Seeking to prepare her friend Lucretia Tox for the revelation of Mr Dombey's engagement, Louisa Chick, Dombey's sister, turns to the natural world to illustrate the inevitability of change:

Of all Dickens's eccentric children – whose numbers include the Artful Dodger, Paul Dombey, Little Nell, and Smike – none, perhaps, is more peculiarly “old-fashioned” than Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend (1864-65). From her first appearance, Jenny exhibits a strange indeterminacy:

The first issue and number of the Nineteenth Century, 1877, included a searching article by J. Baldwin Brown entitled “Is the Pulpit Losing Its Power?” Looking back over the decades, Brown marked a generational decline in England's preaching, which he argued had now been eclipsed by a print market distributing “freest discussion of the most sacred truths.” Brown lamented that fewer talented men now joined the Anglican ministry, while the Church had increasingly withdrawn from the social mission which had animated mid-century preachers like Charles Kingsley (107–09). More troublingly, Brown speculated that modern Britons had become constitutionally averse to the homiletic situation. The preacher, he writes, often “seems as if he came down on the vast range of subjects which he is tempted to handle as from a superior height; and this is what the scientific mind can never endure. . . . [T]here has always been a sort of omniscient tone in the pulpit method of handling intellectual questions which stirs fierce rebellion in cultivated minds and hearts” (109–10). Brown pulls up short of blaming theology per se; for him its language of “above” and “beyond” has continuing relevance (110). Still, he broaches the possibility that by its very nature preaching risks antagonizing what current scholarship would term the “liberal subject”: one which prizes freedom of conscience, empirical exploration, and debate.

Throughout her life, Christina Rossetti was an enthusiastic writer and player of word games in verse. When she was seventeen, for instance, she spent the summer of 1848 in Brighton playing bouts-rimés sonnets with her brother, William. Together they timed themselves to see how fast they could write lines of verse to a given set of end rhymes: “emotional devastation in ten minutes or less,” Anne Jamison wittily puts it (145). Two years later, Rossetti published under her initials instances of different word games – an enigma (“Name any gentleman you spy”) and a charade (“My first is no proof of my second”) – as part of a series of riddling word games in verse by various authors in the Marshall's Ladies Daily Remembrancer: For 1850. They count among Rossetti's first poetic publications. These popular riddling genres, while perhaps less familiar to readers today, were immediately recognizable to Rossetti's contemporaries. In his 1872 riddle anthology, Guess Me, F. D. Planché defines an “Enigma” as a riddle in verse, or “the most ancient form of Riddle . . . often a real poem as well as a question for solution” (3). In the 1891 Cornhill Magazine, the article “Riddles” glosses a “charade” as a riddle that “turns upon the letters or syllables composing a word” (518). By publishing an enigma and a charade in Marshall's Ladies Daily Remembrancer, an inexpensive pocket book for women, Rossetti capitalized on the association of these genres as written by and for middle-class women, a point that I will argue in more detail later.

On September 3, 1841, George Eliot wrote in a letter to her friend Maria Lewis:

Behold an infinite of floating worlds
Divide the crystal waves of ether pure,
In endless voyage without port

Amid those sov'reign glories of the skies,
Of independent, native lustre, proud;
The souls of systems! and the lords of life,
Through their wide empires! (276)

This paper is a study of subject-object relations in British writings about the Indian Uprising of 1857. I focus in particular on accounts vocalizing panic over a colony of objects “baldly encountered” and “not quite apprehended” in the context of remembering and remediating traumatic memories of the Uprising (Brown 5). What follows is an exercise in object-oriented investigation, reading depictions of subject-object and object-subject encounters, analyzing matters-of-concern emerging from the events of 1857 (Latour, “Realpolitik” 14; also, Reassembling 70n80, 114–20).

George Eliot'sDaniel Deronda (1876), a novel that spurred Zionism in Palestine, opens with a scene of watching and thus moves from a male gaze on a woman's body to a project of envisioning a new nation in a distant land. The national drama of the novel turns on the ideological meaning of gazing at landscape, as Daniel Deronda replaces one political perspective with another. Indeed, Mordecai's political dream of a Jewish national future involves “Looking towards a land” (454; bk. 6, ch. 42): his nationalist vision transpires as a gaze upon a far-off place. Colonial ambition itself can be understood as an ideological view of landscape as open to possession, a gaze on the territory of others that insists often violently on itself, to the exclusion of other political perspectives. Motivated not by sex but by moral and political domination, this colonial gaze nationalizes viewership, and makes the landscape it imagines real. For Deronda himself, nationality itself is a kind of viewership. He wants to study abroad, because, he says, “I want to be an Englishman, but I want to understand other points of view” (155; bk. 2, ch. 16). Being an Englishman is a “point of view,” a perspective to claim, to the possible exclusion of other nationalized ways of seeing landscapes both domestic and distant.

Let's face it:Impressionsof Theophrastus Such can be a pretty dreary book. It's all too easy to put it down, especially if you happen to be in the middle of a particularly heavy-handed passage in “The Watch-Dog of Knowledge” or “Debasing the Moral Currency.” Some early readers felt that the real George Eliot had abandoned them in her final publication by ceasing to write fiction, while recent critics have gone to some lengths to show that the narrator, allegedly a minimally published bachelor named Theophrastus Such, is a self-reflexive fictional character whose failings and contradictions are the real subject of the book.1 Who is Theophrastus Such? What is his ethical, political, or scientific orientation? How does his character emerge during the course of the volume? These are questions that have occupied recent critical dialogue. In response, I find myself harboring some sympathy for George Saintsbury, who reviewed Impressions in the Academy of 28 June 1879:

“There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals” (137). This evolutionary claim is not attributable to Darwin, but to Oscar Wilde, who allows Gilbert to voice this bold assertion in “The True Function of Criticism.” While critics have long wrestled with the ethical stance and coherence of Wilde's writings, they have overlooked a significant influence on his work: debates concerning the evolution of morality that animated the periodicals in which he was writing. Wilde was fascinated by the proposition that complex human behaviours, including moral and aesthetic responses, might be traced back to evolutionary impulses. Significantly, he also wrote for a readership already engaged with these controversies.

