In chapter 8 of Dorian Gray, Dorian reflects on the terrifying discovery, which he has made the previous night, that the painting has been somehow altered to express his own moral state. He speculates thus on a possible explanation for the change in the picture:

A review of F. D. Maurice'sLectures to Ladies on Practical Subjects in 1856 considered the question of “female visiting” among the poor with reference to Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South. Though agreeing that it is “the subject of much anxiety,” the reviewer illustrates the value of female philanthropic visiting with a reading of Gaskell's novel:

PART OF THE EXCITEMENT of reading Victorian woman’s poetry lies in its manifold refusals to adopt wholesale the codes and conventions of the male poetic tradition. Such refusal may manifest itself in the bold rewriting of forms (as in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese), or in the unhinging of domestic or romantic pieties through irony and other doubling strategies (as in Dora Greenwell’s “Scherzo” or Christina Rossetti’s “Winter: My Secret”). Both the rewriting of male forms and the attack on conventional ideologies opened up new subject positions for women. For example, women’s responses to poetic tradition and to each other’s work initially made use of expressive theory to explore sexual and religious passions simultaneously (as in the poetry of the Brontës), while towards the end of the century, when religion and sexuality were not so inextricably intertwined, women could openly celebrate non-hierarchical sexualities (as in the lesbian poems of Michael Field).

Although romance QUA romance is often seen as leading to the grim finality of the Victorian marriage plot, Charlotte Brontë's second novel, Shirley (1849), thwarts readerly expectations. Brontë cautions the reader that “if you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken,” but also teases that “it is not positively affirmed that you shall not have a taste of the exciting” (39; ch. 1). This disavowal, coupled with contradicting hints of romance, appears in the second paragraph of Shirley and establishes the vexed dynamic surrounding the marriage plot present throughout the novel.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century future or speculative fiction became big business in Britain. It was a safe haven for invasion narratives, for socialist paradises or hells, for worlds ruled by benevolent machines, or worlds ruined by mechanical dependence. Themes and plots were varied, but they always reflected some facet of contemporary society. The future was not a bubble, untouched by time or trouble, but a field of battle, where ideas could be tested and philosophies given a test drive. The future was a place where the mistakes or triumphs of today dictated the course of human progress. I argue in this essay that the nascent ideas about euthanasia of the early and middle Victorian period became full-fledged philosophies in the late-Victorian period and that Malthusian philosophy and Darwinian-informed theories were manipulated by novelist and theorist-turned- novelists, resulting in euthanasia becoming a tool in class warfare and in the fight to eradicate social undesirables for their good and for the good of society.

In 1881 William Powell Frith (1819–1909) exhibited a painting at the Royal Academy in London titled For Better For Worse (1881; oil on canvas; Private Collection). It depicts a well-to-do wedding Frith had witnessed in Bayswater (Figure 3). The newly married couple are represented crossing the pavement on a red carpet, just about to step into a waiting carriage pulled close to the kerb. The audience for their departure comprises a broad mix of classes and types. In his own description of this work, Frith identified the bride and groom, the bride's family and friends arranged on the steps of the house, plus a crowd standing behind the red carpet that included street boys, a Jewish second-hand clothes seller, and a policeman. In the foreground, on the left, a family of beggars approach from the street, while on the right-hand side, with his back to the viewer, stands a figure identified by Frith as an Italian boy with a monkey (2: 209–10).

THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT, WITH the publication of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë established a landmark in the history of the novel, but there is little agreement as to exactly what she accomplished or how she pulled it off. Brontë's detractors, as well as her defenders, have often stopped short of treating her as a mature artist or social theorist, explaining her power as “personal” or “autobiographical.” They adjourn further analysis of such qualities by expressing their distaste for, or at best, faintly embarrassed appreciation of, her intensely personal, perilously autobiographical, violently passionate style. There is a family resemblance between Matthew Arnold's disgust at Brontë's “hunger, rebellion and rage” (Letters 132), Virginia Woolf's wariness of her “self-centered and self-limited” but “overpowering personality” (Common Reader 222–23), and Terry Eagleton's ambivalent acknowledgment that Brontë's novels, though politically compromising, nonetheless contain a radical “sexual demand – an angry, wounded, implacable desire for full personal acceptance and recognition” (xix). Each of these critics, to varying degrees, distrusts the personal and emotional as factors that pull Brontë (and her readers) too close to herself and too far away from either her social conscience or her art. Of course, in The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar valorize rather than regret Brontëan rage, but they still emphasize the violent emotion, on the verge of spinning out of control, pervading her “confessional art” (440).Gilbert and Gubar consider Brontë's oeuvre, especially Villette, “a literature of consciousness,” claiming that Brontë is “in some ways, a phenomenologist – attacking the discrepancy between reason and imagination, insisting on the subjectivity of the objective work of art, choosing as the subject of her fiction the victims of objectification, inviting her readers to experience with her the interiority of the Other” (440).

