In Sartor Resartus (1831), Thomas Carlyle wrote that “the loss of his religious Belief was the loss of everything” (129; bk. 2, ch. 7). At the time, this statement was no exaggeration because, as the nineteenth century dawned, Christianity was inarguably perceived by many as one of the most definitive components of Britishness; as Jane Austen's Henry Tilney says: “Remember that we are English, that we are Christians” (172, vol. 2, ch. 9). The sense of being a Christian represents a fundamentally important ideal to the conceptualization of Victorian cultural identity in that it not only dictated to society an imaginary concept of identity after which the Victorian civilization tried to pattern itself, but also led to the manifestation of cultural ideologies such as the ambiguously defined Victorian virtue and work ethic. However, in order for the ideology of cultural identity to function, a specific set of institutional forms would be required to provide society with a firm foundation for the process of “cultural elaboration” to take place. Thus, alongside the early Victorians' belief in their self-professed faith, Orientalism represents another of the more important Victorian cultural institutional forms, which complemented the concept of Christianity to create a sense of moralistic connection, and in turn allowed the manifestation of Victorian cultural identity as a rigidly moralistic and virtuous entity that was perceived by many early Victorians as a true reflection of their society.

Such Enlightenment, the narrator tells us facetiously, is effected by an elastic religion known as the Simla Creed, alive at the edges of the British Empire where he, an unnamed Englishman, is stationed. An amalgam of occult practices, the creed stretched itself and embraced pieces of everything that the medicine-men of all ages have manufactured (63). So Rudyard Kipling mockingly observes in this satire of British Victorian forays into the marginal sciences of occultism, Spiritualism, and Mesmerism. An early Kipling tale, “The Sending of Dana Da” (1888) is one of Kiplings first engagements with the religions and philosophies of the East; it was published in the Civil and Military Gazette, a provincial newspaper for which Kipling regularly wrote. The infamous Dana Da – whose name, we are told, escapes every ethnological inscription, and who came from nowhere, with nothing in his hands (62) – dispatches a sending on the behalf of (and through) the Englishman. The recipient of this letter, (again) a Lone Sahib, is characteristically armed with scientific naturalism and Christian faith, and therefore refutes the possibilities of ectoplasmic infestation, unseen currents, and the fecund times of reincarnation. Kiplings eloquent exposition on a sending, despite his final rational explanation of this unseemly act, betrays his fascination with such forbidden epistemologies multiplying at the edges of Empire:

The dystopia of the Victorian city is ubiquitous as a trope of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, appearing across a wide array of literature in fiction, poetry, pamphlets, articles, reviews, socio-demographic works, socialist tracts, and miscellaneous papers. Anti-urbanism plays a prominent role in Dickens, Kingsley, and Gissing, to name but a few, and emerges in more pointedly sociological titles such as Andrew Mearns's The Bitter Cry of London (1883); Thomas Escott's England: Its Peoples, Polity, and Pursuits (1885); Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People of London (1889–1902); Ford Madox Ford's The Heart of the Empire (1905); and W. W. Hutching's London Town Past and Present (1909) (Lees, in Fraser and Sutcliffe, 1983: 154; Hulin and Coustillas, 1979: passim). Themes of urban degradation, overpopulation, squalor, unemployment, lack of education, despair, and pollution fill their pages.

Visiting a missionary school for girls in the central Chinese city of Chungking in the early 1890s, British writer Alicia Little entertained some disquieting thoughts about instilling Western values in Chinese children. Her reflections in Intimate China on the benefits and hazards of such teaching instance Britain's increasingly conflicted views of China in the last decades of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, the passage manifests the long-held Victorian view that the Chinese mind and culture had lain dormant for at least a century and needed Western aid to awaken them to their full potential. On the other hand, her unease about children made “susceptible of outside influences” admits both to the limited effects of Western teaching on entrenched Chinese traditions and to the dubious advantages of alienating individuals from the values of the country that must house their futures. Writing some thirty years after the Second Opium Wars, which formally opened China to foreign traders, travelers, and missionaries, and less than a decade before the Boxer Rebellion, in which thousands of foreigners and Chinese Christians were massacred in retaliations against Western influences, Little's observations foreground pivotal problems in Britain's evolving relationship with China as well as dispute conventional models of East-West relations in the nineteenth century.

