The relationship between mistress and maid is curiously intimate yet bounded by class. Employers and their servants are caught in a dynamic of dominance and submission, in which they practice mutual surveillance. Yet the relationship may also evoke models of loyalty, devotion, and the possibility, in fiction at least, of female alliance. On the comparatively rare occasions that servants feature at all in Victorian fiction, these dynamics lend a homoerotic dimension to the cross-class relationship between mistress and maid. The positions of mistress and maid bring two women together under the same roof while separating them by class, thus providing a framework for a fictional exploration for yearning, desire, unrequited love, or sometimes union. Alternatively, a queer relationship may be obscured by the guise of employer and servant. Indeed, the mistress-maid stories discussed here often involve masquerade in some form, including cross-class and cross-gender disguises.

When T. S. Eliot famously called Wilkie Collins's 1868 novel The Moonstone “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels” (The Moonstone 1966, v), the implication, presumably, was that the “detectives” are the hero Franklin Blake and other English characters who carry out the detective function, such as the family lawyer, Mr. Bruff. In addition to a detective story, the novel has been read variously as imperialist, anti-imperialist, a narrative invested with economic undertones, and as an exploration of gift theory, among others. In all these iterations, however, the underlying assumption has been that the only real “detectives” in the novel are the English characters; it is they who solve the theft of the diamond and work to police it. The Brahmin priests, whose pursuit of the diamond parallels that of the English, have generally been viewed as peripheral to the main narrative; a marginal acknowledgement of the impact that India, in its various facets, had upon nineteenth-century English society. Vicki Corkran Willey calls the priests, tongue-in-cheek, “‘villains’. . . working in tandem with two other imported troublemakers – [John] Herncastle's stolen diamond and the drug, opium” (226). Timothy L. Carens describes them as practicing “dutiful self-renunciation” (246) in their search for the diamond, implying that passivity is inherent in such dutifulness, and Jenny Bourne Taylor suggests they are important only because of their use of “[c]lairvoyance [which] is projected on to them as a form of romantic fascination, [and] which they then internalize and represent” (193). Critics are in general agreement, then, that the priests are not central to the novel, and their involvement in the solving of the crime is minimal. The present essay will refute this perspective and argue that, in fact, the Brahmin priests are central to the narrative and far more active (and effective) policing agents than the English characters.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century future or speculative fiction became big business in Britain. It was a safe haven for invasion narratives, for socialist paradises or hells, for worlds ruled by benevolent machines, or worlds ruined by mechanical dependence. Themes and plots were varied, but they always reflected some facet of contemporary society. The future was not a bubble, untouched by time or trouble, but a field of battle, where ideas could be tested and philosophies given a test drive. The future was a place where the mistakes or triumphs of today dictated the course of human progress. I argue in this essay that the nascent ideas about euthanasia of the early and middle Victorian period became full-fledged philosophies in the late-Victorian period and that Malthusian philosophy and Darwinian-informed theories were manipulated by novelist and theorist-turned- novelists, resulting in euthanasia becoming a tool in class warfare and in the fight to eradicate social undesirables for their good and for the good of society.

Readers have long noted the pervasiveness of sympathy in George Eliot's work. But why always sympathy? One cannot fully answer this question without attending to a crucial and yet still understudied context for Eliot's work: evangelicalism. It is from evangelical thought and practice that she gleaned the concept of what I will call sympathetic “insight,” which evangelicals privileged for its ability to “see” the real and to move between the dichotomous barriers of the in/visible and in/external. I want to suggest that even after Eliot no longer found compelling its accompanying theology, sympathetic “insight” persisted in her imagination as a way to see into and within her realist fictional worlds.

