In an 1857 Saturday Review article of the novel Two Years Ago, T. C. Sanders characterizes Charles Kingsley's ideal man: he “fears God and can walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours – [he] breathes God's free air on God's rich earth, and at the same time can hit a woodcock, doctor a horse, and twist a poker around his fingers” (qtd. in Haley 108). Tom Thurnall, the fearless, constitutionally robust, well-traveled doctor and hero of Two Years Ago, fits these requirements. His physical strength also manifests itself as a charmed immunity to illness: during a cholera epidemic in Aberalva (a fictional Cornish town), “[Tom] thought nothing about death and danger at all . . . Sleep he got when he could, and food as often as he could; into the sea he leapt, morning and night, and came out fresher each time” (Kingsley, Years 288). Charles Kingsley's own self-proclaimed medical and religious philosophies give clear insight into Two Years Ago's intended effects. A sanitary reformer in the mould of Edwin Chadwick and Florence Nightingale, Kingsley felt that disease arose from crowding, filth, and poisonous vapors. Kingsley's contemporaries named his perspective “muscular Christianity,” recognizing that Kingsley “strong arms” his readers by inspiring in them fear and uncertainty about their own health practices and then shows them the way, with examples like Tom, to an active, devout lifestyle.

Let's face it:Impressionsof Theophrastus Such can be a pretty dreary book. It's all too easy to put it down, especially if you happen to be in the middle of a particularly heavy-handed passage in “The Watch-Dog of Knowledge” or “Debasing the Moral Currency.” Some early readers felt that the real George Eliot had abandoned them in her final publication by ceasing to write fiction, while recent critics have gone to some lengths to show that the narrator, allegedly a minimally published bachelor named Theophrastus Such, is a self-reflexive fictional character whose failings and contradictions are the real subject of the book.1 Who is Theophrastus Such? What is his ethical, political, or scientific orientation? How does his character emerge during the course of the volume? These are questions that have occupied recent critical dialogue. In response, I find myself harboring some sympathy for George Saintsbury, who reviewed Impressions in the Academy of 28 June 1879:

STANLEY FISH RECENTLY IDENTIFIED the intersection between crime and religion as a hot topic, a trend that he gauged by paying attention to a popular television show: “Law and Order…from its beginning…has had its plots follow the headlines. Only if the tension between commitment to the rule of law and commitment to one's ethnic or religious affiliation was, so to speak, in the news would a television writer put it at the heart of a story.” During the same week that Fish published this claim, a Texas woman who drowned her five children had her guilty verdict overturned when it was revealed that an expert witness for the prosecution had made false statements to the court about an episode of the very same show. Commentators on the case said the witness had confused plots from Law and Order with real-life trials. One need not be Oscar Wilde to see a meta-dramatic chiasmus at work here: Law and Order imitates life, but life also imitates Law and Order. The same could be said of popular Victorian crime fiction, which was serialized in eagerly awaited autonomous episodes in a manner not unlike televised crime drama. Victorian authors, moreover, commonly sought inspiration in real-life criminal plots. Like Law and Order, such fictional representations both mirrored and created readers' “reality” outside the text. In this article, I will examine a previously unexplored instance of such fictional recycling and reinvention: L. T. Meade's popular detective series The Sorceress of the Strand, I argue, is an overt rewriting of the strange case of “Madame Rachel,” a notorious female criminal of the 1860s. Before I make my case concerning how, why, and to what end Meade revised Madame Rachel's story, let me briefly summarize the evidence for this connection.