In his popular Romance of London (1867), John Timbs refers to Thomas Babington Macaulay's oft-repeated metaphor of a “New Zealander sitting, like a hundredth-century Marius, on the mouldering arches of London Bridge, contemplating the colossal ruins of St Paul's” (290). Originally intended as an illustration of the vigor and durability of the Roman Catholic Church despite the triumph of the Reformation, Macaulay's most famous evocation of this idea dates from 1840, the year of New Zealand's annexation; hence it is reasonable to suppose that this figure is a Maori (Bellich 297–98). For Timbs and subsequent generations, however, the image conveyed the sobering idea of the rise and fall of civilizations and in particular of England being invaded and overrun, if not by a horde of savages, then by a more robust class of Anglo-Saxons from the other side of the world.

In the mid-1800s, two significant and widely read Chartist poems appeared, both written in prison by Chartist organizers, and both using the epic form to interrogate the present, body forth a utopian future, and rewrite a history conceived both as broadly human and specifically national. These long poems, Thomas Cooper's Purgatory of Suicides (1845) and Ernest Jones's The New World, first published in 1851 and then republished after 1857 as the Revolt of Hindostan, have much to tell us about how radicals envisioned the history of Britain, its relationship with empire, and the fulfillment of the ends of history. Cooper's poem proceeds in ten books, written in Spenserian stanzas, in which he dreams of visiting a purgatory of suicides: mythical and historical personages who have committed suicide debate the reasons for their condition and the condition of the world. Jones's poem was written in couplets, supposedly on the torn pages of a prayer book, in his own blood. The poem surveys the rise and fall of multiple empires, and also surveys recent political history closer to home. The two poems look to the past and the future, to universal history and its end. They thus participate in utopian political discourse, with its emphasis on the end of history, as well as the epic tradition. Both utopian and epic discourse in this period were affiliated with specifically national narratives, and the internationalist and universal elements of the poems sometimes inhabit these genres uneasily. Additionally, both poets attend to the religious tradition of eschatological discourse that underlies the secular notion of the end of history, and work to reconcile it with the political vision they are promoting. These writers use unique combinations of spatial and temporal frames to achieve the reconciliation of their diverse goals with the genres and discourses that they claim and transform.

In the late Victorian period, when writers, critics, and actors of the English theatre became obsessed with defining a decidedly New Drama – with establishing its history, directing its progress forward, and creating a literary drama – the majority of the plays produced focused upon forms of femininity. Strangely, these innovative dramas engaged not with the future, but with an all-too-familiar stock character: the woman with a past. This well-known type was “a lady whose previous conduct, rightly or wrongly, disqualified her from any position of rank or respect” (Rowell 108–09). Familiar examples of such plays include George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893) and Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan (1892); lesser-known ones include Henry Arthur Jones's Case of Rebellious Susan (1894) and two plays that form the focus of this essay, Arthur Wing Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893) and The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith (1895). Several English theatre historians (including Richard Dietrich and Jean Chothia) present these plays as the basis of modern intellectual drama, yet none explains the paradox that the theatre of modernity is founded upon the woman with a past, a figure whose future in these plays is foreclosed or ambivalently conceptualized at best.

Most readers either overlook or dismiss John Ruskin's climbs in the Alps as being insignificant compared to his avid interest in geology and mountain form. However, I want to suggest that Ruskin's climbing – his physical and kinetic relationship to the mountains – is essential to his understanding of them. His numerous and repeated ascents in the lower Alps were not always easy: in fact, they were often tough and sometimes dangerous. Through a few select examples, in the first part of the essay, I establish just how difficult many of these scrambles were so that I may proceed, in the body of the paper, to talk about how these strenuous experiences influenced his way of seeing the mountain landscape he admired, and how, in turn, they helped shape his concept of imperfect vision.

In Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), multiple discursive strategies contend with the difficulty of determining racial identity. My aim here is not to delineate a straightforward or unambiguous racial discourse in the novel but rather to clarify the usefulness of ambiguity to the narrative's racialism. If, as Ann Laura Stoler has argued, racism in the nineteenth century depended on flexible rather than fixed criteria, Brontë's novel allows for the study of such criteria and of the discursive displacements that assign them to diverse human qualities.

