The days have passed in which John Ruskin's scientific writings were deemed secondary and separate to his art, architecture, or politics, but his science still tends to be viewed predominately via the prism of his later natural history, with its characteristically virulent opposition to Darwin and materialism, and in relation to his application of typological exegesis to landscape study. I would argue that an approach is required that situates Ruskin's response to Darwin against the background of his entire career in scientific writing and that seeks to clarify the relationship between the various influences which informed his engagement with environment. While this article cannot pursue such an analysis in full, it outlines some key reasons for its necessity. Through examination of significant 1843 correspondence and related works, I will call in particular for a re-evaluation of the degree to which Ruskin engaged in modern scientific methods and approaches. In doing so, I will suggest that Ruskin's later anti-materialism did not represent a seamless continuation of a long-established attitude to science and nature, but something of a discontinuity, in which, faced with the implications of evolutionary theory, he attempted to reject not just Darwinism, but many of the elements that had made his own work in science distinctive, convincing, and attuned to modernity, materiality, and process.

When the 1851 census reported an “excess” of some half-million women in Britain, feminists and anti-feminists quickly took to the press to debate the implications of the demographic imbalance. Yet Victorian novelists also wishing to convey and alter the “Condition of England” experienced something of a quandary: How should fiction respond to news of the imbalance, and what options could be suggested for resolving it?

SPIRITUALISM WAS SEXY. The Victorian faith of sittings, mediums, and spirit contact thrilled its practitioners and detractors alike and broke all rules of decency and decorum in spite of the fact that it was nurtured and developed in the drawing rooms of the proprietous middle classes. A faith little known to modern scholars and, perhaps for that reason, one which has not often been recognized for its historical and social importance, Spiritualism became the religion of thousands over the course of the last four decades of the period. In spite of its humble and strange beginnings in 1848–a code of raps developed between a murdered peddler and two young American girls–aristocrats, scholars, and scientists, along with ordinary men and women of all ages, were converted to the belief that death was no barrier to communication. This contact, achieved through the services of mediums, who were sensitive to the sounds and sights of the spirit world, provided many with comfort, peace, and the reassurance of an afterlife in a social and intellectual climate that called those things into doubt.

Art making and art viewing activities steeped in assumptions about gender recur throughout Jane Eyre and Villette. This paper will argue that Charlotte Bronte developed these fine arts devices as part of a carefully crafted feminist critique of spectatorship and representation. Bronte pursued this end by demonstrating that incidents relating to the production and reception of visual culture were relevant for visual experience more broadly understood by linking these events in the narrative to “scopic custom”; that is, the art experiences of Bronte's characters are presented as occurring in relation to the customary, gendered patterns of looking and being looked at which dominated Victorian society. This strategic interweaving of visual culture with scopic custom allows Bronte to accentuate their interdependence as a socio-cultural dynamic of critical significance, and to illuminate their share in the cultural and social constraints affecting women as producers and objects of representation.

There is a familiar critical narrative about the fin de siècle, into which gothic fiction fits very neatly. It is the story of the gradual decay of Victorian values, especially their faith in progress and in the empire. The self-satisfied (middle-class) builders of empire were superseded by the doubters and decadents. As Patrick Brantlinger writes, “After the mid-Victorian years the British found it increasingly difficult to think of themselves as inevitably progressive; they began worrying instead about the degeneration of their institutions, their culture, their racial ‘stock’” (230). And this late-Victorian anomie expressed itself in the move away from realism and toward romance, decadence, naturalism, and especially gothic horror. No wonder, then, that the 1880s and 1890s saw a surge of gothic fiction paranoiacally concerned with the disintegration of identity into bestiality (Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886), the loss of British identity through overpowering foreign influence (du Maurier's Trilby, 1894), the vulnerability of the empire to monstrous and predatory sexualities (Stoker's Dracula, 1897), the death of humanity itself in the twilight of everything (Orwell's The Time Machine, 1895). The Victorian Gothic, thus, may be read as an index of its culture's anxieties, especially its repressed, displaced, disavowed fears and desires. But this narrative tends to overlook the Victorians’ concerns with the terrifying possibilities of progress, energy, and self-assertion. In this essay I consider two oppositions that shape critical discussions of the fin-de-siècle Gothic – horror and terror, and entropy and energy – and I argue that critics’ exploration of the Victorians’ seeming preoccupation with the horrors of entropic decline has obscured that culture's persistent anxiety about the terrors of energy. I examine mid- to late-Victorian accounts of human energy in relation to the first law of thermodynamics – the conservation of energy – in both scientific and social discourses, and then I turn to Richard Marsh's 1897 gothic novel The Beetle as an illustration of my point: the conservation of energy might have been at least as scary as entropy to the Victorians.

