Criticism on Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872) has noted the strong contrasts Collins sets up between binaries such as sight and touch and able-bodiedness and disability. This article proposes that these structuring binaries cohere around three interdependent “problems of knowing”: the near-incommunicability of subjective, embodied experience; the ways in which sensory hierarchies transform normative forms of knowledge into totalizing forms of knowing; and, lastly, the problems of knowing inherent in narrative depictions of lived experience. While sensation fiction has been increasingly reexamined and revalued, much of the radical potential of its embodied reading techniques remains to be explored. This article argues that Poor Miss Finch seeks to bridge the gap created by the three problems of knowing, drawing on sensation fiction’s formal features of melodrama and sudden disruptions of domesticity to create moments of sensory disorientation and heightened affect, enabling imaginative immersion in nonnormative embodied and perceptual experiences.
The papers of Benjamin Disraeli in the Bodleian Library contain a remarkable sequence of letters by a young woman from Vienna: the writer, translator, and journalist Bettina Wirth (1849-1926). Sent to Disraeli between 1879 and 1881, they are fascinating documents that are more than just a record of ardent hero-worship and romantic projection. They offer revealing insights not only into the gendered dynamics of fandom and cultural mediation but also into the ambivalent position of the professional woman writer in nineteenth-century literary culture, oscillating between normative femininity and emancipatory self-assertion. Themselves border-crossing objects, Wirth's letters give us a sense of how transnational practices, such as multilingualism, network-building, and translation, could be strategically employed to forge a career during a period in which the sphere of cultural production enabled new degrees of female literary professionalism. Wirth's cultural mediatorship between German- and English-speaking cultural contexts enriches our understanding of the shifts, manifestations, and complexities of professional female authorship in a transnationally connected literary marketplace in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It points toward a new female writerly persona strategically built around cosmopolitan career trajectories and the (often flawed) forms of agency they entailed.
Unrequited love is the largest of the many disappointments in Great Expectations. The revised ending may or may not relieve readers of the burden of imagining a permanently thwarted Pip; the centrality of unrequited love is more than thematic, and goes far beyond the protagonist's desperate love and its fate at the novel's end. As the most salutary effect of unrequited love may be its securing of perception from an omnipotence that would reduce it to hallucination, disappointment paradoxically "grounds" the subject of Bildung by thwarting the unification of character and first-person narrator toward which the development ostensibly aims. The question of unrequited love thus brings into focus that literally exorbitant constitution of the subject-and the particular canniness of Dickens's novel in rendering a structure common to the narration of development.
This article examines the relationship between experiences of mental ill health in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's life and the representations of insanity in her fiction. It discusses the response of the periodical press to the famous sensation novelist's illness and disappearance from public view in 1869, which reveal the cultural stigmas around psychological distress and confinement in asylums, despite the prevalence of mental ill health in the period. Examples from a range of novels across Braddon's career are discussed to trace the development of her literary treatment of "madness" and asylums. I contend that this representation becomes more informed and sensitive following her own experience of mental ill health. The article considers the place of the private lunatic asylum in the lives of the mid-Victorian middle classes, focusing particularly on Brooke House, the Metropolitan Licensed House in which it is suggested for the first time that Braddon may have been a patient. Previously unknown archival sources are examined for the first time in connection with Braddon's research on psychological conditions and treatments as well as the Victorian press's response to her illness in 1869.
This article explores the evolving Chinese representations of Queen Victoria from the First Opium War (1839) to her Diamond Jubilee (1897), beginning with early Qing official histories that deliberately omitted or delegitimized her presence, portraying her implicitly as a female usurper whose rule violated Confucian gender norms and dynastic orthodoxy. Such initial silencing is later juxtaposed with increasingly complex portrayals across a broad spectrum of textual and visual sources, including painting captions, diplomatic travelogues, private poems, newspaper reports, and illustrations. Focusing on envoys like Binchun, whose cautious official diary contrasts with his more admiring private poetry, and Zhang Zuyi, whose pseudonymous writings convey ambivalence and critique, the essay examines how rhetorical strategies were shaped by genre, anonymity, and audience. The analysis also extends to popular and elite print culture, particularly Dianshizhai Pictorial and Shenbao, to trace how Queen Victoria's image circulated among both literate and semiliterate readers. Throughout, the article argues that acts of translation and mediation-visual, linguistic, and ideological-shaped not only perceptions of the British monarch but also reflected the fractured modernity of the Qing empire. The study contributes to global Victorian studies by foregrounding non-Western receptions and complicating imperial iconography through a Sinocentric lens.
