Charles Kingsley's children's novelThe Water-Babies (WB), written in the spring and summer of 1862, is a politically anxious text. In this essay I argue that although The Water-Babies’ overall structure appears to be chaotic and arbitrary – J. M. I. Klaver, for example, deems the work a “Victorian fantasy crowded with Kingsley's hobby-horses” where he “pour[s] out whatever he had on his mind” (517) – in fact Kingsley's disquietude concerning the Irish Famine, U.S. slavery, and the condition of the British working classes provides a logical framework for the text.

Imagine a story featuring a dreamy descent underground, grotesquely gigantic and dwarfish carnality, a prodigious pool of body fluid, cartwheels and pratfalls, cornucopian helpings of food and drink, antic playgrounds, riddling language and name games, repeated nonsense (re)verses, various negative capabilities, mathematical miracles, voyages of discovery, cycles of crowning and uncrowning, not to mention metalists like the previous catalogue in this sentence. It seems curious that this tangled tale, Lewis Carroll's in the Alices, has never been linked to the Carnival tradition typified by François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–64) even though our imagined story equally describes Rabelais's glorious epic. At least, it's never been linked much beyond Northrop Frye's suggestion that “[t]he Alice books are perfect Menippean satires, and so is [Charles Kingsley's] The Water-Babies, which has been influenced by Rabelais” (310) and Martin Gardner's note to Looking-Glass that Medieval and “Renaissance chess games were sometimes played with human pieces on enormous fields” as in “Gargantua and Pantagruel” (135, n. 2). And yet, to spin William Empson's memorable take on Freudian readings (357), one has only to tell Alice's story to make it a carnival tale.

“London, for some time previous to the opening of the Great Exhibition, has been a curious sight even to Londoners,” Henry Mayhew declared in 1851, or the Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and Family, Who Came Up to London to “Enjoy Themselves,” and to See the Great Exhibition, his comic instant novel about the transformation of London in the year of the Great Exhibition. Mayhew proceeded to detail what had grown curiouser and curiouser about the London scene in that climactic year: “New amusements were daily springing into existence, or old ones being revived. The Chinese Collection had returned to the Metropolis, with a family from Pekin, and a lady with feet two inches and a half long, as proof of the superior standing she had in society; Mr Calin [sic; he means Caitlin] had re−opened his Indian exhibit; Mr Wyle [sic; he means Wyld; instant novels apparently did not allow much time for proofreading] had bought up the interior of Leicester Square, with a view of cramming into it – ‘yeah, the great globe itself’” (132). Elsewhere in Mayhew's parodic panorama of London's exhibition mania, he offered a view of other globalized London scenes, focusing on celebrated chef Alexis Soyer's new restaurant, “where the universe might dine, from sixpence to a hundred guineas, of cartes ranging from pickled whelks to nightingale's tongues . . . from the ‘long sixes,’ au natural of the Russians, to the ‘stewed Missionary of the Marquesas,’ or the ‘cold roast Bishop’ of New Zealand” (2). Mayhew's imaginary menu, with its cannibalistic extremes, expresses a wider concern about the deluging of London by foreigners come to see the Great Exhibition (some 60000 “extra” foreigners – beyond, that is, standard visiting numbers – were estimated to have actually visited, mostly from the Continent, that year, roughly doubling the existing foreign population of London; see Auerbach 186), which found expression in an amused (when not more genuinely terrified) xenophobia that often focused on foreign foodways.

MR. TULLIVER DRAWS LITTLE ATTENTION from critics of The Mill on the Floss compared to his children, Maggie and Tom, and his finances are hardly ever looked at in any detail, just as other sections of George Eliot's novel that concern economics are not. Yet George Eliot says Mr. Tulliver has his tragedy, as do his daughter and son, and it is precisely Mr. Tulliver's money trouble, his bankruptcy, that sets the condition for the troubles of the next generation. I seek to trace a narrative logic for a novel that has seemed to many to strain plot coherence, and I do so by an economic analysis that allows a link to be drawn between such seemingly disparate tragedies as a father's financial ruin and death and his children's drowning, with the sister giving up love then life itself to reclaim her brother's favor, seeking in vain to rescue him from a flood.

