In his bookDistinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues that in order to understand the workings of culture “in the restricted, normative sense” we must not only relate our discussion to the broad anthropological meanings of the concept, we must also relate it to “taste” in the physical sense. We must, he argues, bring “the elaborated taste for the most refined objects . . . back into relation with the elementary taste for the flavours of food” (Bourdieu 99). Bourdieu is writing of twentieth-century France and not nineteenth-century Britain. It may seem anachronistic to juxtapose a quotation from his work with one from an 1861 volume of domestic advice. However, his argument that social distinctions can be understood through a discussion of the material and cultural values attached to food resonates with Beeton's argument that “the rank which a people occupy . . . may be measured by their way of taking their meals.”

Charles Kingsley's children's novelThe Water-Babies (WB), written in the spring and summer of 1862, is a politically anxious text. In this essay I argue that although The Water-Babies’ overall structure appears to be chaotic and arbitrary – J. M. I. Klaver, for example, deems the work a “Victorian fantasy crowded with Kingsley's hobby-horses” where he “pour[s] out whatever he had on his mind” (517) – in fact Kingsley's disquietude concerning the Irish Famine, U.S. slavery, and the condition of the British working classes provides a logical framework for the text.

DESPITE SOME TWENTY YEARS of scholarship in the field, core questions such as “what is a New Woman?” and “what is New Woman fiction?” still remain vexed and all too often need more precise definition. Yet one can say that for all the conflicts of meaning and emphasis between sexual and political, discursive and actual, or caricature and didactic, the feminist rediscovery of the New Woman during the late 1970s has not only opened the canon but has also begun a transformation in the way we understand the entire fin de siècle.

Imagine a story featuring a dreamy descent underground, grotesquely gigantic and dwarfish carnality, a prodigious pool of body fluid, cartwheels and pratfalls, cornucopian helpings of food and drink, antic playgrounds, riddling language and name games, repeated nonsense (re)verses, various negative capabilities, mathematical miracles, voyages of discovery, cycles of crowning and uncrowning, not to mention metalists like the previous catalogue in this sentence. It seems curious that this tangled tale, Lewis Carroll's in the Alices, has never been linked to the Carnival tradition typified by François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–64) even though our imagined story equally describes Rabelais's glorious epic. At least, it's never been linked much beyond Northrop Frye's suggestion that “[t]he Alice books are perfect Menippean satires, and so is [Charles Kingsley's] The Water-Babies, which has been influenced by Rabelais” (310) and Martin Gardner's note to Looking-Glass that Medieval and “Renaissance chess games were sometimes played with human pieces on enormous fields” as in “Gargantua and Pantagruel” (135, n. 2). And yet, to spin William Empson's memorable take on Freudian readings (357), one has only to tell Alice's story to make it a carnival tale.

Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone is a novel constructed through the repeated representation of the abnormal body. Reading The Moonstone in critical terms has traditionally required a primary engagement with form. The work has been defined as a foundational narrative in the genre of crime and detection and at the same time read as a narrative located within the context of the immensely popular group of sensation novels that dominate the Victorian literary marketplace through the middle and the second half of the nineteenth century. T. S. Eliot is one of the first readers to define one end of this paradigm, reading the novel as an original text in the genre of detective fiction, and famously saying that The Moonstone is “the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels” (xii). On the other end of the paradigm, the novel's formal workings are again often cited as a larger example, and even triumph, of Victorian sensation fiction – melodramatic narratives built, according to Winifred Hughes and the more recent Derridean readings by Patrick Brantlinger and others, around a discursive cross-fertilization of romanticism, gothicism, and realism.

Since the late 1980s and Elaine Showalter's influential Sexual Anarchy, it has become axiomatic to read Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula as a text that responds to anxieties of degeneration through metaphors of infection (184). Given the obvious sexual nature of the threat represented by the vampire, critics have focused on syphilis as the text's most immediate disease of reference. They have identified many important correspondences between Stoker's text and racialized fears of decline through blood and bloodlines, drawing connections between Stoker's own possible demise from syphilis, the history of contagious diseases legislation, and the scandal surrounding Ibsen's Ghosts (1882). But, as Martin Willis has noted, there continues to be “a need to reassess Dracula within the contexts of disease theories that allows for a more historically rigorous analysis of the novel” (302).

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.

