Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) (1856–1935) first met Walter Pater (1839–1894) at Oxford during the summer of 1881, though she was already well acquainted with his work. The extent and import of their relationship, which lasted until Pater's death, has received significant attention by biographers and critics.1 Like many of Lee's friendships, its intimacies were both personal and intellectual—risking, as she put it, “a question of caw-me-caw-you” through reciprocal endorsement.2 The epistolary-averse Pater was uncharacteristically forthcoming in their correspondence, and Lee often stayed with his family when visiting England. The two read aloud from drafts, exchanged books, and met repeatedly on the published page. Indeed, scholars have traced an elegant intertextual arc from Lee's rewriting of Pater's “The Child in the House” (1878) in Belcaro (1881), to her dedication of Euphorion (1884), through her introduction to Juvenilia (1887), and arriving at her “Valedictory” conclusion to Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895).3 By this account, Lee initially adheres to Paterian aesthetics, then grows skeptical of the doctrine's epicurean features, but finds solace when her mentor's late work takes its own ethical turn.

This essay argues that an antiracist, anticolonialist Victorian studies must remain open to universalizing claims of the kind found in early works of queer theory, particularly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Although recent work in queer studies (as well as literary studies generally) finds inspiration in Sedgwick's late-career turn to the more modest notion of “reparative reading,” strong knowledge claims are necessary to disrupt the colonial matrix of power that systematically renders both racism and heteronormativity invisible. Rereading Epistemology in light of postcolonial theories of comparison, I argue that, although Sedgwick does not address how the late Victorian “crisis of homo/heterosexual definition” takes place within the overall colonial system of power, she nevertheless inhabits a critical position remarkably similar to what Walter Mignolo calls “the border epistemology” of “decolonial thinking.” This entails making universalizing claims that promote the emancipation of disenfranchised groups but also rejecting the imperialist fantasy of critical neutrality in favor of political commitment and historical self-awareness. I end by putting the Sedgwick of Epistemology in dialogue with critical race theorist Sylvia Wynter to suggest how scholars might integrate their respective critical approaches by analyzing the figure of “the human” in Victorian literature and culture.

This essay on the “English-speaking Caribbean” reflects on pasts that have not passed but have instead been passed on, for example in gestures of erasure, silence, or genteel substitution, whether in the Victorian novel or the twenty-first-century novel that insistently returns to the past, or in the rhetoric of law and statecraft. In addition, I consider how Victorianism has reproduced itself in postcolonial Caribbean and British life, with consequences for Black intimacy and kinship.

Population mobility is an analytic category through which we can reconsider nineteenth-century literature and its locations, and not just through an imperial lens. If we look beyond the geographical boundaries of empire, we get a clearer sense of the stakes of Victorian place-making. In this essay I briefly examine a case of two hundred migrants from Scotland to Venezuela in the 1820s as a model for a different kind of analysis that thinks about the impermanent, or fugitive, elements of migration and the ways these intersect with literary study.

This brief position paper argues for the importance of understanding Victorian translations, in particular English translations from Asian languages, in relation to the specific places where they were produced and where they were read.

The project Literary Ecology in Nineteenth-Century Bengal has been investigating the representation and interpretation of the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature in the context of the radical transformations in the physical and ideological landscapes that characterized nineteenth-century Bengal. We are examining the diverse political, economic and scientific influences that shaped the narrative trajectory of literary ecology in nineteenth-century Bengal, which subsequently went on to influence understandings, representations, and interpretations of ecological concerns in the twentieth century.

In this presentation, I offer some reflections on how Victorianists might understand nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discursive practices for mapping Africa. I introduce and problematize a series of Victorian-era maps or, more specifically, problematize what such maps represent conceptually, then offer some alternate means by which Victorianists might critically engage with cultural social, and political reality on the nineteenth-century African continent, particularly the more southern and eastern parts of the continent where much of my prior research has focused.