In the twenty-first century, leftist politics has taken a turn toward antiwork philosophy and postwork imaginaries. These politics critique not only the work-centered capitalist society but also challenge the "productivist ethics" of other leftist traditions. A popular variation of this antiwork/postwork politics calls for full automation, the replacement of as much human labor as possible with technological alternatives. Positioning work as a realm of unfreedom, these thinkers argue that human liberation can only be achieved in a world with less work. This article reads Oscar Wilde's "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" (1891) as a precocious articulation of a postwork imaginary that demands full automation. In response to contemporaries like William Morris, who argued that capitalism had severed humanity from a natural affinity for work, Wilde expresses an antiwork position, arguing that humanity was made for contemplative leisure and creative expression. Thus, automated labor becomes a key element of his utopian vision. Though Wilde formulates a necessary critique of a Victorian radical politics that was decidedly prowork, his postwork utopia is based on a troubling premise: "civilization requires slaves." In reading twenty-first-century postwork thinkers alongside Wilde, we find the same premise still subtly operative within this politics.
This short essay considers Kathy Psomiades’s recent book, Primitive Marriage: Victorian Anthropology and the Novel, from a feminist perspective.
Kathy Psomiades’s Primitive Marriage argues that Victorian thinkers used consent as the turning point of history, changing our reading of the marriage plot.
This cluster of short essays discusses Kathy Psomiades’s Primitive Marriage: Victorian Anthropology, the Novel and Sexual Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2023), winner of the North American Victorian Studies Association’s 2023 Subsequent Book Prize, along with a response from the author.
This essay considers the contributions that Primitive Marriage makes to psychoanalytic theory and the history of sexuality. It also explores the ways that Kathy Psomiades’s emphasis on the Victorian anthropology of marriage complicates our understanding of the histories of structuralism and critical theory in the present.
This essay describes the elaborative model of knowledge production that is both the topic of Kathy Psomiades’s Primitive Marriage and its method. The annotative procedure of (as Psomiades puts it) “adding” to what has come before is dialectical insofar as it understands any concept to emerge from the historical conditions enabling it; it is collaborative insofar as it links thinking agents across bounds of difference; and it is political in that it offers to locate the preconditions for thought in time but then find supplements, blank spots—openings for change. The essay closes with a biographical example of this model in action, in a scene of feminist mentorship from the early 2000s.
In Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), Thomas Hardy imagines a Brazil that functions as an established settler colony and as a more informal zone of economic influence. This imperial anachronism that played out in an ostensibly sovereign Brazil, as my reading will show, physically and ideologically deforms Angel and his fellow colonists. Angel's moral awakening accompanies a body ripped apart by the competing demands of settlement and movement aligned, on one hand, with older models of imperial expansion and, on the other, with newer modes of economic dominance driven by infrastructural investment and speculation. As a site of Britain's economic influence, Brazil becomes a potent symbol of the dangers of pursuing an anachronistic imperial model and a fatal warning back home that attempting to replicate older models of colonial governance cannot remedy England's provincial woes.
This essay examines the artwork Hinterland (2013), a painted photograph of the statue of Queen Victoria in Georgetown, Guyana, by Hew Locke, a Guyanese Scottish artist. Inspired by the global movement against colonial symbols ignited by the Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter protests in 2015 and 2020, respectively, which saw the toppling of statues of colonial figures, the essay explores the themes of void, surface, invisibility, and visibility present in Locke's artwork. The essay builds on the idea that moving an object, which changes its position, alters its perspective, in contrast to toppling, which entails complete removal. The statue of Queen Victoria still stands in Georgetown, though it has been moved over the years. The idea of "moving on" (Mbembe) is introduced as a transformative way of looking at colonial statues as visual artifacts so as to emphasize the movement in space and time involved in transtemporality (speaking to the dynamic recontextualization of Victorian figures amidst contemporary societal shifts) as opposed to the act of toppling, which implies a complete break from the past-an abrupt erasure.
