Throughout his life Stevenson scanned experience with reverted eyes. His passion for the past captured his attention so that he often stared at the present through the glass of memory. As if still studying the stationer's window where, on Saturday mornings, he and his nurse Cummy attempted to read, through the pictures, the “forbidden” sequels to the stories in Cassell's Family Papers, Stevenson at a later time continued to recapture and sometimes extend the “golden moments” and places of his youth by looking at the remembered images displayed within his mind's eye. These pictures brought him closer to the life he had left behind. They helped him re-embody the absence and break the silence of the glass that stood between him and his earlier years. Consequently, the recalled sight of Tibby Birse, a seamstress who had once come to the Edinburgh house and sewn with Cummy, “sitting with her legs crossed in a masculine manner; and swinging her foot emphatically” made audible the “thin, perpetual shrill” voice of her gossiping (Colvin 4: 264–65) and thereby, nearly forty years later (7 December 1893), breathed life into a detail and resuscitated a moment belonging to an earlier time.

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?

In book five of sordello (1840), Browning images the process of historical change in architectural terms. History is a building to be destroyed and rebuilt by successive generations:

… at his arm's wrench,

Charlemagne's scaffold fell; but pillars blench

Merely, start back again — perchance have been

Taken for buttresses: crash every screen,

Hammer the tenons better, and engage

A gang about your work, for the next age

Or two, of Knowledge, part by Strength and part

By Knowledge! (5: 221–28)

The metaphor engages with the nineteenth century's great preoccupation with the historically-determined nature of architectural form — its sense that, as Owen Jones declared in 1856, “architecture is the material expression of the wants, the faculties, and the sentiments, of the age in which it is created” (5). The Classical-Gothic opposition that structured most contemporary debates about aesthetic value in architecture is economically encapsulated by Browning in the mutation of the collapsed Classical pillars into Gothic buttresses. It is the economy of the reference that indicates Browning's easy familiarity with those contemporary architectural debates. He makes use of architectural images and ideas in a number of poems, a fact that has gone relatively unremarked in Browning studies. The theme occurs throughout Sordello and is a major element in “Old Pictures in Florence” and “Bishop Blougram's Apology.” His interest in architecture, I contend, derived, like that of most of his contemporaries, from his preoccupation with history. I intend to examine the precise manifestation of that interest and the ways in which he illuminated, synthesized, and rejected elements of the architecture debates, which reveal much about the particular nature of his concern with history.

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.

In her stimulating book The Animal Estate, Harriet Ritvo notes the frequent interchange of terms for describing domestic servants and domestic animals in nineteenth-century discourse, and she emphasizes the especially distinguished role played by horses in the establishment of this rhetoric (18–19). Philip Hamerton, for example, writing in 1874, announced that “if there is any thing in the world of nature that seems clear, morally, it is that man has an authentic right to demand reasonable service from the horse” (qtd. in Ritvo 20), and the Rev. J. G. Wood, in 1885, decreed that “in return for its means of existence, the horse is bound to give to man the benefit of its labour” (Wood xviii). This anthropomorphic shift, moreover, is fully reversible: an article in Chambers's Journal for 1855 describes how Mrs. Robinson's slack governance of her household has resulted in anarchy — because she has “long let the reins go,” Heaven only knows “where her household will drive to” (“Kitchen and Parlour” 98). A manual on domestic management quoted by Pamela Horn advises that “the greatest ‘kindness’ we can exercise towards” our employees “is to endeavour, by a mild rein, to keep them in the path of duty” (112–13).

In 1843, during a decade marked by political and cultural recognition of the industrialization and urbanization of Britain, a number of plays concerned with city life and the representation of the city were produced on the popular stage in London. These plays were variously called The Bohemians of Paris, The Scamps of London, The Mysteries of Crime, The Mysteries of London or The Mysteries of Paris. Arguably the first and most influential play about the city in the nineteenth century was William Thomas Moncrieff's Tom and Jerry; or Life in London (first performed in 1821). Imitated and adapted throughout the century (Nicoll 96–97), Moncrieff's play was itself an adaptation of Pierce Egan's book, Life in London, which was illustrated by the brothers George and Robert Cruikshank. This particular combination of writers and illustrators is a powerful one, as, collectively and individually, these artists had much to do with the activity and energy of urban popular culture in the first half of the nineteenth century. George Cruikshank, especially, is important in the modernization of the popular art of this period, while William Moncrieff was a prolific dramatist and notable for his use of topical material. Not only was Moncrieff one of the first dramatists to adapt Egan's Life in London for the stage, but his interest in the theatricality of the city and its richness as theatrical source material continued in later melodramas, particularly The Heart of London and The Scamps of London. It is in the Scamps, Bohemians, and Mysteries plays that early century representations of the city assume their most powerful form, and it is William Moncrieff's version which will be my specific focus here.