Most critics who discuss vampirism in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) as a type of seduction focus on the symbolic corruption of English womanhood as the central theme in the novel and emphasize the significance of “the seduction of Lucy and Mina, to which the experience of Harker at Castle Dracula,” according to Phyllis Roth, “provides a preface.” Roth believes that Harker's role as “a hero, one whose narrative encloses the others and with whom, therefore, one might readily identify . . . is a defense against the central identification of the novel with Dracula and his attacks on the women” (61–62). Other critics have observed that, in addition to preserving the symbolic purity of Englishwomen, Stoker's novel is also about the symbolic education of Englishmen, through which members of different professions and classes that carry the bourgeois order learn to work together and, pooling their various backgrounds and knowledge and combining tradition with progress in order to save the women, confirm the strength of their own manhood, and destroy the symbolic threat of the vampire. Both groups of critics, however, tend to overlook the unique position that the young solicitor Jonathan Harker occupies in the narrative: he is the only character who is both an object of the vampire's seduction and an agent of his destruction. While some critics pay due attention to Harker's sensational seduction by Dracula and the three vampiric women in the first part of the novel, they either simplify the meaning of that seduction or underestimate Harker's continuing significance in the rest of the novel because he gradually blends into the group of several valiant vampire hunters. At the same time, his membership in that group has been too easily taken for granted by most critics. What has remained insufficiently explored is the significance of the twofold nature of Harker's experiences: he yields to Dracula's seduction and then recuperates from its consequences by participating in vampire hunting. It is through Harker's experiences throughout the narrative that the paradox of the novel's simultaneously conservative and subversive tendencies becomes most conspicuous.

In a pivotal moment in Mabel Wotton's short story, “The Fifth Edition” (1896), Janet Suttaby, a struggling writer unable to find a publisher for her novel, offers the rising literary star, Franklyn Leyden, her manuscript, telling him, “If you really think there is any good in it . . . it must either go back to the drawer until I have time to polish it, or . . . you must take it” (179). Miss Suttaby offers almost no explanation for her act, nor does she outline what she expects Leyden to do with the manuscript, so when Leyden accepts, re-writes, and then publishes it under his own name, he hasn't done anything that she has explicitly forbidden. Nevertheless, his appropriation of her work is clearly marked in the text as ethically compromised, especially when Miss Suttaby's subsequent death from starvation underscores her desperate need for the money that the sale of a novel would have brought. At the same time, the text offers a much more nuanced critique of Leyden's actions that reaches beyond the ethics of plagiarism and into the realm of literary invention itself; as Leyden revises the manuscript, his creative act is bound up with a parasitical translation of Miss Suttaby herself into text, and he is thus implicated as a fraud on the grounds of both literal and figurative appropriation. In this way, the appropriated manuscript becomes a metaphor for the uneasy relationship between art and life, a concern that is central to fin-de-siècle literary culture. As I will argue, the emphasis in this story, and elsewhere in Wotton's fiction, on what Susan Sontag has termed in another context the “shady commerce between art and truth” (6) makes visible concerns about the connection between inspiration and invention that emerge in the aesthetic theories of Pater, Wilde, and James, as well as in debates over plagiarism and New Woman fiction.

Sonnet XLI of Elizabeth Barrett Browning'sSonnets from the Portuguese is candid about its ambition to write love poetry that will last:

— Oh, to shoot
My soul's full meaning into future years, —
That they should lend it utterance, and salute
Love that endures, with Life that disappears! – (Barrett Browning 397)

Imagine a story featuring a dreamy descent underground, grotesquely gigantic and dwarfish carnality, a prodigious pool of body fluid, cartwheels and pratfalls, cornucopian helpings of food and drink, antic playgrounds, riddling language and name games, repeated nonsense (re)verses, various negative capabilities, mathematical miracles, voyages of discovery, cycles of crowning and uncrowning, not to mention metalists like the previous catalogue in this sentence. It seems curious that this tangled tale, Lewis Carroll's in the Alices, has never been linked to the Carnival tradition typified by François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–64) even though our imagined story equally describes Rabelais's glorious epic. At least, it's never been linked much beyond Northrop Frye's suggestion that “[t]he Alice books are perfect Menippean satires, and so is [Charles Kingsley's] The Water-Babies, which has been influenced by Rabelais” (310) and Martin Gardner's note to Looking-Glass that Medieval and “Renaissance chess games were sometimes played with human pieces on enormous fields” as in “Gargantua and Pantagruel” (135, n. 2). And yet, to spin William Empson's memorable take on Freudian readings (357), one has only to tell Alice's story to make it a carnival tale.

In 1818 John Keats claims that prefaces are written to the public and that he does not want to participate in this mode of address. In 1837 Thomas Love Peacock notes that his novels had originally appeared without prefaces and that he would have preferred that they remain that way. But, he writes, “an old friend assures me, that to publish a book without a preface is like entering a drawing-room without making a bow” (cited in Grierson 134). In England in the 1880s, however, the novel preface went beyond textual etiquette. It was not only written to the public but it also participated in the debate over competing definitions of the reading public, and it contributed, in turn, to a new configuration of this public.

