This article analyzes the tension between the active, present body and the absent, passive body in this medical case study, presented by doctor and prosthetist Henry Robert Heather Bigg in his 1885 book Artificial Limbs and the Amputations which Afford the Most Appropriate Stumps in Civil and Military Surgery. I reproduce Bigg's account in its entirety because, to date, Artificial Limbs has not been digitised, although it is held at around a dozen academic libraries in the UK and USA respectively. Bringing attention to and providing a close reading of a source not previously discussed academically sheds new light on the way the disabled body was read by medical professionals in the second half of the nineteenth century. In addition, I consider Bigg's narrative rendering of this unique case study alongside several contemporary sources, including memoirs, novels, short stories, and journal articles. In doing so, I identify how assumptions made by Bigg about the (disabled, female, privileged) hand mirror and echo those in the wider cultural sphere. The sensing hand is an instrument of will, and the creation of such a prosthesis troubles the dynamics of active and passive, touching and touched that Pamela K. Gilbert has identified as crucial to nineteenth-century discourses surrounding the hand. By designing and making this prosthesis, Bigg exerts his professional and masculine agency to make the woman's body assume the position of something beheld rather than embodied.

In a letter “To the Editor of the Times,” a G. S. Hatton of Brompton writes furiously in May 1850:

The limericks of Edward Lear (1812–1888) prompted a mid-Victorian craze that flourishes to this day. Gorgeously illustrated new limericks appear in a 2015 issue of Poetry magazine (Madrid), a five-line skewering of Stalin is tucked into a recent New York Times obituary (Grimes). The newly founded Edward Lear Society celebrates at the Knowsley estate, and the keeper of the Edward Lear website adds a new feature on Lear and Comics. The British Academy's Chatterton lecturer attends to Lear's birds, including the parrot that “seized” a man's nose and the raven that “danced a quadrille” (Bevis 39, 41) – Lear's first work, it must be remembered, was the magnificent Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots (1832). Of course he is best known today as a writer of nonsense (Peck 15). The illustrated limerick, his lighthearted venture into a double genre, perennially raises questions among his admirers and scholars about the internal dynamics linking its components. Borrowing from recent discussions of various picture-poem combinations, one might call the illustrated limericks in A Book of Nonsense “picture-limericks” (Dilworth 42), “imagetexts” (Mitchell, Picture Theory 89), or “iconotexts” (Louvel). As the labels all suggest, the core issue is the proximity of two media and whether or how they converge.

In the section devoted to “Attention” in The Principles of Psychology (1890), William James describes how the “‘adaptation of the attention’” can alter our perception of an image so as to permit multiple visual formulations (417). In his example of a two-dimensional drawing of a cube, we can see the three-dimensional body only once our attention has been primed by “preperception”: the image formed by the combination of lines has “no connection with what the picture ostensibly represents” (419, 418). In a footnote to this passage, however, James uses an example from Hermann Lotze's Medicinische Psychologie (1852), to show how a related phenomenon can occur involuntarily, and in states of distraction rather than attention:

By the 1860s, the verse novel had become a significant feature of the Victorian literary landscape. According to Dino Felluga, this hybrid was a “perverse” and even “subversive” genre, firstly, because it undermined the “‘high’ autotelic” status of poetry by mixing it with the “heteroglot, carnivalesque, and polyphonic novel” and, secondly, because its specific fictions tended to oppose or parody the “middle-class heterosexual, domestic ideology” upheld by the prose novel of the period. In support of his argument, Felluga discusses a handful of texts that are normally regarded as “high” literature: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de Voyage, George Meredith's Modern Love and Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book (Felluga, “Verse Novel” 171–74; “Novel Poetry” 491–96).

