Although not focused on the Victorian period, John Guillory's recent Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022) might seem to provide a bracing counter to the premise of this special issue. According to Guillory, framing our scholarly projects in political terms may ultimately be delusional, for whatever our aspirations or intentions, scholarship is rarely politically impactful. “Surely the political well-being of our society,” he writes, “is better served by producing one informed, insightful, and habitual reader than by the publication of any number of scholarly essays and books, however devastating these might be as criticisms of society” (78). For Guillory, claiming political significance for our scholarship amounts to an “overstatement of aim,” something he describes as “the principal form of professional deformation resulting from uncertainty about the social effects of literary study” (79).

In this piece, I discuss Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1855) in the context of my experience as one of the lead organizers of the successful campaign to unionize Skidmore College's non-tenure-track faculty. Dickens's novel outlines several claims that directly comprise modern anti-union discourse and that I saw straightforwardly rehearsed in 2022 as we sought to unionize. As an organizer and a Victorianist, I argue that we have ethical obligations in studying and teaching texts like Hard Times in light of the afterlives of their anti-union rhetoric. The Victorian industrial novel needs to be studied (and taught) from an explicitly pro-union perspective, by unionized workers. This paper contributes to that project.

How can tenure-track allies to adjunct workers contribute in our new era of anti-tenure attacks and surging labor activism? Two of the founders of Tenure for the Common Good find guidance in Elizabeth Gaskell's representations of class relations. Gaskell reveals the pervasive entrapment of exploitative systems and suggests ways that privileged participants can serve as intermediaries, amplifying the voices of those who need to be heard. Drawing on servant relations in Cranford and laborer relations in the North and South, we find warrant for a new visibility in the fight against adjunctification.

The end of the nineteenth century in Britain saw a range of “newnesses”; New Unionism signified a boom in trade unionism, while the New Woman figure symbolized women's struggle for independence. However, both as literary figures and as real-life writers, such New Women were largely middle class and educated. Where are the working women within the sphere of literary and cultural production, and how are they represented within the New Unionism? Against a dominant trade unionism that argued for a “family wage” and considered women's organizing as a threat, the Women's Trade Union League (1874), the National Federation of Women Workers (1906), the 1888 Match Girls strike, and writers and labor activists such as Annie Besant and Clementina Black noted women's roles within labor. Attempting to locate a working New Woman in the trade union movement, this paper is a reflective work-in-progress, an exploration rather than a finished argument. Written by a precariously employed woman trade unionist in the twenty-first century, struggling to find time to write, examining the works of precariously employed women workers one hundred years earlier, the essay poses questions about what happens to politically engaged scholarship in a time of increasingly precarious working conditions and knowledges.

This essay describes the author's quest for effective, large-scale political actions to stop the burning of fossil fuels. What are the nuts and bolts of collective organizing at scales large enough to effect substantial change? Frustrated both by widespread public pessimism and by the politics most often articulated in literary studies, Levine finds a working political model in the divestment movement; a methodological model in formalist analysis; and a theory of collective aesthetics and politics in post-Victorian Jane Addams.

The collaboration of William Hyde and Alice Meynell in London Impressions (1898) led to Hyde's photogravure image, “Utilitarian London,” which is a direct critique of Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed (1844), and to a companion essay by Meynell, “The Climate of Smoke,” that is an ecological poetics exploring the deep harms of pollution.

If advanced high school English classrooms remain some of the few spaces where young people, especially young people of color, might read the Victorian novel, what opportunities for political work might we expect, innovate, demand from those encounters? Drawing from experiences directing LitLabs, immersive, site-specific, design-based approaches to studying literature with South LA teens, the author argues for expanding the geographies literary works reference to include readers’ embodiment in place so that Victorian studies can strengthen and nurture a sense of place for readers often displaced by engagements with the Western literary canon. The essay traces the conflicted, but rewarding, processes for reading literature with an agenda for placekeeping, as one avenue for producing a self-affirming communal consciousness among readers as users of urban space. The essay turns to David Copperfield, where a typical mode of individualized, absorptive reading is contrasted to LitLabs’ model of “emplaced reading” through its adaptations of a core urban humanities “fused practice” of thick-mapping.

This essay reflects on the first three years of Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom's work. While we initially perceived our project and corresponding website as a space to develop and circulate pedagogical materials, it has become clear that what we have accomplished since our launch goes far beyond mere content creation. In fact, the community-building portion of our project has become the driving force of our mission. For us, community-buildling is activism in action, as it allows us to change the conditions of academia in real time, by making intentional choices that foster more equitable interactions with one another and with our collaborators. Although the content we publish is, of course, important for ensuring Victorian studies centers questions of race, we view this content as the organic outgrowth of the careful and caring relationships we have been cultivating since our inception, commencing with the four of us and expanding outward to our contributors. Indeed, centering race in scholarship and teaching means little when students and teacher-scholars of color remain cast aside by academic norms, structures, and forms of relation that have been shaped by the increasingly commercialized neoliberal university.

Vassar College was one of the few North American undergraduate institutions to offer a concentration in Victorian studies. From 1970 until 2021, when the program transformed into Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, nearly ninety majors and minors passed through the program. Drawing on surveys and interviews with the program's graduates, the essay contends that Vassar's Victorian studies program engendered certain mental habits as well as specific approaches to activism, which the essay broadly defines to include activist scholarship and journalism, working for change within institutions, and reimagining family life and child-rearing. The Vassar alums who participated in the surveys and interviews made direct links between their activist commitments and an undergraduate education that emphasized primary-source research as well as multidisciplinarity.

Victorian activists Mary Carpenter (1807–1877) and Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904) held different standing in their day: the international founder of reform schools, considered a devout “noble worker,” mentored the Theist journalist who is better known today for feminism and animal-rights organizing. The essay draws on contemporary and recent studies of both figures and the short versions collected in books in Collective Biographies of Women, a database with an XML schema annotating the narratives. Examining different treatment of Carpenter and Cobbe in varied texts, the essay especially focuses on keywords and phrases, “noble,” “worker,” “perishing and dangerous classes,” and tropes of a lady entering low or dark places. Evangelical discourse is disparaged in the current climate among academics and activists seeking health care, education, or rights for the poor, but affect and faith-based activism should not be discounted then or now.