In this paper, I argue that George Eliot's “Brother Jacob” (1864) reveals a fluid system of racial production that is inextricably tied to sugar. “Brother Jacob” is one of Eliot's most unusual narratives. It is written in the tone of a fable, and it concerns confectioner David Faux, who immigrates to the colony of Jamaica. Twice, Faux's plans for fiscal gain are thwarted by his “idiot” brother, Jacob, and the latter's uncontrollable sweet tooth in ways that warn against the ungovernability of bodies—especially white ones—that desire sugar.

My analysis employs the methodologies of critical race studies, as I examine how Eliot's text denaturalizes the frequent “invisibility of whiteness” (Richard Dyer). And if, as Sara Ahmed argues, we “do not face whiteness; it ‘trails behind’ bodies, as what is assumed to be given,” then Eliot's text reveals whiteness when it is in front of bodies, when its construction is rendered seeable. I analyze Eliot's examination of individual and collective white bodies that are ambivalently racialized through their desires for sugar. Throughout, I argue that the plasticity of racial forms connected to sugar suggests that bodies are unruly and cannot uphold coherent systems of racial meaning.

Although there has been extensive scholarship on Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone—including recent commentary on disability and queerness—there has been no extended engagement with the character of Limping Lucy, a Marxist misandrist working-class disabled lesbian. This piece serves as a corrective to that gap and a justification of why we should study her. Lucy appears in only six pages of the novel, but this essay embraces the minimal amount of text and performs a microreading. In doing so, we can learn a great deal about Lucy, her abnormal body, her radical politics, her role in the narrative, and the queer criptopia she imagines for herself and her disabled beloved, Rosanna. This reading will also demonstrate a mode of reading and ethical reading praxis I call narrative sidestepping—which explores and embraces expansive plot potentials for disabled characters. Using these theoretical tools, I will argue that Lucy, uninterested in the closure of the normative narrative (the solving of the mystery and the resolution of the marriage plot), intentionally delays it, focusing instead on her sidestepped narrative, her plan for a queer criptopic future with Rosanna.

This essay reads George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) in dialogue with mid-Victorian debates on British nationality law, illuminating the larger questions of nationality and community that Eliot considered throughout her career. The 1860s, the decade in which the novel is set, witnessed a transformation in the law of subjecthood that culminated in the Naturalization Act (1870). In the lead up to the act, officials reconsidered the doctrine of “indelible allegiance” and debated whether and how the legal status of a subject should reflect an individual's choice and commitments. In the novel, Eliot approaches these issues by examining nationality as an individual experience in addition to a philosophical issue. For example, although both Sir Hugo Mallinger and Mordecai Cohen are British subjects, Mordecai's identity as a Jew conflicts with his legal status—to his great distress. Eliot uses Mordecai's proposal for a Jewish state to engage with an alternative form of national identity: one in which legal identity aligns with cultural and ethnic indices. In tackling these issues, Eliot exposes the complications and contradictions of national identity, showing how nationality law functions as a battleground for larger conflicts over the fate of nationality, both in Britain and beyond.

This article examines Thomas Hardy's conflicting responses to late-Victorian debates about grammatical prescriptivism and linguistic purism. While Hardy claimed that “purism, whether in grammar or vocabulary, almost always means ignorance,” he also frequently expressed his interest in the (perhaps unrealizable) ideal of a “pure English” founded on fixed and unequivocal grammatical rules. Focusing on Tess of the d'Urbervilles, a novel subtitled “A Pure Woman,” I argue that this ambivalence informed the grammar of Hardy's prose style in his fiction. In this novel, Hardy employs the ambiguous modality of the English language, the imprecise grammatical distinction between the indicative statement of facts and the subjunctive elaboration of conceptions and hypotheses, both to sustain and to interrogate the binary of the real and the ideal that underpins his simultaneous critique and defense of the notion of “purity.” This use of modality highlights an analogy between Hardy's views on moral and linguistic purity: in each case, he rejects narrow estimations of purity, while nonetheless championing an ideal—of “pure English” and the “pure woman”—that transcends the limited perspectives of conventional purisms.

It is to Alice Meynell that Coventry Patmore gives the only manuscript of The Angel in the House (1854–62) in 1893. But Meynell's actual house at the time, 47 Palace Court, was built with money from Jamaican sugar and rum plantations owned by her father, the legitimated descendant of plantation owners and enslaved persons. In this article, I seek to reconnect Meynell's work to its Jamaican context, building on the work of scholars—from Adela Pinch to Yopie Prins—who have tracked the influence of her prosody, her theology, and her sense of community.

One of the most heated areas of discussion around monumental sculpture today is whether problematic past statues should be torn down. But what has been missing from conversations is a sense of prehistory: a sense, even among the monument-mad Victorians, that a time could come when statues from the past might adversely affect life in the present. From logistical concerns that too many statues would choke up flow through city streets, to concerns that effecting too many statues of unworthy people might take up limited space better saved for future worthies, to anxieties about visual distraction, plenty of commentators argued for a moratorium on new production. Others went further and proposed destruction. In his satirical 1872 work Erewhon, Samuel Butler would imagine a society that memorialized its dead not with gravestones but with life-size statues, and imagine a time when “the city had become so overrun with these pests, that there was no way of getting about.” He would also envision that the only solution was wholesale demolition. The scenario he sketched may have seemed one of the least hyperbolic of any in the novel, and the least foreign to his contemporaries.

In their field-shaking 2020 essay, “Undisciplining Victorian Studies,” Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong set out to “think carefully and deliberately about how we can develop a truly relational thinking and set of practices that engage scholarship across fields and disciplines, enabling a cross-fertilization of ideas, a coalition-based politics and activism, and even a refashioning of academic structures to better serve the purposes of equity and justice.” Sukanya Banerjee, Ryan D. Fong, and Helena Michie make a similarly powerful call in their introductory essay, “Widening the Nineteenth Century,” for a 2021 special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture. This “widening” occurs across different fields and dimensions, stemming from a “wish to examine the interpretive and methodological possibilities that emerge when we expand our objects of study beyond what has been ordained by the temporal—and spatial—purview of the British nineteenth century, which is to say that we wish to put further pressure on the geotemporal linkage that has largely tethered studies of the nineteenth century to the geographic confines of Britain.” My sense is that central to these projects to “undiscipline” and “widen” the Victorian field should be a reexamining of our reading practices as scholars. What do we read, and when? Do we stick to our “subfields,” however we define these, or do we venture elsewhere? And what does it look like to read “elsewhere” while continuing to produce meaningful scholarship?