In the nineteenth century, middle-class marriage was built on women's unique relationship with and authority over the domestic space, including its pin cushions, diaries, tea sets, mirrors, and boudoir furniture. What would a husband do with his wife's hair brushes? What claim could he have to her workbasket? Though the common law of coverture gave nearly all legal rights of ownership to husbands, leaving married women a mere smattering of ambiguous claims to pin money and paraphernalia, married women were nonetheless encouraged to cultivate ownership of objects through access, proximity, use, and emotional connection. Such unofficial ownership of household objects did not pose a threat to men's legal ownership or economic power, but was instead a necessary component of marriage since it allowed women to participate properly – according to domestic ideology – in the union of “one flesh.” Historians and literary critics of the last twenty-five years have explored the power Victorian middle-class women gain from their gendered relationship to the domestic space. My interest in this topic, however, is less about the agency women gain from their unique ownership of domestic things and more about what this mechanism of heteronormativity reveals about Victorian culture when it breaks down.

The specter of cosmopolitanism haunts Daniel Deronda. In a curious reversal of critical fortune, the novel condemned by many of its initial reviewers for dabbling into obscure mystical doctrines and for pontificating far too explicitly about the significance of narrow loyalties and local attachments has recently come to embody a scrupulous investigation of cosmopolitan ethics. The sources of this radical shift in the understanding of Daniel Deronda’s politics are theoretical as much as they are interpretative. For some time now, humanistic scholarship has been simultaneously attracted to cosmopolitanism and embarrassed by it: while we continue to be drawn to cosmopolitanism as an ideological project invested in overcoming tribal loyalties and in celebrating the encounter with the other, we are also resistant to its universalizing logic which we often see as complicit with the hegemonic tendencies variously present in the intellectual legacy of the European Enlightenment and in contemporary global capitalism. Faced with this tension, several influential scholars –– most notably Amanda Anderson and Kwame Anthony Appiah –– have turned to Daniel Deronda as an example of a cosmopolitanism free of pernicious hegemonic connotations, a cosmopolitanism understood as a commitment to open exchange between nations and races, rather than as the erasure of all cultural difference. In doing so they have, however, simultaneously overextended the concept of cosmopolitanism, rendering it very nearly meaningless, and misjudged the politics of Eliot's novel, overlooking its deep commitment to the logic of ethnic nationalism. In this essay I wish to use what I take to be the dual failure — interpretative and theoretical — of recent readings of Daniel Deronda in order to reexamine both the politics of Eliot's late writings and the ways in which we use the concept of cosmopolitanism in our critical practice. I will argue, first, that the cosmopolitan Deronda, constructed in a series of influential interpretations over the past two decades, is a specter, an apparition. This phantom, as we shall see, was constructed due to an unusual alignment between the desire to dissociate the great Victorian moralist that was George Eliot from the charge of slipping into narrow nationalist worldview and the desire to recuperate a non-hegemonic vision of cosmopolitanism. Second, I will argue that the novel's much discussed marginalization of Gwendolen Harleth in favor of Daniel Deronda's nationalist mission does not constitute simply a rejection of an egotistical heroine in the name of higher duties, but rather a decisive moment in Eliot's late career and in the history of Victorian fiction: by unequivocally favoring the hero's nationalist commitments over the heroine's private struggles, George Eliot has also rejected the private sphere which has traditionally preoccupied nineteenth-century fiction, in favor of the fantasies of collective destiny. Before analyzing the full implications of this shift, however, I will outline in more detail the interpretative history in which this essay intervenes.

Parenting advice has become a booming industry as well as probably one of the most contested discourses. Its proliferation and continued diversification are often considered a particularly contemporary problem, yet the virulent marketing of “expert” advice on childrearing has its roots as much in the nineteenth-century publishing industry as in the overlapping Victorian cults of domesticity, maternity, and childhood. The nineteenth century saw an explosion of advice literature on the physical, moral, and intellectual education of infants and young children. Childrearing, or parenting, rapidly created a niche market, producing specialised manuals and magazines for mothers, the precursors of the current parenting advice literature. As Victorian novelists tapped into the anxieties that these publications both addressed and further fostered, they laid bare the pressure that the childrearing discourses were exerting on mothers, yet popular authors also quickly realised how their own writing offered a vehicle for specific conceptualisations of motherhood. Harrowing scenes were used to dramatise the effects of different parenting practices; protagonists’ quarrels about such practices served both as characterisation devices and as comments on ideological conflicts between different concepts of childrearing. In the most self-consciously insightful moments, the growing supply of information came itself under criticism. Victorian novelists actively participated in shaping and circulating parenting advice in print. The sensationalised nursery fascinatingly expressed the anxieties surrounding childrearing and showed how versatile the interpellation of mothering instructions in fiction could be.

