The nineteenth century is the period when so many of the infrastructures on which we rely for the transmission and distribution of ideas, people, and goods were, on one hand, established and standardized and, on the other, contested and transformed in practice. We argue that literary and cultural scholars of the nineteenth century can make major contributions to the transhistorical and transimperial work of critical infrastructure studies. The pieces in this special issue give us a picture of Victorian infrastructure that we have loosely organized into four major themes: Water and Waste; Death and Bodies; Periods and Punctuation; and Care and Aid. Whether close-reading literary representations of infrastructure or close-reading literature as infrastructure, these essays collectively show how Victorian literature moved people. Our contributors address the following questions, among others: How did the material structures that moved people, goods, and ideas make people feel? How did people's feelings, libidinal energies, and practices affect how infrastructures were imagined, designed, built, used, and transformed—in literature and in the world?

In this essay I read debates about amenities of water and waste in the British Caribbean in the late and immediate post-Victorian period through histories of intimacy and kinship centered in fiction by Caribbean writers of the last twenty years. In these novels and short stories, collecting water at a stream or a standpipe or emptying a chamber pot are actions that produce or recall moments of desire and aspiration, shame and punishment, in storylines that move between a past of enslavement and indentureship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a present of political and psychological stasis or upheaval in the 1950s, 1970s, or the early twenty-first century. Nineteenth-century discussions about fire hydrants or standpipes index a British Caribbean colony's evolving landscape of modernization and the disagreements about what shape and speed this process should take, and recent fiction allows us to discern how these amenities inherit and bequeath associations of trauma.

Municipal solid waste management shapes public life at every moment, and it did so for the Victorians as much as it does for us today. Victorians were concerned about the sanitary risk unruly trash posed, but profit, not conservation or fear of hazardous waste, was the primary motivator behind all Victorian municipal waste management. Though the Victorian period is often characterized as a time when government and public works were becoming centralized, this was not the case with municipal solid waste management. Instead, a focus on the individual pursuit of profit meant that Victorian waste management was dispersed across society, with homemakers, recycling entrepreneurs, dustmen, and the very poorest members of society all playing a role. The structures Victorians built (or failed to build) to attend to their trash can help us understand how they ordered society. Waste management practices provide a microcosm of nineteenth-century British capitalism, class, gender roles, and imperial nationalism.

This article argues that natural environments should be seen as life-sustaining infrastructures. Countering a tendency to see infrastructures as human-engineered, I show how environmental infrastructures are shaped by humans and nonhumans alike, with their life-sustaining roles often only revealed by their disruption. I demonstrate how infrastructures might be shaped by nonhumans by highlighting the career of Elodea canadensis, or Canadian waterweed, an introduced plant that wrought havoc on Britain's watery environments in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Red weed, the plant introduced by the Martians in H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, echoes Elodea in its course through the British environment. But while Elodea and similar introduced species prompted nascent critiques of imperial plant movement, I show how Wells avoids such critiques by deleting red weed, and any further environmental consequences following from its introduction, from his novel's end. Instead, Wells endorses a natural-selection-driven explanation for the British environment's superior fitness—an explanation that affirms rather than critiques ecological imperialism and mitigates the role of nonhumans in reshaping environmental infrastructures.

The political geography of empire transformed with the Victorian rise of steam power and its infrastructure, especially with the emerging dominance of steam as the primary means of transoceanic travel and shipping. Oceanic infrastructure was a new feature of the British Empire especially in the period after 1860, when steamships were increasingly replacing sailing ships and when the material exigencies of fueling and refueling required the installation of coaling stations to support long-haul transport for steam-powered ships. In this essay we explore how these changes registered in literature and discourse, with Joseph Conrad as our prime example. We analyze two of Conrad's works that feature coaling stations and steam-carrying, Victory (1915) and The Mirror of the Sea (1906). Drawing on infrastructure studies, critical ocean studies, and the energy humanities, we make a case for more attention to oceangoing coal as part of a broader reconsideration of empire in the Anthropocene. We also make a case for Conrad as one of the great observers of environmental-infrastructural change in the early fossil-fuel era, worth revisiting now as both witness and interpreter.

Logistics is the science and art of moving goods, people, and information efficiently to maximize profit; though it has become synonymous with the rise of the shipping container, its history is as old as trade itself. At the end of the nineteenth century, the ancient human action of loading and shipping boxes became part of a globalizing network of refrigerated supply chains and transoceanic shipping. Appearing briefly as a detail in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula (1897), the “cold chain” nonetheless orchestrates the plot and governs the vampiric mythology. This temperature-cooled supply and distribution network imbued the times, spaces, and aesthetics of human life with the new capability to ship perishable food, or in the novel's metaphor, “un-death.”

