Scholarly discussions of the anonymous homoerotic novel Teleny (1893) invariably confront the question of its mysterious origins. This is understandable, since for many commentators what has been dubbed “the first gay modern novel” represents the opening chapter in a story about queer print culture that may (or may not) have been authored by Oscar Wilde. Joining the methodologies of bibliography and queer theory, with particular emphasis on temporal directionality and sequencing, this article offers new insight into Teleny's history in light of its virtually unknown 1899 prequel, Des Grieux (The Prelude to “Teleny”). “Des Grieux and the Origins of Teleny” represents the first detailed critical analysis of Teleny's literary progeny, and I pursue this analysis by attending to publishing history, authorial speculation, and both novels’ engagement with Victorian sexology. Although the bibliographer Peter Mendes avers that “Des Grieux was indeed written by the same hand(s) as Teleny, and possibly before Teleny at that,” I contend that its appearance six years after the first appearance of Teleny articulates a queer textual genealogy for the two novels, situating Teleny in an inverted relation to a prequel that postdates it.

IN THE HISTORY OF PENDENNIS (1848–50), William Thackeray calls upon the binary model of Victorian intellectualism in order to define the status and responsibilities of an author of fiction. For Thackeray, himself an initiate of the Middle Temple, the antagonist which permitted such a clarification of artistic privilege was the law, as conceived in utilitarian and mechanistic terms. Perhaps inspired by the ensign of the Inner Temple, the Winged Horse – suggestive of Thackeray's favorite trope for his own creativity, Pegasus-in-Harness – Thackeray effects a deft appropriation of the humanist history of the law for the services of literature, thus divorcing current legal praxis from its traditional role in the protection of liberties and the creation of English identity. Only the author can appreciate and animate the law's history, which is itself a tale of synergistic legal and literary productivity:

To say that this common [criminal] fate was described in the popular press and commented on simply as a piece of police news is, indeed, to fall short of the facts. To say that it was sung and balladed would be more correct; it was expressed in a form quite other than that of the modern press, in a language which one could certainly describe as that of fiction rather than reality, once we have discovered that there is such a thing as a reality of fiction.

—Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes

SPEAKING OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE, Louis Chevalier traces the bourgeoisie’s elision of the working classes with the criminal classes, in which crime becomes either the representation of working class “failure” or “revenge” (396). Chevalier argues that working- class texts “recorded” their acquiescence to and acceptance of “a genuine fraternity of [criminal] fate” when they “described and celebrated [it] in verse” (397). Though a community of fate might inspire collective resistance, popular poetry and ballads, he confirms, reproduced metonymic connections between criminal and worker when “their pity went out to embrace dangerous classes and laboring classes alike. . . . One might almost say [they proclaimed these characteristics] in an identical poetic strain, so strongly was this community of feeling brought out in the relationship between the favorite subjects of working-class songs and the criminal themes of the street ballads, in almost the same words, meters, and tunes” (396) Acquiescence to or reiteration of worker/criminal equations established itself in workers’ views of themselves as “a different, alien and hostile society” (398) in literature that served as an “involuntary and ‘passive’ recording and communication of them” (395). Though I am investigating Victorian England, not nineteenth-century France, and though I regard the street ballads as popular texts which record resistance, not acquiescence, Chevalier’s work usefully articulates the predicament of class-based ideologies about worker and criminal which functioned similarly in Victorian England. More importantly, Chevalier acknowledges the complexity of street ballads as cultural texts..

