The death of Queen Victoria occasioned the publication of commemorative narratives in early twentieth-century Odisha. They serve as site for understanding how feminine authority was imagined as the Odia literati engaged in a fraught movement for the formation of a separate province of Odisha. They imagined an Odia motherland in relation to figures of maternal authority such as mother India and mother Victoria. This article explores this vernacular representation of the queen as mother in the work of the poet Madhusudan Rao. By drawing on traditions of lament and maternal authority, the article illustrates how Rao used lament to carve out a palimpsest of multiple identities, from imperial subjecthood to regional belonging.

“Aajkal Agra ka mausam kaisa hai?” Queen Victoria asks herself, alone in her sumptuous quarters at Osborne House.1 How is the weather in Agra these days? Polite small talk, the loose change of a British monarch's verbal currency, recasts itself in unfamiliar phonemes as the empress of India practices her Hindustani. Soon, Agra will retreat from the imperial consciousness; it will be time to go to the durbar room, or work on her Urdu writing under the munshi's tutelage, perhaps before lunching on chicken curry.2

Victorian activists Mary Carpenter (1807–1877) and Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904) held different standing in their day: the international founder of reform schools, considered a devout “noble worker,” mentored the Theist journalist who is better known today for feminism and animal-rights organizing. The essay draws on contemporary and recent studies of both figures and the short versions collected in books in Collective Biographies of Women, a database with an XML schema annotating the narratives. Examining different treatment of Carpenter and Cobbe in varied texts, the essay especially focuses on keywords and phrases, “noble,” “worker,” “perishing and dangerous classes,” and tropes of a lady entering low or dark places. Evangelical discourse is disparaged in the current climate among academics and activists seeking health care, education, or rights for the poor, but affect and faith-based activism should not be discounted then or now.

If advanced high school English classrooms remain some of the few spaces where young people, especially young people of color, might read the Victorian novel, what opportunities for political work might we expect, innovate, demand from those encounters? Drawing from experiences directing LitLabs, immersive, site-specific, design-based approaches to studying literature with South LA teens, the author argues for expanding the geographies literary works reference to include readers’ embodiment in place so that Victorian studies can strengthen and nurture a sense of place for readers often displaced by engagements with the Western literary canon. The essay traces the conflicted, but rewarding, processes for reading literature with an agenda for placekeeping, as one avenue for producing a self-affirming communal consciousness among readers as users of urban space. The essay turns to David Copperfield, where a typical mode of individualized, absorptive reading is contrasted to LitLabs’ model of “emplaced reading” through its adaptations of a core urban humanities “fused practice” of thick-mapping.

Although not focused on the Victorian period, John Guillory's recent Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022) might seem to provide a bracing counter to the premise of this special issue. According to Guillory, framing our scholarly projects in political terms may ultimately be delusional, for whatever our aspirations or intentions, scholarship is rarely politically impactful. “Surely the political well-being of our society,” he writes, “is better served by producing one informed, insightful, and habitual reader than by the publication of any number of scholarly essays and books, however devastating these might be as criticisms of society” (78). For Guillory, claiming political significance for our scholarship amounts to an “overstatement of aim,” something he describes as “the principal form of professional deformation resulting from uncertainty about the social effects of literary study” (79).

This essay reflects on the first three years of Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom's work. While we initially perceived our project and corresponding website as a space to develop and circulate pedagogical materials, it has become clear that what we have accomplished since our launch goes far beyond mere content creation. In fact, the community-building portion of our project has become the driving force of our mission. For us, community-buildling is activism in action, as it allows us to change the conditions of academia in real time, by making intentional choices that foster more equitable interactions with one another and with our collaborators. Although the content we publish is, of course, important for ensuring Victorian studies centers questions of race, we view this content as the organic outgrowth of the careful and caring relationships we have been cultivating since our inception, commencing with the four of us and expanding outward to our contributors. Indeed, centering race in scholarship and teaching means little when students and teacher-scholars of color remain cast aside by academic norms, structures, and forms of relation that have been shaped by the increasingly commercialized neoliberal university.

Vassar College was one of the few North American undergraduate institutions to offer a concentration in Victorian studies. From 1970 until 2021, when the program transformed into Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, nearly ninety majors and minors passed through the program. Drawing on surveys and interviews with the program's graduates, the essay contends that Vassar's Victorian studies program engendered certain mental habits as well as specific approaches to activism, which the essay broadly defines to include activist scholarship and journalism, working for change within institutions, and reimagining family life and child-rearing. The Vassar alums who participated in the surveys and interviews made direct links between their activist commitments and an undergraduate education that emphasized primary-source research as well as multidisciplinarity.

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.

In this piece, I discuss Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1855) in the context of my experience as one of the lead organizers of the successful campaign to unionize Skidmore College's non-tenure-track faculty. Dickens's novel outlines several claims that directly comprise modern anti-union discourse and that I saw straightforwardly rehearsed in 2022 as we sought to unionize. As an organizer and a Victorianist, I argue that we have ethical obligations in studying and teaching texts like Hard Times in light of the afterlives of their anti-union rhetoric. The Victorian industrial novel needs to be studied (and taught) from an explicitly pro-union perspective, by unionized workers. This paper contributes to that project.

This article explores the narrative functions of domestic accidents in Victorian fiction. Taking Charlotte Yonge's The Pillars of the House (1873) as a case study, it critically parses how popular fiction engaged with competing explanations of how or why accidents occur. As a new understanding of chance, risk, and statistical likelihood in the nineteenth century began to reshape the representation of accidents, narratives navigated shifting concepts of personal misfortune, of providence and poetic justice, as well as of probability. In Yonge's novel, domestic accidents demonstrate risk-management at home, promoting a concept that complicates narrative expectations both of divine punishment and of conventional conversion patterns.