The acquisition of nonnative flora and fauna was long framed by horticultural historians as the result of great British derring-do and hand-to-hand conflict. Yet nineteenth-century plant extraction actually involved comparatively few feats of physical bravery or scenes of Boys’ Own high drama. The letters of Victorian commercial plant-hunters reveal that the removal and exportation of plants entailed the deployment of emerging colonial and national infrastructures together with complex regional and local networks and knowledge systems. Much of a plant-hunter's day-to-day life, tellingly, involved paperwork: submitting drafts and bills of exchange, sending letters and cables to employers, and completing bills of lading to ship plants, in stages, to Europe, where they were received at customs houses before journeying on, by rail and by road, to nurseries, collectors, and auction houses. At the same time, emerging colonial infrastructures only took hunters so far; local and traditional knowledge systems were essential as well. Plant-hunting depended upon the support, expertise, knowledge, and traditions of local people—a fact the enduring narrative of hand-to-hand conflict and triumphant British vanquishing seems structured carefully to conceal.

In its dynamism and shared imaginative scope, popular fiction could provide a creative foundation for “not-yet-achieved” infrastructural projects. By insisting on the moral value of seeing others as “fellow-passengers to the grave,” Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843) anticipates the London Necropolis Railway. Designed to relieve pressure on the capital, this purpose-built funeral railroad and cemetery opened in Brookwood, Surrey, in 1854. Through a fantasy that invokes locomotive hearses, Dickens humanizes the notion of a steam-powered funeral apparatus. He advocates for burial beyond the city by contrasting Tiny Tim's restful end in a “green place” with Scrooge's horrifying, “walled-in,” urban grave. Dickens's enduring Christmas story appeals to what could be and eases the imaginative leap required of those entrusting their loved ones to a novel postmortem infrastructure that was built to last.

This essay traces a disjointed aesthetics of hereditary units in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895) and Chinese filmmaker Wang Xiaoshuai's So Long, My Son (2019) and argues that shared social and economic conditions of Victorian Britain and postsocialist China prompt similar ruptures of social realism's totalizing aspirations. The novel and the film are mutually concerned with tragedies of biopolitical management and doomed lineages, but at the same time they both employ an aesthetics of leapings and projections—also featured in Hardy's 1917 poem “Heredity”—that argues for the value of an individual life based on a radical divestment from personhood itself, in favor of the gene's mindless jumps through unmapped space and time.

This essay argues that infrastructures in Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853) effect temporal accelerations and protractions, as opposed to being connective tissues for spatial and social networks. Reading the law enacted at the court of Chancery and the British Empire's maritime networks, two instances of the novel's many infrastructures, this paper traces infrastructures’ time warps: perpetual deferrals of justice, denials of coevalness to colonial subjects, and accelerations of death for Richard Carstone and other characters. Infrastructures’ temporal transformations reveal how temporalities of varying rhythms are held together under a veneer of uniform linearity by the realist novel's generic attributes like serialized publication and Esther's marriage plot. Attention to this fraught temporality, the author argues, enables readers to glean the extent to which the claims of colonized and subaltern subjects suffuse the novel's narrative voice.

In the Victorian era, innovations in infrastructure, notably the revolutionary stagecoach, redefined women's travel experiences and offered them a means to break free from domesticity. While the rapid pace of the stagecoach initially unsettles individuals like Jane Eyre in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), she accustoms herself to its motion to evade perilous situations. Bearing in mind the cadence of the stagecoach, I suggest that Patricia Park's modern retelling of Jane Eyre, Re Jane (2015), adapts the rhythm of the coach by recasting it as the motion of the New York City subway. Revising in this way, Park incorporates positive racial representation through the subway and its passengers. By re-creating the rhythm of the coach through the subway train, Park considers two historical ideas: the New York City subway was built by racial and ethnic minorities such as Irish immigrants and African Americans, and the subway also softly calls back to the beginnings of the American transcontinental railroad that erased the visibility of Chinese immigrant laborers. This essay contends that the transportation systems in nineteenth-century England and twenty-first-century New York created changes that liberated women from the rooted domestic ideologies of their respective periods.

This essay makes a case for viewing curriculum and the historical assemblages of slavery, racialization, and migration as infrastructures of Victorian literary studies. It does so by taking the recent curricular revision that the English department at Lehman College, a public, Hispanic-Serving Institution in the Bronx, New York, underwent as its starting point. I reflect on how this curricular overhaul, which was catalyzed by student activism, helped me see not only how curriculum has operated as an infrastructure of whiteness in my department and English studies at large but also how disentangling Victorian studies from its white Anglo assumptions will require reconceptualizing the methodological, epistemological, and historical foundations of the field.