Florence Nightingale, who became a national heroine after the Crimean War, was the most popular subject in hagiographical collective biographies of women during the mid- and late-1850s. However, her life can be regarded as a resolute resistance to conformity with the ideal of womanhood in the Victorian era. She recognised the chasm between her popularity and reality:

The specter of cosmopolitanism haunts Daniel Deronda. In a curious reversal of critical fortune, the novel condemned by many of its initial reviewers for dabbling into obscure mystical doctrines and for pontificating far too explicitly about the significance of narrow loyalties and local attachments has recently come to embody a scrupulous investigation of cosmopolitan ethics. The sources of this radical shift in the understanding of Daniel Deronda’s politics are theoretical as much as they are interpretative. For some time now, humanistic scholarship has been simultaneously attracted to cosmopolitanism and embarrassed by it: while we continue to be drawn to cosmopolitanism as an ideological project invested in overcoming tribal loyalties and in celebrating the encounter with the other, we are also resistant to its universalizing logic which we often see as complicit with the hegemonic tendencies variously present in the intellectual legacy of the European Enlightenment and in contemporary global capitalism. Faced with this tension, several influential scholars –– most notably Amanda Anderson and Kwame Anthony Appiah –– have turned to Daniel Deronda as an example of a cosmopolitanism free of pernicious hegemonic connotations, a cosmopolitanism understood as a commitment to open exchange between nations and races, rather than as the erasure of all cultural difference. In doing so they have, however, simultaneously overextended the concept of cosmopolitanism, rendering it very nearly meaningless, and misjudged the politics of Eliot's novel, overlooking its deep commitment to the logic of ethnic nationalism. In this essay I wish to use what I take to be the dual failure — interpretative and theoretical — of recent readings of Daniel Deronda in order to reexamine both the politics of Eliot's late writings and the ways in which we use the concept of cosmopolitanism in our critical practice. I will argue, first, that the cosmopolitan Deronda, constructed in a series of influential interpretations over the past two decades, is a specter, an apparition. This phantom, as we shall see, was constructed due to an unusual alignment between the desire to dissociate the great Victorian moralist that was George Eliot from the charge of slipping into narrow nationalist worldview and the desire to recuperate a non-hegemonic vision of cosmopolitanism. Second, I will argue that the novel's much discussed marginalization of Gwendolen Harleth in favor of Daniel Deronda's nationalist mission does not constitute simply a rejection of an egotistical heroine in the name of higher duties, but rather a decisive moment in Eliot's late career and in the history of Victorian fiction: by unequivocally favoring the hero's nationalist commitments over the heroine's private struggles, George Eliot has also rejected the private sphere which has traditionally preoccupied nineteenth-century fiction, in favor of the fantasies of collective destiny. Before analyzing the full implications of this shift, however, I will outline in more detail the interpretative history in which this essay intervenes.

Shortly before C. R. Ashbee transplanted a hundred and fifty Cockneys to Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, in 1902 to form a utopian arts-and-crafts community, two other back-to-the-land settlements were also established, one located outside the market town of Stroud, a mere bicycle ride away from Ashbee and his guild. These Tolstoyan colonies – Purleigh, founded in 1896 in Essex, and Whiteway, founded in 1898 in the Cotswolds – fostered goals of fellowship and the simplification of life, as had been modeled by Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman in the United States and Edward Carpenter in Britain. Yet, whereas Ashbee was inspired by the model of William Morris and nostalgia for a pre-industrial England, English Tolstoyans looked not to craft, but to a less Aesthetic “bread labor” as a respite from modernity's corruption. Visiting Whiteway in 1904, Ashbee observed the Tolstoyans’ struggles to live off the land and commented, “they hold the other end of the stick we are ourselves shaping at Campden” (qtd. in MacCarthy 100). As his metaphor implied, both groups shared utopian aspirations, but Whiteway's settlers had sought the perfection of life from another vantage point and through other means. Ashbee regarded the austerity of their lives with distance and, as we will see, even with some distaste. Nevertheless, some features of the guildsmen's lifestyle at Chipping Campden mirrored those at Whiteway. This essay uses memoirs and fictions by C. R. Ashbee, his spouse, Janet Ashbee, and the Tolstoyans to disentangle the threads of “Aestheticism” and “simplification,” and to mark places of their conflation.

