Three ghostly white plants float suspended atop the Prussian-blue background of a 27 x 21 cm print (fig. 1). Their leafy fronds are so exquisitely fine that in some places the blue bleeds through their tissues to expose delicate quiltings of veins and willowy inflorescences. Opaque white patches mottle each of the plants to signal where multiple layers of plant flesh overlap. The interplay of shapes, color, and textures in the image captures an atmospheric effect of alien beauty, nearly incomprehensible. That is, until the small label at the bottom of the print in meticulous penmanship informs us that we are looking at Delessaria sanguinea, a type of red algae commonly known as “Sea Beech.” This is one in the thousand-plus body of images that comprises Anna Atkins's Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. Dedicated to documenting England's native seaweed, ferns, and flowering plants, Atkins's photographic botanical project ranged about a decade (October 1843–53) and resulted in multiple editions she would give to friends and cultural institutions. While she primarily helmed the project herself, she occasionally included her father, zoologist and photography enthusiast John Children. For the last couple albums, she enlisted as a co-creator her “like a sister” Anne Dixon, who collected, arranged, and developed the images alongside Atkins.

“Strange, that a pair of silk stockings should so upset a nation.”

— Oscar Wilde, quoted in Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde

TODAY, WE TEND TO ENVISION the male Aesthete as a lanky, long-haired swain outfitted in velveteen pantaloons and clutching an outsize sunflower, an image straight from George du Maurier’s Punch cartoons or Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience. Serious scholars of Aestheticism often prefer to resist this parodic image, insisting on the movement’s significant philosophical development in Ruskin’s and Pater’s work.1 Yet Aesthetic fashion was not just a frivolous side effect of the movement. In fact, Aesthetic fashion was the focus of late-Victorian attention because it so clearly displayed the anxieties, stresses, and formulations of the movement. It was a battlefield for competing voices within Aestheticism; it was a stage whereon the various gender notions of the movement could be displayed; and it functioned as both a critique and a form of art. This article examines the theoretical rationales for Aesthetic fashion, focusing on the paradigmatic figures of Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, and George du Maurier. They demonstrate how Aesthetic men developed new visual codes to reconfigure their fear of feminization, creating a new kind of body which could be read as an essential, unchanging, scholarly, and artistic icon.

With every tool man is perfecting his own organs…. by means of spectacles he corrects defects in the lens of his own eye; by means of the telescope he sees into the far distance. Man has become a kind of prosthetic god.—Freud, Civilization and its Discontents DOROTHY VAN GHENT'S “View from Todgers's” classic essay of 1950 (about perspective in Martin Chuzzlewit) might be defined as the starting point for what we now accept as the veriest Dickens commonplace: the fact that an interchange between animate human subject and inanimate object characterizes his world view. The boundaries of person and material thing are permeable, are constantly criss-crossing, according to Van Ghent, in a “system that is presumed to be a nervous one…. its predications about persons or objects tend to be statements of metabolic conversion of one into the other” (221). But this persistent reading, expressed here in biological terms–“nervous” system, “metabolic conversion”–of Dickens's stylistic habit, itself depends upon attributing to Dickens the critic's sharp distinction between the “human” and the “inhuman” or “non-human.”

The very idea of Victorian cosmopolitanism might at first glance seem an oxymoron. Historically bracketed by a Romanticism that took political inspiration from France and intellectual cues from Germany and by a modernism whose most prominent “English” personnel were largely from overseas, the Victorians can look decidedly parochial. The most incisive recent attempts to link cosmopolitan thinking to specific formal or stylistic innovations have tended to leave the Victorians out of the picture. A recent essay by David Simpson, for example, nominates what he terms the Romantic “historical-geographical epic” as a critically cosmopolitan genre – one whose barrage of footnotes ruptures the surface of the text and ensures that even in surveying the exotic Other, Romantic epics guarantee that “the pleasure of poetry sits uneasily but inescapably alongside the burden of critique” (150). On the modernist side, Rebecca Walkowitz's Cosmopolitan Style (2006) has compellingly excavated the links between a host of modernist experimental practices and the project of thinking creatively outside national boundaries – reaching the conclusion that “there is no critical cosmopolitanism without modernist practices” (18). Neither Simpson nor Walkowitz deals with the Victorians in depth, but a certain idea of nineteenth-century realism hovers as the implicit contrast to the genres and practices they catalogue.

HOW DID IT COME TO THIS? How did the precious coin of the sovereign become the twaddle of misguided preachers? Where did condescension go wrong?