This article reconsiders the racial hierarchies rendering the nonwhite race as the Other in Anglo-American Victorian studies by examining the case of colonial Korea, where both the colonizer and the colonized were people of color. In colonial Korea, reading Victorian and Edwardian literature enabled Koreans to find an alternative humanity beyond the imperial Japanese modernity that stigmatized them. I briefly review how Asian critics located in colonial Korea read Samuel Smiles's Self-Help and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles. I suggest that their findings included the idea of humanity as a liberal, autonomous self and an environmental subject, both of which challenge the Japanese imposition of modern citizenship named as hwang-gook-shin-min (皇國臣民). I argue that such a response to Victorian literature from a locational perspective not affected by the hierarchical binaries of race or empire suggests that we as contemporary Victorianists (located around the globe) consider “transimperial” solidarity to explore a connection with others outside our immediate national community regardless of racial difference. It also urges us to promote “planetarity” in our reading to embrace willful dislocation accepting heterogeneous locationalities against homogenizing globalization.

This article explores the unexpected relationship that working-class children had with doll's houses in the late nineteenth century. Placing texts by children's author Frances Hodgson Burnett alongside historical material concerning the manufacture of doll's house furniture by students in London's Ragged Schools under the supervision of housing reformer Octavia Hill, I argue that both women understood the educational or formative value of the doll's house as deriving from the object's ability to teach lessons in temporality. I examine this object and its deployment in contemporary object lessons to show that the spatial divisions of these miniature homes operate in relation to both short- and long-term cycles of time. This article also demonstrates that apparently universal models of selfhood and development were in fact contingent on class structures (both authors, for instance, connect developmental abnormalities in poor children to the fact that they grow up in one-room homes).

This essay argues that certain readers used Pater's work on an artistic period (the Renaissance) in order to periodize the phases of their own lives. Specifically, I suggest that they took up his “school of art” as a model for conditional group membership in a homoerotic culture. Throughout his career, Pater wrote about collectives who reinterpret the past—usually the Renaissance or Ancient Greece and Rome—in order to establish common orientations in the present. However, it is his school concept that comes closest to centering a group's self-conception in this mediation. Examining how Pater's reception realized this potential, I will make two claims. My conceptual claim is that a linguistic term, “register,” would strengthen how we study a particular function of group identity: style as a shared persona that can be put on and off in particular contexts. My historical claim is that a kind of Paterian register, in excess of Pater's personal style and occasionally in opposition to his intentions, enabled a particular sexual culture—the gay phase—at Eton and Oxford in subsequent generations.

This article uses a corpus of manuscript diaries to illuminate the practices and meanings of everyday mobility that shaped the lives of nineteenth-century Englishwomen. The female pedestrian has typically been characterized by scholars as a marginal or transgressive figure whose movements are interpreted through comparison to a masculine peripatetic tradition. “A Voyage of Discovery” seeks to broaden our understanding of what it meant to move through the world as a woman in the nineteenth century. Drawing from the narrated experiences of a broad range of little-known diarists, this article outlines a paradigm of “everyday adventure” to describe walking's status as an unremarkable act that nevertheless creates the potential for event and variety. In so doing, it expands on feminist concepts of the everyday, elaborates on the under-theorized relationship between walking and the body, and reassesses the boundaries of socially acceptable mobility.

Nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian and British narratives represent the Indian Revolt of 1857 as an event with a rich gustatory grammar—a problem of greased cartridges, adulterated flour and salt, and mysterious chapatis. Contemporary colonial sources report the circulation of chapatis across North Indian villages on the eve of the revolt. To this day, these chapatis remain inscrutable. This essay traces the chapati from the Anglo-Indian table to the Kanpur trenches in the first English-language novel of the revolt, Edward Money's The Wife and the Ward (1859). The chapati, as a domestic edible, functions as an index of assimilation. It adulterates its Anglo-Indian eater bodily and morally. It weaves together adulteration and adultery, to demonstrate the gendered colonial politics of bodily purity. As a food of revolt, the chapati is portrayed as a text of Indian fears of bodily contamination. I argue that The Wife and the Ward displaces Anglo-Indian fears of bodily adulteration onto Indian rebels. I examine how the novel reworks Anglo-Indian panic to analyze its schizophrenic nature—consuming chapatis in India while upholding British racial politics of purity and contamination. This bifurcation is conjured in the very term “Anglo-Indian”: always imbricated in the simultaneous and contradictory impulses to assimilate while maintaining difference.

