ASSESSMENTS OF ELIZABETH GASKELL’S two novels of social purpose typically conclude that North and South, published in 1855, is a more mature work stylistically and ideologically than Mary Barton, published in 1848. North and South is said to integrate the narrative modes of romance and realism more effectively than Mary Barton (Felber 63, Horsman 284), and to provide a more complicated narrative structure (Schor, Scheherezade 122–23), a more complex depiction of social conflicts (Easson 59 and 93) and a more satisfactory resolution of them (Duthie 84, Kestner 170). North and South is also said to deal with “more complex intellectual issues” (Craik 31). And the novel’s heroine, Margaret Hale, has been seen as Gaskell’s most mature creation — a woman who grows in self-awareness as she adapts to an alien environment (Kestner 164–166) and, unlike Mary Barton, becomes an active mediator of class conflicts (Stoneman 120), the central consciousness that brings together “the lessons of social change and romance” (Schor, Scheherezade 127).1 The reconciliation of these conflicts she inspires through her influence over both mill owner and worker has been praised as a more effective and credible narrative resolution to the social problems depicted in the novel than the reconciliation between mill owner and worker in Mary Barton (David 36).

In the fall of 2017, a year into the current U.S. administration, a month into the #MeToo movement, I reread Adorno's 1962 essay “Commitment,” on the creation and consumption of art in an authoritarian world. I reread it at the same time that I became brave enough, and angry enough, to teach Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) for the first time in my fifteen-year career. Adorno says that Sartre's question, “‘Is there any meaning in life when men exist who beat people until the bones break in their bodies?’ is also the question whether any art now has the right to exist” in the wake of atrocities like the Holocaust. Adorno ultimately resolves the question in the affirmative, but only at the end of an essay otherwise dedicated to the difficulties of producing literature that resists a consumerist regime. For Adorno, committed literature (that is, progressive, instrumentalized, messaged) all too often assimilates itself to the brutalities against which it protests, while autonomous literature (that is, art that exists for itself) runs the risk of degenerating into a “fetish . . . an apoliticism that is in fact deeply political” (177). In returning to both Tess and Adorno after a longish absence, I wondered whether, in spite of Adorno's overtly modernist leanings, we might nevertheless consider that certain Victorian novels manifest his concept of tensed oscillation between commitment and autonomy. Adorno suggests that certain nonrealist art forms (one of his examples is Picasso's Guernica) neither “do” nor attempt to compel others to “do” anything instrumental, and yet such works simultaneously both illuminate and (precisely in their turning away from action) condemn systemic brutalities. We need not entirely agree with Adorno's reading of Guernica specifically, nor his fetish-treatment of modernist art broadly, to entertain the idea that—even in their realist projects—certain Victorian novels also “negate empirical reality, [and] by merely existing endlessly reiterat[e systemic] guilt” (190). I'll return to this question more directly later in the essay; for now, let it lurk in the corners of my discussion of Tess.

In short, this [the exchange of gifts] represents an intermingling. Souls are mixed with things; things with souls. Lives are mingled together, and this is how, among persons and things so intermingled, each emerges from their own sphere and mixes together. This is precisely what contract and exchange are.

—Marcel Mauss, The Gift

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.

IN EMILY BRONTË'S Gondal poem, “How do I love on summer nights” (1842–43), the spirit of Lord Alfred S. gloomily haunts Aspin Castle, shut out from heaven after committing suicide for the love of Queen A.G.A.References to Brontë's works are from Chitham and Roper's edition of her poetry and Nestor's edition of Wuthering Heights. Brontë's central Gondolian figure, A.G.A. dominates every poem in which she appears or is evoked, a ruthless and yet ardent ruler, a powerful rhetorician, the murderer of her newly-born daughter and direct cause of the deaths and exile of her several lovers. Yet for Alfred, A.G.A. is almost divine, inspiring in him a fervent passion from which he cannot escape, even as a ghost. His “angel brow,” the reader is informed, is marked by a “brooding” “shade of deep dispair / As nought devine could ever know,“ intimating the dark depression from which Alfred suffers alone: not even a god could contemplate such misery (ll.37–39). Alfred's despair shifts to delirium once he is within the castle itself, a transition marked by the appearance of a statue of A.G.A. situated in the interior gallery. Now corroded, its form “mouldered all away,” the statue still outshines the other figurines and portraits in the room, and Alfred addresses it as “Sidonia's deity,” a supreme being capable of rousing wild and unruly states of mind.

