Tennyson is not only breaking out of the pedestrian clichés and frozen critical expectations that for so long enshrouded him; he is gradually but steadily emerging as a poet of arbitration, as one of the poet-practitioners by whose work the nature of poetry must itself be defined and against which the work of poets habitually preferred to him will more and more be measured.

In the summer of 1847, the nineteen-year-old Dante Gabriel Rossetti came across a copy of Robert Browning's anonymous first book in the library of the British Museum. This discovery of Pauline (published in 1833) by a young poet already enthusiastic about Browning has long been justly famous. Not being able to obtain the book from the publisher – it had long since been removed from sale – Rossetti was forced to transcribe the entire text into a notebook. While doing so, he noticed a similarity between certain passages of Pauline and one of Browning's acknowledged early works, Paracelsus (1835). Several months later, on 17 October 1847, Rossetti wrote to Browning to ask if he were the author of Pauline. Browning's reply – the beginning of an important literary friendship – is presented here for the first time.

It is generally agreed that Robert Browning's Fra Lippo Lippi, in expressing his notions about painting, is to a certain extent putting forth the poet's own artistic creed, which was very much like George Eliot's: “to give a faithful account of men and things.” The Florentine monk captured in painting those he saw from day to day, and, after writing “Fra Lippo Lippi,” Browning himself became increasingly insistent upon basing his poems on contemporary people and surrounding them with the bric-a-brac of daily life. Following Men and Women (1855), then, Dramatis Personae (1864) marks the end of Browning's overwhelming predilection for the historical personage; thenceforward he was to have a much greater interest in presenting the men and women of his day. Of course, some poems are concerned with the contemporary only indirectly, such as “A Death in the Desert,” the poet's answer to Ernest Renan's La Vie de Jésus (1863). Many others, however, portray men of the day speaking in their own voices. “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium,’” for example, consists of the voice of D. D. Home, the American medium, whom Mrs. Browning had admired. This interest in treating contemporaries seems much of the time to have accompanied a desire to enlarge his characters' living space. In such works as Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871), Fifine at the Fair (1872), and Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873), Browning allowed his dramatis personae to speak for about a hundred and fifty pages instead of for a few hundred lines as most often before. Still, his contemporaries continued to have prominent voices in collections of shorter poems: Dramatic Idyls, Second Series, especially “Clive” (1880); Jocoseria, especially “Donald” (1883), and Parleyings with Certain People, especially “With George Bubb Doddington” (1887).

Which is the proper text for an authoritative modern edition of Robert Browning's poems?

An analysis of Browning editions published during the past twenty-five years reveals that there has been a variety of answers to this question. The basis of many inexpensive reprints has been the sixteen-volume 1888-89 collection revised by Browning just before his death. More recently, at least two important editions–the Oxford Standard Authors volume, edited by Ian Jack, and the Ohio University Press variorum edition, edited by Roma A. King, Jr.–have adopted as their text the 1889 “reprint” of Browning's poems (though in the latter case the text is emended), which was issued after his death but incorporated many authorial revisions and corrections. A few editions have also reprinted earlier versions of the poems.

One of the constant factors in Robert Browning's life was his love of music, a love which he repaid by devoting two of the finest examples of his poetic art to musical subjects. “Abt Vogler” and “A Toccata of Galuppi's” are among the most frequently studied and anthologized poems, the latter being a particular favorite with general reader and critic alike. Yet had Browning never written these two poems, his attachment to music would have been just as apparent through the numerous references to music, concerts, and musical personalities in his other poems and his letters. In fact, Browning's knowledge of music and his status as an amateur musician are commonplaces of the Browning legend, a part of the received Gospel. But while we know a great deal about Browning's youthful training in music, his technical knowledge of musical forms, and his philosophy of music, we know very little about the important matter of where his taste in music lay. If one reads Browning's poems and letters with the express purpose of discovering his musical likes and dislikes, the results are surprising and—in terms of his “musical” poems—rather revealing, for they indicate that Browning, living in the great age of musical Romanticism, was something of a musical reactionary who looked with disdain on the great composers of his era and on their musical styles, preferring instead the forms and performing techniques of the preceding century.

