This soaring passage comes from Max Müller's celebrated 1855 essay on linguistic anthropology. I start with it because no brief text better captures the import of Swinburne's poetic manifesto “Hertha.” And “Hertha” is important because, like “Anactoria,” it is pivotal in Swinburne's ambitious poetic program.

The nineteenth century was an era of enormous changes in garden design and garden practice. A wealth of new and exotic plants, located and shipped back by adventurous plant hunters from southern Europe and other, warmer continents, changed the look and character of the garden beyond recognition. The repeal of the glass tax and advances in iron and glass production initiated the craze of the glass house. “Bedding out” consequently became popular, a system in which delicate plants grown under glass could be planted straight outside in warmer months, producing instant colour and ending the frustrating months of bare beds during which gardeners waited for native perennials to bloom. And there were many other important technological advances to ease the lot of the Victorian gardener, such as the patenting of the first lawn mower in 1830 and improvements in tool design. Moreover, with huge advances in printing press technology and distribution, a slew of gardening magazines and gardening manuals sprang up to educate and aid the amateur gardener. The rise of the middle class, housed in suburban terraces and villas with small gardens front and back, produced a ready market for such texts.

In THE WAY WE LIVE NOW (1875), the Melmottes’ origins remain a mystery that becomes increasingly irrelevant. Few of Augustus Melmotte's business partners venture to inquire too closely into the specious public faith in his financial integrity even as they prepare to extract the promising output of his highly speculative enterprises. On the contrary, a suspicion that their seemingly stable investments are as unsafe as they are spurious, that they bear the marks of risky speculation, accompanies the rise of the commercial Melmotte Empire from its beginnings. Close inquiry is not so much guarded against as shirked by those who wish to believe in it. When aristocratic would-be investors scramble for a seat on the boards of this “New Man,” they are therefore guilty not simply of nourishing a fraudulent financier whose history as a swindler they are well aware of, for Melmotte's connections to continental scams are notorious. Rather, they are building on ambivalent attitudes to the seemingly successful speculator. Just as the instability associated with speculation is conveniently embodied by an international man of mystery in the worst sense, it can also be exorcised just as easily by his self-destruction.

The enclosed having come into my hands being a Letter written by my Son to a Literary gentleman who had lent him a Work of Dr. Croly containing some remarks on your Rel Deluv, I having thought it might amuse you to see the Zeal of one of your Disciples, & therefore take the liberty of sending it, but I have a twofold motive believing that should your leisure ever allow of your glancing at the paper you might have an estimate of my Sons Knowledge of the Science he takes such delight in & aid him the more easily by occasional hints which the Intercourse so indulgently granted him by you may afford him the means of deriving.

In his 1867 review of two recent historical novels, Henry James worried that, barring “a second Walter Scott,” no modern mind could synthesize the increasingly scientific discipline of history and the imagination of fiction. “[S]tory-tellers are, for the most part, an illogical, loose-thinking, ill-informed race” (280), James teased, while the new historian – he refers to “writers of a purely scientific turn of mind” such as “Niebuhr and Mommsen, Gizot and Buckle” (278) – “works in the dark, with a contracted forehead and downcast eyes, on his hands and knees, as men work in coal-mines” (279). James's anxious jocularity does little to disguise his interest in (and intimidation before) the ascetic historian, particularly that new professional's willingness to “say sternly to his fancy: So far thou shalt go, and no further.” Why, James subsequently wondered, should the novelist “not [also] imprison his imagination, for the time, in a circle of incidents from which there is no arbitrary issue, and apply his ingenuity to the study of a problem to which there is but a single solution” (279)?