LIKE MANY OTHER PEOPLE these days, I’m concerned about the speed-up in graduate education. The chief cause of our students’ premature professionalization is, of course, the terrible job market — which John Guillory has faulted for propagating intellectual shallowness among our students, by forcing them to become active scholars too soon. Guillory remarks, incidentally, that the social marginalization of literary studies reflected in the job crisis coincides with its strident politicization, which he reads as symptomatic of — and by no means a solution to — the decreased relevance of the discipline itself in contemporary society. What Guillory doesn’t mention, however, is the obvious role that cultural studies plays in the speed-up of graduate studies, and the way its simplistic political imperatives contribute to that speed-up. But it seems to me that the vast new territories cultural studies opens up to scholarship, along with the pressures it creates in all of us to find a hot new cultural topic (in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, one cultural studies professor to another: “I want to do with Elvis what you did with Hitler”), require a reductive politics to enable the quick consumption of knowledge that makes rapid professionalization possible. Our students are no longer surprised by our “commodify or die” ethos.

On November 16, 1918, a little more than two weeks after an armistice officially ended World War I, an editorial in the Idaho Statesman offered advice about the future of the world economy. Lifting the title of its editorial directly from Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil, or The Two Nations, the Statesman argued only the political philosophy espoused by that novel and its author could show the world a way forward. Quoting from the novel's final paragraph, the newspaper declares: “‘To be indifferent and to be young can no longer be synonymous.’ Those words were true when Disraeli penned them just 73 years ago, but they apply with striking force to the problems of today and to the problems which will be certain to develop in the years just ahead” (“Trustees of Posterity” 4). The newspaper wasn't only advocating political involvement by the nation's youth, nor was Disraeli. Sybil proposes a particular kind of economic and political order, a union between a “just” aristocracy, led by the young and ambitious, and the laboring classes. It proposes that great statesmen take up the mantle of responsibility just as Thomas Carlyle, in Disraeli's day, advocated great captains of industry take up that mantle (Houghton 328). The newspaper's argument implies this seventy-year-old British novel will be critical to America's political future. But this vision of responsibility belongs in the nineteenth century – it is rooted in the conflict between republicanism and aristocratic oligarchy – and the timing of the Statesman article at first seems wildly inappropriate. As the First World War ended, the Statesman expected the world would face the kind of threats Americans had perceived before the war. The editorial warns that “mobocracy” still “holds nearly half of the area of Europe and much of northern Asia in its bloody and irresponsible grip.” If there is any doubt about who is behind this “mobocracy,” the newspaper clears that matter up, answering: “Bolshevists, Socialists and all of the disciples of unrest who may be roughly grouped as ‘The Reds’” (“Trustees of Posterity” 4). And when the Statesmen warns about “Reds,” it can easily expect its readers to remember that, only seventeen years earlier, President McKinley had been shot by just such a “Red”: Leon Czolgosz, an alleged anarchist and the child of Polish immigrants.

While crediting William Wordsworth's tutelage in his 1887 essay “Books Which Have Influenced Me,” Robert Louis Stevenson indicates that the poet's contribution to his writing is difficult to pin down: “Wordsworth should perhaps come next. Every one has been influenced by Wordsworth and it is hard to tell precisely how” (164). Seeking to understand this relationship, I examined Stevenson's copy of Wordsworth's The Poetical Works (1858) at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Stevenson's penciled markings, cross-references, and annotations fill the six-volume set, indicating careful and repeated reading over many years. Stevenson purchased the edition as he was entering adulthood in Edinburgh, and kept it with him until the end of his life in Samoa. While Stevenson's marginalia cannot be precisely dated, the handwriting alongside Wordsworth's poetry ranges from the large sloped script of his early years (1870--1874) to the smaller, more rounded and upright letters he used in the final period of his life (1890–1894). Given this record and the frequency and depth of Stevenson's allusions to Wordsworth in his fiction, essays, and letters, it is surprising that no study of the relationship has been undertaken. In recent book-length studies of Romantic influences on Victorian writing, Stevenson is rarely mentioned, and never in connection with Wordsworth. Even Stephen Gill's encyclopedic Wordsworth and the Victorians makes no reference to Stevenson.

