Oliver Twist, the early novel which a twenty-five-year-old Charles Dickens published serially from 1837 to 1839, revised in the 1840s, and featured in the public readings he offered from 1867 until his death in 1870, might well have inspired the thirty-two-year-old Robert Louis Stevenson before he serialized his own first novel, Treasure Island, in 1882. There are, after all, remarkable similarities between the two texts. For each dramatizes a young boy's immersion in a counter-world headed by villains who defy the norms of a dubious patriarchal order. What is more, the strong spell that thieves like Fagin and Bill Sikes and pirates like Billy Bones and Long John Silver exert over the innocents they mesmerize infects readers of each narrative as well as viewers of their many cinematic adaptations. We thus face a quandary. Despite our empathy with little Oliver and with his adolescent counterpart Jim Hawkins, we may question each boy's reintegration into an order whose fissures have been radically exposed.

The story – we might almost say legend – of how Dickens came to make the character of Riah in Our Mutual Friend a benign figure and a deliberate revision of Fagin, underworld denizen of Oliver Twist, is well known. In 1860, an Anglo-Jewish couple, J. P. and Eliza Davis, bought Charles Dickens's London home, Tavistock House. Dickens remarked to his personal secretary, William Wills, that he could not recall any “money-making dealings . . . that have been so satisfactory, considerate, and trusting” (Johnson 487). This expression of relief and slight surprise that the sale of his property to a Jewish family was without complication followed on Dickens's suspicion, crudely expressed earlier in the negotiations, that the “Jew Money-Lender” (as he referred to J. P. Davis) would not come through on the deal (Stone 243). But, though the Davises proved surprisingly cooperative in this phase of the transaction as far as Dickens was concerned, Mrs. Davis did ultimately have a complaint to register with the great writer and delivered it politely in a letter three years later. It was not about the house or the terms of purchase but rather about the character of Fagin, created by Dickens in 1837, some twenty-six years earlier. English Jews, she told him, had taken offense at this portrayal of one of their people and believed Dickens had done them a “great wrong” by offering the greedy, thieving, child-corrupting, sausage-eating criminal as representative of their “scattered nation” (Lane 98). Still, she added, while the author lived he might conceivably “justify himself or atone” for this deed. Apparently contrite and unaware of feeling any of the prejudices his portrait of the London fence might convey, Dickens declared in a letter back to Mrs. Davis that he had only “friendly feelings” for the Jews. His contrition did not end there. For the novel he was then beginning to write, Dickens would create a beneficent Jewish character, Riah, friend to the river dredger's daughter, Lizzie Hexam, and her misshapen companion, the dolls’ dressmaker, Jenny Wren. As the late-nineteenth century Anglo-Jewish poet and novelist Amy Levy put it, Dickens “trie[d] to compensate for his having affixed the label ‘Jew’ to one of his bad fairies by creating the good fairy Riah” (Levy 176).

At New College, Oxford, Lionel Johnson had a reputation for sleeping past noon. On Monday, April 15, 1889, the sun was high overhead when he boasted in a letter to his friend Campbell Dodgson of his intimacy with the elusive Walter Pater, at whose London house he had spent the weekend: “I lunched with Pater, dined with Pater, smoked with Pater, went to Mass with Pater and fell in love with Pater” (Roseliep 148). That all of these friendly activities – lunching, dining, smoking, taking Communion, and perhaps even falling in love – entail opening one's mouth, or at least loosening one's lips, suggests a connection, in Johnson's eyes, between Pater's well-documented powers to charm his audience and the oral susceptibility of that audience. Getting to know the true Pater, Johnson implies, is an oral affair. His conversations with Pater, their meals, his very sense of Pater, linger on his lips. Teachers open our eyes. But Pater opens Johnson's mouth. One is tempted to dismiss the letter to Dodgson, who, like Johnson, was same-sex oriented, as youthful homoerotic banter: a campy projection of Johnson's own ambivalent and mercurial appetites. A year later, after all, in a letter to his friend Arthur Galton, Johnson recounts a “mid-day” visit he received at Oxford – whilst “lying half asleep in bed” – from Oscar Wilde, who “laughed at Pater” and “consumed all my cigarettes” (Holland and Hart-Davis 423). “I am in love with him,” Johnson declares.