In 1831 the first epidemic of what came to be known as “Asiatic cholera” bloomed in Britain. The disease, which in previous centuries had been known only in India, was to appear again in Britain in 1848–49, 1853–54, and 1866–67 as pandemics swept around the globe. But it was cholera's first arrival on the shores of Britain in 1831 that struck terror into British hearts. No one knew what disastrous consequences might ensue from this alien plague. Striking down perfectly healthy people, sometimes as they walked in the streets, it could kill within a few hours. So severe was the rapid dehydration caused by violent diarrhea and vomiting, and accompanied by hideously painful cramps, that victims rapidly became semi-comatose and turned blue-white. The Quarterly Review called it “one of the most terrible pestilences which have ever desolated the earth,” and claimed that it had killed fifty million in fourteen years (Morris 14).

Dickens is not known as a political economist. He is the critic of workhouse abuses (made topical by Benthamite Poor Law reform) in Oliver Twist and the caricaturist of the father of Adam Smith and Malthus Gradgrind in Hard Times. Students of Victorian literature familiarly take Hard Times as F. R. Leavis does as a condemnation of “The World of Bentham,” of utilitarianism, philosophic radicalism, political economy. It is what we expect when Dickens, The Critical Heritage gives us John Stuart Mill complaining about Bleak House and that “creature” Dickens for a portrait of Mrs. Jellyby that he finds antifeminist (to Harriet Taylor, March 20, 1854, qtd. in Collins, 297–98). But consider: in Bleak House there is a passage where Mr. Skimpole declares his family to be “all wrong in point of political economy” (454). His “Beauty daughter” marries young, takes a husband who is another child; they are improvident, have two children, bring them home to Skimpole's, as he expects his other daughters to do as well, though they none of them know how they will get on. Skimpole is exposed in the course of the novel as one of its worst characters. For a bribe and to save himself from infection he turns the smallpox-stricken Jo out into the night. He cadges loans from those who can't afford to make them. He encourages Richard in his fatal false hopes of a Chancery settlement for a payback to himself for helping the lawyer Mr. Vholes to a client. Esther Summerson ultimately condemns him, and Mr. Jarndyce breaks with him. If Skimpole is all wrong in point of political economy, can there be something all right with political economy for Dickens?

FOR MANY YEARS “VERNON LEE” (Violet Paget 1856–1935) has received scant critical attention. More recently, however, her eclectic oeuvre, and her literary stature amongst contemporaries such as Walter Pater, Henry James, and Edith Wharton have attracted increasing interest. Despite this, Lee’s collections of supernatural short stories remain relatively unexplored. With the notable exceptions of Carlo Caballero, Jane Hotchkiss, and Catherine Maxwell, who have used the richness of Lee’s language to examine the fascinating tensions that underlie these tales, little has been done to investigate the central importance of the aesthetic object in Lee’s fantasies and its wider implications in the context of the supernatural space. This essay intends to highlight the role played by the art object (in this case the operatic voice), and the significance of the supernatural in the development of Lee’s professional and private subjectivity.

About two-thirds of the way through George Du Maurier's Trilby (1894), a novel that entranced the reading public with its descriptions of Bohemian Paris and mesmerism, there is a seventeen-page digression on The Origin of Species. This rumination is sparked by the fact that Little Billee is “reading Mr. Darwin's immortal book for the third time” while he contemplates proposing to the parson's daughter, Alice (180; pt. 5). Ultimately, he cannot bring himself to do so because Alice believes, among other Bible stories, that “[t]he world was made in six days. It is just six thousand years old,” a view debunked in The Origin by Darwin's depiction of the gradual evolution of species over vast periods of time (174; pt. 5). While the controversy elicited in the second half of the nineteenth century by Darwin's theory of natural selection continues today, the question remains: what is this debate doing in a novel about expatriate artists and the woman they love? I read this seeming digression from the sentimental and sensational plot of the novel as a cue to the importance of Darwinian ideas to reading Trilby. In this article, I trace Du Maurier's engagement in Trilby and in his cartoons with various permutations of Social Darwinism, notably degeneration (especially its relationship to class), society's moral and cultural evolution, and eugenics. I argue that the novelist negotiates between Darwin and his interpreters as he resists collectivism, or state intervention in questions of social welfare, in favor of individual liberty in matters of sexual selection.

Catacomb, n., a subterranean place for the burial of the dead, consisting of galleries or passageways with recesses excavated in their sides for tombs.

The Oxford English Dictionary

Silence itself — the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers — is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies.

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality

We often assume (rightly) that homosexuality must be hidden, that it has to be found.

Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man?

I. Ruining the Religious Novel

BY TITLING THIS ESSAY “Love Among the Ruins,” I mean at once to be literal, figurative, and allusive in the framing of my topic: literal, in that I will be examining the place of love — specifically, erotic love — within the Roman catacombs or equivalent sites of Christian sanctuary; figurative, in that the representations of love that I will be discussing occur within the context of “literary ruins” — that is, within a relatively obscure nineteenth-century English narrative sub-genre, the Victorian “Early Christian” novel1; and, finally, allusive, in that I deliberately invoke the first poem of Robert Browning’s 1855 collection of dramatic monologues, Men and Women, for more than mere rhetorical effect. In fact, “Love Among the Ruins” condenses a number of the key concerns that I want to address in this essay, for the poem offers an important critique of classical culture not only as a site of pagan aesthetic production and human vainglory, but, relatedly, of homosocial and, perhaps, homoerotic bonds and the sterility presumed to inhere therein — a critique highly visible in Victorian Early Christian fiction. Indeed, I would argue, Browning’s text implicitly participates in the discursive construction of an important, if ultimately unstable, dichotomy that Victorian novels set in the catacombs and written roughly around the same time as “Love Among the Ruins” powerfully reinforce: namely, the traditional opposition between classicism and Christianity, an opposition at least one facet of which is rooted in competing attitudes toward the erotic.

Victorian travelers in colonial contexts encountered differences in landscape, mores and manners, society, politics and culture, among other things, and registered their responses to the places visited in their published travel books for the home audience. Postcolonial critics contend that exoticism, i.e., a Western traveler's response to and description of the differences encountered in the context of travel, was deeply informed by the asymmetrical power relation between the representer/colonizer and the represented/colonized. As a result, these critics argue, exoticism in colonial travel writing was appropriative since it tended to construct the dichotomy of self/other in such a way as to justify imperial interventions in other countries (Forsdick, “Sa(L)Vaging Exoticism” 30–34; Said 1–28). As Graham Huggan rightly argues, difference of the colonial other in its various aspects was denigrated and dismissed as exotic when “translated into the master code of empire,” since it superimposed “a dominant way of seeing, speaking and thinking onto marginalised peoples” (24).

“THE NATION is only the aggregate of individual conditions, and civilization itself is but a question of personal improvement,” argued Samuel Smiles in his 1859 Self-Help, the work that codified the supremacy of aspiration over occupation as a marker of identity for thousands of readers on the ill-defined boundary of the lower-middle and upper-working classes (16; ch. 1).1 Smiles’s importance, then and now, lies not in his invention of “self-improvement” as a defining feature of this group, but rather in his skill at publicly expressing the complex set of ideals and values that had already been worked out in, and expressed by, small groups of improvers for at least two generations.

The work of Amy Levy, as a Jewish, feminist, lesbian writer at the fin de siècle, coincides with what Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst describe as a “crucial moment in the formation and transformation of [the] object[s] of study” of “cultural and social historians, urban theorists, literary critics, post-colonial critics, feminist writers, and gay and lesbian theorists” (xiv). The concern of this article, rather than co-opting Levy into a particular critical framework, is to explore her presentation of subjectivity in the urban landscape, particularly in the poems of the posthumously published A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (1889). In these poems and elsewhere the city instigates a disturbing unsettling of binaries and identifications which suggests the possibility of writing (of) divergent or subversive identities, what Cynthia Scheinberg terms Levy's “minority” voices (Women's Poetry 191). The irregular, unregulated urban space undermines the closure of heterosexual, national narratives and provides a cartography for Levy's exploration of “the intersection between various minority positions and cultural discourses which construct and judge ‘others’” (ibid.). In the first two sections of A London Plane-Tree Levy moves towards a complex elaboration of impermanently located self-knowledge that develops beyond the sexual and racial identifications of her earlier work in which she draws on more traditional and intelligible knowledges. Thus, the biblical and classical themes of “Xantippe” or “Magdalen” and the stable persona of the dramatic monologue are increasingly replaced by a lyric voice that occupies an unstable, modern, urban world. With her interest in the poet James Thomson (B. V.) and her 1883 essay on him, Levy can be seen to be identifying with an emergent late-nineteenth-century urban poetic that greatly influences the first section of A London Plane-Tree. But it is not simply that Levy “discloses how the metropolitan world of high culture was increasingly infiltrated by…feminists, sexual dissidents, Jewish people, and freethinkers” (Bristow 80). The city of A London Plane-Tree and the intersections, interchanges, and subversions it enables make it impossible to maintain the divisions of self and other, object and subject. It is through the space of the city that Levy is enabled to write the specificity of her own unauthorized, ambiguous, “minor” voice.

“The Angel in the House is not a very good poem,” writes Carol Christ, “yet it is culturally significant, not only for its definition of the sexual ideal, but also for the clarity with which it represents the male concerns that motivate fascination with that ideal” (147). Her pronouncement is strongly emblematic of recent approaches to Coventry Patmore's best-known poem. The Angel, it is asserted or implied, almost never receives a full or attentive reading now, and does not reward one; it would long since have sunk into obscurity were it not for the unforeseen appropriation of its title as a repository for the prevailing Victorian conception of womanhood; as a text it belongs more properly to the domain of cultural history or gender studies than literary criticism. A renewed scholarly interest in the technical experimentation of Patmore's later volume The Unknown Eros (1877) has done little to challenge this view, largely defining itself against the dull conventionality of the earlier work.

Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949), the English-language Indian poetess and politician, appears before the viewer in the frontispieces to her first two collections of poetry, The Golden Threshold (1905) and The Bird of Time: Songs of Life, Death and the Spring (1912). She presents herself in print, as in her oratory, as both a figure of nineteenth-century verse culture and a cosmopolitan nationalist. The Golden Threshold includes a now well-known introduction by Arthur Symons and a sketch of a young Naidu by J. B. Yeats (father of W. B. Yeats). [See Figure 1.] Arrayed in a voluminous and ruffled white dress, distinctly “Western” in style, with hands clasped together, Naidu's youthful yet grave face stares directly at the viewer. She appears here as a precocious, prepubescent Victorian poetess captured within a private setting. Yet when this volume was published in 1905, the picture, drawn during Naidu's sojourn in England in the mid-1890s when much of the poetry included in the collection was composed, must have been almost a decade old. The only sign of racial difference in the sketch is her lightly shaded skin and dark hair. The blurred sketch echoes Naidu's own ambiguous position at this time: she is neither wholly Indian nor wholly English, and she navigates uneasily between the roles of naïve student of poetry and accomplished poetess.

EVENBEFORE ESTHER LYON enters the narrative of Felix Holt, she is introduced to the eponymous hero, whom she will eventually marry, through two smells — one present, the other absent; one highly conventional, the other distinctly unusual. As the narrator explains, Mr. Lyon’s sitting room contains “certain things” that are “incongruous” with its “general air” of “privation,” among them the “delicate scent of dried rose-leaves” and a wax candle. Lyon, embarrassed by what he takes to be Felix Holt’s unspoken criticism of such indulgence, explains to his visitor, “You are doubtless amazed to see me with a wax-light . . . but this undue luxury is paid for with the earnings of my daughter, who is so delicately framed that the smell of tallow is loathsome to her” (Eliot 53–54; ch. 5).1 Esther’s association with the scent of roses is quite unremarkable: it simply and quickly registers her as a wholly acceptable marriage partner. Lyon’s reference to the smell of tallow candles is, however, according to the practices of Victorian fiction, quite unconventional, first because it explicitly evokes a smell that is not there, the strong odor of candles made from animal fat; secondly, because it identifies a good smell or the relative lack of one, that of wax candles, with a negative moral judgment: Esther’s practice of spending her earnings on such candles is, to Lyon at least,

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

— George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

WITH THESE WORDS THE NARRATOR of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda appears to invite readers to map Gwendolen Harleth’s psyche, to trace its history, the places it has been, and the events that appear to have been, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, erased from her memory. This passage is typical of the way that questions of identity in George Eliot’s last novel seem consistently to reflect emerging Victorian concepts of memory.

Probably as a direct result of the burgeoning interest in the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, we see at mid-century a general trend toward the empirical study of the mind according to the model used in the natural sciences: observation and taxonomical classification. Scientists thus observed the physical attributes and behaviors of individuals and then attempted to classify each within the larger species of humans and their behaviors. From this point, scientists would then speculate about the existence of general categories or even laws governing the functions of the mind. It comes as no surprise, then, that those writing most prolifically on physiology and psychology at mid-century also wrote important tracts about nature study: George Henry Lewes, Herbert Spencer, and John Stuart Mill among others. And, as other critics have noted before me, Eliot includes references to both types of science in her works.1

FINALLY PASSED IN 1847, the Ten Hours Bill restricted the number of hours worked by women and children in the factories to ten per day. Its enactment was the result of a lengthy political crusade whose chief parliamentary spokesman had been the Tory M.P., Lord Ashley. A decade later, in his two-volume History of the Factory Movement, Samuel Kydd (or “Alfred”) made a cursory, half-sentence reference to the “useful” contribution made to the campaign by Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's Helen Fleetwood (295).Tonna's dates are 1790–1846. Appearing as a novel in 1841, Helen Fleetwood was first serialised between September 1839 and March 1841 in the Christian Lady's Magazine (edited by Tonna 1834 to 1846). Written to persuade her female readership of the urgent need for a Ten Hours Bill, the novel depicts the devastating spiritual and physical consequences of factory work on the eponymous heroine and her adopted family. While Kydd acknowledges Tonna's contribution, the brevity of his remark suggests that her status in the Ten Hours Movement was, at most, ancillary. Kydd seems unaware of the articles about the Ten Hours Bill that Tonna wrote in her magazine. Nor does he refer to her work of 1843, “The Forsaken Home,” which portrays the calamitous domestic consequences of the long hours worked by factory women.This is all the more surprising when one considers Kydd's friendship with the Movement's extra-parliamentary leader, Richard Oastler (Driver 518). “The Forsaken Home” is the second of four stories by Tonna, each published as a separate book under the collective title The Wrongs of Woman (1843–44). The stories were published in the following order: “Milliners and Dress-Makers” (1843); “The Forsaken Home” (1843); “The Little Pin-Headers” (1843); “The Lace-Runners” (1844). Although Tonna continues to be critically obscure, recent literary historians have registered the full range of her writing on the Ten Hours Movement.It is important to acknowledge the work of literary historians such as Fryckstedt, Kestner, Kovacevic, Kanner and (in particular) Neff, which first began the process of raising Tonna's critical profile. Nonetheless, they have perpetuated Kydd's perception of her minor role by persistently characterizing her as meekly following where Ashley led. Wanda Fraiken Neff, for example, depicts Tonna as his “faithful” supporter, someone who “reflected his views” (35, 68). Similarly, Joseph Kestner describes her as having merely “accepted Ashley's fervid word” (93).

“There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals” (137). This evolutionary claim is not attributable to Darwin, but to Oscar Wilde, who allows Gilbert to voice this bold assertion in “The True Function of Criticism.” While critics have long wrestled with the ethical stance and coherence of Wilde's writings, they have overlooked a significant influence on his work: debates concerning the evolution of morality that animated the periodicals in which he was writing. Wilde was fascinated by the proposition that complex human behaviours, including moral and aesthetic responses, might be traced back to evolutionary impulses. Significantly, he also wrote for a readership already engaged with these controversies.