Although my critical focus has shifted in recent years onto other areas—both earlier and later—of novel studies, I find myself returning to the novels of the 1840s, which is, in my view, the pivotal moment in the history and theory of the British novel. This is the moment when novels relegated forever to the past a future that ensured domestic contentment. During the period from 1847 to 1900, as Georg Lukács tells the story, the historical novel faltered and then froze in its tracks, as the narrative of an individual caught in the winds of historical change capitulated to descriptions of demonically fetishized objects that obscured the engines of change. What Lukács doesn't mention is that, halfway through that same period, novels abruptly ceased to formulate a country house providing what Hannah Arendt has called “a model of national housekeeping.” From the ashes of that bourgeois appropriation of certain aspects of the genteel way of life, the novels of the 1840s assembled a single-family household as a kinship system uniquely capable of operating at every level of English society. To go by these novels, one would think that belonging to such a household was not only the same as belonging to English society itself but was also necessary to one's biological survival. In returning to that moment, I want to consider, more pointedly, what these two observations concerning the form of the Victorian novel have to do with one another, a question that was very much in the air in 1977, when I received my doctorate and took up my first university post.

WHERE IS “Victorian autobiography” in the late 1990s? Everywhere and nowhere. Always contested as a genre, autobiography has stretched its fragile boundaries and diffused itself among the many forms of self-representation that interest contemporary critics: travel narratives, letters, journals, fiction, poetry, essays, biography. This diffusion is in many ways a fruitful development, although it raises the question of whether “Victorian autobiography” is still a meaningful category to use in describing critical work. Although I concentrate here on a number of recent books that flourish the word “autobiography” in their titles, I come to this review with a sense that some of the most vital work on Victorian self-representation may be flying under different banners.

When Carlyle praises “wondrous Dualism” in Past and Present, he invokes a model for conceptualizing man's role in the world that held widespread, even hegemonic currency in mid-Victorian culture. The centrality of dualist discourse during the mid-Victorian period, thanks in part to Carlyle's translations of German literature and philosophy in the 1830s, cannot be overstated. Carlyle argues that dualism transhistorically frames all human activity: “In wondrous Dualism, then [in the year 1200] as now, lived nations of breathing men; alternating, in all ways, between Light and Dark; between joy and sorrow, between rest and toil” (50; bk. 2, ch. 1). The subject “man” – I use the masculine advisedly – endlessly oscillates between the opposing elements that constitute the universe. This, for Carlyle, is the position of all men. To be heroic, however, one must recognize and negotiate the most wondrous dualism of all, time and eternity: “this Earthly life, and its riches and possessions, and good and evil hap, are not intrinsically a reality at all, but are a shadow of realities eternal, infinite; that this Time-world, as an air-image, fearfully emblematic, plays and flickers in the grand still mirror of Eternity; and man's little Life has Duties that are great, that are alone great, and go up to Heaven and down to Hell” (72; bk. 2, ch. 6). Minor dualisms are subsumed in the opposition between “Time-world” and “Eternity,” and in the “mirror” of the latter, man discerns himself: his ultimate insignificance, yet the greatness of his “Duties.” Carlyle emphasizes that these duties demand the payment of obedience to one's temporal and eternal superiors – heroic ancestors, captains of industry, colonial governors, and God. Only then can heroic men once again be born, like the laboring Hercules or the humble Christ, from temporal-eternal intercourse.

Belle vue zoo, founded in 1836, both celebrated and replicated the industrial surroundings of Manchester. Looking at the Zoo from a distance, people in the mid-nineteenth century would have remarked upon the establishment's dazzling grounds, illuminated either by Belle Vue's own gas works or by the electricity powered by its robust generators. They also would have caught sight of the zoo's buildings, humming with the action of the steam-driven machines within. By utilizing the most up-to-date technology, Belle Vue was an extension of its neighboring manufacturing city.