There is a familiar critical narrative about the fin de siècle, into which gothic fiction fits very neatly. It is the story of the gradual decay of Victorian values, especially their faith in progress and in the empire. The self-satisfied (middle-class) builders of empire were superseded by the doubters and decadents. As Patrick Brantlinger writes, “After the mid-Victorian years the British found it increasingly difficult to think of themselves as inevitably progressive; they began worrying instead about the degeneration of their institutions, their culture, their racial ‘stock’” (230). And this late-Victorian anomie expressed itself in the move away from realism and toward romance, decadence, naturalism, and especially gothic horror. No wonder, then, that the 1880s and 1890s saw a surge of gothic fiction paranoiacally concerned with the disintegration of identity into bestiality (Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886), the loss of British identity through overpowering foreign influence (du Maurier's Trilby, 1894), the vulnerability of the empire to monstrous and predatory sexualities (Stoker's Dracula, 1897), the death of humanity itself in the twilight of everything (Orwell's The Time Machine, 1895). The Victorian Gothic, thus, may be read as an index of its culture's anxieties, especially its repressed, displaced, disavowed fears and desires. But this narrative tends to overlook the Victorians’ concerns with the terrifying possibilities of progress, energy, and self-assertion. In this essay I consider two oppositions that shape critical discussions of the fin-de-siècle Gothic – horror and terror, and entropy and energy – and I argue that critics’ exploration of the Victorians’ seeming preoccupation with the horrors of entropic decline has obscured that culture's persistent anxiety about the terrors of energy. I examine mid- to late-Victorian accounts of human energy in relation to the first law of thermodynamics – the conservation of energy – in both scientific and social discourses, and then I turn to Richard Marsh's 1897 gothic novel The Beetle as an illustration of my point: the conservation of energy might have been at least as scary as entropy to the Victorians.

Florence Nightingale, who became a national heroine after the Crimean War, was the most popular subject in hagiographical collective biographies of women during the mid- and late-1850s. However, her life can be regarded as a resolute resistance to conformity with the ideal of womanhood in the Victorian era. She recognised the chasm between her popularity and reality:

In one of the fictive dialogues from his 1872 book The Poet at the Breakfast-Table, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. dispensed advice to any scholar planning to start a private library:

By the time the nineteenth century reached its close, it was already possible to look back at Victorian death culture with nostalgia. With the rise of secularism, the slide toward what Diana Fuss has called the death of death had begun. No longer was it common practice to hold onto the remains of the dead. Rarely would a lock of hair be kept by, to be worn as jewelry, nor did one dwell on the deathbed scene, linger upon the lips of the dying to mark and revere those last words, record the minutiae of slipping away in memorials, diaries, and letters. Rooms of houses were increasingly less likely to hold remains; no one had died in the beds in which the living slept. Walter Benjamin, who wrote often about what was lost in the nineteenth century, sees the turning away from death as going hand in hand with the disappearance of the art of storytelling. Writing in the early 1930s, he called his contemporaries “dry dwellers of eternity” because “today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death” (Illuminations 94). Avoiding the sight of the dying, Benjamin argues, one misses the moment when life becomes narrative, when the meaning of life is completed and illuminated in its ending. He privileges the shared moment of death, when relatives, and even the public, gather around the dying to glean final words of wisdom, to know perhaps, in the end, the whole story. Historian of death Philippe Ariès describes a Christian account of the final ordeal of the death bed, when in the moment of death the salvation or damnation of the dying is determined, thus changing or freezing, for good, the meaning of the whole life. Scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century death culture tend, on the whole, to agree that towards the end of the century, a process that began earlier reached a completion – that the death of the other not only became less of a shared experience among a community, but last things such as final words and remains were increasingly to be pushed to the back of consciousness and hence to the lumber room of meaning and importance.

The title of George Egerton's first collection of short stories, Keynotes (1893), announces a concern with the beginnings of sequences, the first principles from which larger patterns are orchestrated. The stories introduce premises from which new social and sexual relations may be engendered and individual existential choices made, a philosophical intent that harks back to the preoccupation in classical Greek thought with the nature of the Good Life and how to live it, which Friedrich Nietzsche renews for modern Western philosophy. Egerton's broad but nonetheless radical engagement with Nietzschean thought can be traced through the references she makes to the philosopher in Keynotes, which are widely credited with being the first in English literature. Indeed, such allusions are, as Iveta Jusová observes, “the most frequent literary reference[s] in Egerton's texts” (53). They were also recognised and mobilised against her by some of her earliest critics.