A story titled “The Impressionists” that was published in 1897 should have something to say about art, but does it? The sixth installment in Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co. series, “The Impressionists” follows the antics of M'Turk, Stalky, and Beetle, three cunning boys at a dreary English military preparatory school. Suspecting these boys of cheating on their schoolwork, housemaster Mr. Prout turns them out of their private study into the main house dormitory. For revenge, and hoping to win back their room, Stalky & Co. become agents provocateurs. They start a fight in their house and manage to involve the other housemasters’ houses: “Under cover of the confusion the three escaped to the corridor, whence they called in and sent up passers-by to the fray. ‘Rescue, King's! King's! King's! Number Twelve form-room! Rescue, Prout's – Prout's! Rescue, Macrea's! Rescue, Hartopp's!’” (102). The three boys then allow Mr. Prout to overhear a conversation that makes money-lending seem common practice in the houses: “‘Where's that shillin’ you owe me?’ said Beetle suddenly. Stalky could not see Prout behind him, but returned the lead without a quaver. ‘I only owed you ninepence, you old usurer’” (103). Stalky & Co. rile up the other boys by telling ghost stories and spreading slanderous ditties; they turn the house against the prefects and undermine Mr. Prout's authority; and in the end they win back their room, but they are also found out by the headmaster, who mixes corporeal punishment with his admonishments: “There is a limit – one finds it by experience, Beetle – beyond which it is never safe to pursue private vendettas, because – don't move – sooner or later one comes – into collision with the – higher authority, who has studied the animal. Et ego – M'Turk, please – in Arcadia vixi” (117). The boys take the headmaster's attentions as a compliment, and they take his advice. Never again do they stake the school's peace in the pursuit of their own ends.

The names Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) and Eugène Sue (1804–1857) rarely figure in the same sentence. Carlyle is commonly remembered as a dour Scots Calvinist and eminent Victorian; Sue, in contrast, as a sensational French novelist, and sybarite-turned-champagne-socialist. Nevertheless, the following article will contend that Carlyle was in fact familiar with the works of Sue, to such an extent that he adapted passages from the latter's Mystères de Paris (1842–1843) in his own Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850). First, the article will offer a brief sketch of Sue and his novel, before discussing their reception amongst Carlyle's circle of friends and acquaintances. It will then suggest that Carlyle himself was likely to have read the novel, and then proceed to compare the relevant passages of the Mystères and the Pamphlets, which together constitute the primary focus of the article. Finally, it will be argued that this matter is far from being a mere curiosity, of concern only to the most obsessive of Carlyle scholars. To the contrary, it will be suggested that in understanding what Carlyle did with Sue, we will be better able to grasp the meaning of some of the more notorious passages of his most notorious work, and particularly their political thrust. In doing so, the article will build upon a number of recent studies of the reception of French literature in Victorian Britain, and will also reopen the question of Carlyle's debts to French socialism, an issue that continues to be a matter of some controversy amongst Carlyle scholars.

John Ruskin and Charles Darwin shared a desire to change the way their readers looked at both nature and art. However, when considering them together, we typically remember their failure to see eye to eye on man's place in nature. Examining Ruskin's responses to Darwin's work, sexual selection in particular, or Ruskin's late dissatisfaction with Victorian science more generally, scholars have emphasized their conflicting worldviews. Yet this tendency to focus on conceptual disagreement fails to consider a shared intellectual background between the two men: the science of geology.

Language can be made to revolt against its own instrumentality. That is the promise Algernon Charles Swinburne pursues in his unfinished novel Lesbia Brandon, composed in 1859–67 but not published until 1952. Early on in this work, we encounter a passage that perfectly showcases his peculiar and innovative prose style. It is a style that boldly invents its own mechanism of self-perpetuation, and, as it ramifies throughout the novel, turns the text into something other than a conventional narrative – a singular grammar of sensuous perception. The novel's young protagonist, Herbert Seyton, has rounded a corner of a coastal road and comes face to face with the sea. Lesbia Brandon is full of descriptions of the natural environment like this one. It is one of many moments in the novel in which characters encounter, experience, and merge with the seascape. These instances concatenate Swinburne's formal project throughout Lesbia Brandon, a project of translating forces that create patterns in the perceived world into models for prose. The resulting stylistic transformation extends not only to the figurative aspects of Swinburne's language but also to its grammatical and syntactic underpinnings, as peripheral, “accessory” elements become core shaping forces in the prose. This process is at work as Herbert rejoices in the sea-coast and all its enchantments:

