NINETEENTH-CENTURY WESTERN OBSERVERS of the South Seas often worried that the islanders were losing touch with their past and were forgetting the traditions of their ancestors. In writing about their concerns these commentators frequently identified the missionaries as being responsible for this loss. To a certain degree, their perspective was correct, for one does not have to search far to find examples of the missionaries' culpability. If one looks more closely, however, one learns that the missionaries (especially those representing the London Missionary Society) also preserved part of what they had destroyed by studying and gathering artifacts from the island cultures they had invaded. As time passed, these missionary collections became important to anthropologists, for they were visual reminders of an older, almost extinct Polynesian culture. They became a means through which to recall the past.

N 1891 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL, father of the more famous Winston, visited South Africa and the soon-to-be Rhodesia on a trip that was intended to combine big-game hunting with the even more exciting prospects of entering the gold mining business. During the eight months of the visit, Churchill contributed a series of letters to the Daily Graphic on his thoughts and experiences, in one of which he had this to say about the Boers: The Boer farmer personifies useless idleness. Occupying a farm of from six thousand to ten thousand acres, he contents himself with raising a herd of a few hundred head of cattle, which are left almost entirely to the care of the natives whom he employs. It may be asserted, generally with truth, that he never plants a tree, never digs a well, never makes a road, never grows a blade of corn…. He passes his day doing absolutely nothing beyond smoking and drinking coffee. He is perfectly uneducated. With the exception of the Bible, every word of which in its most literal interpretation he believes with fanatical credulity, he never opens a book, he never even reads a newspaper. His simple ignorance is unfathomable, and this in stolid composure he shares with his wife, his sons, his daughters, being proud that his children should grow up as ignorant, as uncultivated, as hopelessly unprogressive as himself. In the winter time he moves with his herd of cattle into the better pastures and milder climate of the low country veldt, and lives as idly and uselessly in his waggon as he does in his farmhouse. The summer sees him returning home, and so on [sic], year after year, generation after generation, the Boer farmer drags out the most ignoble existence ever experienced by a race with any pretensions to civilization. (94–95) The piece caused an outcry, and when a year later Churchill republished the letters as Men, Mines and Animals in South Africa (1892), he attempted to exonerate himself by claiming that these views were intended “to be exclusively confined to…the Dutch population of the Transvaal,” not “generally to the Dutch in South Africa” and went on: “The Dutch settlers in Cape Colony are as worthy of praise as their relatives, the Transvaal Boers, are of blame. The former, loyal, thrifty, industrious, hospitable, liberal are and will, I trust, remain the back-bone of our great colony at the Cape of Good Hope” (v–vi).

BY THE TIME “THE ADVENTURE OF THE DYING DETECTIVE” appeared in the Strand magazine in 1913, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's readers were already familiar with the dynamics of the relationship between Sherlock Holmes and his “friend and colleague” Dr. Watson. They would thus not have been surprised to see Holmes, lying apparently delirious and deathly ill, pointing out with his last breath the intellectual limitations of the friend who has come to cure him: “Shall I demonstrate to you your own ignorance? What do you know, pray, of Tapanuli fever? What do you know of the black Formosa corruption?”“I have never heard of either.”“There are many problems of disease, many strange pathological possibilities, in the East, Watson.” He paused after each sentence to collect his failing strength. “I have learned so much during some recent researches which have a medico-criminal aspect. It was in the course of them that I contracted this complaint. You can do nothing.” (DYIN 2: 388)I cite from the two-volume Bantam Classic edition, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories. Like other Holmes scholars, I have also followed the convention of using the standard four-letter abbreviations set out by Jack Tracy's The Encyclopedia Sherlockiana. But this dissertation on the good doctor's “ignorance” is more than a commentary on Watson's personal shortcomings; it is the voice of the specialist declaring that the “general practitioner” is not competent to treat this kind of complaint. Disease has slipped out of the realm of medicine and into the province of the “medico-criminal” expert. Britain's expansion into “the East” has introduced it to “pathological possibilities” that cannot be shut down through the operations of ordinary medical science and which must instead be contained by Holmes's own special “powers” (388).