In 1895, the Critic published an anecdote about two young ladies discussing the popularity of George Du Maurier's novel Trilby (1894):

This essay reads nineteenth-century imperial India as the mise en scène for certain critical concatenations of human sovereignty, divinity, and animality. It does so by focusing on the imperial state's war upon human and extrahuman forms of predation, showcasing in the process a cluster of texts on collective criminal activity, hunting, and popular religion and folklore that share certain grids of intelligibility and vocabularies of rule. Collocating these texts on human and nonhuman predation brings into visibility the degree to which imperial sovereignty in the Victorian period entails traffic across human and extrahuman domains. Thus, thinking about the sanctioned killing of fearsome animal predators comes to be twinned with thinking about wars of pacification against dangerous humans and noxious deities. To think imperial sovereignty consequently involves thinking with humans and animals but also thinking with mutually antagonistic theological forces, Hindu and Christian—and in thinking these together. An attentiveness to these heterogeneous ecologies of empire might serve to illuminate the degree to which the imperial project depends on a complex mesh of transversal and co-constitutive life-forms and forces.

For Frances Trollope, the nineteenth century was defined by what she perceives to be a pervasive mechanization of emotional life, a phenomenon similar to what Tamara Ketabgian has recently described as the “industrialization of affect” in this period. At the center of this phenomenon, for Trollope, is the disquieting specter of the mother-machine, a figure in whom the processes of mechanical production and maternal reproduction collide. The figure originates, in Trollope's fiction, in the character Juno, an enslaved woman whose alienation from her children under slavery serves as a major plot point in her groundbreaking 1836 antislavery novel The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw; or Scenes on the Mississippi. That figure is then reworked in the violent relationship between children and machines Trollope would go on to depict in her 1839–40 novel, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, one of the first industrial novels published in Victorian England. In these early fictions, Trollope documents what she perceives to be the mechanization of the maternal body under, alternately, slavery and industrialism, and its consequences for both the work and experience of care under nineteenth-century capitalism in its varied forms.

Much of the critical writing on Queer Theory and Sexuality Studies in a Victorian context over the last decade or so has been absorbing, exploring, complicating, and working under the burden of the influence of Michel Foucault's theoretical writings on erotic relations and identity. The first volume of Foucault's The History of Sexuality (1978), in fact, had begun with a gauntlet thrown down before Victorian Studies, a chapter-long critique of Steven Marcus's The Other Victorians (1966), a work that had offered an entirely new and at the time, quite bold avenue of exploring nineteenth-century culture – namely, through the pornographic imagination that Marcus taxonomized with precise, clinical flair as a “pornotopia” in which “all men . . . are always infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or both. Everyone is always ready for everything” (276). In Foucault's telling, however, Marcus demonstrated a theoretically impoverished faith in Freudian models of “repression” in Marcus's examination of “underground” Victorian sexualities. It was Marcus's reliance on the “repressive fallacy,” his conviction that there existed a demarcated spatial and psychic Victorian counter-world that The History of Sexuality had so forcefully undermined.

Few topics connected to the study of colonial India have produced quite as much scholarship in recent years as the issue of colonial Indian education reform. The past decade alone has witnessed the publication of no fewer than eight English-language books on the subject, as well as a steady stream of journal articles. Part of the appeal of such research is no doubt a result of India's privileged place in the British Empire during the nineteenth century. In 1881, India's first complete census documented the existence of 253,891,821 Indian subjects living under the British Raj – or, to put it another way, a population nearly ten times the size of England and Wales's own population during the same period. For scholars, education offers a particularly fruitful site for understanding British colonial ideology. In addition, it provides an important glimpse into the lives of Indian subjects. An extensive print archive, manifest in sources as diverse as political speeches, bureaucratic files, periodicals, and memoirs, has greatly aided research into the development of colonial education. At the same time, the tendency for research to privilege particular regional focuses has left troublesome gaps in the historical record.

