IN 1855, THE REVEREND GIRDLESTONE zealously promoted sanitary reform in Britain, claiming that the movement was “pregnant with the most important advantages to the human race, in every point of view — social, moral, and religious” (29). Girdlestone’s claim provides a useful starting point for considering representations of reform, as this view of the redemptive powers of cleanliness has been accepted by many historians as a characteristic Victorian attitude.1 But while it is true that many Victorians believed that sweeping public health reforms could fuel the physical and moral regeneration of the urban poor, it is also true that others responded to these reforms with fear, anger, and suspicion: an active strain of resistance flourished within Victorian sanitary discourse. That scholars have privileged the Victorians’ declarations of faith in matters of cleanliness and to some degree shared in these sentiments should not surprise us. The idea of public health reform as universally advantageous accords not only with our own sense of the desirability of sanitary techniques such as flush-toilets and water-borne sewerage, which have become naturalized in the West, but also with a narrative of historical progress.2 While this essay does not dispute the fact that the sanitary idea gained wide acceptance in the period, it does seek to shift the focus away from Victorian faith to Victorian apostasy in matters of reform.

“‘The Omnipresent,’ said a Rabbi, ‘is occupied in making marriages.’ The levity of the saying lies in the ear of him who hears it, for by making marriages the speaker meant all the wondrous combinations of the universe whose issue makes our good and evil.” 1

— George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon . . . Behold how hideously he governs! See him busied at the work he likes best — making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius, and fetters the dead to the living. . . . All that surrounds him hastens to decay. . . . Your god is a masked Death.”2

— Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S FIRST NOVEL found no publisher: her second one brought her editors and readers, money and success, society and scrutiny. With this muchness the subtlest theologian of Haworth Parsonage turned, all shy and fierce and willing, to grapple. Not for nothing is her third novel set in “the Hollows”: not for nothing are the avatars and objects of its quests named “Mo(o)re.” The Work Question, the Woman Question, the Church Question, the Fiction Question — all of these go to the making of Shirley in its plenitude, but at its heart is a metaphysical question, the fusion, the confusion, of “hollow” with “more.”3

His tall upright figure and quick penetrating glance indicate the man of energy and decision, and those who are most intimately acquainted with him know best that these qualities are combined with a large measure of kindliness and breadth of view, and a readiness to be of use to such as are brought into contact with him in official capacity and in private life. (Biograph 158)

IT IS MY PURPOSE to demonstrate that the above paragraph, published in 1880, is a description of the man who wrote My Secret Life, the man who called himself Walter. I shall be very little concerned with literary or psychological analysis. I intend simply to present the process of research which led me to conclude, beyond reasonable doubt, that I have discovered the identity of the author, then to summarize such biographical information as I have been able to obtain from contemporary sources or archival records, and to comment, where necessary, on the correspondences or differences between Walter’s narrative and the real man’s outer life.

IT IS NOT LIKELY THAT MANY readers of Martin Chuzzlewit will remember Mr. Bevan’s profession. The gentleman so kind as to lend Martin and Mark Tapley money to go back to England is not just one of few honest persons in the vulgar, shoddy world of Dickens’s America, but a doctor as well: “[H]e made Martin acquainted with his name, which was Bevan: and with his profession, which was physic, though he seldom or never practised” (280; ch.17). We find many other medical persons in the novel: Jobling the doctor, Lewsome the medical assistant, and Mrs. Gamp, the most famous or notorious nurse in English literature, but they are not highly commendable characters and never offer effective cures to their patients. Jobling is a pretentious swindler, and Lewsome assists, albeit unintentionally, Jonas Chuzzlewit’s attempt to murder his father. One would be reluctant to be nursed by Sairey Gamp, however tremendous she is as a product of a great literary imagination. As if to endorse the reader’s suspicion, Old Martin Chuzzlewit does not trust any doctors and has an amateur, Mary Graham, carry “a small medicine-chest” to care for him (26; ch. 3). The doctor treating Lewsome never seems very efficient in his practice (410, 416; ch. 26), and the only apparently reliable doctor “seldom or never practise[s].” No doctor or nurse can give proper treatment to the numerous sick people in this text full of physical disorders.

