the Victorians’ driving interest in exploration and expansion is perhaps one of the best-known scholarly truisms about the age and its literature. While the British Empire was rapidly expanding and commercial competition began to stretch across the globe with a newly perceived urgency, Victorians at home throughout this expanding empire were at once fascinated and anxious in reading about the wider world. Armchair explorers might have confined themselves to a vicarious enjoyment of the gold-nuggets that seem to lay scattered throughout the expanding settler world, of adventures in an excitingly exoticised “bush,” and of shipwrecks and dubious impostors who sometimes seemed to return from the middle of nowhere. Readers could even indulge in a smugly self-congratulatory sense of amusement when witnessing the satirised ignorance of Flora Finching in Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit (1857), when she famously evokes semi-colonial China as such

Despite the recent revival of interest in the Victorian epic, poems from the colonial periphery have played only a small role in the revised narrative of the epic's persistence across the nineteenth century. Part of the explanation for this may lie in the centralized imperial geography of the archives that inspired both nineteenth-century scholars and epoists. As Adelene Buckland and Anna Vaninskaya remark, “Britain was certainly the place to be for a nineteenth-century aficionado of epic poetry” (163). While scholars flocked to Oxford, Cambridge, the British Museum, and the Bodleian Library to pour over the texts of Gilgamesh or old Icelandic sagas, a number of nineteenth-century poets began to see the epic itself as a tool for excavating a more geographically and archeologically localized national story. As Simon Dentith notes, “the nationalism of the nineteenth century seized upon epics – especially the old vernacular primary epics . . . and made them an expression of the national spirit (Epic 67). William Morris's Sigurd the Volsung, for example, revives the mythology of the Old North to make a “Great Story” for the race of northern Europeans what the “Tale of Troy was to the Greeks” (Dentith, “Morris” 239).

The Victorian age has long been considered a time of disenchantment. Beginning with Max Weber's seminal “Science as a Vocation,” secularization theory has argued that belief within modernity is marked by “rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’” (155). In this account, modernization makes the “enchanted” world fall apart, changing it from a realm of “mysterious incalculable forces” into an empty space governed by nothing more than “technical means and calculations” (139). Religion, this narrative claims, inevitably fades away. It may attempt to survive disenchantment by downplaying its supernatural roots, but this rationalized religion nevertheless gives way to secularism. And although recent scholarship has challenged the assertion that the Victorian age simply marked the decline of faith, the disenchantment narrative remains a powerful one; even critics who dispute aspects of the theory acknowledge its force. Colin Jager's The Book of God, for instance, describes Weber's narrative of disenchantment as “a powerful account of the way in which science gradually demystifies the universe” (18), and George Levine's Darwin Loves You concedes that Weber's work, whatever its flaws, survives because it was “fashioned so powerfully and convincingly” (xiv).

It might seem bold, or even presumptuous, to assert that there is a clearly identifiable unified theory of the novel present in any aspect of Victorian literary culture. As John C. Olmsted rightly observes, assessing the presence of any specific and consistent critical stance in Victorian criticism is a difficult task; thus, any attempt to evaluate Victorian criticism of the novel is problematic. Victorian periodical criticism is

Despite the recent revival of interest in the works of Anthony Trollope, his short novel The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson has largely escaped serious attention. Trollope called the book a “satire on the ways of trade,” (Autobiography 106) and serialized it in Cornhill Magazine, 1861–62. The novel turned out to be a critical and commercial failure, perhaps because it marked a dramatic departure from the familiar social comedy of Barsetshire novels. Contemporary reviewers called it “coarse,” “odiously vulgar,” and “unmitigated rubbish.” Later readers were no more generous. C. P. Snow judged SBJR “one of the least funny books ever written” and thought Trollope had “perpetrated idiocy. . .” by writing it (95–96).

