In 1892 the celebrated physicist and chemist William Crookes commented on the existence of “an almost infinite range of ethereal vibrations or electrical rays,” which he believed could revolutionize telegraphic communications (174). A few years later, and aided by Crookes's experiments with vacuums, the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen successfully produced X-rays, a hitherto unrecorded form of electromagnetic radiation, which he tantalizingly described as “a new kind of invisible light” (Röntgen 413; Warner 256). Crookes was quick to speculate as to “the possibility of links between roentgen rays and the cerebral ganglia,” that an undiscovered organ in the brain might be “capable of transmitting and receiving . . . electrical rays” (Lyons 105; Crookes 176). X-rays, he thought, might prove a psychic counterpart to higher wavelength radio waves, allowing the transmission of messages telepathically rather than telegraphically, and even communication with the world of the spirits (Lyons 105). Crookes theorized that the parapsychological was intimately entwined with the findings of contemporary physics, occupying different zones of the same electromagnetic spectrum. An ardent Spiritualist, he believed that the ether, the “impalpable, invisible entity, by which all space is supposed to be filled” and which contained countless “channels of communication” also sustained “ghost-light . . . invisible to the naked eye” and acted as a medium that allowed “ethereal bodies to rise up” (Crookes 174; Warner 253–56). In other words, the matter through which light and electrical signals passed was envisaged as the same substance which allowed the spirits to fluctuate between visible and invisible forms. These links between the electromagnetic field and the occult, endorsed by Crookes and certain other members of his circles such as the Society for Psychical Research, anticipated turn-of-the-century associations between electricity, radiation and ancient Egypt which, through its reputation as the birthplace of magic, was central to Victorian conceptions of the supernatural.

Over the last thirty years the growing academic interest in both Victorian periodicals and women's issues in the nineteenth century has focussed interest on the women journalists who wrote for the serious quarterlies and monthlies published during this period. The part played by such writers as Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Eastlake, and Frances Power Cobbe in the development of Victorian thought is now well known, while that of less prolific contributors is increasingly attracting scholarly attention. One of the authors gradually being rescued from oblivion is Anne Mozley (1809–1891), with her views on both contemporary literature and debates about the social position of women being seen as of interest.

The Inn Album was published in 1875 when Browning was sixty-three years old, forty-two years after Pauline, fourteen years before he died. The year 1875 falls six years into what Kenneth Knickerbocker calls Browning's senescence (1869–89), a period during which the poet acquired wide fame yet alienated many critics. After the poems of this period were reviewed, they were largely ignored. Only recently have critics given attention to The Inn Album, and only J. M. Hitner (in 1969) has discussed Browning's revisions of the poem—but his discussion is less than satisfactory. For example, given to oversimplification, he persistently confuses changes made in the proof stage with those made in the manuscript and says that the “last version of the MS. usually agrees with the first edition” (Hitner, p. 118), which, as we shall see, is simply not true.

For browning, the central issue in The Ring and the Book is perception of the finite limits of the human capacity for recognizing truth. For the critical reader, the central issue is perhaps better expressed as Browning's awareness of his own capacity for re-creating or “repristinating” the past. Critics have labelled Browning's work as either relativistic or ironic, often using these terms as the poles of a continuum upon which the accuracy of Browning's perceptions might be measured. For example, Robert Langbaum sees relativism as the basis of the poem's associational coherence: “The organized facts are ‘one fact the more.’ The principle of organization is inseparable from the facts because without it the facts would not be knowable. To know anything we must imagine it” (15). W. David Shaw understands irony and relativism to be mutually exclusive (239). He argues that Browning structures his poem by the dialectical irony which arises out of the movement of Guido's guilt and the corresponding movement of Pompilia's innocence. I suggest that relativism and irony come together once one recognizes the close relationship between historicity and fantasy and the rather serious implications this relationship has for the kind of truth Browning suggests his poem specifies. That is, the act of artistic creativity allows the poet to express with freedom intuitive insights into the world of unlimited possibility, or infinity, and indeed, it is for an ever closer approach to the infinite that he or she strives artistically.