IN THE NEAR DECADE SINCE Herbert Sussman published this journal’s last review essay on the study of masculinities (in VLC 20 from 1992), we in the U.S. have engaged in a heated national debate over “gays in the military,” have participated in a wonderfully perverse (to my mind) public discussion on whether or not oral sex is really “sex,” have seen a muscle-bound ex-wrestler elected governor of Minnesota and a cross-dressing “bisexual” basketball player make national sports headlines for his skills on the court and in front of the makeup mirror. Issues of masculinity — specifically, issues of self-control, proper and improper forms of male self-expression, and the importance (or lack thereof) of traditional adult male “role models” for youth — have been raised by or figured in all of these controversies. Frankly, I have loved the 1990s, have found it a time of enormously entertaining and productive social, cultural, and, yes, scholarly confusion and dynamism. At its best, the decade saw the tackling of some of the most profound issues imaginable regarding the intertwined nature of identity, performance, and politics. At its worst, of course, it simply saw the rehashing of dreary, formulaic answers to some of the toughest questions it dared to pose (a media-encouraged policy of “Oh, ask, please ask, . . . but first let’s promise not to tell each other anything that we don’t particularly want to hear”).

A YOUNG MAN living on a meager tutor’s salary skimps on his expenses to attend an 1882 commemorative exhibit of D. G. Rossetti’s work at the Royal Academy; he then purchases a volume of Rossetti’s sonnets, and makes a pilgrimage to Cheyne Walk where Rossetti had lived. He adopts Aesthetic style more concretely when he moves into a new flat and furnishes it with a dado and a cabinet papered in a Japanese print. In 1886, he subscribes to the library of the Grosvenor Gallery, the institutional center of British Aestheticism. He is tickled by Oscar Wilde’s public performances as an aesthete in 1887, regretting only that Wilde has cut his hair and exchanged velvet breeches for more conventional trousers. Having copied Pater’s famous passage on La Gioconda into his Commonplace Book in 1880, he responds to a trip to Greece years later through a Paterian reverie, trying to recapture the lost, classical Greece he had learned as a child.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY is an important period in the history of psychiatry. According to the accepted narrative about the development of psychiatry as a field, in October of 1793, Philippe Pinel freed the patients at Bicêtre, the hospital for the insane in Paris. This act “heralded a new attitude to the insane,” as Pinel “abolished brutal repression” and “replaced it by a humanitarian medical approach” (Hunter 603). The French physician's approach to madness was officially brought to English soil when his text, A Treatise on Insanity, was translated into English in 1806 by D. D. Davis. His methods then began to appear in English practice and positively bloomed by mid century, particularly in the form of moral management, which advocated freeing patients of physical restraints and emphasizing their abilities to monitor their own behavior, while re-educating them about social mores and expectations (Showalter 27). The period from 1790 to 1850 has been called “the birth of psychiatry” (Donnelly viii).

His anatomy was philosophic, or transcendent, because transcending the vision of the eye, it had the vision of the mind, seeing what the eye alone could never see.

—G. H. Lewes, “Life and Doctrine of Geoffroy St. Hilaire”

Scientific material does not have clear boundaries once it enters literature.

—Dame Gillian Beer, Open Fields

Critics writing on the poetry of Charlotte Mew have long considered the cri de coeur—often described as an involuntary exclamation of the speaker's, or the poet's, secret suffering—a defining element of Mew's poetics; this focus has contributed to an ongoing critical tendency to read Mew's work as pathologically divided between authentic feeling and artificial performance. Due to Mew's liminal position in literary history—writing from the 1890s through the 1910s—her work is often also read in terms of a struggle between Victorian propriety and modernist innovation. Attending to Mew's own use of the phrase “cri de coeur,” however, shows that she used it not primarily to indicate the expression of deep feeling but as a quotable, extractable catchphrase or tag that might circulate independently from its source text in quite different literary and cultural contexts. Reading Mew's poems “The Farmer's Bride” and “The Fête,” as well as her unpublished short story “Thic Theer Kayser,” with this definition of the cri de coeur in mind reveals a poetics rooted in the lively print and performance cultures of Mew's own lifetime—a flexible, entertaining poetics that challenges conventional understandings of the boundaries of literary periods.

