The objective of this article is to connect Matthew Arnold, that statesman of culture, with a tin of Tate and Lyle's Golden Syrup, a by-product of industrial sugar refining that has been named Britain's “oldest brand.” Bringing the lofty to the low, the sage to the sweetener, is an exercise in willful materialism. Reading Arnold's “sweetness and light” literally, as comestibles, and “culture” as a term that engages the culinary, puts Arnold into conversation with revolutionary nineteenth-century materialist theorists, in particular the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. Although not commonly read now, Feuerbach's work was translated by George Eliot and influential on that of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: it is his materialism and his atheism that we see, modified, in their work. In his own time, he was also known for theories about diet and this article will, in part, show how these theories are inseparable from both his materialism and his atheism. True to its viscous, tacky nature, Golden Syrup arrives slowly and emerges late in my argument, but it will adhere Arnold to Feuerbach, and to an intellectual tradition that holds that what we eat, and whether and how we can eat, is as world-making as what we read. Sitting Feuerbach's self-avowed extreme materialism down at the table with Arnold's self-avowed extreme anti-materialism, I will show that they grapple with the same gods – the gods of Christianity, capitalism, and cultural immortality – and that they both conclude that we make and remake our world by digesting it.

When W. E. Gladstone published in November 1874 his spirited pamphlet The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political Expostulation, he seems to have taken many people by surprise. In its issue of the 21st of that month, Punch printed a cartoon, “An Unexpected Cut” (Figure 1) which portrayed the “Hawarden woodcutter” laying an axe to the stout trunk of a tree labelled “Papal Infallibility,” under the bemused gaze of Mr Punch. To the latter's remark “We didn't expect to find you cutting at that tree, you know,” the ex-Prime Minister dourly retorts: “All right, Mr Punch! I choose my own Trees, and my own Time!” In Gladstone's view, the time was ripe to take a stand against the recent pretensions of the Roman Catholic Church, under the leadership of its aging pontiff Pius IX, to exercise an absolute and unchallengeable authority over the consciences and actions of Catholics.

“Young ladies don't understand political economy, you know,” asserts the casually misogynistic uncle of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871) (17; bk. 1, ch 1). Although Eliot's heroine resents both her uncle's remark and “that never-explained science which was thrust as an extinguisher over all her lights,” her attempt to teach herself political economy in the novel only seems to confirm her uncle's assessment (18; bk. 1, ch. 1): Dorothea gathers a “little heap of books on political economy” and sets forth to learn “the best way of spending money so as not to injure one's neighbors, or – what comes to the same thing – so as to do them the most good” (805; bk. 5, ch. 48). Naively likening “spending money so as not to injure one's neighbors” to “do[ing] them the most good,” Dorothea fails to grasp the self-interest at the core of nineteenth-century political economic thought and so misunderstands the subject matter before her: “Unhappily her mind slipped off [the book] for a whole hour; and at the end she found herself reading sentences twice over with an intense consciousness of many things, but not of any one thing contained in the text. This was hopeless” (805; bk. 5, ch. 48).

Seeking to prepare her friend Lucretia Tox for the revelation of Mr Dombey's engagement, Louisa Chick, Dombey's sister, turns to the natural world to illustrate the inevitability of change:

Charles Dickens's novels only occasionally feature images of prehistoric creatures. There is, of course, the famous “elephantine lizard. . .waddling. . .up Holborn Hill” in the opening scenes of Bleak House (1852–53), which, as is brilliantly captured in Tom Gauld's recent cartoon “Fragments of Dickens's Lost Novel ‘A Megalosaur's Progress’” (2011), has become a kind of icon of Dickens's entire fictional oeuvre (Figure 1). But beyond Bleak House’s iconic megalosaurus “forty feet long or so,” Dickens's panoramic representations of urban landscapes, which Adelene Buckland has shown to abound with quasi-geological ruins, are usually populated only by their more diminutive modern inhabitants (1; ch. 1). Even when the changing cityscape of “carcases. . .and fragments” of “giant forms” seems, as in Dombey and Son (1847–48), to suggest the presence of colossal fossilized skeletons thrown up by a “great earthquake,” they remain lifeless and merely augment the pervading atmosphere of urban upheaval (46; ch. 6). Animate extinct animals instead appear more commonly in novels by contemporaries such as William Makepeace Thackeray or, later in the century, Henry James. In their fiction, creatures such as the megatherium, a large edentate from the Pliocene epoch, not only afford apposite metaphors for gargantuan manifestations of industrial modernity, as in the former's Mrs. Perkins's Ball (1846) and the latter's The Bostonians (1885–86). More significantly, they also provide a model for the complex structures of serialized novels, whether commendatory, as in Thackeray's The Newcomes (1853–55), or otherwise, as in the famous epithet “large loose baggy monsters” that James coined in the preface to the New York edition of The Tragic Muse (1908) (1:x).

The Princess (1847), which Tennyson himself famously dismissed as “only a medley” (qtd. in Hallam Tennyson 2.71), presents itself as a cacophonous tangle of poetic experimentation and narrative diversity. Even the frame narrative of The Princess, which ostensibly provides a rationale for the tonal discontinuities of the fantastic tale of gender, education, and sexual dominance that comprises its internal story, creates further confusion by establishing seven largely unidentifiable narrators, an unclear number of intercalary singers, and a poet-speaker whose supposed efforts to compile and record the tale end not in a cohesive narrative, but in a text that moves “as in a strange diagonal” between burlesque and heroic, comic and tragic, narrative and lyric (Conclusion 27).

Of all Dickens's eccentric children – whose numbers include the Artful Dodger, Paul Dombey, Little Nell, and Smike – none, perhaps, is more peculiarly “old-fashioned” than Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend (1864-65). From her first appearance, Jenny exhibits a strange indeterminacy:

While carefully crafting a valentine to his would-be-lover Mary, Sam Weller finishes rather abruptly, and his father, looking over his shoulder, asks, “That's rayther a sudden pull up, ain't it, Sammy?” Sam's response emblematizes the driving force of the serial novel: “Not a bit on it. . . she'll vish there wos more, and that's the great art o' letter writin'” (344; no. XII, ch. XXXIII). Charles Dickens's great art of serial writing aimed to leave his readers repeatedly wishing there was more: more pages, more plot, more world, and above all, more time with their favorite characters. This desire encouraged readers to imagine beyond the novel – to pursue characters outside the pages of The Pickwick Papers itself. Their desires were rewarded with a wide range of continuations that included theatrical adaptations, plagiarisms, or unauthorized sequels – anything that, like the valentine, could reunite readers with their beloved Sam.

These lines, taken from the poem “Sweet Home,” were published by Eliza Cook (1818–89) in Once a Week in 1867. Accompanied by Joseph Swain's engraving (Figure 4), the poem presents an idealized portrait of a middle-class family in the nineteenth century. The home is a “blissful, holy place” where “Manhood, Infancy, and Age” can find their “love and peace” as well as “joy and grace.” Of particular interest is that Swain places the female figures – grandmother, mother with a child on her lap, and daughter – at the center of the engraving: their bodies and faces are clearly sketched, whereas father and son, the only two male figures in the engraving, merely show half their faces with their backs turned to the reader. Overall, the poem itself contains some of the striking echoes of the dominant ideology of home at the time. The scene of the family gathered around the hearth illuminates the all-embracing concept of domesticity – coziness, comfort, and intimacy.

The final chapter ofVanity Fair's account of the 1815 Battle of Waterloo opens with a scene of public panic in the streets of Brussels. As French cannons sound just outside of the Belgian capital, Thackeray captures the chaos that ensues as the English men and women, who have accompanied the army to Brussels and remained in the city during the battle, begin to receive reports that Napoleon's forces have defeated the Duke of Wellington's army and are marching on the city. Rumor reigns in Brussels as the English civilians seek out one another for increasingly inaccurate reports on the French progress towards the city, and civil tranquility collapses as the public consensus becomes that French forces will soon invade.

