“Young ladies don't understand political economy, you know,” asserts the casually misogynistic uncle of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871) (17; bk. 1, ch 1). Although Eliot's heroine resents both her uncle's remark and “that never-explained science which was thrust as an extinguisher over all her lights,” her attempt to teach herself political economy in the novel only seems to confirm her uncle's assessment (18; bk. 1, ch. 1): Dorothea gathers a “little heap of books on political economy” and sets forth to learn “the best way of spending money so as not to injure one's neighbors, or – what comes to the same thing – so as to do them the most good” (805; bk. 5, ch. 48). Naively likening “spending money so as not to injure one's neighbors” to “do[ing] them the most good,” Dorothea fails to grasp the self-interest at the core of nineteenth-century political economic thought and so misunderstands the subject matter before her: “Unhappily her mind slipped off [the book] for a whole hour; and at the end she found herself reading sentences twice over with an intense consciousness of many things, but not of any one thing contained in the text. This was hopeless” (805; bk. 5, ch. 48).

Charles Dickens's novels only occasionally feature images of prehistoric creatures. There is, of course, the famous “elephantine lizard. . .waddling. . .up Holborn Hill” in the opening scenes of Bleak House (1852–53), which, as is brilliantly captured in Tom Gauld's recent cartoon “Fragments of Dickens's Lost Novel ‘A Megalosaur's Progress’” (2011), has become a kind of icon of Dickens's entire fictional oeuvre (Figure 1). But beyond Bleak House’s iconic megalosaurus “forty feet long or so,” Dickens's panoramic representations of urban landscapes, which Adelene Buckland has shown to abound with quasi-geological ruins, are usually populated only by their more diminutive modern inhabitants (1; ch. 1). Even when the changing cityscape of “carcases. . .and fragments” of “giant forms” seems, as in Dombey and Son (1847–48), to suggest the presence of colossal fossilized skeletons thrown up by a “great earthquake,” they remain lifeless and merely augment the pervading atmosphere of urban upheaval (46; ch. 6). Animate extinct animals instead appear more commonly in novels by contemporaries such as William Makepeace Thackeray or, later in the century, Henry James. In their fiction, creatures such as the megatherium, a large edentate from the Pliocene epoch, not only afford apposite metaphors for gargantuan manifestations of industrial modernity, as in the former's Mrs. Perkins's Ball (1846) and the latter's The Bostonians (1885–86). More significantly, they also provide a model for the complex structures of serialized novels, whether commendatory, as in Thackeray's The Newcomes (1853–55), or otherwise, as in the famous epithet “large loose baggy monsters” that James coined in the preface to the New York edition of The Tragic Muse (1908) (1:x).

These lines, taken from the poem “Sweet Home,” were published by Eliza Cook (1818–89) in Once a Week in 1867. Accompanied by Joseph Swain's engraving (Figure 4), the poem presents an idealized portrait of a middle-class family in the nineteenth century. The home is a “blissful, holy place” where “Manhood, Infancy, and Age” can find their “love and peace” as well as “joy and grace.” Of particular interest is that Swain places the female figures – grandmother, mother with a child on her lap, and daughter – at the center of the engraving: their bodies and faces are clearly sketched, whereas father and son, the only two male figures in the engraving, merely show half their faces with their backs turned to the reader. Overall, the poem itself contains some of the striking echoes of the dominant ideology of home at the time. The scene of the family gathered around the hearth illuminates the all-embracing concept of domesticity – coziness, comfort, and intimacy.

Margaret Oliphant much preferredThe Woman in White (published serially 1859–1860) to Great Expectations (published serially 1860–1861). This partiality emerges in a comparative treatment of the texts in her oft-quoted 1862 treatise on sensation fiction, and it rests on the desirability of authors producing thrills using “modest and subtle means” (“Sensation Novels” 569) instead of “by fantastic eccentricities” and “high-strained oddity” (“Sensation Novels” 574). While the existence of an argument against the allegedly regrettable excesses of fantastical narratives will not shock any reader familiar with contemporary criticism of sensation fiction, or, for that matter, Romantic-era novels or Gothic works in general, the primary evidence Oliphant uses to argue her case might come as a surprise. In order to discredit Charles Dickens's ghostly accounts of Miss Havisham's bridal tomb in favor of Wilkie Collins's eerie images of Anne Catherick appearing on a moonlit moor, Margaret Oliphant turns to clothing.