This collection of essays turns to the nineteenth century in order to weigh the legacy of its holistic conception of systems and to resurrect alternative discourses of openness, permeability, and indeterminate relation. If modern ecocriticism has sometimes been hobbled by a restrictively organic, harmonious conception of how ecologies work, we wager that a return to Victorian interrogations of natural and social collectives can furnish more open, less integrated models for how assemblages operate. The nineteenth century saw both the first acceleration of anthropogenic climate change and the birth of a host of sciences-economic, social, geological, energetic, and (yes) ecological-that now struggle to address the planetary implications of that acceleration. Our growing awareness that we are now living in the long tail of this conjuncture and at the birth of the Anthropocene has prompted a re-evaluation of what we think we know about how nature and society work, and how they might work together.

The clean and the proper (in the sense of incorporated and incorporable) becomes filthy, the sought-after turns into the banished, fascination into shame.—Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror THE HISTORY WE ARE SKETCHING is one of boundaries double crossed between India and the West and between periods of the South Asian past. On one level our story is about an historical irony, how late nineteenth-century Orientalism resuscitated the romantic mystique of the eastern dancer in the West just as South Indian dancers were being repressed in their homeland by Indian reformers influenced by western mores. Within that history there is another dynamic that is less about crossing than about shifting boundaries, boundaries between the sacred and the profane and their expression in colonial law. We will be looking at these movements and transformations within the context of current scholarship that is historicizing even those elements of Indian culture conventionally understood to be most ancient and unchanging.

For those of us whose life's work consists of the study of the Victorian Era, nothing is plainer than the fact that one cannot escape from “things.” Indeed, for many of us the wealth of detail and artefact available is one of the attractions of the era: who could resist the hats, coaches, buttons, newspapers, lengths of ribbon, packets of tea, bits of old lace, sugared plums, ink pots, keys, and pocket watches that clutter the pages of Dickens, overflow from Gaskell, and crowd in amongst the characters of Collins, Thackeray, Trollope, Eliot, and Brontë? The Victorians had a preoccupation with and predilection for the careful and considered acquisition and utilisation of objects, and this preoccupation has become a focus for critical trends in this area. In 2003, Lynn Pykett wrote that “The Victorians were fascinated with objects and things – but recent scholarship has proved equally fascinated with this Victorian obsession” (1). This obsession can be traced back to a turn in Victorianist criticism in the 1980s, beginning with Brigg's Victorian Things and based on theories of commodity culture in writers such as Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, and Walter Benjamin, towards an interdisciplinary interest in material culture and particularly in consumer culture and theories of consumption and commodification. More recently critics have moved away from Marxist explorations of objects as commodities, to explore the possibilities of the object in contexts other than those generated by discourses of exchange value, production, and consumption, adopting cultural materialist and new historicist approaches to the objects of Victorian culture and literature. This movement has become known as “Thing Theory.” Starting with Bill Brown's seminal work, A Sense of Things, in 2003, critics have sought for ways of explaining the relationship between the subject and the object in terms other than those of the capitalist market system, in order to take account of the complexities of the object as a signifier. This review seeks to give an overview of these two critical perspectives on the objects of Victorian studies, from the roots of “thing theory” in consumer culture and commodity studies, to the key texts and indicative readings which have shaped “thing theory” as a discipline. Starting with a look at some key texts on consumer culture in the nineteenth century, I then move on to look at those “thing theory” works which have moved away from a focus on the object as commodity, towards cultural materialism and an understanding of the Victorian “object” beyond its role in consumer culture. Finally, I look at some readings indicative of the work currently being published in the field.

RECENT ATTEMPTS at a critical recuperation of the fiction of Charlotte M. Yonge have largely sidestepped the issue of her work's commitment to a religious perspective. June Sturrock's brief 1995 monograph, “Heaven and Home”: Charlotte M. Yonge's Domestic Fiction and the Victorian Debate over Women, is focused on the way in which Yonge's Tractarian beliefs provided a framework within which a conservative feminist account of an independent social role for women could be articulated, but takes those beliefs themselves as givens. Catherine Sandbach-Dahlström's more substantial 1984 study, Be Good Sweet Maid: Charlotte Yonge's Domestic Fiction: A Study in Dogmatic Purpose and Fictional Form, whilst noting a relationship between apparent changes in Yonge's religious beliefs and differences in the form of her novels, is characterized by a formalist mode of interpretation which tends to bracket off the question of how Yonge presents religious belief in her novels from any wider context in Victorian religious thought.