This article contends that George Eliot's higher critical approach to biblical prophecy led her to interpret prophetic knowledge about the future as a product of historical scholarship rather than supernatural revelation. This interpretation bore creative fruit in Eliot's 1862–63 novel Romola, a book that repeatedly condemns the irrational ethos of supernatural prophecy by rebuking mystical seers’ emotional volatility and their ignorance of history. As a rational alternative to supernaturalism, Romola upholds a serious, scholarly mode of prophecy whose power to predict the future derives from historical research. Recasting prophecy as a rational mode of historical scholarship enables Romola to deploy it as a method of intellectually responsible political analysis. In the process of conflating the prediction of the future with the study of history, the rational prophetic mode demands that political visionaries must temper utopian promises about a cosmopolitan future with sober-minded analyses of the intercultural violence that has plagued the past. By revealing cosmopolitan utopia's historical limitations, Eliot's prophetic mode ultimately promotes a “cosmopocalyptic” form of politics.

Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878) has been praised for its careful attention to the relationship between humans and their environment. Hardy traces the intricate relationship between local community, ecosystem, economy, and national political structures with surprising fluidity. This essay argues that his attention to detail provides an important account of the function of the wasteland in English historical development. In doing so, it also establishes the category of waste as a functional element of the character networks of narrative fiction. While Hardy's attention to waste emerges from a respect for the English rural laborer and a nostalgia for precapitalist modes of social and economic life, his valorization of English parsimony and imagination nonetheless subtend a form of nationalism coextensive with the production of British imperial ideology.

Much Victorian Irish studies has followed the Americanist Noel Ignatiev's famous claim that the Irish “became white” upon migration to the United States, whereas they had not been in the context of the United Kingdom. This article argues, in contrast, that an emphasis on the undeniable racialization of Irish poverty and politics can distract us from an important truth: nineteenth-century Irish people, in Britain and Ireland as well as in the United States, were broadly understood as white, and “Celticness” was not in any serious or widespread way treated as equivalent to Blackness, although that did not stop some nineteenth-century Irish advocates from drawing that misleading analogy. Drawing upon cultural and anthropological work of the mid-nineteenth century, from Robert Knox, Thomas Carlyle, and John Mitchel to Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold, and the caricaturists of Punch to Frederick Douglass, this article proposes that the implication that nineteenth-century Irishness was cognate to Blackness—or the Irish experience a version of the Black experience—represents the epistemological and ethical error that Frank B. Wilderson III has called “the ruse of analogy” that we must interrogate more critically lest we, in Wilderson's formulation, enact a “mystification, and often erasure, of Blackness's grammar of suffering.”

It is to Alice Meynell that Coventry Patmore gives the only manuscript of The Angel in the House (1854–62) in 1893. But Meynell's actual house at the time, 47 Palace Court, was built with money from Jamaican sugar and rum plantations owned by her father, the legitimated descendant of plantation owners and enslaved persons. In this article, I seek to reconnect Meynell's work to its Jamaican context, building on the work of scholars—from Adela Pinch to Yopie Prins—who have tracked the influence of her prosody, her theology, and her sense of community.

