IN THE HISTORY OF PENDENNIS (1848–50), William Thackeray calls upon the binary model of Victorian intellectualism in order to define the status and responsibilities of an author of fiction. For Thackeray, himself an initiate of the Middle Temple, the antagonist which permitted such a clarification of artistic privilege was the law, as conceived in utilitarian and mechanistic terms. Perhaps inspired by the ensign of the Inner Temple, the Winged Horse – suggestive of Thackeray's favorite trope for his own creativity, Pegasus-in-Harness – Thackeray effects a deft appropriation of the humanist history of the law for the services of literature, thus divorcing current legal praxis from its traditional role in the protection of liberties and the creation of English identity. Only the author can appreciate and animate the law's history, which is itself a tale of synergistic legal and literary productivity:

A shocking child murder has just been committed at Nottingham. A girl named Wragg left the workhouse there on Saturday morning with her young illegitimate child. The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperly Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody.—Matthew Arnold THE ONLY SURPRISING THING about the above concise narrative is its location, not in a broadside or newspaper, but in Matthew Arnold's “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1865). Six years after the publication of George Eliot's Adam Bede, Matthew Arnold finds, or postulates, an “infanticidal woman” named “Wragg” and uses her as a symbol of all that is imperfect in Great Britain. He offers her in answer to the “retarding and vulgarising” (21) self-satisfaction he sees about him, the falsity, jingoism, and hyperbole of politics. But he is not using her as a symbol of the oppressed, ground under by those politics; rather, she represents the dreary reality that gives lie to the nationalist smugness of the Philistines, both of which necessitate the role of the critic. And the first thing upon which he focuses, rather than her actions, is her name: “Wragg! If we are to talk of ideal perfection, of ‘the best in the whole world,’ has any one reflected what a touch of grossness in our race, what an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names. Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg!” (23–24). Her worst crime, it becomes apparent, is being plebian: of being, in fact, poor. Her next is a consequent lack of taste: “And ‘our unrivalled happiness;’–what an element of grimness, bareness, and hideousness mixes with it and blurs it; the workhouse, the dismal Mapperly Hills,–how dismal those who have seen them will remember;–the gloom, the smoke, the cold, the strangled illegitimate child!” (24). Eliot's Hetty Sorrel has a much prettier name, and for most of the narrative her surroundings are bucolic. Eliot, however, is no more a Romantic than Arnold. She reacts against the stock sentimental image of the “infanticidal woman” as victim, and while at first glance Hetty Sorrel may seem a prototype, or rather, a culmination, of the outcast wanderer figure so common in both Romantic texts and popular literature, she is nevertheless part of the same field of representation as Arnold's wretched Wragg. Eliot's biographer Frederick Karl makes direct comparison between her elitism and that of Matthew Arnold (423); in fact, he draws a series of comparisons throughout the volume. A sense of beleaguered conservatism, a nostalgic nationalism, and anxiety about the laboring classes and working-class sexuality as a troubling marker of that worrisome group, all come together in the figures of both Wragg and Hetty. Eliot's text is not sentimental. It reinterprets the familiar wrenching tale of the abandoned woman, alone on her doomed journey, but with close attention to realistic psychological detail. Hetty is simultaneously the beautiful heroine of the folkloric ballad, the lonely outcast of Romantics such as Wordsworth, and the temptress and even murderess of the lurid “good nights” sold on the street, but she is transmogrified by the parameters of the realist novel and fixed, like a specimen ready for study, by Eliot's avowedly dispassionate eye.

IN 1856, WHEN MANY VICTORIAN PHYSICIANS WERE STRUGGLING TO DEFINE A MODEL OF CLINICAL MEDICINE, the reviewer of one collection of case histories voiced his dismay at the physician-author's preference for “dreadful incidents” and “cases exceptional and strange” (“Works” 473). Indeed, although physicians of the clinical era did not disguise their efforts to achieve a new kind of discourse, productive of a “realist” vision, few acknowledge how often the “clinical” case history of the nineteenth century also shares the romantic discourse of the Gothic, especially its interest in the supernatural and the unexplainable and its narrative aim of arousing suspense, horror, and astonishment in the reader. Literary critics have also focused primarily on the association of medical narrative with a realist literary discourse. Nineteenth-century physicians did campaign for the formal, objective, and professional clinical discourse that serves as their contribution to a realist aesthetic, in the process explicitly rejecting eighteenth-century medicine's fascination with “the curious” and its subterranean affiliation with the unknown, the unexplainable, and the subjective. But, as I show in this article, a discourse of “the curious,” allied with a Gothic literary aesthetic, stubbornly remained a critical element of many case histories, though it often presented under the mask of the more acceptable term, “interesting.” The discourse of Gothic romance in the case history provides a narrative frame that, unlike the essentially realist clinical discourse, could make sense of the physician's curious gaze, which had become nearly unrecognizable as a specifically medical vision. Indeed, a “curious” medical discourse haunts even case histories of the high clinical era, late in the century; and it energizes the nineteenth-century Gothic novel. Samuel Warren's novel Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician–deplored in the quotation above–illuminates this tradition of “Gothic medicine” as it plays out in the nineteenth-century novel. This tradition, I argue, provides the novel with a powerful model of cultural contamination and conflict in its yoking of disparate discourses. Gothic medicine demonstrates the importance of clinical medicine to literary romance, and it cannot help but reveal the ghost of “the curious” in the clinic.