The improbable course of Thomas Cooper's life (1805–1892) – from shoemaker and autodidact, to school teacher, to Methodist circuit rider, to Chartist activist, to prison poet, and finally to working-class lecturer and editor – encapsulates the tensions and contradictions of Victorian self-help. Fiercely devoted to projects of self-education and improvement, as an apprentice craftsman in Lincolnshire, Cooper memorized Hamlet and significant portions of Paradise Lost, and taught himself Latin, French, and some Hebrew. The publication of The Purgatory of the Suicides, the epic poem for which he is best known, made Cooper a minor celebrity in the world of middle-class literary reformers, who praised his artistic and educational accomplishments. The novelist and Christian socialist Charles Kingsley discerned in his heroic commitment to “the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties” an alternative to political militancy and loosely based Alton Locke, the story of a disillusioned Chartist hero's spiritual redemption, on Cooper's own life (Collins 3–4). Samuel Smiles, the Scottish reformer and author of Self-Help, celebrated Cooper's writing as part of a national culture which could help heal the country's social and economic divisions, arguing that his literary achievements placed him in “the same class as Burns, Ebenezer Elliot, Fox, the Norwich weaver-boy, to say nothing of the Arkwrights, Smeatons, Brindleys, Chantrys, and the like, all rising out of the labour-class into the class of the thinkers and builders-up of English greatness” (Smiles 244).

Such was George Orwell's vision of suburban life in his 1939 novel Coming Up for Air – a vision of mindless, middle-class consumerism teetering always on the edge of financial ruin – a domestic life-in-death. Over the course of the twentieth century, suburbia has become the topos of bourgeois complacency, the locus of psychic decline. Strange, then, to think that at the end of the nineteenth century, two of Europe's Decadent writers – Max Beerbohm and Joris-Karl Huysmans – could find in the suburbs of London and Paris an aesthetic retreat from the snares of bourgeois urban life. In 1884, Huysmans published Against Nature, the paragon of fin-de-siècle Decadent fiction which recounts the movement of the syphilitic aristocrat, Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, from the centre of Paris to the suburban village of Fontenay-aux-Roses where he constructs his anti-bourgeois aesthetic hermitage. Over ten years later, in 1896, Beerbohm published his satirical essay “Diminuendo,” in which the twenty-four-year-old writer announces his retirement from the literary world and his subsequent retreat to a quiet life of aesthetic contemplation in a London suburb. Needless to say, these suburban havens are a far cry from Orwell's sordid account of pre-war suburbia's obsession with false teeth and life insurance. Though only a little over fifty years separate Against Nature and Coming Up for Air, the suburbs of Huysmans and Orwell seem worlds apart. No one could imagine Des Esseintes's leather-bound study in the “Hesperides Estates,” and it seems unthinkable to picture Beerbohm locking himself away in a library amidst the cacophony of squealing infants and nagging housewives. The suburbs seem the least likely place in which the Decadent or dandy might thrive, and yet in Against Nature and “Diminuendo,” Huysmans and Beerbohm depict the suburbs as the last refuge of the man of taste. How could this be? What are these fin-de-siècle suburbs of London and Paris, and what do they signify in Huysmans's and Beerbohm's writing? These are the central questions I pose in this study of the Decadents’ retreat from urban life.

Scholars have had a difficult time assessing the significance of Dinah Mulock Craik (1824–1887), best remembered as the author of John Halifax, Gentleman (1856). The critical verdict on her life and letters has swung toward extremes. Some critics have seen her, to quote Henry James, as “kindly, somewhat dull, pious, and very sentimental” (172); her novels embody the Victorian values of self-help, moral earnestness, and hard work, and it is assumed that her life did too. Elaine Showalter's and Sally Mitchell's feminist recoveries of Craik's work in the 1970s and early 1980s found that just the opposite was true, and that Victorian sentimentality allowed Craik to voice the subversive desires of her female readers covertly, in a form that was acceptable to the general public (Showalter 5–7, Mitchell 31). This critical tradition tended to overemphasize the melodramatic aspects of Craik's life and career as a means of dramatizing the struggles of women in a patriarchal society. The most recent scholarship eschews Craik's life altogether for the most part, focusing on her novelistic representations of disability, of Irish and Scottish nationality, and of class and enfranchisement. This criticism engages Craik's writing as an interesting cultural artifact rather than as an aesthetic object: her work is once again seen as embodying normative Victorian values, but to what extent the author was the cognizant promoter of these values, and to what extent she was their unwitting filter, and whether it matters, is unclear. But new archival work shows the importance of her life in understanding her career. The Mulock Family Papers, held at the University of California at Los Angeles, underscore Craik's challenges in managing an abusive father, who suffered from periods of dejection followed by periods of great happiness, and who was frequently absent and incarcerated. Craik was intensely private when it came to her personal life, and scholars like Showalter have read her reserve as a bow to womanly decorum in a life otherwise dominated by literary celebrity. But the archive suggests that Craik's taciturnity was instead a strategy for managing the threat of violence and scandal.