AT THE END of the Victorian era and in the first decades of the twentieth century, Israel Zangwill was a well-known name in Europe, America, and even the Middle East. The enormous success of his 1892 novel Children of the Ghetto had made Zangwill the spokesperson for English Jewry throughout the world, as he revealed and explained an alien community to its non-Jewish neighbors and made the universe of the Jewish immigrants more intelligible to their acculturated coreligionists. An early Zionist, Zangwill met with Theodore Herzl in London and attended the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897; he continued to participate in the movement until 1905, when he formed his own nationalist group, the Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO). He became active in the pacifist and feminist movements of the early 1900s, and his literary output of that period for the most part reflects those interests, although he still explored issues of Jewish identity in numerous short stories and the highly popular play The Melting Pot (1908). In all, Zangwill published eight novels, nine collections of short fiction, eleven plays, and a volume of poetry, writing on both Jewish and more general themes; and (with the exception of some of his later thesis drama) his work was for the most part both popular and acclaimed. During the later 1880s and 1890s Zangwill was a prolific journalist, publishing columns on literature and current topics not only in the Jewish Standard, but also in the comic paper Puck (later Ariel, which he also edited), the Critic, and the Pall Mall Magazine. In short, he was very much a turn-of-the-century literary personality, esteemed as one of their own by his Jewish readers, but also prominent in the more general transatlantic literary milieu.

Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin’s views on Turner are sound or not? What does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate, symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word and epithet, is at least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England’s Gallery; greater, indeed, one is apt to think at times, not merely because its equal beauty is more enduring, but on account of the fuller variety of its appeal, soul speaking to soul in those long cadenced lines, not through form and colour alone, though through these, indeed, completely and without loss, but with intellectual and emotional utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought, with imaginative insight, and with poetic aim; greater, I always think, even as Literature is the greater art.

—Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist

WHILE MUCH ATTENTION has been lavished upon the positive and ultimately profitable relationship between Ruskin and Turner, the closeness of their association has served to obscure a more subtle dynamic between the author and the painter in their respective quests for expression. Both Turner, who considered himself a poet as well as a painter, and Ruskin, an accomplished draughtsman who illustrated his own writings, were actively involved in forging new connections between word and image, and in breaking down the barriers between genres embraced by earlier generations. Turner and Ruskin each turned to the sister art both for inspiration, and importantly, for a means of supplementing what each perceived to be the insufficiencies of his own medium. For Turner, painting’s concrete, mimetic nature was at odds with his desire to communicate abstract ideas, while for Ruskin, language’s abstract and conventional nature fell short of our visual experience of the world and failed adequately to address our visual powers of thought, memory, and imagination. Yet as Turner tried to infuse his painting with poetry and Ruskin tried to render his prose visual, they nonetheless remained acutely aware of the gap between words and images. And if Turner and Ruskin readily acknowledged their intergeneric borrowings from the sister arts, implicit within their formulations of “poetic painting” and “painterly prose” is the subtext of the paragone, an age old rivalry between painters and poets for representational or expressive superiority.

I

ON JULY 23, 1830, Parliament passed “An Act to permit the general Sale of Beer and Cyder by Retail in England.” Commonly known as the Beer Act of 1830, this law called for a major overhaul of the way beer was taxed and distributed in England and Wales. In place of a sixteenth-century statute that had given local magistrates complete control over the licensing of brewers and publicans, the Beer Act stipulated that a new type of drinking establishment, the beer shop, or beer house, could now be opened by any rate-paying householder in England or Wales (Scotland and Ireland had their own drink laws). For the modest annual licensing fee of two guineas, rate-payers in England could now purchase a license to brew and vend from their own residence.1

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.

