The objective of this article is to connect Matthew Arnold, that statesman of culture, with a tin of Tate and Lyle's Golden Syrup, a by-product of industrial sugar refining that has been named Britain's “oldest brand.” Bringing the lofty to the low, the sage to the sweetener, is an exercise in willful materialism. Reading Arnold's “sweetness and light” literally, as comestibles, and “culture” as a term that engages the culinary, puts Arnold into conversation with revolutionary nineteenth-century materialist theorists, in particular the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. Although not commonly read now, Feuerbach's work was translated by George Eliot and influential on that of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: it is his materialism and his atheism that we see, modified, in their work. In his own time, he was also known for theories about diet and this article will, in part, show how these theories are inseparable from both his materialism and his atheism. True to its viscous, tacky nature, Golden Syrup arrives slowly and emerges late in my argument, but it will adhere Arnold to Feuerbach, and to an intellectual tradition that holds that what we eat, and whether and how we can eat, is as world-making as what we read. Sitting Feuerbach's self-avowed extreme materialism down at the table with Arnold's self-avowed extreme anti-materialism, I will show that they grapple with the same gods – the gods of Christianity, capitalism, and cultural immortality – and that they both conclude that we make and remake our world by digesting it.

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.

The final chapter ofVanity Fair's account of the 1815 Battle of Waterloo opens with a scene of public panic in the streets of Brussels. As French cannons sound just outside of the Belgian capital, Thackeray captures the chaos that ensues as the English men and women, who have accompanied the army to Brussels and remained in the city during the battle, begin to receive reports that Napoleon's forces have defeated the Duke of Wellington's army and are marching on the city. Rumor reigns in Brussels as the English civilians seek out one another for increasingly inaccurate reports on the French progress towards the city, and civil tranquility collapses as the public consensus becomes that French forces will soon invade.

In the late 1840s, as revolution swept across Europe, Anthony Trollope wrote a novel portraying the Vendean War, a French civil war fought during the revolutionary decade. La Vendée: An Historical Romance (1850) depicts the conflict between centralised, revolutionary France led by the National Convention in Paris and the insurgent, royalist population of western France from the perspective of the royalist rebels. La Vendée is one of Trollope's least read novels; yet Trollope's turn to the history of the 1790s in the context of renewed revolutionary movements in the 1840s demonstrates that the political and cultural stakes of the revolutionary period remained present in the minds of Victorians who confronted the possibility of European revolution for the first time in their own lives. Trollope draws on the interrelated democratic and nationalist movements that produced the 1848 revolutions in order to represent the royalist Vendeans as a victimised incipient nation, akin to other minor European nations struggling for sovereignty against their more powerful neighbours. Significantly, throughout the 1840s Trollope lived in Ireland, one such minor nation, and witnessed the Famine years and the consequences of Ireland's governance from London throughout that crisis first-hand. Using the conventions of the generically related national tale – a typically Irish genre – and the historical novel, Trollope works to establish sympathy for a marginalised Vendean community while containing revolution in the past by casting the royalist Vendeans as the true patriots and insurrectionists. However, although Trollope attempted to contain revolution by re-aligning it with the conservative, Vendean position, La Vendée is fragmented by anxieties about the possibility of revolution in the late 1840s that disrupt his efforts to establish an authoritative, distanced historical perspective.

In hisMemoirs of anUnfortunate Son of Thespis (1818), the actor Edward Cape Everard recalled a performance of Sheridan's School for Scandal that was interrupted in its third act by a rowdy bunch of sailors. At the sight of Charles Surface drinking, the sailors allegedly left the auditorium, entered the stage, and accosted the actor playing Charles, “exclaiming ‘My eyes, you're a hearty fellow! Come, my tight one, hand us a glass’” (qtd. in Russell 104). As apocryphal as the encounter seems, it is not the only account of mariners rushing the early-nineteenth century stage to join in with the drama. In her analysis of these anecdotes Gillian Russell comments that though they may have been intended to depict the sailor “as naïve and unsophisticated, unable to make the distinction between fiction and reality. . . it is not surprising that the sailor should have disregarded the rules of mimesis and the distinction between stage and auditorium” (104), for the sailor's life lent itself to, and was structured by, theatricality. Service in “the theatres of war,” or more generally in the “wooden world” of the ship, demanded strict performance of custom and ritual in the forging of social identities and relations, not least of all in the ritualistic initiation ceremonies and corporal punishments that were enacted in front of the amassed audience of the crew (Russell 139–57; see Dening). At sea and in dock sailors entertained themselves with amateur theatricals. On shore, they were keen theatre-goers, and in auditoriums and elsewhere they played up to the characteristics of the sailor in the brazen assertion of an identity that was celebrated in stories, songs, and plays, but frequently also belittled, bemoaned, and victimized, the latter particularly while the press gangs were active.

