Wan mists enwrap the still-born day;

The harebell withers on the heath,

And all the moorland seems to breathe

The hectic beauty of decay.

—Mathilde Blind, “The Evening of the Year,” Songs and Sonnets

To again invoke the organic metaphor at the root of decadence, what is crucial about the notion of decay is not so much the change from a greater to a lesser state, but the changing itself.

—David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism

[T]he aim of decadence, whether in science or art, is to challenge the limits that mark some forms of knowledge as permissible and others as forbidden, regardless of the results.

—Christine Ferguson, “Decadence as Scientific Fulfillment”

Mary Elizabeth Braddon launched her editorship of Belgravia magazine by painting a picture for her readers of a murderous medical practitioner. At the outset of Birds of Prey (1867), the serial novel which kicked off the magazine's publication, Braddon introduces us to a surgeon-dentist named Philip Sheldon. The narrator ironically explains, “Of course he was eminently respectable . . . A householder with such a door-step and such muslin curtains could not be other than the most correct of mankind” (7; bk. 1, ch. 1). Sensation novels of the 1860s have long been critically recognized as vehicles for revealing the disparity between respectable façades and seedy interior truths, and Braddon's underexamined work Birds of Prey and its sequel Charlotte's Inheritance (1868) are no exception: by the close of the second novel, the seemingly upright Sheldon has been revealed as a liar, a cheat, and a killer.

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA–eclectic, vibrant, and heterogeneous–still bears the marks of its past as a site of Victoria's empire. The city abounds in English Victorian artifacts: buildings, statues, fountains, streets and their names (even to Victoria Street and Rhodes Drive) are all reminders of the period, but one wonders what, if anything, they mean to the people who live with them. Some recognize them as a legacy–pleasant or unpleasant– of the days when the Cape was a British colony; to others they are symbols whose context has been forgotten, to yet others, they are simply objects devoid of extrinsic meaning. All are, however, artifacts of imperialism, in its broader sense of the social, political, economic, and cultural domination of one group over all others.

“THE PRINCESS,” TENNYSON's narrative poem about a radically feminist princess and a cross-dressing prince, framed by an imagined argument between Victorian men and women concerning the role of women in modern society, has, understandably, formed the central text in a number of articles about nineteenth-century gender poetics. Critics have been eager to engage with the fictional authors of the narrative, casting Tennyson as, on the one hand, a bastion of Victorian patriarchy, and on the other a subversive feminist. Donald E. Hall, in an essay, published in his collection Fixing Patriarchy, is the most persuasive advocate for a masculinist Tennyson, presenting “The Princess” as undertaking a project of “subsumption,” in which the words and demands of the women are “ingested, modified and incorporated by the patriarch” (46). In an article entitled: “Marginalized Musical Interludes: Tennyson's Critiques of Conventionality in ‘The Princess,’“ Alisa Clapp-Itnyre provides a representative case for the defence, presenting the lyrics as “pivotal feminist commentaries” that work to interrupt and deconstruct the male narrative (229). Herbert Tucker locates a third way, identifying the poem as a “textbook Victorian compromise” (Tennyson 352). He argues that it “avoids taking a position on a hotly debated issue by taking up any number of positions” and characterizes this compromise, not as a commitment to portraying a complex contemporary issue with integrity, but as the result of Tennyson's not caring particularly either way: “neither the rallying of Victorian feminism” he writes, “nor the patriarchal status quo was sufficient stimulus to commitment” (352). In order to open up a new line of enquiry into “The Princess” I would like to look beyond the gender questions that continue to be batted back and forth amongst Tennyson's critics and to offer the figure of the child as an alternative and more powerful cultural, aesthetic and professional stimulus to Tennyson's poem.

Critics of Miss Marjoribanks are divided about whether Margaret Oliphant's eponymous heroine's performance of social conventions, particularly those pertaining to gender roles, is consciously subversive or an unreflective embodiment of those conventions. This scholarship implicitly equates agency with critical detachment: if Lucilla does not critique the conventions she uses and the constructions of gender they reflect, she must lack the capacity to think strategically about her desires, a capacity necessary for agency. It's true that Lucilla is neither critical nor detached. Oliphant characterizes her as fully invested in social norms and as lacking the psychological depth that typically marks agential characters. In fact, I argue that Lucilla is a flat character and that Lucilla's flatness is precisely what makes her excel as an agent. Lucilla's nigh-emotionless thinking, combined with her ruling qualities of good sense and self-satisfaction, promotes agency. Untrammeled by mixed feelings or self-doubt, she has nothing to do but rationally calculate how best to achieve her interests. Reconsidering Lucilla's agency in light of her flatness thus allows us both to value that agency as Oliphant portrays it and to understand how characters can have agency at all.