Women are occasionally governors of prisons for women, overseers of the poor, and parish clerks. A woman may be ranger of a park; a woman can take part in the government of a great empire by buying East India Stock.

— Barbara Bodichon, A Brief Summary in Plain Language, of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women (1854)

ON OCTOBER 5, 1860, GEORGE HENRY LEWES VISITED a solicitor in London to consult about investments. He wrote in his journal: “[The Solicitor] took me to a stockbroker, who undertook to purchase 95 shares in the Great Indian Peninsular Railway for Polly. For £1825 she gets £1900 worth of stock guaranteed 5%” (qtd. in Ashton, Lewes 210). Thus Marian Evans, called Polly by her close friends, known in society as Mrs. Lewes and to her reading public as George Eliot, became a shareholder in British India. Whether or not Eliot thought of buying stock as taking part in the government of a great empire, as her friend Barbara Bodichon had written in 1854, the 5% return on her investment was a welcome supplement to the income she had been earning from her fiction since 1857. From 1860 until her death in 1880, she was one of a select but growing number of middle-class investors who took advantage of high-yield colonial stocks.1 Lewes’s journals for 1860–1878 and Eliot’s diaries for 1879–80 list dividends from stocks in Australia, South Africa, India, and Canada. These include: New South Wales, Victoria, Cape of Good Hope, Cape Town Rail, Colonial Bank, Oriental Bank, Scottish Australian, Great Indian Peninsula, Madras. The Indian and colonial stocks make up just less than half of the total holdings. Other stocks connected to colonial trade (East and West India Docks, London Docks), domestic stocks (the Consols, Regents Canal), and foreign investments (Buenos Aires, Pittsburgh and Ft. Wayne) complete the portfolio.2

“[S]INCE CHRIST ASCENDED into Heaven, our electric communication with the Creator has been established, and an ever-flowing current of divine inspiration is turned beneficially in the direction of our Earth….” So writes Heliobas, the sage scientist from the East in Marie Corelli's first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds (247; ch. 14). According to this character's religio-technological treatise on the Creation, God is a “Shape of pure Electric Radiance” and each human soul an electric spark emitted from this wellspring in the heavens (237; ch. 14). Many years after Genesis, human corruption and apathy prompted God to restore electric lines of communication with His wayward humans. For this purpose Christ was sent down to Earth, to establish a connection not unlike that made possible by submarine telegraphy; as Heliobas explains, “this Earth and God's World were like America and Europe before the Atlantic Cable was laid. Now the messages of goodwill flash under the waves, heedless of storms. So also God's Cable is laid between us and His Heaven in the person of Christ” (241; ch. 14). Romance's abundant technological metaphors for Christian worship–prayers imagined as telephone calls and the like (223; ch. 13)–culminate in this daring “Electric Principle of Christianity,” which reinterprets Christ as, in effect, a Word dispatched telegraphically (235; ch. 13).

The improbable course of Thomas Cooper's life (1805–1892) – from shoemaker and autodidact, to school teacher, to Methodist circuit rider, to Chartist activist, to prison poet, and finally to working-class lecturer and editor – encapsulates the tensions and contradictions of Victorian self-help. Fiercely devoted to projects of self-education and improvement, as an apprentice craftsman in Lincolnshire, Cooper memorized Hamlet and significant portions of Paradise Lost, and taught himself Latin, French, and some Hebrew. The publication of The Purgatory of the Suicides, the epic poem for which he is best known, made Cooper a minor celebrity in the world of middle-class literary reformers, who praised his artistic and educational accomplishments. The novelist and Christian socialist Charles Kingsley discerned in his heroic commitment to “the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties” an alternative to political militancy and loosely based Alton Locke, the story of a disillusioned Chartist hero's spiritual redemption, on Cooper's own life (Collins 3–4). Samuel Smiles, the Scottish reformer and author of Self-Help, celebrated Cooper's writing as part of a national culture which could help heal the country's social and economic divisions, arguing that his literary achievements placed him in “the same class as Burns, Ebenezer Elliot, Fox, the Norwich weaver-boy, to say nothing of the Arkwrights, Smeatons, Brindleys, Chantrys, and the like, all rising out of the labour-class into the class of the thinkers and builders-up of English greatness” (Smiles 244).

