Such Enlightenment, the narrator tells us facetiously, is effected by an elastic religion known as the Simla Creed, alive at the edges of the British Empire where he, an unnamed Englishman, is stationed. An amalgam of occult practices, the creed stretched itself and embraced pieces of everything that the medicine-men of all ages have manufactured (63). So Rudyard Kipling mockingly observes in this satire of British Victorian forays into the marginal sciences of occultism, Spiritualism, and Mesmerism. An early Kipling tale, “The Sending of Dana Da” (1888) is one of Kiplings first engagements with the religions and philosophies of the East; it was published in the Civil and Military Gazette, a provincial newspaper for which Kipling regularly wrote. The infamous Dana Da – whose name, we are told, escapes every ethnological inscription, and who came from nowhere, with nothing in his hands (62) – dispatches a sending on the behalf of (and through) the Englishman. The recipient of this letter, (again) a Lone Sahib, is characteristically armed with scientific naturalism and Christian faith, and therefore refutes the possibilities of ectoplasmic infestation, unseen currents, and the fecund times of reincarnation. Kiplings eloquent exposition on a sending, despite his final rational explanation of this unseemly act, betrays his fascination with such forbidden epistemologies multiplying at the edges of Empire:

The dystopia of the Victorian city is ubiquitous as a trope of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, appearing across a wide array of literature in fiction, poetry, pamphlets, articles, reviews, socio-demographic works, socialist tracts, and miscellaneous papers. Anti-urbanism plays a prominent role in Dickens, Kingsley, and Gissing, to name but a few, and emerges in more pointedly sociological titles such as Andrew Mearns's The Bitter Cry of London (1883); Thomas Escott's England: Its Peoples, Polity, and Pursuits (1885); Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People of London (1889–1902); Ford Madox Ford's The Heart of the Empire (1905); and W. W. Hutching's London Town Past and Present (1909) (Lees, in Fraser and Sutcliffe, 1983: 154; Hulin and Coustillas, 1979: passim). Themes of urban degradation, overpopulation, squalor, unemployment, lack of education, despair, and pollution fill their pages.

In his popular Romance of London (1867), John Timbs refers to Thomas Babington Macaulay's oft-repeated metaphor of a “New Zealander sitting, like a hundredth-century Marius, on the mouldering arches of London Bridge, contemplating the colossal ruins of St Paul's” (290). Originally intended as an illustration of the vigor and durability of the Roman Catholic Church despite the triumph of the Reformation, Macaulay's most famous evocation of this idea dates from 1840, the year of New Zealand's annexation; hence it is reasonable to suppose that this figure is a Maori (Bellich 297–98). For Timbs and subsequent generations, however, the image conveyed the sobering idea of the rise and fall of civilizations and in particular of England being invaded and overrun, if not by a horde of savages, then by a more robust class of Anglo-Saxons from the other side of the world.

In the late Victorian period, when writers, critics, and actors of the English theatre became obsessed with defining a decidedly New Drama – with establishing its history, directing its progress forward, and creating a literary drama – the majority of the plays produced focused upon forms of femininity. Strangely, these innovative dramas engaged not with the future, but with an all-too-familiar stock character: the woman with a past. This well-known type was “a lady whose previous conduct, rightly or wrongly, disqualified her from any position of rank or respect” (Rowell 108–09). Familiar examples of such plays include George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893) and Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan (1892); lesser-known ones include Henry Arthur Jones's Case of Rebellious Susan (1894) and two plays that form the focus of this essay, Arthur Wing Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893) and The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith (1895). Several English theatre historians (including Richard Dietrich and Jean Chothia) present these plays as the basis of modern intellectual drama, yet none explains the paradox that the theatre of modernity is founded upon the woman with a past, a figure whose future in these plays is foreclosed or ambivalently conceptualized at best.

