Sonnet XLI of Elizabeth Barrett Browning'sSonnets from the Portuguese is candid about its ambition to write love poetry that will last:

— Oh, to shoot
My soul's full meaning into future years, —
That they should lend it utterance, and salute
Love that endures, with Life that disappears! – (Barrett Browning 397)

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.

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.

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.

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:

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”).

JANE EYREIS A NOVEL INTENSELY CONCERNED with reading and being read. It is a text fixated on acts of literacy and states of legibility, and it produces reading as a compelling, multivalent locus for narrative pleasures and for the articulation of desire. Jane Eyre grants the greatest possible significance to every form of literacy, frequently structuring its articulations of the erotic through reading: reading books or watching others read them, successfully (or unsuccessfully) reading the faces and heads of others, and controlling or failing to command one's legibility. These many crucial literacies do not originate from a chance narrative enthusiasm, but are centrally linked to the novel's equally intense interest in the classificatory arrangements of phrenological systems. Phrenology, that famous nineteenth-century pseudo-science of reading, enables the production of the novel's multiple erotic strands, structuring not only a considerable portion of the heterosexual romance plot(s), but articulating and enabling the novel's female homoerotic dynamics, as well.

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.

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.

Many Victorian commentators, from Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin on, saw music as the most primitive of all the arts, an inarticulate precursor of language, and yet many Victorians, particularly towards the end of the century, also saw music as the purest of all art forms. The tremendous tension between these two views meant that music provided, and provides, an ideal way to understand more completely Victorian ideas about evolution, gender, and race in relation to aesthetics, although scholarship on music has only begun to consider those relationships. But as Vernon Lee long ago pointed out, in a series of thoughtful essays about music published in Fraser's Magazine and other periodicals in the 1870s and 1880s, music has always been slower to develop than other arts or fields of study. This is in fact why musicologists speak of “nineteenth-century music,” rather than Victorian music: the Romantic period in music, for example, is starting as the Romantic period in literature had largely ended; the English Musical Renaissance comes after the renaissance period in British literature; and so on. Musicology, likewise, is a comparatively young field, and the study of nineteenth-century British music – long limited to Gilbert and Sullivan, if considered at all – younger yet. Studies of literature that engage with music as an important part of the historical context of a given text depend on developments in musicology for a proper understanding of that context, which is why such works are comparatively few. Why music should be slower to develop than other fields is a question outside the scope of this essay, but the good news is that in the past ten years a number of useful and valuable works of scholarship on nineteenth-century British music have appeared, examining not only neglected composers and musical works, but also performers, concert organizers, music publishers, instruments and their history, and evolutionary, Orientalist, and nationalist discourses about music. This scholarship, valuable in itself, not only expands our knowledge of musicology and cultural history; by pointing out some of the deep connections between literature and music in the Victorian period, such scholarship also suggests new ways to think about literary forms, canon formation, and aesthetic theories.

There is a curious narrative moment near the middle of George Eliot's novel Silas Marner. Marner, on discovering the theft of his gold, runs to the Rainbow Inn, the village's popular gathering place, intending to broadcast the theft and demand justice. This is a climatic moment in the plot; as readers we turn the page with mounting anticipation: how will the villagers react to the strange weaver's first intrusion into this most sacred of spaces in Raveloe? The reader must immediately be disappointed, then, on turning the page and coming to chapter six. We do go inside the Rainbow Inn but leave Marner on the other side of the yet-unopened door; instead of an exciting confrontation between Marner and the villagers, we are made to listen to a meandering exchange of retold stories by a cast of unimportant characters. This narrative interruption within the novel echoes the much larger interruptions that surround the production and reception of this text. Silas Marner most literally interrupted Eliot's work on Romola. She says in her journal that the idea “thrust itself between me and the other book I was meditating” (Journals 87). The novel also disrupts most critical consensus about Eliot as a realist writer. No one seems quite sure what to do with this half fable, half realist work alongside such masterpieces as Middlemarch. In addition, the character of Marner interrupts what we have come to expect from Eliot's characters; whether an earlier hero like Adam Bede or a later heroine like Gwendolen Harleth, her characters have at least some endearing qualities despite, or maybe because of, their flaws. When one turns to Silas Marner, however, a reader can be hard pressed to find anything appealing about the peculiar weaver.