This essay looks at Carlyle's interest in visual and literary portraiture, as the basis for a reassessment of his practice as a biographer in relation to the wider biographical culture of Victorian Britain. Carlyle's fascination with portraits manifested itself in a number of ways. Despite his professed reluctance as a sitter, his face was one of the most visible of his day – painted, sketched, sculpted, photographed, and reproduced for public circulation in engravings and cartes de visite. He collected portraits of his family, friends, and heroes, and was a public champion of the art, most famously through his influential role in the founding of the English National Portrait Gallery. He was also valued by his contemporaries as a portraitist in words, a writer whose graphic style included a striking ability to picture people. Yet only partial answers have been offered to the question of how these activities related to each other and what their significance might be in terms of his career. Paul Barlow has explored Carlyle's concept of the authentic, historical portrait in relation to his proposals for a National Portrait Gallery (“Facing the Past” and “The Imagined Hero”), and John Rosenberg has discussed his pictorial style as a means by which he sought to make history into a secular scripture by “endowing the past with extraordinary ‘presence’” (24). Richard Salmon has given some consideration to Carlyle's engagement with contemporary “portrait gallery” publications as part of his discussion of his ambivalent response to idolatry and literary “lionism” (Salmon 2002). I am indebted to these discussions but I differ from them in arguing that we need to see Carlyle's interest in portraiture, both visual and verbal, as integral to his conception and practice of biography. The fact that he, famously, enmeshes history and biography, in theory and practice, does not invalidate this point. It is with biography and the biographical basis of historical narrative, that he associates the portrait and portraiture. This distinction matters because it shifts us away from the emphasis on Carlyle as an historian that has sometimes occluded his links with his contemporary biographical culture. By restoring these links we can understand more fully the significance both of the portrait within his work, and of his innovative contribution to a broader climate of experimentation with the conjunction of visual and verbal portraiture in life writing at the period.

InImperialism at Home, Susan Meyer explores Charlotte Brontë's metaphorical use of race and empire in Jane Eyre. In particular, she is struck by Brontë's repeated allusions to bondage and slavery and wonders, “Why would Brontë write a novel permeated with the imagery of slavery, and suggesting the possibility of a slave uprising, in 1846, after the emancipation of the British slaves had already taken place?” (71). Meyer speculates, “Perhaps the eight years since emancipation provided enough historical distance for Brontë to make a serious and public, although implicit, critique of British slavery and British imperialism in the West Indies” (71). Perhaps. More likely, I would argue, is the possibility that Brontë was thinking not of West Indian slavery, but of American slavery.

IN THE JEW IN THE TEXT:Modernity and the Construction of Identity (1995) Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb noted that although questions of race, colonialism, and Eurocentrism were now prominent in cultural studies, the ways in which the “Jew” had been represented in modern culture remained relatively unexplored (6). Over the last few years, however, exploration of this kind has burgeoned, bringing with it important challenges both for Jewish studies and for English literary history. The nineteenth century has proved a particularly rich resource for such research, and the importance of this period for considering the relationship between modernity and the “Jew” is underlined by Nochlin:

WALTER HARTRIGHT, THE primary narrator of The Woman in White (1859–60), commences the novel with a declaration – “This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve” – followed by a complaint that relative poverty drove that “story” out of the courts because “the machinery of the Law” relies so heavily on “the lubricating influences of oil of gold” (5). Despite this beginning, the novel's concern with legal procedure is playfully opportunistic. Here Hartright grumbles about the Law's avaricious practice, but Collins will make a lawyer, Mr Wansborough, the key agent in Hartright's enrichment and social elevation. By contrast the novel is deeply engaged with its own historical moment as a time when creative endeavors of all kinds were being transformed by the laws of machinery. And thus it is the vehicle for Collins's metaphorical legal system – the creaking and covetous machine – that points to my present argument: that The Woman in White is English literature's first industrialized kunstlerroman, a portrait of the artist which seeks to reconcile representation and reproduction by equating modern modes of illustration with the primal goals of biological creation.

