This article explores the representation of British sailortown and merchant sailors onshore in the context of their representation in Victorian writing and contemporary journalism. It proposes that sailortown functioned as an urban setting which offered the traveling or returning sailor an important sense of homeliness—a homeliness that was paradoxically based on the promotion of a collective and worldly belonging. This sense of “worldliness” was articulated through aspects of ornamental material culture ranging from sailortown's visual display of nautical and transnational symbols, to the interior arrangements of places of hospitality such as Sailors’ Homes, to sailors’ own forms of portable property. By thinking more closely about the relationship between the domestic and the global in the context of maritime culture, the article proposes that the ornamental features of the seafarer's life, in all its diverse manifestations, serves to reveal the paradoxes and rich ambivalences that underscore the situation of the nineteenth-century sailor onshore.

In 1881 two women who were to become part of the history of Victorian feminism met: Constance Maynard (1849–1935), graduate of one of the first cohorts of women to enter Girton College and founder in 1882 of Westfield College for Women, and Bessie Rayner Parkes Belloc (1829–1925), friend of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the “Langham Place” group of feminists, and former editor of the feminist English Women's Journal. In 1873 Maynard became the first woman in England to receive a degree in “moral sciences,” from Girton, and subsequently worked for six years as a headmistress and schoolmistress at two groundbreaking girls' schools, Cheltenham Ladies' College and the new St. Leonard's School in Scotland. When she met Belloc, she was living in London with her brother, taking art classes at the Slade School, and beginning discussions that would lead to the foundation of Westfield College, formed as an explicitly Evangelical-identified parallel to ecumenical Girton and also as the first college to prepare women for the examinations and degrees offered by the University of London.

This essay uses Elizabeth Gaskell's industrial novels Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1955) to chart an intersection between biopolitics, food studies, and questions of novelistic form. First, the essay develops the argument that with the emergence of population as a key cultural concern, the Victorian novel became a biopolitical form structured by an interplay between the marriage plot and what I call the “food plot.” Following Thomas Malthus's uneasy connections between reproduction and the food supply, the nineteenth-century British novel was animated by a biopolitical tension between sexuality and appetite that took the shape of an uneven relationship between the dominant marriage plot and the subordinate food plot. However, the essay goes on to argue that Gaskell's industrial fiction reworks this dynamic to expose its limits and elisions. Through its commitment to representing working-class hunger, Gaskell's industrial fiction reshapes the relationship between the food plot and the marriage plot, giving appetite a central place in Victorian narrative but also drawing attention to the problematic ways in which marriage plots push appetite to the margins. My main test case is Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton, which deploys in order to scrutinize and finally destabilize the novelistic framework that subordinates appetite to sexuality.

How does the category of the “animal” contribute to the Victorian novel? In the 1840s and 1850s, magazines offered endless short tales of “animal sagacity” that most commonly featured dogs, demonstrating the virtues of the species. An 1858 article in Household Words, “Old Dog Tray,” observes, “Alas! not a day will pass but we can descry human qualities in the brute, and brute qualities in the human being; and, alas again, how often we find a balance of love, fidelity, truth, generosity, on the side of the brute!” In the 1850s and 1860s, the analogies between human and animal behavior upon which these tales depended became a resource to the growing fields of comparative ethology and evolutionary theory—Frances Power Cobbe would suggest in 1877 that dogs had “reflex morality.” Meanwhile, novels from this period increasingly raised questions of the scientific, political, and aesthetic value of claims of resemblance among species. For Charles Dickens, whose work offered a capacious image of the London population, the question of who belongs in a family, a community, or a nation persistently turned to the status of animals. In his work, animal figures mark meditations on the conditions and limits of social inclusion.

Situating George Eliot within mid-Victorian debates over central versus local government, this article contests the widespread presupposition that Eliot rejected official politics in favor of cultural mediation. Specifically, I argue that in Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–72), Eliot seeks to kindle a desire for local political institutions and to promote, in J. S. Mill's words, “the capacities moral, intellectual, and active required for working” them. Using the representative protocols of the local press, Eliot portrays Middlemarch's public health institutions as both opaque and transparent. While the public health work of Tertius Lydgate is essential to the novel's bildung plots and the town's cholera response, it is only represented obliquely through narrative paralipsis. In contrast, Eliot stages local council debates theatrically in scenes whose typography mimics the local press's treatment of council meetings. Eliot then supplements these protocols with the realist novel's networked form, which compels readers to supply characterological depth to the elided labors of Lydgate and the dramatic representations of council meetings. In thus depicting local representative government, Eliot prompts a desire for local political institutions and trains her readers in the cognitive skills needed to participate within them.