Accounting for the prevalence of enmity in nineteenth-century Western culture, Peter Gay evinces some surprise at the tenacious grip of the meek upon their aggression, which appears to satisfy a basic necessity of life. Uriah Heep alone attests to the harmony between Charles Dickens's social imagination and Gay's critical assessment that the Victorians had cause to treat their self-effacing neighbors with as much caution as the bellicose. But what about the more resignedly “umble” and solemnly self-diminishing denizens of Dickens's fictional world: the good girls at the center of so many novels? Why do aggression and resentment seem less compatible with their humility than with Heep's? Because, I would suggest, they are little. Littleness is certainly an idealized quality of girls in Dickens's novels. In particular, Nell Trent and Amy Dorrit share the epithet “little” as an indication of their preciousness, physical smallness, modesty, and, most importantly, self-abnegation in service of others. As a number of critics have observed, this selflessness takes many forms, including starvation, over-work, and self-erasure. Such extremes of compassionate resolve and willful self-limitation, however, intimate the strictness of the nice girl and the difficulty of measuring up to her (as a) standard. Dickens himself set this bar – if not precisely high, at so low a level as to require painstaking self-contortion to pass under it – in an 1847 speech to the Mechanics’ Institution at Leeds where he described women as “those who are our best and dearest friends in infancy, in childhood, in manhood, and in old age, the most devoted and least selfish natures that we know on earth, who turn to us always constant and unchanged, when others turn away” (Fielding 83). This definition of the best feminine endowments recognizes no difference between girls and women, because the female half of the human population remains “constant and unchanged” in service of male needs. Although Dickens calls upon women to be the bigger person in a moral sense, for girls, growing up appears a matter of remaining little, selfless, “constant.” For good self-effacing Victorian girls like Little Nell and Little Dorrit, aggression thus is necessary because enforcing self-negation requires enormous will power, but also perhaps because aggression guards the last modicum of selfhood belonging to those for whom selflessness is socially prescribed.

[I]t is not enough to make the Jew respected, but to have JUDAISM rightly reverenced; and to do this, there must be a JEWISH LITERATURE, or the Jewish people will not advance one step.

— Grace Aguilar, The Jewish Faith (1846)

THE ESSAYS COLLECTED in this issue of Victorian Literature and Culture seek to introduce Victorianists to some of the many Anglo-Jewish writers of nineteenth-century England. What differentiates this moment in Anglo-Jewish scholarship from most previous considerations is that we do not purport to fill a falsely constructed “void” of Anglo-Jewish literary silence; on the contrary, this collection seeks to amplify the fullness of nineteenth century Anglo-Jewish literary life. In 1846, Grace Aguilar, the important Anglo-Jewish writer and theologian, called out for the production of a “Jewish literature” that would aid the “right reverence[e] of Judaism,” and “advance” the Jewish people in Victorian England. All too aware of the way exclusion from Hebrew literary and religious texts often precipitated assimilation, conversion, and more generalized alienation from Jewish religious life, Aguilar sought new tools to combat Jewish religious apathy. Detailing the subtle conversionary and theological assumptions that so-called secular — yet clearly Christian — literature often performed, Aguilar reasoned that a Jewish literature could provide Jewish readers — and especially Jewish women — with literary pleasure and a simultaneous sense of Jewish values and ethics; likewise, such a literature could recast the generally negative images of Jewish people and Judaism which pervade the long history of English literature.1 With her emphasis on a Jewish literature, then, Aguilar sought to claim the cultural and ideological power literature held in Victorian England for specifically Jewish uses. Significantly, Aguilar’s tone in the statement above suggests that she saw no such Jewish literature in past moments of Anglo-Jewish history; Aguilar’s intensive production of such a literature in a variety of genres was her own response to this desire for Jewish literature.

