Three black dolls appear in the etchings by H. K. Browne (Phiz) that accompany Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853). They hang, strange fruit, from strings on walls and in shop windows, and their purpose as commentary on the text remains unclear because it is also initially unclear what they might represent. The dolls are never mentioned in the text of the novel, nor do they receive any substantial criticism in readings of Bleak House's illustrations. This article plumbs the archive for evidence of the dolls, and uses the resulting range of associations, from the American cotton trade to Victorian advertising techniques, to argue for a greater integration of the analysis of text and illustrations in serialized, illustrated novels such as Bleak House. Material culture readings of the novel to this date have overlooked elements of the illustrations (which are themselves material objects), or have focused on illustrations as print culture, and not conversations with the written text. Examining the dolls in this context not only enriches Bleak House, but also attests to the value of observing the interplay of text and illustration, as well as text and advertising, in readings of the novel's serialized form.

The story of Jack Sheppard, a jailbreaker hanged for theft in 1724, inspired William Harrison Ainsworth in 1839 to write a historical romance chronicling and fictionalizing Sheppard's exploits. Though first published in a middle-class magazine, Ainsworth's serialization of Sheppard's career in Jack Sheppard: A Romance (1839–1840) subsequently caused a sensation among lower-class audiences for whom the novel was not originally intended. The wide dissemination of Sheppard's story among the lower classes in ballads, songs, cheap plagiarisms, and theatrical performances created a moral panic for contemporary middle-class critics who were concerned with the implications of such material in lower-class culture. Thus, despite the novel's initial reception in the middle-class press as another pleasant and harmless romance, it soon became reviled as a source of inspiration for would-be Jack Sheppards everywhere.

That Algernon Charles Swinburne loved the Brontës is well known, and his interest in them well documented. His admiration for Charlotte and Emily, in particular, prompted two studies, a short book and an article, which were instrumental in establishing their critical reputation as it exists today. “Those great twin sisters in genius,” as he wrote in 1877, held a powerful sway over Swinburne's imagination (A Note 188–200). He considered them his Yorkshire kinswomen, bred in the wild borderlands of the North (although Swinburne was born in London and spent most of his life in southern England, his family was based in Northumberland, and he never lost his allegiance to the county, calling himself a “Borderer” to the very end). He sensed in their work – Emily's especially – the haunting, poetic influence of the moors, a passionate, romantic spirit that saturated his own verse and prose. More, they were his novelistic predecessors, and his essays on them shed considerable light on his own fictional practice. In framing himself as the Brontës’ apologist, Swinburne was “far ahead of his time,” shaping Victorian criticism (Hyder 15–16). His praise of Wuthering Heights is considered “by some literary historians to be epochmaking” and altered the way in which novels were discussed, analysed, and ultimately evaluated (Watson 247). There are also striking features that suggest Swinburne's own novel Lesbia Brandon – in its trans-genre form and unique milieu – was conceived as an exercise in the manner of Wuthering Heights.

When Elizabeth Gaskell died in November 1865, she left unfinished her final novel, Wives and Daughters (1864–66). The Cornhill Magazine's editor, Frederick Greenwood, published a tribute to Gaskell with the novel's final installment. Her fiction, he wrote, pulls you from “an abominable wicked world, crawling with selfishness and reeking with base passions into one where there is much weakness, many mistakes, sufferings long and bitter, but where it is possible for people to live calm and wholesome lives . . .” (Gaskell 685–86; ch. 60). As Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund observe, Greenwood shaped Gaskell's reputation for a hundred years “as an author whose work captured . . . the idyllic charm of a lost era” and took “readers away from unpleasant realities” (158). Notably, Greenwood's list of “unpleasant realities” (wickedness, selfishness, and base passions) implicitly refers to capitalism — that is, to the economic world of the 1860s from which Gaskell ostensibly encouraged her readers to retreat.

The Victorian novel is dominated by heroines, its narrative driven by their impulses and their irrepressible physicality. These women possess a strong visual presence that is intrinsically bound with the way in which they choose to dress themselves, with authorial attention consistently focusing on the elements of their clothing. The body was a highly visible, and more significantly, a readable cultural symbol in the Victorian period, with its signifying ability vitally linked to the clothes that adorned it. Clothes have often been employed in literary metaphors – words as the clothing of thought, clothes as a masking of the real, and so on. In his long poem In Memoriam, A.H.H., Tennyson succinctly deploys the quiet grief contained in the idea of widow's weeds, bringing together the expressivity of both clothes and words, when he writes: “In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er, / Like coarsest clothes against the cold” (stanza 5, ll. 9–10). But in the realist Victorian novel, clothes become even more pertinent, offering a useful descriptive device that is pivotal to the creation of a believable, legible character. The awareness of clothing as something that has potential for both restriction of identity as well as expression of it permeates much of Victorian writing, with numerous novels rendering visible the construction of a coherent selfhood through clothing.

This essay looks at how the question of late-Victorian imperial decline is contested, formulated, and framed within Guy Boothby's A Prince of Swindlers – a popular, yet critically-overlooked, collection of detective stories set in Calcutta and London, that appeared in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. There is, of course, a familiar critical narrative about the Victorian fin de siècle that characterises the era as a particularly fraught period “of mounting complexity and contradiction” with regard to empire (Dixon 2). The Berlin Conference of 1885, the failure of British Troops at the Siege of Khartoum, the so-called scramble for Africa, the undermining of Britain's steel manufacturing superiority by German and American competition, and the decline of the Royal Navy relative to the navies of France, Germany, Russia, and Italy all underscored the fragility of British imperial dominion. As Patrick Brantlinger puts it, “After the mid-Victorian years the British found it increasingly difficult to think of themselves as inevitably progressive; they began worrying instead about the degeneration of their institutions, their culture, their racial ‘stock’” (230).

In chapter 8 of Dorian Gray, Dorian reflects on the terrifying discovery, which he has made the previous night, that the painting has been somehow altered to express his own moral state. He speculates thus on a possible explanation for the change in the picture:

Robert Louis Stevenson took it for granted that Rome had shaped most of the Western modern world: “the average man at home . . . is sunk over the ears in Roman civilisation,” he wrote in a letter to H. B. Baildon (Mehew 474). Unlike the English contemporaries of his own class, he had not been steeped in classical literature, nor had he “internalised Latin literature in the way he ascribed to his English character Robert Herrick . . . in The Ebb-Tide” – mostly because his poor health had precluded regular school attendance (Jolly, Stevenson in the Pacific 37). But he did come to the classics, “from the outside” as Roslyn Jolly demonstrates, through his legal studies: “Rome counted to him as something very much more than a literature – a whole system of law and empire” that had laid the foundations of most Western societies.