“Suspend it all,” writes Charles Dickens in the ninth number plan for his novel Little Dorrit (“Working Notes” 207). Referring to the thirtieth chapter, in which Blandois – formerly Rigaud – arrives on the doorstep of Mrs. Clennam's house, this phrase aptly describes how much the chapter moves the plot forward. Mysteries are gestured toward, but the stakes of the mystery are left blank. Rigaud shows surprise upon seeing Flintwinch, but such surprise is inexplicable until we learn at the end of the novel that Rigaud has met Flintwinch's twin brother abroad. We learn more about the mysterious watch that the dying Mr. Clennam bequeathed to his wife, but not much more than the meaning of the letters “D.N.F.” inscribed within it: “Do not forget.” Dickens suspends so much from the reader that it is hard to feel suspense about anything, a fact that is amplified by Rigaud's insistence on “Secrets!” that can be read as a meta-commentary on the chapter itself: “I say there are secrets in all families,” he tells Flintwinch, adding that the house is “so mysterious” (381–82; bk.1, ch. 30).

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:

Midway through the old curiosity shop (1840–41), Quilp returns home to discover his own wake in progress upstairs. He has been absent for three days, dogging the footsteps of the friends and family searching for Nell: materializing at Little Bethel, the chapel Kit's mother attends, or rising from the larder of the inn to which the single gentleman and Kit's mother retire after discovering from Mrs. Jarley that they have just missed Nell. Quilp's wife, having heard nothing from him all this time, has concluded that he has drowned, and so Quilp finds her, her mother, and the lawyer Sampson Brass at work on a descriptive advertisement for his corpse. As Quilp looks on, the group insultingly anatomizes him – “Large head, short body, legs crooked” (Dickens 382; ch. 49) – a process punctuated by the slightly inebriated Brass's musings on the afterlife to which the dwarf might have flown. Brass considers the possibility that the recently deceased might be at that moment watching from the next world, and this thought leads to another platitude about the dead:

In George Eliot'sDanielDeronda, animal vitality figures prominently in shaping the human shell, to use an opening animal metaphor. Approaching the significance of the animal leads to a reading of Gwendolen Grandcourt's character as a responsible creature. Gwendolen is Eliot's heroine, one half of the pair of protagonists around whom the novel revolves. Eliot's fantastic character takes shape in three movements, each punctuated by its own animal metaphor: Gwendolen morphs from Lamia to mastered-animal to white doe. Animal imagery appears at the edge of the human, the point at which humanity gains and loses subjectivity, and Gwendolen's novel is fundamentally one of finding her place in the world, her singularity, her responsibility. Images of animals stand in the linguistic gaps – in the places words fail – to figure the subject.1 Animals appear at the end of the ability of language to mean. Nevertheless, this analysis is not intended to encompass the complex range of animal representations in George's Eliot's oeuvre, or even to catalog every example in Daniel Deronda. Instead, it suggests the possibility of using animal metaphor as a map for reading a Victorian heroine.