FOR MANY YEARS “VERNON LEE” (Violet Paget 1856–1935) has received scant critical attention. More recently, however, her eclectic oeuvre, and her literary stature amongst contemporaries such as Walter Pater, Henry James, and Edith Wharton have attracted increasing interest. Despite this, Lee’s collections of supernatural short stories remain relatively unexplored. With the notable exceptions of Carlo Caballero, Jane Hotchkiss, and Catherine Maxwell, who have used the richness of Lee’s language to examine the fascinating tensions that underlie these tales, little has been done to investigate the central importance of the aesthetic object in Lee’s fantasies and its wider implications in the context of the supernatural space. This essay intends to highlight the role played by the art object (in this case the operatic voice), and the significance of the supernatural in the development of Lee’s professional and private subjectivity.

MR. SWINBURNE, DECLARED THOMAS BAYNES in the Edinburgh Review, is a “poet of what is known as the sensational school of literature.” Swinburne’s predilection for sensuous subject matter, and the premium on physical sensation in his poetry, Baynes argued, produce in the reader neither “ideal pleasures” nor “any purely mental effect,” but a “physical commotion in the frame — a ‘flutter of the blood’” (93–94; 89–90).

THE POPULAR LEGEND used to be that at supper in 1895, Bram Stoker had “a too generous helping of dressed crab,” and that the crab begot the subsequent nightmare which in turn begot Dracula (Ludlam 99). This theory was nullified, however, by the discovery in the 1970s of Stoker’s working notes in the Rosenbach Foundation library of Philadelphia.1 Stoker, it seems, made his initial memorandum for the novel on March 8, 1890 while on holiday in Whitby, where Dracula was eventually to disembark in canine semblance. By February 1892, he had sketched out a plot, complementing a nod to the new technology — Kodak cameras, portable typewriters and recording phonographs — by situating events in the next calendar year, that of 1893. The retrospect over an interval of seven years in Jonathan Harker’s “Note” comprising the final pages of the novel would thus imply a date of composition of 1900; they were actually written, however, by Stoker, in July 1896, and one may wonder whether his official chronology was at this point to the forefront of Stoker’s consciousness. Arguably, July 1889 would have been precisely among the candidates to have been a portentous date, epitomizing an epoch when “we all went through the flames,” so far as the inspiration of Dracula is concerned (378; ch. 27).2

AT THE END OF MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON’SLady Audley’s Secret (1862), her hero- detective Robert Audley marries the near-identical sister of George Talboys, his one close friend since their days at Eton College years before. Throughout the novel, Braddon characterizes Robert as having effeminate mannerisms and a strong longing to be with George. She consciously makes him an alumnus of Eton College, which one contemporary critic cited as a prime example of “characteristic faults and virtues” of the entire public school system (Payne 35). One perceived “fault” of the public schools in particular was that homosexuality and homoeroticism were condoned among the boys, who were later expected to “become” heterosexual upon graduation. But Robert’s homoerotic urges do not disappear with his “purchase” of a heterosexual marriage at the novel’s end.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

— George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

WITH THESE WORDS THE NARRATOR of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda appears to invite readers to map Gwendolen Harleth’s psyche, to trace its history, the places it has been, and the events that appear to have been, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, erased from her memory. This passage is typical of the way that questions of identity in George Eliot’s last novel seem consistently to reflect emerging Victorian concepts of memory.

