“‘LETTERS!’ … ‘I BELIEVE HE DREAMS IN LETTERS!’” so exclaims Betsey Trotwood of Mr. Micawber, the epistolary aficionado of Charles Dickens's David Copperfield (664; ch. 54). David's aunt Betsey is not the only one to wonder at Micawber's prolific, albeit prolix, nature. His letters have made him a favorite of nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers alike; his “in short” has become one of the most memorable Dickensian tag-lines. But however much attention Micawber's epistolary endeavors garner, this notice fails to raise him to the position of respected writer–the position reserved for the eponymous hero of the novel. In the usual line of thinking, David stands as the ideal literary man while Micawber molders in the world of fantasy and comedy in which J. B. Priestley, James Kincaid, and J. Hillis Miller so securely position him.

N 1891 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL, father of the more famous Winston, visited South Africa and the soon-to-be Rhodesia on a trip that was intended to combine big-game hunting with the even more exciting prospects of entering the gold mining business. During the eight months of the visit, Churchill contributed a series of letters to the Daily Graphic on his thoughts and experiences, in one of which he had this to say about the Boers: The Boer farmer personifies useless idleness. Occupying a farm of from six thousand to ten thousand acres, he contents himself with raising a herd of a few hundred head of cattle, which are left almost entirely to the care of the natives whom he employs. It may be asserted, generally with truth, that he never plants a tree, never digs a well, never makes a road, never grows a blade of corn…. He passes his day doing absolutely nothing beyond smoking and drinking coffee. He is perfectly uneducated. With the exception of the Bible, every word of which in its most literal interpretation he believes with fanatical credulity, he never opens a book, he never even reads a newspaper. His simple ignorance is unfathomable, and this in stolid composure he shares with his wife, his sons, his daughters, being proud that his children should grow up as ignorant, as uncultivated, as hopelessly unprogressive as himself. In the winter time he moves with his herd of cattle into the better pastures and milder climate of the low country veldt, and lives as idly and uselessly in his waggon as he does in his farmhouse. The summer sees him returning home, and so on [sic], year after year, generation after generation, the Boer farmer drags out the most ignoble existence ever experienced by a race with any pretensions to civilization. (94–95) The piece caused an outcry, and when a year later Churchill republished the letters as Men, Mines and Animals in South Africa (1892), he attempted to exonerate himself by claiming that these views were intended “to be exclusively confined to…the Dutch population of the Transvaal,” not “generally to the Dutch in South Africa” and went on: “The Dutch settlers in Cape Colony are as worthy of praise as their relatives, the Transvaal Boers, are of blame. The former, loyal, thrifty, industrious, hospitable, liberal are and will, I trust, remain the back-bone of our great colony at the Cape of Good Hope” (v–vi).

Most readers either overlook or dismiss John Ruskin's climbs in the Alps as being insignificant compared to his avid interest in geology and mountain form. However, I want to suggest that Ruskin's climbing – his physical and kinetic relationship to the mountains – is essential to his understanding of them. His numerous and repeated ascents in the lower Alps were not always easy: in fact, they were often tough and sometimes dangerous. Through a few select examples, in the first part of the essay, I establish just how difficult many of these scrambles were so that I may proceed, in the body of the paper, to talk about how these strenuous experiences influenced his way of seeing the mountain landscape he admired, and how, in turn, they helped shape his concept of imperfect vision.

The dystopia of the Victorian city is ubiquitous as a trope of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, appearing across a wide array of literature in fiction, poetry, pamphlets, articles, reviews, socio-demographic works, socialist tracts, and miscellaneous papers. Anti-urbanism plays a prominent role in Dickens, Kingsley, and Gissing, to name but a few, and emerges in more pointedly sociological titles such as Andrew Mearns's The Bitter Cry of London (1883); Thomas Escott's England: Its Peoples, Polity, and Pursuits (1885); Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People of London (1889–1902); Ford Madox Ford's The Heart of the Empire (1905); and W. W. Hutching's London Town Past and Present (1909) (Lees, in Fraser and Sutcliffe, 1983: 154; Hulin and Coustillas, 1979: passim). Themes of urban degradation, overpopulation, squalor, unemployment, lack of education, despair, and pollution fill their pages.

“HOW MANY TRAVELLERS from all lands have visited this dwelling among the Westmoreland mountains as a shrine!” (377). So begins Maria Weston Chapman's 1877 homage to The Knoll, Harriet Martineau's Ambleside home. By the 1870s The Knoll had become a regular stop on literary tours of the Lake District. This was of course partly due to the fact that Martineau's literary reputation had established her as a central figure in most major political and social controversies of her day, including industrial relations, women's rights, and abolition. By the time she came to settle in the Lake District, Martineau had already published over a dozen successful works, including Illustrations of Political Economy, Society in America, and Deerbrook. She had also published numerous articles in literary periodicals such as the Westminster Review, Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, and the Monthly Repository.

