“Salvation lies not in tight lacing,” Carlyle quips in the opening of Book II of Past and Present by way of defending the loose structure of his comparative study of English society in the early 1840s. Critics still disagree sharply in their estimates of Carlyle's political argument, but the loosely-laced structure of Past and Present has allowed Book II, with its portrait of twelfth-century monasticism and Abbot Samson, to remain fairly immune to controversy. In fact, most readers, whether they applaud or dismiss the rest of Past and Present, would agree with A. M. D. Hughes that “it is in virtue of this interlude … that the book belongs among the classics of our tongue.” Several editors have gone so far as to sever Carlyle's tenuous connection between past and present altogether, printing the section devoted to Abbot Samson separately under a new title.

The eight plays Robert Browning wrote before Men and Women (1855) are the least read and, by common consent, the least successful of his works, but they deserve attention from anyone interested in Browning's ideas. In agreeing that the blame must be divided between the “romantic temper of the age” and the poet's “inability to objectify conflict,” critics have dismissed Browning's dramatic efforts as “laboratory experiments” which taught him mainly that he could never be a dramatist and should restrict himself to psychological analysis in poetry. But if Browning was uncertain about how to say what he wanted, he was not at all uncertain about what he wanted to say, and a study of the repeated patterns of theme and characterization in the plays shows that the experience of writing for the stage provided an invaluable opportunity for him to work out his developing moral philosophy. The demands of stage presentation forced him to crystallize his unresolved ethical theories and led him to that study of motivation without which the great character studies of Men and Women could not have been written.

When, in an episode in the long courtship by mail between Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, Elizabeth “confessed” that she was to be numbered, in religion, among “those schismatiques of Amsterdam” Donne talks of, Browning, always the opportunist in the affair, fired back: “Can it be you, my own you past putting away, you are a schismatic and frequenter of Independent Dissenting Chapels? And you confess this to me—whose father and mother went this morning to the very Independent Chapel where they took me, all these years back, to be baptized—and where they heard, this morning, a sermon preached by the very minister who officiated on that other occasion!” The Independent Chapel in question was, of course, the Locks Fields Chapel, or, as it came to be called, the York Street Congregational Church, at Walworth, about a mile from the Brownings' Camberwell home, south of London; and the minister was a George Clayton. Browning's credentials as a schismatic were, however, less obvious than he implies. On his father's side Browning's people, in fact, were members of the Church of England (his grandmother was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman), and in the 1830's he and his sister also attended evening services at Camden Chapel, a separate offshoot from the parish church of St. Giles, in order to hear the more “eloquent and earnest” sermons of Henry Melvill, “Melvill of the Golden Mouth,” whose sermons were also highly approved by John Ruskin. If Clayton's Independent Chapel was nonetheless the family church, there can be no doubt that this was because of the influence of Browning's mother, already a member there before marriage. About 1820, her husband, raised in the Church of England, followed her and officially joined the York Street Congregation.

The medieval revival was a great imaginative force for more than a century in art, literature, politics, and culture. Its imprint is most visibly recorded in the architecture of the age which, with greater or lesser fidelity to the past, delivered its sermons in stones. It was also present in the whole texture of nineteenth-century thought: in the imagery with which it expressed and surrounded its daily life and in a broad network of values and ideas that similarly sought to recapture an idealized vision of history. Far more than Orientalism or Classicism, it took hold of the spirit of the age, causing a whole era to reverberate with the memories and associations of a half-actual, half-imagined past.

The theatricality of modern politics is an axiom available to every headline writer, every talk show host, and every college professor. National and international politics have become a branch of theater which is a branch of advertising. And most people who bother to note this commonplace complain about it. With the presidency of a movie actor, the headline writers have tended more and more to acknowledge the metaphor that animates their own activity. The press with its words and pictures, the newsreel, and then television have very self-consciously assumed the function of the stage in this century. Politicians step in as its actors while ad agencies produce, and we the people quietly sequestered in our living rooms play an uneasy role as a dispersed and silent audience, the weakest component of a global metaphor that has been with us at least since Shakespeare's time.

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.