This article reexamines Emily Bront & euml;'s poetry focusing on dungeons and imprisonment, discussing how her prisoner characters compare their incarceration to being buried alive. Strong poetic and thematic dynamics of rising and falling also structure these experiences, particularly as manifest in depictions of the yearning soul flying away from the inert, living-dead body. Little Bront & euml; scholarship has focused, thus far, on the actual narratives and themes of the Gondal poems, and still less on their philosophical significance, a lacuna this article hopes to begin to fill. It considers these poems in relation to the homophonic and etymological linkage of grave (receptacle for the dead) and grave (weighty, serious) with engrave, to inscribe something into a hard surface, often stone, using a lens informed by Mary Jacobus's work on the gravity of things in nineteenth-century poetry, and Simone Weil's writing on limitation and transcendence. Ultimately, it argues that Bront & euml;'s philosophical and poetic priorities lie in this movement between states, in the phenomenology of yearning for such a paradoxical liberation, and in the body's gravity, a metaphor for mortal time, upon which souls and poems might be engraved.
Comparing Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) with medical essays found in Carroll's private library, this article argues that an examination of Alice's Adventures "through the looking-glass" of Victorian psychology can generate new perspectives of the novel. It demonstrates that Carroll's literary treatment of nonsense-illustrated by the characters' linguistic and cognitive incongruities, identity issues, forgetfulness, and altered perception of time-builds upon mid-nineteenth-century psychological investigations of the similarities between sleeping and madness. This article also shows that while little is known about the meanings that psychology and psychiatry bestowed upon the novel before the emergence of psychoanalysis in the 1930s, Alice's Adventures supplied Victorian writers of psychology with a means of illustrating their ideas. My exploration of the two-way influence between Alice's Adventures and Victorian psychology aims to shine a light on Carroll's representation of the madness that characterizes Alice's dreamworld of Wonderland. By likening Alice's behavior to that of the "mad" characters in the novel, Carroll portrays Wonderland as a place where childhood dreaming and adult insanity converge in their capacity to provide escape from dull, everyday reality into the absurdities of nonsense.
This essay examines five children's homemade manuscript magazines and advances an argument that creative collaboration was an important feature of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century childhood, especially for middle-class young people associated with artistic circles. Focusing on children connected to the Pre-Raphaelite and Bloomsbury circles, the essay shows how select children formed their own artistic circles, modeled on those of the adults in their lives. The magazines are The Scribbler (1878-80) by the children of William Morris with assistance from the children of Philip Burne-Jones; Our Paper (1870-87) by the children and cousins of the Strachey family; The Gem (1898) by Margaret Keynes with her brothers Geoffrey and John Maynard; the Hyde Park Gate News (1891-95) by the Stephen children, later Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell; and the Charleston Bulletin (1921-27) by Vanessa Bell's sons, Julian and Quentin Bell. Through serialized stories, correspondence, competitions, and abundant editorial commentary, child-authors and editors asserted a textual agency as they documented and created collaborative artistic communities.
This article places the nearly forgotten local tour guides at the forefront of the studies of Victorian travel and travel writing on semicolonial China, showing how mediating agents shaped and disrupted cross-cultural writing and history with their relational identities. It contextualizes British and American travel writing on the Five Hundred Genii Temple (in Chinese, the Hualin Temple) from 1849 to 1912 within the intertwined relations between travel writers and guides, in the local socio-spatial condition of Guangzhou (then Canton) and under the travel-to-tourism transition in China. The role played by earlier foreign expatriate guides shifted from introducers to coordinators, leading to travelers' nuanced local understandings that challenged the temple's presumed otherness. Later authoritative Cantonese guides manipulated local interactions, reviving stereotypical images among the tourists. The guides appropriated metropolitan baggage of the guided in different ways, cowriting the travel writing and the cross-cultural history it implied. Being mediating agents in the travel as a process of encounter with otherness, the guides significantly altered the encounter while sometimes becoming themselves the focal Other in the writing.
This paper argues that recategorizing Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872) as humane children's literature exposes a nineteenth-century humane education that was based in human exceptionalism, while the narratives also push for a conception of subjectivity that would include the child and nonhuman-animal. The Alice books overturn the popular nineteenth-century views that children were inferior British subjects and that nonhumans lacked subjectivity altogether (even as this era saw an upsurge in legal protections for children and animals alike). I argue that Carroll's work satirizes, not just children's literature, but humane children's literature, imagining a revised form of humane education that resisted a speciesist indoctrination of the Victorian child. In the Alice books, humane education leads to positive interspecies relationships and provides children and animals with opportunities to model a robust humane framework for Victorian adult society, ultimately pushing for a view of children and animals not as subordinate to their adult (human) counterparts but as autonomous beings not lacking in subjectivity.