IN HIS INTRODUCTION to The Question of the Gift, Mark Osteen claims that “economism … is the land mine of gift theory” (5). For many theorists, he explains, gift-giving and market exchanges share the same forms of calculation; for others, more specifically, self-interest is the “objective truth” of the gift. The challenge that gift discourse has taken up in recent years is how to rethink reciprocity, altruism, and generosity while at the same time avoiding both the “Scylla of sentimentality and the Charybdis of economism” (Osteen 31). In this paper I discuss Dinah Mulock Craik's mid-Victorian bestseller, John Halifax, Gentleman (1856), using gift theory (or some insights thereof) as my main analytical tool. Why is gift theory relevant to the understanding of a novel that openly extols the advantages of self-help and economic individualism?

AT AGE FIFTY-TWO, THOMAS HARDY was beginning to feel uneasy about aging. On October 11, 1892, he wrote to his friend Arthur Blomfield: “Hurt my tooth at breakfast-time. I look in the glass. Am conscious of the humiliating sorriness of my earthly tabernacle…. Why should a man's mind have been thrown into such close, sad, sensational, inexplicable relations with such a precarious object as his own body!” (F. Hardy 13–14). This moment of specular disgust was ultimately recorded in a poem: I look into my glass,And view my wasting skin,And say, “Would God it came to passMy heart had shrunk as thin!”For then, I, undistrestBy hearts grown cold to me,Could lonely wait my endless restWith equanimity.But Time, to make me grieve,Part steals, lets part abide;And shakes this fragile frame at eveWith throbbings of noontide. (T. Hardy, Complete Poems 81)

In their courtship and marriage, the Brownings did not contend for that “mastery” the wife of Bath and other traditional sources of marital wisdom cite as the usual object of competition between the sexes. Instead they struggled over the privilege of admiring and serving the other. Robert Browning won that competition, his victory both symptom and cause of a poetic silence that lasted throughout most of his married life. An important exception to his prolonged inactivity is Men and Women, Browning's successful attempt at bringing his innovative style to full, sustained articulation. In order to achieve the kind of psychological, as well as intellectual, independence that would enable him to speak “in [his] true person” (“One Word More,” line 137), however, the poet needed to alter the terms of his relationship with his wife, who was both the emotional center of his life and a more successful, more popular poet. Browning achieved this separation in Men and Women, particularly in “One Word More.”

In the late 1880s, around the time he decided to settle on the Samoan island of Upolu, Robert Louis Stevenson's writing began to take a strikingly different shape as he attempted to infuse it with the flavor of his new surroundings. “When Stevenson traveled to the margins of the empire,” John Kucich observes, “he suddenly found new ways of organizing his narratives” (59). His novel-length Pacific works The Wrecker (1892) and The Ebb-Tide(1894), both nominally co-authored with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, made a marked departure from the dominant models for representing imperial space and themes provided by his own Treasure Island (1883) and by H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885), and they were generally met by critics with bemusement and disappointment. One reviewer of The Ebb-Tide began by observing, “It certainly has no claim to a place with those romances which are already ranked among the classics of our tongue,” and concluded sorrowfully: “This is not the Stevenson we love, but it is something to be read and remembered, nevertheless” (qtd. in Maixner 458, 59). While recent critical interest in Stevenson's Pacific fiction has tended to focus on works such as “The Beach of Falesá” (1892) and the portrayal of cultural encounter, The Wrecker in particular continues to be held in low regard. As Stephen Arata summarizes,

The organizing theme of this volume and of the conference from which it originated and the publication within a year of one another of Mr. Richard Jenkyns's The Victorians and Ancient Greece and my own Creek Heritage in Victorian Britain are symptomatic of our having arrived at an important turning point in the pursuit of Victorian studies. As scholars of history, literature, art, ideas, and culture, we are at long last beginning to investigate topics that were actually of the most fundamental significance to the educated elites of nineteenth-century Britain and without which their culture and intellectual universe would have been radically different. It has taken us a very long time to reach this point of departure. We have remained overly interested in questions that seem relevant for our own rime or major figures whose work has entered die literary or philosophical canon. We have almost unwittingly continued to interpret die nineteenth century through the dwardian categories of “Victorianism.” That has even been die situation with critics, such as Walter Houghton and Basil Willey, who refuted much of the Edwardian image but did so without rejecting the very presuppositions from which Edwardian writers had launched their attack. In a unique manner the study of Victorian classicism and related topics will allow us to break through the old interpretive and evaluative categories, because classicism was an issue about which Edwardian critics and later scholars had little to say. We come to Victorian classicism widi rather fewer presuppositions than to many other topics in Victorian intellectual and literary history.