Probably as a direct result of the burgeoning interest in the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, we see at mid-century a general trend toward the empirical study of the mind according to the model used in the natural sciences: observation and taxonomical classification. Scientists thus observed the physical attributes and behaviors of individuals and then attempted to classify each within the larger species of humans and their behaviors. From this point, scientists would then speculate about the existence of general categories or even laws governing the functions of the mind. It comes as no surprise, then, that those writing most prolifically on physiology and psychology at mid-century also wrote important tracts about nature study: George Henry Lewes, Herbert Spencer, and John Stuart Mill among others. And, as other critics have noted before me, Eliot includes references to both types of science in her works.1

ON AUGUST 21, 1911 THE MONA LISA was stolen from the Louvre, not to reappear again until well over two years later when the thief tried to sell the work to a Florentine art dealer. The patriotic Italian workman who had stolen the painting had wanted to bring some of the Italian masterpieces in French collections back to where they belonged, and he had commenced his grand project with the Mona Lisa because, as he explained, “mi sembrava la piú bella” — she seemed to him to be the most beautiful of them all.1 For Bernard Berenson the disappearance of the Mona Lisa brought about a major rebellion against the ideals he had cultivated as a young man. In his early books on the Florentine painters and their drawings he had sung the praises of Leonardo,2 and ever since he was a student at Harvard in the early 1880s he had been a professed devotee of the writings and thought of Walter Pater.3 Pater’s most celebrated prose passage — his evocation of the Mona Lisa — was one of the pieces of nineteenth-century art criticism which had influenced Berenson more than anything else.4 Like so many other people of his generation, he had learnt the text by heart, and his first visits to the Louvre appear to have been as much in honor of Walter Pater as of the Italian masters.

Has a dead man any use for money? Is it possible for a dead man to have money? What world does a dead man belong to? ‘Tother world. What world does money belong to? This world. How can money be a corpse’s? Can a corpse own it, want it, spend it, claim it, miss it?

— Gaffer Hexam, Our Mutual Friend

WHILE FISHING CORPSES out of the fast-flowing Thames, itself a symbol of death,1 in order to probe their pockets, Gaffer Hexam makes sharp reference to a long-standing distinction regarding the limits of earthly possession. Some of Dickens’s readers would have been quite ready to connect Gaffer’s remarks to Bunyan’s story of Christian’s exodus from the commerce and bustle of the earthly city and his crossing of the river of death that flows before the gates of the celestial city. Others might have considered the riverman’s musings as somehow referring to St. Paul’s saying that “the end of those things [wealth] is death” (qtd. in Welsh 59).2 In the presentation of Gaffer’s ghastly career, however, Dickens points out a dislocation from these earlier views: the riverman desecrates the “muffled human form” he finds just as he truncates (if not turns inside-out) what was once the afterlife’s principal judgment of the use of riches in this lower world (44; bk. 1, ch. 1). According to the text, Gaffer, in sharply dividing spiritual transactions from material ones, and the soul from his or her former possessions, only further mires himself in the “slime and ooze” of the commercial river (43; bk. 1, ch. 1), enabling decay to encroach more aggressively on life.

IN AN 1835 ARTICLE PUBLISHED in the Rugby Magazine under the title “School a Little World,” A. P. Stanley wrote:

Introduction

BURIED AMONG ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON’S miscellaneous papers at the Beinecke Library (Yale) is a seemingly insignificant tailor’s bill made out to “R. L. Stevenson, Samoa” from Chorley, the tailor in Sydney (Australia). The bill lists such items as “1 pair of white serge tros.,” “1 pair of Bedford Cord riding tros.,” “and 3 pairs of pyjamas” (Figure 3). Not even his biographers have bothered to mention it.