In 1892 the celebrated physicist and chemist William Crookes commented on the existence of “an almost infinite range of ethereal vibrations or electrical rays,” which he believed could revolutionize telegraphic communications (174). A few years later, and aided by Crookes's experiments with vacuums, the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen successfully produced X-rays, a hitherto unrecorded form of electromagnetic radiation, which he tantalizingly described as “a new kind of invisible light” (Röntgen 413; Warner 256). Crookes was quick to speculate as to “the possibility of links between roentgen rays and the cerebral ganglia,” that an undiscovered organ in the brain might be “capable of transmitting and receiving . . . electrical rays” (Lyons 105; Crookes 176). X-rays, he thought, might prove a psychic counterpart to higher wavelength radio waves, allowing the transmission of messages telepathically rather than telegraphically, and even communication with the world of the spirits (Lyons 105). Crookes theorized that the parapsychological was intimately entwined with the findings of contemporary physics, occupying different zones of the same electromagnetic spectrum. An ardent Spiritualist, he believed that the ether, the “impalpable, invisible entity, by which all space is supposed to be filled” and which contained countless “channels of communication” also sustained “ghost-light . . . invisible to the naked eye” and acted as a medium that allowed “ethereal bodies to rise up” (Crookes 174; Warner 253–56). In other words, the matter through which light and electrical signals passed was envisaged as the same substance which allowed the spirits to fluctuate between visible and invisible forms. These links between the electromagnetic field and the occult, endorsed by Crookes and certain other members of his circles such as the Society for Psychical Research, anticipated turn-of-the-century associations between electricity, radiation and ancient Egypt which, through its reputation as the birthplace of magic, was central to Victorian conceptions of the supernatural.

After his harrowing escape from Castle Dracula, Jonathan Harker entrusts his journal, and the secret of his traumatic experiences with the vampire Count contained therein, to his new wife, Mina Harker (née Murray). “Here is the book,” he urges; “Take it and keep it, read it if you will, but never let me know; unless, indeed, some solemn duty should come upon me to go back to the bitter hours, asleep or awake, sane or mad, recorded here” (Stoker 100; ch. 9). Mina clasps the book, sealing it with a kiss, as she replies, “it would be an outward and visible sign for us all our lives that we trusted each other.” This scene from Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) catalyzes the novel's concern with how knowledge transfer and technology intersect with women's bodies and labor. Not only is Mina the one trusted with the diary, but she is also the only person within the novel who has the required skills to translate its shorthand into a typed and readable document. In this solemn scene, which precedes and resembles their marriage vows, Mina both gains access to private information and is charged with deciding who else should have access to that knowledge and under what circumstances. This “trust” secures Mina as the mediator of knowledge and the curator of what will become an increasingly expansive imperial archive within the novel.

H. G. Wells's 1908 novel Tono-Bungay is a remarkable concoction, binding together characters and setting out of Dickens, sparkling imitations of fin-de-siécle commodity culture and new media, bitter social satire inflected by Wells's socialism, fascination with invention and flight, and murderous imperial adventure. Readers, though often seduced by the wit and precision of Wells's depiction of patent medicines and their advertisements, have not known whether to read the narrative as anti-Bildungsroman, Condition of England novel, science fiction, or imperial romance. It is no wonder that many critics have labeled this novel a failure.

