The nineteenth century was an era of enormous changes in garden design and garden practice. A wealth of new and exotic plants, located and shipped back by adventurous plant hunters from southern Europe and other, warmer continents, changed the look and character of the garden beyond recognition. The repeal of the glass tax and advances in iron and glass production initiated the craze of the glass house. “Bedding out” consequently became popular, a system in which delicate plants grown under glass could be planted straight outside in warmer months, producing instant colour and ending the frustrating months of bare beds during which gardeners waited for native perennials to bloom. And there were many other important technological advances to ease the lot of the Victorian gardener, such as the patenting of the first lawn mower in 1830 and improvements in tool design. Moreover, with huge advances in printing press technology and distribution, a slew of gardening magazines and gardening manuals sprang up to educate and aid the amateur gardener. The rise of the middle class, housed in suburban terraces and villas with small gardens front and back, produced a ready market for such texts.

In THE WAY WE LIVE NOW (1875), the Melmottes’ origins remain a mystery that becomes increasingly irrelevant. Few of Augustus Melmotte's business partners venture to inquire too closely into the specious public faith in his financial integrity even as they prepare to extract the promising output of his highly speculative enterprises. On the contrary, a suspicion that their seemingly stable investments are as unsafe as they are spurious, that they bear the marks of risky speculation, accompanies the rise of the commercial Melmotte Empire from its beginnings. Close inquiry is not so much guarded against as shirked by those who wish to believe in it. When aristocratic would-be investors scramble for a seat on the boards of this “New Man,” they are therefore guilty not simply of nourishing a fraudulent financier whose history as a swindler they are well aware of, for Melmotte's connections to continental scams are notorious. Rather, they are building on ambivalent attitudes to the seemingly successful speculator. Just as the instability associated with speculation is conveniently embodied by an international man of mystery in the worst sense, it can also be exorcised just as easily by his self-destruction.

In his 1867 review of two recent historical novels, Henry James worried that, barring “a second Walter Scott,” no modern mind could synthesize the increasingly scientific discipline of history and the imagination of fiction. “[S]tory-tellers are, for the most part, an illogical, loose-thinking, ill-informed race” (280), James teased, while the new historian – he refers to “writers of a purely scientific turn of mind” such as “Niebuhr and Mommsen, Gizot and Buckle” (278) – “works in the dark, with a contracted forehead and downcast eyes, on his hands and knees, as men work in coal-mines” (279). James's anxious jocularity does little to disguise his interest in (and intimidation before) the ascetic historian, particularly that new professional's willingness to “say sternly to his fancy: So far thou shalt go, and no further.” Why, James subsequently wondered, should the novelist “not [also] imprison his imagination, for the time, in a circle of incidents from which there is no arbitrary issue, and apply his ingenuity to the study of a problem to which there is but a single solution” (279)?

In the penultimate book ofDaniel Deronda, Gwendolen Harleth appears in a state of physical and mental shock after the drowning of her detested husband. Exposed to an increasingly popularized discourse of trauma, today's readers would have little trouble in identifying and labeling Gwendolen as a traumatized subject, suffering from a variety of typical symptoms in the aftermath of her terrible experience. She is fixated on the “dead face” of Grandcourt in the water, hallucinating it everywhere. Later, she complains that she “can't sleep much” and that “[t]hings repeat themselves in me so. They come back – they will all come back” (659; ch. 65). Disoriented in the present, she seems to return repeatedly to the past, the line between her interior world and the external world growing increasingly tenuous: “She unconsciously left intervals in her retrospect, not clearly distinguishing between what she said, and what she had only an inward vision of” (594; ch. 56). In her conversation with Daniel Deronda, she is described as being silent for a moment or two, “as if her memory had lost itself in a web where each mesh drew all the rest” (592; ch. 56). Deronda wonders whether she “was she seeing the whole event – her own acts included – through an exaggerating medium of excitement and horror.” (591; ch. 56).

On 19 June 1900, during the heyday of the British seaside resort, a new gentleman's lavatory opened on one of the Firth of Clyde's most famous piers. The Isle of Bute was a popular destination for Scottish Victorians, who would make the short journey from Glasgow by paddle steamer for a day of shopping or a weekend holiday. Despite its small size and close proximity to major cities, Rothesay, the island's only town, supported a large number of shops year round and hosted regular fairs during the summer. Travelers were also lured to the island by its diverse topography and by Rothesay Castle, which dates from 1230 and eventually devolved to the Stuarts. The island's moderate west-coast climate attracted a considerable number of visitors throughout the year (Figure 1).