You can continue to thoughtlessly pollute, Ruskin warns his readers, but in so doing you will destroy the earth and end your own existence. Six years earlier, in 1865, Ruskin coined the term “dis-ease” to denote a clear link between ill-being and environmental detachment. He yoked physical and mental health, elucidating “[h]ow literally that word Dis-Ease, the Negation and impossibility of Ease, expressed the entire moral state of our English Industry and its Amusements!” (“Of Kings’ Treasuries” 282). For Ruskin, nineteenth-century mills and factories, despite promising consumer satisfaction, made comfort impossible by endlessly producing frivolous, disposable goods, and thus waste. This needless consumption, a symptom of industry, produced an ignorance of true needs. Dis-ease, mental and bodily discomfort, resulted from alienation from the ecosystem, the networks of dependence between all species, and that estrangement blinded human beings to their actual role in the environment. While Ruskin focused on urban toxicity, the toxic ideological separation between humans and their environment impacted all spaces, a concern that several Victorian writers raised decades earlier than he did. This article traces the salutary cultural anxiety over improper sanitation and contaminants in two popular mid-nineteenth-century novels that demonstrate the effects of anthropogenic pollution in urban and rural environments, respectively. Published almost exactly one year apart, both Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) invoke what I call eco-consciousness in their description of urban and rural filth, portrayed as both visible and invisible toxins. Gaskell uncovers urban pollution in plain sight, going beyond smell to expose the causes of toxicity, while Brontë challenges the belief in the country as a safe haven from pollution, going beyond beauty to expose rural toxicity. Characters suffer physical disease and mental dis-ease resulting from a poor understanding of ecological relationships. Reading Jane Eyre alongside Mary Barton accentuates Brontë’s use of eco-consciousness to expose the hidden dangers of rural pollution that resulted from the very types of urban toxicity that Gaskell identifies.

During the first astronomy lesson shared by the two protagonists of Thomas Hardy's Two on a Tower (1882), Lady Viviette Constantine and Swithin St Cleeve share a decidedly gloomy interpretation of human insignificance in the face of a vast universe:

Nineteenth-century religious ideology is adamant about the spiritual outcome that should arise from the experience of illness: “The time of sickness is a season when every afflicted person should resolve, with the assistance of God's grace that if his health be restored, he will ever afterwards live a truly religious life” (Church of England Tract Society, Manual of Instructions 8). However, sickroom visitors consistently report that, even when a patient makes such a resolution, physical recovery often coincides with a spiritual relapse. As one writer laments, “The friends of religion, whose warning and consoling voices are heard at the bed of sickness, are often compelled to witness the dispersion of their fairest prospects of good, at the period of returning health” (Fry, A Present for the Convalescent vii-viii).

The Great Stink of London took place one year before the publication of George Eliot's The Lifted Veil (1859). As a peak sanitary crisis, the Great Stink helps us to understand the particular telepathy of Eliot's narrator, since The Lifted Veil combines the rhetoric of telepathy with that of a more threatening form of transmission among bodies: foul odor and contagious air. Throughout the figurative structure of Eliot's story, tropes that convey the narrator's ostensibly supernatural experience contain traces – sometimes cryptic, sometimes explicit – of the earthly matter of sanitary crisis. The first section of this essay explores the sanitary dimension of The Lifted Veil, linking the story to sanitary crisis and to Victorian materialist psychology – particularly the work of George Henry Lewes – which conceived mind in physical terms. With the role of sanitation established, the second section shows the importance of the sense of smell to Latimer's first-person narration of telepathy. This section outlines the transition, contemporaneous with sanitary reform, from the use of animal to the use of vegetable perfumes. Throughout the story, vegetable scents act as prophylaxes against the narrator's too-physical telepathy. From these readings, it becomes clear that Eliot writes “extrasensory” perception with recourse to sensory figures. Telepathy and sanitation overlap in this exceptional gothic science fiction in such a way as to demand a new concept of olfactory telepathy.