The animal turn in studies of nineteenth-century imperialism has been a long time in coming. Scholars seeking to yoke together questions of nonhuman life and the domain of the colony have come to acknowledge, at long last, that the imperial landscape was not a purely human one. Only now, suggests John Miller, has the considerable scholarship on empire and the natural world made an impress upon Victorian literary studies (479). The animal turn, however, is not new in the scholarship on Rudyard Kipling. For Kipling, empire never was simply an affair of human beings; more perhaps than any other writer of the colonial experience, he saw imperialism as encompassing plural and multiply scaled orders of animate life. Henry James, an early admirer of Kipling's work, took disgusted note in 1897 of what seemed to him the simultaneous multitudinousness and diminution of the younger writer's fictional world: “My view of his prose future has much shrunken in light of one's increasingly observing how little life he can make use of. . . . In his earliest time I thought he perhaps contained the seeds of an English Balzac; but I have given that up in proportion as he has come down steadily from the simple in subject to the more simple–from the Anglo-Indians to the natives, from the natives to the Tommies, from the Tommies to the quadrupeds, from the quadrupeds to the fish, and from the fish to the engines and screws” (Page 49).

One of the obvious strengths of Margaret Harkness's 1887 novel A City Girl is its comprehensive visual record of London's East End. Harkness depicts Whitechapel's geography and public and residential spaces with an authority derived, as we know, from her voluntary residence in the Katharine Buildings, thinly disguised in the novel as the Charlotte Buildings. The Katherine Buildings were a block of apartments for working class tenants built by the East End Dwelling Company; Harkness lived in them for a few months in 1887 and was one of a wave of middle-class women who ventured into such residences, sometimes as employees (“lady rent collectors”) and sometimes, as with Harkness and her cousin Beatrice Potter (later Webb) as writers determined to document in fictional or non-fictional form the conditions in which the poor lived. Harkness's first-hand experience and descriptive acuity has inspired some rich and productive scholarship on A City Girl, which in the form of two scholarly editions (one recent and one forthcoming) is the subject of a modest renaissance. From a literary perspective, most scholars have grappled with the novel's generic affiliation, describing it variously as a New Woman novel, a socialist novel, a sentimental novel, and an example of English naturalism. Some of these critics – principally John Goode and Rob Breton – combine a study of the novel's generic signs with historical attention to Socialism, one of Harkness's many ambivalent and abbreviated political and institutional affiliations in the 1880s and 90s; they use the literary lens of genre study to better understand the author's political consciousness in the context of late-Victorian reform politics. Pursuing another horizon of inquiry, I turn away from the novel's documentary evidence and generic and political loyalties to its elusive but revealing study of artistic representation. It is not the sociological or political milieu of Harkness's East End heroine, Nelly Ambrose, that interests me, but the link that Harkness establishes between Nelly's impoverished mind and her impoverished world, which I read principally through her unfamiliarity with narrative representation. Harkness sustains two discrete perspectives in A City Girl: Nelly experiences the world in episodic moments, and her inability to shape these moments into a purposeful or predictive sequence makes her effectively powerless to control the events that shape her life. Her distance from a narrative consciousness alerts us to the second perspective in the novel which might otherwise escape special notice: the narrative realism that A City Girl participates in, that the experience of reading the novel activates, and that is self-consciously followed by Arthur Grant, Nelly's seducer. Arthur's class-based narrative advantage over Nelly enables him to write the story of their affair and control its outcome much in the way that the readers of A City Girl have worked to make sense of Nelly's detached and inexpressive character, and have often made their own determinations about the novel's ending. The medium of the novel's hostility to Nelly's particular kind of consciousness is a metaliterary reflection, then, of the subjugation by narrative disadvantage that we see play out in the story.

