This article surveys works from Kerala related to Queen Victoria and situates M. R. Madhava Warrier's (1893–1952) biography, Victoria Maharani (1931), against the backdrop of early twentieth-century Travancore. It draws on threads related to the position of women on the Malabar coast, the actions of the maharani regent at the time, Sethu Lakshmi Bayi (r. 1924–31), and the political and social climate at the time of her reign. It also considers the relationship between the qualities of Queen Victoria praised in Victoria Maharani, reforms instituted by Sethu Lakshmi Bayi, and the reputation of both in Travancore.

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.

This article examines a range of texts produced by authors from different caste-class backgrounds in the Bombay Presidency in Western India between the 1850s and the 1920s. They were composed for commemorating special occasions such as the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria's accession to the throne (1897) or the visits to India of the Prince of Wales (1876, 1922) and King George V (1911). These texts offer an opportunity for us to understand the various points of view about the British royalty as manifested in the world of Marathi speakers ranging from the harshly critical to the unabashedly loyalist, with many shades in between. The yardstick of modern nationalism has a fixed and negative image of what royalism represented for the colonial subjects. This article seeks to redress the balance.

Starting with Queen Victoria's address to the Proclamation Durbar in 1877, this article surveys how Bengali writers critiqued British colonialism in India through their stories, songs, poetry, journalism, and lectures, sometimes directly about the queen herself, more often when discussing governance, social reform, and the desire for political liberty.

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.

“Aajkal Agra ka mausam kaisa hai?” Queen Victoria asks herself, alone in her sumptuous quarters at Osborne House.1 How is the weather in Agra these days? Polite small talk, the loose change of a British monarch's verbal currency, recasts itself in unfamiliar phonemes as the empress of India practices her Hindustani. Soon, Agra will retreat from the imperial consciousness; it will be time to go to the durbar room, or work on her Urdu writing under the munshi's tutelage, perhaps before lunching on chicken curry.2

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.