In spite of the supernatural trappings of Charles Dickens's most famous work, A Christmas Carol, critics from G. K. Chesterton to Edmund Wilson have found its equally famous protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge, to be a real character, more fleshed-out and compelling than many of the characters of Dickens's longer, presumably more “serious” novels. Much of the reaction to A Christmas Carol and its protean anti-hero can be summarized by Stephen Prickett's succinct appraisal in his seminal study, Victorian Fantasy: “The strength of A Christmas Carol lies quite simply in its psychological credibility” (54). Scrooge is a character we can believe in, a character that, as Margaret Atwood suggests, “remains fresh and vital. ‘Scrooge Lives!’ we might write on our T-shirts” (xiii).

This essay looks at Carlyle's interest in visual and literary portraiture, as the basis for a reassessment of his practice as a biographer in relation to the wider biographical culture of Victorian Britain. Carlyle's fascination with portraits manifested itself in a number of ways. Despite his professed reluctance as a sitter, his face was one of the most visible of his day – painted, sketched, sculpted, photographed, and reproduced for public circulation in engravings and cartes de visite. He collected portraits of his family, friends, and heroes, and was a public champion of the art, most famously through his influential role in the founding of the English National Portrait Gallery. He was also valued by his contemporaries as a portraitist in words, a writer whose graphic style included a striking ability to picture people. Yet only partial answers have been offered to the question of how these activities related to each other and what their significance might be in terms of his career. Paul Barlow has explored Carlyle's concept of the authentic, historical portrait in relation to his proposals for a National Portrait Gallery (“Facing the Past” and “The Imagined Hero”), and John Rosenberg has discussed his pictorial style as a means by which he sought to make history into a secular scripture by “endowing the past with extraordinary ‘presence’” (24). Richard Salmon has given some consideration to Carlyle's engagement with contemporary “portrait gallery” publications as part of his discussion of his ambivalent response to idolatry and literary “lionism” (Salmon 2002). I am indebted to these discussions but I differ from them in arguing that we need to see Carlyle's interest in portraiture, both visual and verbal, as integral to his conception and practice of biography. The fact that he, famously, enmeshes history and biography, in theory and practice, does not invalidate this point. It is with biography and the biographical basis of historical narrative, that he associates the portrait and portraiture. This distinction matters because it shifts us away from the emphasis on Carlyle as an historian that has sometimes occluded his links with his contemporary biographical culture. By restoring these links we can understand more fully the significance both of the portrait within his work, and of his innovative contribution to a broader climate of experimentation with the conjunction of visual and verbal portraiture in life writing at the period.

The speaker of this ballad (circa 1828) laments the fact that, though he was born of “honest parents,” he became “a roving blade” and has been convicted of an unspecified crime for which he has been sentenced to “Botany Bay,” a popular name for Australia. Although he addresses his audience as “young men of learning,” the rest of the ballad implies that he, as is conventional in the broadside form, is a working-class apprentice gone astray. Like this fictional speaker, approximately 160,000 men and women convicted of crimes ranging from poaching hares to murder – but mostly theft – were transported to one of the new British colonies in Australia between the years 1787 and 1867. Minor crimes such as shoplifting, which today would merit some community service and a fine, yielded a sentence of seven years, while other felons were sentenced for fourteen years to life for more serious crimes. While non-fictional accounts of the young colony of New South Wales were published in Britain almost as soon as the First Fleet arrived there in 1788, these were written by people with at least a middle-class education, whereas the vast majority of the convicted felons who were transported came from the working classes. Since books and newspapers were expensive and the level of literacy among working-class people varied considerably, few of them would have had access to such accounts of the new colonies. Several descriptions, mostly borrowed from the writings of the officers who accompanied the First Fleet, were published in cheap chapbook form, while occasional letters from convicts to their families were printed and distributed, and of course there were unpublished letters plus word-of-mouth reports from convicts or soldiers who did return. But none of these were broadly disseminated among working-class people.

“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.

