Recent guidebooks for the Westerner traveling to Northern India generally refer the prospective visitor to a common range of cities around Delhi – Agra, Jaipur, and Udaipur; within these, the Taj Mahal, Jaipur's Pink City and nearby Amber Fort, and Udaipur's glamorous lake palaces usually merit must-see status. Until its refurbishment a few years ago, the Albert Hall Museum, an elaborate structure with old-fashioned interiors and a location a kilometer south of Jaipur's city center, ranked as a second- or even third-tier tourist attraction; travel guides from recent years mention it with indifference, describing its collections as “dusty” and “fine, if carelessly exhibited” (Bindloss and Singh 170), or even suggesting that “a slow circular turn around the building in a car will suffice” (Frommers 520). Yet a century ago the Museum proudly occupied a primary place in British travel guides to India. It opened with ceremony and fanfare in 1887, and by 1898 almost three million Indian and over ten thousand European visitors had passed through its doors (Hendley, Report 9). A striking example of colonial architecture, constructed of white stone with numerous courtyards, covered walkways, and ornamented domes (Figure 1), it was regarded as perhaps the most noteworthy edifice within a noteworthy Indian city. Thomas Holbein Hendley, resident Surgeon-Major in Jaipur, chief curator for the 1883 Jaipur Exhibition, and the Albert Hall Museum's Secretary and tireless champion, recommended that travelers in Jaipur for a single day make two visits, both morning and evening, to the site, and that those with an additional day to spend in the city schedule a third visit. Murray's Handbook for Travellers in India, Burma and Ceylon concurred, describing it as “a beautiful museum – an Oriental South Kensington, suitably housed” (174), and just after the turn of the century, English journalist Sidney Low recalled that it was “the best museum, with one exception, in all India, a museum which, in the careful selection and the judicious arrangement of its contents, is a model of what such an institution ought to be” (114).

Accounting for the prevalence of enmity in nineteenth-century Western culture, Peter Gay evinces some surprise at the tenacious grip of the meek upon their aggression, which appears to satisfy a basic necessity of life. Uriah Heep alone attests to the harmony between Charles Dickens's social imagination and Gay's critical assessment that the Victorians had cause to treat their self-effacing neighbors with as much caution as the bellicose. But what about the more resignedly “umble” and solemnly self-diminishing denizens of Dickens's fictional world: the good girls at the center of so many novels? Why do aggression and resentment seem less compatible with their humility than with Heep's? Because, I would suggest, they are little. Littleness is certainly an idealized quality of girls in Dickens's novels. In particular, Nell Trent and Amy Dorrit share the epithet “little” as an indication of their preciousness, physical smallness, modesty, and, most importantly, self-abnegation in service of others. As a number of critics have observed, this selflessness takes many forms, including starvation, over-work, and self-erasure. Such extremes of compassionate resolve and willful self-limitation, however, intimate the strictness of the nice girl and the difficulty of measuring up to her (as a) standard. Dickens himself set this bar – if not precisely high, at so low a level as to require painstaking self-contortion to pass under it – in an 1847 speech to the Mechanics’ Institution at Leeds where he described women as “those who are our best and dearest friends in infancy, in childhood, in manhood, and in old age, the most devoted and least selfish natures that we know on earth, who turn to us always constant and unchanged, when others turn away” (Fielding 83). This definition of the best feminine endowments recognizes no difference between girls and women, because the female half of the human population remains “constant and unchanged” in service of male needs. Although Dickens calls upon women to be the bigger person in a moral sense, for girls, growing up appears a matter of remaining little, selfless, “constant.” For good self-effacing Victorian girls like Little Nell and Little Dorrit, aggression thus is necessary because enforcing self-negation requires enormous will power, but also perhaps because aggression guards the last modicum of selfhood belonging to those for whom selflessness is socially prescribed.