“Sure I am that all the light we can let in upon our own minds, all the acquaintance we can make with our own understandings, will not only be very pleasant, but bring us great advantage in directing our thoughts to the search of other things.” Locke/— Under the authority of so great a man, I proceed to the investigation of myself with no small anxiety— Hitherto I have forgotten myself, I have thought neither of my few perfections or my many failings— I have endeavoured to insinuate myself into the windings of other souls, of other characters— I have endeavoured, I may say, to seek truth with an ardent eye, a sincere heart—of that I can boast—but I have never, even in imagination looked into my own heart— How few indeed know themselves! The investigation of oneself is an anxious employment— The heart may appear corrupted by vanity, exalted by pride, soured by ill temper, & then that brilliant phantom, so dear to every soul, self estimation, fades for ever, & those shining clouds, on which you have soared so often to fame, sink under self-debasement—but shall such weakness prevent us from looking into ourselves? No.— I am not vain, but I have some tincture of pride about me, which I fear not to own, on the contrary which I like to boast of— I am not at all insensible to flattery, when in a proportionate degree, but when outraged, I am conscious of it— I prefer praise most when seasoned with censure, as it then appears in the light of truth— I detest flattery when offered by those whom I feel unworthy, I detest flattery when carried, as I said before, beyond just limits— I confess that I enjoy fame more than any worldly pleasure; I know it is transient, & yet I worship it as such— I am fond of reading & of all literary occupations— I hate needlework & drawing because I never feel occupied whilst I work or draw— I know not why, but I always am fatigued— Dancing I consider mere idleness— I abhor music.— I am told it is the trouble of learning that I dislike— It is not so— I have no desire to learn— I always feel weary, full of ennui at the Piano— I sit down discontented, and I rise disgusted.

Forgery is now considered an offence of the greatest magnitude;… In proportion, therefore, as a nation increases in wealth by buying and selling, it will magnify the criminality of a fraud by which buying and selling may be checked. The change of opinion will show itself in the penal laws, and in the not less deterrent force of social reprobation.

—Luke Owen Pike, History of Crime in England (1876)

Thomas hardy was at work on his last novel, Jude the Obscure, when two of the best-known New Woman novels of the 1890s, Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins and George Gissing's The Odd Women, appeared in 1893. Hardy read The Heavenly Twins, or at least parts of it, in May 1893 and noted its criticism of the “constant cultivation of the [female] animal instincts” (i.e., the marital and maternal instincts) in his notebook (qtd. in Literary Notebooks 2:57). Hardy met Sarah Grand later in the spring and praised her to his friend Florence Henniker as a writer who had “decided to offend her friends (so she told me) — & now that they are all alienated she can write boldly, & get listened to” (Collected Letters 2:33). Hardy was also at this time looking into the popular short-story collection Keynotes (1893) by George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Clairmonte), from which he copied a passage concerning man's inability to appreciate “the problems of [woman's] complex nature” (qtd. in Literary Notebooks 2:60). Hardy's interest in George Egerton continued for several years. He wrote to Florence Henniker in January 1894 and reported that he had “found out no more about Mrs. Clairmont [sic]”; Sue Bridehead at this same time was still “very nebulous” (Collected Letters 2:47). Two years later, Hardy had found the author of Keynotes and finished his novel: he wrote to Mrs. Clairmonte in late December 1895, two months after the publication of Jude the Obscure, and commented on their shared interest in the Sue characters “type”: “I have been intending for years to draw Sue, & it is extraordinary that a type of woman, comparatively common & getting commoner, should have escaped fiction so long” (Collected Letters 2:102). Hardy's comment suggests that Sue's origins were, at least in part, real New Women, and that he had been following the New Woman phenomenon for several years. Hardy had completed work on Jude in the spring of 1895 while simultaneously reading another New Woman novel, the best-selling and controversial The Woman Who Did (1895) by Grant Allen. Hardy wrote to Allen in February 1895 to thank Allen for sending a copy of the novel and to express his praise for the book, which he had read “from cover to cover.” Hardy added that it “was curious to find how exactly [Allen] had anticipated my view” (Collected Letters 2:68).

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.

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.

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.

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

THE POPULAR LEGEND used to be that at supper in 1895, Bram Stoker had “a too generous helping of dressed crab,” and that the crab begot the subsequent nightmare which in turn begot Dracula (Ludlam 99). This theory was nullified, however, by the discovery in the 1970s of Stoker’s working notes in the Rosenbach Foundation library of Philadelphia.1 Stoker, it seems, made his initial memorandum for the novel on March 8, 1890 while on holiday in Whitby, where Dracula was eventually to disembark in canine semblance. By February 1892, he had sketched out a plot, complementing a nod to the new technology — Kodak cameras, portable typewriters and recording phonographs — by situating events in the next calendar year, that of 1893. The retrospect over an interval of seven years in Jonathan Harker’s “Note” comprising the final pages of the novel would thus imply a date of composition of 1900; they were actually written, however, by Stoker, in July 1896, and one may wonder whether his official chronology was at this point to the forefront of Stoker’s consciousness. Arguably, July 1889 would have been precisely among the candidates to have been a portentous date, epitomizing an epoch when “we all went through the flames,” so far as the inspiration of Dracula is concerned (378; ch. 27).2