“MUSEUMS,” VERNON LEE WRITES in her 1881 Belcaro: Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions, are “evil necessities where art is arranged and ticketed and made dingy and lifeless even as are plants in a botanic collection” (18). Lee's career as a writer and aesthetician coincided almost exactly with what Paul Greenhalgh has called the “golden age” of the exhibition – 1871 to 1914 (26) – and she devoted much of it to making sense of the strange interactions with art offered by museum-going. She was not alone in this effort; during the period I will examine, from the 1880s to 1914, countless stories and articles in the popular press depicted museum settings. These accounts, I will argue, were part of a larger cultural effort to make sense of museums in terms the middle classes could understand, and to clarify what there was about museum-displayed objects that made them worth looking at. Ultimately, I will suggest, these accounts charge museum-displayed objects with a specifically museal aura: a transcendent essence linked to their presentation as decommodified, decontextualized objects under the care of an expert and under the gaze of a properly detached and analytical museum-goer.

THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT, WITH the publication of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë established a landmark in the history of the novel, but there is little agreement as to exactly what she accomplished or how she pulled it off. Brontë's detractors, as well as her defenders, have often stopped short of treating her as a mature artist or social theorist, explaining her power as “personal” or “autobiographical.” They adjourn further analysis of such qualities by expressing their distaste for, or at best, faintly embarrassed appreciation of, her intensely personal, perilously autobiographical, violently passionate style. There is a family resemblance between Matthew Arnold's disgust at Brontë's “hunger, rebellion and rage” (Letters 132), Virginia Woolf's wariness of her “self-centered and self-limited” but “overpowering personality” (Common Reader 222–23), and Terry Eagleton's ambivalent acknowledgment that Brontë's novels, though politically compromising, nonetheless contain a radical “sexual demand – an angry, wounded, implacable desire for full personal acceptance and recognition” (xix). Each of these critics, to varying degrees, distrusts the personal and emotional as factors that pull Brontë (and her readers) too close to herself and too far away from either her social conscience or her art. Of course, in The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar valorize rather than regret Brontëan rage, but they still emphasize the violent emotion, on the verge of spinning out of control, pervading her “confessional art” (440).Gilbert and Gubar consider Brontë's oeuvre, especially Villette, “a literature of consciousness,” claiming that Brontë is “in some ways, a phenomenologist – attacking the discrepancy between reason and imagination, insisting on the subjectivity of the objective work of art, choosing as the subject of her fiction the victims of objectification, inviting her readers to experience with her the interiority of the Other” (440).

HARDLY A CHAPTER goes by in novels like Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1860) or Our Mutual Friend (1864) or Anthony Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) or The Way We Live Now (1875) without money being invoked. Generations of critics have noted that almost every relationship between characters comes with a pound sign attached. Thus The Last Chronicle of Barset belies its most esteemed and truthful character, Mr. Harding, when he says, “Money is worth thinking of, but it is not worth very much thought” (447; ch. 49). He is correct to the extent that money alone fails to do justice to the complexity of most of the relationships in the novel. In the first place, money is only a component of a broader and more pervasive set of connections that can be described as exchanges of capital. Indeed, as this essay shows in the case of The Last Chronicle of Barset, if one stands back from more than a few novels of the mid-Victorian decades, one can see that the intersections and progressions of fictional lives that they portray are couched within a larger pattern of interaction and exchange of which capital is the protagonist.Such a reading is implicit, if not explicit, in recent studies that analyze representations of circulation, whether of money, gossip, blood, or language itself. I am thinking particularly of Beer, Shell, Smart, and Trotter. If this formulation seems extreme, it is only one step beyond the arguments of recent studies that money is “perhaps the most common theme in nineteenth-century fiction” (Vernon 14) or that “the universal, leveling power of money is a theme intrinsic to, perhaps even definitive of, the novel form itself” (Brantlinger 23). The intensity of the nineteenth-century novelistic fascination with money in particular and capital in general can be explained in part by demonstrating, as Mary Poovey and James Thompson respectively have, that novelistic discourses emerged in eighteenth-century Britain in conjunction with the emergence of the discourses of political economy. Similarly, the fact that the mid-Victorian decades in particular produced such a large number of works organized around exchanges of capital is understandable in relationship to historical developments within capitalism. I have in mind especially the finalization in the 1830s of the long transition from gold to paper – from wealth as treasure to the exchange of capital – and the complete formalization in the first half of the nineteenth century of the central institutions of finance capitalism, namely the joint-stock company and the stock market.I mark this finalization with the standardizing of currency on the Bank of England note in 1833; only in 1844 were other British banks banned from issuing their own notes (Vernon 32). The London Stock Exchange was established in its modern institutional form in 1802 (Baskin 207). Also indicative of the period is that “[t]here were eight million pounds more paper money in circulation in 1825 than in 1823, with no corresponding increase in trade and industry to justify it”; at the same time, “there had developed a vast extension of private credit – the ‘new currency of the age’ – and the market was flooded with bills of exchange, promissory notes, and similar paper” (Russell 45). I of course am not claiming that paper money or stock trading did not exist prior to the nineteenth century. Rather, I am claiming that finance capitalism reached society-wide dissemination in the first half of the nineteenth century and only then took on the institutional forms that still are in place in the twenty-first century. As Ermarth remarks in this regard: “Market-places may be old; but the market-system, which ‘is a mechanism for sustaining and maintaining an entire society’ is a fairly recent invention, as new as the humanist conception of the species ‘man’, as new as ‘the profit motive’, and as new as the idea of gain conceived in terms of capital” (121). These contextual factors set the stage on which mid-Victorian novels in particular struggled to interpret and re-express the meaning of human relationship for a society increasingly organized by and obsessed with exchanges of capital. The first goal of this essay is to describe, more thoroughly and precisely than has been done to date, exactly how capital circulates through mid-Victorian novels, taking The Last Chronicle of Barset as a representative case. The second goal is to demonstrate how exchanges of capital are not only thematically significant but actually constitute the plot structure of this novel. Finally, the third purpose is to challenge certain recent critical arguments that continue to posit – even while critiquing – a separation in the nineteenth century of the domains of the novel and of political economy, a separation that reproduces the Victorian notion of “separate spheres” and underestimates the cultural work of mid-Victorian novels.