InImperialism at Home, Susan Meyer explores Charlotte Brontë's metaphorical use of race and empire in Jane Eyre. In particular, she is struck by Brontë's repeated allusions to bondage and slavery and wonders, “Why would Brontë write a novel permeated with the imagery of slavery, and suggesting the possibility of a slave uprising, in 1846, after the emancipation of the British slaves had already taken place?” (71). Meyer speculates, “Perhaps the eight years since emancipation provided enough historical distance for Brontë to make a serious and public, although implicit, critique of British slavery and British imperialism in the West Indies” (71). Perhaps. More likely, I would argue, is the possibility that Brontë was thinking not of West Indian slavery, but of American slavery.

About a decade after Waterloo, there arose in England a subgenre of fiction that can be called the military novel. George Robert Gleig is credited with originating the genre with a fictionalized autobiography entitled The Subaltern, which appeared serially in Blackwood's Magazine in 1825 and was subsequently published as a book. Military memoirs were appearing from soon after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and the military novel was an outgrowth of that literature. Many of the authors of military novels had themselves served in the army, but the most notable of them all, Charles Lever, had not been a military man, though he consorted with officers often enough. Beginning with The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, which was serialized first and then appeared as a single volume in 1839, Lever produced a string of popular novels about the army, with young officers as their heroes. The novels of this subgenre concentrated on officers, though there are amusing rankers, that is, enlisted soldiers, as well in Lever's novels likely to be clever Irishmen. For the most part, though, rankers are background figures and have largely stereotypical lower class ways. There are obligatory romance and inheritance plots in these narratives, with the hero usually ending up married and with an estate of his own, either through direct inheritance, or the discovery of a hitherto unknown fortune. This genre lasted about fifteen years, petering out by mid-century.

In the penultimate book ofDaniel Deronda, Gwendolen Harleth appears in a state of physical and mental shock after the drowning of her detested husband. Exposed to an increasingly popularized discourse of trauma, today's readers would have little trouble in identifying and labeling Gwendolen as a traumatized subject, suffering from a variety of typical symptoms in the aftermath of her terrible experience. She is fixated on the “dead face” of Grandcourt in the water, hallucinating it everywhere. Later, she complains that she “can't sleep much” and that “[t]hings repeat themselves in me so. They come back – they will all come back” (659; ch. 65). Disoriented in the present, she seems to return repeatedly to the past, the line between her interior world and the external world growing increasingly tenuous: “She unconsciously left intervals in her retrospect, not clearly distinguishing between what she said, and what she had only an inward vision of” (594; ch. 56). In her conversation with Daniel Deronda, she is described as being silent for a moment or two, “as if her memory had lost itself in a web where each mesh drew all the rest” (592; ch. 56). Deronda wonders whether she “was she seeing the whole event – her own acts included – through an exaggerating medium of excitement and horror.” (591; ch. 56).

On 19 June 1900, during the heyday of the British seaside resort, a new gentleman's lavatory opened on one of the Firth of Clyde's most famous piers. The Isle of Bute was a popular destination for Scottish Victorians, who would make the short journey from Glasgow by paddle steamer for a day of shopping or a weekend holiday. Despite its small size and close proximity to major cities, Rothesay, the island's only town, supported a large number of shops year round and hosted regular fairs during the summer. Travelers were also lured to the island by its diverse topography and by Rothesay Castle, which dates from 1230 and eventually devolved to the Stuarts. The island's moderate west-coast climate attracted a considerable number of visitors throughout the year (Figure 1).

When Rudyard Kipling offered his wry observations on officialdom in Imperial India to his cousin, Margaret Bourne-Jones, in 1885, he might have been toying with the kernel of one of his more perplexing stories on race and hybridity, written for his 1888 anthology, Plain Tales from the Hills. When Kipling actually came to address this theme fictionally, in his short story entitled “His Chance in Life,” he made one crucial change: he substituted a dark-skinned telegraphist of mixed race for an Englishman, thereby engaging with the illogics of character that hybridity posed for narratives on race and Empire. In Kipling's story, his hybrid hero, stationed in the mofussil town of Tibasu, experiences a sudden surge of Britishness in the mixed blood flowing in his veins at the moment when crisis strikes, and leads a group of terrified policemen in quelling a communal riot between Hindus and Muslims. He is found guilty of exercising unconstitutional authority by a Hindu sub-judge, but the verdict is set aside by the British Assistant Collector. As a reward, he is promoted to an up-country Central Telegraph Office, where he proceeds to marry his ugly sweetheart, also of mixed race parentage, and live happily with a large brood of children in quarters on the office premises, a loyal government servant, “at home” with officialdom and Empire.

