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.

While analysis of the figure of the “typewriter girl” abounds in literary scholarship, few have yet taken the real typewriting women, those individuals involved in the production of literature, as serious subjects of literary study. This article focuses on one such typist, Ethel Kate Dickens (1864–1936), in an examination of the types of intellectual and social work that constituted her literary-adjacent career. Ethel Dickens was not only a representative “independent literary typist” at the turn of the twentieth century, she was also the granddaughter of the “inimitable” Charles Dickens, a business owner, and a playwright; she typed for G. B. Shaw, J. M. Barrie, and other notables. Leveraging evidence that includes Barrie's “The Twelve Pound Look,” archival letters, historic typewriting manuals, and a wide array of periodicals, I argue that reevaluating her work as specifically literary labor recuperates significant processes that are frequently omitted from official accounts of literary history. Recovering the interpretive and transformative processes of Ethel Kate Dickens's professional literary copying thus expands what it might mean to make and experience literature, and to have literary value, beyond the persistent paradigms of “originality” that continue to structure literary studies today.

What does “decadence” mean? Does it mean anything at all? Is it sinister or irresistibly appealing? Regardless of the ambiguity that surrounds the word “decadence” (often with a small “d”), no one can deny that decadence (frequently with a capital “D,” especially when it alludes to the late nineteenth-century European cultural movement) has been sweeping the world of academic publishing. Seen from the perspective of 2022, the past few years appear to have been, at least among scholars, a decade of decadence. Joseph Bristow opens his chapter on “Female Decadence” for the 2016 volume The History of British Women's Writing, 1880–1920 by saying, “There is no question that by the mid-1890s one word had come to define avant-garde art and literature in Britain,” and that word was decadence. Judging by the recent proliferation of books and art exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic, history appears to be repeating itself and on a broader scale. Decadence is now defining, or at least preoccupying, many of us.

This essay utilizes the publication of the first scholarly edition of The French Revolution: A History (1837) as an occasion to reassess this thoroughgoingly radical—and puzzlingly neglected—masterpiece. It explores how Thomas Carlyle's maverick conceptions of sympathy and affect, the relationship of the individual and the collective, and narrative itself underlie the audacious stylistic innovations that characterize this singular text. Moreover, this paper interprets Carlyle's history as a chronicle of inverted utopianism; that is, an apocalyptic manifestation of what is nevertheless a properly utopian longing for heaven on earth. Thus read, The French Revolution offers perspective on our own volatile times as well as a promise—or perhaps a warning—that the insurrectionary struggle for Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity is not over.

This article uses thing theory to interrogate literary portrayals of ancient statues in Africa. It argues that Victorian colonists adopted a “rhetoric of thinghood” to portray these statues’ history and purpose as forever lost to time. By treating them as “things”—singular, incomprehensible, sublime—the statues could be decoupled from the indigenous cultures that made them. Victorians could thus avoid acknowledging the evidence that the objects’ appearance and manufacture provided of the existence of Black civilization, which Victorian race theory denied to Black Africans. Starting with an overview of the nineteenth-century European concept of fetishism, this article traces the development of that rhetorical sleight-of-hand through the real-world integration of the bust of Younger Memnon (now Ramses II) and other Egyptian antiquities into Eurocentric notions of world history: an integration that spurred a variety of interpretive methods intended to negate their racialized appearance. Nonetheless, many African artifacts, particularly those with human likenesses, remained sites of hegemonic destabilization, which authors like Haggard and Wells interrogated in their imperial romances. Under the assumed scrutiny of ancient statues—portrayed as pseudo-animate sentinels bearing silent witness to the unfolding of history—the justifications for colonial expansion corrode, triggering a more hostile and xenophobic mind-set in the Victorian protagonist.