CHARLES DICKENS'S INTERESTS in legal and administrative reform are as apparent to readers as the famous depictions of Chancery and the Circumlocution Office in, respectively, Bleak House (1852–53) and Little Dorrit (1855–57). Dickens's equally profound engagement with sanitary reform is less obvious. In this essay I argue that the modern social consciousness engendered by the public health movement – including Edwin Chadwick's groundbreaking Sanitary Idea – is important to understanding Bleak House as well as underlying and more general questions of “pastoral” agency in a self-consciously liberal society.The notion of “pastorship” as the means by which a society governs its citizens, both inside and out of formal state mechanisms, is developed in Foucault's late thinking on “governmentality,” especially in “Subject,” “Governmentality,” and “Space.” Although Foucault never completed a revised model as such, these essays clearly aim to provide alternatives to the panoptical paradigm of Discipline and Punish. In my forthcoming book, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State, I argue that governmentality describes Victorian Britain's self-consciously liberal society better than does the more influential panoptical model. Nevertheless, the present discussion does not profess to offer an orthodox Foucauldian reading of any kind. Explaining these convergences takes us to the very heart of the novel's frustrated desire for order, authority, and individual purpose while, at the same time, providing a useful vantage on contemporaneous social reforms. Dickens's 1851 preface to Oliver Twist elucidates the extent to which the author had been influenced by the sanitary movement's comprehensive environmentalist logic. Sanitary reform, he insists, must “precede all other Social Reforms,” preparing for “Education” and “even for Religion” (qtd. in Butt and Tillotson 190–91). Here sanitary reform is an unquestionable priority, crucial to the moral and physical wellbeing of the nation's social body. Seemingly impervious to entrenched divides between laissez faire and interventionist politics, Dickens appears to make a strong statement on behalf of state pastorship. But it would be a mistake to infer from such remarks that Dickens had become a staunch proponent of the state's duty not only (negatively) to prevent wrong, but also (positively) to intervene in the lives of individuals and communities.

