The collision I explore in this essay is not a physical one, though it does emerge from a performance event that brought Ditchers (European residents in Calcutta) and Jack Tars (sailors in the Royal Navy) to the Calcutta Lyric Theatre on February 25, 1858. The collision actually manifests in print, as conflicting reviews of this event. Announced in the silk playbill pictured in Figure 19, the sailor amateurs of HMS Chesapeake offered a benefit theatrical to raise money for the Indian Relief Fund, a charity offering support to “widows, orphans, or other representatives of those who perished in the mutiny” (“Indian Relief”) (Figure 19).

Victorian travelers in colonial contexts encountered differences in landscape, mores and manners, society, politics and culture, among other things, and registered their responses to the places visited in their published travel books for the home audience. Postcolonial critics contend that exoticism, i.e., a Western traveler's response to and description of the differences encountered in the context of travel, was deeply informed by the asymmetrical power relation between the representer/colonizer and the represented/colonized. As a result, these critics argue, exoticism in colonial travel writing was appropriative since it tended to construct the dichotomy of self/other in such a way as to justify imperial interventions in other countries (Forsdick, “Sa(L)Vaging Exoticism” 30–34; Said 1–28). As Graham Huggan rightly argues, difference of the colonial other in its various aspects was denigrated and dismissed as exotic when “translated into the master code of empire,” since it superimposed “a dominant way of seeing, speaking and thinking onto marginalised peoples” (24).

In 1827, Josiah Harlan, a Quaker from Chester County, Pennsylvania, set up camp just south of the border of the Punjab region of India. He rummaged up a ragtag army of Muslim, Hindu, Afghan, and Akali Sikh mercenaries, and with Old Glory flying above him, he and his army started their journey, along with a caravan of saddle horses, camels, carriage cattle, and a royal mace bearer to announce the coming of the would-be American king. With Alexander the Great's march through the same lands twenty-one centuries earlier very much on his mind (Macintyre 40), Harlan set out – under the auspices of restoring the exiled Afghan monarch Shah Shujah to the throne – determined to win power and fame for himself. Disguising himself as a Muslim holy man and at times using brute force, he crossed the Afghan border and ultimately became the Prince of Ghor under secret treaty (227). By 1839, loyal not to Shah Shujah but to his enemy, Dost Mohammed Khan, Harlan returned to his Kabul home to find that the British had seized his property “by right of conquest” (252). Harlan left Kabul, fully intending to return and reclaim his princely title. Once back in the United States, Harlan proposed various schemes to the U.S. government (for which he would be the emissary, of course), including an Afghanistan-U.S. camel trade and grape trade, neither of which succeeded. Harlan penned a memoir that the British lambasted – unsurprisingly, for it sharply criticized the British presence in Afghanistan. In 1862, at the age of sixty-two, with no formal rank or U.S. military experience, Harlan became the colonel of Harlan's Light Cavalry, fighting on the side of the Union in the Civil War (Macintyre 275). Too weak to perform his duties, he left the army the same year, wandered the U.S. aimlessly, and died in 1871, buried “after a funeral without mourners” (286).

The concept of “The Irish Wilde” achieved considerable prominence during the 1990s, due to the advocacy and scholarship of Davis Coakley, Owen Dudley Edwards, Declan Kiberd, Jerusha McCormack, Richard Pine, and David Upchurch, among others. However, as the decade drew to a close, the scholarly calibration of distinctively Irish elements in Wilde's literary works began to become a matter of dispute. In his 2000 survey of emerging trends, Ian Small listed “The Irish Wilde,” along with “The Gay Wilde” and “Wilde & Consumerism,” as significant “recent paradigms” (Recent 38, 37-78). Nonetheless, he cautioned that such thematic pigeonholes as Irishness and gayness may “rely upon highly selective details of the life which in turn are used to instruct us in how to read the works” (7). Small's wariness resurfaced in his judgment that some contributions in McCormack's anthology Wilde the Irishman “are highly speculative and seem to strain to make connections,” so that “the ‘Irish dimension’ (for the want of a better term) seems rather gratuitously tacked on” (67). These reservations about methodology were subsequently echoed by Bruce Bashford, who critiqued the strategy of “reasoning by analogy” employed by Kiberd and Pine in their attempts to Hibernicize Wilde's works (617).