In his Preface to R. M. Ballantyne's most famous novel, J. M. Barrie writes that “[t]o be born is to be wrecked on an island,” and so the British boy “wonder[s] how other flotsam and jetsam have made the best of it in the same circumstances. He wants a guide: in short, The Coral Island” (v). While for Barrie the island is a convenient shorthand for masculine self-actualization, the question pursued here is the relevance of a coral island, or more specifically the coral that forms the island, to the child reader. Published in 1857 and widely recommended for boys in the latter half of the nineteenth century, The Coral Island presents three boys, shipwrecked in the South Pacific, who in the first half of the novel demonstrate their resourcefulness in forming an idyllic community. Their pre-lapsarian paradise is then disrupted, first by Pacific Island cannibals and then by European pirates, the juxtaposition implicitly presenting civility as a quality that must be actively maintained by the European reader, rather than assumed as inherent in ethnicity. The second half of the novel sees the boy narrator, and eventually all the boys, implicated in key Western activities in the South Pacific: piracy, trade, and missionary activity. The latter is important to Ballantyne, a staunch Christian himself, and is focused through the historical phenomenon of Pacific Island “teachers,” that is, converted Pacific Islanders who preceded or accompanied European missionaries in the effort to spread Christianity across the South Pacific. The missionary work highlighted in the novel, as this essay will show, is also integrally connected to the coral featured prominently in its title.

I begin this essay by quoting two books that deeply shaped George Eliot's thinking because I want to draw attention to the problem of “faith” in her writings, which I believe illuminates an important aspect of her realist project. I am not so much interested in her well-documented personal loss of faith, or her deconstruction of Victorian Christianity into religious humanism (Knoepflmacher 44–59; Wright 173–201; Dolin 165–89), as I am in her positive theorization of faith, throughout her early writings, as a cognitive structure that shapes perception, interpretation, and action. Faith materializes as beliefs shape perception, perceptions shape belief, in hermeneutical spirals coiling out to exert benign or malignant force on believers’ material lives. For Eliot, Christian faith enables social violence, and literature must both expose this malignant relationship and instill more benign (and less totalizing) cognitive patterns for bringing one's faith to bear on materiality. Among other effects, such a transformation changes the way the Bible itself can be read. The realism Eliot articulates in Adam Bede (1859) and elaborates for the rest of her career is modeled on her understanding of the cognitive structure of faith – and calculated to infiltrate and eradicate it.

Waterhouse Revisited

CAROLE G. SILVER

Young Victoria

GAIL TURLEY HOUSTON

Darwin in the Greater Britain of the Southern Hemisphere

E. WARWICK SLINN

Steampunk at Oxford

HERBERT SUSSMAN

Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage

TALIA SCHAFFER

My aim in this essay is to provide a categorical map to the landscape of digital resources available to enrich scholarship on Victorian literature and culture. But I also want to reflect for a moment on the general state of digital scholarly work within the larger institutional structures of our disciplines. For over a decade now, digital resources relevant to the study of nineteenth-century literature and culture have been proliferating, becoming part of the way we live now as scholars and teachers. Yet reviews of such resources in standard channels have thus far been rare. There are a number of reasons for this state of affairs, all related primarily to the fact that digital projects have developed outside the well-settled infrastructure that has supported the academic book. This infrastructure is familiar to us, involving a network of institutions that includes publishers, libraries, scholarly societies, humanities departments, and academic journals like Victorian Literature and Culture. The scene of production of digital scholarship is, by contrast, variable and dynamic, involving experimental platforms, emergent collaborations, competing standards, rapidly-evolving technologies, and unfamiliar genres. Perhaps most crucially, digital scholarly resources in our field have only recently (with the advent of NINES [http://www.nines.org] in 2005) begun to receive systematic peer-review, of which post-publication reviews in academic journals have been a part. Because digital projects are more process than finished product (i.e., they are never “done” in the way a book is), they have tended to elude the reviewers. As a result of this unsettled environment, digital scholarship still abides in the shadows of the printed monographs, articles, and editions by which we have long measured achievement in the field.