By the mid-nineteenth century, British women had ample motivation for imagining forms of charity that did not require money. Property laws continued to deprive most married women of personal wealth and new statistics revealed a “surplus” of unmarried middle-class women lacking employment. Elizabeth Gaskell addressed these financial challenges by envisioning alternative forms of economic power for women. Her novella Cranford (1851–53) depicts a community of shabby-genteel women who support each other, in the virtual absence of men, through gift practices. Using principles of sympathetic and economic conservation, Cranford's system of exchange reworks material limitations, turning these women's lack of private property to their advantage. Cranford is among a number of mid-century works that treat sympathetic exchange in a sustained manner and on an expanded scale, writing women's charity in terms of sympathy and sisterhood rather than coin. By doing so, it not only co-opts the traditional province of the upper class by pitting middle-class women's care-giving against unfeeling wealth, but also defines a sympathetic gift economy in opposition to the masculinized marketplace essential to such models of charity as that of Dickens's turkey-buying Scrooge.

About a decade ago, I discovered an unknown poem attributed to Robert Browning in two New York abolitionist periodicals, and published an article about it here in Victorian Literature and Culture. I made the case that the poem, a dramatic monologue entitled “The King is Cold,” sounds like Browning in ways that suggest either its authenticity or the early familiarity of an American audience with Browning's style; and I closed the article with the statement, “By bringing ‘The King is Cold’ to light, I hope to encourage further speculation and inquiry as to its place either among Browning's collected works, or within the larger field of Browning scholarship that includes the study of his American reputation” (469). Since then, electronic databases have automated broad, sweeping searches of periodicals, and now the relevant information is easily discovered: the poem was in fact written by Richard Henry Stoddard, the American poet and man of letters. It was first published under Browning's name in the New York News sometime late in 1857, and was correctly ascribed to Stoddard in Russell's Magazine in December of that year; I found this information by searching in the American Periodicals Series Online, 1740–1900. The abolitionist reprintings (in the National Anti-Slavery Standard and the Liberator) apparently followed the version in the New York News, and the misattribution was perpetuated. Indeed, the poem reappeared in another New York periodical, Munsey's Scrap Book, in 1909, where it was still being given out as Robert Browning's. “The King is Cold” was also included as Browning's in William Cullen Bryant's oft-reprinted New Library of Poetry and Song.

The Victorian fascination with the influence of technology on human vision led to a proliferation of replications of its effects in all manner of media, including novel writing. Like the kaleidoscope that holds the viewer in thrall, M. E. Braddon's sensation novel Eleanor's Victory, as this reviewer describes, holds a certain “power” over the reader that forces her to listen to, if not accept, the arguments Braddon posits in her work. “Power” is at issue in other ways in Braddon's work as her heroines continually seek ways of developing agency by shaping sexual identities that press the limits of the norm of the bourgeois family unit. What is also significant here is the appropriateness of the kaleidoscope as a metaphor for Braddon's writing, a metaphor she used personally in describing her work in an unpublished letter: “I will give the kaleidoscope another turn, and will do my best with the old bits of glass and pins and rubbish” (letter to Edmund Yates, qtd. in Maxwell 150). The kaleidoscope fractures the vision of a single object or scene into a multitude of different but interrelated forms of the same. One of the prominent issues Braddon repeatedly addresses in her work is the construction of multiple forms of sexuality. The fracturing or multiplying effect of the kaleidoscope resembles the isolation and reduction of different forms of sexuality as described by Foucault in The History of Sexuality.