For much of the twentieth century, literary criticism tended to be relatively dismissive of Anne Brontë's novels. While recent scholarship has argued for the complexity of gender and class dynamics in Agnes Grey (1847), there is little consensus as to what, precisely, those dynamics are. Elizabeth Hollis Berry suggests that Agnes “takes charge of her life” (58), and Maria H. Frawley argues that her narrative is a “significant statement of self-empowerment” (116). Maggie Berg and Dara Rossman Regaignon, however, highlight the continued subjugation of Agnes in the course of her narrative. These scholars’ divergent readings demonstrate how Agnes Grey and Agnes Grey can be read both as illustrative of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has famously described as the nineteenth century “female individualist” (307), and as instructive of the social strictures that circumscribed this identity. In this essay, I outline how shame works in and through the novel to bridge these opposing readings.

In the past twenty years, given the burgeoning field of postcolonial studies and its inquiry into the identity politics of race, ethnicity, and imperialism, significantly more critical attention has been paid to Charlotte Brontë's portrayal of Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre (1847) than in the prior one hundred and forty years of Brontë scholarship. While in The Madwoman and the Attic (1979), Gilbert and Gubar present an earlier reading of Bertha as “Jane's truest and darkest double” (360), any reading of Bertha's darkest in terms of a cultural or racialized identity came about in later criticism. Gayatri Spivak was instrumental in positioning Bertha within a discourse of imperialism rather than reading her merely in psychological terms, which then precipitated more recent studies on Bertha's colonial heritage, her financial and cultural imperialist inheritance and her ambiguous ethnic status as a Creole women. Contemporary critics have also addressed how Rochester in a sense becomes Bertha's “truest and darkest double.” However, his darkness has proven to be far more quizzical, for unlike Bertha he is neither Creole nor raised in the West Indies; quite to the contrary, Rochester was desired by the Masons precisely because of his heritage, being “of a good race.” Still, as readers, we have had to grapple with Brontë's numerous descriptions of Rochester's dark visage.

By now, arguments about the familiarity of realism in general, and the novels of Anthony Trollope in particular, are themselves familiar. D. A. Miller's suggestion that the “easy chair” is “still the most likely place to read Trollope” because such a location is congenial to novels that allow one to fall “into the usual appreciation of his appreciation of the usual” is the touchstone of such arguments (107). In Trollope's own day, reviewers and commentators did not use the term “the usual” to describe the domain of his novels, but they convey the same notion as Miller by maintaining that the transparency of his novels creates verisimilitude. What follows here suggests that an “easy chair” is not “the most likely place” to read Trollope. I reveal the surprising extent to which Trollope himself investigates and thinks at length about “the usual,” instead of merely allowing his reader to “appreciate” the transparency of his novels, by attending to his ideas about classical perspective in relationship to the novel form. I focus on Trollope's complicated relationship to issues of classical perspective because the transparency of his novels described by his contemporaries continues into today's critical descriptions of his novels as the domain of the ordinary, the everyday, and the familiar. Such descriptions, however, do not fully illuminate Trollope's own complicated relationship to issues of perspective. I throw Trollope's own ideas on perspective into full relief in an effort to disrupt accounts of his work that emphasize its natural qualities. On the one hand, Trollope's work is described by contemporaries as perspectival, and his own comments in his Autobiography and his handling of issues of intimacy in his novels demonstrate what he sees as the virtues of perspectivalism. Foremost among those virtues is the ability of perspectivalism to abstract its observer, which is confirmed as Trollope accomplishes a universal, generalized intimacy with characters that is felt by the author, the narrator, and the reader. By attempting to align readerly, authorial, and narratorial perception, Trollope works to recreate the “objective ground of visual truth” that a classical model of vision supplied (Crary, Techniques 14). Nevertheless, he worries about issues of point of view. Perspectivalism relies on its viewer's attitude in a particular position. That is, in its ideal form, pictorial perspectivalism allows any viewer who inhabits a particular position to see the same objects and to see them in the same way as any other viewer. In this sense, perspectivalism depersonalizes and abstracts the observer because it does not rely on the individuality of any particular observer. Trollope, however, fears that this impersonal model of the observer creates a vacuum that the personality of a particular observer fills. The narrator is the name Trollope gives to the personality that fills the vacuum, which Trollope fears indicates that his novels are subjective and represent only one way of understanding the world. In such a case, the point of view that characterizes his novels is not familiar – as we are accustomed to believe – because it represents the everyday world. Trollope believes that because novels are oriented from the narrator's point of view, the catholicity implied by pictorial perspectivalism is not available to the novel. The presence of a narrator, to Trollope's mind, veers the novel away from the objectivity to which perspectivalism seems a means. As Trollope notes fundamental differences between novelistic and pictorial point of view, we see that he himself did not consider his novels as natural or naturalizing.

