Dickens is not known as a political economist. He is the critic of workhouse abuses (made topical by Benthamite Poor Law reform) in Oliver Twist and the caricaturist of the father of Adam Smith and Malthus Gradgrind in Hard Times. Students of Victorian literature familiarly take Hard Times as F. R. Leavis does as a condemnation of “The World of Bentham,” of utilitarianism, philosophic radicalism, political economy. It is what we expect when Dickens, The Critical Heritage gives us John Stuart Mill complaining about Bleak House and that “creature” Dickens for a portrait of Mrs. Jellyby that he finds antifeminist (to Harriet Taylor, March 20, 1854, qtd. in Collins, 297–98). But consider: in Bleak House there is a passage where Mr. Skimpole declares his family to be “all wrong in point of political economy” (454). His “Beauty daughter” marries young, takes a husband who is another child; they are improvident, have two children, bring them home to Skimpole's, as he expects his other daughters to do as well, though they none of them know how they will get on. Skimpole is exposed in the course of the novel as one of its worst characters. For a bribe and to save himself from infection he turns the smallpox-stricken Jo out into the night. He cadges loans from those who can't afford to make them. He encourages Richard in his fatal false hopes of a Chancery settlement for a payback to himself for helping the lawyer Mr. Vholes to a client. Esther Summerson ultimately condemns him, and Mr. Jarndyce breaks with him. If Skimpole is all wrong in point of political economy, can there be something all right with political economy for Dickens?

Margaret oliphants ghost story “The Library Window” (1896) — one of the last works of its author's prolific career — is haunted by images of reading and writing. Visiting her aunt, the young narrator (never named) reads obsessively, perched in the window seat where she witnesses another scene of textuality. Some claim that a window in the college library across the street is only “fictitious panes marked on the wall” (296), yet in a series of increasingly vivid tableaux the girl sees through those panes a young man seated in a study “writing, writing always” (305). So entranced is she by this vision of scholarship, so convinced of its reality, that she is devastated to learn the window is indeed a fake and the young man a ghost who appears to her because of a curse on the female members of her family: he was killed by the brothers of another young girl — the narrator's ancestor — when they mistakenly assumed he was responding to her flirtatious overtures as she waved to him across the street.

Writing on the Living conditions in Devon and Somerset in 1849, Alexander Mackay set out to discredit the often picturesque depiction of the homes of the poor:

We are accustomed to associate with the idea of a country village, or with a cottage situated in a winding vale, or hanging upon the side of a rich and fertile slope, nothing but health, contentment and happiness. A rural dwelling of this class … makes such a nice pencil sketch, that we are naturally inclined to think it as neat and comfortable as it appears. But to know it aright, it must be turned inside out, and its realites exposed to the gaze of the observer. (qtd. in Lester 320)

It was this turning “inside out” of working-class interiors to the voyeuristic gaze of their largely middle-class readers that Mackay and his fellow journalists on the Morning Chronicle set out to accomplish in a series of “letters” written in 1849 and 1850. But such depictions of working-class houses and their interiors had been a staple part of the discourse on the condition of the laboring population as early as 1832, when the Manchester physician and later Assistant Poor Law Commissioner James Kay published The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes, and they continued to appear throughout the 1830s, 40s, and early 50s in the work of Peter Gaskell, William Alison, Thomas Beames, Hector Gavin, Edwin Chadwick, Henry Mayhew, and others. This writing, as I will demonstrate, betrays similar discursive and ideological underpinnings as the workingclass interior becomes the focal point for the assertion of bourgeois value and the maintenance of class distinction.

Nationalism and imperialism in nineteenth-century European literature, located within a theoretical framework of Self/Other, have been the subject of much recent interest. Such projects focus chiefly on representations of the Other in descriptions, images, and evaluations. Sometimes, however, the affirmation of the national Self in such literature is achieved by the total or near total obliteration of the Other. In such cases it is on non-representations, or to use Macherey's word “silences,” that one's reading of such texts must be focused if their nationalistic and imperialistic character is to be exposed.

According to charles darwin's subsidence theory of coral reef formation, coral polyps laid the foundation fifty million years ago for a Pacific reef now known as Enewetak Atoll (Wood 12). At that time Enewetak was simply a ring of coral around the fringe of a sinking island mountain. Able to live only near the ocean's surface, however, corals build upon previous generations of coral structure as their land base sinks, and in the case of Enewetak this process continued long after the mountain's peak first submerged. Today Enewetak Atoll rises above the original mountain seven-tenths of a mile (two-and-a-half times the height of the Chicago Sears Tower) before it reaches its apex in a circle of lagoon islands on the ocean's surface.