In the April issue of the Quarterly Review of 1863, H. L. Mansel, Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, disparaged “sensation” novels by comparing them to cheap fashion wear. “A commercial atmosphere floats around works of this class, redolent of the manufactory and the shop,” he taunted, “The public want novels and novels must be made – so many yards of printed stuff, sensation pattern, to be ready by the beginning of the season” (500). To scholars of Victorian literature, Mansel's analogy now serves as a commonplace for literary commercialism. Its other emphasis, which is on fashion, however, has received less attention. This paper examines Wilkie Collins's use of dress in Armadale (1864-66), as presented in the example of Lydia Gwilt's favoured attire, a “black gown and a red Paisley shawl”; and suggests that Collins uses the Paisley shawl to provide an indirect reference to the Indian Mutiny. In particular, the essay argues that as well as generating a humanised reading of Lydia's character, her shawl is a powerful metaphor to symbolize mid-century anxieties about class and empire.

For almost a decade, George Eliot labored at a translation of seventeenth-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and Ethics, and although completed, it never saw the light of day; it was the subject of a petty fight between the proposed publisher, Henry Bohn, and her partner, George Henry Lewes. The result was that for more than a century it was tucked away, first, presumably, in a drawer, and eventually, in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Although critics and scholars have long known that she had completed this work – references abound in letters and journal entries – it wasn't published until 1981, and even then, in an obscure imprint of the Salzburg University press. Copies of this published edition, which is limited to the Ethics and capably annotated by Thomas Deegan, are quite rare and difficult to get ahold of.

Early in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Daniel's life is set on a decisive new path by his fleeting attraction to an object in a shop window. He is turning into a side street off Holburn Road when:

These lines begin an “Ode” which has permeated culture throughout the last hundred years. In 1912, Edward Elgar set it to music, as did Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály in 1964, to commemorate the 700th anniversary of Merton College, Oxford. In 1971, Gene Wilder spoke the opening lines as Willy Wonka in the film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. The words appear as epigraphs in an eclectic range of novels, including science fiction (Raymond E. Feist's Rage of a Demon King), fantasy (Elizabeth Haydon's The Assassin King), and historical fiction (E. V. Thompson's The Music Makers). They are quoted in an even more varied selection of books, including travelogues (Warren Rovetch's The Creaky Traveler in Ireland), textbooks (Arnold O. Allen's Probability, Statistics and Queueing Theory and R. S. Vassan and Sudha Seshadri's Textbook of Medicine), New Age self-help books (Raven Kaldera's Moon Phase Astrology: The Lunar Key to Your Destiny), autobiographies (Hilary Liftin's Candy and Me, a Love Story) and pedagogical guides (Lindsay Peer and Gavin Reid's Dyslexia – Successful Inclusion in the Secondary School).

While crediting William Wordsworth's tutelage in his 1887 essay “Books Which Have Influenced Me,” Robert Louis Stevenson indicates that the poet's contribution to his writing is difficult to pin down: “Wordsworth should perhaps come next. Every one has been influenced by Wordsworth and it is hard to tell precisely how” (164). Seeking to understand this relationship, I examined Stevenson's copy of Wordsworth's The Poetical Works (1858) at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Stevenson's penciled markings, cross-references, and annotations fill the six-volume set, indicating careful and repeated reading over many years. Stevenson purchased the edition as he was entering adulthood in Edinburgh, and kept it with him until the end of his life in Samoa. While Stevenson's marginalia cannot be precisely dated, the handwriting alongside Wordsworth's poetry ranges from the large sloped script of his early years (1870--1874) to the smaller, more rounded and upright letters he used in the final period of his life (1890–1894). Given this record and the frequency and depth of Stevenson's allusions to Wordsworth in his fiction, essays, and letters, it is surprising that no study of the relationship has been undertaken. In recent book-length studies of Romantic influences on Victorian writing, Stevenson is rarely mentioned, and never in connection with Wordsworth. Even Stephen Gill's encyclopedic Wordsworth and the Victorians makes no reference to Stevenson.