In the nineteenth century Britain underwent a period of immense religious doubt and spiritual instability, prompted in part by German biblical criticism, the development of advanced geological and evolutionary ideas forwarded by men such as Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, and the crisis in faith demonstrated by many high profile Church members, particularly John Henry Newman's conversion to Catholicism in 1845. In tracing the development of this religious disbelief, historian Owen Chadwick comments that “mid-Victorian England asked itself the question, for the first time in popular understanding, is Christian faith true?” (Victorian Church: Part I 1). Noting the impact of the 1859 publication of Darwin's Origin of Species and the multi-authored collection Essays and Reviews in 1860, Chadwick further posits that “part of the traditional teaching of the Christian churches was being proved, little by little, to be untrue” (Victorian Church: Part I 88). As the theological debate over the truth of the Bible intensified so did the question of how to reach, preach, and convert the urbanized and empowered working and middle classes. Indicative of this debate was the immense popularity of the Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon, who was commonly referred to as the “Prince of Preachers.” Spurgeon exploded onto the religious scene in the mid-1850s and his theatrical and expressive form of oratory polarized mid-Victorian society as to the proper, most effective mode of preaching. In print culture, the emergence of the religious periodical Good Words, with its unique fusion of spiritual and secular material contributed by authors from an array of denominations, demonstrated a concurrent re-evaluation within the religious press of the evolving methods of disseminating religious discourse. The 1864 serialization of Ellen Wood's Oswald Cray in Good Words emphasizes the magazine's interest in combining and synthesizing religious and popular material as a means of revitalizing interest in religious sentiment. In 1860 Wood's novel East Lynne was critically categorized as one of the first sensation novels of the 1860s, a decade in which “sensational” became the modifier of the age. Wood, alongside Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, was subsequently referred to as one of the original creators of sensation fiction, a genre frequently denigrated as scandalous and immoral. Oswald Cray, however, sits snugly among the sermons, parables, and social mission essays that fill the pages of Good Words.

Gothic stories and fictionalized travel accounts featuring dangerous exotic plants appeared throughout the nineteenth century and were especially prevalent at the fin de siècle. As the century progressed and the public's fascination with these narratives grew, fictional plants underwent a narrative evolution. By the end of the Victorian period, deadly plants had been transformed from passive poisoners into active carnivores. Stories about man-eating trees, among the most popular of the deadly plant tales, reflect this narrative progression. The trope of the man-eating tree developed out of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century accounts of a much less dangerous plant: the Javanese upas. Tales about the upas described the tree as having a poisonous atmosphere which killed every living thing within a several mile radius. The existence of this plant was first reported by a Dutch surgeon named Foersch in a 1783 article published in the London Magazine, and the story was recounted several times throughout the century (“The Valley of Poison” 46). A typical account of the popular tale would highlight the exotic location and the mysterious power of the tree:

The questions that The Ring and Book (1868–69) raises regarding truth, perception, and testimony have long concerned critics. However, few critics have given particular focus to the role that memory plays in the poem. While The Ring and the Book was not the first piece of literature to offer different narrations of the same event, Robert Browning's introduction of at least ten iterations or perspectives (depending on how you count) of the same narrative within one work remains unique. The legal system is very much in view throughout the text of the poem, and so the nature of testimony as a component of the legal process is integral to our consideration of The Ring and the Book. Specifically, shifting attitudes about legal testimony in the nineteenth century make memory particularly important for any study of testimony in the poem. In his multivolume work The Rationale of Judicial Evidence (1827), Jeremy Bentham gives special consideration to the composition of testimony, which he argues consists of four elements: perception, judgment, memory, and expression (155). Bentham's work recognized that testimony was not a simple matter of truth and falsehood, but that the faculties of the witness were intimately intertwined with testimony. However, contemporary critics have tended to focus on perception and expression (language), while memory has remained mostly unexamined.