Ferishtah's Fancies was a work of Browning's old age, the first of the three volumes he published after he turned seventy, before his death in 1889. All these volumes, but especially the first two, Ferishtah's Fancies (1884) and Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day (1887), are reflective works, in which Browning revisits the major themes and imaginative locations of his life and work. But they are also characteristically restless works, formally complex and innovative, and polemical in spirit. They contain some of Browning's least engaging writing: dense, prickly, mannered, full of a kind of late-Browning poetic lingo which is not quite demotic and not quite high art. Oddly enough, Ferishtah's Fancies was a success when it was published – it is the only volume Browning ever published to be reprinted twice in a year – but this success did not last beyond the First World War, and in modern critical terms it is probably the most neglected of all his work. There are good reasons for this. When you know that Henry Jones based most of his 1912 book, Browning as a Religious and Philosophical Teacher on Ferishtah's Fancies, you can guess what is coming. To Jones what was earnest, profound, and consoling about Browning's ideas was exactly what the next generation rejected with a kind of nausea. Since these ideas no longer came clothed in the verse that had enraptured the Pre-Raphaelites – the verse of Men and Women (1855), Dramatis Personae (1864), and even The Ring and the Book (1868–69) – it failed utterly to make its way into the twentieth century, and has lain buried.

The first issue and number of the Nineteenth Century, 1877, included a searching article by J. Baldwin Brown entitled “Is the Pulpit Losing Its Power?” Looking back over the decades, Brown marked a generational decline in England's preaching, which he argued had now been eclipsed by a print market distributing “freest discussion of the most sacred truths.” Brown lamented that fewer talented men now joined the Anglican ministry, while the Church had increasingly withdrawn from the social mission which had animated mid-century preachers like Charles Kingsley (107–09). More troublingly, Brown speculated that modern Britons had become constitutionally averse to the homiletic situation. The preacher, he writes, often “seems as if he came down on the vast range of subjects which he is tempted to handle as from a superior height; and this is what the scientific mind can never endure. . . . [T]here has always been a sort of omniscient tone in the pulpit method of handling intellectual questions which stirs fierce rebellion in cultivated minds and hearts” (109–10). Brown pulls up short of blaming theology per se; for him its language of “above” and “beyond” has continuing relevance (110). Still, he broaches the possibility that by its very nature preaching risks antagonizing what current scholarship would term the “liberal subject”: one which prizes freedom of conscience, empirical exploration, and debate.

Throughout her life, Christina Rossetti was an enthusiastic writer and player of word games in verse. When she was seventeen, for instance, she spent the summer of 1848 in Brighton playing bouts-rimés sonnets with her brother, William. Together they timed themselves to see how fast they could write lines of verse to a given set of end rhymes: “emotional devastation in ten minutes or less,” Anne Jamison wittily puts it (145). Two years later, Rossetti published under her initials instances of different word games – an enigma (“Name any gentleman you spy”) and a charade (“My first is no proof of my second”) – as part of a series of riddling word games in verse by various authors in the Marshall's Ladies Daily Remembrancer: For 1850. They count among Rossetti's first poetic publications. These popular riddling genres, while perhaps less familiar to readers today, were immediately recognizable to Rossetti's contemporaries. In his 1872 riddle anthology, Guess Me, F. D. Planché defines an “Enigma” as a riddle in verse, or “the most ancient form of Riddle . . . often a real poem as well as a question for solution” (3). In the 1891 Cornhill Magazine, the article “Riddles” glosses a “charade” as a riddle that “turns upon the letters or syllables composing a word” (518). By publishing an enigma and a charade in Marshall's Ladies Daily Remembrancer, an inexpensive pocket book for women, Rossetti capitalized on the association of these genres as written by and for middle-class women, a point that I will argue in more detail later.