Such Enlightenment, the narrator tells us facetiously, is effected by an elastic religion known as the Simla Creed, alive at the edges of the British Empire where he, an unnamed Englishman, is stationed. An amalgam of occult practices, the creed stretched itself and embraced pieces of everything that the medicine-men of all ages have manufactured (63). So Rudyard Kipling mockingly observes in this satire of British Victorian forays into the marginal sciences of occultism, Spiritualism, and Mesmerism. An early Kipling tale, “The Sending of Dana Da” (1888) is one of Kiplings first engagements with the religions and philosophies of the East; it was published in the Civil and Military Gazette, a provincial newspaper for which Kipling regularly wrote. The infamous Dana Da – whose name, we are told, escapes every ethnological inscription, and who came from nowhere, with nothing in his hands (62) – dispatches a sending on the behalf of (and through) the Englishman. The recipient of this letter, (again) a Lone Sahib, is characteristically armed with scientific naturalism and Christian faith, and therefore refutes the possibilities of ectoplasmic infestation, unseen currents, and the fecund times of reincarnation. Kiplings eloquent exposition on a sending, despite his final rational explanation of this unseemly act, betrays his fascination with such forbidden epistemologies multiplying at the edges of Empire:

When, on 17 November 1868, Anthony Trollope came bottom of the poll at Beverley in Yorkshire, his cherished ambition to become a Liberal MP was at an end. He had advocated the key elements of the liberal program – Irish Church disestablishment and national education – but this mattered little in a notoriously corrupt borough which was shortly to be stripped of its representation (Tingay). He later explained in his Autobiography (1883) that since he was deprived of a parliamentary seat, he instead used characters in his fiction “for the expression of my political or social convictions . . . they have served me as safety-valves by which to deliver my soul” (112–13). This reflection starkly conveys the sense of a man literally bursting with opinions, but it sits oddly with the common view of critics that Trollope's parliamentary novels depicted political life primarily in social terms; that unlike Disraeli he was not especially interested in exploring issues and testing convictions; and that he had “very few political ideas” (Brantlinger 209).

On 19 June 1900, during the heyday of the British seaside resort, a new gentleman's lavatory opened on one of the Firth of Clyde's most famous piers. The Isle of Bute was a popular destination for Scottish Victorians, who would make the short journey from Glasgow by paddle steamer for a day of shopping or a weekend holiday. Despite its small size and close proximity to major cities, Rothesay, the island's only town, supported a large number of shops year round and hosted regular fairs during the summer. Travelers were also lured to the island by its diverse topography and by Rothesay Castle, which dates from 1230 and eventually devolved to the Stuarts. The island's moderate west-coast climate attracted a considerable number of visitors throughout the year (Figure 1).

The diagnosis made by Dr P. C. Remondino, M.D. was unambiguous. “Trilby is a masterpiece when viewed in the light of a study in heredity,” he announced in the pages of Practical Medicine in 1895. “Du Maurier has given us . . . the well digested results of a careful as well as discriminating study. . . . Neither Darwin, [nor] Galton, . . . could have given us a more comprehensive or more lucid study of the subject. Neither could Maudsley” (380–81). Despite the good doctor's critical insight, Trilby's deployment of degenerationist discourse has often gone unnoticed. On the rare occasions it has been touched upon, it has most often been subsumed under the banner of fin-de-siècle anti-Semitism or connected to Du Maurier's anti-Aestheticism. Yet what this essay reveals is that art, degeneration, and anti-Semitism were, in fact, intimately connected in the late nineteenth century, and that this not only influenced literature, it also shaped its reception. This essay examines Trilby (1894) in conjunction with The Master (1894), a novel by the most important British Zionist of the late nineteenth century, Israel Zangwill. Since Zangwill's death in 1926, literary critics have paid him scant attention. His contributions to degenerationism have been wholly overlooked even though his notion of the “melting pot” was almost certainly the theory of ethnicity with the most traction in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.

While addressing the Royal African Society, founded in honor of Mary Henrietta Kingsley, Edward Wilmot Blyden reflected on one of his more memorable experiences in Victorian England:

IN HIS LATE PLAY, Sardanapalus (1821), Byron repeatedly presents questions of legacy, as the Assyrian monarch struggles to determine what his reign will mean to future eras. The drama ends with Sardanapalus and his beloved slave, Myrrha, atop a suicidal pyre meant to destroy the palace as the rebellious satraps close in–the pyre also to be the king's final monument, the act by which posterity will remember him. Indeed, he imagines his flaming destruction will produce “a light/To lesson ages, rebel nations, and/Voluptuous princes,” even though “Time shall quench full many/A people's records, and a hero's acts;/Sweep empire after empire, like this first/Of empires, into nothing” (V.i.440–45). In the event, Sardanapalus's last words on the matter come in the form of a satire on the Egyptian pyramids, those proud Ozymandian monuments which time has turned into sites of confusion: [I]n this blazing palace,And its enormous walls of reeking ruin,We leave a nobler monument than EgyptHath piled in her brick mountains, o'er dead kings,Or kine, for none know whether those proud pilesBe for their monarch, or their ox-god Apis:So much for monuments that have forgottenTheir very record! (V.i.480–87)

This essay considers one important episode in the relationship between the British novel and the philosophical movement known as British Idealism. Focusing on two novels from the 1880s, Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean and Mary Augusta Ward's Robert Elsmere, I show how both works adapt the generic framework of the bildungsroman to reflect a distinctively idealist notion of development, which conceives of ethical, spiritual, and aesthetic growth as a kind of death—a “dying to live.” Viewed, in this way, from beyond the grave, the early deaths of both Pater's and Ward's eponymous protagonists represent not a critique of the logic of bildung but its ultimate fulfillment.

