The Victorian age has long been considered a time of disenchantment. Beginning with Max Weber's seminal “Science as a Vocation,” secularization theory has argued that belief within modernity is marked by “rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’” (155). In this account, modernization makes the “enchanted” world fall apart, changing it from a realm of “mysterious incalculable forces” into an empty space governed by nothing more than “technical means and calculations” (139). Religion, this narrative claims, inevitably fades away. It may attempt to survive disenchantment by downplaying its supernatural roots, but this rationalized religion nevertheless gives way to secularism. And although recent scholarship has challenged the assertion that the Victorian age simply marked the decline of faith, the disenchantment narrative remains a powerful one; even critics who dispute aspects of the theory acknowledge its force. Colin Jager's The Book of God, for instance, describes Weber's narrative of disenchantment as “a powerful account of the way in which science gradually demystifies the universe” (18), and George Levine's Darwin Loves You concedes that Weber's work, whatever its flaws, survives because it was “fashioned so powerfully and convincingly” (xiv).

In spite of the supernatural trappings of Charles Dickens's most famous work, A Christmas Carol, critics from G. K. Chesterton to Edmund Wilson have found its equally famous protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge, to be a real character, more fleshed-out and compelling than many of the characters of Dickens's longer, presumably more “serious” novels. Much of the reaction to A Christmas Carol and its protean anti-hero can be summarized by Stephen Prickett's succinct appraisal in his seminal study, Victorian Fantasy: “The strength of A Christmas Carol lies quite simply in its psychological credibility” (54). Scrooge is a character we can believe in, a character that, as Margaret Atwood suggests, “remains fresh and vital. ‘Scrooge Lives!’ we might write on our T-shirts” (xiii).

In her landmark study, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, Elizabeth Prettejohn identifies “the burgeoning Victorian interest in the sciences” as one of Pre-Raphaelite art's “most important contemporary contexts” (251). Many critics have seen the at times remorseless detail of early Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry as analogous to science. As Tim Barringer puts it, “The attention which hard-edged Pre-Raphaelite naturalism of the 1850s paid to observing the individual object encapsulates [science's] questioning, empirical spirit” (16). A major exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite landscape painting in London, Berlin, and Madrid in 2004 to 2005 paid close attention to geology, meteorology, and natural history (Staley et al.). There have been a growing number of studies of specific aspects of the relationship between Pre-Raphaelitism and science, with individual chapters or articles published on Pre-Raphaelitism and phrenology (Grilli), physiognomy (Hartley 80–109) and ethnography (Pointon), and on specific painters, including John Everett Millais (Codell) and John Brett (Payne 104–23). Through this work, recent critics have begun to rediscover the relationship between Pre-Raphaelitism and science which Victorian critics favourable to the movement saw as fundamental to it (see also Rosenfeld). Writing in the Fortnightly Review in 1867, Sidney Colvin remarked that “the scientific spirit, coupled with the disgust of earnest men at academic pretensions and their reaction from academic principles, constituted the very essence of præ-Raphaelitism” (470–71).

“The judge, the jury, the avenger of blood, the prisoner, the witnesses – all were gathered together within one building” (306; ch. 32): at the melodramatic acme of Elizabeth Gaskell's 1848 Mary Barton, the reader's energies have similarly converged upon Jem Wilson's trial for the murder of Harry Carson. Yet despite the narrative significance of the courtroom testimonies, once Jem has pled not guilty, the narrator unexpectedly mutes the prosecutor's opening speech and substitutes instead what seems to be a lowbrow debate about the defendant's physical appearance. The first speaker insists that any justly accused man will have “some expression of [his] crimes” in his face, and observing Jem's “low, resolute brow” and “white compressed lips,” he comments that he has “seldom seen one with such marks of Cain on his countenance as the man at the bar” (309; ch. 32). The second observer disagrees, asserting that Jem's forehead is not so low as it might initially seem and is in fact rather square, “which some people say is a good sign” (309; ch. 32). He asserts that he is “no physiognomist” and proposes instead that Jem's agitated and depressed visage is less the sign of a depraved character than the result of inner turmoil and a bad haircut.

Animal autobiography – a first-person fictional narrative in which an animal tells its own story – emerged in the late eighteenth century as the first attempt to represent animal minds in extended narrative form. Authors of this genre were anxious to create accurate, believable animal characters, even as they afforded them human language and a habit of critical commentary. To do this, they wrote in sync with scientific understandings of animals as set out in books of natural history. A few authors are explicit about their debt to natural history, and their comments point to a broad but intended compatibility between the ideas of animal minds in animal autobiography and those in the popularized scientific discourse of the day.

Ellen Wood's East Lynne (1861) exhibits the exhilarating characteristics of a Victorian sensation novel and then some: degenerate aristocracy, a sneering villain, flight, adultery, a child born out of wedlock, disfigurement, disguise, extended deathbed scenes, murder, and more (e.g., fake accents, false identities, an electrifying homicide trial, and a spectacular train wreck). But at the center of all the disaster, transgression, pathos, coincidence, and extremity, East Lynne is (mainly) the story of the aptly-named Isabel Vane, the beloved but patently bored wife who abandons her husband and children to run away with a handsome seducer. Overcome by remorse (and conveniently both disfigured and presumed dead), she returns to the home of her remarried husband to act as governess to her own children and to witness (at length and in painful detail) the life she might have had if she had denied her perpetually irrepressible but inappropriate feelings — feelings not so much of lust for another man, but of annoyance and tedium with the man she actually has. East Lynne urges (usually in the form of multiple diatribes from the third person narrator) that the wives and mothers of mid-Victorian England be content with their lot, employing a moral didacticism that insists on female domestic responsibility — and the attendant obligation of female suffering — with sadistic pleasure. And yet, when not lingering over the agonies of Isabel, the narrative gushes, seemingly despite itself, with sympathy for the heroine's life of monotony and misery. Indeed, East Lynne's compelling power comes in large part from the novel's skillful, lingering walk on a ledge of its own making and its protracted vacillation between condemnation and empathy for an unhappy heroine gone astray.

Although subtitled “A Domestic Story,” Wilkie Collins's Poor Miss Finch (1872) offers a sensational plot bursting with secrets and mistaken identities. Many of the novel's plot twists and turns center on the transformation of the hero, Oscar Dubourg, from a wealthy white Englishman into a dark blue “Other” when he is treated with nitrate of silver after a serious head injury. While Oscar's medication cures him of his seizures, it also causes agryria, a skin discoloration, which turns him permanently dark blue. The hero's experience of this traumatic side effect is exacerbated by the reaction of his blind fiancée Lucilla, the title's “Poor Miss Finch.” In the novel, Lucilla's blindness leads her to distort visual concepts such as light and color in her imagination, resulting in her desperate fear of dark colors. The novel's central conflict arises when Oscar engages the help of Lucilla's companion Madame Pratolungo in hiding his new dark skin color from the blind heroine. Complicating this situation further is the arrival of Oscar's identical (but still white) twin Nugent, who deviously schemes to elope with the beautiful Lucilla by impersonating his brother.

In the first half of the twentieth century, analytic bibliographers in Britain turned their attention to the systematic study of the nineteenth-century book. Developing their subject, they felt compelled to distance themselves from the Victorian book collector, who touched off a “suspicion . . . deeply ingrained in the mind of scholars and librarians” (Sadleir, “Development” 147). A new generation of bibliographers – Michael Sadleir, John Carter, and Graham Pollard – acknowledged that Victorian collecting had laid the foundations for the bibliographic study of books by “modern” (i.e., nineteenth-century) writers, as opposed to incunabula, the traditional focus of British book collecting. The contribution was regarded as fundamentally flawed, however, owing to a “sentimental element” in Victorian collecting (Carter and Pollard 101).

Inspired by the power and influence that Charles Darwin attributed to heredity in On the Origin of Species (1859), Francis Galton developed a program of eugenics that he believed could shape Britain's progress as a nation by managing the evolutionary development of the British race. In Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (1883), Galton summarizes this aim as “to learn how far history may have shown the practicability of supplanting inefficient human stock by better strains, and to consider whether it might not be our duty to do so by such efforts as may be reasonable, thus exerting ourselves to further the ends of evolution more rapidly and with less distress than if events were left to their own course” (1–2). While this project, Galton's life's work, was largely a process of analysis and the development of dictates that could be put in place to shape the reproduction of the nation, it was also a project of imagination; not only was Galton himself imagining a different future for Britain, but in promoting his program, he appealed to the imaginations of his readers in an attempt to get them to share his vision.

