Much Victorian Irish studies has followed the Americanist Noel Ignatiev's famous claim that the Irish “became white” upon migration to the United States, whereas they had not been in the context of the United Kingdom. This article argues, in contrast, that an emphasis on the undeniable racialization of Irish poverty and politics can distract us from an important truth: nineteenth-century Irish people, in Britain and Ireland as well as in the United States, were broadly understood as white, and “Celticness” was not in any serious or widespread way treated as equivalent to Blackness, although that did not stop some nineteenth-century Irish advocates from drawing that misleading analogy. Drawing upon cultural and anthropological work of the mid-nineteenth century, from Robert Knox, Thomas Carlyle, and John Mitchel to Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold, and the caricaturists of Punch to Frederick Douglass, this article proposes that the implication that nineteenth-century Irishness was cognate to Blackness—or the Irish experience a version of the Black experience—represents the epistemological and ethical error that Frank B. Wilderson III has called “the ruse of analogy” that we must interrogate more critically lest we, in Wilderson's formulation, enact a “mystification, and often erasure, of Blackness's grammar of suffering.”

The 1840s saw the creation of weekly illustrated newsmagazines in several European countries, with titles like the Illustrated London News, L'Illustration, and the Illustrirte Zeitung. This article questions the common assumption that these influential periodicals contributed to modern news time primarily by speeding up the consumption of visual information through rapidly produced and consumed eyewitness accounts. An analysis of the many images of staged public events, like inaugurations, political meetings, and parades, that were published during the early years of illustrated news instead shows than they were often produced as translations of information from different sources (both visual and verbal) and created as pictorial summaries of events in a way that can best be described as “synoptic.” Rather than ephemeral reflections of an ever-changing present, such visual condensations also served to commemorate and make lasting and thus contributed to establishing the very events on which the experience of a fast-forward movement of time was based.

This article contends that George Eliot's higher critical approach to biblical prophecy led her to interpret prophetic knowledge about the future as a product of historical scholarship rather than supernatural revelation. This interpretation bore creative fruit in Eliot's 1862–63 novel Romola, a book that repeatedly condemns the irrational ethos of supernatural prophecy by rebuking mystical seers’ emotional volatility and their ignorance of history. As a rational alternative to supernaturalism, Romola upholds a serious, scholarly mode of prophecy whose power to predict the future derives from historical research. Recasting prophecy as a rational mode of historical scholarship enables Romola to deploy it as a method of intellectually responsible political analysis. In the process of conflating the prediction of the future with the study of history, the rational prophetic mode demands that political visionaries must temper utopian promises about a cosmopolitan future with sober-minded analyses of the intercultural violence that has plagued the past. By revealing cosmopolitan utopia's historical limitations, Eliot's prophetic mode ultimately promotes a “cosmopocalyptic” form of politics.

This essay argues that certain readers used Pater's work on an artistic period (the Renaissance) in order to periodize the phases of their own lives. Specifically, I suggest that they took up his “school of art” as a model for conditional group membership in a homoerotic culture. Throughout his career, Pater wrote about collectives who reinterpret the past—usually the Renaissance or Ancient Greece and Rome—in order to establish common orientations in the present. However, it is his school concept that comes closest to centering a group's self-conception in this mediation. Examining how Pater's reception realized this potential, I will make two claims. My conceptual claim is that a linguistic term, “register,” would strengthen how we study a particular function of group identity: style as a shared persona that can be put on and off in particular contexts. My historical claim is that a kind of Paterian register, in excess of Pater's personal style and occasionally in opposition to his intentions, enabled a particular sexual culture—the gay phase—at Eton and Oxford in subsequent generations.

Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) (1856–1935) first met Walter Pater (1839–1894) at Oxford during the summer of 1881, though she was already well acquainted with his work. The extent and import of their relationship, which lasted until Pater's death, has received significant attention by biographers and critics.1 Like many of Lee's friendships, its intimacies were both personal and intellectual—risking, as she put it, “a question of caw-me-caw-you” through reciprocal endorsement.2 The epistolary-averse Pater was uncharacteristically forthcoming in their correspondence, and Lee often stayed with his family when visiting England. The two read aloud from drafts, exchanged books, and met repeatedly on the published page. Indeed, scholars have traced an elegant intertextual arc from Lee's rewriting of Pater's “The Child in the House” (1878) in Belcaro (1881), to her dedication of Euphorion (1884), through her introduction to Juvenilia (1887), and arriving at her “Valedictory” conclusion to Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895).3 By this account, Lee initially adheres to Paterian aesthetics, then grows skeptical of the doctrine's epicurean features, but finds solace when her mentor's late work takes its own ethical turn.

This essay argues that practical discussions about pedagogy in the field of Victorian studies warrant a regular place in major field-based conferences and journals as well as greater attention in graduate programs at large to maintain our discipline's viability. While conversations about and tools to help with teaching have become more prominent in digital projects like Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom and COVE, these topics continue to be minimized at conferences like NAVSA and are often relegated to special issues of Victorian studies journals. By “defamiliarizing” pedagogy, we ask the field of Victorian studies to reckon with the ways its systems of prestige and recognition sideline teacher-scholars working at teaching-intensive institutions, community colleges, high schools, and minority-serving institutions. We assert that, given the current state of the job market, more space must be dedicated to pedagogical research, and requirements for tenure/promotion need to recognize pedagogy as a viable field of research. Such attention to pedagogy will contribute to efforts to decolonize Victorian studies, attend more deeply to gendered and racialized labor politics, and mobilize for collective action.

It is August 2022, and I am sitting in the British Library completing a shamefully late review (this one) when I see the headline: “Trespassers Demand Right to Roam Minister's 12,000 Acre Estate.” One hundred fifty protesters led by activist Nadia Shaikh and complete with a Morris dancing troupe walked into the Englefield estate of Richard Benyon, the UK government minister responsible for access to nature, as part of a campaign around public access to land. Benyon's ancestral estate contains sizeable areas of former common land enclosed by his ancestor, also Richard Benyon, in 1802. Nick Hayes, author of The Book of Trespass, who was at the protest, added:

Two recently published books ask the same question: How might we read textual representations of Victorian women by focusing on their relationality, not their separate individuality? Ronjaunee Chatterjee's Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Carolyn Dever's Chains of Love and Beauty: The Diary of Michael Field both stress that multiple genres of Victorian writing depend upon the intimate play of tension and identification among women who are not-quite-one. They enact that idea, however, in rather different ways.