IN THE PAST DECADE EDWIN CHADWICK has been the subject of several scholarly inquiries; indeed one can almost speak of a “Chadwick industry” these days. This is not, however, the first time he has attracted significant scholarly attention: in 1952, S. E. Finer's and R. A. Lewis's biographies initiated our century's first evaluation of him, culminating in M. W. Flinn's excellently edited reprint of Chadwick's most important text, The Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (referred to as the Sanitary Report). Yet the Chadwick that emerges in recent accounts could not be more different from the mid-century Chadwick. The post-war critics saw him as a visionary, an often-embattled crusader for public health whose enemies were formidable but whose vision, extending the liberal and radical tradition, ultimately prevailed. Cultural critics, on the other hand, present a Chadwick who misrepresented (if not outright oppressed) the poor and who was instrumental in developing a massive bureaucracy to police their lives. Thus, while earlier accounts highlighted Chadwick's accomplishments, the progress of public health reforms, and the details of legislative politics, more recent ones draw attention to his representations of the poor, the erasures in his text, and the growing nineteenth-century institutionalization of the poor that the Sanitary Report promotes. Chadwick, in other words, is portrayed as either a pioneer of reform or an avatar of bureaucratic oppression.

It is not indeed necessary to own a country in order to do trade with it or invest capital in it.—J. A. Hobson, 1902 WHEN WE EXAMINE Alfred Tennyson's and Matthew Arnold's poetic depictions of the wealth of the East, we find that most poems respond to one of two impulses. Some poems seem motivated mainly by the same classic orientalism that is exemplified by those poems of the Romantic period that represent the East as a world apart, untouched by time. But Arnold and Tennyson also wrote poems driven more by the imperialist currents that strengthened throughout the Victorian period; these poems show the East becoming increasingly assimilated into the very modern world of commerce within the British imperial system. In their poems on Eastern wealth, then, Arnold and Tennyson seem not only to be working through their inheritance from Romanticism (specifically, Romantic orientalism), but also to be negotiating between more traditional notions of value and those specific to the developing political and economic systems of the Victorian age. Ultimately, these poems' conception of the wealth of the East is at least consistent with, if not also implicated in, the conflicted evolution of imperialist ideology.

WHEN ANGELIQUE RICHARDSON AND I began collecting the essays included here, we were interested to see how recent theorists of boundaries like Audre Lorde (hyphenated identities), Gloria Anzaldua (borderlands), Donna Haraway (cyborg), J-F Lyotard (the in-between), or Jacques Derrida (deconstruction) fared in relation to classic theorists of boundaries like Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin. We found that while the field of Victorian Studies has absorbed the theory, current practitioners may refer little to past or present theoretical masters. Rather they describe which boundaries were salient to the Victorians and why; when they were permeable and how; and who enforced them and to what ends. The essays in this volume focus on specific boundaries and amass a wealth of detailed knowledge about them. They include the boundaries or boundlessness of London and her suburbs (Parrinder, Cunningham); transnational or deterritorialized boundaries of empire (Spear and Meduri); psychological boundaries (Rylance, Trotter); boundaries between body and soul (Moran) and living and dead (Robson); generic boundaries (Barzilai, Howsam, Small, Toker); boundaries of popular representation between art and politics (Ledger, Livesey); and boundaries between humans, animals, and machines (Joseph and Sussman). The essays here interrogate boundaries historically and pragmatically, with a high tolerance of the in-between or queer, to which I shall return below.