THIS PAPER AIMS TO CONTRIBUTE to the resurgent study of relations between literature and the visual arts in nineteenth-century England by exploring a variety of representations of the highly visible poet and law reformer, Caroline Norton.1 One aspect of these intersecting discourses is the image of the author and the processes and effects of its representation. Linda M. Shires in “The Author as Spectacle and Commodity” argues for the inseparable but potentially troubling relation between literary authority and authorial spectacle in Victorian England. Some authors embraced theatrical self-display, others presented a more reserved image to their public. Whereas, Shires suggests, “the need to shape the self through display” (202) was increasingly accepted as a strategy for literary success, the countervailing social pressures on women writers to shun the immodest exposure of publication have been demonstrated by Dorothy Mermin in Godiva’s Ride. Perhaps no writer illustrates the tension created by these opposed imperatives more graphically than Caroline Norton.

IN 1821 IN PICCADILLY, Giovanni Battista Belzoni staged a spectacular full-scale reproduction of royal tombs he had uncovered in the Valley of the Kings. Crowds of paying visitors milled through rooms at the Egyptian Hall, marveling at enormous stone artifacts and at colorful wall paintings replicating ancient Egyptian tomb interiors. About half a century later and around the globe, tens of thousands of guests, including many European luminaries, witnessed the grand 1869 opening of the Suez Canal and fêted the achievement of its chief engineer, Ferdinand de Lesseps, with fireworks and extravagant feasts. The driving forces behind these exhibitions were very different — one was an entrepreneur’s packaging of ancient Egypt into a leisure excursion for Londoners, the other evidence of Egyptian acquiescence to European pressure for enhanced trading routes; one was available for a middle-class, fee-paying popular British audience; the other to specially invited international guests traveling thousands of miles — but both were public displays that rendered Egypt, past and present, into a cultural and visual commodity for the West. Dickens’s final, unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), written during the excitement and controversy over the Suez Canal and drawing on both de Lesseps and Belzoni as partial models for the title character, is deeply aware of such Egypt-gazing, but Egypt’s presence within the novel is in fact highly unspectacular, almost invisible.

WHEN ENGLISHWOMAN ANNA SEWELL died in 1878 of an indeterminate chronic illness, she left a modest note among her papers which read: “I have for six years been confined to the house and to my sofa, and have from time to time, as I was able, been writing what I think will turn out a little book, its special aim being to induce kindness, sympathy and an understanding treatment of horses” (qtd. in Chitty 178). Published in 1877 just months before her death, the “little book” that Sewell wrote proved to be the sixth most popular work printed in the English language1; she entitled it Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse. Sewell’s sentimental tale charts the rise and fall of a beautiful thoroughbred gelding, Black Beauty, from the wholesome pastoral bliss of his early life on a landed estate to his ultimate degradation as a cab horse working the dirty, crowded streets of London. From among the many instances of physical abuse depicted in Black Beauty, Sewell isolates those incurred in the name of “Fashion” as the most pernicious, and her narrative passionately participates in what was at the time a heated public controversy: the application of the curb-bit and the bearing rein, two popular harnessing devices which held the horse’s head tightly erect, compelling the animal into contrived and painful postures for the purpose of appearances alone.

There is a delightful feeling when you are well mounted, that those who are casting admiring glances at your horse, will find your dress and “get-up” just as perfect in their way.

— Mrs. Alice Hayes, The Horsewoman, 1893

At no time are the beauties of the female form divine displayed with such witching grace, the faultless flowing lines so attractively posed, the tout ensemble so thoroughly patrician. But if there be one blot in the fair picture, the charm at once vanishes.