As Cambridge historian J. R. Seeley writes inThe Expansion of England (1883), the fear of colonial secession, inspired by that of the United States, haunted Britons’ perception of their “second Empire” throughout the nineteenth century, effectively working against a sense of shared national destiny with the white settlers of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia (14–15). One important way Victorian writers combatted the “optimistic fatalism” Seeley observed in his fellow Britons was through an imperial economy of affect, which circulated sentiment and stressed emotional identification between settlers and metropolitan Britons (15). If mid-nineteenth-century British literature can be said to negotiate the tensions of Britain's empire through representations of racial, cultural, and linguistic difference, then narratives of sameness – of British families across the oceans – offer models for cohering the British settler empire. In such a model, techniques designed to reinforce the sentimental bonds of settlers to their families might also reinforce the social, political, and affective connections of the settlers to the metaphorical “mother country.”

Punch's Mr. Dunup is indeed in an awful position. Having fled to France to escape his English creditors, he finds himself in the midst of the French Revolution of 1848. The question that he must answer – what is worse, revolution in France or bankruptcy in England? – is one that preoccupied Victorians at midcentury, when a wave of European revolutions coincided with the domestic financial crisis of 1845–48. In classic accounts of nineteenth-century Europe, 1848 is remembered as the year when a crucial contest was waged between political revolution, identified with the Continent, and capitalism, identified with Britain. According to Eric Hobsbawm, the failure of the 1848 revolutions to effect lasting political change ushered in “[t]he sudden, vast and apparently boundless expansion of the world capitalist economy”: “Political revolution retreated, industrial revolution advanced” (2). For mid-nineteenth-century Britons, however, the triumph of capitalism was by no means assured. In what follows, I look closely at how Victorian journalists and novelists imagined the British financial crisis of the 1840s after this event was given new meaning by the 1848 French Revolution. Much of this writing envisions political revolution and the capitalist economy in the same way as the Punch satirist does – not as competing ideologies of social progress but as equivalent forms of social disruption. As we will see, at midcentury, the ongoing financial crisis was routinely represented as a quasi-revolutionary upheaval: it was a mass disturbance that struck terror into the middle classes precisely by suddenly and violently toppling the nation's leading men and social institutions.

In her landmark study, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, Elizabeth Prettejohn identifies “the burgeoning Victorian interest in the sciences” as one of Pre-Raphaelite art's “most important contemporary contexts” (251). Many critics have seen the at times remorseless detail of early Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry as analogous to science. As Tim Barringer puts it, “The attention which hard-edged Pre-Raphaelite naturalism of the 1850s paid to observing the individual object encapsulates [science's] questioning, empirical spirit” (16). A major exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite landscape painting in London, Berlin, and Madrid in 2004 to 2005 paid close attention to geology, meteorology, and natural history (Staley et al.). There have been a growing number of studies of specific aspects of the relationship between Pre-Raphaelitism and science, with individual chapters or articles published on Pre-Raphaelitism and phrenology (Grilli), physiognomy (Hartley 80–109) and ethnography (Pointon), and on specific painters, including John Everett Millais (Codell) and John Brett (Payne 104–23). Through this work, recent critics have begun to rediscover the relationship between Pre-Raphaelitism and science which Victorian critics favourable to the movement saw as fundamental to it (see also Rosenfeld). Writing in the Fortnightly Review in 1867, Sidney Colvin remarked that “the scientific spirit, coupled with the disgust of earnest men at academic pretensions and their reaction from academic principles, constituted the very essence of præ-Raphaelitism” (470–71).

“The judge, the jury, the avenger of blood, the prisoner, the witnesses – all were gathered together within one building” (306; ch. 32): at the melodramatic acme of Elizabeth Gaskell's 1848 Mary Barton, the reader's energies have similarly converged upon Jem Wilson's trial for the murder of Harry Carson. Yet despite the narrative significance of the courtroom testimonies, once Jem has pled not guilty, the narrator unexpectedly mutes the prosecutor's opening speech and substitutes instead what seems to be a lowbrow debate about the defendant's physical appearance. The first speaker insists that any justly accused man will have “some expression of [his] crimes” in his face, and observing Jem's “low, resolute brow” and “white compressed lips,” he comments that he has “seldom seen one with such marks of Cain on his countenance as the man at the bar” (309; ch. 32). The second observer disagrees, asserting that Jem's forehead is not so low as it might initially seem and is in fact rather square, “which some people say is a good sign” (309; ch. 32). He asserts that he is “no physiognomist” and proposes instead that Jem's agitated and depressed visage is less the sign of a depraved character than the result of inner turmoil and a bad haircut.