IN A BRILLIANTLY SUGGESTIVE ARTICLE, the urban historian Lewis Mumford defined the form of the “archetypal city” as follows: First of all, the city is the creation of a king…acting in the name of a god. The king's first act, the very key to his authority and potency, is the erection of a temple within a heavily walled sacred enclosure. And the construction of another wall to enclose the subservient community turns the whole area into a sacred place: a city. (12) This ancient city, which arose just before the beginning of recorded history, is double walled. It has an inner as well as an outer boundary. The outer walls enclose the area inhabited by a subservient population, but the city itself exists for the sake of the temple and its adjoining palace, the homes, respectively, of the god and the king. Some great historic city centers such as Rome with its Vatican, Moscow with its Kremlin, and Beijing with its Heavenly City preserve a structure that is apparently descended from this model. In Anglo-Saxon London, however, an abbey and a seat of government were established at Westminster, just outside what became the walled City overlooked by the grim citadel of the Tower. Canterbury, not London, became the nation's religious capital. London, in effect, marks a stage in the separation of spiritual and temporal powers and, thus, in the secularization of the city. Medieval London was able to assert its independence from the monarchy through the institution of its self-governing Corporation, presided over by the Lord Mayor. The mayoralty was the only significant temporal office in the land not in the gift of the king; and this explains why, in the folk-tale, the ragged boy Dick Whittington could become Lord Mayor of London.

Oh it really is a wery pretty garden And Chingford to the eastward could be seen; Wiv a ladder and some glasses You could see to 'Ackney marshes If it wasn't for the 'ouses in between. “WHAT A PLEASANT THING IT MUST BE…to have ancestors,” muses Alma in George Gissing's The Whirlpool. This reflection is prompted by response to her location, living as she does neither in country village nor metropolitan center but in suburbia. Recognition of this brings her bleakly down to earth: “Nobody's ancestors ever lived in a semi-detached villa” (342; pt. 3, ch. 4). Genealogically speaking, of course, Alma has as many ancestors as anyone else, as Gissing knew perfectly well; his point, however, is to signal through Alma–as he does throughout the novel–the degree to which the explosion in suburban living that characterized late nineteenth-century London had disturbed and fractured identities. Alma's ancestors may have existed, but not in any spatial, social, or temporal dimension to which she, a dweller in the new semi-detached suburbia, can relate. Like all suburban dwellers of the fin de siècle, she has moved beyond the bounds of the historically known and culturally defined. Floundering between fantasies of rural idylls and illusions of metropolitan glamour, she is fatally unable to settle the new territory she now actually inhabits, a terra incognita of domesticity in redbrick villas, of streets, gardens, commuters, of atomized family units in homogenized streetscapes. She has no social or historical chart by which to navigate.

The clean and the proper (in the sense of incorporated and incorporable) becomes filthy, the sought-after turns into the banished, fascination into shame.—Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror THE HISTORY WE ARE SKETCHING is one of boundaries double crossed between India and the West and between periods of the South Asian past. On one level our story is about an historical irony, how late nineteenth-century Orientalism resuscitated the romantic mystique of the eastern dancer in the West just as South Indian dancers were being repressed in their homeland by Indian reformers influenced by western mores. Within that history there is another dynamic that is less about crossing than about shifting boundaries, boundaries between the sacred and the profane and their expression in colonial law. We will be looking at these movements and transformations within the context of current scholarship that is historicizing even those elements of Indian culture conventionally understood to be most ancient and unchanging.

MY TITLE is derived from G. H. Lewes's psychological magnum opus Problems of Life and Mind (1874–79). Lewes's image is a metaphor for the relation of mind to brain, or more generally of the mind to the nervous system: “every mental phenomenon has its corresponding neural phenomenon (the two being as convex and concave surfaces of the same sphere, distinguishable yet identical)” (Problems: First Series 1: 112). His point is that, though the two entities can be analytically distinguished, they are as necessarily linked as the two surfaces of a bending plane. Like the recto and verso of a sheet of paper, or signifier and signified in the linguistic sign, one can make an interpretative separation of the two, but not an ontological one. It is a characteristically deft metaphor by Lewes to express a notoriously vexed relationship, not only in Victorian psychology but also in modern thinking today.

THE LAST THREE DECADES of the nineteenth century were phobia's belle époque. During this first phase of investigation there was, it must have seemed, no species of terror, however febrile, which could not talk its way immediately into syndrome status. In 1896, in his Psychology of the Emotions, Théodule Ribot spoke of psychiatry's inundation by a “veritable deluge” of complaints ranging from the relatively commonplace and self-explanatory, such as claustrophobia, to the downright idiosyncratic, such as triakaidekaphobia, or fear of the number 13 (213). Twenty years later, in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud was to respond with similar impatience to the list of phobias drawn up by the American psychologist Stanley Hall. Hall had managed to find 132 (446).