Accounting for the prevalence of enmity in nineteenth-century Western culture, Peter Gay evinces some surprise at the tenacious grip of the meek upon their aggression, which appears to satisfy a basic necessity of life. Uriah Heep alone attests to the harmony between Charles Dickens's social imagination and Gay's critical assessment that the Victorians had cause to treat their self-effacing neighbors with as much caution as the bellicose. But what about the more resignedly “umble” and solemnly self-diminishing denizens of Dickens's fictional world: the good girls at the center of so many novels? Why do aggression and resentment seem less compatible with their humility than with Heep's? Because, I would suggest, they are little. Littleness is certainly an idealized quality of girls in Dickens's novels. In particular, Nell Trent and Amy Dorrit share the epithet “little” as an indication of their preciousness, physical smallness, modesty, and, most importantly, self-abnegation in service of others. As a number of critics have observed, this selflessness takes many forms, including starvation, over-work, and self-erasure. Such extremes of compassionate resolve and willful self-limitation, however, intimate the strictness of the nice girl and the difficulty of measuring up to her (as a) standard. Dickens himself set this bar – if not precisely high, at so low a level as to require painstaking self-contortion to pass under it – in an 1847 speech to the Mechanics’ Institution at Leeds where he described women as “those who are our best and dearest friends in infancy, in childhood, in manhood, and in old age, the most devoted and least selfish natures that we know on earth, who turn to us always constant and unchanged, when others turn away” (Fielding 83). This definition of the best feminine endowments recognizes no difference between girls and women, because the female half of the human population remains “constant and unchanged” in service of male needs. Although Dickens calls upon women to be the bigger person in a moral sense, for girls, growing up appears a matter of remaining little, selfless, “constant.” For good self-effacing Victorian girls like Little Nell and Little Dorrit, aggression thus is necessary because enforcing self-negation requires enormous will power, but also perhaps because aggression guards the last modicum of selfhood belonging to those for whom selflessness is socially prescribed.

MR. TULLIVER DRAWS LITTLE ATTENTION from critics of The Mill on the Floss compared to his children, Maggie and Tom, and his finances are hardly ever looked at in any detail, just as other sections of George Eliot's novel that concern economics are not. Yet George Eliot says Mr. Tulliver has his tragedy, as do his daughter and son, and it is precisely Mr. Tulliver's money trouble, his bankruptcy, that sets the condition for the troubles of the next generation. I seek to trace a narrative logic for a novel that has seemed to many to strain plot coherence, and I do so by an economic analysis that allows a link to be drawn between such seemingly disparate tragedies as a father's financial ruin and death and his children's drowning, with the sister giving up love then life itself to reclaim her brother's favor, seeking in vain to rescue him from a flood.

Of all Dickens's eccentric children – whose numbers include the Artful Dodger, Paul Dombey, Little Nell, and Smike – none, perhaps, is more peculiarly “old-fashioned” than Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend (1864-65). From her first appearance, Jenny exhibits a strange indeterminacy:

[I]t is not enough to make the Jew respected, but to have JUDAISM rightly reverenced; and to do this, there must be a JEWISH LITERATURE, or the Jewish people will not advance one step.

— Grace Aguilar, The Jewish Faith (1846)

THE ESSAYS COLLECTED in this issue of Victorian Literature and Culture seek to introduce Victorianists to some of the many Anglo-Jewish writers of nineteenth-century England. What differentiates this moment in Anglo-Jewish scholarship from most previous considerations is that we do not purport to fill a falsely constructed “void” of Anglo-Jewish literary silence; on the contrary, this collection seeks to amplify the fullness of nineteenth century Anglo-Jewish literary life. In 1846, Grace Aguilar, the important Anglo-Jewish writer and theologian, called out for the production of a “Jewish literature” that would aid the “right reverence[e] of Judaism,” and “advance” the Jewish people in Victorian England. All too aware of the way exclusion from Hebrew literary and religious texts often precipitated assimilation, conversion, and more generalized alienation from Jewish religious life, Aguilar sought new tools to combat Jewish religious apathy. Detailing the subtle conversionary and theological assumptions that so-called secular — yet clearly Christian — literature often performed, Aguilar reasoned that a Jewish literature could provide Jewish readers — and especially Jewish women — with literary pleasure and a simultaneous sense of Jewish values and ethics; likewise, such a literature could recast the generally negative images of Jewish people and Judaism which pervade the long history of English literature.1 With her emphasis on a Jewish literature, then, Aguilar sought to claim the cultural and ideological power literature held in Victorian England for specifically Jewish uses. Significantly, Aguilar’s tone in the statement above suggests that she saw no such Jewish literature in past moments of Anglo-Jewish history; Aguilar’s intensive production of such a literature in a variety of genres was her own response to this desire for Jewish literature.