While there is never any serious doubt that Mr. Arabin, clergyman hero of Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers (1857), is destined to marry our heroine, Eleanor Bold, there are moments in the novel when he is all but overcome by the charms of Signora Madeline Neroni, most beautiful and most amoral member of the rackety Stanhope family. Having spent her wicked youth in Italy, where her father has been taking an extended leave of absence from his clerical duties – curtailed only by a peremptory summons from the new Bishop – Madeline is entertaining herself during her enforced stay in Barchester by waging a concerted campaign of seduction, intending “to have parsons at her feet” (86–87; vol. 1, ch. 10). The fact that she never leaves her sofa does nothing to impede her success in this regard: although Madeline is described by the narrator as “a helpless, hopeless cripple” (270; vol. 1, ch. 27), every man she meets is shown to fall under her spell. In fact, when Arabin finds himself “mak[ing] comparisons between her and Eleanor Bold, not always in favour of the latter,” he reflects that Madeline is “the more lovely woman of the two, and had also the additional attraction of her affliction; for to him it was an attraction” (74; vol. 2, ch. 34). Far from diminishing her “loveliness,” Madeline's disability actually heightens her sexual appeal for Arabin.

The custom of celebrating Valentine's Day dates back to the Middle Ages. The emergence of Valentine's Day as a commercial holiday, exploited above all by the greeting card industry, is more recent. In Britain, Valentine's Day cards emerged in the eighteenth century. As David Vincent writes,

Writing as recently as 2011, Michael Bennett asks if Salomé is an anomaly in the oeuvre of Oscar Wilde (viii). Read against his witty societal comedies of manners, it certainly appears to be one. Salomé has been regarded as a fine example of symbolist drama in the history of British theatre, and few critics would dispute its “seriousness” as such. Its growing significance in recent discourses of gender and sexuality also adds seriousness to the play. Although Feminist and gender critics show little qualms about dubbing the play as symbolist, the final tableau of a young girl kissing the mouth of the severed head seems to me at odds with symbolism, whether Salomé is seen as an archetypal femme fatale, a queer man in disguise, or a New Woman as critics argue. Symbolism in Wilde's Salomé is widely different from other specimens of the genre such as Yeats's The Countess Cathleen, for instance, which directly deals with a spiritual issue of the salvation of soul. Salomé also lacks the fatalistic sense of doom that dominates Maeterlinck's Princess Maleine, with which it is often compared. Wilde's wayward heroine is not a victim of the invisible forces in the same way Maeterlinck's characters are. Wilde's Salomé is “monstrous,” as Herod says: she seems to commit “a crime against some unknown God” (Complete Works 604). How can we reconcile her cruel passion of carnal desire with the supposed spirituality of the symbolist tradition? Also problematic in a symbolist reading of the play is the presence of the comic and the parodic, as pointed out by many critics. Is Wilde's Salomé an authentic symbolist drama?

H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) has hitherto been read in two principal scientific contexts: those of evolutionary biology and thermodynamic physics. Numerous critics have situated the romance in the context of evolutionary biology and contemporary discourses of degeneration (McLean 11–40; Greenslade 32–41). Others have discussed it in the context of thermodynamic physics. For instance, Bruce Clarke has read The Time Machine as “a virtual allegory of classical thermodynamics,” and shows that its combination of physical and social entropy reflects a wider transfer within the period of concepts and metaphors from physical science to social discourses of degeneration (121–26). Neatly linking these scientific contexts with issues of form, Michael Sayeau has argued that the social and physical entropy that are themes of the romance are reflected in its narrative structure, which manifests a type of narrative entropy, and thereby raises the spectre of the end of fiction (109–46).

The very first line of Mary Augusta Ward's novel Marcella ends with the word “beautiful,” repeated twice, the second time in italics. In this paper I will argue that this symbolizes the central role of aesthetics in the novel in a discourse that engages the social criticism of John Ruskin and William Morris. Some scholars have assessed Marcella (1894) as having a retrograde ending of Marcella marrying a Tory politician and landowner. Judith Wilt's critical study of Ward is entitled Behind Her Times, an indication of the general view of Ward as a political conservative, although Wilt argues that she was also progressive in many ways, and Ward has enjoyed other nuanced, sensitive re-readings and assessments (Argyle; Sutton-Ramspeck). I, too, am arguing that Ward's political and social views in this novel are complex and mixed and that examining the novel's Victorian cultural discourses can illuminate complex socio-political content that draws on late-century art world debates. The very texture of Marcella belies an unstable view of class and social problems, as the eponymous protagonist goes through several stages of thinking and trial-and-error solutions, some socialist, to problems of poverty and class disparity.