BETWEEN 1863 AND 1865 Gerard Manley Hopkins maintained a “little bk. for sins” as a record arising from his daily examination of conscience (6). Many of the failings seem sexually oriented: “Looking with terrible temptation at Maitland” and “Looking at temptations esp. at Geldart naked” (191, 174). The poet's guilty annotations of the illicit homoerotic pleasures of spectatorship are even more striking when the devout Hopkins associates perverse desire with the contemplation of bodies tortured for a religious cause: “Evil thought slightly in drawing made worse by drawing a crucified arm on same page,” or, even more directly blasphemous, “The evil thought in writing on our Lord's passion” (167, 157).

WHAT DO WE EXPECT to learn when we scrutinize the boundaries of, or within, Victorian literary studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Because many nineteenth-century scholars had always worked within an interdisciplinary paradigm, the theoretical shifts of the last thirty years or so, which broke down divisions between generically distinct discourses, could be said to have brought continuity, rather than change, to this particular community. Yet it is probably true that a pre-existing predilection for historicist investigation has gained added strength in Victorianist circles in recent times. Certain kinds of journeys have become especially common: intrepid explorers travel beyond the bounds of a literary text to hitherto unimagined contexts, and then return to said text laden with the spoils of their expeditions. The exotic voyage to discover the strangeness of the Victorians, then, has become a familiar event; we have witnessed an expansion of the empire of possible connections. Rarer than these heroic ventures, however, has been the practice of quiet contemplation: we have perhaps been less adept at standing still, and looking carefully at the ground we already hold, the ground we assume we share with our nineteenth-century predecessors. What happens when we eschew the temptation to strike out across new territory, and turn our eyes merely to the earth below? Might we discover boundaries between the Victorians and ourselves in the most mundane, the most fundamental of places?

“You mustn't marry more than one person at a time, may you, Peggotty?”“Certainly not,” says Peggotty, with the promptest decision.“But if you marry a person, and the person dies, why then you may marry another person, mayn't you, Peggotty?”“You MAY,” says Peggotty, “if you choose, my dear. That's a matter of opinion.”—David Copperfield (1849–50)

THE FIRST TIME I HEARD OF CAPTAIN MURDERER was in the Jerusalem Theater many years ago when the Welsh actor Emlyn Williams (1905–87) gave a reading of scenes from the works of Charles Dickens. Williams's performance was a recreation of the initiative of Dickens himself who, in the late 1850s, took on yet another activity and persona, that of the itinerant player, and began a series of public tours in which he read from his own works. Of all the pieces Williams performed on that occasion, the story of “a certain Captain Murderer” remains most vividly present to memory not only for its eerie atmosphere and plot but especially for its effect on the audience. I can still recall the collective gasp of horror, as well as the outbursts of laughter, that the story's denouement elicited from a captivated company of listeners.

SERIOUS PRACTITIONERS OF THE HISTORICAL discipline in late nineteenth-century Britain mistrusted their culture's practice of framing the nation's contemporary greatness in terms of former glories. In the view of the new professional historians, it was essential to negotiate a boundary between their own professional work and that of amateurs, with science on one side and literature on the other. The stakes were high. John Robert Seeley thought the writings of men of letters, particularly Macaulay and Carlyle, had “spoiled the public taste,” by being so delightful to read that “to the general public no distinction remains between history and fiction….deprived of any, even the most distant association with science, [history] takes up its place definitively as a department of belles lettres” (“History and Politics” 292). He and others wanted a new generation of students whose work would appear in serious publications which would no more appeal to the general public than Newton's Principia. A scientific training would prepare historians not only to research, write, and teach British history properly, but also to encounter the work of their peers as critical readers and knowledgeable reviewers. The boundary between popular and professional history (or between narrative and scientific approaches to the past) was often invoked by people like Seeley. A sharp dichotomy made for a compelling rhetoric of modernization and improvement. Earlier histories had been written inaccurately though patriotically, by gentlemen of letters for the general reader. Macaulay's essays, for example, had first appeared in the Edinburgh Review, and the great quarterlies continued to publish historical narratives that were unsatisfactory by modern standards. Equally unacceptable was the tradition of introducing children to their nation's past with such romanticized narratives as Little Arthur's History of England. Maria Callcott was the anonymous author of this much-reprinted and often-maligned work. Now, applying to the discipline the principles of Leopold von Ranke and a newly rigorous approach which resonated with the broader contemporary culture of science, history-writing was to be limited to trained professionals, so that it might be made precise, verifiable, and reliable, even at the expense of narrative appeal. One colleague paraphrased Seeley's views pungently: “To make sure of being judged by competent judges only, we ought to make history so dull and unattractive that the general public will not wish to meddle with it” (Freeman 326).

