As we planned this special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture, the editors of VLC and I engaged in a lively exchange – what title could capture such a sprawling arena of concern? Victorian India seemed short and sweet. And yet one must ask, which Victorian India? Whose Victorian India? Do we mean India and Indians in the British Isles? British traders, soldiers, and administrators in Britain or Indian subjects across the subcontinent? What about an imagined Britain in India? An imagined India in Britain? The essays collected here represent varied answers to these questions. They also chart the recent parameters of what Albert Pionke calls in his essay “the epistemological problem of British India.” Before returning succinctly to the baker's dozen articles assembled here – for readers will want to encounter them without unnecessary commentary – I turn to the conjoined issues animating both these essays and much recent work on British imperialism: issues of historiography and epistemology.

MY TITLE is derived from G. H. Lewes's psychological magnum opus Problems of Life and Mind (1874–79). Lewes's image is a metaphor for the relation of mind to brain, or more generally of the mind to the nervous system: “every mental phenomenon has its corresponding neural phenomenon (the two being as convex and concave surfaces of the same sphere, distinguishable yet identical)” (Problems: First Series 1: 112). His point is that, though the two entities can be analytically distinguished, they are as necessarily linked as the two surfaces of a bending plane. Like the recto and verso of a sheet of paper, or signifier and signified in the linguistic sign, one can make an interpretative separation of the two, but not an ontological one. It is a characteristically deft metaphor by Lewes to express a notoriously vexed relationship, not only in Victorian psychology but also in modern thinking today.

As Cambridge historian J. R. Seeley writes inThe Expansion of England (1883), the fear of colonial secession, inspired by that of the United States, haunted Britons’ perception of their “second Empire” throughout the nineteenth century, effectively working against a sense of shared national destiny with the white settlers of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia (14–15). One important way Victorian writers combatted the “optimistic fatalism” Seeley observed in his fellow Britons was through an imperial economy of affect, which circulated sentiment and stressed emotional identification between settlers and metropolitan Britons (15). If mid-nineteenth-century British literature can be said to negotiate the tensions of Britain's empire through representations of racial, cultural, and linguistic difference, then narratives of sameness – of British families across the oceans – offer models for cohering the British settler empire. In such a model, techniques designed to reinforce the sentimental bonds of settlers to their families might also reinforce the social, political, and affective connections of the settlers to the metaphorical “mother country.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh has become a key text for feminist critics concerned with nineteenth-century women writers. For some, Aurora Leigh is a revolutionary poem, a passionate indictment of patriarchy that speaks the resentment of the Victorian woman poet through a language of eroticized female imagery. For others, the poem is less explosive, and Barrett Browning's liberal feminism is seen as compromised by Aurora Leigh's eventual dedication to a life governed by traditionally male directives. In my view, however, Aurora Leigh is neither revolutionary nor compromised: rather, it is a coherent expression of Barrett Browning's conservative sexual politics, and I shall argue that female imagery is employed to show that the “art” of the woman poet performs a “service” for a patriarchal vision of the apocalypse. In Aurora Leigh woman's art is made the servitor of male ideal.

This morning—the last of the dying year—all that was mortal of Robert Browning was borne from the old home at 29, De Veregardens, Kensington, to the stately Abbey at Westminster. The body had been lying encased in an air-tight coffin, covered by a purple satin pall edged with gold lace, surrounded by wreaths. So numerous were the wreaths that subsequently the hearse could not contain them, and a couple of vehicles had to be employed to convey them.

Scientific and hermeneutic studies, which held the attention of Robert Browning7's contemporaries who were sensitive to Christology, made Scripture and the “book of nature” seem even more inscrutable. A prominent theme in many Browning poems, “How very hard it is to be / A Christian” (Easter-Day, lines 1–2), pertains not only to behavior but also to the influence of spoken, written, or printed discourse on historical and canonical matters. In Karshish's epistle to Abib, Cleon's letter to Protus, and multiple analyses of a parchment concerning St. John's death, Christianity appears not just a religious and cultural phenomenon, but a changing philological and interpretive one affected by “the ineptitude of the time, / And the penman's prejudice” (Christmas-Eve 871–72). For Victorians and later readers, anxious about being on the brink of a post-Christian age and therefore inclined to idealize their ancestors' religious confidence, Browning's portraits of Christianity's first century are a chance to review inherited discursive practices. He represents Christianity's vocal and textual foundations to accentuate “hermeneutics, … how poets find authority and means to communicate in written language and how readers derive meaning from poetic texts … or an event qua text.” (Peterson 363). Browning is less troubled by “higher” or “lower” critics, attuned to the perils of logocentrism, than by nervous religious and literary disciples who understand his poetics no better than they adapt to the altered theological climate.