“London, for some time previous to the opening of the Great Exhibition, has been a curious sight even to Londoners,” Henry Mayhew declared in 1851, or the Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and Family, Who Came Up to London to “Enjoy Themselves,” and to See the Great Exhibition, his comic instant novel about the transformation of London in the year of the Great Exhibition. Mayhew proceeded to detail what had grown curiouser and curiouser about the London scene in that climactic year: “New amusements were daily springing into existence, or old ones being revived. The Chinese Collection had returned to the Metropolis, with a family from Pekin, and a lady with feet two inches and a half long, as proof of the superior standing she had in society; Mr Calin [sic; he means Caitlin] had re−opened his Indian exhibit; Mr Wyle [sic; he means Wyld; instant novels apparently did not allow much time for proofreading] had bought up the interior of Leicester Square, with a view of cramming into it – ‘yeah, the great globe itself’” (132). Elsewhere in Mayhew's parodic panorama of London's exhibition mania, he offered a view of other globalized London scenes, focusing on celebrated chef Alexis Soyer's new restaurant, “where the universe might dine, from sixpence to a hundred guineas, of cartes ranging from pickled whelks to nightingale's tongues . . . from the ‘long sixes,’ au natural of the Russians, to the ‘stewed Missionary of the Marquesas,’ or the ‘cold roast Bishop’ of New Zealand” (2). Mayhew's imaginary menu, with its cannibalistic extremes, expresses a wider concern about the deluging of London by foreigners come to see the Great Exhibition (some 60000 “extra” foreigners – beyond, that is, standard visiting numbers – were estimated to have actually visited, mostly from the Continent, that year, roughly doubling the existing foreign population of London; see Auerbach 186), which found expression in an amused (when not more genuinely terrified) xenophobia that often focused on foreign foodways.

In spite of the supernatural trappings of Charles Dickens's most famous work, A Christmas Carol, critics from G. K. Chesterton to Edmund Wilson have found its equally famous protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge, to be a real character, more fleshed-out and compelling than many of the characters of Dickens's longer, presumably more “serious” novels. Much of the reaction to A Christmas Carol and its protean anti-hero can be summarized by Stephen Prickett's succinct appraisal in his seminal study, Victorian Fantasy: “The strength of A Christmas Carol lies quite simply in its psychological credibility” (54). Scrooge is a character we can believe in, a character that, as Margaret Atwood suggests, “remains fresh and vital. ‘Scrooge Lives!’ we might write on our T-shirts” (xiii).

While carefully crafting a valentine to his would-be-lover Mary, Sam Weller finishes rather abruptly, and his father, looking over his shoulder, asks, “That's rayther a sudden pull up, ain't it, Sammy?” Sam's response emblematizes the driving force of the serial novel: “Not a bit on it. . . she'll vish there wos more, and that's the great art o' letter writin'” (344; no. XII, ch. XXXIII). Charles Dickens's great art of serial writing aimed to leave his readers repeatedly wishing there was more: more pages, more plot, more world, and above all, more time with their favorite characters. This desire encouraged readers to imagine beyond the novel – to pursue characters outside the pages of The Pickwick Papers itself. Their desires were rewarded with a wide range of continuations that included theatrical adaptations, plagiarisms, or unauthorized sequels – anything that, like the valentine, could reunite readers with their beloved Sam.

Henry Mansel, writing in 1863, was confident in his prediction that the current popular vogue for sensation novels was an ephemeral phase, soon to pass into a deserved oblivion. Yet by the end of a decade marked by extensive and frequently hysterical debates over the genre, the future Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, was still bemoaning the ubiquity of sensation fiction: “the world may congratulate itself when the last sensational novel has been written and forgotten” (424). Mansel and Austin would doubtless have been astounded (and appalled) at the current status of mid-Victorian sensation fiction in the realm of academic scholarship. Far from being a long-forgotten, inconsequential moment in literary history, the sensation novels of authors such as Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Ouida have prompted a plethora of critical studies, which have impacted on our wider understanding of the dynamics and influences of mid-Victorian literary and publishing practices.

The temporal structures of provincial realist novels set in extraction landscapes convey the new understanding of futurity that attended the nineteenth-century rise of an industrial system powered by a nonrenewable, diminishing stock of underground resources. Focusing on Joseph Conrad's Nostromo (1904), George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Fanny Mayne's Jane Rutherford; Or, the Miners' Strike (1853), this article demonstrates how these works adapt the provincial realist novel's emphasis on social renewal by way of marriage, reproduction, and inheritance to the extraction-based society of industrial Britain, undergirded by a trajectory of depletion and exhaustion rather than renewal. These works' deviation from novelistic chrononormativity expresses a new understanding of an extraction-based present that is claimed at the expense of future generations.

TO SPEAK ABOUT JOHN RUSKIN’S anxious figures for engraved reproduction is to speak about his troubled relationship to a modernity in which excess and impermanence present complex and interrelated challenges. The ruined cathedral in my title occurs in lectures Ruskin delivered in 1857, and published the same year as The Political Economy of Art. Invited to speak at Manchester on the occasion of the Art-Treasures Exhibition, at the height of his fame as a critic, Ruskin responded to the moment with two lectures challenging much that the exhibition stood for. He offered the following apocalyptic description of the situation of art away from the self-congratulating festival. It is worth considering this passage — at once about art and about the responsibility for its blighting — in relation to the immense temporary structure built to house the Art-Treasures Exhibition (Figure 9):