At the heart of all great religion and art there is a mystery that expresses an ineluctable paradox: “Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in a moment, In the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet” (I Cor. 15:51–52). The bass aria of Handel's Messiah confounds the natural world and all its laws to affirm the divine power that will make the corruptible incorruptible and the mortal immortal. For Marx the transformation of humankind does not wait upon a seraphic clarion; it will be accomplished when the industrial proletariat overthrows the capitalist classes in revolutionary struggle. That in itself is a mystery which has not been demonstrated historically; but that greater mystery conceals another, which required the specific revisions of Lenin. The problem is stated very clearly by the late Alvin Gouldner.

In Mythologiques Lévi-Strauss describes an exotically defiant figure – the Honey-Mad Woman – who eats honey in bizarre amounts, who feeds on it wildly and to excess. She consumes honey rather than plantains or meat because honey, as Lévi-Strauss explains, delineates the ambiguous border between culture and nature, the border where – in primitive societies – woman herself is asked to reside. As a prearticulated, predigested substance, honey is at once raw and cooked, processed and unprocessed; in consuming it in great quantities, the honey-mad woman becomes an archetype of sexual as well as gustatory defiance. Breaking the rules of politic eating, she covertly defies the system in which women are exchanged by men, for the ostensible purpose of containing women's “natural” disorder and fecundity. An inhabitant, then, of the agonistic border between nature and culture that societies erect to protect themselves from ideological collapse, woman is the unwitting dupe, the strange symbol, the wild card in a primitive metaphysic. But in consuming honey so avidly, the honey-mad woman preempts this symbolization, for by consuming a substance like herself, she usurps her society's right to consume her.

Victorian political and social thought was shaped to some extent in response to the French Revolution and the Regency. One widely circulated mid-nineteenth-century emblem of the State is George Cruikshank's The British Bee Hive, which he designed in 1840 during a second wave of Chartist agitation whose origins and program extend backward into the first decades of the century (Fig. I). The Bee Hive was not published, however, until twenty-seven years later, on the eve of the second Reform Bill, when Cruikshank's “Penny Political Picture for the People” gave him an opportunity to address his public one more time “with a few words upon Parliamentary Reform” and the constitutional subjects that had preoccupied him “for upwards of fifty years.” As an expression of populous enterprise and the stable class hierarchies of the British bourgeois monarchy, George Cruikshank's beehive embodies in its design and accompanying letterpress not only his notions about the second Reform Bill, but also ideas growing out of earlier political, social, and graphic controversies.

John Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture was among the books that Charles Dickens read at the seaside resort of Broadstairs during the summer of 1851. In November of that same year he commenced his great novel about the city, Bleak House (Forster 505). This work began the period of Dickens's last creative outpouring, in which he wrote the remarkable series of books that have sometimes been referred to as the dark novels. The connection between these events may be found in one of the central chapters of The Seven Lamps, “The Lamp of Power.” There Ruskin identifies the sublime in architecture as “a severe, and in many cases mysterious majesty, which we remember with an undiminished awe, like that felt at the presence and operation of some great Spiritual Power” (100). It is important for Ruskin that the architectural sublime – since it is based in a human construction – resembles but is not equivalent to the operation of a “great Spiritual Power.” In Modern Painters, he also located “the first step” of the sublime in “human power,” explicitly placing the origin of this inherently superhuman quality within humanity itself (128).

In their courtship and marriage, the Brownings did not contend for that “mastery” the wife of Bath and other traditional sources of marital wisdom cite as the usual object of competition between the sexes. Instead they struggled over the privilege of admiring and serving the other. Robert Browning won that competition, his victory both symptom and cause of a poetic silence that lasted throughout most of his married life. An important exception to his prolonged inactivity is Men and Women, Browning's successful attempt at bringing his innovative style to full, sustained articulation. In order to achieve the kind of psychological, as well as intellectual, independence that would enable him to speak “in [his] true person” (“One Word More,” line 137), however, the poet needed to alter the terms of his relationship with his wife, who was both the emotional center of his life and a more successful, more popular poet. Browning achieved this separation in Men and Women, particularly in “One Word More.”

Giuseppe Chiarini was an Italian poet, translator, and critic. In 1874 he sent a copy of his Poesie to Robert Browning. Among the English poets Chiarini translated were Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Shelley, Tennyson, Swinburne, and Robert Browning. As an example of the liberties he took with Italian metrics in order to render the gusto of Browning's rollicking manner, I cite the first stanza of “Up at a Villa – Down in the City” (“Su in Villa e Giù in Città”):

S' i' avessi denari, se n'avessi

Abbastanza e d'avanzo, la mia casa

Sarebbe al certo alla città, giù in piazza.

Oh dolce vita, oh, dolce vita starsene

Affacciati laggiù alla finestra.

(Poesie 421)

(If I had money, if I had

Enough and cash on hand, my house

Would certainly be in the city, down in a piazza.

O sweet life, O sweet life, to be

Leaning out of a window there.)

[My translation]

A recent work calls the history of Romanticism “a history of redefinitions” (Rosen 16). I have no intention of attempting to define or redefine that movement; rather, in classifying a figure whose career spans the periods generally categorized under both Romantic and Victorian – Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) – I want to raise some questions about certain of his ideas and look closely at his relationship to some of his contemporaries. Neither Romantic nor Victorian, he resists being neatly categorized. Perhaps this circumstance helps to explain the tremendous influence he had on many writers, some of whom seem at some remove from this enigmatic nineteenth-century figure.

In 1846 William John Thoms, who contributed the term “folklore” to the English language, commented in The Athenaeum that “belief in fairies is by no means extinct in England” (Merton 55). Thoms was not alone in his opinion; he merely echoed and endorsed the words of Thomas Keightley, the author of a popular and influential book, The Fairy Mythology. For believers were not limited to gypsies, fisherfolk, rural cottagers, country parsons, and Irish mystics. Antiquarians of the Romantic era had begun the quest for fairies, and throughout Victoria's reign advocates of fairy existence and investigators of elfin origins included numerous scientists, historians, theologians, artists, and writers. By the 1880s such leading folklorists and anthropologists as Sabine Baring-Gould, Joseph Jacobs, Andrew Lang, and Sir John Rhŷs were examining oral testimony on the nature and the customs of the “little folk” and the historical and archaeological remains left by them. At the beginning of the twentieth century eminent authors, among them Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, swelled the ranks of those who held the fairy faith and publicized their findings. In all, in a remarkable “trickle up” of folk belief, a large number of educated Romantics, Victorians, and Edwardians speculated at length on whether fairies did exist or had at least once existed.