H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) imagines the environmental consequences of two important Victorian horticultural trends: artificial selection and selective breeding. Victorian horticulturalists glorified these techniques as steps toward the subjugation of the natural environment. This horticultural narrative of environmental control seemingly reaches its apex in the novel's future world of 802,701: Wells's Time Traveller believes he has entered an environment perfectly engineered to suit human needs. While critical attention has typically focused on the novel's humans, I use its engagement with contemporary horticulture to describe a plant-centered plotline. Building on critical work that argues for the possibility of nonhuman narrative agency, I read the novel's plants as minor characters. I argue that Wells's novel pits its plant and human characters against one another in competing plotlines, in a narrative refraction of ecological competition. Earlier ecocritical analyses of Victorian works have pointed to the harmonious entanglement of humans with the nonhuman vegetal environment. I argue that ecological competition, as exemplified both in horticultural narratives’ descriptions of environmental subjugation and in Wells's competing plant and human plots, was also a significant source of inspiration for Victorian environmental depictions.

In February 2003 my close friend Jeff Hubbard died in a car accident, taking the curve of an icy metro Detroit highway exit ramp too fast late one weekend night. He was twenty years old and had been living at home with his parents since we graduated from high school, working odd jobs—a host at a Mexican restaurant, a temporary letter carrier for the USPS—and helping take care of his young nephew. I was in college in New York, and a friend called to give me the news. I knew that I needed to go home to Michigan for the funeral to believe that it had really happened.

Once asked his opinion on the appropriateness of irony to poetry, the poet Charles Olson reportedly answered, “I don't get the ‘iron’ in it.” There are few who have the ability to be as (delightfully) literal-minded as Olson in this quip, and then there's Elaine Freedgood: so literalist that she probably would get the iron in irony. Surely, if iron were to be found in figurative language, Freedgood would be the first to uncover it, track it to its sources, and tell us about its extraction, manufacture, and circuits of global exchange. Similarly, if we were to ask Freedgood to interpret Olson's meaning, she might first investigate the history of iron and steel production in the United States—discovering how the industry grew, peaked, and then sharply contracted during Olson's lifetime, with centers of production shifting from the Rust Belt to locations in Japan, the Soviet Union, and, later, China. She might also relate that steel was once the largest industry in Olson's hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts, and the American Steel & Wire Company its largest employer, until the company withered and finally shuttered in 1977, just a few years after Olson's death. Through such a literalist lens, we would surely begin to see how, having lived his entire life in a world of steel, Olson could neither fail to notice the iron in irony nor allow it to stand as an abstraction. Becoming alert to these extended contexts, we might begin to hear, underlying the deadpan, the way Olson recalls his audience to working-class realities while commenting on the manner in which figurative and poetic language can alternately mask or reveal—make palpable or render abstract—the material foundations of our lives, caught up as they are in structures and movements of global capital.

Even before I heard about this celebration of Elaine Freedgood's work and mentorship, I was already thinking about how I'd come to know her and about the numerous ways she has shaped my writing and my writing life. This reflection was prompted, inadvertently, by Elaine herself. A little while back, Elaine wrote me an email with the always-thoughtful subject line, “How are you, my friend?” Except, Elaine had forgotten the comma after “you,” so it read instead, “How are you my friend?” This message made me laugh, as did her subsequent response about leaving out that crucial comma. Elaine came to be an unusually generous mentor through the most usual of circumstances. I was first put in touch with her when she came to Berkeley to give a talk called “The Secret Life of Diegesis,” five years ago. I have a vivid memory of the emails we'd exchanged about booking flights and reserving hotel rooms and all that—usually these would be somewhat tedious issues to sort through, but Elaine's typically dry humor enlivened even the driest of topics. When asked if she wanted to “be a trooper” and take a red-eye over to the West Coast, she responded, “Thanks so much. I would be a trooper if necessary but of course would rather be a pathetic middle-aged person (i.e., myself).”