In May 1855, Charles Dickens confided to a friend that he had found a “capital name” for his new work, Nobody's Fault, a title that remained until he completed the first three numbers and renamed it Little Dorrit (Letters 7.703). The original title has generally been assumed to refer to Dickens's broad attack on the lack of accountability in government, particularly in relation to the Crimean War. However, the phrase also evokes the issues of financial impropriety that permeate the novel. In particular, Arthur's obsessive concern that through his parents’ grasping at money “some one may have been grievously deceived, injured, ruined” (39; bk. 1, ch. 5) links his personal sense of guilt to the more public instance of financial “ruin” in the book – the collapse of Mr. Merdle's fraudulent schemes. In both cases, the question of agency remains ambiguous. Who is at fault for the bankruptcy of Clennam & Doyce: Arthur, who invested the firm's money in Merdle's ventures; Pancks, who convinced him of their soundness; or Merdle, who perpetrated the fraud? And who bears responsibility for the financial deceit that deprived Amy Dorrit of her rightful inheritance from Arthur's grandfather: Mrs. Clennam, who hid the codicil; Arthur's father, who colluded in the concealment; or Arthur, who, along with his parents, benefited financially from the transaction? Out of these ambiguities emerges one figure that becomes the locus of responsibility and blame for both transgressions – Arthur Clennam. Against the express wishes of his solicitor, Arthur steps forward to become the “solitary target” for the “thousands of people. . . wildly staring about for somebody alive to heap reproaches on” in the aftermath of Merdle's downfall and suicide (599; bk. 2, ch. 26). His actions give public expression to his private sense of familial guilt, allowing him to declare openly, “I am at fault.”

Charles Kingsley's children's novelThe Water-Babies (WB), written in the spring and summer of 1862, is a politically anxious text. In this essay I argue that although The Water-Babies’ overall structure appears to be chaotic and arbitrary – J. M. I. Klaver, for example, deems the work a “Victorian fantasy crowded with Kingsley's hobby-horses” where he “pour[s] out whatever he had on his mind” (517) – in fact Kingsley's disquietude concerning the Irish Famine, U.S. slavery, and the condition of the British working classes provides a logical framework for the text.

In Charlotte Brontë’sVillette (1853), Lucy Snowe is tasked to deliver a “little basket” to the mysterious shut-in Madame Walravens (396; ch. 34). After crossing an “inhospitable threshold” (398) that leads to an “inhospitable salon” (400), Lucy is told to wait for the lady of the house, who will serve as both grandmother and wolf in this Red Riding Hood revision. Caught in a dreamlike, “fairy tale” trance, Lucy focuses her attention on a curious picture, which “give[s] way” to expose an arched doorway and a winding staircase. The tapestry momentarily displaced, Lucy hears the taps of a walking-stick, and then spies a “substance” that eventually materializes into the distinct form of Madame Walravens: “She might be three feet high, but she had no shape. . .. Her face was large, set, not upon her shoulders, but before her breast; she seemed to have no neck.” Lucy proceeds to call her host “[h]unchbacked,” and “dwarfish” — a “barbarian queen,” an “uncouth thing,” and an “old witch of a grand-dame” (399–402; ch. 34), who is as “hideous as a Hindoo idol” (473; ch. 39). Most important, Lucy notes the “violence of a temper which deformity made sometimes demoniac” (403; ch. 34). Madame Walravens's physical abnormalities make her not just the villain of a fairy tale, but a supernatural terror. Lucy may only confront the reality of disability by transforming it into a “tale of magic” (399; ch. 34) — one that she escapes by re-crossing the “inhospitable threshold.”