“A trial and a literary text,” Shoshana Felman once noted, “do not aim at the same kind of conclusion, nor do they strive toward the same kind of effect. A trial is presumed to be a search for truth, but technically it is a search for a decision; and thus. . . it seeks not truth but finality: a force of resolution.” Literature, on the other hand, Felman posits, is characterized by “a search for meaning. . . for heightened significance, for symbolic understanding” (Felman 55). Trials function to curb the proliferation of meanings in favor of finality, if not absolute truth, whereas literature allegedly forgoes such determinacy. A corollary of this distinction has to do with language itself: while law seeks to fix linguistic meaning, literature draws attention to the inherent instability of meaning.

This article reads Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders (1887) and Jude the Obscure (1895) as ambivalent responses to the new conception of human intelligence that emerged from Victorian psychology and evolutionary theory and which formed the basis of what I describe as the Victorian biopolitics of intelligence. Although these novels reflect Hardy's endorsement of the new biological model of intelligence, they also register his resistance to what many late Victorians assumed to be its corollary: that mental worth can be an object of scientific measurement, classification, and ranking. I suggest that the work of the philosopher Jacques Rancière illuminates the extent to which these novels challenge the scientific reification of intellectual inequality and attempt to vindicate overlooked and stigmatized forms of intelligence.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh is an unusual Victorian heroine because she ultimately combines career and marriage. Although Aurora's story has been recognized as an important revision of a traditional woman's story by such famous readers as Virginia Woolf (182–92) and Ellen Moers (60–62), some feminist critics have been disturbed by the ending, even as they describe its compelling feminist vision. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, while acknowledging that the story is a “rescripting,” argues that “being an artist is, at the end, reinterpreted as self-sacrifice for the woman, and thus is aligned with feminine ideology” (87). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that Aurora has to learn “not to be herself,” that is, she must learn sympathy and service (576–77). Deirdre David goes even further in asserting Barrett Browning's conservatism when she argues that Aurora's art does not subvert Romney's authority; instead, feminine art serves “male socialist politics” and “a woman's voice [speaks] patriarchal discourse – boldly, passionately, and without rancor” (134).

In the April issue of the Quarterly Review of 1863, H. L. Mansel, Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, disparaged “sensation” novels by comparing them to cheap fashion wear. “A commercial atmosphere floats around works of this class, redolent of the manufactory and the shop,” he taunted, “The public want novels and novels must be made – so many yards of printed stuff, sensation pattern, to be ready by the beginning of the season” (500). To scholars of Victorian literature, Mansel's analogy now serves as a commonplace for literary commercialism. Its other emphasis, which is on fashion, however, has received less attention. This paper examines Wilkie Collins's use of dress in Armadale (1864-66), as presented in the example of Lydia Gwilt's favoured attire, a “black gown and a red Paisley shawl”; and suggests that Collins uses the Paisley shawl to provide an indirect reference to the Indian Mutiny. In particular, the essay argues that as well as generating a humanised reading of Lydia's character, her shawl is a powerful metaphor to symbolize mid-century anxieties about class and empire.

One of the peculiar challenges facing scholars who wish to write about Thackeray's fiction is locating a dominant critical account to argue against. The MLA Bibliography contains a great number of examples of scrupulously argued, compelling research into Thackeray's body of writing, but few if any of them have reached any kind of canonical status as the (or even one of the) interpretive accounts that define how critics understand his fiction. It can seem, for example, that Thackeray is either consciously or unconsciously evaded by many scholars seeking to develop overarching, defining accounts of the nineteenth-century novel. In two works that helped set the terms for decades of critical conversation about nineteenth-century literature – Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987) and The Novel and the Police (1988) – Nancy Armstrong and D. A. Miller each give at most a passing mention to Thackeray (he shows up four times in Armstong's book; never in Miller's). In their equally influential bodies of criticism, Mary Poovey and Catherine Gallagher provide no sustained – or even fragmentary – treatment of Thackeray's work. Moving into the twenty-first century, one would look in vain for a chapter on Thackeray in Amanda Anderson's The Powers of Distance (2001), Sharon Marcus's Between Women, and Alex Woloch's The One vs the Many (2003) – books that have provided us with key terms, issues, and methods to do our work. (To readers of this journal, it might be not necessary to say the following: Thackeray's fiction includes many illustrations of the phenomena discussed by these works – cosmopolitanism, female-female friendship, and minor characters – so his absence cannot be explained solely on this basis.) And to move backwards from the 1980s, Steven Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, and Raymond Williams produced pioneering analyses of the links between history, ideology, and Victorian literature, but Thackeray's writing played almost no part in their elaboration of those links, with Hillis Miller focusing on Thackeray only in one short essay and one book chapter among his large body of scholarship and Williams omitting him altogether from The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970).

