IN 1855, THE REVEREND GIRDLESTONE zealously promoted sanitary reform in Britain, claiming that the movement was “pregnant with the most important advantages to the human race, in every point of view — social, moral, and religious” (29). Girdlestone’s claim provides a useful starting point for considering representations of reform, as this view of the redemptive powers of cleanliness has been accepted by many historians as a characteristic Victorian attitude.1 But while it is true that many Victorians believed that sweeping public health reforms could fuel the physical and moral regeneration of the urban poor, it is also true that others responded to these reforms with fear, anger, and suspicion: an active strain of resistance flourished within Victorian sanitary discourse. That scholars have privileged the Victorians’ declarations of faith in matters of cleanliness and to some degree shared in these sentiments should not surprise us. The idea of public health reform as universally advantageous accords not only with our own sense of the desirability of sanitary techniques such as flush-toilets and water-borne sewerage, which have become naturalized in the West, but also with a narrative of historical progress.2 While this essay does not dispute the fact that the sanitary idea gained wide acceptance in the period, it does seek to shift the focus away from Victorian faith to Victorian apostasy in matters of reform.

IT IS NOT LIKELY THAT MANY readers of Martin Chuzzlewit will remember Mr. Bevan’s profession. The gentleman so kind as to lend Martin and Mark Tapley money to go back to England is not just one of few honest persons in the vulgar, shoddy world of Dickens’s America, but a doctor as well: “[H]e made Martin acquainted with his name, which was Bevan: and with his profession, which was physic, though he seldom or never practised” (280; ch.17). We find many other medical persons in the novel: Jobling the doctor, Lewsome the medical assistant, and Mrs. Gamp, the most famous or notorious nurse in English literature, but they are not highly commendable characters and never offer effective cures to their patients. Jobling is a pretentious swindler, and Lewsome assists, albeit unintentionally, Jonas Chuzzlewit’s attempt to murder his father. One would be reluctant to be nursed by Sairey Gamp, however tremendous she is as a product of a great literary imagination. As if to endorse the reader’s suspicion, Old Martin Chuzzlewit does not trust any doctors and has an amateur, Mary Graham, carry “a small medicine-chest” to care for him (26; ch. 3). The doctor treating Lewsome never seems very efficient in his practice (410, 416; ch. 26), and the only apparently reliable doctor “seldom or never practise[s].” No doctor or nurse can give proper treatment to the numerous sick people in this text full of physical disorders.

FOR MANY YEARS “VERNON LEE” (Violet Paget 1856–1935) has received scant critical attention. More recently, however, her eclectic oeuvre, and her literary stature amongst contemporaries such as Walter Pater, Henry James, and Edith Wharton have attracted increasing interest. Despite this, Lee’s collections of supernatural short stories remain relatively unexplored. With the notable exceptions of Carlo Caballero, Jane Hotchkiss, and Catherine Maxwell, who have used the richness of Lee’s language to examine the fascinating tensions that underlie these tales, little has been done to investigate the central importance of the aesthetic object in Lee’s fantasies and its wider implications in the context of the supernatural space. This essay intends to highlight the role played by the art object (in this case the operatic voice), and the significance of the supernatural in the development of Lee’s professional and private subjectivity.

THE POPULAR LEGEND used to be that at supper in 1895, Bram Stoker had “a too generous helping of dressed crab,” and that the crab begot the subsequent nightmare which in turn begot Dracula (Ludlam 99). This theory was nullified, however, by the discovery in the 1970s of Stoker’s working notes in the Rosenbach Foundation library of Philadelphia.1 Stoker, it seems, made his initial memorandum for the novel on March 8, 1890 while on holiday in Whitby, where Dracula was eventually to disembark in canine semblance. By February 1892, he had sketched out a plot, complementing a nod to the new technology — Kodak cameras, portable typewriters and recording phonographs — by situating events in the next calendar year, that of 1893. The retrospect over an interval of seven years in Jonathan Harker’s “Note” comprising the final pages of the novel would thus imply a date of composition of 1900; they were actually written, however, by Stoker, in July 1896, and one may wonder whether his official chronology was at this point to the forefront of Stoker’s consciousness. Arguably, July 1889 would have been precisely among the candidates to have been a portentous date, epitomizing an epoch when “we all went through the flames,” so far as the inspiration of Dracula is concerned (378; ch. 27).2

ON AUGUST 21, 1911 THE MONA LISA was stolen from the Louvre, not to reappear again until well over two years later when the thief tried to sell the work to a Florentine art dealer. The patriotic Italian workman who had stolen the painting had wanted to bring some of the Italian masterpieces in French collections back to where they belonged, and he had commenced his grand project with the Mona Lisa because, as he explained, “mi sembrava la piú bella” — she seemed to him to be the most beautiful of them all.1 For Bernard Berenson the disappearance of the Mona Lisa brought about a major rebellion against the ideals he had cultivated as a young man. In his early books on the Florentine painters and their drawings he had sung the praises of Leonardo,2 and ever since he was a student at Harvard in the early 1880s he had been a professed devotee of the writings and thought of Walter Pater.3 Pater’s most celebrated prose passage — his evocation of the Mona Lisa — was one of the pieces of nineteenth-century art criticism which had influenced Berenson more than anything else.4 Like so many other people of his generation, he had learnt the text by heart, and his first visits to the Louvre appear to have been as much in honor of Walter Pater as of the Italian masters.