In 1840, thePhrenological Journal published an anonymous personal testimony of phrenological salvation titled “Remarkable Case of Change of Character and Pursuits.” The article appears in the “Cases and Facts” section of the periodical, commonly reserved for correspondents who provided personal accounts of the truth of phrenology. The correspondent in this “Case” makes use of the conventional structure of the conversion narrative: youthful deviance, a moment of illumination, and rebirth into a new life of virtue, peace, and joy. Beginning with a description of his former life, he explains that being “Born in the lap of luxury – bred in the tainted atmosphere of opinion” led to the “best years of [his] existence [being] passed in idle, if not in sinful pursuits.” After becoming a military officer, his dissolute behavior increases until he finally decides to correct his character, and “the great instrument employed was phrenology” (342). After adopting a disciplined regimen of moral and intellectual mental exercises, he triumphantly emerges as a man who better knows himself and his capabilities. With his “new” character comes a new life more suited to his cultivated faculties: realizing that a soldier's advancement depends on the “number of victims” sacrificed for the country's cause, he “selected the more humble profession of the Civil Engineer, for which [he] believed, phrenologically, nature had made a fair provision.” He concludes by noting that his life has since been prosperous, and that he hopes now to “aid the cause of that science” through the phrenological education of his own children and his public confession in the journal (343).

Almost at the end of Book VI of Daniel Deronda, that is, with at least three-quarters of the novel over, Gwendolen Harleth's dreadful husband, Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt, suddenly reveals a new side of himself. Whereas heretofore he has mentioned or engaged in recreations that include hunting, shooting (including tigers), and gambling, all as means of passing the time rather than achieving exhilaration or amusement, he now reveals himself as a yachtsman. After catching Gwendolen in their town house in Grosvenor Square in yet another of her contrived tête à têtes with Daniel, he declares he has already begun preparations for a Mediterranean cruise for himself and his wife, alone together.

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, edginess was experienced as a literal problem. The OED gives the first definition, occurring in 1822, as “the condition of having the outlines too clearly marked; angularity, hardness of outline.” This problem of unsightly outlines was solved, I suggest, by an extensive use of fringe throughout the Victorian period. These many miles of trimming performed symbolic work for a culture whose anxieties seemed to gather at edges — of clothing, of furniture, of nations, of empires, and eventually, of selves. A few inches of fringe, after all, can make an edge wide and irregular enough to allow for error. A row of pompoms strategically placed can usefully blur the beginnings and endings of literal and figurative fabric. A border of lace can protect edges from unraveling or wearing down. The fringed, and thus indefinite border, suggests the value of being able to imagine and construct limits as variable, permeable, and attenuated structures, rather than as hard edges at which one must stop short. The befringed edge offers a margin for error, for exploration, for coming to an end slowly and gradually.

Can fringe really mean anything, much less create symbolic space for working out conflicts that gather at boundaries, limits, and edges? I contend that fringe, like other debased aspects of material culture, can perform cultural work precisely because it doesn’t get taken seriously. Indeed, the debasement of fringe is part of what makes it interesting and significant.

It would be hard to discover a theoretical or aesthetic approach to George Eliot's Middlemarch that is not already anticipated in some way by the novel's sagacious narrator. Possibly that persona, the quintessential Victorian polymath, does not foresee digital humanities as we know it. But critics have been struck as much by Eliot's prototyping of information systems, semiotics, and network analysis as by her humanist ethics. Casaubon does not invent the database of myths any more than Lydgate discovers DNA, or than Marian Evans Lewes rivals Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. As I illustrate a kind of digital research that adjusts to the minute particulars of narrative, I hope to keep sight of historical distances between the 1830s, the 1870s, and the era of feminist Victorian studies that I sketch here. Lydgate's penetrative “invention,” in the epigraph, is associated elsewhere in the novel with his actual “flesh-and-blood” vitality: “He cared not only for ‘cases,’ but for John and Elizabeth, especially Elizabeth” (Middlemarch, chap. 15). He is as dedicated to evidence as the narrator, in many scientific analogies, counsels readers to be, and yet he approaches his own life story and the characters of women with a kind of prejudgment that filters out most data. Eliot's readers, seeing Lydgate's errors, are flattered into believing we miss no signals and see all analogies. Can contemporary readers appreciate both numerical cases and individual stories of women? In this article I try to outline a feminist criticism that encompasses both typological classifications and flesh-and-blood individuality, both digital research and interpretative advocacy.