Most critics who discuss vampirism in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) as a type of seduction focus on the symbolic corruption of English womanhood as the central theme in the novel and emphasize the significance of “the seduction of Lucy and Mina, to which the experience of Harker at Castle Dracula,” according to Phyllis Roth, “provides a preface.” Roth believes that Harker's role as “a hero, one whose narrative encloses the others and with whom, therefore, one might readily identify . . . is a defense against the central identification of the novel with Dracula and his attacks on the women” (61–62). Other critics have observed that, in addition to preserving the symbolic purity of Englishwomen, Stoker's novel is also about the symbolic education of Englishmen, through which members of different professions and classes that carry the bourgeois order learn to work together and, pooling their various backgrounds and knowledge and combining tradition with progress in order to save the women, confirm the strength of their own manhood, and destroy the symbolic threat of the vampire. Both groups of critics, however, tend to overlook the unique position that the young solicitor Jonathan Harker occupies in the narrative: he is the only character who is both an object of the vampire's seduction and an agent of his destruction. While some critics pay due attention to Harker's sensational seduction by Dracula and the three vampiric women in the first part of the novel, they either simplify the meaning of that seduction or underestimate Harker's continuing significance in the rest of the novel because he gradually blends into the group of several valiant vampire hunters. At the same time, his membership in that group has been too easily taken for granted by most critics. What has remained insufficiently explored is the significance of the twofold nature of Harker's experiences: he yields to Dracula's seduction and then recuperates from its consequences by participating in vampire hunting. It is through Harker's experiences throughout the narrative that the paradox of the novel's simultaneously conservative and subversive tendencies becomes most conspicuous.

In a pivotal moment in Mabel Wotton's short story, “The Fifth Edition” (1896), Janet Suttaby, a struggling writer unable to find a publisher for her novel, offers the rising literary star, Franklyn Leyden, her manuscript, telling him, “If you really think there is any good in it . . . it must either go back to the drawer until I have time to polish it, or . . . you must take it” (179). Miss Suttaby offers almost no explanation for her act, nor does she outline what she expects Leyden to do with the manuscript, so when Leyden accepts, re-writes, and then publishes it under his own name, he hasn't done anything that she has explicitly forbidden. Nevertheless, his appropriation of her work is clearly marked in the text as ethically compromised, especially when Miss Suttaby's subsequent death from starvation underscores her desperate need for the money that the sale of a novel would have brought. At the same time, the text offers a much more nuanced critique of Leyden's actions that reaches beyond the ethics of plagiarism and into the realm of literary invention itself; as Leyden revises the manuscript, his creative act is bound up with a parasitical translation of Miss Suttaby herself into text, and he is thus implicated as a fraud on the grounds of both literal and figurative appropriation. In this way, the appropriated manuscript becomes a metaphor for the uneasy relationship between art and life, a concern that is central to fin-de-siècle literary culture. As I will argue, the emphasis in this story, and elsewhere in Wotton's fiction, on what Susan Sontag has termed in another context the “shady commerce between art and truth” (6) makes visible concerns about the connection between inspiration and invention that emerge in the aesthetic theories of Pater, Wilde, and James, as well as in debates over plagiarism and New Woman fiction.

In 1818 John Keats claims that prefaces are written to the public and that he does not want to participate in this mode of address. In 1837 Thomas Love Peacock notes that his novels had originally appeared without prefaces and that he would have preferred that they remain that way. But, he writes, “an old friend assures me, that to publish a book without a preface is like entering a drawing-room without making a bow” (cited in Grierson 134). In England in the 1880s, however, the novel preface went beyond textual etiquette. It was not only written to the public but it also participated in the debate over competing definitions of the reading public, and it contributed, in turn, to a new configuration of this public.

Inasmuch as they offer advice on how to improve appearances, nineteenth-century beauty manuals also vividly describe the dangers of putting on a face. The consequences of using cosmetics – often comprised of toxic ingredients such as arsenic, mercury, and lead – might range from the discomfort of surface irritation to the fatality of poisoning. Several manuals recount the unfortunate story of Lady Mary Montagu, who suffered an allergic reaction to a popular cosmetic, the Genuine Balm of Mecca, which led her face to turn red and swell “to a very extraordinary size . . . . It remained in this tormentable state three days, during which you may be sure I passed my time very ill” (Toilette of Health 64). Another woman succumbed to an equally unfortunate fate as the facial powder, or “pearl white,” she wore to a scientific demonstration suddenly turned black in an adverse reaction to the chemicals used in the experiment. In an even more tragic case, “Mrs. S, being much troubled with pimples, applied an alum poultice to her face, which was soon followed by a stroke of the palsy, and terminated in her death” (Clark iv, 46). These stories caution that beautification through artificial means may eradicate the very self that had sought improvement.

