Marie Lavington, the runaway octoroon slave in Charles Kingsley's little-read novel Two Years Ago (1857), makes this declaration of independence in a letter to Tom Thurnall, the novel's hero. Though Tom helped her escape to a Canadian Quaker community, Marie has tired of the “staid and sober” (122; vol. 1, ch. 5) lifestyle of a Quakeress. She reenters the public marketplace by refashioning herself into the Italian diva, La Cordifiamma. Marie's ascent to the stage as La Cordifiamma marks the construction of a new female body in the mid-nineteenth century: the Tragic Mulatta who becomes a Tragic Muse.

In the nineteenth century Britain underwent a period of immense religious doubt and spiritual instability, prompted in part by German biblical criticism, the development of advanced geological and evolutionary ideas forwarded by men such as Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, and the crisis in faith demonstrated by many high profile Church members, particularly John Henry Newman's conversion to Catholicism in 1845. In tracing the development of this religious disbelief, historian Owen Chadwick comments that “mid-Victorian England asked itself the question, for the first time in popular understanding, is Christian faith true?” (Victorian Church: Part I 1). Noting the impact of the 1859 publication of Darwin's Origin of Species and the multi-authored collection Essays and Reviews in 1860, Chadwick further posits that “part of the traditional teaching of the Christian churches was being proved, little by little, to be untrue” (Victorian Church: Part I 88). As the theological debate over the truth of the Bible intensified so did the question of how to reach, preach, and convert the urbanized and empowered working and middle classes. Indicative of this debate was the immense popularity of the Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon, who was commonly referred to as the “Prince of Preachers.” Spurgeon exploded onto the religious scene in the mid-1850s and his theatrical and expressive form of oratory polarized mid-Victorian society as to the proper, most effective mode of preaching. In print culture, the emergence of the religious periodical Good Words, with its unique fusion of spiritual and secular material contributed by authors from an array of denominations, demonstrated a concurrent re-evaluation within the religious press of the evolving methods of disseminating religious discourse. The 1864 serialization of Ellen Wood's Oswald Cray in Good Words emphasizes the magazine's interest in combining and synthesizing religious and popular material as a means of revitalizing interest in religious sentiment. In 1860 Wood's novel East Lynne was critically categorized as one of the first sensation novels of the 1860s, a decade in which “sensational” became the modifier of the age. Wood, alongside Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, was subsequently referred to as one of the original creators of sensation fiction, a genre frequently denigrated as scandalous and immoral. Oswald Cray, however, sits snugly among the sermons, parables, and social mission essays that fill the pages of Good Words.

Early in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Daniel's life is set on a decisive new path by his fleeting attraction to an object in a shop window. He is turning into a side street off Holburn Road when:

One of the most melancholy events in modern literary history was the dispersal of the books, manuscripts, and other artifacts owned by Pen Browning at the Sotheby sale of 1–8 May 1913. Not only did that event mark the ultimate frustration of Pen's dream of keeping together, for sentiment's sake, the bits and pieces of his parents' lives that he had been collecting through the years, but the sale also had a seriously detrimental effect upon subsequent Browning scholarship. Whereas Tennyson scholars, for example, can today examine that poet's entire personal library and a large collection of his family papers in the Tennyson Research Centre at Lincoln, the corresponding materials for the Brownings are scattered all over the world.

In the Introduction to my recent edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Casa Guidi Windows, I present Mrs. Browning as an astute and knowledgeable witness to the early events of the Italian Risorgimento in Florence during the years 1847–1851.* In that essay I concur with the Florentine critic Giuliana Artom Treves, who wrote that “‘Casa Guidi Windows’ is the poetic cry which rises from Tuscany to the world in praise of the desire for liberty,” and that the poem in which Mrs. Browning “describes the upheaval in Tuscany deserves the perennial gratitude of Italians for the way she frankly assumes the rôle of poet of the Italian Risorgimento.”

In general Carlyle was not kind in dealing with the English Romantic poets. Wordsworth was no exception to the rule. As early as 4 March 1823 Carlyle cautioned Jane Welsh against admiring Wordsworth and Byron too much and Goethe too little. “Wordsworth and Byron! They [compared to Goethe] are as the Christian Ensign and Captain Bobadil before the Duke of Marlboro!” Even in treating rustics and their way of life Schiller was far superior to Wordsworth. In his Life of Schiller (1825) Carlyle wrote:

Among our own writers, who have tried such subjects, we remember none that has succeeded equally with Schiller. One potent but ill-fated genius has, in far different circumstances and with far other means, shown that he could have equalled him: the Cotter's Saturday Night of Burns is, in its own humble way, as quietly beautiful, as simplex munditiis, as the scenes of Tell. No other has even approached them; though some gifted persons have attempted it. Mr. Wordsworth is no ordinary man; nor are his pedlars, and leech-gatherers, and dalesmen, without their attractions and their moral; but they sink into whining drivellers beside Rösselmann the Priest, Ulric the Smith, Hans of the Wall, and the other sturdy confederates of Rütli.