Population was a socially significant yet politically precarious concept in nineteenth-century Britain. In order to highlight the affective implications of “population,” this essay examines Harriet Martineau's fiction in the context of early Victorian concerns over population growth and contemporary thoughts of political economy. As an avid supporter of Thomas Malthus, Martineau maintains that “proportionate labor” is the determining factor in national stability, but her use of sentimental fiction in Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34) reveals aspects of the population crisis that are not accounted for by the classic political economists. Martineau's fiction presents population as a phenomenon collectively felt among Victorians rather than as an objective number that represents sociological truth. In her modification of the Malthusian principles to encompass affective negotiations that extend beyond individual morals, Martineau emphasizes the importance of somatic experience in shaping the nineteenth-century understanding of population. Furthermore, as Martineau's narrative resolution to the population crisis comes from well-managed emigration, her works demonstrate that geographical colonial expansion operated as an essential condition in establishing a nationally sustainable idea of population. Reassessing Martineau's literary and historical significance as an innovative successor of Malthus unveils a sophisticated Victorian nexus of population theory and the collective feelings of empire.

The conservative—as both a philosophy and a political ideology—was radically unstable in the Victorian period, and so too were its manifestations in the literary sphere. However, as one of the keynotes of Victorian politics, life, and literature, it raises some serious questions about the consequences for our scholarship that it remains relatively neglected and undertheorized. We should train ourselves to read for the conservative alongside the liberal, to see how conservative aesthetics shape writers and texts in myriad ways.

In this article I argue for the relevance of examining tolerance in Victorian literature in its specificity and particularly as distinct from sympathy. Following a recent reconceptualization of tolerance in philosophy and political theory, I argue for recovering the relevance of its roots in the Latin term tolerare, which means “to suffer,” “to endure,” and suggest that Victorian novels explore the cognitive, emotional, and physical pains involved in tolerance. Victorian studies thus add an important perspective to current discussions of tolerance, while, conversely, a focus on tolerance in Victorian literature reveals an important category as yet overshadowed by the strong focus on sympathy in the field.

“Trans” offers Victorian studies two different but ultimately intertwined methods for studying sex and gender in a historically bounded discipline: nominal, biographical work and theoretical, conceptual work. While biographical accounts tend to evoke historicist concerns of anachronism, the theoretical potential of “trans” is largely untouched in Victorian studies. This Keywords essay argues that such theoretical work is much needed in analyses of Victorian sex and gender, and makes the case for “trans” as historical method.

In Victorian studies, the term “extraction” helps us express the nineteenth-century emergence of a society fully reliant on finite underground materials and thereby describe the material and value relations at the heart of imperialism and at the heart of the provincial-metropole dynamic. Much of the recent attention to extraction in Victorian studies and beyond returns us to the sites of removal, to the extraction zones or sacrifice zones left behind when commodities of value are withdrawn, tallied, and sold. In Victorian literature, England's coal mines, copper mines, quarries, and other sites of extraction left a hefty footprint, but so did the British extractive industry that was increasingly moving to the colonial frontier. Written in the aftermath of the emergence of the first fossil-fuel-based society, Victorian literature is a crucial archive for understanding extractivism and how it was both normalized and challenged across the British imperial world.

I examine the temporality of disaster through a condition that I term “retroactive hopefulness”: looking back at a time when we could still hope that we would be exempt from imminent catastrophe. I discuss this condition in relation to our current Covid moment and to H. G. Wells's dystopic novel The War of the Worlds (1898).

In this essay, I argue for the importance of employing the concept of the urban when analyzing Victorian Britain, given the status of the British Isles as the most urbanized place on the planet during the nineteenth century.

This essay sketches out how “the provinces” became a central (if semi-imagined) geography in nineteenth-century culture, usually opposed to—though ultimately inextricable from—the development of capitalist and colonial modernity. Surveying recent criticism on the Victorian provincial novel, especially its imbrication with broader scales and networks, I suggest that recent scholarship in critical cartography and feminist theory offers a way to reconceptualize the notion of the provincial in (and beyond) Victorian studies. If to be provincial is always to be opposed to some real or imagined center—toggling between countryside, colony, region, and minor capital—we might revise our understanding of the provincial itself as a relational phenomenon, unfolding on multiple scales. Ultimately, I propose the “provincial” as a critical heuristic for the spatial analysis of narrative: one that might offer a more productive means of grasping modernity's uneven production of space beyond city/country, metropole/colony, and even local/global divides.

Talk of meaning and meaningfulness, ubiquitous today, only emerges in the nineteenth century. This emergence remains to be explained and calls into question accounts of modernity that treat “meaning” as a stable, timeless concept.

Human life under Queen Victoria was built on—or, more accurately, with—vegetables, from sugarcane, tea, and spices to cotton and indigo, tobacco and opium poppies. While the intricate and multiple economies of some of these vegetable staples have been explored in considerable detail, the highly uneven power dynamics of the Victorians’ complex, drawn-out encounters with the vegetable world mostly continue to be glossed over in simplistic terms of human appropriation and control. This essay proposes “vegetable” as a heuristic for critically engaging plants and other nonanimal growy things as sources of action in Victorianist scholarship. Drawing on thinking from the interdisciplinary field of critical plant studies, I argue that human life and ideas cannot be thought apart from vegetable materialities, especially during the Victorian period. The high degree to which human history was entangled in the vegetable world, I suggest, renders a “vegetable” heuristic indispensable to Victorianist scholarship, especially in the struggle to come to terms with its imperial inheritance.