This article explores the representation of British sailortown and merchant sailors onshore in the context of their representation in Victorian writing and contemporary journalism. It proposes that sailortown functioned as an urban setting which offered the traveling or returning sailor an important sense of homeliness—a homeliness that was paradoxically based on the promotion of a collective and worldly belonging. This sense of “worldliness” was articulated through aspects of ornamental material culture ranging from sailortown's visual display of nautical and transnational symbols, to the interior arrangements of places of hospitality such as Sailors’ Homes, to sailors’ own forms of portable property. By thinking more closely about the relationship between the domestic and the global in the context of maritime culture, the article proposes that the ornamental features of the seafarer's life, in all its diverse manifestations, serves to reveal the paradoxes and rich ambivalences that underscore the situation of the nineteenth-century sailor onshore.

In the anonymous “The Charter and the Land” (1847), a story about the Chartist Land Co-operative Society, William Wright's drunkard's path is remarkably short and his subsequent journey to teetotalism is astonishingly easy. Displaced in urban London and without sustainable work, Wright slowly and somewhat predictably takes to the bottle. The lack of detail the author gives regarding Wright's waywardness suggests that the narrative was common enough to be truncated. Unemployment, poverty, and forced idleness receive a good deal more attention than the ensuing moral downfall. Still, Wright's wife grows increasingly worried as the small amount of money she brings home is cruelly taken from her and spent by her husband in the alehouse, and not on food for the children. After witnessing familial conflicts over spending, readers familiar with the drunkard trope might expect spousal abuse, crime, and death. But one day, out of the blue, Wright says he has for weeks given up drink, instead using the family money to purchase lottery tickets for a stake in the Land Co-operative Society, what was to become the National Land Company in 1846. Feargus O'Connor founded the Company in 1845 in part to allow urban working classes to return to a more rural and stable way of life and in part to create working-class landowners who could subsequently qualify for the franchise. Wright wins a few acres of land outside of London and though the work promises to be challenging, he is happy to have it. The Wright family settles happily in their new home and has nothing but the possibility of more unmitigated happiness to celebrate. Pleasing his wife to no end, Wright promises total abstinence and the story comes to an abrupt conclusion.

How might literary and cultural spheres intersect with the Anthropocene, the epoch — however defined — of humanity's detectable influence at geological scale? What forms, genres, objects, and methodological lenses might prove most fertile in mediating between the concept's abstraction and its concrete entailments for literary and cultural history? Such questions have already commissioned a range of critical projects that attempt to reframe the Anthropocene itself: as a trope of science fiction, given how humans are “terraforming” the planet (Heise 215–20); as an object for media archaeology, considering the “signatures” that our aggregate actions are leaving in the physical strata of the earth (Boes and Marshall 64–67); and as a challenge to the categorical distinctions by which historical study is practiced, with its blurring of “human history” and “natural history” (Chakrabarty 201–07).

In 1872, Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré began publishing their lavish travelogue, London, a Pilgrimage. Much renowned for his illustrations of Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, Idylls of the King, and other significant literary texts, Doré's considerable reputation as an artist fetched him a staggering sum of ten thousand pounds as payment for his work in London, a Pilgrimage. Jerrold, responsible for conceptualizing the project, was an established liberal playwright and journalist, often contributing pieces to the Daily News, Illustrated London News, and Athenaeum. Looking for interesting material, Jerrold and Doré traveled all over London; Doré often made notes on the spot and finished the illustrations later. Seeking to situate their work within the field of social exploration, Jerrold and Doré referenced Henry Mayhew's reformist journalistic series, London Labour and the London Poor. Jerrold claimed that their social investigation would reproduce for contemporary readers Mayhew's categories of “those who work, those who cannot, [and] those who won't work” (“Frontmatter”). Volumes of London, a Pilgrimage, however, were reviewed as gift-books in various periodicals; the Examiner, for example, reviewed it in the “Christmas-Books” section, indicating that these volumes, which contained pictures of lower-class shanties and miserable, under-fed people, were being gifted and enjoyed (“Christmas-Books”).