The “deeply felt” quality of Walter Pater's essay on Winckelmann indicates the depth of affinity between these two men. Young Pater shared Winckelmann's religious scepticism, his intense commitment to rationality, and his absorption in the study of art. As well, both shared an erotic temperament and wrote especially for young men. Winckelmann had shown that an explicit homoeroticism might play a key role in cultural interpretation. His writing helped Pater in his effort to counter the Matthew Arnold of “Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment.” Already in March 1864, when Arnold delivered this lecture at Oxford, he was reacting against the second-generation Pre-Raphaelites. At least such a reaction explains his harsh treatment of Heine as a latter-day pagan. Although only a year earlier Arnold had delivered a sympathetic and well-informed lecture on Heine, he now put him in the position of aesthete and ignored important elements of his thought. Walter Pater may well have been one of Arnold's auditors at this time (DeLaura, p. 203). If so, the occasion was prophetic because Heine's position as characterized by Arnold resembles that which Pater would take in 1867 in his second published essay, “Winckelmann” (DeLaura, p. 201). Pater realized as much, hence took steps to subvert the position that Arnold took in his lecture. He supplemented Arnold's view of Greek culture in the time of Sophocles with Winckelmann's playful and sensuous ideal of androgynous beauty in the succeeding age of Praxiteles. Pater reinterpreted Arnold's ideal of the imaginative reason in an erotic light. Arnold's negative treatment of Heine extended to the “peace” between “body and soul” that Heine had prophesied (p. 227). Pater corrected this bias in Arnold and argued instead the importance of the body as a crux of value in a contemporary ideal of culture.

Alfred Price Barrett Moulton-Barrett, known to his family as “Daisy,” was born at Hope End, Herefordshire, on 20 May 1820, the sixth son and tenth child of Edward and Mary Moulton-Barrett.

He was fourteen years younger than his eldest sister Elizabeth, whose essay, “Glimpses into My Own Life and Literary Character,” reprinted in pp. 121–33 of this volume, shows that she already “read Homer in the original with delight inexpressible, together with Virgil.” She had also completed in 1817–18 her first major work in verse, The Battle of Marathon, which appeared in print, through her father's indulgence, in the year of Alfred's birth. Thus she was already established as a scholar and a poetess, already somewhat set apart from her brothers, except the beloved “Bro” with whom she shared the study of the classics.

Most of “Pan and Luna” is addressed not to an internal auditor but to what Gerald Prince calls the “virtual reader,” the reader the author imagines himself or herself to be writing to – in the case of “Pan and Luna,” the Victorian reading public. Prince observes:

Every author, provided he is writing for someone other than himself, develops his narrative as a function of a certain type of reader whom he bestows with certain qualities, faculties, and inclinations according to his opinion of men in general (or in particular) and according to the obligations he feels should be respected. This virtual reader is different from the real reader: writers frequently have a public they don't deserve. (9)

In addition to the distinction between the virtual reader and the real reader, Prince makes a further distinction between the real reader and the ideal reader. From the writer's point of view, “an ideal reader would be one who would understand perfectly and would approve entirely the least of his words, the most subtle of his intentions” (9).

In 1947–48 Vernon Rendall wrote the first essays on George Eliot's use of the classics in her novels and supplied the first tentative list of authors she was acquainted with: Aeschylus, Aristotle, Epictetus, Homer, Nonnus, Pausanias, Sophocles, Thucydides, and Xenophon in Greek; Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Livy, Persius, Plautus, Quintilian, Tacitus, and Virgil in Latin. Rendall pointed to Sophocles and Horace as Eliot's favorites in each language. She is like the tragedian in that “Sophocles does not let himself go” in “the delineation of the passions”; and she “never lets herself go.” Horace is not only the Latin poet she most persistently alludes to but also the one she most nearly assimilates in the wit and point of her style. Of the other Greek writers, Aeschylus provided George Eliot with that concept of Nemesis which pervades her novels. The Latin writers supplied her with happy tag phrases diat punctuate the speech of feckless gentlemen – “A quotation or two adorns the whole man,” according to Heine – like Arthur Donnithorne and Arthur Brooke; in addition, they allowed George Eliot to give Politian and Scala ammunition for academic warfare in Romola. In his comments on Sophoclean control, Horatian wit, Aeschylean Nemesis, and classical allusion, Rendall initiated the study of George Eliot's use of the classics. He broke ground for others to excavate.

