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.