At the core of literary decadence is a conflicted relationship with modernity. For some decadent writers, the onset of rapid social and technological change could usher in possibilities for living and loving in hitherto unimagined ways, yet for others of a more conservative hue, modernization was to be rejected, tradition embraced. This essay argues that experience can be used as a framework for articulating these very different forms of decadence. The essay begins with an exploration of aesthetic modernity as an attempt to articulate the shock of the new, whereby the experience (present) or sensation becomes the ground for the erosion of collective tradition (experience past). Decadent and aestheticist writers such as Walter Pater, Arthur Symons, and Oscar Wilde embraced these new experiences, rejecting the “fruits of experience” as a ground for knowledge. In contradistinction to this valorization of sensation, I examine the “conservative” decadent aesthetic of Lionel Johnson and Michael Field. These writers’ embrace of nostalgia and jingoistic nationalism, I argue, demands we expand our current critical frameworks to more fully encompass the politics of decadence.

The conditions of rapid change and modernization that swept the world from the second half of the nineteenth century enforced the new nationalisms, imperialisms, racisms, anti-Semitisms, and, more positively, sexualities that are again sweeping the world today. The longue durée of modern globalization that began with British industrialization continues with our contemporary forms of technological expansion, international competition, populist disaffection, and accompanying forms of stress, anxiety, depression, nostalgia, regression: decadence. This essay will focus on the political-economic conditions of the period and the cosmopolitanism and progressivism that resisted, and continue to resist, them. I conclude with the classic Japanese analysis of the condition, Kobayashi Hideo's “Literature of the Lost Home” (1933).

When Basil Hallward discovers the distorted portrait of Dorian Gray in chapter 13 of Wilde's eponymous novel, he first ascribes the changes to “some wretched mineral poison” in his paints. Although the passage corresponds to the climax of the story, it has rarely been discussed from a chromatic perspective. And yet, color mattered to Wilde as well as to many of his decadent friends. Drawing on the canonical text of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which it revisits from a color perspective, this article explores the literary inscription of new, shifting chromatic materialities in order to shed light on what Théophile Gautier, in his seminal 1868 essay on Baudelaire, defined as the decadent “palette”: “veined with the greenness (verdeurs) of decomposition.”

The graphic designer Aubrey Beardsley created perverse, grotesque illustrations that encapsulate our sense of decadent visuality. This essay explores Beardsley's use of foreign styles, specifically those of nineteenth-century Japan and eighteenth-century France. Looking at Beardsley's illustrations for Salomé (1893) and The Rape of the Lock (1895), the essay argues that the Japanese and French stylistic influences are actually connected, despite their diverse geographies and temporalities. Studying both styles together reveals the ways that decadence embraced hierarchy and the inequality of persons, wielding a surprisingly normative politics of racial and cultural otherness to produce a Victorian counterculture. Decadence harnessed these familiar imperial-era attitudes in strange ways, using models of taboo difference to create a transgressive aesthetics that moved toward both embodiment and abstraction.

This essay proposes a new understanding of the widely recognized disdain for realism and the realist novel among decadent writers, a disdain most critics have interpreted as a protomodernist celebration of artifice. Focusing on Oscar Wilde's dialogue “The Decay of Lying,” the essay argues instead that decadent antirealism is antimodern, embodying a repudiation of contemporary society. Decadent writers regard realism not as hidebound and traditional, as twentieth-century theorists would have it, but as terrifyingly modern. Wilde looks back to neoclassical theories of mimesis and classical Republican political theory to imagine a different, older world, one in which art improves upon brute reality and in which the artist stands apart from the social forces that realist novels make central to their literary universes.

Though there is now a vast body of work detailing Dickens's extensive interests in contemporary science, technology, and medicine, still there is an overriding sense that Dickens was in energetic contact with scientific knowledge but had no precise role in its constitution, creation, or contestation. In this essay, I argue instead that Dickens was one of the most powerful communicators of scientific knowledge in the mid-Victorian period. Drawing on James A. Secord's model of “knowledge in transit,” the idea that the content of scientific knowledge is arrived at at the same time as audiences for knowledge are constituted or imagined, I also argue that Dickens had a significant role to play in shaping the practices, objects, and values of scientific work. If we have lost sight of this Dickens, I argue, it is because the kinds of science he advocated and the power he wielded threatened other literary-scientific practitioners—including G. H. Lewes—who reshaped Dickens's reception in ways that suited their own aims and agendas. Dickens—a vocal exponent of mesmerists, spontaneous combustionists, sanitary campaigners, early-development hypothesizers, and fantastical engineers—had a far more direct and central role in scientific culture than has yet been understood.