In February 2003 my close friend Jeff Hubbard died in a car accident, taking the curve of an icy metro Detroit highway exit ramp too fast late one weekend night. He was twenty years old and had been living at home with his parents since we graduated from high school, working odd jobs—a host at a Mexican restaurant, a temporary letter carrier for the USPS—and helping take care of his young nephew. I was in college in New York, and a friend called to give me the news. I knew that I needed to go home to Michigan for the funeral to believe that it had really happened.

IN KING SOLOMON'S MINES (1885), H. Rider Haggard describes the journey of three robust English men who successfully penetrate a sexualized landscape in southern Africa, depicted as both the body of the long-dead Queen of Sheba and that of her contemporary, King Solomon. The three English adventurers, led by the narrator Allan Quatermain, climb “Sheba's breasts” (26; ch. 2), traverse her torso, and arrive finally at the location where diamonds are stored inside her cavernous body, in the space Haggard calls “King Solomon's treasure chamber” (27; ch. 2). Narrative desire and the mystery of the Jewish patriarch's ancient empire propel these men through a series of male bonding adventures that lead to their arrival and conquest of the famed mines, where they pocket diamonds “as large as pigeon-eggs” (225; ch. 17) and plot their escape from what they fear may be a sealed cave.

H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) has hitherto been read in two principal scientific contexts: those of evolutionary biology and thermodynamic physics. Numerous critics have situated the romance in the context of evolutionary biology and contemporary discourses of degeneration (McLean 11–40; Greenslade 32–41). Others have discussed it in the context of thermodynamic physics. For instance, Bruce Clarke has read The Time Machine as “a virtual allegory of classical thermodynamics,” and shows that its combination of physical and social entropy reflects a wider transfer within the period of concepts and metaphors from physical science to social discourses of degeneration (121–26). Neatly linking these scientific contexts with issues of form, Michael Sayeau has argued that the social and physical entropy that are themes of the romance are reflected in its narrative structure, which manifests a type of narrative entropy, and thereby raises the spectre of the end of fiction (109–46).

Why was Charles Dickens so popular when he broke onto the scene in the late 1830s? That's still a real question to ask, but so is another, related question: what did the terms “popular” and “popularity” mean when applied to this novelist at this signal moment in the development of the novel? Writing in the National Magazine and Monthly Critic: A Journal of Philosophy, Science, Literature, Music, and the Drama – a short-lived monthly designed to publish serious work on various subjects – G. H. Lewes begins his 1837 review of Dickens's Sketches by Boz, Pickwick Papers, and Oliver Twist with a paragraph that worries over the nature of popularity:

The core of this paper is a reading of Robert Browning's “Clive” (1880); it attempts to account for the formalist demands of this generically complex and relentlessly ironic poetic text, while at the same time it construes the accomplishment of Browning's poetic language and form as intricate cultural critique. However, in order to better understand Browning's poem an additional discussion of its intertexts is required, the most important being Thomas Babington Macaulay's essay “On Clive” (1840).

The story – we might almost say legend – of how Dickens came to make the character of Riah in Our Mutual Friend a benign figure and a deliberate revision of Fagin, underworld denizen of Oliver Twist, is well known. In 1860, an Anglo-Jewish couple, J. P. and Eliza Davis, bought Charles Dickens's London home, Tavistock House. Dickens remarked to his personal secretary, William Wills, that he could not recall any “money-making dealings . . . that have been so satisfactory, considerate, and trusting” (Johnson 487). This expression of relief and slight surprise that the sale of his property to a Jewish family was without complication followed on Dickens's suspicion, crudely expressed earlier in the negotiations, that the “Jew Money-Lender” (as he referred to J. P. Davis) would not come through on the deal (Stone 243). But, though the Davises proved surprisingly cooperative in this phase of the transaction as far as Dickens was concerned, Mrs. Davis did ultimately have a complaint to register with the great writer and delivered it politely in a letter three years later. It was not about the house or the terms of purchase but rather about the character of Fagin, created by Dickens in 1837, some twenty-six years earlier. English Jews, she told him, had taken offense at this portrayal of one of their people and believed Dickens had done them a “great wrong” by offering the greedy, thieving, child-corrupting, sausage-eating criminal as representative of their “scattered nation” (Lane 98). Still, she added, while the author lived he might conceivably “justify himself or atone” for this deed. Apparently contrite and unaware of feeling any of the prejudices his portrait of the London fence might convey, Dickens declared in a letter back to Mrs. Davis that he had only “friendly feelings” for the Jews. His contrition did not end there. For the novel he was then beginning to write, Dickens would create a beneficent Jewish character, Riah, friend to the river dredger's daughter, Lizzie Hexam, and her misshapen companion, the dolls’ dressmaker, Jenny Wren. As the late-nineteenth century Anglo-Jewish poet and novelist Amy Levy put it, Dickens “trie[d] to compensate for his having affixed the label ‘Jew’ to one of his bad fairies by creating the good fairy Riah” (Levy 176).