A critical darling, Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula features several infamous blood transfusions. In that novel, Lucy Westenra receives blood transfusions from four different men, making her, according to Dr. Van Helsing, a polyandrist (158). In Stoker's novel, transfusion is not about medical verisimilitude so much as about romance or eroticism. Perhaps because of Dracula's status, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 1896 story “Good Lady Ducayne” is often read as a vampire tale because it, too, includes blood transfusions. However, Braddon's engagement with contemporary medicine is very different than Stoker’s, since, unlike Dracula, Braddon's story engages with the experience of day-to-day medical treatment and is strongly invested in medical verisimilitude. Lauren M. E. Goodlad identifies the story's engagement with the medical profession largely through the character of Dr. Stafford, whom she views as a representative of the male-dominated, professional establishment. In Goodlad's reading, Lady Ducayne herself is a figure in both vampire literature and New Woman discourse as an “odd” woman, who becomes an “anti patriarchal figure of women's uncanny power to signify” (213). Goodlad's perceptive reading shows how the female vampire undermines conventional medicine, as embodied by Dr. Stafford. Yet, there is another physician in the story: Dr. Parravicini. If we take Dr. Parravicini as our starting point, we see that Braddon's critique of the medical profession is more wide-ranging and more radical than it previously appeared. What is Dr. Parravicini doing in this story? What is his relationship to Stafford and to the medical establishment? What does Braddon's realistic depiction of anesthesia and transfusion indicate about the medical profession and about the medicalization of modern culture?

In a controversial article on the life and fiction of Charles Dickens, George H. Lewes ponders the inexplicable preference of readers for the novelist's too-simplistic characters over the more complex characters of other writers. He finds an answer in the primitive reaction to fine art: “To a savage there is so little suggestion of a human face and form in a painted portrait that it is not even recognized as the representation of a man” (“Dickens” 150). The implication, it would seem, is that readers turn to Dickens because they are similarly incapable of appreciating more refined modes of art. Today the remark reads as gratuitous and insulting to readers, to Dickens, and to the other cultures Lewes stereotypes as savage. At the same time, the casual nature of the passage also suggests that it reflects commonly held beliefs about primitive life, beliefs we do not have but that Lewes and his readers took for granted. He was clearly safe in assuming such a body of common knowledge, for many other articles in the Fortnightly Review (in which Lewes's article appeared in 1872) had similar references to primitivism. Reading through the journal issues of the time, the extent to which anthropological concepts had escaped the covers of books on primitive society and taken up residence in the pages of review essays on contemporary issues – from history, to life in the colonies, to life in Britain itself – is striking. In its print context, the comment about savages and art is less isolated and inexplicable than it is representative of a broad turn to the topic of primitivism in social commentary and analysis during the 1870s.

ONE OF THE BEST selling volumes of Victorian verse, as Donald Gray has shown, was Thomas Babington Macaulay’s The Lays of Ancient Rome first published in 1842 (Complete Writings 19: 167–279). For a generation after its publication, the Lays also generally enjoyed the praise of critics and poets.1 But in 1860, just months after Macaulay had been interred in Poets’ Corner, Matthew Arnold offered up the Lays as a touchstone of the grandly bad. In his lectures On Translating Homer, Arnold said that “a man’s power to detect the ring of false metal in those Lays is a good measure of his fitness to give an opinion about poetical matters at all” (1: 211). Arnold’s put-down was echoed in later works such as Thomas Humphry Ward’s multi-volume anthology The English Poets (1880), which opened with Arnold’s essay “The Study of Poetry.” Ward cited the continuing popularity of the Lays, but he pointed out that “the higher critical authorities have pronounced against them, and are even teaching us to wonder whether they can be called poetry at all. They find in the Lays the same faults which mar the author’s prose — commonplaceness of ideas, cheapness of sentiment and imagery, made to prevail by dint of the writer’s irresistible command of a new rhetorical force; in a word, eloquent Philistinism” (4: 540).

These lines, taken from the poem “Sweet Home,” were published by Eliza Cook (1818–89) in Once a Week in 1867. Accompanied by Joseph Swain's engraving (Figure 4), the poem presents an idealized portrait of a middle-class family in the nineteenth century. The home is a “blissful, holy place” where “Manhood, Infancy, and Age” can find their “love and peace” as well as “joy and grace.” Of particular interest is that Swain places the female figures – grandmother, mother with a child on her lap, and daughter – at the center of the engraving: their bodies and faces are clearly sketched, whereas father and son, the only two male figures in the engraving, merely show half their faces with their backs turned to the reader. Overall, the poem itself contains some of the striking echoes of the dominant ideology of home at the time. The scene of the family gathered around the hearth illuminates the all-embracing concept of domesticity – coziness, comfort, and intimacy.