THEODOR ADORNO'S LATE LECTURES on Metaphysics propose a “shocking thesis”: “metaphysics began with Aristotle” (15). A “doubly shocking” thesis, Adorno tells his audience, because it gives credit where credit is not usually given, and declines to give it where most students of philosophy would understand that it belongs–with Plato (18). The Platonic doctrine of Ideas misses the essential criterion for metaphysics. Plato never fully accepted that the tension between the sphere of transcendence and the sphere of “direct experience” is not merely an adjunct of metaphysical inquiry but its defining subject matter (18). Aristotle understood this, and understood also that metaphysics has always a “twofold aim”; for, even as Aristotelian metaphysics criticizes Plato's attempt to define essence in opposition to the world of the senses, it tries to “extract an essential being from the sensible, empirical world, and thereby to save it.” True metaphysics, Adorno claims, is an effort to go beyond thought in the very act of defining the boundaries of thought. In his words, it is “the exertion of thought to save what at the same time it destroys” (20).

TWO CARNIVALESQUE EVENTS are referred to in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. One is used as an example in a discussion of political expediency: the Archbishop of Naples is said to have sanctioned, in what would now be called a populist gesture, the St. Januarius procession against the plague (1993, 384; bk. 4, ch. 33). The other is embedded in a simile: the attitude of the British mainstream society to Jews is compared with the attitude of the matrons of Delphi to the tired Maenads who had wandered into their city: the matrons “tenderly” minister to the Bacchae and take them “safely to their own borders” (195; bk. 2, ch. 17).

ON AN AUTUMN DAY IN 1842, William Hone lay dying. He was by now an obscure figure, but through the services of an old friend, George Cruikshank, he sent a request to Charles Dickens that he might shake his hand before he died. The famous novelist agreed to the request, and for a brief moment Dickens, Cruikshank, and William Hone came together in Hone's shabby London home. The meeting apparently meant little to Dickens who, subsequently attending Hone's funeral, recounted with comic viciousness Cruikshank's histrionics as his old friend was laid to rest. Writing to an American friend, Cornelius Felton, Dickens described how he found himself “almost sobbing with laughter at the funereal absurdities of George Cruikshank and others” (Ackroyd 407). The encounter between Dickens, Cruikshank, and Hone in 1842 is a little-known but with hindsight a significant convergence; for despite Dickens's seeming disregard for the ailing and rather threadbare old bookseller, the deathbed tableau crystallizes an important and much overlooked connection between Dickens's writings and an earlier popular radical tradition.

IN JUNE 1885 a group of radical intellectual Londoners gathered for the evening at that hub of nineteenth-century free thought, the South Place Institute. The event was organized by the Socialist League, a revolutionary socialist organization which counted William Morris, Eleanor Marx, and Edward Aveling as its most prominent members at that point in time. But this was no ordinary meeting. There were no lectures and no debates, just popular songs and dramatic recitations that had been carefully rehearsed by the membership in order to entertain for the cause. William Morris drafted a poem for the occasion, urging these “Socialists at Play” to cast their “care aside while song and verse/Touches our hearts.” Play, however, was not to lull the audience into a “luxurious mood”:

With every tool man is perfecting his own organs…. by means of spectacles he corrects defects in the lens of his own eye; by means of the telescope he sees into the far distance. Man has become a kind of prosthetic god.—Freud, Civilization and its Discontents DOROTHY VAN GHENT'S “View from Todgers's” classic essay of 1950 (about perspective in Martin Chuzzlewit) might be defined as the starting point for what we now accept as the veriest Dickens commonplace: the fact that an interchange between animate human subject and inanimate object characterizes his world view. The boundaries of person and material thing are permeable, are constantly criss-crossing, according to Van Ghent, in a “system that is presumed to be a nervous one…. its predications about persons or objects tend to be statements of metabolic conversion of one into the other” (221). But this persistent reading, expressed here in biological terms–“nervous” system, “metabolic conversion”–of Dickens's stylistic habit, itself depends upon attributing to Dickens the critic's sharp distinction between the “human” and the “inhuman” or “non-human.”