Margaret Oliphant much preferredThe Woman in White (published serially 1859–1860) to Great Expectations (published serially 1860–1861). This partiality emerges in a comparative treatment of the texts in her oft-quoted 1862 treatise on sensation fiction, and it rests on the desirability of authors producing thrills using “modest and subtle means” (“Sensation Novels” 569) instead of “by fantastic eccentricities” and “high-strained oddity” (“Sensation Novels” 574). While the existence of an argument against the allegedly regrettable excesses of fantastical narratives will not shock any reader familiar with contemporary criticism of sensation fiction, or, for that matter, Romantic-era novels or Gothic works in general, the primary evidence Oliphant uses to argue her case might come as a surprise. In order to discredit Charles Dickens's ghostly accounts of Miss Havisham's bridal tomb in favor of Wilkie Collins's eerie images of Anne Catherick appearing on a moonlit moor, Margaret Oliphant turns to clothing.

In the late 1840s, as revolution swept across Europe, Anthony Trollope wrote a novel portraying the Vendean War, a French civil war fought during the revolutionary decade. La Vendée: An Historical Romance (1850) depicts the conflict between centralised, revolutionary France led by the National Convention in Paris and the insurgent, royalist population of western France from the perspective of the royalist rebels. La Vendée is one of Trollope's least read novels; yet Trollope's turn to the history of the 1790s in the context of renewed revolutionary movements in the 1840s demonstrates that the political and cultural stakes of the revolutionary period remained present in the minds of Victorians who confronted the possibility of European revolution for the first time in their own lives. Trollope draws on the interrelated democratic and nationalist movements that produced the 1848 revolutions in order to represent the royalist Vendeans as a victimised incipient nation, akin to other minor European nations struggling for sovereignty against their more powerful neighbours. Significantly, throughout the 1840s Trollope lived in Ireland, one such minor nation, and witnessed the Famine years and the consequences of Ireland's governance from London throughout that crisis first-hand. Using the conventions of the generically related national tale – a typically Irish genre – and the historical novel, Trollope works to establish sympathy for a marginalised Vendean community while containing revolution in the past by casting the royalist Vendeans as the true patriots and insurrectionists. However, although Trollope attempted to contain revolution by re-aligning it with the conservative, Vendean position, La Vendée is fragmented by anxieties about the possibility of revolution in the late 1840s that disrupt his efforts to establish an authoritative, distanced historical perspective.

“Suspend it all,” writes Charles Dickens in the ninth number plan for his novel Little Dorrit (“Working Notes” 207). Referring to the thirtieth chapter, in which Blandois – formerly Rigaud – arrives on the doorstep of Mrs. Clennam's house, this phrase aptly describes how much the chapter moves the plot forward. Mysteries are gestured toward, but the stakes of the mystery are left blank. Rigaud shows surprise upon seeing Flintwinch, but such surprise is inexplicable until we learn at the end of the novel that Rigaud has met Flintwinch's twin brother abroad. We learn more about the mysterious watch that the dying Mr. Clennam bequeathed to his wife, but not much more than the meaning of the letters “D.N.F.” inscribed within it: “Do not forget.” Dickens suspends so much from the reader that it is hard to feel suspense about anything, a fact that is amplified by Rigaud's insistence on “Secrets!” that can be read as a meta-commentary on the chapter itself: “I say there are secrets in all families,” he tells Flintwinch, adding that the house is “so mysterious” (381–82; bk.1, ch. 30).

In the April issue of the Quarterly Review of 1863, H. L. Mansel, Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, disparaged “sensation” novels by comparing them to cheap fashion wear. “A commercial atmosphere floats around works of this class, redolent of the manufactory and the shop,” he taunted, “The public want novels and novels must be made – so many yards of printed stuff, sensation pattern, to be ready by the beginning of the season” (500). To scholars of Victorian literature, Mansel's analogy now serves as a commonplace for literary commercialism. Its other emphasis, which is on fashion, however, has received less attention. This paper examines Wilkie Collins's use of dress in Armadale (1864-66), as presented in the example of Lydia Gwilt's favoured attire, a “black gown and a red Paisley shawl”; and suggests that Collins uses the Paisley shawl to provide an indirect reference to the Indian Mutiny. In particular, the essay argues that as well as generating a humanised reading of Lydia's character, her shawl is a powerful metaphor to symbolize mid-century anxieties about class and empire.

