tradition. “A Voyage of Discovery” seeks to broaden our understanding of what it meant to move through the world as a woman in the nineteenth century. Drawing from the narrated experiences of a broad range of little-known diarists, this article outlines a paradigm of “everyday adventure” to describe walking's status as an unremarkable act that nevertheless creates the potential for event and variety. In so doing, it expands on feminist concepts of the everyday, elaborates on the under-theorized relationship between walking and the body, and reassesses the boundaries of socially acceptable mobility.

Nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian and British narratives represent the Indian Revolt of 1857 as an event with a rich gustatory grammar—a problem of greased cartridges, adulterated flour and salt, and mysterious chapatis. Contemporary colonial sources report the circulation of chapatis across North Indian villages on the eve of the revolt. To this day, these chapatis remain inscrutable. This essay traces the chapati from the Anglo-Indian table to the Kanpur trenches in the first English-language novel of the revolt, Edward Money's The Wife and the Ward (1859). The chapati, as a domestic edible, functions as an index of assimilation. It adulterates its Anglo-Indian eater bodily and morally. It weaves together adulteration and adultery, to demonstrate the gendered colonial politics of bodily purity. As a food of revolt, the chapati is portrayed as a text of Indian fears of bodily contamination. I argue that The Wife and the Ward displaces Anglo-Indian fears of bodily adulteration onto Indian rebels. I examine how the novel reworks Anglo-Indian panic to analyze its schizophrenic nature—consuming chapatis in India while upholding British racial politics of purity and contamination. This bifurcation is conjured in the very term “Anglo-Indian”: always imbricated in the simultaneous and contradictory impulses to assimilate while maintaining difference.

This article investigates two collaborative (and little-known) novels published in the early 1890s periodical The Gentlewoman. The collaborations turn on, and center, a heroine whose reputation, choices, and actions stand as the locus of investigation; the business of interpreting a woman's character brings multiple writers, from many walks of life, together in a shared enterprise shaped by ongoing disagreement, for how to interpret the heroine evolves week by week. The two texts disrupt not only their own reading of their heroine but stage, through their very form, that any fixed, stable, or unitary reading of womanhood is impossible.

This essay examines an important subgenre of the Victorian ghost story: narratives of phantom vehicles. Wilkie Collins's “The Last Stage Coachman” (1843), Charles Dickens's “The Story of the Bagman's Uncle” (1837), and Amelia Edwards's “The Phantom Coach” (1864), among others, feature vehicles from the past that return to haunt the living. I argue that that by using ghosts to express nostalgia for more human(e) modes of transportation, Victorian writers explore what it means to feel profound attachments to material things that are no longer accessible. The longing for lost objects results in a grotesque materiality that blurs the line between persons and objects. This is an unusual strain of commodity fetishism, an objectification of persons and animation of things provoked by a desire for a time in which these categories were distinct. In the first two sections, I focus on mid-Victorian writings that explore the process through which transportation nostalgia triggers uncanny exchanges of the human and the thing, thus exposing nostalgia itself as a dehumanizing and even violent process. In the final part, I discuss Rudyard Kipling's “The Phantom Rickshaw” (1885) as a narrative that revives this spectral tradition within the context of imperial nostalgia and racial labor.

This essay examines the literary career of Anglo-Irish peer Lewis Strange Wingfield (1842-1891) in relation to the rise of investigative journalism and Victorian debates over the treatment of mental illness. Situating his work in the context of the first covert investigations into asylums in Britain and the United States, it focuses on Wingfield's use of disguise to infiltrate a private London asylum for the purpose of researching his novel Gehenna; or, Havens of Unrest (1882). Wingfield's pioneering experiment in undercover authorship, we argue, sheds new light on investigative journalism's impact on both the form and thematics of the nineteenth-century realist novel.

Simon Reader's Notework: Victorian Literature and Nonlinear Style, as I discuss below, pushes us to rethink how we understand notes in the nineteenth century and in our own. I will begin with the contemporary implications of Reader's argument by pairing it with Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan's The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study. Both books foreground aspects of the research and writing life that have always supported the publish-or-perish research agenda and yet have seemed instrumental or ephemeral.