Margaret Oliphant much preferredThe Woman in White (published serially 1859–1860) to Great Expectations (published serially 1860–1861). This partiality emerges in a comparative treatment of the texts in her oft-quoted 1862 treatise on sensation fiction, and it rests on the desirability of authors producing thrills using “modest and subtle means” (“Sensation Novels” 569) instead of “by fantastic eccentricities” and “high-strained oddity” (“Sensation Novels” 574). While the existence of an argument against the allegedly regrettable excesses of fantastical narratives will not shock any reader familiar with contemporary criticism of sensation fiction, or, for that matter, Romantic-era novels or Gothic works in general, the primary evidence Oliphant uses to argue her case might come as a surprise. In order to discredit Charles Dickens's ghostly accounts of Miss Havisham's bridal tomb in favor of Wilkie Collins's eerie images of Anne Catherick appearing on a moonlit moor, Margaret Oliphant turns to clothing.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI and his artistic circle are emerging as privileged sites of modernist genesis. Studies by Jessica Feldman (Victorian Modernism: Pragmatism and the Varieties of Aesthetic Experience) and Allison Pease (Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity) include Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne, respectively, in their reassessments of modernism. In a complementary move, Jerome McGann argues in Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be Lost that Rossetti's art anticipates Imagism (44) and is characterized by a “hyper-realism that anticipates certain Postmodern styles” (32). Such work implicitly questions, in Feldman's words, the narratives of “strife, loss, [and] rupture” (4) that have been told about modernism's relationship with its predecessors. By linking nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists in a historical trajectory of aesthetic change, as Pease does, or by effacing the historical through a “web” of Victorian modernism, as Feldman does, it becomes possible to see new relations among authors previously separated by critical practice. Rossetti and associates enjoy a new spotlight as they become modern through their aesthetic productions and domestic arrangements.

The figure of darwin hovered like a specter over the fin de siècle, not only the Darwin of the explosive 1859 On the Origin of Species that redirected evolutionary thinking but also the author of the 1871 Descent of Man — a less heralded work, though generating equally significant repercussions with its pronouncements on the intellectual capacities of the sexes. By linking a perceived mental inferiority of women to the mechanism of evolution, Darwin seemingly brought scientific proof to support a cultural truism. In so doing, he reinforced Victorian strictures that maintained women in a subservient state, which now could be justified on the basis of biological determinism. Yet Sarah Grand's popular 1897 novel, The Beth Book, contests the Darwinian verities, questioning the scientists' specious conclusions about sex-linked traits and identifying culture as an equally significant force determining the mental dispositions of the sexes.

The “condition of England” in the middle of the nineteenth century was, for most Victorians (and is, indeed, for most modern scholars of the Victorian period), about as far removed from desert pirates and neo-Grecian queens as London from Jerusalem. But such was not the case in 1847 for the ambitious novelist-turned-politician Benjamin Disraeli, himself a mixture of political and social incongruities, who chose to conclude his political trilogy with a novel that bore greater resemblance to an Arabian Nights fantasy than to any mid-Victorian reform fiction. Contemporary readers of Tancred, or The New Crusade (1847) were understandably perplexed: “There is no principle of cohesion about the book, if we except the covers,” complained one reviewer (qtd. in Stewart 229). And, while critics have expanded upon this dismissive condemnation throughout the twentieth century, not much has changed regarding the general critical appraisal or thoughtful analysis of what Disraeli regarded as the favorite of his compositions (Blake 215). The least popular of the Young England novels both in its own day and in ours, Tancred has most frequently been viewed as an anomaly – an abandonment of the political manifesto Disraeli began in Coningsby and continued in Sybil.