Although she did not feature in W. T. Stead's influential 1894 essay “The Novel of the Modern Woman,” Ménie Muriel Dowie (1867–1945) was firmly established as one of the pre-eminent New Woman writers after the publication of Gallia in 1895. A controversial novel in which “the eugenic project is overt,” Gallia has been of some interest to scholars of the New Woman novel (Ledger 70). Despite this, Dowie remains one of the more obscure of the New Woman writers and her work beyond Gallia is seldom discussed. However, one hundred years after its first publication, Gallia was reprinted by Everyman in 1995. Helen Small's introduction to this edition also contains the fullest account of Dowie's life to date, in which the author is shown to be “every bit as defiant of convention as the heroine of her first novel” (xxvi). But, as Small points out in this introduction, it was her 1891 book A Girl in the Karpathians, a vivacious account of a summer of intrepid independent travel undertaken in 1890 when Dowie was twenty-two years old and unmarried, as opposed to Gallia that first established Dowie's considerable contemporary literary reputation. A Girl in the Karpathians enjoyed enthusiastic reviews and impressive sales. The Review of Reviews deemed it “[t]he most noticed, and in some respects most noticeable, book of the month” (“The New Books of the Month” 627). In the first year alone, the book went through five English, four American, and one German edition, and its author quickly became something of a literary celebrity (Small xxviii). According to John Sutherland, Dowie proudly claimed that the book received four hundred reviews, all unanimous in their praise (195).

The fictional setting of the “Shropshire” of A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad (1894) is well known. He himself admitted to hardly having visited the county before the publication of his cycle of poems and the topography of the county in verse and actuality are often two different things. For instance, Hughley, whose steeple in the poems is a “far-known sign,” as Housman's brother Laurence discovered on a post-publication visit, is located in a valley and the remarkable spire turns out to be squat rather than soaring (Burnett, Letters 1: 90). The particular form of unreality that will be the subject of this paper is not, however, the physical backdrop of Housman's poems, imaginary or otherwise. Rather I would like to focus on the way in which the imaginative universe of Housman is populated by figures who challenge our assumptions about the boundary between the realms of the living and the dead. We might say that I will be concerned not with the epistemology of Housman's Shropshire but with its ontology, or perhaps, to use a term of Derrida's, with its “hauntology” (Specters 10, 51, 161). Indeed, my suggestion will be that far from being an untrue or fictional world, the phantasmal figures of Housman's Shropshire articulate that reality that is named, in the late work of Jacques Derrida, as the spectral. My essay will elaborate the question of the spectral as an interplay between the poems of Housman and the philosophical meditations of Derrida.

The most striking thing about reviewing the field of Victorian ecocriticism is that there is so little of it. This relative absence is all the more perplexing given that ecocritical work on Romanticism and nineteenth-century American literature is so profuse. Thoreau and Wordsworth remain the most-discussed authors in a field that was in many respects inaugurated by Jonathan Bate's Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991) and Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture (1995). Romanticism remains the point of departure for some of the most influential studies in the field, including those like Timothy Morton's Ecology Without Nature (2009) that challenge many of its core precepts. Meanwhile, ecocriticism has expanded to include many other periods and regions, with collections ranging from The Ecocritical Shakespeare (2011) to Postcolonial Ecologies (2011), and unsurprisingly, a strong turn toward the contemporary.

In 2001 Laurel Brake wrote an article entitled “On Print Culture: The State We're In.” Now, almost fifteen years later, where does the term “print culture” stand in relation to Victorian studies? Brake was both brave and wise in her speculations. She knew very well that terminology – and fields and theories – have lives of their own and yet that sometimes someone has to step forward and try on certain names for size, make a pitch for style and fit and function. Brake took that risk in her endorsement of print culture. This essay considers the ways in which print culture has resonated in the intervening years by reviewing both books that have engaged productively with the term and books that have not used the term and yet are working under its umbrella.