LARGELY OVERLOOKED in Collins scholarship, the 1872 novel Poor Miss Finch: A Domestic Story describes the complicated relationships between a young blind woman, Lucilla Finch, and twin brothers, Oscar and Nugent Dubourg. Lucilla's blindness results in her aversion to dark colors, and as she and Oscar fall in love, he must deploy a series of elaborate deceptions in a desperate attempt to keep from her his own dark secret–that his skin has been turned blue by medication prescribed for his epileptic condition. Following an extraordinary operation, Lucilla's eyesight begins to return, and Oscar's carefully guarded secret of blueness threatens to destroy their relationship. The plot of Poor Miss Finch explores the ways in which Oscar hides his blueness from Lucilla as well as the duplicitous function of his twin, Nugent, who stands in for Oscar as Lucilla begins to regain her sight. At every turn, Poor Miss Finch mines issues of identity and investigates the ways in which identity becomes withheld and disclosed–closeted and uncloseted–through a series of spectacular deceptions that enable the keeping of secrets.

Rudyard Kipling's final novel, Kim (1901), begins with an intriguing – if paradoxical – description of the eponymous Kim, or Kimball O'Hara: he is an “English” boy with an Irish name and Irish parentage who speaks “the [Indian] vernacular by preference” (1). While the narrator hastens to reassure the reader that Kim is both “white” and “English,” Kim is also “burned black as any native” and speaks his supposed “mother tongue,” English, in an “uncertain sing-song” (1). If we are to take Kipling's assertion at face value, that Kim is, indeed, “English,” then certainly this is a kind of Englishness that is divorced completely from the racially pure ideals of Anglo-Saxon whiteness that were privileged by many racial theorists earlier in the nineteenth century. As an Irish Celt, Kipling's protagonist is always already at a layer of remove from ideals of pure Englishness, but Kipling renders Kim's racial identity even more complicated in the text. The manuscript of Kim gives us some telling clues about the contexts that inform Kipling's peculiar descriptions of “burned black” whiteness in his finished novel. While the published text baldly declares that “Kim was English. . . . Kim was white” (1; ch. 1; emphasis mine), parts of the manuscript are much less certain of this fact, as that document asserts that Kim “looked like a half caste” (Kipling, Kim o’ the ‘Rishti n. 3). And while Kipling ultimately removed this explicit link between Kim and Eurasian bodies in the opening of his published text, this disavowal is neither complete nor convincing throughout Kim. For instance, in the novel, the narrator later describes a “half-caste woman who looked after [Kim . . . and] told the missionaries that she was Kim's mother's sister” (1; ch. 1). While this woman is not, in fact, the boy's aunt, Kim's near-familial tie with her underlines the intimate connection between him and the hybridized subjects of empire. Indeed, Kim demonstrates ideological and affective links to non-white Others and to people of mixed race, and this connection between whiteness and racial hybridity is of central importance to Kipling. If Kim is tenuously white, then he can only perform this whiteness in immediate proximity to racial hybridity, with which whiteness is ideologically contiguous in this text. As I contend in this paper, Kim reveals the under-examined links between early twentieth-century ideas of white British identity and descriptions of imperial miscegenation. In Kim, “White” and “English” emerge as a vexed pair of signifiers that reveal unprecedented traces of racial and national hybridization.

This essay looks at how the question of late-Victorian imperial decline is contested, formulated, and framed within Guy Boothby's A Prince of Swindlers – a popular, yet critically-overlooked, collection of detective stories set in Calcutta and London, that appeared in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. There is, of course, a familiar critical narrative about the Victorian fin de siècle that characterises the era as a particularly fraught period “of mounting complexity and contradiction” with regard to empire (Dixon 2). The Berlin Conference of 1885, the failure of British Troops at the Siege of Khartoum, the so-called scramble for Africa, the undermining of Britain's steel manufacturing superiority by German and American competition, and the decline of the Royal Navy relative to the navies of France, Germany, Russia, and Italy all underscored the fragility of British imperial dominion. As Patrick Brantlinger puts it, “After the mid-Victorian years the British found it increasingly difficult to think of themselves as inevitably progressive; they began worrying instead about the degeneration of their institutions, their culture, their racial ‘stock’” (230).