I. Privileged Spies

TOWARD THE END of Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), the most infamous femme fatale of the Victorian novel retires to her dressing room after a long day of committing arson and attempting murder. Shamming a headache, Lady Audley sends her maid from the room. The narrator explains her motive:

My title brings together two cultures — Indian and British — and three phases of womanhood — the bride, the widow, and — through suttee — the dead widow. Suttee, or sati, is the obsolete Hindu practice in which a widow burns herself upon her husband's funeral pyre. In this essay I wish to explore how sati was used as a metaphor in British novels and periodicals in the nineteenth century — used both as a metaphor for the British widow's mourning rituals and for the plight of the British bride in an unhappy marriage. I shall argue that sati forms a nexus connecting the seemingly disparate situations of the bride and widow, and that it also in this metaphorical sense forms a nexus or point of comparison between British and Indian culture.

WHEN CLOTH OR CLOTHING made for a specific purpose in one cultural context begins to be produced as a commodity and is appropriated as fashion by a different culture, meanings reverberate on both sides of the transaction. The commercial traffic with India in the nineteenth century brought many such commodities into the homes of the English middle class. Some of these items, and particularly textiles, led a double life, functioning at once as exotic foreign artifacts and as markers of proper Englishness. If mid-Victorian novels may be said to have assisted in circulating and crystallizing, rather than merely reflecting, social norms among their readers, then the regularity with which certain Indian textiles and especially shawls reappear in these novels bespeaks their burgeoning importance both commercially and ideologically.

Crowds of miserable Irish darken all our towns.

—Chartism

THUS WROTE THOMAS CARLYLE in his famous long pamphlet Chartism, published in December 1839. But what moved Carlyle, the intellectual hero of the age, to direct attention in Chartism to the Irish presence in the early Victorian city? Why did he present the Irish in England in such negative terms? Was his analysis correct? And what was the wider significance of his interpretation? These, as Carlyle might have said, are measurable questions and they form the essential framework of this paper. Yet it is impossible to respond to these questions without first examining the contemporary social, economic, and political contexts within which Chartism was written; Carlyle’s development as an historian in the early 1830s; and the purpose of Chartism, including the chapter on the Irish entitled “The Finest Peasantry in the World.”

IN 1856, WHEN MANY VICTORIAN PHYSICIANS WERE STRUGGLING TO DEFINE A MODEL OF CLINICAL MEDICINE, the reviewer of one collection of case histories voiced his dismay at the physician-author's preference for “dreadful incidents” and “cases exceptional and strange” (“Works” 473). Indeed, although physicians of the clinical era did not disguise their efforts to achieve a new kind of discourse, productive of a “realist” vision, few acknowledge how often the “clinical” case history of the nineteenth century also shares the romantic discourse of the Gothic, especially its interest in the supernatural and the unexplainable and its narrative aim of arousing suspense, horror, and astonishment in the reader. Literary critics have also focused primarily on the association of medical narrative with a realist literary discourse. Nineteenth-century physicians did campaign for the formal, objective, and professional clinical discourse that serves as their contribution to a realist aesthetic, in the process explicitly rejecting eighteenth-century medicine's fascination with “the curious” and its subterranean affiliation with the unknown, the unexplainable, and the subjective. But, as I show in this article, a discourse of “the curious,” allied with a Gothic literary aesthetic, stubbornly remained a critical element of many case histories, though it often presented under the mask of the more acceptable term, “interesting.” The discourse of Gothic romance in the case history provides a narrative frame that, unlike the essentially realist clinical discourse, could make sense of the physician's curious gaze, which had become nearly unrecognizable as a specifically medical vision. Indeed, a “curious” medical discourse haunts even case histories of the high clinical era, late in the century; and it energizes the nineteenth-century Gothic novel. Samuel Warren's novel Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician–deplored in the quotation above–illuminates this tradition of “Gothic medicine” as it plays out in the nineteenth-century novel. This tradition, I argue, provides the novel with a powerful model of cultural contamination and conflict in its yoking of disparate discourses. Gothic medicine demonstrates the importance of clinical medicine to literary romance, and it cannot help but reveal the ghost of “the curious” in the clinic.

IT IS THE EARLY AFTERNOON of October 7, 1857. Charles Hadden Spurgeon ascends to the pulpit and announces, “there are such things as national judgments, national chastisements for national sins” (1). The topic is the electrifying and as yet unresolved “Mutiny” in India.I place “Mutiny” in quotation marks in my title and throughout my text. My intention is to recall that such a naming of the 1857 rebellion is already an interpretation, and one that has been cogently questioned, notably by the historians Chaudhuri and Stokes, both of whom find their place within my argument. However, I retain this naming in my text as it is, throughout the Victorian era and in the early twentieth century, the most common and recognizable way of referring to the 1857 uprisings in India. The speaker is arguably the most popular preacher of the mid-Victorian period. I do not, however, attach a special importance to Spurgeon's words simply on the basis of his engaging topic and his personal celebrity. Spurgeon is speaking in the Crystal Palace, that signal monument to mid-Victorian England's preeminence among nations; he has before him an assembled crowd of 24,000 listeners. Spurgeon, moreover, is not alone in sermonizing on rebellion in India on this particular day. More or less simultaneously reverend preachers all over the British Isles are weaving their way through the “Mutiny” topic. Queen Victoria, as one learns from the dailies of September 28 (I take my text from the Morning Post), has declared October 7 a national “fast-day”: “We, taking into our most serious consideration the grievous mutiny…in India, command…a Public Day of Fast, Humiliation, and Prayer…so both we and our people may humble ourselves before Almighty God, in order to obtain pardon for our sins” (Victoria 4).