Finding themselves with more money and more time in which to spend it, the middle classes began in the 1860s to renegotiate their relationship to the arts, and to theater in particular. Recording and rendering visible this process of cultural change are the popular sensation novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, author of Lady Audley's Secret, and the numerous dramatic adaptations of her work. Braddon shares with Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott the distinction of being one of the novelists whose work was most frequently adapted for the stage. Unlike Dickens, however, she often responded favorably to the efforts of her adapters. This congenial relationship resulted, no doubt, from the three years she spent performing on the provincial stage in the late 1850s. Her continuing interest in the theater and theater people is reflected in their frequent appearance in her novels.

In his groundbreaking study of Victorian pornography, The Other Victorians, Steven Marcus draws on passages from The Romance of Lust (1873–76) to elucidate his now-famous term, “pornotopia.” To Marcus's mind, this text, like other pornographic novels, has few, if any, redeeming features. While the literary novel fleshes out the lives of its characters, pornography dwells endlessly on fleshly relations, he argues. Pornography, in fact, tends towards utopian fantasy, towards pornotopia. “More than most utopias,” says Marcus, “pornography takes the injunction of its etymology literally – it may be said largely to exist at no place, and to take place in nowhere” (268). In a pornotopia, time is always bedtime (269), life begins not at birth but at the moment of sexual awakening (270), and relations between characters are merely juxtapositions of bodies, body parts, and organs (274). Introducing an orgy scene from The Romance of Lust, Marcus asserts, “[t]his novel comes as close as anything I know to being a pure pornotopia in the sense that almost every human consideration apart from sexuality is excluded from it” (274). Pornography's lack, that is, its apparent disconnection from realistic settings and human relations, is a consequence and sign of human deprivation. “Pornotopia could in fact only have been imagined by persons who have suffered extreme deprivation,” he holds, “and I do not by this mean sexual deprivation in the genital sense alone. . . . The insatiability depicted in it seems to me to be literal insatiability, and the orgies endlessly represented are the visions of permanently hungry men” (273). Thus, “[i]nside of every pornographer there is an infant screaming for the breast from which he has been torn” (274).

In March of 1861, Thomas Henry Huxley was regularly drawing crowds of six hundred working-class men to Piccadilly for his Thursday night anatomy lectures. In a letter to his wife, Huxley reported that his evolutionary message was a success: “By next Friday evening they will all be convinced that they are monkeys” (L. Huxley, ed. 1: 205). Two years later, the notes from these lectures would make up the core of his popular work of comparative anatomy, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature.

AMIDST THE CAST OF Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers (1857) is the stunningly beautiful “Signora Madeline Vesey Neroni,” who turns the heads of readers and characters alike. “It was impossible,” the narrator informs us, “that either man or woman should do other than look at her” (ch. 10). Dark and mysterious, brilliant and alluring, Madeline Neroni entices the swains of Barchester to pay her court, then toys with them mercilessly and enjoys watching them writhe. The fact that she is both beautiful and without compunction may do little to set her apart from other Victorian villainesses, Trollope's Lizzie Eustace, for instance, Wilde's Mrs. Cheveley or, more infamously, Thackeray's Becky Sharpe, but while Lizzie, Mrs. Cheveley, and Becky ultimately meet with poetic justice, their fortunes descending as their ruthless self-interest becomes increasingly apparent, Madeline keeps herself carefully protected. Pristinely beautiful from first to last, La Signora Neroni guards her virtue and maintains an even temper, bemused both by those who hate her and by those who court her, ultimately returning with her family to their home in Italy, apparently unchanged by her experience in Barchester society. Madeline has a strange kind of integrity; she is a powerful figure, a force to be reckoned with, able to stand up with equal ease and self-assurance to the daunting Mrs. Proudie, the earnest Arabin, and the slick Mr. Slope.