This essay turns on a quiet, though intriguing, expression—the sigh—and considers the aesthetic work that it performs in the novels of Thomas Hardy. While the primary focus of the essay is the aesthetic, communicative, and biological functions of the sigh itself, the broader imperative is to demonstrate how paralanguage was implicated in broader nineteenth-century debates about evolution. It does this by setting Hardy's sighs in conversation with Herbert Spencer's essay “The Origin and Function of Music” (1857). Hardy's writing dramatizes a comparable associative relationship between paralanguage, listening, and sympathy to that which Spencer proposed in “The Origin” but does not replicate the ideological conditions of Spencer's model, which had reserved the highest forms of sympathy for the “cultivated” few. Hardy's aesthetic interest in the sigh, I argue, is more overtly related to how the biosemiotics of paralanguage communicate insights into emotional conditions that are outside the grasp of language.

As the philosopher Charles Taylor argues, some experiences of the secular have surprisingly little to do with the “self-sufficient power of reason” that Kant celebrates in “What Is Enlightenment?” This essay argues that Algernon Charles Swinburne offers such a novel strand of secularity in his “Hymn to Proserpine” and “Hymn of Man.” In these poems, time is a power external to the self that is not transcendent yet which the mind cannot fully grasp. Exploring the age of the Earth and the process of evolution, Victorian scientists had been suggesting that the depths of time lie beyond what the human mind may observe or understand, and this notion of time surfaces in Swinburne's poetry. “Hymn to Proserpine” attends to the limits of reason as it evokes deep time. “Hymn to Man,” in which humans channel the power of time, presents logos as both external and internal to the individual subject. By representing and formally registering deep time, Swinburne's poems restore awe and wonder to a world in which God remains absent. Swinburne presents an enchanted vision of the secular and contributes to the pluralization of nontheistic perspectives.

George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin (1872) is frequently read as a reflection of the scandalous theological doctrine conventionally attached to the author's name, the principle of universalism. But if the fairy tale seems to serve up an optimistic teleology of faith—belief triumphant, no matter the long odds—it also undermines its own project. The very overwrought Christian symbols that most seem to depict MacDonald's universalism in fact suggest its opposite, imagining spiritual progress and individual growth as contingent, indeterminate, and perpetually in process. Recognizing that representations of progress in MacDonald's Princess books are compromised at best and deliberately diverted, more likely, reveals a surprisingly inconsistent treatment of childhood, which he imagines not—or not just—as the telos of spiritual growth but also as a state of suspended development. In this way, The Princess and the Goblin endorses the concept of terminal spirituality while theorizing religious subjectivity as an intermittent temporal process.

In the early 1890s, both John Addington Symonds and Arthur Symons were fascinated by Paul Verlaine's sonnet “Parsifal” (1886)—in particular, by its final line, which dwells on the voices of singing children. Symonds enthused to Symons that it was “a line [to] treasure forever,” while, nevertheless, noting his reservations to Horatio Forbes Brown that “fine as it is, [it] looks like it […] must be rather of the sickly school.” In an article on Verlaine, Symons praised the poem as a “triumph [of] amazing virtuosity,” echoing the sentiments of his friend George Moore, who in Confessions of a Young Man (1886) exclaimed that he “kn[ew] of no more perfect thing than this sonnet.” With its repetition of assonant vowel sounds, Verlaine's closing line captures the gentle rise heavenward of the ethereal voices of Richard Wagner's offstage choristers, resounding above the stage at the conclusion of the opera. The hiatus with which the line opens functions as a sigh of renunciation, as the listeners abandon themselves to the inexpressible force of the transcendent. In Verlaine's sonnet, these children's voices become the epitome of the “disembodied voice” that Symons sees as so characteristic of Decadent poetics. They sing of the delicate immateriality of spiritual experience, the transient fragility of existence.