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.

On march 30, 1859, according to a Times court report, a young woman named Mary Jones was tried for the crime of willful murder of her illegitimate child: for infanticide. She had concealed her pregnancy and the labor, and a suspicious neighbor found the child's corpse with its throat cut and the bloody knife lying next to it. Jones pled guilty to the charge. The court reporter writes that she “sobbed out a few incoherent words” to the effect that she was in too much agony after the birth to know what she was doing. Jones could only be found guilty if the baby was proved to be born alive, and to this end a surgeon testified that it was and that the cut throat was the cause of death. The jury accordingly found her guilty but recommended mercy. The judge, Mr. Baron Martin, is quoted as saying, “he hoped that her unfortunate example would be a warning to other young women.” He sentenced her to death, apparently thinking the jury's verdict required him to do so. Afterwards, however, as the Times reported on April 8, Jones's execution was respited, through the intervention of the Home Secretary which was invited by the judge.

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.

Finding themselves with more money and more time in which to spend it, the middle classes began in the 1860s to renegotiate their relationship to the arts, and to theater in particular. Recording and rendering visible this process of cultural change are the popular sensation novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, author of Lady Audley's Secret, and the numerous dramatic adaptations of her work. Braddon shares with Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott the distinction of being one of the novelists whose work was most frequently adapted for the stage. Unlike Dickens, however, she often responded favorably to the efforts of her adapters. This congenial relationship resulted, no doubt, from the three years she spent performing on the provincial stage in the late 1850s. Her continuing interest in the theater and theater people is reflected in their frequent appearance in her novels.

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).

Evelyn pickering De Morgan (1855–1919) produced a large body of work, primarily paintings but also some sculptural projects, during a career spanning half a century. The great majority of her images include women as protagonists, often as allegorical personifications but with an unusually wide range of characteristics. She created women as members of a constructed and often constraining civilization, who exhibit at times a sort of drooping resignation, but she also represented women as powerful natural elements, actively in control of their destinies. Her art stands out as an attempt to blend metaphysical concerns about material embodiment and spiritual transcendence, grounded in the Platonic ideal, with concerns about social constraints and creative freedom that can be interpreted from a feminist perspective. By translating these fundamental issues about what it means to be human and, more specifically, female into an allegorical language that was unusual for a woman artist of the period (in fact, called “imprudently ambitious” by one critic1), she moved beyond the socially accepted “female iconography” of still life, landscape, and domestic narrative. Overlapping and sometimes contradictory attitudes toward the roles of women can be traced in her oeuvre, particularly in a body of images related to the theme of imprisonment.

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.

Among the many anecdotes explaining Elizabeth Gaskell's entrance into the literary marketplace is one circulated by Travers Madge, a leading Manchester philanthropist. Gaskell allegedly told him that “the one strong impulse” to write Mary Barton came after visiting one particularly destitute laborer's cottage:

She was trying hard to speak comfort, and to allay those bitter feelings against the rich which were so common with the poor, when the head of the family took hold of her arm, and grasping it tightly said, with tears in his eyes, “Ay, ma'am, but have ye ever seen a child clemmed to death?” (Hompes 131)

While this anecdote ostensibly explains Gaskell's literary calling as a sacred duty and illustrates her expansive feminine sympathy, it also positions her work within the larger project of nineteenth-century philanthropy. As a lady visitor, she attempts to “speak comfort” and assuage working-class hostility toward the rich, but she finds herself in a discursive struggle with the workman, whose rough vernacular and even rougher hand threaten violence both to the lady and the narrative. Like the Ancient Mariner of Coleridge's poem, the nameless workman compels her to listen and accord him the authority that great suffering demands. He wrests the reader's attention away from the main figure of the anecdote, the benevolent “Mrs. Gaskell,” and renders her speechless — at least for a while. For it is his domestic tragedy which authorizes her literary vocation and enables her to present her work as a form of fictional philanthropy.

In this essay, I suggest that we may read Esther Summerson's narration in Bleak House through the lens of recent feminist theoretical speculations on mimicry and masquerade. I argue that Esther's narrative is a duplicitous one in that it redeploys masculine modes of discourse, calling attention to the production of women in that discourse. Writing a narrative about her life, Esther, in effect, copies masculine discourse, but she also writes over it imprinting her own signature. Esther's writing sheds much light on the text's obsessive focus on writing and copying; she produces copy, the copy of a Victorian ideal woman, but in doing so she engenders blots that preclude a unidimensional reading of her. I contend that Esther adopts a narrative veil; this then is her secret in the text which links feminine identity to mimicry and masquerade. At the center of the text is Dickens's mordant critique of the legal system and its machinations; similarly, I argue that Esther's narrative participates in the demolishing of the idea of a stable notion of feminine identity.

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.