In a fragmentary preface to St. Mark's Rest, now in Princeton University's Firestone Library, Ruskin gives a brief history of his Venetian experiences, emphasizing the reading that conditioned his early responses to the city that proved so important to his life and work:

My father had trained me well in Shakespeare I knew the Two Gentlemen, & the Merchants of Verona and Venice, better than any gentlemen or merchants in London. had learned most of Romeo and Juliet, by heart; and all the beautiful beginnings of Othello. From Byron though with less reverence, I had received even deeper impressions – nor can I to this day be enough thankful for the glorious ideal of Venetian womanhood and Venetian patriotism which he gave me in Faliero and the Foscari, as I became capable of receiving it in later years Add to these Rogers poems, with Turner Vignettes – and Shelleys Julian & Maddalo, Prouts drawings in the Watercolour Rooms of its Old Society and the list of my first tutors in Venetian work will be full.

Influences, Imitators, Offshoots, and Other Interlocutors: Punch Re-Rooted: Comedy and the Periodical Press 1820–1850

SHANNON R. SMITH

A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photography

RICHARD L. STEIN

Oscar the Opera and the High-Pitched Life

GAIL TURLEY HOUSTON

Conversations with Oscar Wilde

ANN C. COLLEY

A Felt Experience: Touching the Book at Birkbeck, London

RYAN SWEET

This essay describes the author's quest for effective, large-scale political actions to stop the burning of fossil fuels. What are the nuts and bolts of collective organizing at scales large enough to effect substantial change? Frustrated both by widespread public pessimism and by the politics most often articulated in literary studies, Levine finds a working political model in the divestment movement; a methodological model in formalist analysis; and a theory of collective aesthetics and politics in post-Victorian Jane Addams.

The emergence of limited liability over the course of the nineteenth century was marked by intense and sustained feelings of anxiety. Victorians debated it in Parliament and in the periodical press, anatomized its evils in fiction and drama, and theorized its merits and pitfalls in the nascent discipline of economics. Formalized at mid-century through a series of acts that collectively instituted what Paul Johnson describes as “companification” – “the substitution of an impersonal corporate legal entity for the sole proprietorship or partnership” – limited liability was the means by which a corporation was constituted as a legal individual in order to restrict the responsibility of a company's owners for its debts (106). Early response to the practice was tentative: though hailed by some as a means of promoting economic growth, limited liability also inspired fear among the public, for whom it seemed a threat both to moral character and to responsible social behaviour. Wary that it would promote dishonesty in business and legitimize irresponsible speculation among investors, the mid-Victorians did not initially rush to invest. Despite the fact that by the final decades of the century many early fears had been realized and anxieties about investment continued unabated, however, there was a marked shift towards a culture of investment (Taylor 212–13). Summarizing the effects of the “‘Limited-Company’ Craze” in the Nineteenth Century in 1898, one commentator observed that “Personal ownership has ceased to be the controlling power in trade; and when it left it took along with it that personal care, personal supervision, and personal responsibility which made our business great.” The result, he suggested, is that “we now have, in thousands of instances, mere ‘corporations without bodies to be kicked or souls to be damned’” (Van Oss 734).

The Dictionary of National Biography, published between 1885 and 1900, was one of Britain's biggest cyclopedia projects. The rampant expansion of the nation's archives, private collections, and museums produced an abundance of materials that frustrated the dictionary's editors, Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, especially because methodologies for making order of such materials were underdeveloped. Adding to their frustration was the sense of impending doom felt generally in Britain after the discovery of the second law of thermodynamics in 1859. Entropy put an end to the presiding belief in the infinite energy that fueled Britain's economic development and therefore challenged Victorian biography's premise that the capacity for self-development was boundless. Like the physicists of the era, these dictionary makers searched for ways to circumvent entropy's deadening force and reenergize their world. This project would not actually be achieved, however, until the twentieth century when Claude Shannon published his “Information Theory” in 1948. I argue that in an attempt to get out from under the chaos of information overload, the editors of the DNB invented new methods to organize information that anticipated Shannon's revolutionary theory and changed the way that we think, write, and work.

If New Woman writing embraced everything from political reform, sexual freedoms, and economic and social independence to literary publishing, Lucy Bland and other historians have confirmed that New Woman debates often played out in terms of marriage, whether in Mona Caird's path-breaking 1888 essay on “Marriage” or her by-now familiar novel of 1894, The Daughters of Danaus. This title, taken from the myth of women in Hades condemned to haul water in leaky jars after murdering their husbands on their wedding nights, suggests both the futility of life for middle-class Victorian women and the latent, murderous recoil they could harbor. To fall back upon these two Caird works to exemplify New Woman writing, however, is in some ways to perpetuate a generic oversimplification that New Woman writing was a prose medium.

