This chapter analyzes the redistribution of the Romantic sublime in Victorian culture. Contrary to the assumption that the Victorians seem to have neglected the sublime, it shows how the concept was unpacked into a busy metonymy, first by Thomas Carlyle when he speaks of inverse sublimity. A fit for the world disassembled by the Industrial Revolution and for Charles Lyell’s geology of ongoing planetary transformation, Carlyle’s metonymy heralds the Victorian chthonic sublime, a structure of feeling where affect, once bound in awe, terror and rupture, is reclaimed for melancholia and tasked with the work of mourning. It is a work that finds an emphatic articulation in John Ruskin’s aesthetics and art history, notably in his theory of pathetic fallacy, and in Matthew Arnold’s poetry and criticism, especially in the concept of touchstone, with important critical footholds in the Victorian industrial novel, evolutionary theory and Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry.

It is a point of some controversy whether we can call the Ireland of the nineteenth-century ‘Victorian’, for all that Victoria was its head of state within the United Kingdom. While not a state in itself, Ireland was certainly going through what William Carleton called in 1842 a ‘transition state’. There is much that is preliminary, provisional or even experimental about the writing of nineteenth-century Ireland, caught between Romanticism and Revival and never fully accounted for in the mainstream of Victorian literary history. The writing, too, was not located solely in Ireland: famine and mass emigration meant that the Irish found themselves in the United States, Australia or India, both as participants in decolonising movements or as servants of Empire. This chapter surveys the twin location of Irish literature, nationalist and diasporic. It focuses on the work of Carleton and Jane Elgee (Speranza) while also introducing many of the themes and authors which are the subject matter of the pages that follow.