The allusion in my title, of course, is to Marion King Hubbert's theory of “peak oil,” that moment in history when petroleum production reaches maximum output and then begins to decline. But Peak Freedgood is not Time's fool. It is an ever-fixèd mark: a quality or an intensity rather than a quantity; a stretch of Elaine Freedgood's work in which she is most like herself—when Elaineness production reaches maximum output. Such passages can be encountered in every book and article she's ever published, but the one I'll start with appears in a 2010 New Literary History essay called “Fictional Settlements” focused on Catharine Parr Traill's Canadian Crusoes (1852).

I first met Elaine Freedgood seven years ago, when she sent an abstract to me after her friend and colleague, Toral Gajarawala, came across a call for papers I had posted for an MLA session on fictional worlds. Since then, I've been just one of many people who have received tremendous behind-the-scenes support from Elaine, and I want to take some time to reflect on this profound but largely invisible way in which she has contributed to the profession. At the same time that Elaine has forged lifelong friendships with her students, continuing to support them long after they have moved on to new institutions and new stages of life, she has also cultivated close relationships with countless PhD candidates, job-seekers, and junior faculty members who never had a chance to pass through her classroom. What makes these relationships so special is precisely their unofficial, noninstitutional nature—in much the same way that it can be so important and life-changing for teenagers to have a “cool” adult in their lives who is not one of their parents.

It is an honor to have the chance to discuss publicly Elaine Freedgood's work and its effects—“incalculably diffusive,” as they say in Middlemarch—in the world. George Eliot is an idealist and Elaine a materialist, which means that tracing Elaine's work and its work in the world, unlike that of the more pious and boring Dorothea Brooke, is possible. You can touch it. To do this labor of tracing will require thinking about Elaine's commitment to the category of the material, against the ideal and the idealized; it will also require thinking about the place that the conceptual or theoretical, but also the affective and communal, occupy for her, in relation to what Raymond Williams used to call concrete social processes. If Dorothea has a “finely tuned spirit,” with “many fine issues,” Elaine's allegiances push her away from finery, away too from “spirit.” Away, as she says in her reading of this very passage, from “mysterious, quietist, and … deeply sentimental form[s]” of consolation and toward “larger historical processes that cannot be domesticated.”

“Totality” offers itself for reading under the rubric of “defamiliarization” less on the basis of our overfamiliarity with it than on account of our already estranged relationship to it. Not only literary critics but also cultural theorists, art historians, and philosophers bid “totality” adieu in the 1990s through the influence of Jean-François Lyotard's forging of a causal link between thought under the sign of totality and action under the sign of totalitarianism, and his ensuing imperative, “Let us wage a war on totality.” The war is over and done with now that the eminently influential Bruno Latour has decried the intellectual and political fallout of “totality” on his way to explicitly resignifying Margaret Thatcher's dictum, “There is no such thing as society.” Yet in the process of conflating academic method and political action, the victors in this war have shrouded totality in confusion. It is the goal of this brief essay to address this confusion, to defamiliarize our defamiliarization. Victorianists in particular should take up the problematic anew, since totality has long been the lynchpin of modernist and postmodernist dismissals of Victorian literature as at once naïve and sinister, encyclopedic and imperialist, bloated, boring, and baggy. When Victorianists have tried to defend against these dismissals, they have generally emphasized that the fiction of the period is more fragmented, self-reflexive, and modernist than such charges admit—that, in short, the novel should not be associated with totality. But this cedes too much ground to bad definitions of totality. Another path to reclaim the aesthetic strengths and epistemic benefits of our period's literature would be to strike at the root, regrounding better definitions.

Practiced by both state and nonstate agents, biopower operates by recognizing certain bodies as life-worthy and cultivating them so that they thrive under capitalism, while consigning other bodies to death, deprivation, or extractable labor in the service of the life-worthy. French philosopher Michel Foucault famously coined the term in his historical analyses of modern Western power. He argued that biopower emerged in the eighteenth century in western Europe in conjunction with imperial wars of conquest. It joined forces with sovereignty, which relies on laws and the legitimate monopoly of physical force, and discipline, a newer mode of power, which shifted the traditional target of sovereign rule from a territory and its borders to a population conceived of as abstract individuals. Three recent books take us to the nineteenth century in England and the United States, a period when biopower expanded its reach, positing and exploiting biological divisions within and between national populations: Nathan K. Hensley's Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty, Nasser Mufti's Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture, and Kyla Schuller's The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century.