With its biting portrait of mid-Victorian greed, foolishness, and the obsessive pursuit of wealth, Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now is often read as both a eulogy for traditional English society and an attack on rapacious capitalist values, particularly as they manifest themselves in the market for finance capital. Indeed, in the novel, the market mechanism seems to have run amok: social status, titles, and reputations circulate like commodities in a sea of new money that swamps traditional distinctions between creditworthiness and social capital, investment and speculation, and commerce and graft. The pervasive sense that everything has its price extends to intimate social relations, including courtship and marriage. Penniless, pretty women of good families, such as Julia Triplex (later Lady Monogram) and Lady Carbury, much like penniless, titled men such as Lord Nidderdale and Lady Carbury's handsome son Felix, recognize that, for them, marriage is a business arrangement in which the pretense of sentiment between the parties is little more than a social convention. Yet, the novel also suggests that the frenzy that free-for-all market forces have unleashed will exhaust itself, just as the speculative price bubble in railway shares central to the narrative eventually collapses. Countering its satire of capitalist excess is the novel's more optimistic treatment of exchange, which implies that fraud in the share market can be contained through the imposition of standards of behavior that foster honest commerce.

IN 1877, AS AN OXFORD UNDERGRADUATE, Oscar Wilde was invited to fill out two pages of a “Confession Album,” an informal survey of his likes, dislikes, ambitions, and fears. Wilde's answers testify to his deep appreciation for all things Greek: his favorite authors include Plato, Sappho, and Theocritus; he would hate to part with his Euripides; he admires Alexander the Great. But when faced with a question regarding the place he would most like to live, Wilde chooses not Athens or Argos but “Florence and Rome”; and when asked about the historical period in which he would most liked to have lived, Wilde opts for “the Italian Renaissance” (Holland 44–45). As there was no room on the form for Wilde to expand on this statement, we can only speculate as to why he saw Renaissance Italy as a time and a place in which he would have felt at home. But what the response tells us for certain is that while he was at Oxford, Wilde found the culture of Quattro- and Cinquecento Italy particularly appealing, was comfortable imagining himself as part of that period, and was prepared to acknowledge his enthusiasm for the period to his friends. Moreover, it shows that while Wilde may have treasured the cultural artifacts of ancient Greece as a young man, he was more eager to experience the whole way of life captured in the idea of the Italian Renaissance.

There is, perhaps, no richer archive of Victorian reading experiences than Victorian literature itself. We know how Maggie Tulliver, child of the rural Midlands in the early years of the nineteenth century, felt when reading the Imitation of Christ in the bleak aftermath of her father's bankruptcy, how the young David Copperfield felt sitting on his bed in Suffolk, “reading as if for life” in the shadow of an abusive home life (56; ch. iv), and how a besieged Jane Eyre felt reading Bewick's History of British Birds in the window-seat at Gateshead; we know because Eliot, Dickens, and Brontë trace those feelings and their significance in vivid detail. We know more: Maggie's book, is a “little, old, clumsy book. . .the corners turned down in many places” with “certain passages” marked in “strong pen and ink,” one of a job lot brought to her by Bob, the packman (301; bk. 4, ch. 3). We know that the novels available to David from the small collection on his father's shelf were largely picaresque tales from a hundred years earlier, Gil Blas, Humphrey Clinker, and Roderick Random; and that Jane was reading the second volume of Bewick's Birds with its evocative vignettes in the introductory pages, an edition whose letter-press the ten-year-old Jane “cared little for” (14; vol. 1, ch. 1).