Since its introduction at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1891, Luke Fildes's painting The Doctor has earned that often hyperbolic adjective “iconic.” Immediately hailed as “the picture of the year” (“The Royal Academy,” “The Doctor,” “Fine Arts”), it soon toured the nation as part of a travelling exhibition, in which it “attracted most attention” (“Liverpool Autumn Exhibition”) and so affected spectators that one was even struck dead on the spot (“Sudden Death”). Over the following decades it spawned a school of imitations, supposed companion pictures, poems, parodies, tableaux vivants, an early Edison film, and a mass-produced engraving that graced middle-class homes and doctors' offices in Britain and abroad for generations to come and was reputedly the highest-grossing issue ever for the prominent printmaking firm of Agnew & Sons (Dakers 265–66). When Fildes died in 1927 after a career spanning seven decades and marked by many commercial successes and even several royal portraits, his Times obituary nonetheless bore “The Doctor” as its sub-headline (“Sir Luke Fildes”) and sparked a lively discussion of the painting in the letters column for several issues thereafter (“Points From Letters” 2, 4, 5 Mar. 1927). Although the animus against things Victorian in the early twentieth century shadowed The Doctor it never eclipsed it; by the middle of the century the painting was still being held up as the quasi-Platonic ideal of medical practice (“Bedside Manner,” “98.4”), gracing postage stamps, and serving ironically as the logo for both a celebration of Britain's National Health Service and a campaign against its equivalent in the United States. Appreciation of the painting in mid-century art historical circles was echoed in the popular press (“Victorian Art”), and The Doctor was singled out as a highlight of the reorganized Tate Gallery in 1957 (“Tate Gallery”), after which it settled into a sort of dowager status as a cornerstone of that eminent collection, where it is still in the regular rotation for public display. Since the mid-1990s it has been a recurring focus of discussion in both Medical Humanities journals and prominent medical professional organs such as the Lancet and the British Medical Journal, where a steady stream of articles still cite it as a sort of prelapsarian benchmark for the role and demeanor of the ideal medical practitioner.

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) has long suffered accusations of insincerity and expediency, especially with regard to his religious position. The mercurial novelist and prime minister famously evaded reference to his theological opinions. His official biographers, W.F. Moneypenny and G.E. Buckle, claimed that an “absolute reticence as to his personal religion was one of [Disraeli's] marked characteristics” (qtd. in Vincent 38). In June of 1832 – early in Disraeli's literary career – a critic in the Monthly Review even charged him with outright irreligion. The subject of the column was Disraeli's new novel Contarini Fleming (1832), which called itself a “psychological romance.” Speaking to the protagonist's various experiments with the hedonism of poetic expression, devout Roman Catholicism, and political pragmatism throughout the novel, the reviewer asked, “What are we to understand by the exemption from ‘sectarian prejudices’? The absence of religion. What is meant by the [artist's] ‘flowing spirit of creation’? Simply that there is no God” (qtd. in Letters 1: 284). Days after the review was published, Disraeli wrote to his sister, Sarah, “I suppose you have read the Review in the Monthly [-] where I am accused of Atheism, because I retire in Solitude to write novels” (Letters 1: 284).

“Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan,” noticed Richard Hofstadter in his famous essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (21). This observation, made in the 1960s, draws upon centuries-old tradition of casting Catholics in the role of sexual perverts, not only in American politics but also in British politics and culture. Through the study of anti-Catholic Victorian writing we can analyse the particular crux embodied in Hofstadter's pithy remark: a mixture of moral superiority combined with prurient enjoyment of the described practices it purports to condemn. This part of my study is dedicated to the Victorian novel and its depictions of Catholic sexuality, which, as the novelists often suggested, was either stifled and warped or rampant, but either way it transgressed the boundaries delineated by the Protestant family ideal. It also discusses Victorian gender roles and the ways in which Catholicism was allegedly undermining them.

There is, perhaps, no richer archive of Victorian reading experiences than Victorian literature itself. We know how Maggie Tulliver, child of the rural Midlands in the early years of the nineteenth century, felt when reading the Imitation of Christ in the bleak aftermath of her father's bankruptcy, how the young David Copperfield felt sitting on his bed in Suffolk, “reading as if for life” in the shadow of an abusive home life (56; ch. iv), and how a besieged Jane Eyre felt reading Bewick's History of British Birds in the window-seat at Gateshead; we know because Eliot, Dickens, and Brontë trace those feelings and their significance in vivid detail. We know more: Maggie's book, is a “little, old, clumsy book. . .the corners turned down in many places” with “certain passages” marked in “strong pen and ink,” one of a job lot brought to her by Bob, the packman (301; bk. 4, ch. 3). We know that the novels available to David from the small collection on his father's shelf were largely picaresque tales from a hundred years earlier, Gil Blas, Humphrey Clinker, and Roderick Random; and that Jane was reading the second volume of Bewick's Birds with its evocative vignettes in the introductory pages, an edition whose letter-press the ten-year-old Jane “cared little for” (14; vol. 1, ch. 1).