Inasmuch as they offer advice on how to improve appearances, nineteenth-century beauty manuals also vividly describe the dangers of putting on a face. The consequences of using cosmetics – often comprised of toxic ingredients such as arsenic, mercury, and lead – might range from the discomfort of surface irritation to the fatality of poisoning. Several manuals recount the unfortunate story of Lady Mary Montagu, who suffered an allergic reaction to a popular cosmetic, the Genuine Balm of Mecca, which led her face to turn red and swell “to a very extraordinary size . . . . It remained in this tormentable state three days, during which you may be sure I passed my time very ill” (Toilette of Health 64). Another woman succumbed to an equally unfortunate fate as the facial powder, or “pearl white,” she wore to a scientific demonstration suddenly turned black in an adverse reaction to the chemicals used in the experiment. In an even more tragic case, “Mrs. S, being much troubled with pimples, applied an alum poultice to her face, which was soon followed by a stroke of the palsy, and terminated in her death” (Clark iv, 46). These stories caution that beautification through artificial means may eradicate the very self that had sought improvement.

Several important studies of animals in Victorian Britain have considered the ways that animals have served as surrogates for the discussion of human relationships. Historical statements about the treatment of animals are often interpreted as telling stories about issues such as class dynamics or social problems among humans. But must one always imagine animals to have been only the ostensible subject of discussion? While it is certainly important to study how historical discussions about animals have reflected and expressed opinions about sensitive, tense, or otherwise difficult relationships among humans and groups of humans, it is unreasonable to dismiss all discussion of the welfare of animals as a cover for what is really a concern about humans. Is it not just as interesting – and important – to consider the ways in which humans have identified with animals as animals? The introduction of the animal as animal into the discussion of human culture reveals a level of complexity in life and history that is all too easily overlooked.

Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone is a novel constructed through the repeated representation of the abnormal body. Reading The Moonstone in critical terms has traditionally required a primary engagement with form. The work has been defined as a foundational narrative in the genre of crime and detection and at the same time read as a narrative located within the context of the immensely popular group of sensation novels that dominate the Victorian literary marketplace through the middle and the second half of the nineteenth century. T. S. Eliot is one of the first readers to define one end of this paradigm, reading the novel as an original text in the genre of detective fiction, and famously saying that The Moonstone is “the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels” (xii). On the other end of the paradigm, the novel's formal workings are again often cited as a larger example, and even triumph, of Victorian sensation fiction – melodramatic narratives built, according to Winifred Hughes and the more recent Derridean readings by Patrick Brantlinger and others, around a discursive cross-fertilization of romanticism, gothicism, and realism.

The core of this paper is a reading of Robert Browning's “Clive” (1880); it attempts to account for the formalist demands of this generically complex and relentlessly ironic poetic text, while at the same time it construes the accomplishment of Browning's poetic language and form as intricate cultural critique. However, in order to better understand Browning's poem an additional discussion of its intertexts is required, the most important being Thomas Babington Macaulay's essay “On Clive” (1840).

Marie Lavington, the runaway octoroon slave in Charles Kingsley's little-read novel Two Years Ago (1857), makes this declaration of independence in a letter to Tom Thurnall, the novel's hero. Though Tom helped her escape to a Canadian Quaker community, Marie has tired of the “staid and sober” (122; vol. 1, ch. 5) lifestyle of a Quakeress. She reenters the public marketplace by refashioning herself into the Italian diva, La Cordifiamma. Marie's ascent to the stage as La Cordifiamma marks the construction of a new female body in the mid-nineteenth century: the Tragic Mulatta who becomes a Tragic Muse.

Nineteenth-century reviewers, though they disagreed about nearly all aspects of the sensation phenomenon, were united in diagnosing the sensation novel as a symptom of modernity. In a review of novels by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, Henry James noted that their books were typically set in “Modern England – the England of to-day's newspaper” and featured protagonists who were “English [gentlewomen] of the current year, familiar with the use of the railway and the telegraph” (593). Like Bram Stoker's Dracula some four decades later, Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862) represented “nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance” (Stoker 67; ch. 3). But Braddon's novel was also “a sign of the times” because it betokened the rising awareness of modernity's tendency toward rapid obsoleteness (“Our Female Sensation Novelists” 485). The critical hostility directed against it at the moment of its greatest success in the 1860s also had the effect of exposing the seeds of transience that constitute the paradoxical essence of novelty.