The second chapter of The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with a metaphor that is worth considering: “The morning sun was streaming through the crevices of the canvas when the man awoke” (17; ch. 2). The “crevices of the canvas” are, in my opinion, emblematic of the breach by which Henchard has just severed the bonds between himself and humankind. Not only has he shaken loose from his wife, he has also, more importantly, discarded his own daughter. As Elaine Showalter has pointed out, the sale of the child brings to the fore the question of paternity; Henchard has broken the symbolic chain which connected him to both his ancestors and his offspring, and he re-enters society alone, “the new Adam, reborn, self-created, unencumbered” (57). In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, as Jan Gordon observes, a similar rupture affects historical continuity (366). The pointed shaft of the mail-cart piercing the breast of the unhappy horse, Prince, and releasing a flood of blood that cannot be staunched, represents that breach metaphorically. In the two novels, Hardy deals with a breach in the succession of generations and the subsequent impossibility to re-unite what has been sundered. In both stories, a missing link in a chain of symbolic transmission sets off a tragic process that will end only with the death of the heroes.

IN HIS BOOKMarxism and the City, Ira Katznelson, while lamenting the disappearance of spatial elements within Marxist thought, points to Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England as an ur-text that is able to provide “positive specification of the mechanisms linking base and superstructure” (56). As a corrective to the narrowly “scientific” strain of Marxism that privileged “structure” over “agency,” Katznelson views Engels’s early text on the industrial city of Manchester as the bearer of a double message: “Writing at the precise branching moment of the emergence of the modern industrial city, [Engels] connected the development of this new urban form to the epochal changes of the industrial revolution; he showed how changes in organization of city space affected social relationships within and between classes; and he tied this social geography to the suffering and coming to consciousness of the new proletariat” (144). In this critical exchange between “base” and “superstructure,” where Marxism becomes a tool for reading the city, and the city a space for revising Marxist method, class consciousness gets redefined as “urban consciousness,”1 thus supplanting the site of praxis from the arena of production to the psycho-social experience of space.

…the ancient metaphor of the lean and the fat, the eaters and the eaten, still haunts the frame of political discourse.

—Frank Lestringant, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne

Space–my space–is not the context of which I constitute the textuality: instead, it is first of all my body, and then it is my body's counterpart or “other,” its mirror-image or shadow: it is the shifting intersection between that which touches, penetrates, threatens or begets my body on the one hand, all other bodies on the other.

—Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

BY THE EARLY 1820s, medievalist representations of the British nation, such as those disseminated through Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, had increasingly displaced longstanding, Francophobic forms of nationalist imagery popular throughout Britain during the century of wars against France before 1815. The “medieval revival” of the early nineteenth century provided inspiration for a new strain of nationalist imagery and discourse that would evolve and help to shape British subjects for nearly a century preceding the Great War. Scholarship since Alice Chandler’s A Dream of Order (1970) has widely explored the literary and artistic development of medievalism in the nineteenth century. What needs further discussion or theorization are the cultural uses of nineteenth-century medievalist representations of the British nation, its history, aristocracy, and chivalric ideology. What also needs further discussion are the subject-forming and nation-forming implications of texts by popular, recently revived medievalist writers such as Felicia Hemans (Figure 5).

FROM “MY LAST DUCHESS” to The Picture of Dorian Gray, portraits are ubiquitous in Victorian literature – lurking behind velvet curtains or stowed in locked attics, their canvases turned to the wall. The literary portrait, a variation on the copious nineteenth-century description typical of the Victorian novel, provides a verbal representation of physical appearance that most conspicuously functions to establish character. Literary portraits work vicariously, asking readers to conceptualize imaginatively what the characters actually see, requiring that they visualize a painting – see it in their mind's eye. Verbal and visual, private and portable, the literary portrait is a memento of an exciting reading experience. To better understand the appeal of literary portraits in the Victorian era, we might explore the effects of verbal description and the psychosexual impulses motivating the production of literary portraits. Victorian literary portraits commonly fetishize female subjects for a purportedly male gaze; even post-Freud, psychoanalysts view fetishism as a primarily masculine proclivity (Metz 89). Novels such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), to name only one among many, present a fetishistic portrait that seems to be a classic illustration of Mulvey's observation that “[i]n a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female” (11). Film theory offers literary critics ways to theorize specularization – the behavior of “looking” – that precinematic viewers could not yet articulate.

