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.

In 1843, during a decade marked by political and cultural recognition of the industrialization and urbanization of Britain, a number of plays concerned with city life and the representation of the city were produced on the popular stage in London. These plays were variously called The Bohemians of Paris, The Scamps of London, The Mysteries of Crime, The Mysteries of London or The Mysteries of Paris. Arguably the first and most influential play about the city in the nineteenth century was William Thomas Moncrieff's Tom and Jerry; or Life in London (first performed in 1821). Imitated and adapted throughout the century (Nicoll 96–97), Moncrieff's play was itself an adaptation of Pierce Egan's book, Life in London, which was illustrated by the brothers George and Robert Cruikshank. This particular combination of writers and illustrators is a powerful one, as, collectively and individually, these artists had much to do with the activity and energy of urban popular culture in the first half of the nineteenth century. George Cruikshank, especially, is important in the modernization of the popular art of this period, while William Moncrieff was a prolific dramatist and notable for his use of topical material. Not only was Moncrieff one of the first dramatists to adapt Egan's Life in London for the stage, but his interest in the theatricality of the city and its richness as theatrical source material continued in later melodramas, particularly The Heart of London and The Scamps of London. It is in the Scamps, Bohemians, and Mysteries plays that early century representations of the city assume their most powerful form, and it is William Moncrieff's version which will be my specific focus here.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Nineteenth-century reviewers, though they disagreed about nearly all aspects of the sensation phenomenon, were united in diagnosing the sensation novel as a symptom of modernity. In a review of novels by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, Henry James noted that their books were typically set in “Modern England – the England of to-day's newspaper” and featured protagonists who were “English [gentlewomen] of the current year, familiar with the use of the railway and the telegraph” (593). Like Bram Stoker's Dracula some four decades later, Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862) represented “nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance” (Stoker 67; ch. 3). But Braddon's novel was also “a sign of the times” because it betokened the rising awareness of modernity's tendency toward rapid obsoleteness (“Our Female Sensation Novelists” 485). The critical hostility directed against it at the moment of its greatest success in the 1860s also had the effect of exposing the seeds of transience that constitute the paradoxical essence of novelty.

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.

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.

This essay returns to the early nineteenth-century prehistory of ecology to argue that the anthropocentrism of Victorian social novels should be understood as a deliberate, pragmatic response to the ethical dilemmas of ecological entanglement—dilemmas visible by the late eighteenth century. Interspecies entanglement and its discontents provided the cornerstone of Malthus's infamous arguments about overpopulation in the Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Inspired by Malthus's proto-ecological vision of endless interconnection, Harriet Martineau adopted it as the plot structure of her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34), some of the earliest and most influential examples of industrial fiction. Later social novelists borrowed Martineau's narrative technique of disclosing community by tracing material interdependence, but they excluded relations that crossed the species barrier. Those exclusions arose not from arrogance or ignorance of humanity's dependence on other species but from the decision to bracket often unanswerable questions arising from interspecies collectivity to foreground the practical importance of attending to the urgent needs of human beings.

OF THE GOD that appears in so many of Thomas Hardy's lyrics as so many shapes of one name, of the God that appears to defy common description because each of his many shapes is unique, this may be said: He easily entertains the supposition of his own disappearance. That this peculiar claim so closely echoes one made by Emerson about the disappearance of literature is intentional; in rendering the prospect of divine dissolution, Hardy reveals profound misgivings about the efficacy of poetry as a symbolic means for coming to terms with the painful and toilsome experience of living, and about the continued adequacy of poetic efforts to provide “a frame of acceptance” for suffering humanity (Burke, Attitudes 5)The original reads “Criticism must be transcendental, that is, must consider literature ephemeral & easily entertain the supposition of its entire disappearance” (qtd. in Poirier, Renewal 27).. That this claim probably elicits less surprise and uneasiness than ironic acknowledgement in readers already familiar with Hardy's lyrics, that it rings vaguely true even before they turn back to the poems themselves may indicate how inured these same readers have grown to even the most extravagant instances of Hardy's “unrelieved pessimism.”The phrase “unrelieved pessimism” appears in “The Shorter Poems of Thomas Hardy” (Blackmur 2). It may derive from Lytton Strachey's 1914 review of Hardy's Satires and Circumstances, Lyrics and Reveries: “The desolation is complete. And the gloom is not even relieved by a little elegance of diction” (225).

When Basil Hallward discovers the distorted portrait of Dorian Gray in chapter 13 of Wilde's eponymous novel, he first ascribes the changes to “some wretched mineral poison” in his paints. Although the passage corresponds to the climax of the story, it has rarely been discussed from a chromatic perspective. And yet, color mattered to Wilde as well as to many of his decadent friends. Drawing on the canonical text of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which it revisits from a color perspective, this article explores the literary inscription of new, shifting chromatic materialities in order to shed light on what Théophile Gautier, in his seminal 1868 essay on Baudelaire, defined as the decadent “palette”: “veined with the greenness (verdeurs) of decomposition.”

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

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).

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 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.

In Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey (1847), the eponymous narrator uses a range of ecological metaphors to make sense of her interactions with others. She likens governessing to domestic horticulture and envisions how her task of educating children will be “to train the tender plants, and watch their buds unfolding day by day.” Rather than voice her unfulfilled romantic feelings for Weston or consciously work through her self-doubts about physical appearance, she visualizes them both as insects: she is the “humble glow-worm” who, without a “power of giving light” (i.e., beauty), “the roving fly might pass her . . . a thousand times, and never light beside her” (123). Even the reader, in the opening sentence, assumes the role of active participant: a nucivorous beast hunting for whatever “dry, shriveled kernel” of narrative meaning might be found by “cracking the nut” (5). As character, the budding naturalist “botanize[s] and entomologize[s] along the green banks and budding hedges”; as narrator, she projects herself and those around her into complex ecosystems (95). Her choice of metaphors captures a matrix of exchanges in which species of all kinds interact with one another and their environments in unpredictable ways. Agnes assigns the life cycles of flora and fauna to characters, populating the novel with human and nonhuman animals in ways that draw heavily on early nineteenth-century science even as they also prefigure some of the concerns of contemporary animal studies and ecocriticism.