Blanche Warre Cornish's 1921–22 tripartite memoir, “Memories of Tennyson,” begins in 1869 when she meets the poet by way of her parents’ friendship with Tennyson's neighbor, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (145) (Figure 1). The photograph that Cornish recalls as “psychophotography” is one instance of a trend in Victorian England of spirit photography that was first practiced around 1872 after it was imported from America, where William Mumler had developed it (Tucker 68; Doyle 2: 128). Reactions to these spirit photographs took various forms: while some viewers regarded them as a credible medium for communication with the dead, their detractors saw them as deliberate acts of deception. Others employed photography's spectral qualities for entertainment, such as the London Stereoscopic Company that had marketed photographs of angels, fairies, and ghosts for their customers’ amusement in the 1860s (Chéroux 45–53). By the time the “shadowy figure of a man” appears beside Arthur Hallam's erstwhile fiancé, Mrs. Jesse, Tennyson's sister, the practice had been subject to public intrigue and scandal as a part of broader and contentious Victorian debates about the status of photography as art or document. The already surreal qualities of Cornish's anecdote are amplified by Tennyson's question, “Is that Arthur?,” which entertains the possibility of Hallam being present in a visible, spectral form while unrecognized by his beloved friend.

Susan L. Ferguson shows how Victorian novelists used the reported speech of their characters to create a “ficto-linguistics” wherein “the systems of language that appear in novels . . . indicate identifiable alternative patterns congruent to other aspects of the fictional world” (1). These novels present self-contained systems, she says, in which “speech relates in style as well as content to the speech of other characters, [and] all quoted language in a novel is contained within and potentially interacts with the language of the narrator” (1). Ferguson's interpretation of novelistic speech enables more convincing analyses of reported dialect speech than earlier efforts, which compared them directly to real-life dialects – a tendency that itself reflects the “grand narrative” of “authenticism” (Sanchez-Arce) – and which assumed that discrepancies and inconsistencies were stylistic weaknesses due, for instance, to over-sentimentality or “lowness” (Quirk 5), or to the writer being reluctant to depict virtuous characters as speaking non-standard English, regardless of the likelihood or possibility that characters from badly educated backgrounds would speak anything else.

Elizabeth Gaskell undertook the writing of The Life of Charlotte Brontë with a highly specific purpose in mind: it was meant, first and foremost, as a defense. Spurred by the urgings of longtime family friend Ellen Nussey, who was despairing over “the misrepresentations and the malignant spirit” at work in recent commentaries about the late author of Jane Eyre, Patrick Brontë had written to Gaskell only three months after his daughter's untimely death in 1855 and expressed the hope that an “established Author” like herself might produce a biography of Charlotte Brontë immediately. Gaskell was thus charged with the work of presenting to the world a definitive account of the celebrated, if enigmatic, writer's life, in defiance of the inflammatory and rumor-filled posthumous reports that were circulating.

With its biting portrait of mid-Victorian greed, foolishness, and the obsessive pursuit of wealth, Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now is often read as both a eulogy for traditional English society and an attack on rapacious capitalist values, particularly as they manifest themselves in the market for finance capital. Indeed, in the novel, the market mechanism seems to have run amok: social status, titles, and reputations circulate like commodities in a sea of new money that swamps traditional distinctions between creditworthiness and social capital, investment and speculation, and commerce and graft. The pervasive sense that everything has its price extends to intimate social relations, including courtship and marriage. Penniless, pretty women of good families, such as Julia Triplex (later Lady Monogram) and Lady Carbury, much like penniless, titled men such as Lord Nidderdale and Lady Carbury's handsome son Felix, recognize that, for them, marriage is a business arrangement in which the pretense of sentiment between the parties is little more than a social convention. Yet, the novel also suggests that the frenzy that free-for-all market forces have unleashed will exhaust itself, just as the speculative price bubble in railway shares central to the narrative eventually collapses. Countering its satire of capitalist excess is the novel's more optimistic treatment of exchange, which implies that fraud in the share market can be contained through the imposition of standards of behavior that foster honest commerce.

Thomas Hardy came to the writer’s life with prodigious endowments and little self-confidence. His struggle with this unlikely predicament shows up repeatedly in his career, but nowhere so often as in its early stages. The “Studies and Specimens” Notebook, completed in the mid-1860s, bears touching witness to the labor of a greatly gifted writer teaching himself the very rudiments of literary form. The editors of the notebook speak accurately of the “diligence and doggedness” of his striving (Dalziel and Millgate xv). At the time his striving was dedicated to mastering poetry, the first and always most favored of his muses. But in 1867 “under the stress of necessity” he shifted his focus to “a kind of literature in which he had hitherto taken but little interest – prose fiction” (Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 58). With varying results he turned to writing novels, still testing his vocation until 1873 when he published A Pair of Blue Eyes, which, together with his impending marriage, fixed his literary course for decades to come.

In 1827, Josiah Harlan, a Quaker from Chester County, Pennsylvania, set up camp just south of the border of the Punjab region of India. He rummaged up a ragtag army of Muslim, Hindu, Afghan, and Akali Sikh mercenaries, and with Old Glory flying above him, he and his army started their journey, along with a caravan of saddle horses, camels, carriage cattle, and a royal mace bearer to announce the coming of the would-be American king. With Alexander the Great's march through the same lands twenty-one centuries earlier very much on his mind (Macintyre 40), Harlan set out – under the auspices of restoring the exiled Afghan monarch Shah Shujah to the throne – determined to win power and fame for himself. Disguising himself as a Muslim holy man and at times using brute force, he crossed the Afghan border and ultimately became the Prince of Ghor under secret treaty (227). By 1839, loyal not to Shah Shujah but to his enemy, Dost Mohammed Khan, Harlan returned to his Kabul home to find that the British had seized his property “by right of conquest” (252). Harlan left Kabul, fully intending to return and reclaim his princely title. Once back in the United States, Harlan proposed various schemes to the U.S. government (for which he would be the emissary, of course), including an Afghanistan-U.S. camel trade and grape trade, neither of which succeeded. Harlan penned a memoir that the British lambasted – unsurprisingly, for it sharply criticized the British presence in Afghanistan. In 1862, at the age of sixty-two, with no formal rank or U.S. military experience, Harlan became the colonel of Harlan's Light Cavalry, fighting on the side of the Union in the Civil War (Macintyre 275). Too weak to perform his duties, he left the army the same year, wandered the U.S. aimlessly, and died in 1871, buried “after a funeral without mourners” (286).

Much of the critical writing on Queer Theory and Sexuality Studies in a Victorian context over the last decade or so has been absorbing, exploring, complicating, and working under the burden of the influence of Michel Foucault's theoretical writings on erotic relations and identity. The first volume of Foucault's The History of Sexuality (1978), in fact, had begun with a gauntlet thrown down before Victorian Studies, a chapter-long critique of Steven Marcus's The Other Victorians (1966), a work that had offered an entirely new and at the time, quite bold avenue of exploring nineteenth-century culture – namely, through the pornographic imagination that Marcus taxonomized with precise, clinical flair as a “pornotopia” in which “all men . . . are always infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or both. Everyone is always ready for everything” (276). In Foucault's telling, however, Marcus demonstrated a theoretically impoverished faith in Freudian models of “repression” in Marcus's examination of “underground” Victorian sexualities. It was Marcus's reliance on the “repressive fallacy,” his conviction that there existed a demarcated spatial and psychic Victorian counter-world that The History of Sexuality had so forcefully undermined.