In The Poetry of Chartism (2009), Mike Sanders describes the temptation which confronts literary scholars of working-class and radical political movements to present their endeavors as “archival work [of] discovery, a bringing to light of long forgotten artefacts” (36). Such posture, though dramatic, is unwarranted in Sanders's view because a critical tradition beginning in the late nineteenth century has continued to republish, analyze, and appreciate the writing of Chartist poets. Yet, if the temptation persists (for students of radical poetry and fiction alike), it does so for reasons beyond the difficulties inherent in accessing literature printed in ephemeral newspapers by movements which suffered state persecution. New generations of scholars must “discover” the radical corpus anew because in a profound sense this corpus has not been integrated into broader literary history but has remained a separate tradition, found and lost again and again.

During the first astronomy lesson shared by the two protagonists of Thomas Hardy's Two on a Tower (1882), Lady Viviette Constantine and Swithin St Cleeve share a decidedly gloomy interpretation of human insignificance in the face of a vast universe:

In their evaluation ofJude the Obscure (1895), some earlier literary critics have justifiably (given the historical context) judged the text by the standards of the then dominant and sustained New Criticism trend, taking into account its symbiotic relationship with modernist aesthetics. The basic premise behind this conception was the aesthetic notion of structural and thematic unity as well as coherence and integrity of character. These notions were high on the agenda of the New Criticism of the 1940s and onwards. The narrative was found most lacking in this respect. An article entitled, “Hardy and the Fragmentation of Consciousness” (1975) by Harold L. Weatherby, a foremost Hardy critic, serves as an outstanding example of such a critical view. It makes the case that what ails Jude is its unruliness and disjunctiveness: “the brilliance of the novel's peripheries can scarcely compensate for a profound weakness at its center. Indeed the centre cannot hold: the book falls into fragments” (“Hardy” 469). Weatherby continues, arguing that “There is no unified authorial consciousness” (470), that “Hardy as narrator contradicts himself repeatedly in his estimation of what is right or wrong, good or bad, for his characters” (470), and that it is “an artistic failure . . . failing to achieve unity and coherence” (479). Hardy, in addition, is undeservedly dismissed as “the old-fashioned man from Wessex” (483) – which reminds us of the well-known “good little Thomas Hardy” epithets of Henry James's adverse judgment (Cox xxxi). The article also associates incoherence and contradictions in the narrative with attitudinal ambivalences in Hardy's own mind (473, 476). Undeniably, Jude is permeated with incoherence. Who can disagree? It is deeply involved in sustained and unsettled opposition and what may be termed the play of Derridean différance (Positions 14). And, indeed, Hardy himself acknowledges the tangle of disconnections and self-contradictions disrupting the stability of character in a notebook admission (which shows it to be his design):

Although the OED's first citation for “journalism” is dated 1833 (it comes from Westminster Review), the current dramatic expansion of digital resources suggests that scholarly use of Victorian journals may be reaching a point of transition. In addition, the number, variety, breadth, and depth of recent studies, most of them finished before the new materials went online, is truly remarkable.

FOR THE EXHIBITION of his collected works at the Burleigh Gallery in London during the spring of 1865, Ford Madox Brown supplied a lengthy descriptive catalogue which gave highly detailed accounts of many of the paintings on display. Rarely before had a painter offered such an insight into his artistic methods and intentions, and the reviewers of the day were suitably impressed; the Pre-Raphaelite critic William Michael Rossetti even went so far as to remark that if others were to follow Brown’s practice, “it would enable the spectator to know for certain exactly what the artist meant, and what his work means, and would thus cut short a deal of silly and often perverse guess-work” (Rossetti, 1970: 181).The centerpiece of the show was a highly detailed canvas called Work (Figure 8) which had taken the artist over ten years to complete. In his review for Fraser’s Magazine Rossetti commented that the artist’s account of this painting was particularly valuable, since it enabled one “to follow out the whole scheme of thought into its details with certainty instead of by guess,” so that one gradually came to realise that “not a corner of the picture, a figure, or an action, is without its close yet varied relation to the central idea” (1970: 182). And indeed, Brown’s catalogue description did give a remarkably full account of its development, recording its transformation from a comparatively modest genre painting into a large-scale celebration of modern labor: