It may seem that Christmas literature, with its glorified descriptions of overflowing tables and conviviality, has no place in a discussion of that other extreme, starvation. However, much of the nineteenth-century literature containing narratives of Christmas speaks directly to national fears of famine. Starvation entered the print matter of Christmas first as part of a social argument and later as a concern for the abiding national identity that had become intertwined with Christmas itself and, more symbolically, Christmas fare. Writers including Charles Dickens, Benjamin Farjeon, Augustus and Henry Mayhew, the creators of Punch, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon authored Christmas pieces that showcase literary reactions to the developing issues of hunger throughout their century. This essay offers an overview of the treatment of starvation in the Christmas literature of the nineteenth century.

In 1892, Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913) published a volume of poetry with the title Sight and Song based on their response to a series of paintings in British and Continental public galleries. Bradley and Cooper, aunt and niece, devoted lovers, who over the three decades of their writing lives produced numerous volumes of poetry and plays collaboratively under the authorial signature “Michael Field,” had already made their name with a volume published in 1889 entitled Long Ago, comprising translations and elaborations of the Sapphic fragments, which has been read as an intriguing and (for the times) audaciously explicit celebration of love between women. The concept of “translation” was as fundamental to the project of Sight and Song as it had been to Long Ago; however, in the later volume it refers not to the literal translation of poetic fragments written in an ancient and other language (as Long Ago ostensibly did) but to the rhetorical act of interpreting visual images. The aim of their new collection of ekphrastic poems was, as they explained in the Preface to Sight and Song, “to translate into verse what the lines and colours of certain chosen pictures sing in themselves” (Michael Field, Sight and Song v). The synaesthetic complexity of Michael Field's language here suggests the multidimensional sensory experience of looking at and responding to visual art works, something the women try to capture in the various kinds of writing they undertake around the production of this volume – their journal and their letters, as well as the poems themselves – in their attempt to provide such a translation. In this essay I should like to explore how Sight and Song continues the project of Long Ago in the sense both of articulating their lesbian experience and of locating them in a cultural tradition, only that experience is here specifically associated with visual hermeneutics and with the circulation of the verbal and the visual, and the cultural connections they make are not with a classical lesbian heritage but with recent and contemporary aestheticians and writers on art – most notably, I suggest, with two other couples who wrote art criticism in collaboration: Bernard Berenson and Mary Costelloe, and Vernon Lee and Clementina (“Kit”) Anstruther-Thomson.

IT SHOULD COME AS NO SURPRISE, and probably doesn’t, that cultural studies and Victorian studies have much in common. As George Levine observes in his overview of the earlier field over the past quarter century, “the founding of [the journal] Victorian Studies, in 1957 . . . was almost exactly contemporary with the publication of Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society, one of the most influential books of the last half century” (136).1 Williams’s book was equally influential, indeed something of a founding text, both for Victorian studies and for cultural studies. And this makes sense. Williams’s tough-minded but generous salvaging of the romantic anti-capitalist tradition from Burke through Arnold and all the way to Orwell, which did so much to reinvent Victorian studies for the left, might also be seen as an argument for the necessity of cultural studies, which went on to integrate the tradition of romantic anti-capitalism into its pluralized, anthropological view of culture and to extend it into the present.

On his last trip to America in 1868, Charles Dickens would write a letter to his friend and biographer John Forster, which paints a sobering picture of postbellum Baltimore: “It is remarkable to see how the Ghost of Slavery haunts the town; and how the shambling, untidy, evasive, and postponing Irrepressible proceeds about his free work, going round and round it, instead of at it.” While Dickens's phrase “the Ghost of Slavery” indicts a slave system that persists despite abolition, his representation of the former slave body – “the shambling, untidy, evasive, and postponing Irrepressible” – suggests another kind of ghost, an identity that toggles between the spectral and the grossly embodied. Dickens reinforces this conjunction of the ghostly and the corporeal as he goes on to note that “[t]he melancholy absurdity of giving these people votes, at any rate at present, would glare at one out of every roll of their eyes, chuckle in their mouths, and bump in their heads, if one did not see . . . that their enfranchisement is a mere party trick to get votes” (Letters 27). Resorting to the crudest racial stereotypes, Dickens portrays recently manumitted slaves as dolls devoid of speech and political agency. In depicting the “postponing Irrepressible” as stripped of personhood and civil capacities, Dickens conjures the legal fiction of “civil death” – a medieval English common law that divested a prisoner accused of treason any rights by proclaiming him dead in the eyes of the law. In stark contrast to Dickens's impassioned pleas for the abolition of slavery and prison reform in American Notes (1842), his private remarks in this letter some twenty-five years later convert former slaves into the objects of satire – minstrelsy puppets in a larger political game in which they play no civil part – as it were, dead again. However, even as Dickens attempts to constrain the former slave body through a kind of stereotypical branding, his language – the “postponing Irrepressible” – registers an unease that this corporeal ghost won't die. It is precisely in this form of the living dead that the “ghost of slavery” surfaces in Our Mutual Friend (OMF).

“One of the very worst books of that abominable class!” exclaimed the old lawyer, opening at the coloured frontispiece, from which brazen Miss Random smiled bewitchingly out, as if she had no doubt of captivating Time and all his veterans on a fair field. “Pah!” he shut her to with the energy he would have given to the office of publicly slapping her face.

—George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel

Promiscuous adj. 1. Consisting of diverse and unrelated parts or individuals; confused. 2. Lacking standards of selection; indiscriminate. 3. Indiscriminate in sexual relations. 4. Casual; random. [Latin promiscuus, mixed: pro (intensifier), thoroughly + miscere, to mix.]

—American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

The enclosed having come into my hands being a Letter written by my Son to a Literary gentleman who had lent him a Work of Dr. Croly containing some remarks on your Rel Deluv, I having thought it might amuse you to see the Zeal of one of your Disciples, & therefore take the liberty of sending it, but I have a twofold motive believing that should your leisure ever allow of your glancing at the paper you might have an estimate of my Sons Knowledge of the Science he takes such delight in & aid him the more easily by occasional hints which the Intercourse so indulgently granted him by you may afford him the means of deriving.

Welsh author Arthur Machen (1863–1947) wrote his most popular supernatural tales between 1890 and 1900, a period in which European culture felt itself to be on the decline and in which “decadent” art and literature rose up both as a reflection of and a contribution to this perceived cultural deterioration. While Machen's works have received little critical attention, a recent revival of interest in fin-de-siècle decadence has brought his supernatural tales into the literary limelight. Noteworthy examples of this interest include Julian North's treatment of The Great God Pan in Michael St. John's Romancing Decay: Ideas of Decadence in European Culture and Christine Ferguson's analysis of the same work in her PMLA article “Decadence as Scientific Fulfillment.” Indeed, Machen's supernatural tales could enhance and complicate any exposition of decadent literature and culture; they offer a unique vision of descent into the primordial that differs from the moral and psychological treatment of decadence in other popular works of the time, such as Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Like Stevenson and Wilde, Machen employs themes of transgression and metamorphosis to illustrate his characters’ deviations from human nature. However, the forces at work in Machen's tales do not arise from the recesses of the human mind in its modern conception, nor do his protagonists sin primarily against society and the arbitrary nature of its morals and values. Instead, Machen locates mythic forces at work within his contemporary society to highlight a much older form of transgression and to challenge notions of degeneration that held currency at the end of the nineteenth century.

The second chapter of The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with a metaphor that is worth considering: “The morning sun was streaming through the crevices of the canvas when the man awoke” (17; ch. 2). The “crevices of the canvas” are, in my opinion, emblematic of the breach by which Henchard has just severed the bonds between himself and humankind. Not only has he shaken loose from his wife, he has also, more importantly, discarded his own daughter. As Elaine Showalter has pointed out, the sale of the child brings to the fore the question of paternity; Henchard has broken the symbolic chain which connected him to both his ancestors and his offspring, and he re-enters society alone, “the new Adam, reborn, self-created, unencumbered” (57). In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, as Jan Gordon observes, a similar rupture affects historical continuity (366). The pointed shaft of the mail-cart piercing the breast of the unhappy horse, Prince, and releasing a flood of blood that cannot be staunched, represents that breach metaphorically. In the two novels, Hardy deals with a breach in the succession of generations and the subsequent impossibility to re-unite what has been sundered. In both stories, a missing link in a chain of symbolic transmission sets off a tragic process that will end only with the death of the heroes.

There is a central contradiction in human relationships with animals: as Erica Fudge notes, “We live with animals, we recognize them, we even name some of them, but at the same time we use them as if they were inanimate, as if they were objects” (8). Such a contradiction is also, of course, present in human interactions, in which power relations allow for the objectification of one human being by another. In an analysis of images and texts produced by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in the nineteenth-century, I want to examine the overlap in representations of animals and humans as subject to objectification and control. One common way of critiquing human treatment of animals within the RSPCA's journals, Animal World and Band of Mercy, was to have humans trade places with animals: having boys fantastically shrunk to the size of the animals they tortured, for example, or imagining the horrors of vivisection when experienced by humans. Such imaginative exercises were meant to defamiliarize animal usage by implying a shared experience of suffering: what was wrong for a human was clearly just as wrong for an animal. However, I argue that some of the images employed by the society suggest the opposite; instead of constructing animal cruelty in a new light, these images instead work to underline the shared proximity of particular humans with animals. In texts that focus specifically upon humans wearing animal bonds – reins, collars, and muzzles – the RSPCA's anti-cruelty discourse both critiqued the tools of bondage and, I suggest, invited the audience to see deep connections between animals and the humans taking their place. Such connections ultimately weaken the force of the animal/human reversal as an animal rights strategy, suggesting as they do that humans themselves often have use value in economies of labor, affect, and are subject to the same power relations that produce an animal as “animal.”

“A handful of foreigners have shown China what they can do against murderous thousands, and it only remains for the Powers to stamp the lesson deeper, and exact punishment for the guilty and full compensation for losses sustained.”

— W. Murray Graydon, The Perils of Pekin (1904)

“To find something akin in its savage barbarity you must go back to Lucknow, where a mixed multitude shut up in the Residency were holding out against fearful odds in expectation of relief by Havelock’s Highlanders, resolved to perish of starvation rather than surrender, for the fate of Cawnpore stared them in the face. “It adds point to this parallel to remember that the Tartar rulers of China are cousin german to the Great Moghul who headed the Sepoy Mutiny. “It was some excuse for the King of Delhi that he was seeking to regain his throne. No such apology can be offered for the Empress Dowager of China. She has made war not without provocation, but wholly unjustifiable, on all nations of the civilized world.”

— W. A. P. Martin, The Siege in Peking (1900)

THIS ESSAY REVIEWS THE LITERARY PRODUCTION — primarily adventure novels, and several of them bestsellers — centered around the events of the 1900 Boxer Rebellion, in which a Chinese “secret society,” with the collusion of certain Manchu authorities, carried out a systematic attempt to annihilate all Westerners and “native Christians” living in China.1 The Boxers, so-called because their “superstitious” practices looked like magic boxing, swept across North China from the spring of 1900, eventually throwing much of the imperial capital of Peking (Beijing) into confusion.2 Forced to hole up in the Legations and other barricaded areas, the Westerners of the region joined forces under largely British leadership and fought against incredible odds to protect themselves, holding out until an international resistance force, led by the British, rescued them fifty-five days later, and the Rebellion subsided.3 Important as a turning point in Chinese international relations and as a mark of the increasing weakness of the central authority of the Middle Kingdom, the Boxer Rebellion served an even more important function with regard to British conceptualizations of the empire in its formal and informal forms. It threw into question non-interventionist trade strategies and underscored the tenuous nature of imperial authority both in formal colonies such as India (where fledgling nationalist movements were evolving) and in areas bordering on these formal colonies and largely dominated through foreign authority. (The central Chinese government, for instance, though not dependent on imports and loans to any great degree, at this point gathered all of its significant income from the British-led Imperial Maritime Customs Service.)

Five chapters after the famous foggy opening of Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853), the novel's protagonist Esther Summerson disappears into thick air. Esther's “darling,” the young orphan Ada Clare, first discloses her companion's climatic dissolution when she celebrates her kind-hearted treatment of the hapless Jellyby children. Although Ada and Esther's guardian John Jarndyce maintains that a shower of “sugar-plums, or three-cornered raspberry tarts,” might be a suitable remedy for the children's neglect, Ada contradicts this proposition when she makes the odd claim, “It did better than that. It rained Esther” (61). This assertion that Esther's precipitated personhood is a “better” palliative than an abundance of sugared confections undoubtedly evinces Ada's childlike appreciation of her companion's effusive goodness. Within the larger scope of the novel, however, the remarkable notion that Esther's seemingly embodied actions and emotions are equivalent to rain, raises an unexpected but essential question: To what ends does Dickens's protagonist evaporate into the dense atmosphere we traditionally associate with the setting of Bleak House?

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.

Several important studies of animals in Victorian Britain have considered the ways that animals have served as surrogates for the discussion of human relationships. Historical statements about the treatment of animals are often interpreted as telling stories about issues such as class dynamics or social problems among humans. But must one always imagine animals to have been only the ostensible subject of discussion? While it is certainly important to study how historical discussions about animals have reflected and expressed opinions about sensitive, tense, or otherwise difficult relationships among humans and groups of humans, it is unreasonable to dismiss all discussion of the welfare of animals as a cover for what is really a concern about humans. Is it not just as interesting – and important – to consider the ways in which humans have identified with animals as animals? The introduction of the animal as animal into the discussion of human culture reveals a level of complexity in life and history that is all too easily overlooked.