‘“Sincerity’ Is Not Enough”: “Drood,” Drood, and Victorian Camp

CAROLINE REITZ

A Strange Magic: Gustave Moreau's Salome

RICHARD L. STEIN

Victorian Sentimentality at Tate Britain

CAROLYN BURDETT

Pre-Raphaelites in London and Washington

HERBERT SUSSMAN

Much of the critical writing on Queer Theory and Sexuality Studies in a Victorian context over the last decade or so has been absorbing, exploring, complicating, and working under the burden of the influence of Michel Foucault's theoretical writings on erotic relations and identity. The first volume of Foucault's The History of Sexuality (1978), in fact, had begun with a gauntlet thrown down before Victorian Studies, a chapter-long critique of Steven Marcus's The Other Victorians (1966), a work that had offered an entirely new and at the time, quite bold avenue of exploring nineteenth-century culture – namely, through the pornographic imagination that Marcus taxonomized with precise, clinical flair as a “pornotopia” in which “all men . . . are always infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or both. Everyone is always ready for everything” (276). In Foucault's telling, however, Marcus demonstrated a theoretically impoverished faith in Freudian models of “repression” in Marcus's examination of “underground” Victorian sexualities. It was Marcus's reliance on the “repressive fallacy,” his conviction that there existed a demarcated spatial and psychic Victorian counter-world that The History of Sexuality had so forcefully undermined.

In his groundbreaking study of Victorian pornography, The Other Victorians, Steven Marcus draws on passages from The Romance of Lust (1873–76) to elucidate his now-famous term, “pornotopia.” To Marcus's mind, this text, like other pornographic novels, has few, if any, redeeming features. While the literary novel fleshes out the lives of its characters, pornography dwells endlessly on fleshly relations, he argues. Pornography, in fact, tends towards utopian fantasy, towards pornotopia. “More than most utopias,” says Marcus, “pornography takes the injunction of its etymology literally – it may be said largely to exist at no place, and to take place in nowhere” (268). In a pornotopia, time is always bedtime (269), life begins not at birth but at the moment of sexual awakening (270), and relations between characters are merely juxtapositions of bodies, body parts, and organs (274). Introducing an orgy scene from The Romance of Lust, Marcus asserts, “[t]his novel comes as close as anything I know to being a pure pornotopia in the sense that almost every human consideration apart from sexuality is excluded from it” (274). Pornography's lack, that is, its apparent disconnection from realistic settings and human relations, is a consequence and sign of human deprivation. “Pornotopia could in fact only have been imagined by persons who have suffered extreme deprivation,” he holds, “and I do not by this mean sexual deprivation in the genital sense alone. . . . The insatiability depicted in it seems to me to be literal insatiability, and the orgies endlessly represented are the visions of permanently hungry men” (273). Thus, “[i]nside of every pornographer there is an infant screaming for the breast from which he has been torn” (274).

The History of Little Henry and His Bearer (1814), an Evangelical tract, was published on the heels of the Charter Act of 1813, an act of Parliament of the United Kingdom that introduced more regulation of the East India Company and legalized missionary work in India. The act implicitly rationalized expanding British dominance, invoking the moral mission to save the heathen. Little Henry captures this zeitgeist and was received enthusiastically by a readership newly interested in additional imperial expansion as a means of bringing civilization to the colonial world (Regaignon 89).

In the opening chapter of Charlotte Mary Yonge's The Clever Woman of the Family, six-year-old Francis Temple, on first having “the pebbly beach, bathing machines and fishing boats” of the English seaside pointed out to him, judges it all to be “ugly and cold.” “I shall go home to Melbourne when I am a man,” he declares (53; ch. 1). This early and unfavourable contrast between England and one of its colonies exemplifies the novel's larger project of judging England and English society through values established in colonial locales, a project that reaches its apogee when Francis and his older brother Conrade judge the conduct of a cruel and duplicitous Englishwoman to be “as bad as the Sepoys” and thus hope that she will be “blown from the mouth of a cannon” (340, 342; ch. 18). While the narrator comments that here the children exhibit “some confusion between mutineers and Englishwomen,” the narrative in its entirety suggests that such “confusion” is founded on a reasonably astute appraisal of colonial history and contemporary English society (342; ch. 18). Published in 1865, with memories of the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857–59 fresh in the public's mind, The Clever Woman of the Family is a critique of contemporary England and English values viewed through a colonial and military lens. More particularly, the novel records the after effects of the “Mutiny” – when sepoys were indeed “blown from the mouth of a cannon” – on early 1860s England, as characters shaped by the “Indian war” and bearing scars both physical and emotional flock home to the small English seaside town of Avonmouth (120; ch. 5). These characters, all associated with the British Army, were involved in some of the key events of the “Mutiny,” such as the siege of Delhi, and include in their number a young wounded war hero, Captain Alick Keith, winner of the Victoria Cross. The novel's older hero is Colonel Colin Keith, also recovering from wounds sustained in India. Under his protection is Lady Fanny Temple, widow of General Sir Stephen Temple, with her seven young children born, severally, in the Cape Colony, India and Australia. Together these characters – shaped by their experiences in the empire and the army – confront and then transform the England to which they return.