Aubrey Beardsley made major contributions to the art of the grotesque. Initially, he probably learned the theory as well as the technique of creating designs in this mode from the work of medieval European artists. His own development of the grotesque, however, rests on his treatment of subject matter, a treatment which was influenced by Japanese woodblock artists. The double viewpoint, both expressing an author's point of view and critiquing one's own society, is seen most frequently in humorous grotesque Japanese woodblock designs, which were collected, exhibited, and reproduced in England during the 1890s. In order to detail one of Beardsley's major contributions to this form, this essay will first delineate Beardsley's attraction to the grotesque as well as his exposure to Japanese art, and, after examining the ways in which the grotesque works, it will concentrate on Beardsley's adaptations of the Japanese grotesque.

On january 13, 1858 — a few months after the eruption of the Indian Mutiny — John Ruskin addressed an audience at the South Kensington Museum in London with a lecture entitled “The Deteriorative Power of Conventional Art over Nations” (published the following year as Lecture I of The Two Paths). Commenting on the dearth of artistic talent to be found in Scotland as opposed to the artistic abundance of India, Ruskin decrees that Indians are a “race rejoicing in art, and eminently and universally endowed with the gift of it,” whereas with Scots one is faced with “a people careless of art and apparently incapable of it” (16: 262).

This paper is concerned with the Judicature Acts of 1873 and 18751 and the controversy surrounding them. The administrative reform of the Judicature was less obviously controversial than some other Victorian reformist legislation, such as the Factory Act, or the Married Women's Property Act, but legal debate about the Judicature Acts brings the law into dialogue with moral debates in the broader arena of Victorian culture. As a response to a crisis of authority in the country's legal institutions, this debate was one significant manifestation of the general conflict between authority and individualism that pervades Victorian discourse. The key terms of the legal debate were law, conscience, and equity, underwritten by the vague but powerful concepts of justice and natural law, and throughout the debate the relationships between legal usage and other forms of language were persistently questioned. The terms were also tested, and the questions asked, in such central literary texts as Daniel Deronda, Idylls of the King, and The Ring and the Book, and in the writings of such culturally central figures as Charles Darwin and Frederick Denison Maurice.

My title brings together two cultures — Indian and British — and three phases of womanhood — the bride, the widow, and — through suttee — the dead widow. Suttee, or sati, is the obsolete Hindu practice in which a widow burns herself upon her husband's funeral pyre. In this essay I wish to explore how sati was used as a metaphor in British novels and periodicals in the nineteenth century — used both as a metaphor for the British widow's mourning rituals and for the plight of the British bride in an unhappy marriage. I shall argue that sati forms a nexus connecting the seemingly disparate situations of the bride and widow, and that it also in this metaphorical sense forms a nexus or point of comparison between British and Indian culture.

In his project for the tale “The Death of The Lion” (1894), Henry James envisaged the mythical, and distinctively modern, fate of the artist as celebrity. Besieged by journalists, lionizers, and autograph-hunters, the celebrated writer is subjected to a voracious desire for knowledge concerning his life, whilst, conversely, the work, upon which his literary fame supposedly rests, is neglected. The work of the author is displaced from its position as the privileged object of literary interpretation by a proliferation of new cultural practices which construe the “life” as a more vital source of meaning. Through such media as advertising, journalism and photography, authors, like the texts which they produce, are marketed as commodities, as products to be circulated and consumed.

She'd had no end of myths about immortals coming down and taking human bodies, dying human deaths. Helen knew how to interpret that scripture: if gods could do this human thing, then we could as well. That plot as the mind's brainchild, awareness explaining itself to itself.…She'd had the bit about the soul fastened to a dying animal. What she needed, in order to forgive our race and live here in peace, was faith's flip side … how body stumbled onto the stricken celestial, how it taught itself to twig time and what lay beyond time. (Powers, 319–320)

A sudden scholarly interest in Robert Louis Stevenson has resulted in a good many publications — his collected letters, a brief life by Ian Bell, a more authoritative life by Frank McLynn, and a very full biography of Fanny Stevenson, the American woman who lived with the writer for the last twenty years of his life. Besides informing us about the Stevensons, this outpouring says a good deal about where biography is now, in the mid-1990s.