Victorian assumptions about care infrastructure differed profoundly from our own. Accustomed to local care communities, Victorian writers like Charles Dickens and Samuel Richard Bosanquet resisted the advent of standardized, centralized, institutional care for the poor and sick. While they acknowledged the need for widespread help, they fought to provide care through personal charity based on intimate knowledge, not governmental edict. Comparing their care infrastructure with ours can help remind us of the risks of institutional indifference and the value of care relations.

As part of the effort to secure the release of the Dorchester Labourers, a group of agricultural workers sentenced in 1834 to penal transportation, London theaters hosted four fundraising evenings for the prisoners and their families. A turning point in the popular stage, these evenings marked a moment when commercial venues became willing to ally with working-class protest movements. At three of the four events, the theaters mounted nautical melodramas. Using Judith Butler's theories of the political possibilities of mourning, this article argues that melodrama effectively explored the twinned crises of social austerity and political repression while imagining radical transformation emerging from loss.

Pensions were a means of social provisioning long before they became a cornerstone of state welfare policies in the early twentieth century. The multifarious pension forms that persisted and were reshaped during the Victorian period offer occasions to glimpse how social bonds and obligations across time were imagined and contested. The pensions of Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852–53) suggest how the infrastructural potential of a form might flicker within the literary text, even as it is unacknowledged and left behind.

This article examines Rokeya Hossain's “Sultana's Dream” (1905), a short story that pictures a solar-powered utopia governed by women, as a key site for thinking through the entanglements of sovereignty, gender, colonization, and environmental relations as they are articulated through infrastructure. To read infrastructurally in this way, we attend to socio-historical contexts of nineteenth-century Bengali society and to the Victorian imperial roots of early solar inventions, alongside the more modular aesthetics and meaning-making affordances of solar energy. Such a mode of reading makes infrastructure legible as an essential political ground for the maintenance or transformation of socio-ecological relations and reveals the irreducible political, material, and poetic qualities of infrastructures themselves. Texts like “Sultana's Dream” make such configurations visible and open to interrogation, and demonstrate the ways that solar, as infrastructure, energizes new social and political forms—even those yet undreamed.