In her groundbreaking bookMasks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989), Guari Viswanathan established that “the discipline of English came into its own” not in England but in India, as an instrument of cultural colonization: “As early as the 1820s, when the classical curriculum reigned supreme in England despite the strenuous efforts of some concerned critics to loosen its hold, English as the study of culture and not simply the study of language had already found a secure place in the British Indian curriculum” (2, 3). Pausing to summarize the English literary curriculum fostered by “government schools in midcentury India,” she lists the following poetical works, gleaned from a report reprinted for the House of Lords in 1853: “Richardson's Poetical Selections (Goldsmith, Gray, Addison, Pope, and Shakespeare), Otway's Venice Preserved, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, Pope's Iliad by Homer, [and] Milton's Paradise Lost (the first four books)” (54). Although Viswanathan does not identify Richardson or his Poetical Selections, she is right to head the list with that textbook, which is mentioned in many other government reports of the period, and which was instrumental in establishing a classroom canon of British poetry in India before any such curriculum had been determined in Great Britain.

This paper identifies the theme of honey gathering in Charlotte Brontë's fiction and places it within the context of Romantic and early Victorian representations of the nectarium's role in insect-flower relationships. Brontë's novels often invert the conventional use of botany to represent female sexuality by representing men as flowers and endowing her protagonists with an ulterior form of entomological agency. These insects work to express Brontë's desire for greater economic and erotic mobility, but it is argued that this mobility is problematized by the self-absorbed nature of the masculine nectarium, a dulcet gland in flowers originally believed by botanists to ooze sugar to serve a plant's own needs. This is particularly evident in Brontë's industrial romance Shirley (1849), as the theme of honey gathering is pathologized to visualize a crisis in the plotting of Victorian femininity. This paper may be helpful to scholars interested in Brontë's fiction, representations of sexuality, botany, entomology, ecology, and early Victorian pest discourse.

Inspired by the power and influence that Charles Darwin attributed to heredity in On the Origin of Species (1859), Francis Galton developed a program of eugenics that he believed could shape Britain's progress as a nation by managing the evolutionary development of the British race. In Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (1883), Galton summarizes this aim as “to learn how far history may have shown the practicability of supplanting inefficient human stock by better strains, and to consider whether it might not be our duty to do so by such efforts as may be reasonable, thus exerting ourselves to further the ends of evolution more rapidly and with less distress than if events were left to their own course” (1–2). While this project, Galton's life's work, was largely a process of analysis and the development of dictates that could be put in place to shape the reproduction of the nation, it was also a project of imagination; not only was Galton himself imagining a different future for Britain, but in promoting his program, he appealed to the imaginations of his readers in an attempt to get them to share his vision.

The ideal of the British New Woman, variously representing feminist, activist, fashion reformer, and writer, has been the subject of renewed critical interest since the late twentieth century. Although symptomatic of its situation in the fin de siècle, which “names those things that were never quite assimilated into the high-Victorian moment,” since the 1980s the New Woman has transcended its polemical Victorian conceptualization to represent “prequels to modernism as well as sequels to Victorianism.” As Sally Ledger has argued, the New Woman, despite being largely a “discursive phenomenon,” was nonetheless historically significant and central to late Victorian literary culture.