This article examines Thomas Hardy's conflicting responses to late-Victorian debates about grammatical prescriptivism and linguistic purism. While Hardy claimed that “purism, whether in grammar or vocabulary, almost always means ignorance,” he also frequently expressed his interest in the (perhaps unrealizable) ideal of a “pure English” founded on fixed and unequivocal grammatical rules. Focusing on Tess of the d'Urbervilles, a novel subtitled “A Pure Woman,” I argue that this ambivalence informed the grammar of Hardy's prose style in his fiction. In this novel, Hardy employs the ambiguous modality of the English language, the imprecise grammatical distinction between the indicative statement of facts and the subjunctive elaboration of conceptions and hypotheses, both to sustain and to interrogate the binary of the real and the ideal that underpins his simultaneous critique and defense of the notion of “purity.” This use of modality highlights an analogy between Hardy's views on moral and linguistic purity: in each case, he rejects narrow estimations of purity, while nonetheless championing an ideal—of “pure English” and the “pure woman”—that transcends the limited perspectives of conventional purisms.

In this paper, I argue that George Eliot's “Brother Jacob” (1864) reveals a fluid system of racial production that is inextricably tied to sugar. “Brother Jacob” is one of Eliot's most unusual narratives. It is written in the tone of a fable, and it concerns confectioner David Faux, who immigrates to the colony of Jamaica. Twice, Faux's plans for fiscal gain are thwarted by his “idiot” brother, Jacob, and the latter's uncontrollable sweet tooth in ways that warn against the ungovernability of bodies—especially white ones—that desire sugar.

My analysis employs the methodologies of critical race studies, as I examine how Eliot's text denaturalizes the frequent “invisibility of whiteness” (Richard Dyer). And if, as Sara Ahmed argues, we “do not face whiteness; it ‘trails behind’ bodies, as what is assumed to be given,” then Eliot's text reveals whiteness when it is in front of bodies, when its construction is rendered seeable. I analyze Eliot's examination of individual and collective white bodies that are ambivalently racialized through their desires for sugar. Throughout, I argue that the plasticity of racial forms connected to sugar suggests that bodies are unruly and cannot uphold coherent systems of racial meaning.

The panorama was from its outset a medium of contemporary history. This article examines its contribution to initial historical narratives about the “Indian Mutiny” (1857–58). Nineteenth-century critics often saw the form as voyeuristic, while modern scholars have critiqued its chauvinistic patriotism. The article uses panorama paratexts, adverts, and reviews to recover the visitor experience and to compare these with contemporary would-be historical accounts of the mutiny. I ask, Was it possible for panoramic representations of the mutiny to avoid jingoism? And what can this case study tell us about mid-nineteenth-century approaches to historical distance?

My analysis of 1850s panoramas of the mutiny (by Burford, Hamilton, Marshall, and Gompertz) shows that when they depicted graphic violence, it did not suppress visitor numbers but did lead to accusations of voyeurism. Reviewers declared that the events were too temporally and emotionally proximate to be treated as history. Initial contemporary histories nonetheless borrowed from panoramic modes in their illustrations of the mutiny, making panoramas a means of mediating events into historical form. By the 1870s, concerns about voyeurism diminished but chauvinistic representation continued, as the episode ossified into a cultural myth. Chronological distance did not lead to greater openness but to more unquestioning jingoism.

By situating Anna Kingsford's vegetarian writings within the paired context of late-Victorian dietetic discourse and modern posthuman philosophy, this article demonstrates both the Victorian association between diet and evolution and the contemporary applications of late-nineteenth-century dietary ethics. Kingsford was a leading scientist, antivivisector, feminist, and mystic who helped shape the Victorian vegetarian movement. Her influential rhetoric emphasized that vegetarianism would nourish interspecies relations and allow Victorians to materialize novel forms of subjectivity, kinship, community, and responsibility appropriate for the post-Darwinian landscape. This article reads her foundational vegetarian treatise, The Perfect Way in Diet (1881), along with her published lectures on vegetarianism through the overlapping lenses of posthumanism and new materialism, illuminating the congruence between Kingsford's call to embody ethics and the contemporary posthuman call to become an ecologically situated self. I argue that by framing vegetarianism as a generative, affirmative kin-making practice, grounded in the shared materiality and interests of humans and nonhumans, Kingsford articulates a posthuman dietary ethics.