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 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).

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.”

How much time has passed since the publication of VLC’s Keywords issue five years ago? This is not a trick question. Students of nineteenth-century British literature and culture are primed to see five years as a long time (“with the length of five long summers”), and events at both national and global scales have encouraged a widespread sense that 2018 is located less in the recent past than on the far side of a divide—in the Before Times. On the other hand, the long view encouraged by a scholarly focus on a period that ended over a century ago may see little or no meaningful time as having passed between 2018 and 2023. Moreover, on a more quotidian level, the very pace of scholarship—the amount of time it typically takes to conceive, research, write, and publish work, even for those without a Casaubonian bone in their bodies—can make five years seem like no time at all (“five summers that flew by,” as Wordsworth might have put it had he been on an academic calendar).

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.

The 1840s saw the creation of weekly illustrated newsmagazines in several European countries, with titles like the Illustrated London News, L'Illustration, and the Illustrirte Zeitung. This article questions the common assumption that these influential periodicals contributed to modern news time primarily by speeding up the consumption of visual information through rapidly produced and consumed eyewitness accounts. An analysis of the many images of staged public events, like inaugurations, political meetings, and parades, that were published during the early years of illustrated news instead shows than they were often produced as translations of information from different sources (both visual and verbal) and created as pictorial summaries of events in a way that can best be described as “synoptic.” Rather than ephemeral reflections of an ever-changing present, such visual condensations also served to commemorate and make lasting and thus contributed to establishing the very events on which the experience of a fast-forward movement of time was based.

This essay focuses on “abstraction” as an underresearched keyword in Victorian studies. I argue that the productive ambiguity of abstraction indexes contradictions and tensions in capitalist modernity, statistical thinking, and interdisciplinary mediations that trace significant parts of their histories to the nineteenth century and still heavily inform our current Victorian scholarships.

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.

How can tenure-track allies to adjunct workers contribute in our new era of anti-tenure attacks and surging labor activism? Two of the founders of Tenure for the Common Good find guidance in Elizabeth Gaskell's representations of class relations. Gaskell reveals the pervasive entrapment of exploitative systems and suggests ways that privileged participants can serve as intermediaries, amplifying the voices of those who need to be heard. Drawing on servant relations in Cranford and laborer relations in the North and South, we find warrant for a new visibility in the fight against adjunctification.

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.

This essay considers one important episode in the relationship between the British novel and the philosophical movement known as British Idealism. Focusing on two novels from the 1880s, Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean and Mary Augusta Ward's Robert Elsmere, I show how both works adapt the generic framework of the bildungsroman to reflect a distinctively idealist notion of development, which conceives of ethical, spiritual, and aesthetic growth as a kind of death—a “dying to live.” Viewed, in this way, from beyond the grave, the early deaths of both Pater's and Ward's eponymous protagonists represent not a critique of the logic of bildung but its ultimate fulfillment.

In Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), Walter Pater asks if “modern art” can “represent men and women in these bewildering toils so as to give the spirit at least an equivalent for the sense of freedom?” I discuss how the notions of both subjective and aesthetic autonomy that Pater refers to here have gotten a bad rap for the past century or so for helping facilitate the liberal, capitalist, and imperialist projects of the nineteenth century. I then argue, however, that the version of autonomy described in the writings of Pater and other Victorian aesthetes and decadents is actually quite different from the bourgeois, Enlightenment notion of sovereign subjectivity that has been rightfully critiqued by postmodernists and poststructuralists. I end by suggesting that aestheticist and decadent versions of autonomy, which affirm humanity's capacity to unmake and remake ourselves and our society via the aesthetic, might serve as a resource for countering the racist Western myth Sylvia Wynter refers to as “biocentricity”: the notion that humankind,and thus the hierarchies that justify the uneven distributions of power, is wholly and intractably in thrall to natural laws beyond our control.

This keyword introduces readers to the theory of ethics of care, arguing that it is both a historically appropriate metric for Victorian studies and a theoretical form grounded in the experience of marginalized subjects. Moreover, care is a way of thinking that encourages us to interrogate our own scholarship.

This essay serves as an introduction to the cluster of essays on “Victorians in Location,” offering a preview of the critical function of “place” and “location” in the Victorian world and our study of it.

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.

The end of the nineteenth century in Britain saw a range of “newnesses”; New Unionism signified a boom in trade unionism, while the New Woman figure symbolized women's struggle for independence. However, both as literary figures and as real-life writers, such New Women were largely middle class and educated. Where are the working women within the sphere of literary and cultural production, and how are they represented within the New Unionism? Against a dominant trade unionism that argued for a “family wage” and considered women's organizing as a threat, the Women's Trade Union League (1874), the National Federation of Women Workers (1906), the 1888 Match Girls strike, and writers and labor activists such as Annie Besant and Clementina Black noted women's roles within labor. Attempting to locate a working New Woman in the trade union movement, this paper is a reflective work-in-progress, an exploration rather than a finished argument. Written by a precariously employed woman trade unionist in the twenty-first century, struggling to find time to write, examining the works of precariously employed women workers one hundred years earlier, the essay poses questions about what happens to politically engaged scholarship in a time of increasingly precarious working conditions and knowledges.

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.

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 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.

The word “conscience” appears frequently in Victorian writings across realms of discourse, in which it assumed an edge of ambivalence and energy difficult for us to perceive in the twenty-first century. While conscience today may seem a residual concept, recent critical strains in Victorian studies have suggested the possibilities bound up in examining anew this complex and multivalent word. Turning particularly to the writings of Charles Darwin and George Eliot reveals a self-conscious awareness not only of how the fluctuating meanings of conscience capture broader social shifts, but the ways these shifts are registered and enacted in language.