The Phrase “editing Hardy” encompasses a range of very different tasks: Hardy's private notebooks, for example, pose some editorial problems not at all characteristic of his correspondence, and there are similar differences in the problems involved in editing his poetry as opposed to his prose fiction. In fact, somewhere in the course of “editing Hardy” one can probably find an example of almost every major kind of problem which editors of Victorian authors are likely to confront. In the space of one essay it would be of course hopeless to attempt a detailed consideration of all the various questions Hardy's texts pose for editors; yet any discussion of editing Hardy that did not attempt to come to grips with at least some of the specific editorial problems editors face would scarcely be more than a summary account of current progress. This essay, therefore, provides a general survey of the present state of the scholarly editing of Hardy's texts, but it also includes a more detailed consideration of current theory and practice in editing Hardy's prose fiction which focuses on the question of copy-text choice and uses examples drawn from the texts of Far from the Madding Crowd to illustrate one aspect of that problem.

Algernon Charles Swinburne's Specimens of Modern Poets: The Heptalogia or The Seven Against Sense, a volume of parodic poems published in 1880, is a text that has sparked little modern criticism, and even those few remarks seem to take the volume about as seriously as contemporary critics did, seeing it essentially as a mark of Swinburne's well-known talent for imitation. Andreas Höfele, the most recent critic to mention the work, is perhaps the first to consider the work as more than a literary lark, seeing in it a self-conscious reflection upon the procedures of literary imitation, and upon Swinburne's own artistry. Höfele's valuable but rather general comments lack detailed analysis, and any greater specificity in his article only goes so far as to say that the volume aims its wit at “poetry with a message,” and has particular sport with the more “earnest” of the poets, namely Tennyson and Patmore. Jerome McGann's Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism does mention The Heptalogia in the context of Swinburne's talent for pastiche and imitation — but he places the parody volume outside of Swinburne's primary intentions: “These things [The Heptalogia and his other literary ‘hoaxes and burlesques’] are much, it is true, but they also seem, as it were, the outlying territories of an ideal center within which he would live” (80). This dismissal, on top of lack of attention to The Heptalogia, needs to be remedied, and it is the intention of this essay to do so.

In book five of sordello (1840), Browning images the process of historical change in architectural terms. History is a building to be destroyed and rebuilt by successive generations:

… at his arm's wrench,

Charlemagne's scaffold fell; but pillars blench

Merely, start back again — perchance have been

Taken for buttresses: crash every screen,

Hammer the tenons better, and engage

A gang about your work, for the next age

Or two, of Knowledge, part by Strength and part

By Knowledge! (5: 221–28)

The metaphor engages with the nineteenth century's great preoccupation with the historically-determined nature of architectural form — its sense that, as Owen Jones declared in 1856, “architecture is the material expression of the wants, the faculties, and the sentiments, of the age in which it is created” (5). The Classical-Gothic opposition that structured most contemporary debates about aesthetic value in architecture is economically encapsulated by Browning in the mutation of the collapsed Classical pillars into Gothic buttresses. It is the economy of the reference that indicates Browning's easy familiarity with those contemporary architectural debates. He makes use of architectural images and ideas in a number of poems, a fact that has gone relatively unremarked in Browning studies. The theme occurs throughout Sordello and is a major element in “Old Pictures in Florence” and “Bishop Blougram's Apology.” His interest in architecture, I contend, derived, like that of most of his contemporaries, from his preoccupation with history. I intend to examine the precise manifestation of that interest and the ways in which he illuminated, synthesized, and rejected elements of the architecture debates, which reveal much about the particular nature of his concern with history.

This article explores the ecology of form presented in George Eliot's novel Silas Marner. Though many have read the novel as a tight-knit account of an organic society, this author reads a more disorienting, emergent, and conflicted study of the coproduction of lives and environment. George Henry Lewes's account of physiology, particularly his discussion of epigenesis, is foundational to this disorganizing turn in Eliot's fiction. Finally, the author explores how the contingent relation between Eppie and Silas Marner underlines the recent convergence between discussions of queer futurity and the agential turn in ecocriticism.