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.

Marie Lavington, the runaway octoroon slave in Charles Kingsley's little-read novel Two Years Ago (1857), makes this declaration of independence in a letter to Tom Thurnall, the novel's hero. Though Tom helped her escape to a Canadian Quaker community, Marie has tired of the “staid and sober” (122; vol. 1, ch. 5) lifestyle of a Quakeress. She reenters the public marketplace by refashioning herself into the Italian diva, La Cordifiamma. Marie's ascent to the stage as La Cordifiamma marks the construction of a new female body in the mid-nineteenth century: the Tragic Mulatta who becomes a Tragic Muse.

In 1868, Alexander Wallace paused in his introduction to the life and works of Janet Hamilton, a respected Scottish working-class poet, to note his subject's interest in literary parlour games: “Janet asked us if we had ever tried the writing of Cento verses, which she characterized as a pleasant literary amusement for a meeting of young friends in a winter's night.”

In the work of George Eliot, a “past evil that has blighted or crushed another” is often “made a source of unforeseen good to ourselves” (Adam Bede 573; ch. 54). Eliot's early novel Adam Bede might be read as a three-volume exploration of the moral difficulties inherent in a narrative pattern premised on such inequality of lots. The seduction of Adam Bede's first love, Hetty Sorrel, her pregnancy, subsequent act of infanticide, transportation, and early death darkly prepare the path to the hero's joyous union with Dinah Morris, who guides him through the story's most painful, educative hours. Adam's union with Dinah, the narrator tells us, is deeper, more powerful, and more pleasurable than any with Hetty might have been because of the knowledge through suffering that Adam attains; “what better harvest from that painful seed-time” can there be than this second love? (578; ch. 55). Yet Hetty embodies all the loss and destruction that enable Adam and Dinah's redemptive future while enjoying no such redemption herself.

Charles Dickens was lionized in the early 1850s for his political powers as a novelist, journalist, and reformer. A December 1850 review of David Copperfield in Fraser's Magazine affirmed that the so-called “Boz”

Why was Charles Dickens so popular when he broke onto the scene in the late 1830s? That's still a real question to ask, but so is another, related question: what did the terms “popular” and “popularity” mean when applied to this novelist at this signal moment in the development of the novel? Writing in the National Magazine and Monthly Critic: A Journal of Philosophy, Science, Literature, Music, and the Drama – a short-lived monthly designed to publish serious work on various subjects – G. H. Lewes begins his 1837 review of Dickens's Sketches by Boz, Pickwick Papers, and Oliver Twist with a paragraph that worries over the nature of popularity:

When Dr. Watson first meets Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, the former is an itinerant medical veteran of the Second Afghan War who, sick and rootless, without “kith or kin” in England, is naturally drawn to London, “that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the empire are irreversibly drained” (6; ch. 1). Lacking emotional ties, physical strength, and purpose of any real kind, Watson seems to demonstrate the “feverish restlessness” and “blunted discouragement” that Max Nordau described as degenerative symptoms of the age. Watson's identification with urban refuse of the empire, together with his metaphor of the metropolitan landscape as cultural sewer, suggests Nordau's degenerative “feeling[s] of immanent perdition and extinction” (2) and emphasizes both the pervasiveness of modern social decay and the destructive potential of insalubrious influences that lurk within the civilized world as much as they do on its remote peripheries.

In Naomi Lloyd's “The Universal Divine Principle, the Spiritual Androgyne, and the New Age in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins” (37.1; 2009), the first sentence of the final paragraph on p. 189 should begin: “As Heilmann has illustrated in her discussion of Grand's water erotic in New Woman Strategies (51–52, 95–96, 100).”