While in recent years there has been a slow accumulation of research exploring the links between Robert Louis Stevenson's work and capitalism, there remains a sense that this is still only an interesting byway when reading him, rather than a central route. Partly, this can be explained by this research having tended to focus on individual texts attached to specialised or circumscribed contemporary frames – the gold versus silver standard debate, for instance, or Victorian economic theory. As revealing as these localised contextualisations are, their connection to the rest of Stevenson's oeuvre, and to the wider operation of late Victorian capitalism, can be somewhat opaque. More broadly, the neglect of this aspect of Stevenson's work can be seen as the continuing legacy of his status as writer and theorist of romance, a fictional mode still often associated with a childish escapism and reactionary politics – despite recent work by Julia Reid and Glenda Norquay showing how Stevenson must be distinguished from fellow romance revivalists such as H. Rider Haggard, Andrew Lang, and G. A. Henty, to whom such epithets more properly apply.

Since the late 1980s and Elaine Showalter's influential Sexual Anarchy, it has become axiomatic to read Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula as a text that responds to anxieties of degeneration through metaphors of infection (184). Given the obvious sexual nature of the threat represented by the vampire, critics have focused on syphilis as the text's most immediate disease of reference. They have identified many important correspondences between Stoker's text and racialized fears of decline through blood and bloodlines, drawing connections between Stoker's own possible demise from syphilis, the history of contagious diseases legislation, and the scandal surrounding Ibsen's Ghosts (1882). But, as Martin Willis has noted, there continues to be “a need to reassess Dracula within the contexts of disease theories that allows for a more historically rigorous analysis of the novel” (302).

We understand little of Harriet Martineau, I am convinced, if we do not see how roots and wings formed the coordinates of both her subjectivity and writing, affecting all the choices she made and all the reasons she gave for those choices. Inextricably bound together like the knot in a rope, her attraction to houses as signs of self must be given equal weight with the experiences of move and travel she wrote of again and again. Emblematic in this sense was perhaps Martineau's own emphatic assessment of herself in a March 1844 letter to Mrs Romilly written during the monotony and impotence of her Tynemouth confinement, in which she described, in terms of a symbolic geography, her sense of being apart and undeniably privileged: “a sort of pioneer in the regions of pain,” this is how she termed herself, “whose mission is to make the way somewhat easier, or at least more direct to those who come after” (Martineau 2007, 2: 262).

Digital Victorian studies, as the field might be called, has entered a new generation of endeavor. Of course, many older digital Victorian projects remain online and continue to be important resources for scholars working in a variety of areas. In the pantheon of the older projects we might include: The Victorian Web (Landow; 1987–2012), a long-standing project that presents an array of images and texts linked to the Victorian era as nodes in a complex network; the Rossetti Archive (McGann; 1993–2008), a comprehensive digital collection of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poetry, prose, and visual art as well as diverse contextual materials; NINES (2003-present), a nineteenth-century digital resource aggregator that facilitates integrated searching across a variety of sites and that provides peer review for relevant scholarly projects; the Old Bailey Online (Hitchcock; 2003–15), a large-scale venture that, among other things, makes available digital images and fully searchable, structured text of the 190,000 pages that constitute the Old Bailey Proceedings; and Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse) (Brake; 2005–08), a rigorous edition of six nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers that explores the issue of modeling nineteenth-century serials in digital form. Many other such projects might also be added. However, the rapid advance of web-based technologies has recently propelled the development of digital Victorian studies in multiple directions at once. The concurrent rise of digital humanities has also ensured that Victorian scholars now have ever more exciting options for creating and analyzing digital Victorian materials and ever more sophisticated questions for interrogating the process by which those materials are created.