“TO RAISE A REAL SPECTRE of the antique is a craving of our own century” (104) writes “Vernon Lee” in her early collection of essays on aesthetics, Belcaro. The nineteenth century is indeed, as Julia Briggs has pointed out, an age which craves ghost stories of all kinds. Sceptical of the supernatural yet nostalgic for it (Briggs 19), the age turns to ghost stories to assuage its lost faith. Ghosts, if nothing else, might still glimmer in the empty spaces of a universe vacated by the gods but not yet filled with the space journeys of science and science fiction. Their questionable shapes thus continue to shape the questions of an age seeking reassurance, even if that reassurance comes in a spasm of terror. And terror, however subtly or ingeniously aroused, whether by the self-induced fantasies of James’s governess or the calculated self-hauntings of Stevenson’s Jekyll, remains the primary motivation and aim of the ghost story. Fear of the unknown, whether within or without, provides the last bastion of a supernaturalism under threat from the encroaching “materialism” (Briggs 24) of the modern world. The ghost story not only indulges the unstable, if sometimes deeply conventional order of fantasy at the expense of “naturalistic art” (Cavaliero 7); it also indulges the wish to believe in another, more fearful world, beyond the material order of things. The specter focuses this trouble of belief. It is there and not there. It outlines emptiness but also fills it up, embodying and disembodying its own reality at the same time.

To say that this common [criminal] fate was described in the popular press and commented on simply as a piece of police news is, indeed, to fall short of the facts. To say that it was sung and balladed would be more correct; it was expressed in a form quite other than that of the modern press, in a language which one could certainly describe as that of fiction rather than reality, once we have discovered that there is such a thing as a reality of fiction.

—Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes

SPEAKING OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE, Louis Chevalier traces the bourgeoisie’s elision of the working classes with the criminal classes, in which crime becomes either the representation of working class “failure” or “revenge” (396). Chevalier argues that working- class texts “recorded” their acquiescence to and acceptance of “a genuine fraternity of [criminal] fate” when they “described and celebrated [it] in verse” (397). Though a community of fate might inspire collective resistance, popular poetry and ballads, he confirms, reproduced metonymic connections between criminal and worker when “their pity went out to embrace dangerous classes and laboring classes alike. . . . One might almost say [they proclaimed these characteristics] in an identical poetic strain, so strongly was this community of feeling brought out in the relationship between the favorite subjects of working-class songs and the criminal themes of the street ballads, in almost the same words, meters, and tunes” (396) Acquiescence to or reiteration of worker/criminal equations established itself in workers’ views of themselves as “a different, alien and hostile society” (398) in literature that served as an “involuntary and ‘passive’ recording and communication of them” (395). Though I am investigating Victorian England, not nineteenth-century France, and though I regard the street ballads as popular texts which record resistance, not acquiescence, Chevalier’s work usefully articulates the predicament of class-based ideologies about worker and criminal which functioned similarly in Victorian England. More importantly, Chevalier acknowledges the complexity of street ballads as cultural texts..

“Strange, that a pair of silk stockings should so upset a nation.”

— Oscar Wilde, quoted in Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde

TODAY, WE TEND TO ENVISION the male Aesthete as a lanky, long-haired swain outfitted in velveteen pantaloons and clutching an outsize sunflower, an image straight from George du Maurier’s Punch cartoons or Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience. Serious scholars of Aestheticism often prefer to resist this parodic image, insisting on the movement’s significant philosophical development in Ruskin’s and Pater’s work.1 Yet Aesthetic fashion was not just a frivolous side effect of the movement. In fact, Aesthetic fashion was the focus of late-Victorian attention because it so clearly displayed the anxieties, stresses, and formulations of the movement. It was a battlefield for competing voices within Aestheticism; it was a stage whereon the various gender notions of the movement could be displayed; and it functioned as both a critique and a form of art. This article examines the theoretical rationales for Aesthetic fashion, focusing on the paradigmatic figures of Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, and George du Maurier. They demonstrate how Aesthetic men developed new visual codes to reconfigure their fear of feminization, creating a new kind of body which could be read as an essential, unchanging, scholarly, and artistic icon.

A YOUNG MAN living on a meager tutor’s salary skimps on his expenses to attend an 1882 commemorative exhibit of D. G. Rossetti’s work at the Royal Academy; he then purchases a volume of Rossetti’s sonnets, and makes a pilgrimage to Cheyne Walk where Rossetti had lived. He adopts Aesthetic style more concretely when he moves into a new flat and furnishes it with a dado and a cabinet papered in a Japanese print. In 1886, he subscribes to the library of the Grosvenor Gallery, the institutional center of British Aestheticism. He is tickled by Oscar Wilde’s public performances as an aesthete in 1887, regretting only that Wilde has cut his hair and exchanged velvet breeches for more conventional trousers. Having copied Pater’s famous passage on La Gioconda into his Commonplace Book in 1880, he responds to a trip to Greece years later through a Paterian reverie, trying to recapture the lost, classical Greece he had learned as a child.