In hisMemoirs of anUnfortunate Son of Thespis (1818), the actor Edward Cape Everard recalled a performance of Sheridan's School for Scandal that was interrupted in its third act by a rowdy bunch of sailors. At the sight of Charles Surface drinking, the sailors allegedly left the auditorium, entered the stage, and accosted the actor playing Charles, “exclaiming ‘My eyes, you're a hearty fellow! Come, my tight one, hand us a glass’” (qtd. in Russell 104). As apocryphal as the encounter seems, it is not the only account of mariners rushing the early-nineteenth century stage to join in with the drama. In her analysis of these anecdotes Gillian Russell comments that though they may have been intended to depict the sailor “as naïve and unsophisticated, unable to make the distinction between fiction and reality. . . it is not surprising that the sailor should have disregarded the rules of mimesis and the distinction between stage and auditorium” (104), for the sailor's life lent itself to, and was structured by, theatricality. Service in “the theatres of war,” or more generally in the “wooden world” of the ship, demanded strict performance of custom and ritual in the forging of social identities and relations, not least of all in the ritualistic initiation ceremonies and corporal punishments that were enacted in front of the amassed audience of the crew (Russell 139–57; see Dening). At sea and in dock sailors entertained themselves with amateur theatricals. On shore, they were keen theatre-goers, and in auditoriums and elsewhere they played up to the characteristics of the sailor in the brazen assertion of an identity that was celebrated in stories, songs, and plays, but frequently also belittled, bemoaned, and victimized, the latter particularly while the press gangs were active.

In 1861, in a review of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, a critic for the Spectator complained that, “We are threatened with a new variety of the sensation novel … the whole interest of which consists in the gradual unraveling of some carefully prepared enigma” (“The Enigma Novel” 20). He was hardly the only reviewer to use a vocabulary of “puzzlement” or “enigma” when discussing Collins's work. Whether we look to an earlier review of The Woman in White to find Collins faulted as “not a great novelist … the fascination which he exercises … [is] that he is a good constructor. Each of his stories is a puzzle, the key to which is not handed to us till the third volume” (Rev. of The Woman in White 249) – or whether we turn to a critic of The Moonstone, who found Collins and his latest production “[un]worthy”: “We are no especial admirers of the department of art to which he has devoted himself, any more than we are of double acrostics or anagrams, or any of the many kinds of puzzles on which it pleases some minds to exercise their ingenuity” (Page, ed. 171–72) – we come up against the fact that Collins's novels, and especially his sensation novels, were sometimes known as “enigma novels” in the Victorian period. We can see too that this was not necessarily intended as a complimentary label. Indeed, though our own contemporary tendency has been to employ this particular moniker in a more neutral, descriptive register – to denote simply some fictions' reliance on mystery – we quickly find that Victorian reviewers were not so dispassionate in their usage. Instead, tracking names like “conundrum novel” or “enigma novel,” and terms like “puzzle,” “enigma,” and even “anagram,” shows that Collins's critics often used such phrases to index some of the same kinds of problems or concerns they more familiarly described with a rhetoric of “sensation.” A short survey suggests that their language of “puzzles” and “enigmas,” like their language of shocks and nerves, expressed disappointment at Collins's tendency to create anticlimaxes (the novel fizzles when the “puzzle” is solved); his emphasis on plot – or “carefully prepared enigma[s]” – over character; and his potential to render readers amoral and passive – patient attendants of solutions (“the key to which is not handed to us”) – rather than creatively engaged thinkers or moral questers. A simple nickname would seem to be a damning label indeed, on fuller survey.

On September 3, 1841, George Eliot wrote in a letter to her friend Maria Lewis:

Behold an infinite of floating worlds
Divide the crystal waves of ether pure,
In endless voyage without port

Amid those sov'reign glories of the skies,
Of independent, native lustre, proud;
The souls of systems! and the lords of life,
Through their wide empires! (276)