The victorian discourse of self-help, popularized by Samuel Smiles in the mid-nineteenth century, was integral to the success of mid-Victorian British emigration and colonialism. As Robert Hogg notes in his study of British colonial violence in British Columbia and Queensland, Samuel Smiles's notion of character, which embraced the virtues of hard work, perseverance, self-reliance, and energetic action, helped sanction masculine colonial violence and governance in these regions (23–24). According to Robert Grant in his examination of mid-Victorian emigration to Canada and Australia, one's desire “to better him or herself” was closely entwined with Smiles's self-help philosophy and the rhetoric of colonial promotion permeating British self-help texts “in the projection of the laborer's progress from tenant to smallholder to successful landowner through hard work” (178–79). Francine Tolron similarly observes the pervasiveness of the success narrative in emigrant accounts of New Zealand, noting that this story often constitutes “yet another tale of the British march of Progress” (169) with the yeoman, John Bull, as the hero at its centre, who adopts the imperialist impetus to subdue the wilderness and recreate an ideal England in which a man can earn gentility through hard work and uprightness of character (169–70). She extends accounts by male emigrants to New Zealand to the “collective psyche” of all New Zealanders “whose stuff is made up of earth, so to speak, the inheritors of the old archetypal Englishman who worked on the land before the dawn of the industrial era” (173). These studies contribute significantly to a growing body of scholarship that considers the connections between self-help literature and British emigration and colonialism. Yet, occasionally such analyses apply the meaning of self-help rhetoric universally across British male and female emigrant groups when the rise from tenant to landowner was typically a male, not a female, prerogative. Building on this important body of work, this paper considers how domestic concerns, rather than a sole focus on controlling foreign lands and people, informed versions of success penned by a particular group of mid-Victorian middle-class female emigrants and these women's understanding of their positioning within the colonies.

George Eliot, notoriously sensitive to criticism of her novels, received a reassuring letter from her publisher, John Blackwood, one month into the publication of Daniel Deronda (1876) in Books or Parts:

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).

Animal autobiography – a first-person fictional narrative in which an animal tells its own story – emerged in the late eighteenth century as the first attempt to represent animal minds in extended narrative form. Authors of this genre were anxious to create accurate, believable animal characters, even as they afforded them human language and a habit of critical commentary. To do this, they wrote in sync with scientific understandings of animals as set out in books of natural history. A few authors are explicit about their debt to natural history, and their comments point to a broad but intended compatibility between the ideas of animal minds in animal autobiography and those in the popularized scientific discourse of the day.

Almost at the end of Book VI of Daniel Deronda, that is, with at least three-quarters of the novel over, Gwendolen Harleth's dreadful husband, Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt, suddenly reveals a new side of himself. Whereas heretofore he has mentioned or engaged in recreations that include hunting, shooting (including tigers), and gambling, all as means of passing the time rather than achieving exhilaration or amusement, he now reveals himself as a yachtsman. After catching Gwendolen in their town house in Grosvenor Square in yet another of her contrived tête à têtes with Daniel, he declares he has already begun preparations for a Mediterranean cruise for himself and his wife, alone together.