DEBATES ABOUT FEMALE EMIGRATION to the British colonies throughout the Victorian era routinely capitalize on the crucial role women could play in consolidating the empire through the civilizing mission. Advocates of female emigration frequently publicized the benefits of “matrimonial colonization,” a rendering of what is now called republican motherhood that defines women’s place in the nation in terms of their domestic and reproductive roles.1 The founding in 1862 of the Female Middle Class Emigration Society (FMCES) by two educated middle-class women, Maria Rye and Jane Lewin, marked a departure from this conventional approach to female emigration. The work of the FMCES was carried out in the spirit of energy and determination that characterized the period of growing feminist activity in the 1860s, when the British rhetoric about “superfluous” women was reaching the tenor of a national crisis.2 While campaigns for improving female education and employment opportunities were long-term solutions to the problem, emigration offered a more immediate palliative. Concerned primarily with the plight of single, middle-class women, Rye and Lewin saw in emigration an alternative plot to the tragic denouement in poverty and spinsterhood that awaited a large proportion of Britain’s population of single, unemployed women. Ignoring the civilizing mission and the inducements for genteel women to marry or to become domestic servants in the colonies,3 Rye and Lewin instead focused on creating a class-differentiated access into colonialism by enabling single middle-class women, most of whom were governesses,

In 1893, overwhelmed by readers' insatiability for Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle killed his detective off at the height of his popularity. Writing to a friend in 1896, Doyle described how literally sick he was of the figure he had created: “I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day” (Chabon 17). Holmes's (first) literary demise was marked by his creator with a culinary simile, one which recalls that his literary debut was made under the name that, above all others, stood for the culinary in late nineteenth-century Britain: Isabella Beeton. The first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet,” appeared in the 1887 edition of Beeton's Christmas Annual. Three other editors had rejected the story before the Beeton Annual accepted it. This Doyle-Beeton publishing encounter was an instance of one publishing phenomenon recognizing another one and ushering it into the limelight. When Doyle's reflections on his huge publishing success turn to a gustatory memory of overindulgence in a purposefully overdeveloped organ, it raises the following question: what were the relationships between the mass market, the culinary, and the production and adjudication of judgment and refinement in the nineteenth century?

By the mid-nineteenth century, British women had ample motivation for imagining forms of charity that did not require money. Property laws continued to deprive most married women of personal wealth and new statistics revealed a “surplus” of unmarried middle-class women lacking employment. Elizabeth Gaskell addressed these financial challenges by envisioning alternative forms of economic power for women. Her novella Cranford (1851–53) depicts a community of shabby-genteel women who support each other, in the virtual absence of men, through gift practices. Using principles of sympathetic and economic conservation, Cranford's system of exchange reworks material limitations, turning these women's lack of private property to their advantage. Cranford is among a number of mid-century works that treat sympathetic exchange in a sustained manner and on an expanded scale, writing women's charity in terms of sympathy and sisterhood rather than coin. By doing so, it not only co-opts the traditional province of the upper class by pitting middle-class women's care-giving against unfeeling wealth, but also defines a sympathetic gift economy in opposition to the masculinized marketplace essential to such models of charity as that of Dickens's turkey-buying Scrooge.