CRITICS HAVE BEEN COMPLAINING about Ruskin’s inconsistencies since the 1840s. In 1856, Elizabeth Rigby wrote contemptuously of Ruskin’s “crochety contradictions and peevish paradoxes” (187). Marshall Mather lamented in 1897 that the critic’s “so-called inconsistencies roused the laughter and sneer of superficial readers” (xi). By 1933, R. H. Wilenski simply affirmed that “Ruskin’s art criticism . . . is an appalling muddle” (192). And in our own time, scholars as various as John Rosenberg, Elizabeth Helsinger, and Gary Wihl have pointed not so much to the connections as to the shifts, gaps, and breaks that interrupt the succession of Ruskin’s first nine major volumes — Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, and The Stones of Venice.1

IN ITS VERY TITLE, Charles Kingsley’s 1850 novel Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography hints at a set of questions that the novel itself never manages to answer in a very clear or convincing way: what is the relationship between manual and intellectual labor, between industrial and poetic production, between making a coat and writing a poem? How might the early Victorian imagination conceive of a working tailor who is also a working poet — especially in light of the various actual working-class poets who appeared on the literary scene in the first half of the nineteenth-century, complete with occupational epithets, such as Thomas Cooper, the “shoe-maker poet” (a figure who in many ways provided a model for Kingsley’s fictional protagonist)? And what if, like a fair number of urban artisans, including Cooper himself, the tailor-poet is also a Chartist — as Alton Locke indeed turns out to be? What is the relationship between the Chartist call for reform and for representation of disenfranchised men in the political realm, and the attempts of a fictional working-class man (since the novel’s treatment of gender, as I will argue, is crucial to its treatment of politics and culture) to enter the early Victorian field of literary production? Or why, in the first place, should a novel that treats the “social problem” of class in the hungry forties and the appalling working conditions of the clothes trade do so by way of the literary aspirations of its title character, that is, through a fictional construction of working-class authorship?

@FP = CHARLES DICKENS ADAMANTLY DECLARES he will not indulge in “any grave examination into the government or misgovernment of any portion” of Italy, because “that beautiful land” requires only aesthetic reflections that “have ever a fanciful and idle air” (1); and John Ruskin relentlessly insists on turning attention away from the action in the Italian streets and inward toward the motionless stones of buildings, because Venice, “Queen of Marble and of Mud,” has no political dimension (“Stones of Venice” 9: xxix). Elizabeth Barrett Browning, by contrast, masterfully tackles the problem of the emerging nation’s political image in Victorian England. These comments by prominent Victorian men of letters reflect the conventional British formulation of Italy through the nineteenth century “as the locus of the feminine and silent properties of space, painting, nature, and the body — a place outside of history where temporal motion had ceased” (Bailey 94).1 Indeed, a commonplace implicit in the British definition of pre-national Italy is the idea of la bella Italia as apolitical and even ahistorical. But from 1815 onwards, as Italians became increasingly dissatisfied under their new Austrian rulers, the British equation between Italy and art, Italy and beauty, became increasingly out of touch with the Italian republican movement.2

The true greatness of this great century consists . . . not in its vain wars, and formal stage, and stilted eloquence, and pompous palaces, and grandiose art, but in the formation and working out of the political and social system of which these things were the first fruits. It is idle to indulge in academical discussions as to the merits of this system. We have inherited it, it has penetrated our lives in every direction, we act, we think under its invisible pressure, and its study is pregnant with teaching.

— Emilia Dilke, Art in the Modern State

FUSING AESTHETIC INQUIRY WITH POLITICAL THEORY, Emilia Dilke’s Art in the Modern State heralds a shift in the evolving discipline of art history. Published in 1888, the book succeeds her well-received The Renaissance of Art in France (1879) and anticipates by a decade her multi-volume study of the arts of eighteenth-century France. Methodologically, however, Art in the Modern State stands apart from her other books. Predicated upon the supposition that art — indeed all cultural production — derives from and serves the “invisible pressure” of ideology, the book points to a new direction in Victorian aesthetic theory. Specifically, the book offers the first direct application of Marxist philosophy in an art historical text. That this innovation met and continues to meet with critical as well as popular indifference appears, at first, extraordinary. Considered within the context of Victorian art writing and materialist art history, however, the sources of this critical neglect begin to emerge.

Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin’s views on Turner are sound or not? What does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate, symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word and epithet, is at least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England’s Gallery; greater, indeed, one is apt to think at times, not merely because its equal beauty is more enduring, but on account of the fuller variety of its appeal, soul speaking to soul in those long cadenced lines, not through form and colour alone, though through these, indeed, completely and without loss, but with intellectual and emotional utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought, with imaginative insight, and with poetic aim; greater, I always think, even as Literature is the greater art.

—Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist

WHILE MUCH ATTENTION has been lavished upon the positive and ultimately profitable relationship between Ruskin and Turner, the closeness of their association has served to obscure a more subtle dynamic between the author and the painter in their respective quests for expression. Both Turner, who considered himself a poet as well as a painter, and Ruskin, an accomplished draughtsman who illustrated his own writings, were actively involved in forging new connections between word and image, and in breaking down the barriers between genres embraced by earlier generations. Turner and Ruskin each turned to the sister art both for inspiration, and importantly, for a means of supplementing what each perceived to be the insufficiencies of his own medium. For Turner, painting’s concrete, mimetic nature was at odds with his desire to communicate abstract ideas, while for Ruskin, language’s abstract and conventional nature fell short of our visual experience of the world and failed adequately to address our visual powers of thought, memory, and imagination. Yet as Turner tried to infuse his painting with poetry and Ruskin tried to render his prose visual, they nonetheless remained acutely aware of the gap between words and images. And if Turner and Ruskin readily acknowledged their intergeneric borrowings from the sister arts, implicit within their formulations of “poetic painting” and “painterly prose” is the subtext of the paragone, an age old rivalry between painters and poets for representational or expressive superiority.

BY THE CLOSE OF THE PREVIOUS CENTURY, English music-hall or variety, an entertainment form that incorporated comic acts, sketch comedy, dance, even animal acts, was drawing a broad base of middle-class patrons, and losing its exclusive character as working-class entertainment. “Variety” halls like the Alhambra or the Empire now claimed the attention and lucre of a new mass audience. Music-hall was also, I would argue, a proving ground where enterprising intellectuals could flex their evaluative muscle. Perhaps more than any other Late Victorian man of letters, critic and poet Arthur Symons frequented the music-hall with an eye toward representing it, a service that he regularly performed for The Star newspaper and elite cultural venues such as The Fortnightly Review.

THE VICTORIANS LOVED MACHINERY. One example, to serve for many, is Mayhew’s description of reduced admission days at the Great Exhibition:

OF THE FIVE BIOGRAPHIES under scrutiny here, at least two have attempted to break with traditional biographical procedures. By traditional, I mean linear or chronological development, some elementary discussion of each work, an effort to detail all aspects of the life, the evasion of psychological elements that seem to defy explanation. Of the other three biographies, David Nokes’s Jane Austen: A Life purports to be more innovative than his study really is. He pursues Austen relentlessly as satirical and rebellious — picking up on her remark in one of her letters, “I am a wild beast.” But Nokes’s probe of her rebelliousness is not so new as he makes us believe it is, although he does edge Jane out of the “maiden aunt” posture. More on Nokes later, when he will be paired with Claire Tomalin’s very different Jane Austen: A Biography. Whatever else, both books indicate that Austen biography, despite the recent “definitive” study by Park Honan (1987), is still quite alive. Still, a corollary question remains whether we need two more Austen biographies when the material has already been so thoroughly defined.

GEORGE ELIOT’S MIDDLEMARCH concludes with the summing up of the lives of her most visionary characters, bringing them to either happy fulfillment or early demise according, not to the worth of their dreams but, in part, to their success or failure in choosing a domestic partner. For Dorothea Brooke, Middlemarch’s most luminous and large-souled citizen, Eliot can finally justify no other existence than that of a devoted wife and mother. Eliot defends this apparent demotion of her heroine from modern Saint Theresa to London matron by arguing that her “study of provincial life” was of necessity the story of domestic times, when, in fact, the “heroics” of raising a family and offering “wifely help” to a husband were more noble than sororal obligation or religious mysticism. Though the novel is set in the late Georgian period just before the first Reform Bill of 1832, it was published in 1871–72, at the height of the Victorian era and is thoroughly Victorian in character. For the Victorians, the “reformed rakes” of Richardson and Fielding are no longer desirable as heads of households. The Queen herself seemed to offer a model of perfect domesticity in her large family, middle-class values, and reliance on her husband. In fact, just as Eliot concedes the dominance of the “home epic” (890), the myth of the Victorian family continues to maintain a powerful presence within contemporary American culture. Questions that still consume us today — What makes a good mother?

IN THE NEAR DECADE SINCE Herbert Sussman published this journal’s last review essay on the study of masculinities (in VLC 20 from 1992), we in the U.S. have engaged in a heated national debate over “gays in the military,” have participated in a wonderfully perverse (to my mind) public discussion on whether or not oral sex is really “sex,” have seen a muscle-bound ex-wrestler elected governor of Minnesota and a cross-dressing “bisexual” basketball player make national sports headlines for his skills on the court and in front of the makeup mirror. Issues of masculinity — specifically, issues of self-control, proper and improper forms of male self-expression, and the importance (or lack thereof) of traditional adult male “role models” for youth — have been raised by or figured in all of these controversies. Frankly, I have loved the 1990s, have found it a time of enormously entertaining and productive social, cultural, and, yes, scholarly confusion and dynamism. At its best, the decade saw the tackling of some of the most profound issues imaginable regarding the intertwined nature of identity, performance, and politics. At its worst, of course, it simply saw the rehashing of dreary, formulaic answers to some of the toughest questions it dared to pose (a media-encouraged policy of “Oh, ask, please ask, . . . but first let’s promise not to tell each other anything that we don’t particularly want to hear”).