ON THE FAR SIDE OF MATTHEW ARNOLD'S familiar call for objectivism lies a world of phantoms. His phrase, “to see the object as in itself it really is,” responds to a vision of the social body as particularly in need of objectivity. And because it lacks this quality, Arnold's Victorian society is one that sees the object as in itself it really is not. This mode of perception is the other side of Arnold's writing: a world of prevailing hallucinations, where fictions are taken for fact and facts for fiction. Seeing the object as it is not takes a characteristic form in Arnold's writing. Illustrative is the stanza in “Empedocles on Etna,” when the philosopher describes what happens when a child is injured, and then compares it to the normal condition of social life: Scratch'd by a fall, with moansAs children of weak ageLend life to the dumb stonesWhereon to vent their rage,And bend their little fists, and rate the senseless ground. (1.2.272–76) Attributing “life” to a stone, or to the ground, is a particular way of seeing the object as it is not. It involves an imaginative attribution of power to the object, and this active investing then goes unrecognized by the child, who believes that the object's power exists independently, in the external world. The passage continues by resolving the simile of the injured child into a prototypical act of magically explaining the unknown: So, loath to suffer mute,We, peopling the void air,Make Gods to whom to imputeThe ills we ought to bear;With God and Fate to rail at, suffering easily. (1.2.277–81) Both the reference and figure describe the process of fetishism, in its earliest form. Initially associated with “primitive” cultures, fetishism described a society in which supernatural powers are routinely attributed to inanimate objects. Empedocles is describing his own society as fetishistic, one that not only sees the object as it is not, but worships the object that is not, making a deity out of the void.

ON OCTOBER 23, 1873, an enthusiastic reporter for the Times observed: “In the course of these fifty years we have become a nation of public speakers. Everyone speaks now, and tolerable well too …. Eloquence is but a facility, or instrument, or weapon, or accomplishment, or, in academic terms, an art …. We are now more than ever a debating, that is, a Parliamentary people” (7). What an understanding of this nation of public speakers might mean for the study of socio-political and literary culture in the nineteenth century has only recently begun to be explored. In last year's issue of Nineteenth-Century Prose, the historian Martin Hewitt observed: “The platform culture of nineteenth-century Britain was so ubiquitous that its omnipresence has helped to render it strangely invisible. We look through it in search of material on all aspects of the period, but we fail to look at it, to interrogate it as a cultural form in its own right” (1). Seeing voices can be a tricky business, but – given the pervasive nature of this platform culture – Hewitt's call for a shift of emphasis from “material” to “form” is timely. What I want to offer here is a survey of this emerging field of study via an account of recent work by social and political historians. My account of what has been done will then lead to a suggestion of what might be left to do, and more particularly, to a consideration of the uses of this body of historical research for the study of literature in the period.

THE CRITICAL AND SCHOLARLY attention to Charles Dickens and his body of work in the last few years is quite varied, ranging from detailed critical analysis of singular aspects of his work to broader studies of his role as commentator and critic in Victorian England. Dickens scholarship, which once might have led to articles in PMLA, has morphed into historical-critical studies using deconstruction, Lacanian analysis, the new historicism, and other disciplines. One omission, surprisingly, in this latest batch is the passing over of Dickens's flaws as a novelist and thinker – so that in turning him into an iconic figure critics have often glossed over his shakiness of structure, his contradictory ideas, and his failure to achieve a consistent fictional ideology. I emphasize a “fictional” ideology, since we have no reason to demand that a novelist sustain any consistent social or political agenda. A fictional one becomes necessary in order for the novelist to uphold his or her own voice, personal tone, that meeting of the reader's expectations with the writer's sense of order (or disorder).

IN RUDYARD KIPLING'SKim (1901), the hero's education as colonial spy entails learning how to map the natural and constructed features of the Indian landscape. On one of his first missions, Kim surreptitiously measures the “mysterious city of Bikanir” and, with the “help of his little Survey paint-box,” produces a diagram of the “wild, walled city” (218). Among other duties, he apparently serves as a subaltern agent of the Survey of India, an actual department established in 1878 to coordinate a number of cartographic projects already under way. The British effort to chart the interior of its colony had begun a century before, however. In 1767, the East India Company created the post of Surveyor General of Bengal. The Company continued to map India until ceding power to the crown in 1858, after which the government carried the project forward until independence. The impulse to survey India refused to die along with the political institutions that gave it life. It found a new mode of expression in the Raj revival films of the 1980s. In films such as The Far Pavilions (1984), the camera sweeps panoramically over snow-capped peaks, golden plains, and “wild, walled” cities, nostalgically re-capturing the majestic terrain ceded in 1947.

FOR OVER TWENTY-FIVE YEARSVictorian Literature and Culture, and its predecessor, Browning Institute Studies, has presented annually an annotated bibliography of works on the Brownings. With the change of name in the early 90s came a change in focus. Then, with increased access to journals by technological means, the need for an annotated bibliography on individuals has seemed less necessary than it once did. The final bibliography appeared in volume 29.2 (2001) of VLC and included materials published through 1998.