IN THE PREFACE TO HER twenty-five volume series of novellas, Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–33), Harriet Martineau advertises her attempt to popularize the emergent science of political economy. However, at the same time that she justifies her plan to illustrate various principles of political economy through her use of narrative form, Martineau goes further, arguing for the global scope and significance of this contested and often misunderstood new science. Toward the close of her preface, she writes:

THE NEW WOMAN was both a discursive formation and a figure produced by materialist history as a result of debates over marriage, sexualities, political rights, labor conditions, life styles, and fashion. Unnamed until 1893 (Tusan 169), the “New Woman” became a lively topic in the press only in 1894 (Schaffer, “‘Nothing’” 39–40), at which point the rhetoric aimed at actual women quickly transformed into attacks on or defense of a literary phenomenon – in part, Ann Ardis suggests, because a literary controversy was less threatening than the prospect of actual social change (12). The “‘props’” attributed to the New Woman by Punch, the preeminent periodical to construct the literary stereotype, included five defining activities: “She smoked, rode a bicycle, frequented women's clubs, read voraciously and wore bloomers” (Miles 247). Scholars have long acknowledged that the New Woman did not suddenly appear but had a pre-history dating back to the 1880s (e.g., Ledger 23). A crucial part of that pre-history in life and in print was the founding of the “Literary Ladies,” a women writers' dining club, in 1889. The club not only represented significant innovation in fin-de-siècle authorship but also, more crucially, precipitated in the press the “props” (bloomers excepted) that would typify – and target – the New Woman from 1894 onward.

MR. POTTER'S MUSEUM OF CURIOSITIES was a small Victorian museum that contained unique anthropomorphic tableaux made by the taxidermist Walter Potter (1835–1918). Its glass cases were crammed with small “stuffed” or “mounted” animals, such as birds, squirrels, rats, weasels, and rabbits, wearing miniature clothes and placed in models of the human settings of Potter's time. They play sports, get married, fill schoolrooms and clubs, but they also illustrate well known sayings, rhymes, and rural myths. From the 1860s the tableaux were displayed in Bramber, Sussex, in the southeast of England. In 1972 the Museum was sold and relocated to Brighton and two years later to Arundel, in Sussex. In 1985 it was sold again and moved to the Jamaica Inn – a Daphne du Maurier inspired tourist attraction on the edge of the bleak Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. The collection was finally dispersed in an auction sale in 2003. This sale attracted some media attention and several campaigns attempted to preserve the museum intact. The artist Damien Hirst claimed he had offered to buy the entire collection, but the auction went ahead (Hirst). Hirst was perhaps only the most high profile of those campaigning to keep Potter's collection together. Nevertheless, at the time it seemed hardly surprising that this unusual museum stood more chance of being rescued by an artist whose work often uses animal corpses to speak of mortality and the processes of preservation and decay, than it did of being bought by any public museum.

THE VICTORIANS' PASSION FOR plants has been well established as a defining feature of the period, and scholars from the humanities and the sciences – from literature, history, anthropology, botany, art, and religion – have lavishly documented how this obsession pervaded every aspect of nineteenth-century British life, creating what was truly the golden age for the “Culture of Flowers,” to borrow the title of Jack Goody's ethnobotanical study tracing traditional and ceremonial uses of flowers through history and around the globe. As Brent Elliott argues, improvements in greenhouse design beginning in 1817 and the use of the Wardian case from the 1830s for transporting plants by ship led to an unprecedented number of plant introductions to England, especially those intended for ornamental purposes (8–13). Decorative plants either of the indigenous, old-fashioned varieties or exotic new species were now widely available and visible everywhere – in vast public garden beds or small cottage plots; in pots or cut arrangements in the homes and on the window sills of the middle class and the well-to-do; in theaters, meeting halls, and fashionable shops; in churches for weddings, funerals, and holidays; in the boutonnieres of dandies and at the wrists, bosoms, and in the hair of ladies; for sale on the streets in flower carts and stalls; and in the shops of the burgeoning florist trade.