Nationalism and imperialism in nineteenth-century European literature, located within a theoretical framework of Self/Other, have been the subject of much recent interest. Such projects focus chiefly on representations of the Other in descriptions, images, and evaluations. Sometimes, however, the affirmation of the national Self in such literature is achieved by the total or near total obliteration of the Other. In such cases it is on non-representations, or to use Macherey's word “silences,” that one's reading of such texts must be focused if their nationalistic and imperialistic character is to be exposed.

While carefully crafting a valentine to his would-be-lover Mary, Sam Weller finishes rather abruptly, and his father, looking over his shoulder, asks, “That's rayther a sudden pull up, ain't it, Sammy?” Sam's response emblematizes the driving force of the serial novel: “Not a bit on it. . . she'll vish there wos more, and that's the great art o' letter writin'” (344; no. XII, ch. XXXIII). Charles Dickens's great art of serial writing aimed to leave his readers repeatedly wishing there was more: more pages, more plot, more world, and above all, more time with their favorite characters. This desire encouraged readers to imagine beyond the novel – to pursue characters outside the pages of The Pickwick Papers itself. Their desires were rewarded with a wide range of continuations that included theatrical adaptations, plagiarisms, or unauthorized sequels – anything that, like the valentine, could reunite readers with their beloved Sam.

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).

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

Literary decadence played an active role in promoting the increased circulation and critical scrutiny of literary translations in the second half of the nineteenth century. Building on Walter Benjamin's influential definition of translation as an autonomous literary form, this article examines Walter Pater's “Style” (1888) and Lafcadio Hearn's 1910 translation of Flaubert's Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874) in order to map a theory and practice of decadent translation founded on the aesthetic and ethical respect for the foreignness of the original. Paying closer attention to the aesthetics of decadent translation, as well as its social networks and material history, generates new insights on the cosmopolitan culture of decadence and Victorian literature more broadly.

TO SPEAK ABOUT JOHN RUSKIN’S anxious figures for engraved reproduction is to speak about his troubled relationship to a modernity in which excess and impermanence present complex and interrelated challenges. The ruined cathedral in my title occurs in lectures Ruskin delivered in 1857, and published the same year as The Political Economy of Art. Invited to speak at Manchester on the occasion of the Art-Treasures Exhibition, at the height of his fame as a critic, Ruskin responded to the moment with two lectures challenging much that the exhibition stood for. He offered the following apocalyptic description of the situation of art away from the self-congratulating festival. It is worth considering this passage — at once about art and about the responsibility for its blighting — in relation to the immense temporary structure built to house the Art-Treasures Exhibition (Figure 9):

Inspired whilst on holiday in 1893, the poet and literary critic Mathilde Blind speculated on the potential for intimacy in great poetry: “The poet only truly lives when he feels the rapture of communion; when his soul mirrored in a sister soul is doubled like the moon glassed in the Lake of Nemi” (Commonplace book 36; hereafter CB). Blind here alludes to the belief that from the shores of Lake Nemi, located just southeast of Rome, one might witness a perfect reflection of the moon upon the lake's still waters. Like the moon that casts its light down on the lake, Blind imagines the poet radiating outward toward her readers and experiencing with them “the rapture of communion,” a flash of sympathetic confederacy. It was an ideal Blind had considered from her first volume of poetry in 1867 to her recently published Dramas in Miniature (1891), and it had determined most notably The Ascent of Man, Blind's 1889 poetic re-writing of Darwinian evolution. In her work as a literary critic as well as in her poetry, Blind singles out moments of passionate communication, such as lines of D. G. Rossetti that “set[] ones nerve tingling” (Correspondence; letter to Richard Garnett, 10 October 1881), and Shelley's poetry, which is like an “electric telegraph of thought flashing its fiery spark through the dull dense world of sense” (“Shelley” 97). At its best, poetry fuses an “intensity of feeling, [a] depth of thought, music, and form” (Correspondence; letter to Richard Garnett, 26 January 1870) so as to resonate most effectively with what Tennyson called “the deep heart of every living thing” (Poems 1: 85).