By the mid-nineteenth century, British women had ample motivation for imagining forms of charity that did not require money. Property laws continued to deprive most married women of personal wealth and new statistics revealed a “surplus” of unmarried middle-class women lacking employment. Elizabeth Gaskell addressed these financial challenges by envisioning alternative forms of economic power for women. Her novella Cranford (1851–53) depicts a community of shabby-genteel women who support each other, in the virtual absence of men, through gift practices. Using principles of sympathetic and economic conservation, Cranford's system of exchange reworks material limitations, turning these women's lack of private property to their advantage. Cranford is among a number of mid-century works that treat sympathetic exchange in a sustained manner and on an expanded scale, writing women's charity in terms of sympathy and sisterhood rather than coin. By doing so, it not only co-opts the traditional province of the upper class by pitting middle-class women's care-giving against unfeeling wealth, but also defines a sympathetic gift economy in opposition to the masculinized marketplace essential to such models of charity as that of Dickens's turkey-buying Scrooge.

The Victorian fascination with the influence of technology on human vision led to a proliferation of replications of its effects in all manner of media, including novel writing. Like the kaleidoscope that holds the viewer in thrall, M. E. Braddon's sensation novel Eleanor's Victory, as this reviewer describes, holds a certain “power” over the reader that forces her to listen to, if not accept, the arguments Braddon posits in her work. “Power” is at issue in other ways in Braddon's work as her heroines continually seek ways of developing agency by shaping sexual identities that press the limits of the norm of the bourgeois family unit. What is also significant here is the appropriateness of the kaleidoscope as a metaphor for Braddon's writing, a metaphor she used personally in describing her work in an unpublished letter: “I will give the kaleidoscope another turn, and will do my best with the old bits of glass and pins and rubbish” (letter to Edmund Yates, qtd. in Maxwell 150). The kaleidoscope fractures the vision of a single object or scene into a multitude of different but interrelated forms of the same. One of the prominent issues Braddon repeatedly addresses in her work is the construction of multiple forms of sexuality. The fracturing or multiplying effect of the kaleidoscope resembles the isolation and reduction of different forms of sexuality as described by Foucault in The History of Sexuality.

Mr. Brooke himself has already been described by the narrator as having a “neutral physiognomy,” and that neutrality itself identified as one of few “striking points in his appearance” (503). Part of the effigy's menace, clearly, is its uncanny similarity to the original. As described, however, the effigy is unlikely to be a piece of skilled imitative craftsmanship; indeed, it is the very shoddiness of the thing that makes it eerie. Unlike the banality and apparent harmlessness of this vaguely empty caricature, a rag-doll in waistcoat and monocle, the “parrot-like, Punch-voiced echo of [Mr. Brooke's] words” threatens because it offers no legible meaning, instead forcing interpretive agency onto the reader. Indeed, the “neutral physiognomy” must foreground interpretive agency, otherwise it would be impossible for a non-trait such as neutrality, either in Brooke or in his effigy, to be a “striking point” at all.

With the growth of the organized feminist movement in England at the end of the 1850s, women began to mount public lecture platforms in increasing numbers. By claiming a space in public assembly rooms through the simple use of their voices, women reformers such as Bessie Rayner Parkes and Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon challenged the male privilege of public address, and changed the visual, oral, and aural culture of Victorian reform movements. Women's public speech in the 1850s and 60s was never linked with the kind of riotous responses provoked later by Josephine Butler or the women's suffrage movement. But even public speakers associated with a more moderate or “polite” tone, such as Parkes and Frances Power Cobbe, routinely received a mixture of moral censure and ridicule, causing them to question the value of publicity – both print and platform – for the feminist cause. However, one of the most prolific female public speakers of mid nineteenth-century England, Mary Carpenter (1807–77), seems to have escaped all such criticism and was repeatedly held up as a shining example, by both feminists and non-feminists, of appropriate womanly behavior in official public settings. Commentators on Carpenter's work and her public reputation were nearly unanimous in their approval of not only the content of her public speech but also its flawless delivery. What can Carpenter's apparently unique public persona tell us about shifts in the gendered dimensions of public utterance in the 1850s and 60s, when she was most active? More broadly, what does the history of women's platform speech have to do with a seemingly unrelated narrative: that is, the theorization of juvenile delinquency as a specific problem in nineteenth-century England?

Margaret Oliphant's work has of late received renewed attention for her portrayal of heroines who struggle against the confines of proper middle-class femininity – who are at once sympathetic and yet do not fit the model of the submissive Victorian domestic angel – and Miss Marjoribanks (1866) is no exception. Without fully discounting the Victorian notion that there is a proper place women ought to occupy, Miss Marjoribanks raises complex questions about how that place is defined and limited. Recent scholarly attention to the novel highlights Oliphant's sustained engagement with the issue of how far propriety and custom circumscribe a woman's place. Such examinations, however, fail to address the extent to which Oliphant demonstrates the flexibility of cultural notions of a woman's place by focusing the action of Miss Marjoribanks almost entirely on the heroine's creation of a very specific physical place for herself – her drawing-room. Examining Miss Marjoribanks's portrayal of how a Victorian woman might capitalize on the centrality of the drawing-room in shaping cultural notions of feminine identity, this essay argues that once Lucilla Marjoribanks has established the drawing-room as a physical and ideological space that will contain her actions, she uses this space and all it represents to expand the boundaries of her cultural place. By focusing specifically on the work its heroine undertakes within her drawing-room and by asserting that a woman's power lies in the possibility for feminine taste to accomplish action, Oliphant's novel, like her heroine, operates within the “prejudices of society” while simultaneously offering a means to exploit those prejudices. This architecturally-motivated re-reading of Oliphant's novel in turn suggests a re-reading of Oliphant's own career. For I would argue that novels operated for Oliphant the way that drawing-rooms do for Lucilla: they provided a culturally-sanctioned place in which to locate herself, and thereby reaffirm her respectable feminine position, even while she undertook projects that challenged Victorian assumptions about gendered identity.