In a pivotal moment in Mabel Wotton's short story, “The Fifth Edition” (1896), Janet Suttaby, a struggling writer unable to find a publisher for her novel, offers the rising literary star, Franklyn Leyden, her manuscript, telling him, “If you really think there is any good in it . . . it must either go back to the drawer until I have time to polish it, or . . . you must take it” (179). Miss Suttaby offers almost no explanation for her act, nor does she outline what she expects Leyden to do with the manuscript, so when Leyden accepts, re-writes, and then publishes it under his own name, he hasn't done anything that she has explicitly forbidden. Nevertheless, his appropriation of her work is clearly marked in the text as ethically compromised, especially when Miss Suttaby's subsequent death from starvation underscores her desperate need for the money that the sale of a novel would have brought. At the same time, the text offers a much more nuanced critique of Leyden's actions that reaches beyond the ethics of plagiarism and into the realm of literary invention itself; as Leyden revises the manuscript, his creative act is bound up with a parasitical translation of Miss Suttaby herself into text, and he is thus implicated as a fraud on the grounds of both literal and figurative appropriation. In this way, the appropriated manuscript becomes a metaphor for the uneasy relationship between art and life, a concern that is central to fin-de-siècle literary culture. As I will argue, the emphasis in this story, and elsewhere in Wotton's fiction, on what Susan Sontag has termed in another context the “shady commerce between art and truth” (6) makes visible concerns about the connection between inspiration and invention that emerge in the aesthetic theories of Pater, Wilde, and James, as well as in debates over plagiarism and New Woman fiction.

Literary studies is not the only discipline to show a new enthusiasm for religion in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. When Stanley Fish suggested back in 2005 that religion might become the new theoretical center of gravity in the humanities, his declaration was cited frequently and may have proved a little too convenient for those, like myself, who wanted to see a major theoretical realignment in the humanities’ attitude to religion. But, the reality is that Fish is just one of a number of other prominent theorists in the last twenty years or so to have shown a new appreciation for the theoretical resources that religious thought makes available. Although the term religion is understood very differently across thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Bruno Latour, Sabo Mahmood, Charles Taylor, and Slavoj Žižek, they share a refusal to accept crude notions of the secularization thesis, with its commitment to seeing religion as an irrelevance in the modern world, and are instead determined to see religion as more than just an antiquated ideology that needs to be unmasked.

Victorian sensation literature was inextricably related to identity and the body: its primary purposes were to elicit a physical response from the senses of readers and to question “the social formation of the self” (Taylor, The Secret 2). Sensation fiction regularly relied on different, deformed, or diseased bodies to provoke fear or unease in its readers, and it created anxiety by juxtaposing the domestic with scandal, crime, and Gothicism to disturb the perceived stability of the home and social identity. Lyn Pykett argues that the genre reproduces the “real mid-nineteenth-century anxiety” that domestic selfhood “could be disrupted by danger, death or disease on the one hand, and the vagaries of the law, the banking system or the stockmarket on the other” (“Collins” 59). Nineteenth-century critics’ reactions to sensation novels connected anxieties about the body to fears about the instability of social identity: contemporary reviews described sensation literature and its works as “feverish” (Smith 141), “a collective cultural nervous disorder” (Taylor, The Secret 4), and as “symptoms of . . . social disease” (Pykett, “Collins” 51). In his 1880–81 series of essays, “Fiction Fair and Foul,” John Ruskin argues that the “[p]hysically diseased, ‘deformed,’ and ignobly dead bodies [in Collins's and Dickens's novels] are symptomatic of diseased and deformed genres, produced by morally and physically ill writers to cater to the tastes of morally and physically diseased urban readers” (Holmes, Fictions 92). These extreme critical responses, as well as the extreme popularity of sensation fiction, call attention to Victorian preoccupation with the body and social identity and with the instability of both. This paper, through analyzing the instability of bodies and identities in Wilkie Collins's sensation novel No Name (1862) and its serial context, challenges readings by both Victorian and more recent critics that distinctly interpret diseased and disabled bodies in the novel as either symbolic of or a result of social deviance.

This essay examines the literary career of Anglo-Irish peer Lewis Strange Wingfield (1842-1891) in relation to the rise of investigative journalism and Victorian debates over the treatment of mental illness. Situating his work in the context of the first covert investigations into asylums in Britain and the United States, it focuses on Wingfield's use of disguise to infiltrate a private London asylum for the purpose of researching his novel Gehenna; or, Havens of Unrest (1882). Wingfield's pioneering experiment in undercover authorship, we argue, sheds new light on investigative journalism's impact on both the form and thematics of the nineteenth-century realist novel.