[Hardy] is too fond — and the practice has been growing on him through all his later books — of writing like a man “who has been at a great feast of languages and stole the scraps,” or, in plain English, of making experiments in a form of language which he does not seem clearly to understand, and in a style for which he was assuredly not born. (Mowbray Morris)

No reader can fail to notice — and few critics have failed to deplore — the ponderous allusions to literature and art which strew with their initial capitals the pages of Hardy’s early novels. . . . The mark of the autodidact is perhaps to be found not so much in what he knows as in how he regards the world of knowledge. . . . Hardy may have known more than many a man with a university education, but he lacked the kind of intellectual as well as social assurance that such an education might have given him. (Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist, Michael Millgate)

DESPITE A GAP OF ONE HUNDRED YEARS between these two statements, they exhibit little difference with regard to an issue that has drawn critical comment since first publication of Thomas Hardy’s novels: the language of the texts. Morris and Millgate both disapprove of Hardy’s style because of its overt use of quotation, but behind this lies the view that good style depends upon correct language, and that the ability to use language correctly is the preserve of a select few by virtue of their class or education. In the one hundred years and more since Hardy wrote the novels, there are many instances of critics sharing this opinion. And yet, of course, from the early 1970s onwards, new theoretical approaches to language have increasingly dominated critical practice, changing rapidly the premises of literary interpretation. More specifically, the relationship between literature, language, and education has been theorized as an ideological matrix requiring precise historical and political analysis. The late nineteenth century in England, with its dramatic changes in State Education and the cultural crisis leading to fin-de-siècle decadence has proved fertile ground for investigations of these issues, which have indeed cited Hardy’s texts in the process.1 This article invokes that research in its focus upon Jude the Obscure — the novel by Hardy that most explicitly explores the links between education, literature, and language in the context of class.

The question of Shelley's influence on the young Robert Browning is hardly a disputed one, but the question of how far it continues into the life and work of the later Browning is quite a different matter. While the early influence is readily acknowledged, the later hardly receives the amount of attention it deserves. The consensus among critics has long been that in his youth Browning had a great enthusiasm for Shelley, an enthusiasm clearly apparent in Pauline and Paracelsus, but abruptly extinguished in Sordello. Generally speaking, it would seem that Browning's ardent enthusiasm for Shelley the poet ends with Sordello in 1840, just as his respect for Shelley the man ends in 1856, with the discovery that he had abandoned his first wife. Any evidence for a lapse of his disaffection in later life seems effectively countered by Browning's own testimony in a letter written in 1885 to F. J. Furnivall, refusing the presidency of the newly formed Shelley Society: “For myself, I painfully contrast my notions of Shelley the man and Shelley, well, even the poet, with what they were sixty years ago, when I only had his works, for a certainty, and took his character on trust.” With these highlights of the relationship, most Browning critics and biographers terminate the discussion.

In 1865, an unknown author calling himself Lewis Carroll compelled a leading publishing house, Macmillan & Company, to suppress the first edition of a children's book entitled Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In 1886, the same author, better established, instructed the same publisher to dispose of the first edition of The Game of Logic, also meant for children, as not up to his standards of book production. In 1889, Carroll condemned the entire first run often thousand copies of The Nursery “Alice”; and in 1893, when he found that a later run (the sixtieth thousand) of Through the Looking-Glass had come from the presses with the illustrations not well printed, he ordered Macmillan to scuttle those copies as well.

Samuel Clemens' infatuation with the poetry of Robert Browning during and after the 1880s demonstrates the subtle dimensions in Browning's verse that a gifted oral interpreter can disclose. Whatever first attracted Clemens to the Browning canon, however, it was not the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. When Clemens began courting Olivia Langdon she was already a partisan of Mrs. Browning's works, and the couple had several good-natured exchanges about the intelligibility of her poems. In a letter of 17 May 1869 Clemens jocularly alluded to “some dark & bloody mystery out of the Widow Browning”; on another occasion he turned to Livy for an explanation of obscurities in Aurora Leigh.* In the second week of Livy Clemens' marriage she appended a teasing note to the letter which Clemens was writing to Mrs. Mary Mason Fairbanks, vowing that she, along with Clemens' sister and niece, “will make Mr Clemens read aloud to us in Mrs Browning—Felicity to us—but what to him?”* Around 1872 Clemens declared, in a letter written to Livy, “If they were to set me to review Mrs. Browning, it would be like asking you to deliver judgment upon the merits of a box of cigars.”

