Tennyson's poem The Princess (1847) has long intrigued readers with its polarizing gender politics and playful, lilting verses recounting the grim bloodshed that results when an ambitious Princess establishes a women's college. The frame narrative focuses on a group of friends at a summer party who are inspired by a tale of an ancient warrior queen, who “sallying thro’ the gate, / Had beat her foes with slaughter from her walls” (Prologue 30–34). At some moments jocular and at others acerbic, the men spin the Princess's story, with the women of the gathering providing interludes of music between the tales. In the narrative that unfolds, the Princess establishes a separatist women's college deep in the country, but counter to her plans, a neighboring prince has determined to make her his wife. Along with two friends, the Prince sneaks into the school disguised as a woman. Comedy and romance ensue, leading to the Prince's eventual unmasking and a deadly serious battle between his father and the Princess's father over how her body will be disposed in marriage. The Prince is wounded in the battle and the Princess is smitten with remorse. While nursing him back to health she is “ultimately transformed from a fierce feminist into a broken nurse” (Buchanan 573) as she anticipates the possibilities of agency through marriage and motherhood. The poem ends with the disbanding of the Princess's school and the reinstallation of its female leaders under patriarchal control.

Around 1847, an author describing himself as “A Discharged officer with twenty years’ experience” published a book entitled The Mysteries of the Madhouse. It commences as a novel: the third-person narrative tells a thrilling tale complete with a harmless heir, conniving step-mother, and gormless step-brother. But after the heir of Howarth House is committed to a madhouse by his step-mother, the genre of the text changes abruptly. With no transition, the language of the novel is suddenly interrupted by extended, first-person, ostensibly factual accounts of what conditions are like inside madhouses.

While it is well-known that Victorian women married for financial stability, sexual desire, or social standing, doctors of the time provided another reason: health. Medical texts warned women to make use of their reproductive abilities, to have children to avoid becoming masculine old maids. One anonymous contributor to an 1851 issue of the Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology believed the old maid to be physically unwomanly as a result of childlessness.

The association between mountaineering and taking risks is conventional and has been so since mountaineering emerged in Western Europe as a distinct preoccupation during the first half of the nineteenth century. Whatever else mountaineering might be about, it has always at least been about risk. Scholarship on English alpinism in its formative period – the first two decades of the second half of the nineteenth century – has long acknowledged this association. Scholarship has, however, only begun to recognize the complex nature of risk in early English alpinism.

Early on in Charles Dickens'sOur Mutual Friend (1865), the pair of characters Eugene Wrayburn and Mortimer Lightwood glibly recount the years they have spent doing nothing, with no business, no efforts, no cares. They have jobs – one is a barrister, the other a solicitor – but neither has done a scrap of work, ever.

In 1872, Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré began publishing their lavish travelogue, London, a Pilgrimage. Much renowned for his illustrations of Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, Idylls of the King, and other significant literary texts, Doré's considerable reputation as an artist fetched him a staggering sum of ten thousand pounds as payment for his work in London, a Pilgrimage. Jerrold, responsible for conceptualizing the project, was an established liberal playwright and journalist, often contributing pieces to the Daily News, Illustrated London News, and Athenaeum. Looking for interesting material, Jerrold and Doré traveled all over London; Doré often made notes on the spot and finished the illustrations later. Seeking to situate their work within the field of social exploration, Jerrold and Doré referenced Henry Mayhew's reformist journalistic series, London Labour and the London Poor. Jerrold claimed that their social investigation would reproduce for contemporary readers Mayhew's categories of “those who work, those who cannot, [and] those who won't work” (“Frontmatter”). Volumes of London, a Pilgrimage, however, were reviewed as gift-books in various periodicals; the Examiner, for example, reviewed it in the “Christmas-Books” section, indicating that these volumes, which contained pictures of lower-class shanties and miserable, under-fed people, were being gifted and enjoyed (“Christmas-Books”).

Welsh author Arthur Machen (1863–1947) wrote his most popular supernatural tales between 1890 and 1900, a period in which European culture felt itself to be on the decline and in which “decadent” art and literature rose up both as a reflection of and a contribution to this perceived cultural deterioration. While Machen's works have received little critical attention, a recent revival of interest in fin-de-siècle decadence has brought his supernatural tales into the literary limelight. Noteworthy examples of this interest include Julian North's treatment of The Great God Pan in Michael St. John's Romancing Decay: Ideas of Decadence in European Culture and Christine Ferguson's analysis of the same work in her PMLA article “Decadence as Scientific Fulfillment.” Indeed, Machen's supernatural tales could enhance and complicate any exposition of decadent literature and culture; they offer a unique vision of descent into the primordial that differs from the moral and psychological treatment of decadence in other popular works of the time, such as Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Like Stevenson and Wilde, Machen employs themes of transgression and metamorphosis to illustrate his characters’ deviations from human nature. However, the forces at work in Machen's tales do not arise from the recesses of the human mind in its modern conception, nor do his protagonists sin primarily against society and the arbitrary nature of its morals and values. Instead, Machen locates mythic forces at work within his contemporary society to highlight a much older form of transgression and to challenge notions of degeneration that held currency at the end of the nineteenth century.

In the anonymous “The Charter and the Land” (1847), a story about the Chartist Land Co-operative Society, William Wright's drunkard's path is remarkably short and his subsequent journey to teetotalism is astonishingly easy. Displaced in urban London and without sustainable work, Wright slowly and somewhat predictably takes to the bottle. The lack of detail the author gives regarding Wright's waywardness suggests that the narrative was common enough to be truncated. Unemployment, poverty, and forced idleness receive a good deal more attention than the ensuing moral downfall. Still, Wright's wife grows increasingly worried as the small amount of money she brings home is cruelly taken from her and spent by her husband in the alehouse, and not on food for the children. After witnessing familial conflicts over spending, readers familiar with the drunkard trope might expect spousal abuse, crime, and death. But one day, out of the blue, Wright says he has for weeks given up drink, instead using the family money to purchase lottery tickets for a stake in the Land Co-operative Society, what was to become the National Land Company in 1846. Feargus O'Connor founded the Company in 1845 in part to allow urban working classes to return to a more rural and stable way of life and in part to create working-class landowners who could subsequently qualify for the franchise. Wright wins a few acres of land outside of London and though the work promises to be challenging, he is happy to have it. The Wright family settles happily in their new home and has nothing but the possibility of more unmitigated happiness to celebrate. Pleasing his wife to no end, Wright promises total abstinence and the story comes to an abrupt conclusion.

When Charles Dickens tried to lobby for American support of an international copyright agreement during his wildly popular 1842 tour of the United States, the English author was famously shocked to find himself lambasted as an elitist who dared expect payment for what Americans believed they had the right to read for free (McGill 109–40; Claybaugh 71; Pettitt 152). Dickens encountered in the practice of literary piracy, or what was called in the United States, the culture of reprinting, a deep fissure in capitalist democratic culture between individual ownership and public access, an ideological divide that forms the backdrop for the creation and circulation of nineteenth-century print. If the legal privatization of intellectual property hovered in the imagination of so many Victorian writers, it formed the happy ending of a long nineteenth-century struggle over literary piracy, a contention of goods that shaped the Victorian stage as we well as the transatlantic literary marketplace.

Art for the Nation: Sir Charles Eastlake at the National Gallery

HILARY FRASER

Apocalypse Then and Now

LYNDA NEAD

Exhibiting Dickens at 200

ANNE HUMPHERYS