While music often appears as a “code” for sexual desire in Victorian literature, this article explores music's presence in a text for which no veiled language was needed: the anonymously published pornographic novella Teleny (1893). The authors of Teleny invoke emerging scientific discourses about music physiology to draw explicit parallels between musical and sexual encounters—as when the protagonist Camille orgasms in response to the vibrations of his lover's piano music. In such moments, Teleny offers an insistent defense of queer desire as a natural process rooted in the organic and often involuntary actions of the muscles and nerves—a particularly powerful intervention at a time when sexual “inversion” was most often denigrated as unnatural. In its use of biological science in the service of sexual representation—science that many twenty-first-century queer theorists might deem “essentialist”—Teleny presents a compelling challenge to scholars grappling with conversations about normativity, resistance, utopian desires, and idealized cultural objects.

A drastic shift in British perceptions of China took place between the beginning and end of the nineteenth century. Up through the first decades of the nineteenth century, China and its ideals as well as its art and aesthetic were widely admired. Yet by the end of the century, the discourse surrounding China had become very different: no longer were the Chinese admired for their art or their morals; instead, they were castigated as amoral, pitiless, inscrutable liars. Why and how this change took place has not yet been explored in part because scholars have tended to focus on either the beginning of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth, rather than on the years between these periods. Yet those years saw the rise of sinology, which became established as a field of scholarship in precisely the period (from roughly 1870 to 1901) that has so far been neglected. This scholarship, highly specialized though it might seem (and was), was not confined to the Ivory Tower; it made its way to the educated, upper-middle-class reading public through periodicals. If we look at what British periodicals were teaching their readers about China and the Chinese language during this gap period, we can see – perhaps surprisingly – a concerted and earnest effort being made to avoid assumptions that the Chinese need British help and to avoid pro-Christian judgments, in favor of an attempt to learn the workings of the Chinese language as the first step towards understanding the Chinese on their own terms. What scholars learn and what periodicals teach about the Chinese language, however, leads these very same would-be enlightened people, in the end, to see the Chinese as cunning children incapable of complex thought or basic feeling, and therefore incapable of progress or morality. In other words, the increasing British prejudice against the Chinese originated to an important degree in the work of the first scholars of sinology, rather than in the fears of the ignorant or the culturally-marginalized. Examining this process challenges a paradigm dominant in postcolonial studies, in which modern scholars decry the supremacy of Western systems while problematically replicating a narrative in which the concept of Western systemic supremacy is not challenged and the existence of non-Western systems is not acknowledged. In the case of China, the complexity of its written and spoken language systems helped frustrate Western efforts at colonization, and this systemic resistance to Western domination was constructed by Western scholars in such a way as to create and justify sinophobia.

First published in 1893, George Egerton's Keynotes was immediately popular, selling six thousand copies in its first year alone. Appearing three years later, Laura Marholm Hansson's review effectively singles out what made the text such a tremendous success: each story offered readers a probing representation of woman's “consciousness” or inner world of emotional and sexual passions, subjects unavailable in any “previous work.” Egerton was, of course, the penname for Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright, and many of the themes covered in Keynotes were loosely modeled after her own life. The volume was uncompromising in its portrayal of women's desires, or those “notes” from which it takes its title. “[T]here are no signs of girlish prudery in ‘Keynotes,’” Hansson continues, “it is a liberal book, indiscreet in respect of the intimacies of married life, and entirely without respect for the husband” (63). Despite this high praise, Hansson also worries whether Keynotes was not “too good a book to become famous all at once” (61). Her hesitation alludes to the mixed reception among readers and literary critics, for to say that everyone loved Egerton's fiction would be an exaggeration and, more importantly, would miss the cultural work of her appetitive characters. As signaled by the second epigraph, taken from Egerton's “Now Spring Has Come,” Keynotes was full of stories focused on “unconventional” women who “hungered” for both food and love; such libidinal desires were unthinkable – and even unspeakable – in a world where the proper Victorian lady was defined in terms of bodily sacrifice. While some readers certainly disapproved, still others like Hansson, as the first epigraph suggests, welcomed this “independent” turn in women's writing and saw in Egerton's characters a reflection of their own “woman's individuality.”