It has recently been suggested, in various quarters, that cosmopolitanism, a concept that has proved broadly useful and popular in Victorian studies in the last several years, may have entered its critical senescence. The reports of its decline are, I believe, greatly exaggerated. I would like to prove the continuing vigor of the concept by using it in a reading of Dickens's Great Expectations (1860–61). Conceiving of the cosmopolitan figure as a mediator between native English and colonial subjectivities, I will argue that Pip and Magwitch are reluctant cosmopolitans of indeterminate national identity. Although their final lack of a home country represents a psychological loss, the sympathy they learn to feel for each other – a fellow-feeling between gentleman and convict produced by a transnational irony enacted across class and cultural divides – represents a clear ethical gain, the attainment of a partial universalism that goes to the heart of the moral vision of the novel. Throughout this study, I will seek to extend that “rigorous genealogy of cosmopolitanism” that Amanda Anderson has urged (“Cosmopolitanism” 266).

The oriental ballet is typically associated with modern dance, Russia, and the nonpareil dancers Vaslav Nijinsky, Michel Fokine, Anna Pavlova, and Ruth St. Denis. One of the most excerpted of all classical ballets and considered the first example of the abstract form in modern dance is the “Kingdom of the Shades” sequence in Marius Petipa's La Bayadère, featuring thirty-two ghosts of Hindu temple dancers dressed in white entering the stage one by one with a simple arabesque cambre. What people often forget is that La Bayadère was a huge sensation in Europe during the romantic ballet years – the 1830s and 40s – 50 plus years before the Ballets Russes and a full generation before Petipa's 1877 production, which most assume to be the ballet's original. This and other grand operas and ballets of its kind – Lalla Rookh, Les Orientales, Le Corsair, La Peri, La Paquita, Revolt of the Harem – took romanticism beyond the pale in terms of visual extravagance; elaborate water systems were installed to depict bathing scenes and shipwrecks, and live horses and elephants brought onto the stage to add verisimilitude to the Eastern spectacle.

In THE WAY WE LIVE NOW (1875), the Melmottes’ origins remain a mystery that becomes increasingly irrelevant. Few of Augustus Melmotte's business partners venture to inquire too closely into the specious public faith in his financial integrity even as they prepare to extract the promising output of his highly speculative enterprises. On the contrary, a suspicion that their seemingly stable investments are as unsafe as they are spurious, that they bear the marks of risky speculation, accompanies the rise of the commercial Melmotte Empire from its beginnings. Close inquiry is not so much guarded against as shirked by those who wish to believe in it. When aristocratic would-be investors scramble for a seat on the boards of this “New Man,” they are therefore guilty not simply of nourishing a fraudulent financier whose history as a swindler they are well aware of, for Melmotte's connections to continental scams are notorious. Rather, they are building on ambivalent attitudes to the seemingly successful speculator. Just as the instability associated with speculation is conveniently embodied by an international man of mystery in the worst sense, it can also be exorcised just as easily by his self-destruction.

IN 1861 AMY LEVY was born into a middle-class Anglo-Jewish family with deep roots in England, and was part of the first generation of women at Cambridge University. Her life was marked by the opportunities and predicaments of Anglo-Jews at a pivotal moment in their history. Receiving full political rights in 1858, two years before Levy was born, England’s Jews attained positions of status in the late-Victorian period and became integrated into the fabric of British society. Todd Endelman, however, like other commentators on Anglo-Jewry in this period, gives the British a mixed evaluation on their treatment of the Jews. Tolerant in many ways, England was “hostile to the notion of cultural diversity. Circles and institutions quite willing to tolerate Jews as intimate associates were not willing to endorse the perpetuation of a separate Jewish culture or to see any value in the customs or beliefs of the Jewish religion” (209).