As Jan Assmann writes, the concept of “cultural memory” both “draws our attention to the role of the past in constituting our world” and also investigates “the motives that prompt our recourse to it” (ix). Cultural memory is transmitted through a variety of mediators ranging from texts and images to commemorative sites, whose complex aesthetic and ideological configurations – whether associated with trauma or glory – are a source of great interest. In his New Science (1725–44), Giambattista Vico claimed that “humanitas in Latin comes first and properly from humando” (8), highlighting the importance burial rituals had in the creation of civilised society. The commemoration of the dead is indeed at the core of cultural memory as the foundation on which the social compact between the living and the dead rests.

Over the past few decades, intellectual historians and political theorists have begun to uncover the immense influence Auguste Comte's Positivist ideology exerted on Victorian culture, which attracted sympathisers such as John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, Beatrice Webb, and William Morris (Bevir 57; Varouxakis 100–18; Wright 135, 175–220). Until recently, scholars believed that, within Comte's prolific society of British followers, Vernon Lushington was merely a sympathiser of the movement's aesthetic and literary culture. While many will appreciate that recent accounts of Lushington's life have revealed that he was a “complete” Positivist, or adherent to the Religion of Humanity, few have had an opportunity to examine his position in relation to Comte's prototype for civic reconstruction (Taylor 339–40; Vogeler 163–69). In his four-volume System of Positive Polity (1848–1854), Comte referred to this scheme for pan-European peace as the “Republic of the West.” The extent to which Lushington's work may be read as disseminating this republican city-state system as an inevitable, if not realisable, edifice has remained less clear than others within the circles of British Positivism.

Presented here for the first time since their publication over a century ago are two previously unknown, undocumented periodical writings by Bram Stoker (1847–1912). To be sure, this discovery underscores Richard Dalby's assertion, shared too by his co-author, William Hughes, in Bram Stoker: A Bibliography (2004), that “more of [Stoker's] ephemeral stories and articles may still be awaiting discovery in obscure newspapers and magazines” (“Quest for Bram Stoker” 12). But more still, for one like Stoker whose shorter literary works, outside of “Dracula's Guest” (1913), lie on the periphery of a legacy that for many offers little distinction from the world's greatest of vampire narratives, the necessity to examine his periodical writings is twofold. For one, it will aid in the task of elucidating Stoker-as-writer; but more critically, it will allow us to engage in dialogue with scholars like Richard Dalby, William Hughes, and others who call into question our insistent tunnel view of Dracula as Stoker's only legacy worthy of consideration.

In this article, the 3rd sentence (on the first page) is not grammatically correct. We are reproducing the paragraph for completeness.

IN THE PAST TWENTY YEARS, GIVEN THE burgeoning field of postcolonial studies and its inquiry into the identity politics of race, ethnicity, and imperialism, significantly more critical attention has been paid to Charlotte Brontë's portrayal of Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre (1847) than in the prior one hundred and forty years of Brontë scholarship. While in The Madwoman and the Attic (1979), Gilbert and Gubar present an earlier reading of Bertha as “Jane's truest and darkest double” (360), any reading of Bertha's darkest in terms of a cultural or racialized identity came about in later criticism. Gayatri Spivak was instrumental in positioning Bertha within a discourse of imperialism rather than reading her merely in psychological terms, which then precipitated more recent studies on Bertha's colonial heritage, her financial and cultural imperialist inheritance and her ambiguous ethnic status as a Creole woman.1 Contemporary critics have also addressed how Rochester in a sense becomes Bertha's “truest and darkest double.” However, his darkness has proven to be far more quizzical, for unlike Bertha he is neither Creole nor raised in the West Indies; quite to the contrary, Rochester was desired by the Masons precisely because of his heritage, being “of a good race.”2 Still, as readers, we have had to grapple with Brontë's numerous descriptions of Rochester's dark visage.