The drive toward precision, punctuality, and an accurate global mapping of the ocean has always been in tension with the forces that undermine and undercut the attempt: human failure, bad weather, broken instruments, bad luck, and so on. The serial labor of embedding infrastructure is risky and requires both improvisatory skills and persistence. The ships that paid out the telegraph cable, and the many kinds of serial writing that took place onboard these ships, were all part of the infrastructural endeavor of the nineteenth century, and they anticipated the digital as much as the cables did themselves. If we think of their role as actively and serially remaking positionality in this uneven imperial world, we can think of serial data produced onboard moving ships in the nineteenth century as shaping an infrastructure that powerfully anticipates the digital.

This paper considers fossil fuel infrastructure alongside the punctuation infrastructure of writing. It focuses, in particular, on the period—as both punctuation and time frame—to ask how one demarcates the Victorian period in the context of climate change impacts that exceed it. The paper itself traverses different temporal periods and different forms of punctuation to make its point that infrastructure, while often unnoticed, shapes both ideas and action.

Historians and literary critics often observe that Victorian London had no Baron Haussmann to impose a rational, legible order on its tangle of streets. But the itineraries traced by early forms of public transportation—omnibuses, hackney cabs, and railways—nonetheless invited a reimagining and remapping of the city. Charles Dickens's Sketches by Boz (1836), midcentury encyclopedic cab fare guides, and the debates that preceded the building of the 1863 Metropolitan Underground Railway overwrote the existing geography of the city with a cartographic infrastructure tactically organized into routes, nodes, intervals, and destinations.

Photography may seem primarily a technology of image-making, but it was in fact a powerful mode of meaning-making in the nineteenth century, and its operation as such was actively under negotiation from its invention. This essay examines the photograph's status as both documentary object and artistic expression, drawing on examples including journalistic, political, and familial uses of the medium as well as the forms of entertainment it provided. As a force of knowledge production—whether helping consolidate emerging sentimental ideals of family relations, forwarding anthropological understandings of the world, or supporting the work of spiritualists claiming to commune with the dead—photography was used to clarify and shape people's ideas about phenomena they did not understand and often otherwise could not see. As such, it became a vital infrastructure for the transmission of culture and the consolidation of national identity.

Victorian assumptions about care infrastructure differed profoundly from our own. Accustomed to local care communities, Victorian writers like Charles Dickens and Samuel Richard Bosanquet resisted the advent of standardized, centralized, institutional care for the poor and sick. While they acknowledged the need for widespread help, they fought to provide care through personal charity based on intimate knowledge, not governmental edict. Comparing their care infrastructure with ours can help remind us of the risks of institutional indifference and the value of care relations.

As part of the effort to secure the release of the Dorchester Labourers, a group of agricultural workers sentenced in 1834 to penal transportation, London theaters hosted four fundraising evenings for the prisoners and their families. A turning point in the popular stage, these evenings marked a moment when commercial venues became willing to ally with working-class protest movements. At three of the four events, the theaters mounted nautical melodramas. Using Judith Butler's theories of the political possibilities of mourning, this article argues that melodrama effectively explored the twinned crises of social austerity and political repression while imagining radical transformation emerging from loss.

Pensions were a means of social provisioning long before they became a cornerstone of state welfare policies in the early twentieth century. The multifarious pension forms that persisted and were reshaped during the Victorian period offer occasions to glimpse how social bonds and obligations across time were imagined and contested. The pensions of Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852–53) suggest how the infrastructural potential of a form might flicker within the literary text, even as it is unacknowledged and left behind.

This article examines Rokeya Hossain's “Sultana's Dream” (1905), a short story that pictures a solar-powered utopia governed by women, as a key site for thinking through the entanglements of sovereignty, gender, colonization, and environmental relations as they are articulated through infrastructure. To read infrastructurally in this way, we attend to socio-historical contexts of nineteenth-century Bengali society and to the Victorian imperial roots of early solar inventions, alongside the more modular aesthetics and meaning-making affordances of solar energy. Such a mode of reading makes infrastructure legible as an essential political ground for the maintenance or transformation of socio-ecological relations and reveals the irreducible political, material, and poetic qualities of infrastructures themselves. Texts like “Sultana's Dream” make such configurations visible and open to interrogation, and demonstrate the ways that solar, as infrastructure, energizes new social and political forms—even those yet undreamed.