In February 1893 the feminist journal Shafts published two articles by Mrs. A. Phillips the second of which provided an esoteric reading of the crucifixion in which Phillips, making recourse to Sanskrit, argued that Christ's death on the cross symbolized the “perfect marriage union of the male and female” (qtd. in Dixon, Divine Feminine 163). Feminist theosophists such as Phillips believed Christianity's neglect of the Divine Feminine to have resulted in a masculinist ordering of religious authority and in the concomitant subordination of women. The editor of Shafts, Margaret Shurmer Sibthorpe, agreed; she added a note to Phillips's second article urging her readers to work towards the formulation of a gospel that would facilitate women's emancipation. In the same issue of Shafts, Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins was reviewed. The reviewer cited at length a passage from the novel's Proem characterizing the divine as the union of the male and female principles and concluded with a discussion of the “heavenly twins” of the novel's title. The Shafts reviewer, however, did not explore the significance of religious allusions in The Heavenly Twins, nor did she examine the relation between the dual-sexed divine of the Proem and the story of the heavenly twins, Angelica and Diavolo Hamilton-Wells. Subsequent Grand scholars have not, for the most part, taken up these questions. The possibility that the novel might constitute an attempt to reconfigure dominant discourses of religion and gender, of the kind Sibthorpe had called for and Phillips undertaken, is largely unconsidered. The New Woman as a “modern maiden” is instead assumed to emerge from a predominantly secular cultural context.

This short paper proposes to consider the transition from Bleak House (1852–53) to Little Dorrit (1856–57) as a phase of particular significance in Dickens's debate with himself over the claims, benefits, and pitfalls of national and wider forms of belonging. I elide Hard Times (1854) because it seems to me that with the composition of Bleak House Dickens had definitively arrived at the conviction that the twenty-number monthly novel was that one of his novelistic forms best suited to sustained exploration and testing of capacious social networks making claims upon individuals' identification and loyalty. In Bleak House – as I have argued in Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (2005) – Dickens responds to the false universalism of the Great Exhibition of 1851 by producing his most restrictively “national” of novels, programmatically and demonstratively shutting out a wider world in order to produce an image of Britain that negatively foreshadows the kind of autarkic, autotelic fantasies of single cultures associated with the classic functionalist ethnography of the early twentieth century, as practiced by such luminaries as Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas. “Negatively” is key here, since anticipations of ethnography in nineteenth-century British (autoethnographic) fiction typically involve representation of the nation as “a form of anticulture whose features define by opposition the ideals [later] attributed to genuine cultures” (Buzard, Disorienting 21). Whereas the fast-disappearing genuine culture of ethnographic literature was credited with the integrated totality of “a sturdy plant growth, each remotest leaf and twig of which is organically fed by the sap at the core” (Sapir 90–93), Britain's culture vouchsafed in Bleak House and exemplified in the tentacular Court of Chancery presents “a state of disastrous and inescapable interconnection,” “a culture-like vision of social totality that is simply marked with a minus sign” (Buzard, Disorienting 21).

Charles Dickens was lionized in the early 1850s for his political powers as a novelist, journalist, and reformer. A December 1850 review of David Copperfield in Fraser's Magazine affirmed that the so-called “Boz”

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 ancient metaphor of the lean and the fat, the eaters and the eaten, still haunts the frame of political discourse.

—Frank Lestringant, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne

Space–my space–is not the context of which I constitute the textuality: instead, it is first of all my body, and then it is my body's counterpart or “other,” its mirror-image or shadow: it is the shifting intersection between that which touches, penetrates, threatens or begets my body on the one hand, all other bodies on the other.

—Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

In August 2013 the Canadian government launched its largest search for the ships, relics, and records of the John Franklin expedition, which disappeared with all 129 hands lost searching for the Northwest Passage in 1845. Canada's latest search was its fifth in six years, one of dozens of search expeditions launched since 1848, in a well-known story of imperial hubris elevated to an international cause célèbre. Recent work in nineteenth-century literary and visual culture has shown the significant role that Franklin played in the Victorian popular imagination of the Arctic (see Spufford, Potter, David, Hill, Cavell, Williams, Savours, MacLaren). In panoramas, stereographs, paintings, plays, music, lantern shows, exhibitions, and popular and elite printed texts, record numbers of Britons could enjoy at their leisure the Arctic sublime in which Franklin's men perished. Alongside this work on how Europeans represented Arctic peoples and places, we also have a growing body of Inuit oral histories describing their encounters with nineteenth-century Arctic explorers. Drawing on these traditional histories of British exploration, visual culture, and literary imagination, and on postcolonial, anthropological and indigenous accounts that shift our attention away from the Eurocentrism of exploration historiography, and toward the “hidden histories of exploration,” this essay uncovers an unexamined material dimension of these encounters – the “Franklin Relics” collected by voyagers searching for Franklin.

“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.