From May 1850 to January 1851, the Lady's Newspaper and Pictorial Times of London featured a series of articles entitled “A Few Words about Music” by “M. H.” The author was the governess, composer, and Catholic convert Mary Holmes (1815–1878). Over the course of several months, Holmes extolled the value of music in women's education, offered practical advice on practicing the piano, recommended suitable repertoire for students, and provided useful guidelines for teaching music to children. In 1851, the articles were expanded into a small book and published by J. Alfred Novello as A Few Words about Music: Containing Hints to Amateur Pianists; to Which Is Added a Slight Historical Sketch of the Rise and Progress of the Art of Music, by M. H.

This essay tells a story of endurance: the endurance of a person and the endurance of an object in an archive, both of which have survived despite their apparent fungibility and ephemerality. It focuses on a Jamaican veteran of the navy and merchant marine – one Edward Albert – who lost his legs while at sea and therefore took to working at various intervals as a crossing sweeper, beggar, shop-owner, and author in London and Glasgow. Albert should have been lost. His shipmates burnt his legs to the point of bursting, and his doctors presumed him to be dead following their amputation. I located Edward Albert initially in the pages of Henry Mayhew's massive, unwieldy, almost unnavigable archive, the four volumes of London Labour and the London Poor. Mayhew interviews Albert in his home and then refers to a small chapbook Albert sells to accompany his begging. A simple WorldCat search led me to a copy of the book, housed at the University of Washington in Seattle. It had endured.

In its anonymous review of Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses (1874), the Academy notes rather hopelessly: “this will probably be one of the most popular children's books this winter. We wish we could understand it” (606). The reviewer – who later dwells on the “uncomfortable feeling” generated by this children's tale and its accompanying images – still counts as the most generous among the largely puzzled and horrified readership of Rossetti's story about three sets of girls experiencing violence and failure in their respective fantasy worlds (606). While clearly such dystopic plots are not out of place in Victorian literature about children, something about Rossetti's unusual narrative bothered her contemporaries. John Ruskin, for instance, bluntly wondered how Rossetti and Arthur Hughes, who illustrated the story, together could “sink so low” (qtd. in Auerbach and Knoepflmacher 318). In any case, the book still sold on the Christmas market, and a few months later, Rossetti would publish Annus Domini, a benign pocketbook of daily prayers that stands in stark contrast to the grim prose of Speaking Likenesses. It is therefore tempting to cast this work of children's fiction as a strange anomaly in Rossetti's oeuvre, which from the 1870s, beginning with Annus Domini, to her death in 1894, became almost exclusively dominated by devotional prose and poetry. In contrast, I argue in the following essay that Speaking Likenesses points to a widespread interest throughout Rossetti's writing – but especially in her most well-known poems from Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) and A Prince's Progress (1866) – in alternative modes of sociality that refract a conceptual preoccupation with likeness, rather than difference. Following traditions of critical thought that have paid increasing attention to relations that resist oppositional logic – Stephanie Engelstein and Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick's late work comes to mind here – I establish the primacy of a horizontal axis of similarity in both Speaking Likenesses and Rossetti's most canonical poem, “Goblin Market.” For Rossetti, the lure of similarity, or minimal difference, manifests itself most often in siblinghood and more specifically, sisterhood, the dominant kinship relation throughout her lyrics from Goblin Market and Other Poems. Sisterhood anchors the title poem I will examine in this essay, as well as shorter verses such as “Noble Sisters” and “Sister Maude.” At issue in such relations of likeness is the discreteness of a (typically) feminine self. For Rossetti, shunning oppositional structures of desire and difference that typically produce individuation (exemplified in the heterosexual couple form and the titles of her uneasy lyrics “He and She” and “Wife to Husband”) allows for a new (albeit perilous) space to carve out one's particularity as a gendered being.

