Critics of Miss Marjoribanks are divided about whether Margaret Oliphant's eponymous heroine's performance of social conventions, particularly those pertaining to gender roles, is consciously subversive or an unreflective embodiment of those conventions. This scholarship implicitly equates agency with critical detachment: if Lucilla does not critique the conventions she uses and the constructions of gender they reflect, she must lack the capacity to think strategically about her desires, a capacity necessary for agency. It's true that Lucilla is neither critical nor detached. Oliphant characterizes her as fully invested in social norms and as lacking the psychological depth that typically marks agential characters. In fact, I argue that Lucilla is a flat character and that Lucilla's flatness is precisely what makes her excel as an agent. Lucilla's nigh-emotionless thinking, combined with her ruling qualities of good sense and self-satisfaction, promotes agency. Untrammeled by mixed feelings or self-doubt, she has nothing to do but rationally calculate how best to achieve her interests. Reconsidering Lucilla's agency in light of her flatness thus allows us both to value that agency as Oliphant portrays it and to understand how characters can have agency at all.

The first time a casually racist reference crops up in the Victorian texts I teach, I tell my students that the presence of slurs and stereotypes in Victorian literature reflects the prevalence of racism in Victorian society. I give them some historical context for the racism whenever possible and smile stoically. Yes, I say, that expression in the novel I've made you purchase and that I'm encouraging you to find fascinating is indeed racist. Let's talk about how racist it is and why! The second time an explicitly racist reference crops up, we refer to the previous conversation. The third time it does, we look meaningfully at each other and shake our heads. The fourth time it does, we don't even mention it. We learn, like the Victorians, to take it for granted.

When Charles Lyell chronicles humankind's rise to geologic power in the Principles of Geology, he talks out of both sides of his mouth. Detailing the human species’ seemingly unmatched force as a terrestrial “levelling agent,” he ruminates on an unsettling possibility that haunts the present: “it admits of reasonable doubt whether, upon the whole, we fertilize or impoverish the lands we occupy.” Already at the time of Lyell's writing, the human species had “displaced” or altogether extinguished “a number of beasts of prey, birds, and animals of every class” (2:148) through deforestation, hunting, and the “progress of colonization” (2:150–51). But elsewhere in the Principles, Lyell puts into question what this history of environmental degradation otherwise seems to assert: that to be human is to possess a singular capacity for mastery. Thus, Lyell declares, “we ought always, before we decide that any part of the influence of man is novel and anomalous, carefully to consider all the powers of other animate agents which may be limited or superseded by him” (2:206). Tracing how swarms of insects gave dramatic and lasting shape to the German arboreal landscape in ways that humans could never replicate, he concludes: “[I]t does not follow that this kind of innovation”—human innovation—“is unprecedented” (2:206). Even as Lyell imagines humankind as “superior” in its capacity to act as “a single species,” he persistently lingers with the very real possibility that humans do not possess a “novel and anomalous” hold over the world (2:207, emphasis original). Instead, the Principles traces how the world is shaped by “physical causes” and nonhuman agencies that elude control and unmask the relative “insignifican[ce]” of humankind's “aggregate force” (2:207). Inasmuch as humans comprise only one part of an agential assemblage whose shifting interactions elude anthropogenic mastery, the Principles imagines humankind as interpenetrated by and profoundly susceptible to nonhuman life-forms and forces. According to Lyell, then, deep history speaks not only of the human species’ seemingly privileged capacity for action but also its nonintentionality, noninstrumentality, and vulnerability. That the Principles tells a story about the porous interfaces between human and nonhuman geologic agents is perhaps surprising, given that it emerged and participated in a moment which, for many, marks the zenith of imperial and anthropogenic power.

Tenure, the Anglican practice of residing and ministering within the small bounds of a parish, became the basis for a surprisingly wide range of Victorian novels. Its plot, which begins with the clergyman's arrival in a parish and ends with his leave-taking or death, echoes throughout the work of Gaskell, Oliphant, Trollope, and Eliot, but its origins and most condensed form lie in a minor, midcentury genre that I call the parish novel. In taking the parameters of tenure—its duration and its modest ambit—as their own, parish novels turned reading into a form of pastoral labor: a close, laborious, yet seemingly unproductive attention that simultaneously suffused everyday life with latent meaning and rendered such meaning a function of residence. The following essay traces the rise and fall of this genre against Anglicanism's reorientation from a set of beliefs to a formal activity whose goals aligned closely with the work of reading. Unlike earlier religious narratives, the parish novel offers a model of reading in which spiritual meaning is secured neither by a sense of providence nor by religious allegory but by the sustained exercise of faith.

This new section of Victorian Literature and Culture focuses on apparently minor works of criticism, works that have fallen out of view but that might deserve another look. I want to talk about an almost aggressively minor instance of very Victorian scholarship, minor not only because it isn't often read but also because minorness is built into its very design: E. P. Thompson's “Postscript: 1976,” a longish essay that followed the second and revised edition of his 1955 biography, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. When seen in the reciprocal contexts of Thompson's career and the story of the British left (when, in other words, theory is seen not as opposed to but rather as a part of history), the apparently minor and belated qualities of Thompson's postscript emerge as a source of critical and even utopian promise. I want to argue that Thompson's lifelong engagement with the life of William Morris and with Morris's late conversion to socialism led him to a powerful and counterintuitive account of the lived threshold (what he and Morris call the “river of fire”) as essential to the methods of history and historical materialism.

The Caribbean's middleness within anthropological literature has been recognized and progressively untangled by scholars like Sidney Mintz and David Scott. The dialectics that figure the Caribbean as a perennially contingent space, always embodying too little and too much of the values that bound discourses of colonial modernity, frame the arguments in both Victorian Jamaica and Empire of Neglect. Both books respond to the problem of an ill-fitting Caribbean, especially after the formal abolition of slavery gave way to apprenticeships and inaugurated an uneven process of gaining political freedoms. Victoria's six-decade reign over the British Empire witnessed the expansion of liberal capitalism, reformulations of state and planter relationships, and movements for political rights under empire. Insurgencies and rebellions dotted the landscape of empire, from India (1857–59) and Jamaica (1865) to the Zulu territories (1879) and Alexandria in Egypt (1879–82). Empire responded to subjects who exposed its shaky footings through greater repression, social reform, and ballasting the civilizing mission from above. From below, colonized subjects inhabited empire in resistant, calculative, and often contradictory modes that revealed the undoing of imperial ambitions in practice. The Caribbean's marginalization in post-emancipation political economy, as the British Empire occupied more territory in Africa and Asia, produced many such complex habitations of empire that superficially may appear, pace Mintz, to be culturally midway between there and here.