“The book was nothing like the film,” complained one of my students about a week or so after the premiere of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010). Barely able to contain his disgust, he added: “I expected it to be as exciting as the film, but it turned out to be dull – and it appeared to be written for children!” Stunned with the virulence of his reaction, I thought how much his response to the book mirrored – as if through a looking glass – that most common of complaints voiced by many reviewers and overheard in book lovers’ discussions of film adaptations: “not as good as the book.” Both views reflect the hierarchical approach to adaptations traditionally employed by film studies and literature studies respectively. While adaptations of Victorian literature have been used – with more or less enthusiasm – as teaching aides as long as user-friendly video formats were made widely available, it is only recently that film adaptation started to be considered as an object of academic study in its own right and on an equal footing with works of literature (or, for that matter, films based on original screenplays). Adaptation studies came into its own in early twenty-first century on the heels of valuable work done by scholars such as Brian McFarlane (1996), Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (1999), James Naremore (2000), Robert Stam (2000), Sarah Cardwell (2002), and Kamilla Elliott (2003) which paved the way for a consideration of film adaptations beyond the fidelity debate. The field was solidified with the establishment in 2006 of the UK-based Association of Literature on Screen Association (called Association of Adaptation Studies from 2008) and the inception of its journal Adaptation, published by Oxford University Press, in 2008. Interdisciplinary in nature, the field primarily brought together literature and film scholars who insisted that adaptations were more than lamentably unfaithful or vulgar versions of literature mired in popular culture and market issues on the one hand, or merely derivative, impure cinema on the other. The foundational tenets of adaptation studies therefore included a non-judgemental and non-hierarchical approach to the relationship between the text and its adaptation, and a keen awareness of film production contexts. These vividly illustrate the field's move away from discussing fidelity to the “original” which, thanks to the work of Linda Hutcheon (2006), started to be increasingly referred to simply as “adapted text.” Hutcheon's book came out at the same time as another foundational monograph on the subject, Julie Sanders's Adaptation and Appropriation (2005) which contributed to the debate through its focus on intertextual links and the palimpsestuous nature of adaptations, in which debate on fidelity was substituted with the analysis of the distance between the text and its adaptation(s).

An actor is one who repeats a portion of a story invented by another.

— George Moore, “Mummer-Worship” (1891)

THE COMPLEXITIES OF GEORGE MOORE’S CHARACTER, his reactions to Victorian life, and his experimentation with literary styles and genres make him a persistently marginal, albeit intriguing, character in literary studies. “[H]is best work,” Lloyd Fernando has observed, “rests to this day in an artistic as well as social limbo which resists complete definition” (10). A Mummer’s Wife (1885), his second novel, has been studied for Moore’s debt to French novelists, in particular Flaubert, or for the author’s reaction to the British circulating libraries’ power.1 In response to controversy over A Mummer’s Wife’s perceived crudeness, Moore claimed “I have a great part to play — I am fighting that Englishman [sic] may exercise a right which they formerly enjoyed, that of writing freely and sanely” (qtd. in Hone 114), even appointing himself “un ricochet de Zola en Angleterre.”2 Without exception then, author and scholars regard A Mummer’s Wife as a transitional work, the book that brought naturalism into the British tradition. The novel, however, suspended in that artistic and social limbo, has not come under scrutiny for additional and alternative readings.3

To read closely Nathaniel Hawthorne's Marble Faun in light of its genesis is to discover a series of remarkable parallels between the author, who sometimes copied passages from his notebooks into his romance, and the character Hilda, who copies paintings. But the correlations do not end there: they extend to Sophia, Hawthorne's wife, who resembles Hilda and who carried on her own practice of selectively copying her husband's journals for publication after his death. No matter what caused him to copy in the first place, Hawthorne's manner of composing in part by copying served him as artistic and psychological motivation to develop a certain theme. In this case, Hawthorne's activity of self-borrowing while composing The Marble Faun finds reflection in its theme of copying, and the character Hilda reflects not only Sophia but Hawthorne himself. In The Marble Faun Hawthorne created a microcosm of his current obsession with the practice and implications of copying.