New Zealand experienced a massive influx of European immigrants in the 1870s and early 1880s after the introduction of Julius Vogel's assisted immigration programme. Single women under the age of thirty-five were a significant target group of recruitment schemes. They were expected to contribute to the colony's labour force as domestic servants and balance New Zealand's surplus of male settlers by becoming wives and mothers. Many of these young women had never been away from home until they embarked on their hazardous journey halfway around the world. Elizabeth Fairbairn, a single woman emigrant herself, was the matron in charge of the young women travelling to New Zealand on board the Oamaru in 1877–78. She narrates in her shipboard diary that Christmas Day made many of the single women homesick: “A great many of the girls grew downhearted last night and had such a good cry, poor things I was sorry for them, for the heart does feel things at a time like this and it is the first time a good many of them have been from home” (25 Dec. 1877). Jane Finlayson was one of these homesick “girls” on the same ship a year earlier. On 22 September 1876 she writes in her diary: “After parting with our friends at Greenock and thinking that ‘Whatever be our earthly lot, Wherever we may roam, Still to our heart the brightest spot, Is round the hearth at home’ we came with the tug on board this ship.” Having left their old home, the women emigrants spent three months crammed into an uncomfortable steerage compartment, honing domestic skills such as sewing and knitting. The ship became a temporary home in which the emigrants prepared for their future life in New Zealand. Metropolitan notions of femininity which located women in the private, domestic sphere had to be questioned and modified on board. While the single women's compartment was supposed both to become a home away from home and to represent a domestic setting, the transitional and public nature of shipboard space complicated both of these projects. This ambiguity relates to an image of single women which was similarly contradictory. The single woman emigrant was a figure at the centre of discourses of femininity and community: on her centred hope but also anxiety. Like in other settler colonies, it was imagined in New Zealand that women would exert beneficial moral and religious influence upon male-dominated colonial society. Women were thus expected to act as creators of community, both ideologically through their moral influence and physically by bearing children. However, until they got married, single women also represented a threat: they were often held responsible for the increase in prostitution in New Zealand (Macdonald 180). This illustrates the danger women could embody: again, both ideologically, since prostitution was seen as contaminating the moral character of society, and physically, since deviant sexual activity was often seen as undermining the biological purity of the community. How did such notions of femininity and community travel from Britain to New Zealand? How were they constructed and redefined during the transitional period of the voyage? In order to explore these questions this essay discusses two texts that also travelled, and narrate travelling: the two shipboard diaries by Elizabeth Fairbairn and Jane Finlayson referenced above, which look at single women's experience of emigration from the slightly different perspectives of a matron and a young woman under the care of a matron. The figure of the matron is an ambiguous one within the notion of women as representing both hope and anxiety: she is not married but nevertheless in a position of relative authority compared to the other single women on board. Elizabeth Fairbairn's diary represents her efforts to create unity among the women under her charge by submitting all of them to the same ideology of femininity. However, her text also has to deal with her own complicated status within the social structure of the ship. Jane Finlayson's text aims to contain anxiety and ambiguity by framing subversive and frightening events within the generic conventions of a shipboard diary. It negotiates the position of the single women on board while simultaneously reaffirming this position.

Forms are plastic, names cannot determine the essence of living things, and ceaselessly changing organisms cannot be conceived as elements within a signifying system. Each of these precepts of evolutionary theory finds itself reflected in Lewis Carroll's Alice books: Alice grows bigger and smaller without relation to any notion of a normal or standard size, fantastic organisms such as the “bread-and-butterfly” are generated out of metaphors and puns on taxonomic names, and the Queen's croquet game cannot function properly because the animals do not fulfill their prescribed roles. Lewis Carroll familiarized himself thoroughly with Darwinian theory in the years leading up to his composition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871). He “read widely on the subject of evolution” (Woolf 191), possessing “nineteen books on Darwin, his theories and his critics” (Smith 8), as well as five works of social evolutionist Herbert Spencer, including First Principles (1862), which put Darwinian theory in dialogue with religious understandings of the world (Cohen 350; Stern 17). As a lecturer in mathematics at Christchurch Oxford from 1855 to 1881, he was present during the famous 1860 debate at Oxford University Museum between Thomas Henry Huxley, one of the main proponents of evolutionary theory in the late nineteenth century, and Bishop of Oxford William Wilberforce, one of its major critics.