In perhaps her most famous comment, Isabella Beeton, the doyenne of Victorian cookery, proclaimed, “Dining is the privilege of civilization” (363). Dinner, she went on to explain, “is a matter of considerable importance; and a well-served table is a striking index of human ingenuity and resource” (363). That “much depends on dinner” has been widely recognized in a variety of contexts since Beeton made this pronouncement in her Book of Household Management in the mid-Victorian era. From Upton Sinclair's exposé of the meat industry in The Jungle (1906) to the more recent fascination with Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (2001) and Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006), food – and particularly its mismanagement – has become a positive obsession with the public at large. Anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and psychologists – from Claude Lévi-Strauss to Mary Douglas to Sidney Mintz to Sigmund Freud himself – have long engaged in commenting on what Beeton asserts in her chapter on “Dinner and Dining”: that distinctions in food preparation, eating habits, and modes of dining are a crucial axis around which cultures and groups consolidate themselves. Similarly, organizations like Stanford University's now defunct Food Research Institute have investigated food's centrality to “human ingenuity,” in this case through the study of agricultural practice and policy.

In 1893, overwhelmed by readers' insatiability for Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle killed his detective off at the height of his popularity. Writing to a friend in 1896, Doyle described how literally sick he was of the figure he had created: “I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day” (Chabon 17). Holmes's (first) literary demise was marked by his creator with a culinary simile, one which recalls that his literary debut was made under the name that, above all others, stood for the culinary in late nineteenth-century Britain: Isabella Beeton. The first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet,” appeared in the 1887 edition of Beeton's Christmas Annual. Three other editors had rejected the story before the Beeton Annual accepted it. This Doyle-Beeton publishing encounter was an instance of one publishing phenomenon recognizing another one and ushering it into the limelight. When Doyle's reflections on his huge publishing success turn to a gustatory memory of overindulgence in a purposefully overdeveloped organ, it raises the following question: what were the relationships between the mass market, the culinary, and the production and adjudication of judgment and refinement in the nineteenth century?

Mr. Brooke himself has already been described by the narrator as having a “neutral physiognomy,” and that neutrality itself identified as one of few “striking points in his appearance” (503). Part of the effigy's menace, clearly, is its uncanny similarity to the original. As described, however, the effigy is unlikely to be a piece of skilled imitative craftsmanship; indeed, it is the very shoddiness of the thing that makes it eerie. Unlike the banality and apparent harmlessness of this vaguely empty caricature, a rag-doll in waistcoat and monocle, the “parrot-like, Punch-voiced echo of [Mr. Brooke's] words” threatens because it offers no legible meaning, instead forcing interpretive agency onto the reader. Indeed, the “neutral physiognomy” must foreground interpretive agency, otherwise it would be impossible for a non-trait such as neutrality, either in Brooke or in his effigy, to be a “striking point” at all.

With the growth of the organized feminist movement in England at the end of the 1850s, women began to mount public lecture platforms in increasing numbers. By claiming a space in public assembly rooms through the simple use of their voices, women reformers such as Bessie Rayner Parkes and Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon challenged the male privilege of public address, and changed the visual, oral, and aural culture of Victorian reform movements. Women's public speech in the 1850s and 60s was never linked with the kind of riotous responses provoked later by Josephine Butler or the women's suffrage movement. But even public speakers associated with a more moderate or “polite” tone, such as Parkes and Frances Power Cobbe, routinely received a mixture of moral censure and ridicule, causing them to question the value of publicity – both print and platform – for the feminist cause. However, one of the most prolific female public speakers of mid nineteenth-century England, Mary Carpenter (1807–77), seems to have escaped all such criticism and was repeatedly held up as a shining example, by both feminists and non-feminists, of appropriate womanly behavior in official public settings. Commentators on Carpenter's work and her public reputation were nearly unanimous in their approval of not only the content of her public speech but also its flawless delivery. What can Carpenter's apparently unique public persona tell us about shifts in the gendered dimensions of public utterance in the 1850s and 60s, when she was most active? More broadly, what does the history of women's platform speech have to do with a seemingly unrelated narrative: that is, the theorization of juvenile delinquency as a specific problem in nineteenth-century England?