— E. Kerr, Riding for Ladies, 1895

THE VICTORIAN SIDESADDLE RIDING HABIT was a paradoxical garment. It was a fashionable anti-fashion statement, masculine and feminine, practical yet alluring. While on horseback, the fair equestrian shunned the lace, frills, and furbelows worn by her pedestrian sisters. Even when the bell-like silhouette produced by the crinoline skirt was at its greatest width, the essence of the horsewoman’s garb was a lean, understated, and almost masculine simplicity. She represented the epitome of cultivated elegance and cut a fine figure in her tailored habit and silk top hat. Clad in her severe attire, the horsewoman became a center of visual attention in Victorian England. Though she graced fewer pages than the traditional fashion plate, she put her stamp on paintings, photographs, and caricatures. Preceded by showy, colorful riding costumes and superseded by breeches, caught between the demands of Victorian femininity and rising feminism, the riding habit and the women who wore it were typical of and unique to their era. The modern horsewoman represents a turning point in the history of female dress. She adopted the first sports costume specifically designed for women and opened the way for the invention of other athletic garments like the bicycling suit. The riding habit’s combination of style and practicality launched the fashion for more gender-neutral, utilitarian garments and heralded the advent of the twentieth-century working woman’s uniform: the tailored suit.

AT THE GALLERY OF THE SOCIETY OF PAINTERS in Water Colours in Pall Mall East in the autumn of 1855, Roger Fenton exhibited three hundred and twelve photographs taken in the Crimea. Undertaken with the patronage of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and the Duke of Newcastle, the then Secretary of State for War, Fenton’s photographic record was intended to inform the Victorian public of the “true” condition of the soldiers in what was fast becoming an unpopular war. In the catalogue, one photograph bore the title “The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” a title with both biblical and literary resonances for exhibition audiences in late 1855.1 Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” had been published in the Examiner on 9 December 1854, causing a sensation both at home and in the Crimea.2 Organized around variations on the refrain “Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred,” the poem assumed anthem-like status during the period when Fenton was in the Crimea. Filtered through the lens of Tennyson’s poem, Fenton’s photograph appears to record the traces of a charge or a battle scene that has just taken place.

WHY ARE JANE EYRE AND DOROTHEA BROOKE clad by their creators in “Quakerish” garb? The oppositional plainness and simplicity of Quakerish heroines have often been read as signs of classlessness and sexlessness.1 Plain and simple clothing seems, to both Victorian and contemporary eyes, part of the package of reticence, reserve, and repression associated with the evangelical wing of nineteenth-century dissenting sects.2 The typical sociological view of the function of dress within conservative religious groups holds that “strict dress codes are enforced because dress is considered symbolic of religiosity. Hence dress becomes a symbol of social control as it controls the external body” (Arthur 1). The control of female sexuality and the restraint of desire would seem to be the core function of modest clothing. Then the plain dress of some of the liveliest heroines of Victorian fiction presents a puzzle that can be solved only by recuperating the meaning of that clothing for Victorians. As fashion historian Anne Hollander points out, nineteenth-century novels testify to the way that clothes “always correctly express character” (Feeding the Eye 12), but the meaning of particular articles of clothing or styles can slip away. Accurately reading the characters of Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot thus requires careful interpretation of their dress, in this case reversing the conventional reading of their plain, modest, and simple style. This essay argues that Quakerish clothing expresses both a promise of spirited sexuality and an admonition about the class-crossing potential of the respectable female contained within it.

THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU (1896) is a richly confused novel, and its complexities and mixed agendas constitute one reason why this remarkable enactment of ideas and theories has received so much, and such varied, critical attention. Its generic, psychological, and thematic disorder does not stand out as much as it might, however, because confusion itself — biological, ethical, epistemological — is one of its subjects.1 Furthermore, the text begins with great and misleading attention to accuracy, precision, and narrative control. First, Charles Edward Prendick introduces the manuscript of his now deceased uncle, Edward Prendick, starting with these details: “On February the First, 1887, the Lady Vain was lost by collision with a derelict when about the latitude 1° S. and longitude 107° W” (3; Intro.). When Edward Prendick commences the story proper, he begins with similar exactitude, stating what “every one knows” — that “the Lady Vain . . . collided with a derelict when ten days out from Callao. The long-boat, with seven of the crew, was picked up eighteen days after by H. M. gunboat Myrtle” (4; ch. 1). He then shifts to private knowledge: although four men in the ship’s dinghy were thought to have perished, there were actually only three men in the boat, with he himself as the sole survivor of that group.