One of the most inveterate and gifted liars in Victorian fiction, Lizzie Eustace, the heroine of Anthony Trollope's 1873 novel The Eustace Diamonds, is also one of the most enigmatic. Driven both by her social ambition and by her desire to retain the Eustace family diamonds – a necklace given to her by her late husband but claimed by his relatives as an heirloom – Lizzie depends on deceit to achieve her ends throughout the novel. Yet, her reliance on mendacity becomes perplexingly excessive, confusing not only her sycophantic companion, Julia Macnulty, but most of the story's other characters as well.

Cecil Rhodes, the “Colossus” of late Victorian empire, proudly proclaimed himself a barbarian. He spoke of his taste for things “big and simple, barbaric, if you like,” and boasted that he conducted himself “on the basis of a barbarian” (Millin 165, 242). His famous scholarships designed to turn out men fit for imperial mastery required success in “manly outdoor sports,” a criterion Rhodes privately called the proof of “brutality” (Stead 39). Yet while Rhodes celebrated qualities he called barbaric or brutal, his adversaries seized upon the same rhetoric to revile him. During the Boer War, for instance, the tactics by which Rhodes and his friends tightened their grip on South Africa were boldly condemned by Henry Campbell-Bannerman as “methods of barbarism.” Similarly, G. K. Chesterton denounced Rhodes as nothing more than a “Sultan” who conquered the “East” only to reinforce the backward “Oriental” values of fatalism and despotism (242–44). This strange consensus, in which Rhodes and his critics could agree about his barbarity, reflects a significant uncertainty about late Victorian imperial ambitions and their relationship to “barbarism.” Clearly, the term was available both to the empire's critics as a metaphor for unprincipled or indiscriminate violence and to imperialists as a justification for their efforts to bring civilization to the Earth's dark places, to spread the gospel, and to enforce the progress of history that the anthropologist E. B. Tylor called “the onward movement from barbarism” (29). But Rhodes's cheerful assertion of his own barbarity represents something altogether different: the apparent paradox of an imperialism that openly embraces the primitive. Nor was Rhodes alone in sounding this particularly troubling version of the barbaric yawp. During the period of the New Imperialism (1871–1914), Victorian popular culture became engrossed as never before in charting vectors of convergence between the British and those they regarded as primitive, and in imagining the ways in which barbarians might make the best imperialists of all. This transvaluation of savagery found its most striking expression in the emergence of a wildly popular genre of fiction: stories of lost worlds.

The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved was first published in serial instalments (from 1 October to 17 December1892) with illustrations by Water Paget; see Figure 6) in the Illustrated London News and were published simultaneously with the same title in the American magazine Harper's Bazar. It then appeared in book form, with substantial revisions, as The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament in 1897, and was, in fact, the last of Hardy's novels to appear (Jude the Obscure being published in 1895).

The Turn of the Screw was published in five authorized forms during Henry James's life: as a serial in Collier's Weekly early in 1898, as one of two tales in a “duplex” edition published simultaneously in America and England in October 1898, as the second of four works in a volume of the New York Edition in 1908, and as the first volume of The Uniform Tales of Henry James, edited by Martin Secker in 1915. The first version, in addition to the frame narrative and twenty-four chapters, was divided into twelve installments and five “Parts.” The version published in the duplex edition under the title The Two Magics was altered to suppress these “Parts,” delete the ending of one chapter, raise Flora's age, and place “more focus. . . on the governess,” among other minor alterations (James, The Turn of the Screw 87). The New York Edition underwent even more substantial alterations.

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

“‘Modern Life’ – with a Vengeance”: William Powell Frith at the Guildhall Art Gallery

TIMOTHY BARRINGER

Birth of the Bestseller

HERBERT SUSSMAN

Since our categories of thought produce what they claim to categorize, how are we conceptualizing Victorian Poetry today and what is the Victorian poetry we are producing? The two journal volumes and online essays under review, Victorian Poetry Spring 2004 (42.1) and Winter 2003 (41.4) and Literary Compass: Victorian online 2003–2004, feature discussions about the field's identity and new directions, while appraising where it has been. It is useful to see how recent books by Constance Hassett, Amy Billone, Ana Parejo Vadillo, Helen Groth, E. Warwick Slinn, and David Riede might be located in this larger moving picture.