ELIZABETH GASKELL SCHOLARS are well aware of the anger that Mary Barton evoked in some quarters of Manchester's industrial bourgeoisie. These scholars are also certainly familiar with the central document of this anger, a wide-ranging critique in which an anonymous “Correspondent” of the Manchester Guardian accuses the anonymous novelist not only of ignorance but also of distortions that amount to “a libel on the masters, merchants, and gentlemen of this city.” The correspondent, W. R. Greg, offers several lines of argument in support of this charge. I would like to take one of these as the opening evidence in my own argument. “In a truthful ‘tale of Manchester, or factory life,’” he remarks, “it appears very strange that no notice whatever is taken of what has been done by the masters for improving the condition of the workmen”; instead of “mechanics' institutions,” “libraries founded expressly for [the workers'] benefit,” and other “institutions [where] every stimulus is given to self-culture, to the expansion of the mind … to whatever will elevate the taste, refine the manners, [and] improve the moral character,” the reader sees only the harsh effects of “comparatively uneducated and ignorant” factory masters. The author of Mary Barton, Greg asserts, may be counted among “the hosts of humanity-mongers” who are determined to depict leaders of industry as “upstarts from the very dregs of society” (“Mary Barton”). (See Figures 8 and 9.)

The Great Stink of London took place one year before the publication of George Eliot's The Lifted Veil (1859). As a peak sanitary crisis, the Great Stink helps us to understand the particular telepathy of Eliot's narrator, since The Lifted Veil combines the rhetoric of telepathy with that of a more threatening form of transmission among bodies: foul odor and contagious air. Throughout the figurative structure of Eliot's story, tropes that convey the narrator's ostensibly supernatural experience contain traces – sometimes cryptic, sometimes explicit – of the earthly matter of sanitary crisis. The first section of this essay explores the sanitary dimension of The Lifted Veil, linking the story to sanitary crisis and to Victorian materialist psychology – particularly the work of George Henry Lewes – which conceived mind in physical terms. With the role of sanitation established, the second section shows the importance of the sense of smell to Latimer's first-person narration of telepathy. This section outlines the transition, contemporaneous with sanitary reform, from the use of animal to the use of vegetable perfumes. Throughout the story, vegetable scents act as prophylaxes against the narrator's too-physical telepathy. From these readings, it becomes clear that Eliot writes “extrasensory” perception with recourse to sensory figures. Telepathy and sanitation overlap in this exceptional gothic science fiction in such a way as to demand a new concept of olfactory telepathy.

Scholars have had a difficult time assessing the significance of Dinah Mulock Craik (1824–1887), best remembered as the author of John Halifax, Gentleman (1856). The critical verdict on her life and letters has swung toward extremes. Some critics have seen her, to quote Henry James, as “kindly, somewhat dull, pious, and very sentimental” (172); her novels embody the Victorian values of self-help, moral earnestness, and hard work, and it is assumed that her life did too. Elaine Showalter's and Sally Mitchell's feminist recoveries of Craik's work in the 1970s and early 1980s found that just the opposite was true, and that Victorian sentimentality allowed Craik to voice the subversive desires of her female readers covertly, in a form that was acceptable to the general public (Showalter 5–7, Mitchell 31). This critical tradition tended to overemphasize the melodramatic aspects of Craik's life and career as a means of dramatizing the struggles of women in a patriarchal society. The most recent scholarship eschews Craik's life altogether for the most part, focusing on her novelistic representations of disability, of Irish and Scottish nationality, and of class and enfranchisement. This criticism engages Craik's writing as an interesting cultural artifact rather than as an aesthetic object: her work is once again seen as embodying normative Victorian values, but to what extent the author was the cognizant promoter of these values, and to what extent she was their unwitting filter, and whether it matters, is unclear. But new archival work shows the importance of her life in understanding her career. The Mulock Family Papers, held at the University of California at Los Angeles, underscore Craik's challenges in managing an abusive father, who suffered from periods of dejection followed by periods of great happiness, and who was frequently absent and incarcerated. Craik was intensely private when it came to her personal life, and scholars like Showalter have read her reserve as a bow to womanly decorum in a life otherwise dominated by literary celebrity. But the archive suggests that Craik's taciturnity was instead a strategy for managing the threat of violence and scandal.