In a 1908 review article for the Times of London, Thomas Hardy commented on the previous months of excavation of the Neolithic earthwork amphitheater in Dorchester, known as the Maumbury Ring(s). Hardy had returned to Dorchester from London in 1883, and the town is most famously fictionalized in the 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge. Hardy's description identifies the defining moment in the Ring's history as the execution there in 1706 of the nineteen year-old Mary Channing for allegedly having poisoned her husband. Quoting extensively from a contemporary report of Channing's trial and execution, Hardy asserts that he could find little in the statements of the case to support Channing's execution. His opinion is rather that this was a high spirited young woman forced by her parents to marry a man she did not love, whose weak indulgence of his new wife merely served to contribute to the sense of her being a woman of “careless character” that would see her wrongly condemned.

Religion in Dracula studies has often looked a little like the Un-Dead Lucy, a ghastly simulacrum of living faith. Indeed, readings of the novel frequently depend on a suspicious approach to the novel's professions of piety, one that regards them as a mask for more fundamental concerns: the heroes profess religious concern, but what they really want is to neutralize the New Woman, or racial degeneration, or sexual perversion. Under these conditions, Christianity provides, at best, a potent discourse through which the characters can manage these coded crises. When religion does enter the conversation, critics tend to read the text for clues to Stoker's personal position on the theological controversies of his day: the Catholic-Protestant divide in Ireland, the place of High Church ritualism in Anglican worship, the merit of the doctrine of transubstantiation. As a result, we are left with a Dracula that functions as an elaborate code book, encrypting what Stoker secretly (or not-so-secretly) believed.

Although the Chartist organ the Northern Star was a careful observer of literary developments, especially concerning social-problem fiction, it failed to comment on the publication of Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, today the best-known literary work to treat Chartism. The popular and controversial novel about the consequences of an assassination committed by a disillusioned activist slipped by the radical paper unnoticed in the tumult of the fall of 1848. But the Star was not as unfamiliar with Mary Barton as its initial silence suggests. Two years later, when the paper reviewed The Moorland Cottage, it praised Gaskell's earlier book as “a powerful and truthful exposition of the evils inherent in the factory system,” adding that “the graphic manner in which the writer placed before the public the domestic, moral, and social results of factory life, brought down from the upholders of the factory system many sneers at her political economy and her sentimentalism; but none denied the unquestionable genius and superior discrimination of character and motives which pervaded the work” (Dec. 28, 1850).

“A trial and a literary text,” Shoshana Felman once noted, “do not aim at the same kind of conclusion, nor do they strive toward the same kind of effect. A trial is presumed to be a search for truth, but technically it is a search for a decision; and thus. . . it seeks not truth but finality: a force of resolution.” Literature, on the other hand, Felman posits, is characterized by “a search for meaning. . . for heightened significance, for symbolic understanding” (Felman 55). Trials function to curb the proliferation of meanings in favor of finality, if not absolute truth, whereas literature allegedly forgoes such determinacy. A corollary of this distinction has to do with language itself: while law seeks to fix linguistic meaning, literature draws attention to the inherent instability of meaning.

Herbert Sussman, Editor

Victoria Mills, Assistant Editor

Effie Gray, the Film; Or, the Afterlife of John Ruskin

HERBERT SUSSMAN

Turner Revealed?

JANICE CARLISLE

The Man Who Never Lived and Will Never Die

ANDREW KING

A World Transformed by the Telegraph

AARON WORTH

Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire

DEBORAH LUTZ