Over the last thirty years the growing academic interest in both Victorian periodicals and women's issues in the nineteenth century has focussed interest on the women journalists who wrote for the serious quarterlies and monthlies published during this period. The part played by such writers as Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Eastlake, and Frances Power Cobbe in the development of Victorian thought is now well known, while that of less prolific contributors is increasingly attracting scholarly attention. One of the authors gradually being rescued from oblivion is Anne Mozley (1809–1891), with her views on both contemporary literature and debates about the social position of women being seen as of interest.

In a telling moment in the 1899 account of her life in India, Edith Maturin describes fighting off a potential attacker who attempts to enter her bedroom in the middle of the night. Because she is staying overnight in a remote cabin, she has only the nominal protection of “the Government-chosen khansamah [head servant] and chokey-dar [watchman]” (364). Lying awake, she looks up to find “a huge black man” peering in through the door with an “odiously fiendish expression” (364). Having anticipated such an attack, she is armed with her son's pop gun, and when she spots the intruder, she scares him away by firing it off: “I sat up, took the pistol, and pointed it at him. He saw me distinctly, and ducked as I fired. Then away he went! I put another cap in the toy pistol, and, running to the door, opened it, and fired again and again” (“Chamba Cinderella” 364) (Figure 21).

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838–94) is widely recognized as one of the preeminent novelists of nineteenth-century India. A literary forerunner of the much-celebrated Rabindranath Tagore, he authored fourteen Bengali novels which set the benchmark for Bengal's foray into novelistic territory. Bankim acquired national and international repute over the course of his lifetime, and not only were his novels translated into other Indian languages over the course of the nineteenth century, but translations of his work also appeared in Russia from as early as the 1870s (Novikova ii). While Bankim's fame rests on the strength of his Bengali writings multiply translated as they were, his first novel, Rajmohan's Wife (1864), was written in English. Interestingly, Rajmohan's Wife, usually considered the first Indian novel in English, is now seldom read, a neglect replicating the scant attention that the novel garnered when it was first serialized in the 1860s.

Like many Anglo-Indian novelists of her generation, Alice Perrin (1867–1934) gained fame through the publication and popular reception of several domestic novels based in India and England. However, within the traditional Anglo-Indian romance plot, Perrin often incorporated subversive social messages highlighting racial and cultural problems prevalent in India during the British Raj. Instead of relying solely on one-dimensional, sentimental British heroes and heroines, Perrin frequently chose non-British protagonists who reminded her contemporary readers of very real Anglo-Indian racial inequalities they might wish to forget. In The Stronger Claim (1903), Perrin creates a main character who has a mixed-race background, but who, contrary to prevailing public opinion of the time, is a multi-dimensional, complex, and perhaps most importantly, sympathetic character positioned between two worlds. Even as Victorian India was coming to an end, many of the problems that had plagued the British Raj intensified in the early decades of the twentieth century. Perrin's novel is one of the earliest attempts to present a sympathetic and heroic mixed-race protagonist, one whose presence asked readers to question the lasting negative effects of race relations and racial identity in both India and England.

The oriental ballet is typically associated with modern dance, Russia, and the nonpareil dancers Vaslav Nijinsky, Michel Fokine, Anna Pavlova, and Ruth St. Denis. One of the most excerpted of all classical ballets and considered the first example of the abstract form in modern dance is the “Kingdom of the Shades” sequence in Marius Petipa's La Bayadère, featuring thirty-two ghosts of Hindu temple dancers dressed in white entering the stage one by one with a simple arabesque cambre. What people often forget is that La Bayadère was a huge sensation in Europe during the romantic ballet years – the 1830s and 40s – 50 plus years before the Ballets Russes and a full generation before Petipa's 1877 production, which most assume to be the ballet's original. This and other grand operas and ballets of its kind – Lalla Rookh, Les Orientales, Le Corsair, La Peri, La Paquita, Revolt of the Harem – took romanticism beyond the pale in terms of visual extravagance; elaborate water systems were installed to depict bathing scenes and shipwrecks, and live horses and elephants brought onto the stage to add verisimilitude to the Eastern spectacle.