The denouement of Charlotte Brontë’sJane Eyre contains multiple happy rewards for its heroine: a fortune, strangers turned friends turned cousins, the self-elimination of Bertha, and a Rochester still alive, still in England, and now free to marry. The hefty twenty-thousand-pound legacy (of which Jane only keeps one-fourth) bequeathed to her by her late uncle John Eyre allows Jane to return to the maimed Rochester and gleefully proclaim, “I am an independent woman now” (Brontë 501; ch. 37). Citing such financial independence, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar briefly mention Jane's inheritance as the event that allows Jane to “follow her own will” and marry Rochester on terms of equality (367). Similarly, Nancy Armstrong writes that “[m]ore so perhaps than her virtue or passion, it is an endowment from Jane's wealthy uncle that makes her happiness possible” (47). Other critics, such as Elaine Freedgood and Susan Meyer, focus on the origin of the fortune – Madeira – and suggest that such a colonially associated locale implicates Jane in the finances of colonialism and even of slavery. Unlike those critics, however, I will claim that Jane's complicated relationship to the inheritance distances her from the problematic taint of the money's colonial associations and marks her non-conformity with and resistance to the economic practices of the British Empire.

It is a well-known fact that many Victorian women writers such as the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell adopted pseudonyms or anonymity in publishing their literary works, but few people are aware of how such naming practices had been received by contemporary readers, especially by Victorian periodical reviewers – the very first readers and mediators that presented any major literary works to the public. Since we, as modern day scholars, have become so intimate with their present forms of author names appearing on course syllabuses, school curriculums, and academic papers, we hardly ask how such naming has become possible.

In Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 short story “Green Tea,” the Reverend Mr. Robert Lynder Jennings becomes obsessively engaged in a potentially subversive research project on ancient pagans, and finds himself experimenting with green tea as a stimulant to sharpen his mind, boost his productivity, and maintain his stamina through long, sleepless nights bent over books. One day, while riding an omnibus, Jennings sees two piercing deep red eyes staring at him, and gradually realises that they belong to a small black monkey, which was “pushing its face forward in mimicry to meet mine” (23). At first fancying the creature to be the “ugly pet” (23) of a fellow traveller, Jennings attempts to ascertain the monkey's mood, and “poked my umbrella softly towards it. It remained immovable – up to it – through it!” (23–24). Gradually, he becomes convinced of the creature's demonic nature, and this grinning, screeching vision persecutes Jennings for the rest of his days, sitting on his books and interrupting him while he studies, shrieking curses and blasphemies to drown out his prayers, soliciting him to perform evil acts, and finally, commanding him to commit suicide, which he does, slitting his own throat with a single-edged razor. In the final analysis offered by Jennings's physician and confidant, the metaphysical doctor Martin Hesselius, a significant contributing cause to Jennings's nightmarish experience was his gradual self-poisoning by green tea.

Letty Garth's “favourite red volume” makes its appearance in Middlemarch at the beginning of Book 7, at the Vincy's New Year's Day party that draws most of the Middlemarch town characters together. It is a small passage that can easily go unnoticed – or, if registered at all, glossed as simply part of the fabric of dense, inconsequential details that realist texts deploy to produce verisimilitude. Roland Barthes describes such details as potentially “scandalous” from the point of view of structure in that they seem to amount to “a kind of narrative luxury,” likely to threaten structural coherence, recoverable at best as “filling” or as giving “some index of character or atmosphere” (141). Such details might be said to reinforce the vices of nineteenth-century realism, including closing the gap between words and things: “we are the real,” these details say, producing “the referential illusion” (148). They amount to bad narrative housekeeping, “increasing the cost of narrative information” (141). Since the detail of Letty's book involves a young child it is doubly likely, in a novel so clearly dedicated to the adult world of compromise and doubtful success, to be set aside as mere local colour. The potentially trivializing function of the paradox of small instances of excess is reflected in Barthes’ descriptive phrases for them: “useless details,” “insignificant notation” (142).