The Aesthetic or “Patience” teapot is renowned as the ultimate parody of Aesthetic sensibilities. Composed of the head and torso of a male and female back-to-back dressed in the “greenery-yallery of the Grosvenor Gallery,” with puce hats and fashionable Pre-Raphaelite red hair, the teapot was designed by James Hadley (1838–1903) for the Royal Worcester manufactory following the success of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan's operetta Patience in 1881. Bearing on its base the inscription, “Fearful consequences through the laws of Natural Selection and Evolution of living up to one's teapot,” the vessel took a swipe at Darwin's theories of evolution, as well as Oscar Wilde's famous aphorism. This teapot is certainly not “fit for its purpose,” defying “form must follow function”; rather it is a whim of fashion, novel but transitory. Recognized as a “limited edition” and expensive, its function being primarily for show rather than use, it marks the appearance of the modern “collectable,” in effect a souvenir of Aestheticism and now seen to commemorate its apogee. Yet although loaded with aesthetic signifiers – sunflowers, lilies and gender-bending – no scholar has attempted to unwrap the teapot's meaning, in terms of the identification of china and tea with “life-style aestheticism” (Figure 15).

IN AN 1835 ARTICLE PUBLISHED in the Rugby Magazine under the title “School a Little World,” A. P. Stanley wrote:

WHY ARE JANE EYRE AND DOROTHEA BROOKE clad by their creators in “Quakerish” garb? The oppositional plainness and simplicity of Quakerish heroines have often been read as signs of classlessness and sexlessness.1 Plain and simple clothing seems, to both Victorian and contemporary eyes, part of the package of reticence, reserve, and repression associated with the evangelical wing of nineteenth-century dissenting sects.2 The typical sociological view of the function of dress within conservative religious groups holds that “strict dress codes are enforced because dress is considered symbolic of religiosity. Hence dress becomes a symbol of social control as it controls the external body” (Arthur 1). The control of female sexuality and the restraint of desire would seem to be the core function of modest clothing. Then the plain dress of some of the liveliest heroines of Victorian fiction presents a puzzle that can be solved only by recuperating the meaning of that clothing for Victorians. As fashion historian Anne Hollander points out, nineteenth-century novels testify to the way that clothes “always correctly express character” (Feeding the Eye 12), but the meaning of particular articles of clothing or styles can slip away. Accurately reading the characters of Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot thus requires careful interpretation of their dress, in this case reversing the conventional reading of their plain, modest, and simple style. This essay argues that Quakerish clothing expresses both a promise of spirited sexuality and an admonition about the class-crossing potential of the respectable female contained within it.

In perhaps her most famous comment, Isabella Beeton, the doyenne of Victorian cookery, proclaimed, “Dining is the privilege of civilization” (363). Dinner, she went on to explain, “is a matter of considerable importance; and a well-served table is a striking index of human ingenuity and resource” (363). That “much depends on dinner” has been widely recognized in a variety of contexts since Beeton made this pronouncement in her Book of Household Management in the mid-Victorian era. From Upton Sinclair's exposé of the meat industry in The Jungle (1906) to the more recent fascination with Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (2001) and Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006), food – and particularly its mismanagement – has become a positive obsession with the public at large. Anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and psychologists – from Claude Lévi-Strauss to Mary Douglas to Sidney Mintz to Sigmund Freud himself – have long engaged in commenting on what Beeton asserts in her chapter on “Dinner and Dining”: that distinctions in food preparation, eating habits, and modes of dining are a crucial axis around which cultures and groups consolidate themselves. Similarly, organizations like Stanford University's now defunct Food Research Institute have investigated food's centrality to “human ingenuity,” in this case through the study of agricultural practice and policy.

Writing as recently as 2011, Michael Bennett asks if Salomé is an anomaly in the oeuvre of Oscar Wilde (viii). Read against his witty societal comedies of manners, it certainly appears to be one. Salomé has been regarded as a fine example of symbolist drama in the history of British theatre, and few critics would dispute its “seriousness” as such. Its growing significance in recent discourses of gender and sexuality also adds seriousness to the play. Although Feminist and gender critics show little qualms about dubbing the play as symbolist, the final tableau of a young girl kissing the mouth of the severed head seems to me at odds with symbolism, whether Salomé is seen as an archetypal femme fatale, a queer man in disguise, or a New Woman as critics argue. Symbolism in Wilde's Salomé is widely different from other specimens of the genre such as Yeats's The Countess Cathleen, for instance, which directly deals with a spiritual issue of the salvation of soul. Salomé also lacks the fatalistic sense of doom that dominates Maeterlinck's Princess Maleine, with which it is often compared. Wilde's wayward heroine is not a victim of the invisible forces in the same way Maeterlinck's characters are. Wilde's Salomé is “monstrous,” as Herod says: she seems to commit “a crime against some unknown God” (Complete Works 604). How can we reconcile her cruel passion of carnal desire with the supposed spirituality of the symbolist tradition? Also problematic in a symbolist reading of the play is the presence of the comic and the parodic, as pointed out by many critics. Is Wilde's Salomé an authentic symbolist drama?