IN AN 1835 ARTICLE PUBLISHED in the Rugby Magazine under the title “School a Little World,” A. P. Stanley wrote:

THIS PAPER AIMS TO CONTRIBUTE to the resurgent study of relations between literature and the visual arts in nineteenth-century England by exploring a variety of representations of the highly visible poet and law reformer, Caroline Norton.1 One aspect of these intersecting discourses is the image of the author and the processes and effects of its representation. Linda M. Shires in “The Author as Spectacle and Commodity” argues for the inseparable but potentially troubling relation between literary authority and authorial spectacle in Victorian England. Some authors embraced theatrical self-display, others presented a more reserved image to their public. Whereas, Shires suggests, “the need to shape the self through display” (202) was increasingly accepted as a strategy for literary success, the countervailing social pressures on women writers to shun the immodest exposure of publication have been demonstrated by Dorothy Mermin in Godiva’s Ride. Perhaps no writer illustrates the tension created by these opposed imperatives more graphically than Caroline Norton.

IN 1821 IN PICCADILLY, Giovanni Battista Belzoni staged a spectacular full-scale reproduction of royal tombs he had uncovered in the Valley of the Kings. Crowds of paying visitors milled through rooms at the Egyptian Hall, marveling at enormous stone artifacts and at colorful wall paintings replicating ancient Egyptian tomb interiors. About half a century later and around the globe, tens of thousands of guests, including many European luminaries, witnessed the grand 1869 opening of the Suez Canal and fêted the achievement of its chief engineer, Ferdinand de Lesseps, with fireworks and extravagant feasts. The driving forces behind these exhibitions were very different — one was an entrepreneur’s packaging of ancient Egypt into a leisure excursion for Londoners, the other evidence of Egyptian acquiescence to European pressure for enhanced trading routes; one was available for a middle-class, fee-paying popular British audience; the other to specially invited international guests traveling thousands of miles — but both were public displays that rendered Egypt, past and present, into a cultural and visual commodity for the West. Dickens’s final, unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), written during the excitement and controversy over the Suez Canal and drawing on both de Lesseps and Belzoni as partial models for the title character, is deeply aware of such Egypt-gazing, but Egypt’s presence within the novel is in fact highly unspectacular, almost invisible.

AT THE GALLERY OF THE SOCIETY OF PAINTERS in Water Colours in Pall Mall East in the autumn of 1855, Roger Fenton exhibited three hundred and twelve photographs taken in the Crimea. Undertaken with the patronage of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and the Duke of Newcastle, the then Secretary of State for War, Fenton’s photographic record was intended to inform the Victorian public of the “true” condition of the soldiers in what was fast becoming an unpopular war. In the catalogue, one photograph bore the title “The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” a title with both biblical and literary resonances for exhibition audiences in late 1855.1 Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” had been published in the Examiner on 9 December 1854, causing a sensation both at home and in the Crimea.2 Organized around variations on the refrain “Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred,” the poem assumed anthem-like status during the period when Fenton was in the Crimea. Filtered through the lens of Tennyson’s poem, Fenton’s photograph appears to record the traces of a charge or a battle scene that has just taken place.

THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU (1896) is a richly confused novel, and its complexities and mixed agendas constitute one reason why this remarkable enactment of ideas and theories has received so much, and such varied, critical attention. Its generic, psychological, and thematic disorder does not stand out as much as it might, however, because confusion itself — biological, ethical, epistemological — is one of its subjects.1 Furthermore, the text begins with great and misleading attention to accuracy, precision, and narrative control. First, Charles Edward Prendick introduces the manuscript of his now deceased uncle, Edward Prendick, starting with these details: “On February the First, 1887, the Lady Vain was lost by collision with a derelict when about the latitude 1° S. and longitude 107° W” (3; Intro.). When Edward Prendick commences the story proper, he begins with similar exactitude, stating what “every one knows” — that “the Lady Vain . . . collided with a derelict when ten days out from Callao. The long-boat, with seven of the crew, was picked up eighteen days after by H. M. gunboat Myrtle” (4; ch. 1). He then shifts to private knowledge: although four men in the ship’s dinghy were thought to have perished, there were actually only three men in the boat, with he himself as the sole survivor of that group.

FROM THE BEGINNING OF the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, the central issues in writing about the Victorian city have remained the same: how did the Victorians “see” the city? how do “we” see the Victorian city? and how do “we” see the Victorians seeing the city? Is the city knowable? What are the modes of representation of the Victorian city?

REVIEWINGTHE SCHOLARSHIP on Wilde in the last decade is a daunting task not only because of the large amount of recent work on Wilde, but because the ground is already occupied by two book-length surveys: Ian Small’s Oscar Wilde: Recent Research (which picks up where his 1993 Oscar Wilde Revalued left off) and Melissa Knox’s Oscar Wilde in the 1990s: The Critic as Creator. The reader, then, is referred to these volumes for their more comprehensive coverage. Here I will focus my discussion by borrowing what Small designates three “new paradigms” that emerged in the 1990s: the Gay Wilde, the Irish Wilde, Wilde and Consumerism — this last I will rename the Materialist Wilde. To these I will add a fourth category, again taking my cue from Small: Idealist Wilde. In each category I will use representative examples to reflect on the issues confronting these approaches to Wilde. Both Small and Knox evaluate as well as chronicle, though from different perspectives. Small believes work in the field should be better supported by empirical information — “facts” — about Wilde’s life, his career, and the period, and he thinks scholars need to consider whether the different “Wildes” they construct are compatible with each other (12–13). Knox favors a biographical approach to Wilde, saying explicitly that her survey “explores the forms of resistance to biography as well as its successful use in criticism of the l990s” (xv), and turning up more instances of resistance than success.1