AT A CRITICAL JUNCTURE in part one of Harriet Martineau's Berkeley the Banker, the fourteenth novel in her Illustrations of Political Economy series, there is a run on a country bank. The run is precipitated by a casual exchange in a local shop during which Mrs. Millar, the confectioner, is given a five-pound note to change. Her reply “Oh, I cant change that note [sic]” is misunderstood by others in the shop to mean that she is refusing to honor a particular bank's note while, in fact, she is simply not able to make change (169). The panic that ensues ruins Mr. Berkeley, the country bank's proprietor, and serves the novel's aim of demonstrating the precariousness of paper currency unbacked by the gold standard. In describing this incident, as well as through various characters' periodic lectures, the novel argues that only a gold standard could have prevented a calamity such as the bank run. Under a gold standard, citizens of the town of Haleham never could have misinterpreted Mrs. Millar's remarks–they would have known that the note must be honored and that, therefore, the confectioner merely lacked the correct change. Under a gold standard, in other words, the meaning of paper currency is not open to misinterpretation; its value is fully known and stable. Martineau may be convinced of the gold standard's ability to scuttle the dangers of textual ambiguity, but this moment also exposes the challenge of regulating the circulation and proliferation of meaning. The meaning of a speech act and the value of a banknote are both revealed as unstable and difficult, perhaps impossible, to regulate or manage.

IN HIS BOOKMarxism and the City, Ira Katznelson, while lamenting the disappearance of spatial elements within Marxist thought, points to Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England as an ur-text that is able to provide “positive specification of the mechanisms linking base and superstructure” (56). As a corrective to the narrowly “scientific” strain of Marxism that privileged “structure” over “agency,” Katznelson views Engels’s early text on the industrial city of Manchester as the bearer of a double message: “Writing at the precise branching moment of the emergence of the modern industrial city, [Engels] connected the development of this new urban form to the epochal changes of the industrial revolution; he showed how changes in organization of city space affected social relationships within and between classes; and he tied this social geography to the suffering and coming to consciousness of the new proletariat” (144). In this critical exchange between “base” and “superstructure,” where Marxism becomes a tool for reading the city, and the city a space for revising Marxist method, class consciousness gets redefined as “urban consciousness,”1 thus supplanting the site of praxis from the arena of production to the psycho-social experience of space.

Charles Dickens's novels only occasionally feature images of prehistoric creatures. There is, of course, the famous “elephantine lizard. . .waddling. . .up Holborn Hill” in the opening scenes of Bleak House (1852–53), which, as is brilliantly captured in Tom Gauld's recent cartoon “Fragments of Dickens's Lost Novel ‘A Megalosaur's Progress’” (2011), has become a kind of icon of Dickens's entire fictional oeuvre (Figure 1). But beyond Bleak House’s iconic megalosaurus “forty feet long or so,” Dickens's panoramic representations of urban landscapes, which Adelene Buckland has shown to abound with quasi-geological ruins, are usually populated only by their more diminutive modern inhabitants (1; ch. 1). Even when the changing cityscape of “carcases. . .and fragments” of “giant forms” seems, as in Dombey and Son (1847–48), to suggest the presence of colossal fossilized skeletons thrown up by a “great earthquake,” they remain lifeless and merely augment the pervading atmosphere of urban upheaval (46; ch. 6). Animate extinct animals instead appear more commonly in novels by contemporaries such as William Makepeace Thackeray or, later in the century, Henry James. In their fiction, creatures such as the megatherium, a large edentate from the Pliocene epoch, not only afford apposite metaphors for gargantuan manifestations of industrial modernity, as in the former's Mrs. Perkins's Ball (1846) and the latter's The Bostonians (1885–86). More significantly, they also provide a model for the complex structures of serialized novels, whether commendatory, as in Thackeray's The Newcomes (1853–55), or otherwise, as in the famous epithet “large loose baggy monsters” that James coined in the preface to the New York edition of The Tragic Muse (1908) (1:x).

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.