In his bookDistinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues that in order to understand the workings of culture “in the restricted, normative sense” we must not only relate our discussion to the broad anthropological meanings of the concept, we must also relate it to “taste” in the physical sense. We must, he argues, bring “the elaborated taste for the most refined objects . . . back into relation with the elementary taste for the flavours of food” (Bourdieu 99). Bourdieu is writing of twentieth-century France and not nineteenth-century Britain. It may seem anachronistic to juxtapose a quotation from his work with one from an 1861 volume of domestic advice. However, his argument that social distinctions can be understood through a discussion of the material and cultural values attached to food resonates with Beeton's argument that “the rank which a people occupy . . . may be measured by their way of taking their meals.”

Margaret Oliphant's work has of late received renewed attention for her portrayal of heroines who struggle against the confines of proper middle-class femininity – who are at once sympathetic and yet do not fit the model of the submissive Victorian domestic angel – and Miss Marjoribanks (1866) is no exception. Without fully discounting the Victorian notion that there is a proper place women ought to occupy, Miss Marjoribanks raises complex questions about how that place is defined and limited. Recent scholarly attention to the novel highlights Oliphant's sustained engagement with the issue of how far propriety and custom circumscribe a woman's place. Such examinations, however, fail to address the extent to which Oliphant demonstrates the flexibility of cultural notions of a woman's place by focusing the action of Miss Marjoribanks almost entirely on the heroine's creation of a very specific physical place for herself – her drawing-room. Examining Miss Marjoribanks's portrayal of how a Victorian woman might capitalize on the centrality of the drawing-room in shaping cultural notions of feminine identity, this essay argues that once Lucilla Marjoribanks has established the drawing-room as a physical and ideological space that will contain her actions, she uses this space and all it represents to expand the boundaries of her cultural place. By focusing specifically on the work its heroine undertakes within her drawing-room and by asserting that a woman's power lies in the possibility for feminine taste to accomplish action, Oliphant's novel, like her heroine, operates within the “prejudices of society” while simultaneously offering a means to exploit those prejudices. This architecturally-motivated re-reading of Oliphant's novel in turn suggests a re-reading of Oliphant's own career. For I would argue that novels operated for Oliphant the way that drawing-rooms do for Lucilla: they provided a culturally-sanctioned place in which to locate herself, and thereby reaffirm her respectable feminine position, even while she undertook projects that challenged Victorian assumptions about gendered identity.

In 1529, Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, descendant of the Timurid dynasty and founder of the Mughal empire, wept at the sight of melons. A mere fruit had reminded Babur of the homeland he had left behind in central Asia. In a letter to Khwaja Kalan, the emperor writes of the drudgeries of a ruler in a foreign land, who is forced to do without the tastes of home: “How can one forget the pleasures of that country? . . . Recently a melon was brought, and as I cut it and ate it I was oddly affected. I wept the whole time I was eating it” (423). The Baburnama, a personal record of the establishment of a new empire in the subcontinent, might seem like an unusual place to begin an essay on Victorian India. But Babur's nostalgia for the home left behind in Samarkand poignantly anticipates some of the hidden longings of the British as Company Raj gave way to Crown Raj in India. While the East India Company attempted to oust the Mughal rulers between the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, after India was incorporated into the Empire, the British would also attempt to don the mantle of the Mughals. On 1 November 1858, when India officially became part of Queen Victoria's Empire, the British inherited the Mughal's melons. Whether it was roast beef or mulligatawny, a pint of pale ale or a chhota peg, the British discovered their own versions of Babur's melons over time – an idea of homeland contained in a mouthful.