Belle vue zoo, founded in 1836, both celebrated and replicated the industrial surroundings of Manchester. Looking at the Zoo from a distance, people in the mid-nineteenth century would have remarked upon the establishment's dazzling grounds, illuminated either by Belle Vue's own gas works or by the electricity powered by its robust generators. They also would have caught sight of the zoo's buildings, humming with the action of the steam-driven machines within. By utilizing the most up-to-date technology, Belle Vue was an extension of its neighboring manufacturing city.

Midway through the old curiosity shop (1840–41), Quilp returns home to discover his own wake in progress upstairs. He has been absent for three days, dogging the footsteps of the friends and family searching for Nell: materializing at Little Bethel, the chapel Kit's mother attends, or rising from the larder of the inn to which the single gentleman and Kit's mother retire after discovering from Mrs. Jarley that they have just missed Nell. Quilp's wife, having heard nothing from him all this time, has concluded that he has drowned, and so Quilp finds her, her mother, and the lawyer Sampson Brass at work on a descriptive advertisement for his corpse. As Quilp looks on, the group insultingly anatomizes him – “Large head, short body, legs crooked” (Dickens 382; ch. 49) – a process punctuated by the slightly inebriated Brass's musings on the afterlife to which the dwarf might have flown. Brass considers the possibility that the recently deceased might be at that moment watching from the next world, and this thought leads to another platitude about the dead:

This essay examines the floral telegraph; A New Mode of Communication by Floral Signals, a rare Victorian novel published anonymously in 1836 and reprinted in 1850 with a new tagline – The Floral Telegraph; Or, Affection's Signals. The reprint includes an ascription to Captain Frederick Marryat, Royal Navy (1792–1848) (See Figure 5). The majority of Marryat's biographers, scholars, and archivists have doubted the posthumous ascription. Here, I challenge the critical consensus and argue that Marryat did indeed write The Floral Telegraph published in 1836 and that the attribution of 1850 is correct. I begin with a biographical sketch of Marryat, a brief synopsis of the novel, and a review of its scant, mostly skeptical reception. I then argue that the “floral code” presented in the text resembles (albeit through parody) Marryat's famous codebook for maritime flag signals and that the Captain's acknowledged interest in botany and horticulture gave him the fluency necessary to create the Table of Flowers (See Figure 6). In addition, Marryat had a strong relationship with the novel's publisher, Saunders and Otley, and he was the editor of the Metropolitan, a literary magazine which ran a favorable review shortly after The Floral Telegraph was first published. The narrative also reflects Marryat's stylistic tendency to satire and parody and his ideas about literacy and widespread publication seem to be inversely reflected in the ironic digressions of the unreliable narrator, Horace Honeycomb, and the diatribe against the “cursed and abominable art of Printing” (117) offered by the inventor of the floral code, Floribel. I conclude my essay by viewing The Floral Telegraph as representative of early Victorian issues of literacy, affect, and disembodied, long-distance communication in the age immediately preceding the advent of the electromagnetic telegraph.

When the 1851 census reported an “excess” of some half-million women in Britain, feminists and anti-feminists quickly took to the press to debate the implications of the demographic imbalance. Yet Victorian novelists also wishing to convey and alter the “Condition of England” experienced something of a quandary: How should fiction respond to news of the imbalance, and what options could be suggested for resolving it?

In the opening passage of A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf catches herself, and is subsequently caught out, in a moment of reflection on the banks of a river, within the grounds of a barely fictionalised “Oxbridge University”:

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).

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).

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.