ALTHOUGH VICTORIAN REVIEWERS uniformly praised Elizabeth Barrett Browning for the “sincere” poetic voice of Sonnets from the Portuguese, they often blamed her for faulty craft. In structure and rhyme scheme the poems in the sequence recall the Petrarchan tradition, suggesting the idealized love that accompanies it, yet their varied syntax and diction seem more conversational than ideal. Enjambment usually destroys the integrity of octave and sestet. Then in the Sonnets Barrett Browning continued her use of odd rhymes, which had been raising critical eyebrows since earlier poems. For example, in the most famous sonnet — XLIII, “How do I love thee?” — Barrett Browning rhymed the noun phrase “put to use” (9) with the infinitive “to lose” (11) and rhymed “faith” (10) with “breath” (12). Victorian reviewers, somewhat disoriented, offered a variety of explanations for these apparent technical lapses. Some attributed them to a defective ear for music (“Review of Poems” 278; [Massey] 517).1 George Saintsbury — taking the lead from the controversy over the “cockney school” of poetry — reproved Barrett Browning, born to the educated classes, for relying out of laziness on vulgar pronunciation to force rhymes instead of taking the time to discover correct ones (280–81). Even her poet-friend and correspondent, Mary Russell Mitford, wondered if isolation at Wimpole Street had led to an overly narrow experience with proper pronunciation of English (reported in Horne 458; see also Hayter 38–39). Victorian reproofs and anecdotes like these followed Barrett Browning’s work into the formalist twentieth century.

On September 3, 1841, George Eliot wrote in a letter to her friend Maria Lewis:

Behold an infinite of floating worlds
Divide the crystal waves of ether pure,
In endless voyage without port

Amid those sov'reign glories of the skies,
Of independent, native lustre, proud;
The souls of systems! and the lords of life,
Through their wide empires! (276)

The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject (ego) – who always regards the self as the essential – and the compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential. (Simone de Beauvoir xxxiv)

The name [of poet]

Is royal, and to sign it like a queen

Is what I dare not, – though some royal blood

Would seem to tingle in me now and then,

With sense of power and ache.

Aurora Leigh I. (934–38)

'Tis Antidote to turn –

To Tomes of solid Witchraft –

(Emily Dickinson, #593)

“Speed and energy, forthrightness and complete self-confidence – these are the qualities that hold us enthralled” as we read Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, wrote Virginia Woolf in 1932 (1.212). As Woolf points out, these qualities emanate not so much from Aurora as from her creator, whose strong and lively presence so pervades the poem that “Again and again … Aurora the fictitious seems to be throwing light upon Elizabeth the actual. … [making it] impossible for the most austere of critics not sometimes to touch the flesh when his [sic] eyes should be fixed upon the page” (212). And as Woolf observes, the “flesh” the critic touches is that of a woman who knows that the royal blood of poets flows through her veins. “Elizabeth the actual” is a subject, speaking boldly of the world as she perceives and experiences it.

In multiple entries in his notebooks, Robert Louis Stevenson pauses to consider the failure of scientific language to communicate the abstractions that undergird its theoretical models of natural processes. In failing to make the operations of the physical world speak, materialist discourse suffers from a terminological disorder. His diagnosis is sweeping and acerbic: “Scientific language like most other language is extremely unsatisfactory” (“Note Book” 300). In what follows I will argue that over the course of several key essays of the 1880s and his most famous work of fiction, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Stevenson aims to redress the fundamental abstraction of the most prominent materialist doctrine of his day, Darwinian evolutionary theory, rendering it viscerally communicable in the figure of Hyde, who represents both the individual organism subject to the pervasive modifying forces of speciation and the embodiment, in a single yet fluctuating corporeal entity, of those very forces. Further to this, I will propose that in imagining Hyde's genesis at the laboratory table (the result of Jekyll's incursions into nature) and in placing Hyde in symbiosis with the London fog (the admixture of natural forces and human intervention in the form of the burning of fossil fuels), Strange Case can be added to the body of literature that hails the dawning of the Anthropocene, famously defined by Paul Crutzen as the “human-dominated geological epoch supplementing the Holocene” in which the human has become “a major environmental force” (23). The figure of Hyde thus manifests evolutionary forces in all their teeming presence while also harkening the new forms of subjectivity emerging from our catastrophic agency in the present era – one in which the human has become, in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, a “geophysical force” (13).