Matthew Arnold cuts a familiar figure in narratives of Victorian secularization, although commentators often cast him in contradictory roles. In some accounts we meet him as an elegiac liberal who laments the loss of a no-longer-tenable faith but feels powerless to produce an alternative – “Wandering,” in a famous couplet, “between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born” (Arnold, “Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse” 85–86; see Miller 212–69). Meanwhile other studies portray Arnold as a cautionary example of aggressive counter-secularization, a humanist whose vaunted ideal of “Culture” becomes as absolutist as the religion it is designed to replace (Williams, Culture and Society 125–26). What both accounts share, however, is an understanding of secularization as the process whereby a definite thing called religion lost its hold upon European public life, leaving worried intellectuals to search for substitutes. Since the Second World War this view of secularization has come under increased scrutiny from sociologists, historians, anthropologists, and lately some literary critics; yet it remains difficult to imagine nineteenth-century literary history without it, largely because it is a narrative that was first developed by major Victorian writers like Arnold himself. Perhaps the best way, then, to engage Victorian crisis-of-faith writers is to follow the lead of recent commentators like Talal Asad and Michael Kaufmann and reframe the problem in discursive terms. Rather than retrace the rise and fall of two definite things called religion and secularity, Kaufmann argues, we should instead assume from the outset that “[t]here is no idea, person, experience, text, institution, or historical project that could be categorized as essentially . . . secular or religious” and mark how the significance of this opposition gets reordered in “varying discursive contexts” (Kaufmann 608; see Asad 25–26). We can see such thinking at work in recent scholarship that effectively replaces “secularization” with the conceptual emergence of religion as such – that is, the modern redescription of religion as a specific and limited sphere of human life, marked by certain energies (the irrational, the affective), whose role within the public is considered problematic. Anthropologist Timothy Fitzgerald, for instance, suggests that the Enlightenment turn toward regarding religion as the arena of strong personal belief was instrumental in establishing the space of the secular in the first place, insofar as it helped to define by contrast the new public sphere of “this-worldly . . . freedoms, laws, and markets” (Fitzgerald 5). Similarly, historian Callum Brown argues that late eighteenth-century Evangelicalism produced, as a sort of necessary pair, both the sociological idea of religion as an empirically discrete thing and our popular notion of religion as under threat or in decline (C. Brown 1–34).

In May 1855, Charles Dickens confided to a friend that he had found a “capital name” for his new work, Nobody's Fault, a title that remained until he completed the first three numbers and renamed it Little Dorrit (Letters 7.703). The original title has generally been assumed to refer to Dickens's broad attack on the lack of accountability in government, particularly in relation to the Crimean War. However, the phrase also evokes the issues of financial impropriety that permeate the novel. In particular, Arthur's obsessive concern that through his parents’ grasping at money “some one may have been grievously deceived, injured, ruined” (39; bk. 1, ch. 5) links his personal sense of guilt to the more public instance of financial “ruin” in the book – the collapse of Mr. Merdle's fraudulent schemes. In both cases, the question of agency remains ambiguous. Who is at fault for the bankruptcy of Clennam & Doyce: Arthur, who invested the firm's money in Merdle's ventures; Pancks, who convinced him of their soundness; or Merdle, who perpetrated the fraud? And who bears responsibility for the financial deceit that deprived Amy Dorrit of her rightful inheritance from Arthur's grandfather: Mrs. Clennam, who hid the codicil; Arthur's father, who colluded in the concealment; or Arthur, who, along with his parents, benefited financially from the transaction? Out of these ambiguities emerges one figure that becomes the locus of responsibility and blame for both transgressions – Arthur Clennam. Against the express wishes of his solicitor, Arthur steps forward to become the “solitary target” for the “thousands of people. . . wildly staring about for somebody alive to heap reproaches on” in the aftermath of Merdle's downfall and suicide (599; bk. 2, ch. 26). His actions give public expression to his private sense of familial guilt, allowing him to declare openly, “I am at fault.”

Founded in medieval monasticism, the University of Oxford has always been nervous about women on its premises. For six hundred years, the other sex was comprehensively shut out. It was not until 1879 (some time after Cambridge) that a token few female students were admitted at the collegiate enclave of Somerville (Mallet 432). Oxford dons were bound to formal celibacy until the 1870s. And even after the erosion of this rule, women continued to be seen as fatal presences at the university: a fear burlesqued in Max Beerbohm's novel Zuleika Dobson (1911), where the arrival of one sexually desirable girl drives the whole of Oxford's undergraduate population to lemming-like suicide in the Isis.

When first published in 1855, Doctor Antonio immediately caught the imagination of English readers, in part because it seemed a beguilingly unusual creation. Although written by a former Italian exile, Giovanni Ruffini, it had been composed in an English that struck critics as of the purest in its evocative simplicity and fervid earnestness. And while narrating a familiar story of an English heart captivated by the beauty of Italy and its inhabitants, it told the story largely from the unaccustomed viewpoint of an Italian protagonist. This Italian also perceived a charming freshness in the English heroine's idealistic vision of his country. Perhaps the novel thereby conveyed the subtle but interesting impression that the Italy of the Englishman's romantic dreams owed as much to the imagination and desires of the English beholder as to the realities of Italy itself.