After Sidney and Beatrice Webb founded the New Statesman in 1913, one of their inaugural projects was a series of short articles entitled “What is Socialism?,” which ran from April through September of that year. A telling example of their attempts to frame the debate occurs in installment twelve, in which they liken choosing equality as a social ideal with “teach[ing] ourselves to be gentlemen” and instituting a new “national standard of good manners” (364). They struck a similar note in The Decay of Capitalist Civilisation (1923), condemning capitalist competition as inherently vulgar (36) and tracing “the democratic conception of good manners” to those “strata of society where a practical equality of material circumstances happens to prevail, and social position depends” upon circumstances other than wealth (40). This seemingly anomalous mix of socialism and the behavioral conventions of gentility signals a broader rhetorical strategy employed by the Webbs and other Fabian spokesmen to promote their political brand from the 1880s on.

In his popular Romance of London (1867), John Timbs refers to Thomas Babington Macaulay's oft-repeated metaphor of a “New Zealander sitting, like a hundredth-century Marius, on the mouldering arches of London Bridge, contemplating the colossal ruins of St Paul's” (290). Originally intended as an illustration of the vigor and durability of the Roman Catholic Church despite the triumph of the Reformation, Macaulay's most famous evocation of this idea dates from 1840, the year of New Zealand's annexation; hence it is reasonable to suppose that this figure is a Maori (Bellich 297–98). For Timbs and subsequent generations, however, the image conveyed the sobering idea of the rise and fall of civilizations and in particular of England being invaded and overrun, if not by a horde of savages, then by a more robust class of Anglo-Saxons from the other side of the world.

Critics have used various approaches to explain the paradoxes or inconsistencies evident in the characterization of Angel Clare in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891); however, by examining the social purity movement and its response to increasingly popular theories of degeneration at the fin de siècle, we can understand the interplay of contradictory ideas at work in Angel. The tension between the supposedly modern, secular viewpoints that Angel exhibits in the beginning of the narrative and his unexpected return to a conservative and misogynistic ideology upon Tess's confession of her “fall” puzzles readers, fellow characters, and perhaps even the narrator of the novel itself, who accounts for the alteration as simply the hypocrisy of a man who “was yet the slave to custom and conventionality when surprised back into his early teachings” (Hardy 265; vol. 2, ch. 39). Oliver Lovesey suggests that the reason why “Clare somewhat bombastically renounces his father's Christianity, but . . . still stumbles on elements of traditional social morality” and why he “bypasses the resurrection, but cannot negotiate around Tess's ‘unintact state’” is that Tess's “virginity replaces the resurrection in his religion of unbelief” (913–14). Lovesey argues that Angel displaces religious faith in Christ's resurrection onto a material substitute, Tess's virginity, and that the revelation of her lack of virginity then catapults him into a despair akin to the despair of annihilated spiritual belief, “the void of an unbeliever's hell” (924). While I am also concerned with Angel's fetishization of virginity, I believe that it is significant that his obsession with purity extends beyond Tess's virginity to encompass rural space as a whole, a space in which Tess's virginity constitutes but one part. The very capaciousness of Angel's devotion to purity situates him squarely within the environmental binaries characteristic of later theories of urban degeneration.

In Sartor Resartus (1831), Thomas Carlyle wrote that “the loss of his religious Belief was the loss of everything” (129; bk. 2, ch. 7). At the time, this statement was no exaggeration because, as the nineteenth century dawned, Christianity was inarguably perceived by many as one of the most definitive components of Britishness; as Jane Austen's Henry Tilney says: “Remember that we are English, that we are Christians” (172, vol. 2, ch. 9). The sense of being a Christian represents a fundamentally important ideal to the conceptualization of Victorian cultural identity in that it not only dictated to society an imaginary concept of identity after which the Victorian civilization tried to pattern itself, but also led to the manifestation of cultural ideologies such as the ambiguously defined Victorian virtue and work ethic. However, in order for the ideology of cultural identity to function, a specific set of institutional forms would be required to provide society with a firm foundation for the process of “cultural elaboration” to take place. Thus, alongside the early Victorians' belief in their self-professed faith, Orientalism represents another of the more important Victorian cultural institutional forms, which complemented the concept of Christianity to create a sense of moralistic connection, and in turn allowed the manifestation of Victorian cultural identity as a rigidly moralistic and virtuous entity that was perceived by many early Victorians as a true reflection of their society.