HAVING SURVIVED THE Y2K HYSTERIA, we may feel we have entered new corridors of one hundred and one thousand years. But it is only in 2001 that the punctilious and historical among us may at last observe a centennial, truly the final year of the past century and the hundredth anniversary of the death of Queen Victoria.1 The Jubilees in the last decades of Victoria’s life, and the ceremonies of international mourning that followed her death, might seem to have said goodbye to all that, but in many ways we are still under the sway of the great queen who lent her name to the age before “the American century.” Our own fin-de-siècle urges us to rediscover the many forms of Victoria that have “been hidden in plain view for a hundred years,” as Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich put it in their co-edited collection of essays, Remaking Queen Victoria (1).2 While North American and British feminist studies have dwelt among Victorian ways since the 1970s — with implications that I will consider below — the queen herself has recently commanded critical attention that might seem, like so many features of Victoria’s public performance, out of proportion. Yet that excess, like our obeisance to the arbitrary power of the calendar, seems to be the very stuff of imagined community and ideological construction, and thus worth watching in action. In any case, when feminist literary critics such as Adrienne Munich, Margaret Homans, and Gail Turley Houston

IN ITS VERY TITLE, Charles Kingsley’s 1850 novel Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography hints at a set of questions that the novel itself never manages to answer in a very clear or convincing way: what is the relationship between manual and intellectual labor, between industrial and poetic production, between making a coat and writing a poem? How might the early Victorian imagination conceive of a working tailor who is also a working poet — especially in light of the various actual working-class poets who appeared on the literary scene in the first half of the nineteenth-century, complete with occupational epithets, such as Thomas Cooper, the “shoe-maker poet” (a figure who in many ways provided a model for Kingsley’s fictional protagonist)? And what if, like a fair number of urban artisans, including Cooper himself, the tailor-poet is also a Chartist — as Alton Locke indeed turns out to be? What is the relationship between the Chartist call for reform and for representation of disenfranchised men in the political realm, and the attempts of a fictional working-class man (since the novel’s treatment of gender, as I will argue, is crucial to its treatment of politics and culture) to enter the early Victorian field of literary production? Or why, in the first place, should a novel that treats the “social problem” of class in the hungry forties and the appalling working conditions of the clothes trade do so by way of the literary aspirations of its title character, that is, through a fictional construction of working-class authorship?

The Victorian fascination with the influence of technology on human vision led to a proliferation of replications of its effects in all manner of media, including novel writing. Like the kaleidoscope that holds the viewer in thrall, M. E. Braddon's sensation novel Eleanor's Victory, as this reviewer describes, holds a certain “power” over the reader that forces her to listen to, if not accept, the arguments Braddon posits in her work. “Power” is at issue in other ways in Braddon's work as her heroines continually seek ways of developing agency by shaping sexual identities that press the limits of the norm of the bourgeois family unit. What is also significant here is the appropriateness of the kaleidoscope as a metaphor for Braddon's writing, a metaphor she used personally in describing her work in an unpublished letter: “I will give the kaleidoscope another turn, and will do my best with the old bits of glass and pins and rubbish” (letter to Edmund Yates, qtd. in Maxwell 150). The kaleidoscope fractures the vision of a single object or scene into a multitude of different but interrelated forms of the same. One of the prominent issues Braddon repeatedly addresses in her work is the construction of multiple forms of sexuality. The fracturing or multiplying effect of the kaleidoscope resembles the isolation and reduction of different forms of sexuality as described by Foucault in The History of Sexuality.

To expand understanding of imbricated journalism and high aestheticism at the fin de siècle, this essay examines Vernon Lee's journalism and slow essay serials, a form spread over space (viz., different periodicals) and marked by irregular temporal issue of installments before finding new cohesion when retroactively constructed as a book. Lee's prolific periodical publication, especially her aesthetic criticism, is rarely approached as journalism. Newly available letters and Lee's negotiations with editors clarify the occluded history of Lee's journalism and her slow essay serials, a distinctive serial form at the fin de siècle, which this article conceptualizes in closing.